Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

  Rachel slowed to a halt and waited till Tony was by her side. She stretched out her arm and he followed her point with the beam of the torch.

  ‘There,’ she whispered.

  It was an unremarkable spot compared to the dramatic ruins they had just passed through, an ordinary junction of low wall and frozen ground. They both stood and contemplated it in silence, the intervening nineteen years slipping away before their eyes. Slowly, Rachel knelt and traced the air with her hands, drawing shapes of where the girl’s body had been discovered years before.

  ‘She was on her back here,’ she said, both her father’s words and Bobby Heneghan’s coming back to her. ‘They said there were weeds up to this height. Heneghan and Conway had to part them with their hands to see what was lying here.’

  Tony took his camera bag from his shoulder and took out his Canon EOS-1D, fixing on a flash as he listened to Rachel.

  ‘Her legs were here . . . and here, this one tucked under the other . . .’

  Winter was photographing nothing except memories and dirt but his mind’s eye was well practised in capturing death’s final throes even long after life had been extinguished. The lack of a body and the gap of nearly twenty years didn’t stop his imagination from running riot.

  He saw the weathered red jacket, faded from its original candy red the same way Lily’s blood had lost its vital colour after leaking from her battered skull. He saw her dark blonde hair flecked with blood and dirt as she lay back on a pillow of snow, her head battered, one eye gone and the other shrinking in fright, her mouth wide open, screaming for help that never came, pleading for mercy that wasn’t offered.

  She was so young, forever young, laid out on a snowy altar with the monks of Inchmahome standing over her weeping. He saw her skin and flesh, a winter feast for the island’s wildlife, its surfaces pulled back to expose everything below, her body shrivelling day by day as it lay lonely and abandoned.

  Tony fired off shot after shot, his finger hammering at the shutter release even though the girl, her jacket, her blood and her battered skull fragments had long since gone. Rachel looked up at him, seeing him lost in his moment and knowing what he was seeing through his lens. She had seen the collection of gory photographs that filled a wall of his flat in Charing Cross and wondered if this image of what-had-been would find a place among them. His fascination being what it was, she knew it could fit in his collection even if the substance of it existed only in his mind. She realised it already had a place in hers.

  ‘You feel it?’ she asked.

  Her words broke the trance Winter had drifted into, causing the murdered girl to fade from his sight, her beseeching mouth and pleading eye the last things to disappear as the flame from his final flash shot petered out.

  ‘Yes, I feel it.’

  His camera arm fell to his side, his job done. Rachel took his free hand and gently led him away from the murder scene and back towards the jetty, every step guarded by Inchmahome’s mournful monks as they saw their uninvited guests safely off the island again.

  CHAPTER 11

  Monday 19 November

  He looked smaller but she knew he couldn’t be. It had been only a week since she’d last seen him but it was the first time since he’d moved into this bloody place. Could a man really shrink in a week? Rachel took advantage of being able to watch him, knowing that he didn’t yet realise she was there. They’d told her it would be better if she left it a bit before she went to see him, give him time to settle in without being embarrassed about her seeing him there. So she’d waited, much as it hurt. Christ, he looked sad. People around him chatted away but it seemed as if he’d rather be anywhere else. He appeared older too. There was no getting away from it. Maybe he had done for a while and she just hadn’t seen it but now the bloody home was showing it up.

  Someone was saying something to him and he looked up, confused, as if he hadn’t heard them properly. She hoped that’s all it was. He was shrugging at the man who’d been speaking to him and turned away. She’d seen that faraway look sometimes when he was still at home with her mum – seen it but not noticed it.

  Deep breath. Now go speak to him.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ she managed as brightly as she could.

  There it was: the half-second deliberation as he looked up and didn’t immediately recognise who she was. That part of a second could range from almost instant to drawn out, every extra tenth of it meaning so much and so little.

  He knew her now though and the smile lit up his face and warmed her heart. He got up and held his arms wide for her like he always did. She knew this time the smile hid awkwardness but she ignored it. She needed the hug at least as much as he did – more.

  Now that she was closer, she could see there were a couple of bits of stubbly grey on his chin that he’d missed while shaving and a button undone about halfway up his blue checked shirt. Not much maybe but her dad was always a stickler for being neat and tidy. It worried her to see him letting his standards slip.

  ‘How are you, love?’ he was saying. ‘How was the traffic?’

  ‘Oh, not too bad at all,’ she replied, even though it had been awful. ‘How are you more to the point? Settling in?’

  He lied too. She could see it in his eyes, clear as day.

  ‘Och, yes. You know me. I can make myself at home anywhere. This place is fine. The people are nice enough.’

  ‘How’s the food?’ she whispered conspiratorially.

  ‘Bloody terrible,’ he whispered back. ‘Not a patch on your mother’s.’

  ‘What have they given you today?’

  The moment the words were out her mouth she regretted them. The look of loss in his eyes cut right through her.

  ‘Who can tell?’ he laughed eventually. ‘It all tastes and looks the same anyway.’

  Typical Dad. He would always do anything he could to save her from hurt of any kind. If only she could do the same for him.

  ‘Seriously, Dad,’ she persevered. ‘What’s it like in here?’

  ‘It’s okay. It probably sounds silly but I can’t take the fact they all know my name but I can’t remember theirs. They’ve all been here forever so when I come in they’ve only got one name to learn while I’ve got to try to remember all of theirs. And I’m not doing very well.’

  She let the pain of his comment show on her face.

  ‘Hey, don’t worry,’ he laughed lightly. ‘I was never that good with names anyway.’

  She knew that was anything but true. She used to badger her dad to tell her about his old cases and he would sit her on his knee and reel off incidents, dates and names without ever having to pause to remember details. He’d had a mind like a vice.

  ‘You shouldn’t be in here, Dad. It’s not right.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, love,’ he replied with a sad smile. ‘I’m just a burden to your mum and it’s not fair on her.’

  ‘Mum? Dad . . . Mum wouldn’t want you in here.’

  Her mum had died five years earlier from breast cancer. Dad had been heartbroken but he’d taken the burden for both of them, as brave and strong as always. It had been the single most devastating event in his life and yet, for now, he seemed to have forgotten it.

  ‘I know she never complained,’ he continued. ‘But that’s your mum for you: she’s not the complaining type. But that doesn’t mean she deserves to have to wet nurse someone who can’t remember if he’s eaten or when he last changed his . . . um . . . his socks. See? I can’t even finish a bloody sentence sometimes.’

  She knew better than to challenge him; getting upset only made him worse.

  ‘I can pop over more often and see how you’re doing. I should be doing that anyway.’

  ‘Rachel, you’ve got your own life to lead. Anyway, this bloody thing means I can go haywire at any time. I wandered out for a walk last week and didn’t even tell your mum I was going out.’

  ‘Lots of people do that, Dad.’

  ‘It was raining. Raining and cold and I didn’t even
think to take a jacket. I was soaked to the skin by the time your mum found me. It’s not fair on her.’

  Narey could feel a tear rising to her eyes but fought it, the same way she choked back the lump in her throat. It was the last thing he’d want to see and she wasn’t going to make him endure it.

  ‘It’s not fair on you either, Dad.’

  ‘Ach, well, you get what you deserve in life.’

  ‘Not that again. You’ve got to stop feeling guilty, Dad. It was nearly twenty years ago. You can’t keep beating yourself up about it.’

  ‘Can’t I? Well, why do I keep waking up and thinking about it then? Ironic, isn’t it? I can’t remember a bloody thing half the time but the one thing I’d rather forget . . .’

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER 12

  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 sitt
ing 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.