Snapshot (19 page)

‘What are you reading that pish for?’

He’d had just about enough of this. He knew she was stressed but to keep taking it out on him was out of order.

‘But it’s okay for you to read them?’ he replied testily.

‘It’s work for me. You seem to be enjoying it too much.’

‘But it’s not work for you,’ he blurted out. ‘You’re not on the case.’

As soon as he said it, he regretted it but it was too late.

‘Maybe you should just go home,’ she spat.

‘Yeah, whatever.’

He really could do without this and heading to his own place suited him just fine. Going home meant the opportunity of a couple of guilt-free drinks and the chance to have a guilt-free look over his photographs. Staying meant getting a hard time from a stressed-out maniac. No contest. However he wasn’t about to go without leaving a cowpat of guilt behind.

‘No problem, I’ll get out of your way. I know how hard it is with everything that’s going on at work and it’s only fair you get some rest.’

‘Fuck off, Tony.’

‘No, no, I completely understand. You’ve had a tough day being removed from a high-profile case so it’s perfectly reasonable that you get me round here, get shagged, fall asleep and chuck me out onto the street. Nice.’

‘Don’t even bother trying to make me feel bad.’

But he had, though, and they both knew it. He didn’t slam the door behind him, realizing full well that she wanted him to. Instead he closed it with as much indifference as he could muster and phoned a taxi from his mobile. It was about two and a half miles to his own place in Charing Cross and he couldn’t be bothered with the walk at that time of night.

His own place, that was a bit of a joke, he thought. It was his official home but it was empty more than half the time. He was usually only there to get a change of clothes or when she had friends or family visiting. Or when he wanted to do some work with his photo collection. Or when she was a total pain in the arse. The rest of the time he was chez Narey even though no one was supposed to know.

He was her guilty little secret and that annoyed him. Not just because he couldn’t agree with her insistence that it was better for everyone – by which she meant her – that they kept their relationship quiet, but also because as secrets went it was poor. He knew he had her beat easy on the guilt front. Try having killed both your parents and see how that compares.

The taxi dropped Winter off at his front door and he was inside a minute later, sighing at the mess the flat was in. Tidiness wasn’t a natural instinct for him and the only time the place tended to be presentable was when he knew someone was likely to visit.

He put on the light in the living room but went straight on through to the second bedroom that doubled as his office. He tumbled back onto the bed, hands behind his head, and surveyed the far wall, taking it in impassively as he always did. He’d never been quite sure what anyone else would make of it but then that didn’t matter; only Rachel and Addison had seen it and they were both, usually, on his side.

It wasn’t that the sight of it didn’t move him, it always did. It was just that he chose, forced himself, to try to look at it with as little emotion as possible. He believed there was a solution in there somewhere, an answer to be found even if he wasn’t entirely sure what the question was.

Wall-to-wall death and misery. Twenty carefully positioned and evenly spaced photographs in five rows of four. It was the best of his collection, eighteen of his own and two by Metinides, each photo mounted on white card and framed in black ash, most in black and white but a few in colour. Usually the colour was varying shades of red.

Exhibit number one was his first, Avril Duncanson, wearing her shroud of glass near Muirhead. What made the photograph for him was the stunned look on the face of the middle-aged witness who couldn’t take his eyes off the body. He’d obviously never seen anything like it and was praying to his God that he never would again. It was that and her face, all but unmarked, her eyes screwed shut hoping for the best but not getting anywhere close.

It was his own version of what was Metinides’s most famous shot, the photograph of the death of Adela Legaretta Rivas. The poor photocopy he’d had blown up of that hung next to his own poor imitation of it. Life imitating art imitating life.

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote that ‘there is nothing more beautiful than the death of a beautiful woman’ and Metinides had the proof of it.

Adela was an actress, walking across the Avenida Chapultepec when she was struck by a white Datsun that had crashed into another car. Metinides caught her right on the cusp in a twisted pose between a metal pole and a concrete slab, eyes open, almost expressionless but for a trace of mild surprise and slight disappointment, as if she had forgotten her umbrella and there was a chance of rain. Her shiny red nails were manicured, her blonde hair perfectly coiffured, her clothes elegant and her jewellery understated. She looks alive, maybe caught in the car’s headlights like a startled rabbit. All that gives it away is the unnatural angle of her right arm, the line of blood that runs from the bridge of her nose to her cheek, the trickle of crimson slipping from the corner of her lipsticked mouth and the faraway look in her eyes.

The photo shows a paramedic standing over her and about to gently, almost reverentially, place a blanket over her mangled body. Other people look on staring and you can’t help but gawp alongside them. It’s unsettling, intimate and terribly beautiful.

Winter felt there was beauty in his own work too and he looked at the photograph on the far right of the top row for evidence of it: an old man slumped at the foot of a tree near the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green. He’d taken it first thing on a bitterly cold morning in the depths of January, just an hour after the man they called the Bridgeton Elvis had been found frozen to death. The cops said they all knew the old bloke pretty well and it was obvious they were choked up at seeing him like that. One had said that he’d always greet them with a chorus of ‘Jailhouse Rock’, dressed in a great coat that usually had the bulge of a bottle in one pocket or another.

Elvis must have had a fair share of the bottle inside him because he’d bedded down for the night with nothing more than a balaclava, his coat and some cardboard and newspapers for warmth. Temperatures dropped suddenly during the night and the old man didn’t wake in the morning. Winter’s photograph showed ice on Elvis’s beard and his balaclava, the powder-blue of his cheeks and the frosting on his eyelashes that had brought the shutters down. Elvis had left the building for good but there was something noble about the way he sat there, sanguine about the indignities thrown at him by a spiteful world, quite literally frozen in the moment between life and death.

The beauty in some of Winter’s other photos was perhaps more difficult to see. An Asian boy named Salim Abbas had been kicked and punched to death by a gang of white kids in Pollockshields. They’d chased him through the streets, throwing whatever they could at him before finally falling on him like a pack of hyenas, weighing in with boot and fist. The little bastards probably thought they’d given him no more than a right good doing but Salim never got up again.

The photograph documented every bruise and cut, the bloodied mouth, broken teeth and smashed ribs, as well as the small pool of falu that had formed below his jet-black hair where his skull had crashed against the pavement. The boy had been curled into the foetal position for protection but by the time Winter had arrived he’d been laid out flat on the ground to let a paramedic fight in vain to revive him. All that was left for him to do was record the injuries and shake his head in wonder.

It was the same with the battered wife whose photograph was on the bottom row, her face lacerated with the cuts delivered by her drunken husband and a broken glass. Neighbours had heard her screams and called the police or else the attack in her plush home in Newton Mearns would have gone unreported. Middle-class Marie whose face was a road map of sliced skin and whose eyes shouted shame and resentment.

She lived a long way from the ned in the neighbouring photo who had a screwdriver embedded in his skull. For him, it was all part of the job. Winter had photographed the little scrote in A&E at the old Southern General and the picture was mostly notable for the scowl on his pockmarked face and the raised fist of triumph. You should have seen the other guy, he’d said.

Above the ned was a photograph of a junkie mother whose partner’s flat had been raided. Winter had been there to photograph the four bags of ecstasy found stashed under the sink. The woman – her name was Ashleigh, old way before her time and had already lost the looks she once had – screamed at them for taking away her boyfriend and asked how she was expected to cope and look after her wee girl. The daughter was about five or six, a pretty thing but in torn clothes and in need of a good wash.

Winter had asked if he could photograph the two of them but maybe she had sensed he was over-eager to take their picture because she immediately asked for a hundred pounds to do it. Addison had been there and laughed in the woman’s face but Winter had agreed. Of sorts.

He left and returned twenty-five minutes later with four full bags from the nearest supermarket, putting them down in front of the mother. It was a hundred pounds worth of shopping. Milk, bread, food to get them through the week, plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, a few T-shirts and other clothes for the girl. The mother had sworn and ranted but eventually agreed when he said it was that or nothing. She hadn’t known he would have given her the stuff even if she’d said no.

Her anger at not getting what she’d hoped for had earned Winter the aggrieved glare that looked back at him from the photograph on his wall now. Ashleigh Morgan, junkie-chic skinny, eyes drained and wasted, her teeth soft and disappearing. Six-year-old Tiffany smiling happily. Hopefully both still alive and well but a couple of bags of decent food could only do so much.

Next to angry Ashleigh and her daughter was a black-and-white photograph of an empty street.

Arlington Street was in the west end, just off Woodlands Road. It ran long and narrow with sandblasted traditional tenements on one side of the road and red-and-cream modern versions on the other. You could see the Twenty’s Plenty sign at the beginning of the street and around eight parked cars on each side, but that was it. No people, no blood, no guts.

He didn’t think of it as his favourite photograph and it was far from the most eye-catching, but it was probably the most important. It was the progenitor, the catalyst, the reason for all of it.

The other Metinides copy he had was of his haunting photograph of a woman hanging from the tallest tree in Chapultec Park. It is otherworldly, quite surreal and you have to really look to see what is in front of you. The tree is obvious enough but it is only when you look again that the penny drops and you think, oh my fucking God. The realization eats away at you.

Metinides’s secret was the knowledge that people are so used to seeing death in the cinema or on television that, often, the real thing just doesn’t feel real. So he puts it right there in a photograph and messes with your mind, leaving you uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Winter had felt that way for a long time and knew that was why the Mexican’s photographs resonated so much with him.

It turned out that the woman had gone to Chapultec, asked which tree was the biggest, pulled a rope out of her purse and hanged herself. When they took the body down, they found a photograph of a young girl in her purse along with a note explaining that her husband had taken her daughter away six years before. That day was the girl’s birthday and she couldn’t take the pain any longer. It was a sad little story in a big city full of sad little stories and that was something Winter knew all about.

He loved what Metinides did and what a photograph could do. A picture painting a thousands words and all that. Recording history, exposing lies, showing life in the raw, witnessing reality, framing the shit and the shitters. But a photograph can do more than that, it can also give up hidden truths.

He didn’t claim that he could do what Metinides could but he was a witness to his bit of the world. There were rules though. Roughly speaking they ran along the lines of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. He was there to observe and to document. Sometimes, though, whether you sought it or not, when you bent down to photograph the gutter, reality crept up and bit you on the arse. Something had nagged away at him from the moment he photographed Stevie Strathie but this was the first chance he’d had to do anything about it.

The A5-sized print that he’d run off showed Strathie lying in his own life spill. And he couldn’t help but be pleased at the way he’d flash-filled it, making his bloodless face contrast with the sangria puddle that lent him an unholy halo. Those shit-scared eyes locked fast in the very moment that he crossed over – seeing his past, his future and nothing at all. He was bloodless and blood, empty and full, life and death. The bastard had made a career out of selling it and now he’d met it face to face.

The mark on the right of his chest was a little more than half an inch wide, maybe two centimetres in new money. It curved as if it would make a complete circle although it only punched a crescent into his chest. There were other distinct marks within it and they looked like they formed some sort of pattern. Winter realized that he’d probably known as soon as he’d seen it, maybe in the back of his mind, but he knew.

He sat the print next to the photograph he’d taken of Rory McCabe, the teenager who’d been battered around the knees with a baseball bat, the photo that hadn’t been worthy of a place on his gallery wall but was now lying on the desk on the other side of the room.

There it was on McCabe’s chest, shown up by the infrared on his IS Pro, a circular bruise the size of a five-pence piece. It also had marks within the circle that Winter hadn’t noticed before. A darker, horizontal indentation that he guessed could have been vertical depending on the angle that it had hit the kid’s chest at. The raised marks caused by the vertical/horizontal feature were maybe three millimetres wide. Same as the mark within Strathie’s crescent.