Cold Grave (8 page)

‘Let it go, Dad. It’s for the best.’

‘I can’t. I just can’t. I keep dreaming about that island. That poor girl.’

A single tear ran down his cheek and dropped with a soft splash onto the collar of his shirt. Another followed. Rachel realised she’d never in her life seen her dad cry — not at a movie, a funeral or a wedding. He’d been the strong one, always there and always tough enough to look after everyone else — until now.

‘I’ll sort it, Dad. Don’t worry. I’ll make it right. I promise.’

‘Thanks, love. But some things can’t be sorted.’

‘Of course they can.’

‘Hm? Yes, okay. Okay. Anyway, Helen, you take care and I’ll see you next week.’

‘You count on it. Love you.’

Rachel turned to leave, the tears finally falling. Helen was her mum’s name.

Winter was safely back in his office in the bowels of Strathclyde Police HQ in Pitt Street, down in one of the dark places where daylight is a memory and a moment of cheerfulness is a prisoner. It suited him perfectly.

He was thumbing through photographs of near nothingness that he’d taken under the midnight moon on Inchmahome, looking for the soul of a girl long departed amidst the frozen ground and ancient priory. She wasn’t there but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see her. He’d been seeing her, truth be told, almost every night when sleep finally came.

The sound of the office phone disturbed his reverie and he was grateful for it. Not only did it bring the promise of work, it also took him away from the unfulfilled promise of Rachel’s cold case. He knew they were both obsessing on it and something about their mutual fascination with it bothered him. Maybe, as an only child, he’d just never learned how to share.

He picked up the receiver, recognising the call as an internal ring, and tried to stifle a sigh when he heard the voice on the other end of the phone belonged to Campbell ‘Two Soups’ Baxter, the senior crime scene manager and Winter’s nemesis. Two Soups had never had much time for Winter as part of the team, believing that his scenes of crime officers did a perfectly acceptable job of recording evidence without the need for a specialist photographer. Naturally, Winter disagreed.

‘Ah, Mr Winter. So good of you actually to be in the building for a change. If you could make yourself available for transportation to the east end, then we would be most grateful. Immediately.’

Even when Baxter was in what seemed to be a good mood, he remained a most irritating bastard.

‘Yes, of course, What’s the…’ But Baxter was already gone.

Winter grabbed his camera bag, confident that it was, as always, fully loaded and ready to go. He hustled his way to the car park and saw immediately that whatever it was, it was going to be fun. There were more than enough uniforms, detectives and forensics jumping into cars to put Winter’s antennae on full alert. This was no break-in at a newsagent. He found himself in a car with two of the forensics, Caro Sanchez in the back with him and Paul Burke at the wheel.

The details were scant but Sanchez and Burke at least knew more than Baxter had bothered to tell him. There were two casualties, probably as the result of some gang-related incident near Dalmarnock Road. One was dead at the scene and the other was being rushed to the Victoria. A crowd of local neds was already in attendance, witnesses supposedly among them, and the uniforms who were first there were having a hard time keeping them back from the scene. Blood and crowds, Winter thought, his favourite.

They picked up the sound of sirens as they approached Swanston Street, the noise fuelling his adrenalin and triggering the familiar itch that signalled the imminent chance to photograph something juicy. As they pulled into Swanston Street, it was chaos. There were kids running everywhere, some laughing, some shouting, all moving at the speed of blur and shouting at the top of their voices. As Winter got out of the car and made to get his gear from the boot, a bottle smashed a few feet away, sending glass flying in all directions. Cops were roaring at the kids. The situation was very close to becoming completely out of control.

‘More o’ the bastards,’ yelled one voice to his left, seeing the SOCOs get out of the car. It didn’t matter that they weren’t in police uniform, these kids could spot cops at two hundred yards. As soon as they were all togged out in coveralls, they made their way towards a scrum of neds, who were jumping about with their backs to them, with the intention of pushing their way through. Winter slowed his step long enough to fire off a scene-setting photograph of the crowd, seeing that hoodies, low baseballs caps and football scarves over their mouths were the order of the day. He quickly caught the other two up, getting there just as Burke took a punch on the back as they made their way through the throng. The forensic half-turned, angrily intent on giving as good as he got before Sanchez grabbed his arm and dragged him on.

‘The wild beasts in their natural habitat,’ scowled Burke, in his best David Attenborough voice. ‘Completely feral and exceedingly dangerous to approach.’

Winter was first through the throng and the first to glimpse the scene where the body was being attended to, his heart pounding at the sight of it. A tent was still being hurriedly erected to shield the corpse from the view of the baying mob. The sooner that was managed the better. The smell of blood was in the air and clearly powering the pack mentality. Given how much of it Winter could see trickling towards the gutter, it was hardly surprising. There were two separate pools of it but they were forming a single pond of crimson round the half-hidden body.

He strode straight towards the corpse, his camera in hand, pausing only to get a grab of the figure crouching over the body. He moved on quickly, reaching the cop, and was about to look over his shoulder to see the victim for the first time, ready to let it fill his vision and his viewfinder. He wasn’t going to allow himself his usual luxury of revelling in the moment before he saw his subject — the moment that always filled him with equal measures of excitement and fear — but as he saw the body through his lens, he stopped and let it swing away from his view.

‘Fucking hell,’ he exclaimed.

‘Don’t see that every day, do you?’ said the cop below him, his voice deadpan.

‘No. You certainly don’t.’

Splayed out before him and neatly cut in two was the body of a dog. It was some sort of bullmastiff breed, the kind that the tabloids liked to call devil dogs. This one was already on its way to doggy heaven or doggy hell, depending on just how much of a devil it had been when it was alive.

The dog’s mouth hung open and a thick pink tongue hung pathetically between razor sharp teeth. A broad, bejewelled collar was round its chunky neck, a piece of bling that looked even more stupid on the dog when it was dead than it must have done when it was alive.

Towards its middle, the animal’s short white fur was streaked in crimson, flecks of red spreading out from its gory core. The sight of the dog’s division was nothing short of spectacular. Winter’s camera was a blur of clicks and motors as he flashed shot after shot of the beast’s deliverance from evil.

The dog’s inner organs were spilled unceremoniously onto the frozen concrete of Swanston Street: heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas, large intestine, small intestine, gall bladder, spleen. All sitting piled one on top of the other in a stew of the remains of its last meal, making a smorgasbord of dubious delight for all to see.

As if that wasn’t unpleasant enough, the dog had inevitably shit itself as it went to meet its maker. The resultant smell was horrific — not a treat for anyone’s nostrils.

The cut through the animal was remarkable. It couldn’t have been neater if it had been carried out on a vet’s surgery table and performed by a laser. Winter wondered if that had been the case and the animal had been moved after a dissection elsewhere. There were already signs of partial lividity though and Winter knew enough about forensics to realise that the tell-tale purple marks meant the dog hadn’t been moved.

The blood had rushed through the cut like water through the opening in a dam, making a dark, sticky blanket that would never be enough to keep the dog warm. Winter knew it was the sight of the dog, split asunder and swimming in its own juice, that was startling the watching throng of local neds and making their own blood boil. Winter dropped low to shoot across the body, knowing full well it would let him get the snarling, gawping, roaring, fearful faces in the same frame. Neither element made a pretty sight but together it made the peculiar beauty he sought.

There was still more. He was directed twenty yards away, where he was treated to the sight of a lower arm, cut just below the elbow, the job done as neatly as it had been with the dog, sheared off as if by some precision-mastered machine. The arm was skinny and white, pale even before it had been emptied of the blood that had flowed through it and now lay pooled all around. There was the blotchy stain of a homemade tattoo on the forearm, a declaration of love to Mary, which had been scrubbed over in an afterthought. The nails were dark and chipped and painted with nicotine.

Winter stalked his new prey, photographing from every angle, dropping yellow number markers as he went. On his periphery, he sensed cops and forensics closing in on him, anxious to get to work but having to wait till he had finished his. They circled him like hyenas waiting for a lion to have his fill and silently devising a strategy to drag him away from the kill. With a reluctance that growled deep in the pit of his stomach, he knew he’d have to give it up and let them in.

He dropped his arm to his side, camera in hand, signalling the end of his feasting and immediately bodies rushed past him. They all had their game faces on, suitably serious and intent on getting out of there as soon as possible. It was a routine they had danced far too often, the inevitable consequences of letting bored kids run around with recreational drugs and deadly weapons.

Winter backed off to the edge of the circus, casually firing off shots at the crowd and the cops but knowing he was sated by his photographic feed. A detective sergeant he knew from London Road, Aaron Sutton, was standing nearby, hands rooted in his pockets but his eyes scanning the crowd for likely suspects. Winter sidled over and Sutton greeted him with a despairing nod.

‘Never ends, does it?’

‘Never,’ Winter agreed, failing to mention that a dark corner of his heart hoped it never did. ‘So who do the dog and the hand belong to?’

‘Ah, the Great British pet-loving public. I expected better of you though, Tony. Mention the dog before the severed arm because it seems the worse of the two?’

Winter laughed, conceding there might be some truth in it.

‘Maybe. More likely just that the dog is the more unusual of the two.’

‘Aye, maybe. The dog is called Klitschko after the boxers. The forearm belongs to a local ned cum drug dealer who apparently goes by the name of Casper. Named, ironically enough, after the friendly ghost. Real name Jason Hewitt and he’s on the way to hospital. After he was separated from his arm, he was running round like a headless chicken screaming for his mammy, spurting blood everywhere, making it a friggin’ nightmare for your forensic pals. It was his screaming that drew the crowd but it was the dog that got them angry. If Hewitt doesn’t bleed to death, then he won’t be scratching his arse with his right hand for the rest of his crappy life.’

‘What the fuck cut them in half like that?’

‘My guess is a sword — samurai maybe. I’m tempted to say “who cares”. But I won’t. As much as these stupid little fucks are a waste of space, I’ll keep on caring because someone keeps on paying me to care.’

‘That’s so touching, Suttie. I could almost cry.’

‘You do that and while you do I’ll smack your face, you cheeky git. How’s your pal Addison getting on?’

Winter’s best friend, Detective Inspector Derek Addison, had been confined to desk duties for the previous six months after being seriously injured while on duty. Pushing pens had done nothing to improve his infamously volatile temper.

‘He’s helping old ladies across the road, sending birthday cards to Rangers supporters and generally being indistinguishable from a ray of sunshine.’

‘A crabbit bastard as usual then?’

‘Oh, aye.’

‘Well, tell him I’m asking for him. And while you’re at it, ask him if he knows of any toerags that are handy with samurais. I’d just as rather catch the bastard that did this before he fancies trying it on anyone else. He still like a Guinness?’

‘Of course. He was shot in the head not the throat.’

‘Tell him I’ll see him in The Station Bar some time soon then. Anyway, nice as it is to chat, I have some rampaging hordes to put in line. Watch yourself, Tony.’

Winter saw the DS sigh and move back into the fray, wondering how they all managed to keep doing it time after time after bloody time. Then he peered into the Canon’s digital display and saw the butchered halves of Klitschko and the bit of Jason Hewitt that had been left behind. Okay, maybe he didn’t know how or why the rest of them managed to keep doing it, but he knew why he did.

It was eight days since Winter and Narey had been to the Lake of Menteith Hotel and Rachel wasn’t happy at all. Despite the bombs she’d casually dropped at the hotel and in Callander, and regardless of the ad she’d placed in the Sunday papers, she hadn’t managed to kick up the shit storm she’d hoped for. The email address and PO box she’d provided had received no more than a few crank messages and chancers looking for a reward. She’d told Tony it was time to up the stakes.

She should have been investigating an attempted murder of a drug dealer in Garnetbank. Or else a suspicious fatal fire in Cowcaddens that needed a further round of witness interviews. Or a gang-related beating that had been clogging her in-tray for weeks. It wasn’t a workload any heavier than any other DS in Strathclyde but Narey was having to keep her plates spinning alongside one of her own. If any of them fell because of that extra plate, then her arse would be on the line. That afternoon, as far as anyone else was concerned, particularly DI Addison, she was in Springburn chasing a lead about a missing grandfather. But she wasn’t.