Snapshot (25 page)

‘Have you had any contact at all with Oonagh in the past seven years?’

Brendan McCullough turned to his wife again.

‘The postcard.’

At that Mrs McCullough jumped up, glad of something to do, and almost ran to a teak sideboard against the far wall. She opened a drawer and instantly brought out a card adorned with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower.

‘It arrived four years ago,’ the husband explained. ‘May 2007.’

Narey took the postcard from the woman’s trembling hand and turned it over.

Don’t worry. I’m safe. O.

The card had a Paris postmark and was dated as the man had said.

‘It is definitely Oonagh’s handwriting?’

‘Of course.’

‘And this was the only time she got in touch?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there anyone she was particularly close to before she left, someone that she might have stayed in touch with?’ asked Corrieri.

The father shook his head impatiently.

‘We spoke to all her friends, all the ones we knew of. The police did the same at the time. They knew nothing.’

‘Brendan went out all the time looking for her,’ his wife said, her red eyes staring at the floor. ‘Day after day, night after night, scouring the streets. But nothing. After the postcard came we stopped looking, knowing . . . thinking . . . that she wasn’t in the country any more.’

Mrs McCullough sprang out of her seat and plucked one of the photographs from the mantelpiece, the one of Oonagh in her first school uniform. She sat carefully back onto the sofa, cradling the framed picture to her breast. Her husband sat down beside her and put an arm around her.

‘Mr and Mrs McCullough, might it be possible for us to take a photograph of Oonagh away with us, as recent as you have?’ Narey asked. ‘I’ll ensure it gets back to you safely.’

The husband nodded without looking up.

‘I’ll get you one.’

‘And could we arrange for one of you to identify Oonagh’s body at the city police mortuary at the Saltmarket?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll do it,’ he replied.

‘Thank you. I am so sorry to have had to bring you news like this. I will arrange for a family liaison officer to be in touch with you this afternoon.’

‘There’s no need,’ he snapped at her. ‘We’ll be fine.’

‘I still think it’s best. I’ll ask one to call by and you can take it from there.’

‘Yes, yes, whatever. Let me show you to the door.’

Brendan McCullough squeezed his wife’s shoulder before rising from the seat and leading the two officers out of the living room, closing the door behind him.

‘You’re absolutely certain that it’s Oonagh?’ he asked them quietly.

‘Yes,’ Narey replied.

‘And you are sure that she was an addict and . . . a prostitute?’

‘Yes, Mr McCullough, we are.’

The man’s face darkened.

‘Whatever she had become, I need to know that you will still do your job. No one cares about those working girls, do they? The police always have more important things to do.’

‘I can assure you that we do care,’ Narey answered testily, her mind chiming with the force’s resources being eaten up by the sniper killings.

‘And you will catch the man who did this to my wee girl?’

‘Oh we will, Mr McCullough,’ Narey assured him with a lot more certainty than she knew she could promise. ‘We will.’

Sunday 18 September

Winter woke up feeling sore. Sore head, sore body, sore Sunday morning. Both head and body had taken different kinds of pounding the day before and the price was now being paid. The shower helped one but only succeeded in stinging the other. A cup of coffee at least helped both a bit.

He struggled into some clothes but resisted the temptation to head for the newsagents. His bruises had won the fight against the hangover and woken him early enough that he had time to read over the previous day’s newspapers before going into Pitt Street. There was a morning meeting of the Nightjar team but he wasn’t needed for that and was to wait for a call to arms if their man struck again.

The killings of Adamson and Haddow were splashed over the front pages of the papers and most of them had large photographs of the pair. The
Daily Star
was the exception but even it squeezed the photo of some reality TV bimbo to the side in order to get in a head and shoulders of the dead accountant. For Winter, though, the real eye catcher was the
Sun
’s headline.

Fuck. That left plenty of scope for interpretation. It was as if a striker had scored his twentieth goal of the season, not that there had been another double murder. The paper had a new logo for it too. A large D in a red circle made to look like a rifle sight. Winter could imagine Alex Shirley spitting blood, Addison too for that matter. He’d been in a black mood by the time they went their separate ways the night before, the whisky having him in a near rage about the sniper. The hero status that the papers were serving up would have had his hangover at bursting point.

The crackpots had come out of the cupboard, too. An inside page of the
Record
had the leader of the English Defence League jumping on the bandwagon. He was calling for an amnesty for the Dark Angel and even issued a ‘rallying call’ for someone in England to do the same job there. He wanted ‘an English knight to rid the streets of drug-dealing scum in the same way that the Scottish hero is doing’.

Right-wing American Republicans had picked up on the killings too. A Senator from Texas hailed it as a ‘prime example of people power in reclaiming their freedom from hoodlums’. He went on to make references to his ancestors and
Braveheart
that made Winter want to puke. The pompous prick had no idea who was doing this, far less that it should be lauded as a good thing. In the end, Winter picked up a copy of the
Sun
, the
Record
and the
Herald
and took all of them to work with him. The
Herald
had easily the best photographs from Glasgow Harbour. A staff snapper had made it to the scene while the bodies were still warm and although he’d been chased, he’d gone to the other side of the river and his long lens had done the trick. The main shot they’d used had McConachie standing over Haddow. Of course the pictures weren’t a patch on Winter’s own, given that he had the luxury of standing right over the victims. He printed off a glossy image of Gee Gee Adamson laid out in his heavy, black leather coat with his meaty chops and gobsmacked expression. The coat soaking up his spilled blood like a leathery sponge, making it heavier and heavier with every life drop that it tasted. Gee Gee the gambler and his final losing bet.

He pinned it to the wall alongside a bloody close-up of Haddow in his pinstripe and white. The terrified smart man who died without the brains he was born with. Already on the office wall were his favourite shots of Caldwell, Quinn, Strathie and Sturrock. His Dark Angel gallery.

He so wanted to put a photograph of Sammy Ross there too but couldn’t let himself do it. Some screwed-up version of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil was playing in his head and he had no idea what the rules were. All he knew was that Sammy’s picture couldn’t go up there, not yet. For now it stayed in a drawer along with his blown-up images of the marks on McCabe and Strathie.

Sammy was a dot, a bloodied dot along with McCabe and the McKendrick kid and they were joined to the other six killings somehow. Just how, he had no idea and maybe he didn’t really want to know. Record but don’t interfere, observe but don’t violate. It was getting harder every day to remember the mantra.

Saturday morning stretched into afternoon and no call came for him to join up with the team. Apart from a couple of calls from Addison, he had heard nothing from them all day. His mate was clearly on edge, a cat on a hot tin roof, bouncing from word to word and from subject to subject. One second it would be a mention of Malky Quinn, the next it would be how Celtic were going to do in the next match. He was telling Winter how a guy named Harvey Houston who worked for Ally Riddle had supposedly gone missing and then he just switched to what he’d like to do to the barmaid in the TSB. Not that night though because he was seeing someone else and was worried he’d not be able to get away from work on time, worried because she was a sure thing, or so he reckoned. Talking about women or Celtic, he was fine; it was the case that had him dangerously grouchy. He flew into a rage at any mention of the new hero that was cleaning up the streets and Winter knew he’d been slicing people in two with cutting remarks. Nobody except Winter talked to him or went near him unless they had to. On the Friday, he’d almost decked Colin Monteith when he suggested they just let the Dark Angel get on with it. Even the use of the nickname had Addison’s hackles rising.

Rachel was crabbit as fuck too, snapping at him left, right and centre. Too busy to talk, only time to bite his head off. He finally managed to persuade her to go for some Italian food at Gambrino on Great Western Road on Saturday night but it was a waste of time for both of them. He’d hardly got a word out of her and knew her mind was on both cases every minute they were there. He wouldn’t have minded so much if she had shared it with him but her guard was up, saying nothing. It was obvious she’d rather have been back in the operations room.

Her phone was out on the table and her eyes continually flicked to it as if willing it to ring, saying only that she was waiting for results to come through from some DNA test. Finally, she turned down the offer of dessert and got Winter to drop her off at home, sending him on his way to his own place. He made the mistake of making some comment about no sex and she nearly strangled him.

Saturday night became Sunday morning and Glasgow woke to no more news. It must have been a pisser for the Fox News team that had parachuted in from the US as well as the Japanese and German TV crews that were in town now. Six dead criminals might not have been a lot but sniper killings made headlines everywhere, especially when the person carrying them out was being held up as some kind of people’s champion. Fox had tried calling him the Dark Knight but DC Comics threatened to sue so they had to settle for the Dark Angel as well.

Winter didn’t hear much from either Rachel or Addison throughout Sunday, just the odd text and brief phone call. The little he was being told, it seemed Alex Shirley was running the Nightjar team ragged, having them pore over every bit of CCTV footage they could lay their hands on. They studied every camera anywhere near Central Station, Harthill, George Square and Glasgow Harbour. Every access road and possible escape route, every bit of motorway they could see. All the usual suspects and some unusual ones were run through face-recognition technology but it came back empty.

Forensics were working round the clock, analysing the little that they had. The room at Livingstone Tower had been brushed within an inch of its life but Winter hadn’t heard of anything turning up that was of any use. The bullets had all come from the same gun and manufacturers were being pressured to turn over lists of stockists and owners.

The mood among the few cops Winter spoke to, uniform and CID, was odd. They were all nervy, that much was obvious, but he couldn’t figure out just what they wanted to happen. In the end, he realized they just wanted something, anything, to happen. And if that meant another dealer, mule or boss had to get shot then that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

He’d heard they’d hauled in everyone they knew connected to the drugs trade and squeezed them for all they were worth. Half of them were scared shitless even before they were brought in and knew the shooter could do a lot worse to them than any cop could. In fact they knew they were safer in the cop shop than out of it. Even without what the Dark Angel was doing, they were getting tanked into each other. Their own attempts to find out who was doing the killings continued by way of drive-bys and beatings, everyone suspicious of everyone else. Another of the Gilmartin clan, cousin Billy, had ended up in hospital; an enforcer for Tookie Cochrane named Colin Sinclair was reckoned to be wearing a concrete overcoat somewhere; and the mother of a well-known dealer named Benjo Honeyman walked into Baird Street greeting that he had missed her birthday. The natives were both restless and revolting. One of Terry Gilmartin’s lieutenants, George Faichney, had done a bunk and Gilmartin was supposed to be desperate to find him.

After seven killings in four days, there hadn’t been anything for two days in a row and it seemed like a lifetime. It should have eased the tension but instead it racked it up a few notches till the city was a pressure cooker with the lid twitching like a rabbit’s nostrils. That’s why when the dealers and the doers-in were dragged into stations across Glasgow, they weren’t too fussed about being questioned. In fact, by the time they got hauled in, not only did they have nothing to tell, it was them demanding to know what the police were going to do about it all. The problem was that nobody had an answer for them.

Winter spent most of Sunday afternoon filing everything he had to file so he popped into the Nightjar operation room late on and was basically chased along. If you’re needed, we’ll call you, otherwise fuck off, camera boy. He got the message.

Winter could feel the sudden chill, the wind picking up and the grumble of approaching thunder. His
sgriob
was itching and he couldn’t ignore the voice that was whispering in the back of his head. It’s quiet, too quiet. The calm before the storm. Be calm before the storm.

He got a drunken phone call from Addison late on Sunday night after the DI had emerged empty-handed from Viper, more or less demanding to know why no one had been shot while he’d been inside trying to get his end away.

‘What is it with this fucker?’ he slurred at Winter. ‘Where’s he hiding himself? Eh? Where’s he hiding, wee man?’

‘I’ve no idea, Addy. You looked under the bed?’

‘Ah, a comedian, just what I need. And for your information, the night is still young and I’ll be looking in a bed before it’s finished. The mountie always gets his woman. Anyway, that’s not why I phoned. I know you’re up to something you little scrote. I know your game. You’re hiding something.’