Witness the Dead (22 page)

Danny, inevitably, knew a man who knew a man who worked in Blackridge. The warder got a message to Atto saying that an Anthony Winter and a Daniel Neilson wished to visit him, with news of Christine Cormack. He also let it be known that the news was something that was likely to interest the media. Danny knew that Atto hadn’t had his face on the front pages for a while.

They were sitting in the prison car park, a couple of hundred yards from the main building, the only sound the intermittent squeak of windscreen wipers tackling the softly falling rain. Danny was staring ahead, psyching himself up for what was to come.

Winter could almost see the play that was going on behind Danny’s eyes, seeing them tighten as hard thought followed bad memory. ‘Stop me if I do something stupid, son.’

‘You likely to?’

‘I don’t know. I know I want to. I know I’m going to want to punch his lights out.’ Danny’s voice got louder. ‘I’m going to want to want to rip his head off.’

Danny lashed out, banging his fist into the steering wheel, causing the horn to blast and making a couple of people walking across the car park look and wonder what the hell was going on. Winter waited till he was finished.

‘The anger’s not doing you any good, Danny.’

An ironic little laugh escaped from Neilson. ‘You think not? Look at my hand, Tony.’

Danny held out the back of his hand in front of Winter. ‘What do you see?’

Winter looked at the large, beefy hand dotted with liver spots, a road map of thick veins showing the way from wrist to fingers. The skin was loose and sat in dishevelled folds, the fingers broad and strong. He shrugged. ‘It’s a hand.’

‘It’s an old man’s hand, son. Look at the loose skin. But watch this.’

Danny slowly clenched his hand into a fist and the skin tightened until the loose folds disappeared, leaving the back of his hand as taut as the day he was twenty-one.

‘That’s why the anger’s doing me good. It takes years off me. You’ll always have a reason to live if you have something to make you angry enough.’

‘So that’s your only reason for living?’

Danny sighed. A noise that came from deep within him. ‘No. Not the only one. I met Chloe yesterday.’

Winter swung round to look at him. ‘Seriously? How long’s it been since you’ve seen her?’

‘Too long, son.’

‘And does Barbara know about this?’

A bitter laugh was followed by a long silence. Then, ‘What do you think?’

They walked from the car park to the gatehouse, a shimmer of smirry rain dusting them as they made their way across the tarmac. Winter saw Danny’s jaw clench tighter with every step they took towards the prison.

‘You okay now, Dan?’

‘I’m fine, son. I’ve waited a long time for this, that’s all. Forty bloody years.’

From the gatehouse, they were directed to the visitor centre, a dark-grey building just thirty yards away. Apart from staff, there were a handful of people inside, all mooching about in various states of embarrassment and shamelessness. Winter noticed that a couple of likely lads in tracksuits clocked Danny and immediately saw cop, instinctively turning away so he didn’t see their faces.

A broad, shaven-headed officer had a Labrador on a lead and was wandering in and out of the waiting crowd, the dog clearly sniffing for drugs and causing anxious looks on a few faces. The man on the other end of the lead looked a lot meaner than the dog, his dark-blue tie knotted uncomfortably round a thick, fatty neck as he stared aggressively at everyone in turn. Danny, being Danny, stared back, giving as good as he got. The officer clocked it and walked over, keen to check out the unfamiliar faces.

He pulled his dog over to where Winter and Neilson stood, forcing the dog to go through the routine of sniffing them even though it didn’t seem remotely interested. Danny made a show of looking at the guy’s name badge, C
RIGHTON
, and lingered on it just enough to annoy him. It worked.

‘Visitor forms,’ he demanded, standing confrontationally close to Danny and thrusting his hand out to receive the request form they’d been issued. Danny didn’t take his eyes from the officer’s as he fished in his pocket and brought out both forms and handed them over.

The man scanned through the forms, checking their names and the date and making his authority clear. He seemed about to hand the forms back when something he read made him stop and his face creased in consternation. He looked up at Danny and Winter, obviously unhappy, and gave the forms back without saying anything.

‘Nature’s always full of surprises, isn’t it, Mr Crighton?’ Danny asked him, causing the officer’s face to show further confusion.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s no’ every day you see a bulldog taking a Labrador for a walk, is it?’

Crighton took a step towards Danny, eyes furious, but halted himself. ‘Your first time here, is it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Aye, and maybe your last. See that desk over there? Get yourselves there now. The officer there will take your photographs.’

Danny grinned at the officer before he and Winter strolled casually over to the spot Crighton had indicated. Another member of staff clicked a remote button and a desktop camera took individual photographs of them. Winter, in particular, was irked at the process, never being comfortable on the other side of the lens. They then had to offer up photographic ID of their own, and supporting proof of their names and addresses. ‘You’ll be in the system now and we’ll be able to confirm your identity if you return,’ they were told.

Both men were given keys for lockers where they had to leave everything they had on them, before having to remove their jackets and shoes and being frisked. The officer had already told them they could take up to ten pounds in cash into the visit room but they’d both declined, figuring that there wasn’t a whole lot they would want to spend it on. The niceties over with, they were passed on to another officer at the end of the holding area, being told that he would lead them into the visit room.

The officer, tall and thin, eyed them suspiciously when they approached. ‘First visit?’ he asked stony-faced. Both men nodded.

‘Rules. The visit will last for forty-five minutes. You will enter the visit room and take a seat at a table. I will give you a number and you will sit at the table I tell you and not at any other. You and the prisoner will not share food or drinks of any description from the same container. You will keep your hands in sight at all times. Chairs will remain in a face-on position at all times. When time is called at the end of the session, the prisoner will exit the room. You will remain seated at the end of the session until you are invited to leave. You will not approach or converse with any other prisoner throughout the duration of your visit. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Names?’

‘Neilson and Winter.’

The officer consulted the sheet of paper on the clipboard in his hands. He looked up at them again and then back at the sheet, just to make sure, his eyebrows slowly rising as he did so.

‘Well, well. It’s not every day, that’s for sure. Relatives? Friends?’

‘Naw.’ Danny growled.

The officer glowered at Danny’s bluntness. ‘Okay. This way, gentlemen. Mr Atto awaits you. You’re in for a treat.’

Chapter 26

Wednesday mid-morning

They were driving to Bridgeton again, Narey at the wheel, wondering about the whereabouts of the mysterious Mr Grey, and Toshney whistling something exasperating that was managing to burrow its way into her head. Although they were investigating a double murder, she was seriously considering whether a third body would make things that much worse. Perhaps she could convince him that there was something on the road in front of the car and then, just accidentally, step on the accelerator. Who would doubt her? Which jury in the land would convict her? In the end, she decided against murder on the basis that it wouldn’t look good on her record. Instead, she settled for regular sighs, tuts and glares in his direction. When that failed she told him to shut up.

They parked on Tobago Street, a rundown spot even by East End standards that lay in the old badlands between the Gallowgate and London Road. Much of the surrounding area was being regenerated as part of the Commonwealth Games project but this strip of scrub and boarded-up buildings was more in need of a revival than most. Ritchie Stark’s sandstone tenement sat atop a small row of shops at the corner with Stevenson Street, although it was difficult to tell whether the shops were closed or abandoned. Certainly forsaken was a boarded shack with a hand-painted sign that read J
OHN’S
B
AR
. It propped up the flats above, but John, whoever he was, had long gone.

The area across the street had once held a row of houses but they too had disappeared years before and the foundations were grassed over, home now only to two mongrels who were sniffing and snapping at each other in an age-old mating dance.

‘Why the hell would you come here if you moved up from Nottingham?’ Toshney asked aloud.

‘You’ve obviously never been to Nottingham,’ Narey told him. ‘Although you do think he’d have been able to get something a bit more salubrious than this.’

‘Do you think he could have got somewhere
less
salubrious? He must be a real charmer to persuade his bird to come here.’

Stark’s girlfriend, Faith Foster, had confirmed they had been at the flat on both the Friday and Saturday nights of the murders and that Stevo Barclay, Stark’s boss at the tattoo parlour, had been drinking with them on the Saturday.

Addison and Narey had both wanted to know more though and, on the part-pretence of confirming the alibi, she was going to take the opportunity to ask Faith about Barclay. Addison was suspicious of Barclay’s lack of credible proof as to where he was those nights. Rico Giannandrea had originally asked Barclay about his whereabouts only on the night that Kirsty McAndrew was murdered and the explanation that he’d been at the flat on the Saturday had been something of an afterthought.

‘You think the car’s going to be safe if you leave it here?’ Toshney asked her, looking round warily.

‘Probably not, but the alternative would be to leave you here to look after it, and I’m not sure you’d be any safer. Let’s go up and see what they’ve got to say.’

In the doorway, Narey pressed the wobbly plastic shield that covered a handwritten piece of paper with ‘Stark’ written on it, and moments later the intercom crunched and an English accent crackled through. ‘Yeah? Who is it?’

‘Police. DS Narey and DC Toshney. Can we come up, Mr Stark?’

There was a silence at the other end of the intercom before the man replied. ‘Um, yeah. I thought we’d sorted this.’

‘We’d still like to ask you a few questions, Mr Stark. It won’t take long.’

‘Um . . . okay. Come on up.’

The door catch was released and Narey and Toshney made their way into the tenement and up the stairs towards Stark’s flat. The concrete internal staircase was gloomy and didn’t exactly smell wonderful, causing Toshney to complain by blowing out a sharp blast of breath. ‘It’s reeking in here.’

Stark was waiting at the door to the flat, dressed in skinny jeans and a sleeveless Foo Fighters T-shirt that showed off the bizarre spider’s-web-and-angels tattoo that covered his left arm. His dark hair was swept back on his head and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. ‘Come in.’

They went past him into a narrow hallway with two closed doors off it and headed towards the sound of a television set at the end of the hall, where a third door opened into a large living room. The room was sparsely decorated, just a couple of framed rock-gig posters on a jet-black wall at the door and another on one of the three white walls. In front of the window, with its picturesque views onto the derelict land on Tobago Street, sat a black leather sofa and on that sat a girl clad in black, a shy chameleon seeking camouflage. Faith Foster was probably only about five feet tall but five-inch platform shoes considerably added to that. She wore a long, black, crushed-velvet skirt, a plain black T-shirt and mesh gloves that ran to her elbows. The whole goth look was topped off by the pale make-up on her small round face, her short dark hair and the black lipstick on her thin lips.

Stark reached down and switched off the television set. ‘This is Faith.’

The girl looked at them nervously, a half-hearted attempt at a smile on her lips. ‘Hi.’

‘Hello, Faith. I’m DS Narey and this is DC Toshney. I believe you spoke to one of my colleagues on the phone, DS Giannandrea.’

‘Um, yes. I told them where we were on Friday and Saturday. We were here.’

‘Yes, I know, but I’d just like to ask you a bit more about it.’

‘Why?’

The girl’s voice was soft yet demanding and Narey wondered whether she was emboldened by the disguise that she wore.

‘Faith, two young women, more or less the same age as you, have been murdered. Anything that we learn might just be the breakthrough we need to find out who did it.’

‘Okay. I don’t see how we can help, but okay.’

Stark sat beside his girlfriend, the two of them making an odd pair. He was a few years older than she was, wearing a similar uniform of unconformity and yet somehow wearing his more naturally. Faith gave more of an impression of being at a fancy-dress party that had never stopped.

‘So, if you don’t mind, could you tell me what you told DS Giannandrea. It will help if I can hear it fresh.’

Faith gave an uncertain look towards her boyfriend, who gave the tiniest nod of approval.

‘We were in here. It’s as simple as that. On the Friday, I got in about seven-ish. We ordered in a pizza from Dominoes. Had a bottle of wine and watched telly. And we . . . we did stuff.’

‘Stuff?’

‘Sex. You want me to tell you how many times or positions?’

‘No, thank you. And what did you watch before you had sex? And did you both stay here all night?’

‘Just the usual Friday-night rubbish. A couple of soaps, then some Channel 4 comedy stuff. Then sex. For a while. And, yes, we both stayed here all night.’