Witness the Dead

by Robertson, Craig

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Another one.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘The Western Necropolis. Uniform found it on a sweep of the cemetery at first light.’

  ‘What? I thought it was being—’

  ‘Don’t you fucking start. Just get yourself over there. The place is huge and it’s in a city full of bloody cemeteries. Just shift your arse.’

  Addison was gone, the phone left silent in Winter’s dripping hand. He dropped it back onto the shelf and snatched a towel from the rail, rubbing himself dry as quickly as he could before jumping into the first set of clean clothes that he could find. His heart was pounding and he told himself over and over to stay calm and get a grip. Just get moving, just be professional.

  He was due to meet with Atto again in just a couple of hours, and his mind was flash-filled with the thought of the man sitting there with that superior, told-you-so look on his face. Winter’s stomach clenched at the image, dreading being there and forced to indulge Atto in his sick self-satisfaction.

  The Western Necropolis was up off Maryhill Road near Gilshochill railway station and no more than a ten-minute drive at that time of the morning. Winter pushed the accelerator as far to the floor as he dared, worried less about the certainty of cop cars flying to the scene than he was about his own concentration. Driving with a head full of an unknown young woman, probably strangled, probably raped, didn’t exactly improve his chances of keeping the car on the road.

  He wrenched his Civic left just after Jaconelli’s onto Lochburn Road, winding his way past cars coming in the other direction with barely enough room to pass, dipping under the low bridge and racing on into the wilds of Lambhill. Swinging onto Cadder Road and climbing the hill, he punched on the radio and searched for news but got nothing. A couple of minutes later, driving straight across the mini-roundabout onto Tresta Road without thinking, he saw that the news had found him.

  As he passed the primary school on his left and the flats on his right, he saw the road ahead packed with the familiar yellow and blue that rarely meant good news. He parked up on the nearest available bit of pavement, throwing the door closed behind him and barely paused to fire the remote to lock the car, running the rest of the way to the cemetery gates with his camera bag banging against his back.

  The two cops on duty recognised him and there was no need to bother with the hassle of fishing out his ID, as he rushed straight by them with no more than a nod. He saw more cops up ahead, their garish yellow vests visible in the half-light, and he charged in their direction, wondering if he could have simply driven in but now too late to take the option. The bag weighed heavier with every step, not least because he knew what it was going to be used for.

  Christ, this place was huge: grey granite rows on either side as far as the eye could see, field after field; whole orchards of trees and endless messages to the dead; acre after acre of statues, crosses, angels and obelisks. It was Billy Connolly who said, ‘Glasgow’s a bit like Nashville, Tennessee: it doesn’t care much for the living, but it really looks after the dead.’ He had a point.

  Winter ran, eyes left, right and straight ahead, his senses peppered by the fields of death, some sparse with irregular headstones, others busy in neat, ordered rows. They pushed him on towards the lights and chatter that grew nearer and louder and yet darker and more grim. Panting, sweat clammy on his brow, he arrived among them, the hi-vis vests parting to allow him into the inner sanctum where he recognised the back view of Addison and Narey standing side by side in front of three large winged angels perched atop tall, adjoining, granite headstones. The sight of Rachel standing there jolted him into a new reality: her presence was hardly unexpected yet still caused his heart to drop into his stomach.

  He walked to Addison’s side and knew that all three stone angels had seen evil that night, even if they hadn’t heard it or spoken it. The proof lay at their feet: a bloodied streak across the grey face of the central headstone leading down to the sitting form of a blonde woman whose head was slumped on her chest as if sleeping. It was the longest sleep she’d ever have.

  Addison didn’t turn to look at Winter, just staring at the girl and knowing instinctively that it was he who was standing there.

  ‘Her name’s Ashleigh Fleming according to the cards in her bag. She worked in PR for a London hotel. London phone number, too, so she was only up here visiting. Take her pictures, wee man. I want to get her out of here as soon as we can.’

  Winter nodded and moved forward, sensing and sharing Addison’s uncustomary sensitivity but also gripped by the task in front of him. He remembered and repeated his earlier urge to himself to stay calm, to be professional. He pulled his camera from the bag at his shoulder and, in the very movement of doing so, he felt something switch inside him. The only thing he was unsure of was whether it had switched on or off.

  He framed the girl in situ, an inevitably macabre scene-setter with grim-faced cops unwittingly bookending the towering headstones that she sat against. He grabbed a tighter shot, too, expelling the police from the picture and taking in the curious gaze of the angels instead, seeing them stare down with pity and disapproval.

  The girl’s legs, long and bare, were crossed in front of her in a position that might have suggested she’d been reading a book, propped against a tree on a summer’s day. There was no book, though, and instead her arms were spread wide in a plea for mercy that would never come. Her blonde hair was dappled darkly wet with dew and blood, sparkling coldly in the early light and acting as a curtain to her face, hiding her reaction to whatever horrors she had seen.

  The black cashmere dress that was rucked high on her thighs exposed dark dots moving slowly across her greying flesh: beetles crawling over a fetid feast. Winter’s instinct was to wave his hand above her leg and send them scurrying off but a deeper impulse first made him fire off a shot from his camera, freezing the tiny skin vultures for ever on the dead girl’s skin.

  Checking for evidence of footprints at her side, he dropped to the ground so that he could photograph her face without disturbing the body, feeling the damp grass immediately seep into his clothing and begin to eat away at his threads. Raising his camera, he saw her. Young, pretty and confused, her mouth slackly open. Her eyes seemed questioning rather than afraid despite the physical evidence, a car crash of blues and purples on her neck that screamed brutal strangulation.

  Her skin was smooth and still lightly tanned, despite the lifeblood draining away behind the outer mask. Her lips, swathed in nude gloss, formed a perfect pout of disappointment and her sculpted eyebrows arched in surprise. A girl in the wrong place at the wrong time and a long way from home.

  He focused in on her neck, slim and taut yet made into an ugly canvas by the violent swathes of colour that disfigured it. The attack had been vicious and prolonged – he’d seen more than enough cases to know that – throttling her to the point of death and beyond. Tell-tale purple spots were almost certainly petechiae, caused by broken capillary blood vessels and a probable sign of asphyxiation. His lens had also picked them out in the whites of her eyes.

  Winter pulled away reluctantly, easing himself up off the grass and turning his camera to the dark crimson splash above the girl’s head that streaked like a vein across the headstone and partly concealed the family name etched there: THOMSON. The source of the blood was all too obvious and strangulation clearly had not been enough for the murderer. The girl’s hair was thickly matted and her skull broken, much as Hannah Healey’s had been, where her head had been battered against the monument that she’d rested against.

  Moving down, his lens picked out a thin trail of blood on the girl’s dress by her right-hand side, a rusty track against the cashmere that seemed unlikely, given its position, to have come from the wound to her skull. There was some spatter too on the grass nearby, vivid droplets of blood that stained the ground. Winter positioned his camera under her right hand, so that he could shoot up towards it without the need to move her, and fired the
shutter.

  Withdrawing the camera, he studied the image he’d taken, seeing immediately that he’d found the source of the blood. He stood, taking a succession of images of the girl’s arm, securing the position it and the hand were in, before turning to Addison.

  ‘You’ll want to turn her hand round and look at it. It’s odd and a bit nasty.’

  Addison looked at him questioningly, knowing full well Winter’s idea of what constituted nasty. He moved forward and as he did so, Tony and Rachel found themselves staring into each other’s eyes, a shared look that went on moments longer than it needed to.

  Addison bent down and took the girl’s pale wrist in his gloved hand, turning it as gently as he could given the effects of rigor. The back of her hand was darkly purple with lividity but the most striking detail was her middle finger. While the other four nails were neatly manicured and painted bright red, the middle fingernail had been ripped out, leaving the exposed nail bed a raw and bloody mess.

  Addison sighed heavily. ‘What kind of sick bastard would do that? And where the hell is the fingernail?’

  ‘He’s got it.’ Narey crouched down and ran her own finger above the line of the girl’s violated digit.

  ‘Okay.’ Addison accepted it reluctantly. ‘But why?’

  ‘A trophy of some sort. Same as Kirsty McAndrew’s shoes and Hannah Healey’s bag. Find them and we find our killer. And I’m also wondering why she hasn’t got a coat on.’

  ‘And you’ve some idea of why he’s taken what he has?’

  Narey nodded. ‘I think so. Give me a couple of hours? It might be complete guesswork and I’d rather check it out.’

  Addison rubbed at his eyes and exhaled. ‘Okay. But not any longer than that. We’ve got enough problems without you going all Nancy Drew on me.’

  Narey narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I’m going to start making a list of every time you use Nancy Drew, Juliet Bravo, Miss Marple or Jessica bloody Fletcher from now on. As soon as you hit ten, you’ll be up in front of a tribunal.’

  ‘Aye, okay, Sarah Lund. Add that to your list. Time of the month, is it?’

  ‘You’re a prick, sir.’

  ‘I know. Now let’s get on with this. Tony, you done?’

  Winter nodded to Addison: he was finished.

  The DI moved in, his face set firm in readiness for a task he wasn’t looking forward to. On his knees next to the girl, he reached out towards her, then stopped, rethinking the situation. ‘Rachel,’ he called out to her. ‘Come on, I need your help with this.’

  Knowing what he needed, Narey moved to the girl’s other side and knelt on the ground. She looked at him to signal she was ready.

  ‘Okay, support her back, then we’ll slide the dress up.’ Addison looked up to see uniforms, detectives and forensics all watching them intently – and it pissed him off. ‘This isn’t a fucking peepshow. Go and find something to do. I think you’ll find there’s plenty. Tony, you stay there. The rest of you piss off.’

  The cops and SOCOs dropped their heads in embarrassment, some muttering about Addison but not daring to let it be heard, turning away to busy themselves with some task or other.

  ‘On three . . . lift.’

  They eased Ashleigh’s body from the ground, feeling her cold and damp even through the nitrile gloves. With their spare hands, they took hold of the black dress and began to work it up her thighs until they were completely exposed, revealing a tiny pair of black panties and a small daisy tattoo on her right hip, and finally pulling enough material beyond her midriff until it too was indelicately on show.

  They’d seen it as soon as they’d lifted the dress above her navel, the first glimpse of lipstick and they’d known. There had been no doubts in either mind about what would be revealed, about what would be daubed there.

  SIN

  The word was carved on her flesh in artless stabs of wax, branding her and disfiguring her, if in name only. Sticks and stones will break my bones, Winter thought. As Addison and Narey turned towards him in an unspoken request to photograph the girl’s stomach, he quickly shot a couple of frames and captured them crouched grimly either side of her exposed midriff. In the same movement, he stepped forward and filled his lens with the word, stealing it from her skin.

  ‘Enough,’ Addison told him, nodding at Narey to ease the girl’s dress back down over her body.

  Winter began to move away again but stopped, a thought occurring to him. ‘I think I might know what it means.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Sin. It’s the sins of the father.’

  ‘From the Bible?’

  ‘Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice. The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.’

  Chapter 43

  Saturday morning

  The rain came suddenly to the Western Necropolis, crashing down onto the turf and paths and graves, forcing forensics to hurriedly erect a tent over the crime scene before any evidence was washed away. Ashleigh Fleming’s body, broken and slumped in front of the memorial stone, quickly had a river washing at her feet.

  Narey and Addison took up shelter in the bowels of the red-bricked crematorium at her suggestion, a hurriedly convened counsel of war that Winter was excluded from. Shaking excess water from their already soaking clothes, they descended marble stairs into a small room that at first glance Addison thought was a library. It was of sorts: a library for the dead.

  Large marble stands stood in the middle of the room, polished russet grained with white. Instead of books, the heavyweight stands had spaces designed to hold wooden caskets, each adorned with a brass plaque and containing the ashes of the departed; sixteen caskets on either side and four on each end. The walls, too, were lined with the same marble shelving, identical spaces floor to ceiling and wall to wall, each opening filled with a casket. Some were in teak, oak or ebony but the majority of those on the walls, particularly the older ones, were in white marble, neatly stacked away for eternity.

  A white frieze lined the lower half of one wall, its pale marble grained with grey and the words IN LOVING MEMORY etched upon its skin. Above it, soft light drifted into the room through the reds, blues and yellows of a stained-glass window.

  ‘Cheery place,’ Addison grouched.

  ‘It’s dry and we won’t be overheard. Not by the people in here, anyway. And maybe it’ll help concentrate the mind.’

  ‘I think the body of that girl out there is enough to do that, don’t you? This stops today, Rachel. I am not fu—’ Addison stopped, the solemnity of the place curbing his natural instinct to swear. ‘I’m not having this. We get this guy today.’

  ‘So where are we?’

  ‘Apart from knee deep in it?’ Addison’s hands went to his head, rubbing wearily at his eyes as he put his thoughts in order. ‘Okay, we assume that Atto is telling us the truth and that his devil spawn intends to kill again. Tonight. We can’t take anything he says as gospel but it’s what we have to work with. Agreed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he’s murdered three women, all aged within a few years of each other, all out on their own at night. All three fitting the same generic profile as the Red Silk victims of 1972. We’ve got to assume he’s working to the same template. He’s left his victims in the Necropolis and then the Southern and the Western Necropolis. Obviously, there’s four necropolises in Glasgow and that leaves one. The Eastern Necropolis at Parkhead – Janefield Cemetery.’

  ‘You think that’s his plan?’ Narey asked. ‘To dump a fourth body there? Surely he knows that we’ll be expecting that.’

  ‘Of course he does, but he’s playing with us, pissing us about. This is some kind of game to him. If he’d just wanted to kill and get away with it, then he’d have stopped after one. Or two. It’s about more than doing it and not getting caught.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t bloody know. Like making his daddy proud of him. Like carrying on a family tradition. We’re obviously dealing with someone who’s a few gravestones short of a
cemetery.’

  Narey wandered round the room, distractedly examining the names on the old, white-marble caskets, her mind ticking furiously, her fingers running lightly over inscriptions of names long forgotten.

  ‘If he is the son of Archibald Atto, then maybe that explains why he has a preoccupation with death, and I suppose that might explain the cemeteries. But I can’t help feeling that, if we can work out why he’s so intent on leaving the bodies at the four necropolises, then maybe we’ll be nearer to working out who he is. Don’t we need to get more out of Atto? Go in there and press him hard till we get some answers?’

  Addison shook his head. ‘No. We leave that to Tony and to that tube Kelbie. It’s not our job. We catch the killer. That’s what we do. And we make sure that, if he’s intending to leave a corpse in the Eastern Necropolis, he doesn’t get within a hundred yards of the place.’

  Narey’s eyes widened in a show of surprise. ‘What? He kills another young woman but at least we stop him from depositing the body in the cemetery of his choice? That your idea of success?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean and you bloody well know it. Our first job is to make sure he doesn’t kill again, of course it is. We flood the streets with cops; we warn everyone who remotely fits the profile to stay out of the city centre; we hit every door that we think might have a suspect behind it; we make sure Tony gets whatever he can out of Atto. We do all that and anything else we can think of. But we also take away the option of him finishing this the way he wants. If he knows he can’t dump the fourth body in the Eastern, then maybe, just maybe, he won’t even try to take that body in the first place.’

  ‘You really think that?’

  ‘I’ve got to. It looks like he’s had some crazy plan all along and, if he knows that he can’t see the plan through to the end, then we throw him off course. We put a ring of steel round the Eastern. We protect it like it’s Fort bloody Knox.’