Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

  ‘Just sitting in my office waiting for a call so I can get away from this bloody filing. I’m bored off my tits.’

  She laughed at him down the end of the phone.

  ‘Sitting there praying for a nice car crash or a stabbing?’

  ‘No,’ he answered defensively. ‘Well, yes. A bit.’

  ‘Sick fucker,’ she laughed again and then she was gone.

  She was right though. If there was a choice between admin or photographing the fallout from Glasgow’s endless affection for violence, then it was a no-brainer. The truth was that he’d have chosen it over most things. As if on cue, the office door burst open and Paul Burke stuck his head round the door.

  ‘All right? Shift your arse. We’ve got a job.’

  ‘Something interesting?’

  ‘Suicide.’

  Winter groaned. Suicides were far and away his least favourite subject matter. The fact that they intended their own demise took all the fun out of it for him.

  ‘Well, if you don’t want it, fair enough,’ Burke told him. ‘Two Soups will be more than happy to have me doing the photos and we all know how much you hate that.’

  Campbell Baxter never wanted Winter on any job but that wasn’t what Burke was getting at – there was something else here. The grin playing round the edges of Burke’s mouth told Winter that he was at it. And there was also a glint in the man’s eye that suggested he was excited about this job, whatever it was. Burke was probably the only one on the forensic team whose appetite for gore came anywhere near to matching Winter’s.

  ‘So what aren’t you telling me, Burkey?’

  Burke grinned even wider.

  ‘It’s a belter.’

  The hairs on the back of Winter’s neck instantly stood up.

  ‘Better than the samurai guy?’

  ‘Way better.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Someone stepped out in front of an express train at Cambuslang station. Body parts spread to the winds. Interested now?’

  Winter was out of his chair and pulling on his coat in one swift movement. He was halfway to the door and past Burke before the forensic even had time to laugh.

  ‘I’ll take that as a “yes” then, shall I?’

  ‘Take it as anything you want,’ Winter shouted back at him over his shoulder. ‘But get a move on.’

  Burke filled him in on what had happened as they drove to Cambuslang. The station had gained a reputation for jumpers over the years and a lot of drivers hated going through it. The express would belt through the platform at top speed and if someone were crazy enough to step in front of a train, then they’d be wiped out immediately.

  It was the certainty of death that attracted them to it. A thousand tonnes of metal hitting twelve stones of flesh, tissue and brittle bone at nearly a hundred miles an hour wasn’t much of a contest. Sometimes the train would do such a number on the body that forensic teams were called in just to prove it had actually happened. Traumatised drivers would tell of someone stepping in front of their train but there would be no physical sign of it having taken place. The body could instantly be vaporised on the windscreen, leaving nothing but trace elements that could be washed away by a shower of rain.

  That was all assuming that the jumper got it right.

  Death didn’t become such a certainty if you stepped in front of the wrong train. If it was a slow train, then that could mean broken bones, paraplegia, brain injuries; any number of things that stopped short of death, worse than death. So, it became apparent the would-be jumpers did their homework first, stalking out station platforms, getting to know which trains stopped and which didn’t, memorising the express timetables and also the goods diesels that thundered through without even blinking at the platform. They promised the sweet certainty of an instantaneous demise.

  There could be halfway houses though. If the jumper stepped out a fraction too soon, then they fell under the wheels and ended up cut in two – or three. But the real kicker was when they stepped out a fraction too late, perhaps held back by fear or a last-second change of heart. Then the train might catch them a glancing blow, albeit a thousand tonne–hundred miles an hour glance that could be very messy indeed. Then people standing on station platforms had been known to have been showered in blood, bone and entrails as the jumper was ripped to bits.

  Stations like Linlithgow on the Glasgow–Edinburgh line had seen their share of jumpers over the years. It was a busy platform, with commuter crowds to provide camouflage for the desperate, yet at the same time express trains battered through without a care in the world. Cambuslang, in the east end of the city, fitted the profile on the West Coast Main Line. Not the way out of Central Station towards London though, as you couldn’t be sure that the express had built up a proper head of steam; instead you would wait on the westbound platform for it to make its return journey, ready to catch it before it puts its brakes on ahead of Dalmarnock. You’re not in a hurry if you’ve got nowhere to go.

  Winter and Burke didn’t say much on the drive over from Pitt Street. Once Burke had filled him in on what had happened, they both lapsed into a brooding silence, their minds full of possibilities. Although they both had an appetite for what lay ahead, Burke’s was professional while Winter’s was obsessional. Burke would enjoy the unusual, visceral nature of the case; Winter would positively feast upon it.

  As soon as they got on to Main Street in Cambuslang, the quiet organised chaos of the newly formed crime scene loomed large before them and they could see officers directing traffic and a few white-suited worker bees already busying themselves with the business of death.

  Winter’s itch flared and he found himself hoping the carnage was every bit as bad as Burke had promised. The forensic pulled into the first available space, not having to worry about the double yellows because of the badge displayed on his windscreen. The pair tumbled out of the car and Winter hurriedly grabbed his camera bag from the boot.

  As they ducked under the tape, Winter looked to his left and saw a woman standing, ashen-faced, a shopping bag in her hand, fifty yards or so away. She seemed to be rooted still in shock and the hairs on Winter’s neck tingled as he looked at her and wondered what she’d seen. He wanted to stand and stare at her but Burke called him on and in seconds they were running down the stairs to the station concourse, landing on the grim brick reality of Cambuslang station, all blackened stone and dreary concrete – a depressing sight at the best of times.

  An anxious huddle of people, maybe a dozen of them, were standing against a wall, corralled there by two uniformed police officers, one of them taking notes at the front of the line. Winter could see the emotions on the would-be commuters’ faces ranged from disbelief to nervous excitement. A burly figure in a white coverall was waving his arms around theatrically, gesturing angrily at those near him to get a move on. Campbell Baxter’s actions were those of a man under pressure. He turned at the sound of Winter and Burke coming down the stairs, a glare immediately attaching itself to his face.

  ‘About time,’ he snapped at them. ‘Get yourselves covered up. Winter, do what you have to do but get it done quickly. There’s work to be done so I can get these people out of here.’

  As ever, Two Soups had little regard for Winter’s photography skills and, as ever, Winter would pay him no heed and take as much time as he felt necessary. It was an arrangement only one of them was happy with.

  ‘Where’s the train?’ Winter asked him, regretting the stupidity of the question as soon as it was out of his mouth.

  ‘Glasgow Central,’ Baxter told him condescendingly. ‘It was halfway there before anyone knew anything about it. It can’t stop on a sixpence, you know. It will be examined, and photographed, there.’

  Baxter caught the look of annoyance that crossed Winter’s face.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mr Winter,’ Two Soups replied tersely. ‘There’s more than enough here to be keeping you busy. We haven’t found all of him yet. Speak to the sergeant. He’ll point you in
the right direction. Well . . . directions.’

  Sergeant Willie Scott was old school, the kind of copper who had been round the block twice and hadn’t been surprised by any of it the first time round. He nodded his head at Winter as he saw him approach, giving off nothing more than an air of mild bemusement at what was going on around him.

  ‘Awrite, son? I hope you’ve got plenty of film in that camera of yours. This poor bastard is in more bits than ten jigsaw sets.’

  ‘We don’t use film,’ Winter started to tell him. ‘It’s all digi—’

  ‘I know, son,’ Scott wearily interrupted him. ‘I’m not completely fucking stupid. Right, here’s the script. The guy was thought to be in his forties, stepped in front of the big choo choo train and was smashed to smithereens. We think his torso was blown away but there’s a hand way down the far end of the platform and something that might be a bit of shoulder near it. There’s pieces of him up on the main street too. We haven’t got a head and maybe we won’t get one. That do you?’

  Winter nodded, trying not to give away the surge of adrenalin that was coursing through him. The general view of him among the cops was probably strange enough without making it worse. He turned and headed for the end of the platform where the suicide guy’s hand was.

  The platform end was unguarded and Winter could hear the echo of his own feet as he approached, their beat marching in time to the pounding of his heart. There it was, right enough, a hand cut clean off just above the wrist. Whatever shirt or jacket had been worn by the arm it was attached to had gone. The hand was already deadly pale. The colour, or lack of it, reminded Winter of the woman outside the railway station and he craved to see what she had seen.

  The fingers of the severed hand were pointing to the sky, its pallid flesh torn where it had skidded along the rough concrete, seeping tears of candy apple red. Winter zoomed right on it, capturing every pore, seeing it was a left hand and noting the soft skin and absence of any calluses. The owner, whatever he did, wasn’t used to hard labour.

  The hand was tense, as if beginning to form a claw, perhaps a last-minute change of heart or simply the natural instinct for survival, fighting against the desire for death. The crash of nerve endings, tissue, bone and tendons that were exposed above the wrist didn’t display a clean break but a messy one; the victim of the bludgeon rather than the guillotine. Winter popped a yellow photographic marker down beside the hand and moved on in search of more.

  It didn’t take him long to find the bloodied piece of fresh meat that was indeed a shoulder, stripped bare and broken off as easily as a piece of bread being torn into chunks. The remaining flesh carried no identifying marks, no moles or tattoos, and being devoid of visible expression it didn’t interest Winter much beyond the macabre nature of its demise. He picked over the rest of the platform, seeing and photographing shards of bone and slithers of skin, leaving markers at each of them.

  As he walked back down the platform towards the shocked huddle of passengers, he held his camera at waist height and fired off shot after shot at the waiting crowd, looking the other way and vainly trying to cover the shutter noise with a cough. The allure for him had always been as much the witnesses as the victim, relishing the voyeurism among the rubberneckers and taking some consolation that they shared his grubby fascination for the ghoulish.

  Winter’s hero was the great Mexican tabloid photographer Enrique Metinides and it was from him that he’d learned the value of crowd shots, holding them up as a mirror to the scene of death, a counterpoint to the central image in which a being had crossed from one world to the next. Their fear and enthralment, their tears and affectations – all whistling in the dark. Metinides was the king of car crashes, murders and suicides, taking irresistible photographs that also brilliantly captured those who were there to gawp.

  Winter climbed the steps back up to Main Street, instinctively photographing the crowds peeking in wonder at the events behind the police tape. He didn’t spend much time on them though because he had only one person in mind whom he wanted to find. She was still there, frozen with her mouth open. As he got nearer he could see that she was in her mid-fifties, a neatly dressed woman with her hair tied back, an intended shopping mission now forgotten. She was wringing her hands and nibbling on her own lips as if it could somehow erase whatever it was that she’d seen.

  Winter knew she hadn’t noticed his approach, her mind consumed, and he stopped and put her firmly in the frame of his Nikon FM2, rattling off a few shots before she or anyone else wondered what the hell he was doing. She was a picture of post-trauma and he had no doubt she would lead him to where he wanted to be.

  The woman only looked up when he was a few feet away, his footsteps finally awakening her from her dwam of distraction.

  ‘Where is it?’ he asked her as gently as he could.

  The woman’s eyes widened and she chewed on her lip again before weakly raising an arm and pointing behind her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled at him. ‘Sorry.’

  Winter didn’t stop to explain that she had no reason to apologise, to tell her he understood that all she’d been guilty of was being unable to pass on the horror of what she had stumbled across further down the street. Instead he hurried towards it.

  The head was sitting in the shade of a wall, at rest against a set of railings that kept it from the road, undisturbed and unnoticed, as everyone’s attention had been on the police activity nearer the station. The dark, thick hair that greeted Winter had also perhaps protected it from obvious scrutiny; the last thing a passer-by might imagine he or she was looking at was what it actually was. Winter stepped on by until he was able to turn and see the face of the man who had been unwise enough to step in front of a train.

  Winter dropped onto his backside and immediately framed the bloodied head in his Nikon, seeing a man in his mid-forties, his eyes screwed shut and his mouth wide open. The bloodless skin was scraped at the cheek and temple, doubtless from where it had landed, but otherwise the face was surprisingly unmarked. The back of the head had taken a heavy blow and the matted hair had collapsed in like a sunken mine shaft. The head itself had been snapped clean off the neck, probably the only thing that had saved it from being obliterated by the force of the train. The seeping point of separation licked crimson onto the ground.

  Winter’s lens also picked out pinched red marks across the bridge of the man’s nose and above his ears, clear signs of a pair of spectacles that hadn’t made the flight through the air with him. He saw a rosy blush on the man’s cheeks that could have suggested a fondness for alcohol. The teeth bared by the open mouth were well looked after, white and even, unstained by tobacco. His skin was smooth and freshly shaved. Middle aged, middle class and his head in the middle of the pavement.

  What would drive a man to be so desperate as to take his chances with an express train, Winter wondered. He couldn’t help but think of the old joke about there finally being light at the end of the tunnel but that it was a train coming the other way. Whatever light this guy had been hoping to see, it had been swapped for a stare into the abyss. Winter would never be able to stop wondering what it was they saw there. But no matter how dark the thoughts that inhabited Winter’s mind, he couldn’t imagine how bad things would have to be before he did something like take his own life, particularly in such a violent, chaotic manner. A noise behind him made him jump and broke the trance he realised he’d been in. There were four people standing around him, all with their mouths open, unconsciously mimicking the head that lay on the concrete before them. Two of them were young boys in school uniform and the horror in their eyes was mixed with a joy in what they would soon be able to tell their pals. It was a conflict of emotions Winter knew all too well but he couldn’t let them see this.

  ‘Piss off,’ he told the group but the kids in particular. ‘Go on, get out of here.’

  The gawpers backed off reluctantly, unable to take their eyes off the head but moving back about twenty yards so they could stil
l see what was going on. Winter got to his feet, standing between them and the severed head, waving towards the police barrier at the station. A constable had already seen them, his attention grabbed by the knot of people, and was now hurrying towards them. Winter threw a number marker on the ground beside the photo scale that already lay there, kneeling again to shoot a final few frames of the head and mentally wishing its former owner farewell.

  The clatter of heavy boots signalled the arrival of the uniformed constable, a young guy Winter didn’t know. He arrived as a picture of urgency and efficiency and became a bog-eyed tourist as soon as he saw what lay at Winter’s feet.

  ‘Jeezus.’

  ‘I know. Just keep that lot there back from it and radio for reinforcements and forensics. Don’t worry, it won’t bite.’

  The constable raised his eyes from the head just long enough to throw an embarrassed glare at Winter, then turned back nervously to the severed head. Winter left him to it, content he had an image that would take its place on the wall of photographs adorning his Charing Cross flat. As ever though, he wanted more; ten paces on from the head he swivelled and captured the cop and the crowd and the bloodied prize between them.

  As he neared the station steps again, Winter passed Burke rushing the other way, clearly having been called by the young cop.

  ‘You’ve missed out big time.’ Burke grinned at him. ‘They found a foot. Fucking thing was still wearing a sock and shoe. Seeing as you weren’t around, I had to photograph it. A belter, so it was.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it was you that missed out, mate,’ Winter told him. ‘I couldn’t give a flying fuck about your foot. Hurry along and you’ll get my sloppy seconds. You won’t be needing your camera.’

  Two hours later, Winter stood in front of what he called his wall of excellence. Narey and Addison, the only two other people ever to have seen it, called it his wall of death. It was a label it was hard to argue with.

  It was in the second bedroom in his flat in Berkeley Street in Charing Cross but, as he rarely had visitors, it served as an office and a chilling testimony to his love affair with the city’s dark side. There were twenty photographs in five rows of four, all carefully mounted and positioned, framed in black ash and hung for posterity. Each represented a moment of finality, death captured in stark monotones and bloody reds.