Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

  Winter had this thing about the colour of blood, how it wasn’t red at all but a myriad of shades depending on how long the vital stuff had been spilled for. He had seen and photographed so much of it that he had a keen eye for exactly where it sat on the palate that existed behind his eyes. It was a standing joke among the scenes of crime officers that Winter could give an accurate time of death long before it was rubber stamped by a pathologist. From crimson or candy apple, all the way through to sangria or rufous by way of falu, alizarin, carmine or firebrick, he knew every hue.

  It took a lot for him to alter the photographs on his wall. A new print had to be pretty special to push out one of the twenty that were there. He had taken thousands of images of thousands of incidents and the wall represented the best – and worst – of them. A car crash, a street fight fatality, a frozen corpse, shootings, stabbings, even a crucifixion – all life and death was there, captured in the moment it crossed from one to the other. It had been months, nearly a year in fact, since he had last made a change but the severed head from Cambuslang railway station demanded to be included. A decapitation was a first even for him.

  He hated having to choose which photograph to take down. It wasn’t as if he’d ever throw any of them out but his own unwritten rule was that once they were off the wall, then they were off for good. Instead they’d be filed away to be viewed on rainy days and dark moments when he simply felt the need, which meant they’d be looked at often.

  Winter scanned the rows of photographs, studying them even though he was intimate with every pool of blood, every rip and every scream. Avril Duncanson, his first job: a young woman who had vaulted head first through her car windscreen. Salim Abbas, the innocent schoolboy victim of a gang attack; all broken, bruised and bloodied, his body a roadmap of vicious intent. Marie Wylde, the middle-class victim of a drunken middle-class husband, her face lacerated with a thousand cuts. Graeme Forrest, a uniformed cop, an inspector who’d paid the ultimate price for being on the wrong side of the law and been nailed to a door with a pool of blood and fear at his feet. Jimmy Adamson and Andrew Haddow, underworld minions who’d died by the sword they’d chosen to live by, laid out in puddles of rosso corsa, taken out by bullets of vengeance.

  Those were the bare descriptions, the things other people might have seen if they were given the chance to see them. Winter saw more. He saw the unmarked loveliness of Avril Duncanson’s face: not remarkably pretty but with flawless skin that was all the more astonishing for having somehow survived the windscreen shower. In the dark brown eyes of the boy whose only crime had been to have the wrong colour skin, he saw not only fear but also pity for assailants who were scarred by hate. He saw splendid retribution in the luscious blood pools of the career criminals. He saw beauty where others simply saw death. Choosing which photograph to take down was like deciding which of his children had to leave the bosom of the family home.

  With regret verging on guilt, he finally opted to remove his photograph of the body of Bridgeton Elvis. The old man had frozen to death at the foot of a tree near the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green one bitterly cold January morning three years before. He’d been a harmless jaikie, fond of the Bucky or whatever other booze was going cheap, and always used to greet the east end cops with a tuneless rendition of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ every time he saw them. Winter’s photograph showed Elvis in the middle of his longest sleep with powder blue cheeks and icicled beard. Winter loved the shot of the old guy but he loved the others more. It had to go.

  In its place he hung the Cambuslang commuter. With his eyes screwed shut, the suicide victim stared back at Winter with mouth wide and hope extinguished. Winter had managed to get low enough on the pavement so that he was level with the head and had constructed an angle that gave the impression of a portrait. It would, however, have fulfilled few of the criteria demanded of a passport photograph: it was taken against concrete rather than a light grey or plain cream background; the mouth was open and the eyes were not; the expression was not neutral and the rest of the body was missing.

  The shoe that had been attached to the severed foot forensics had found was relatively new, dressy and well polished. It didn’t exactly scream poverty. The man’s face had been recently shaved and didn’t suggest any lack of care. His full head of dark hair might have hinted at someone whose life wasn’t full of worry or just a set of generous genes that precluded male pattern baldness. Winter knew that psychological problems ran much deeper than money or material possessions though, and he could only guess at the demons that had made this guy step in front of an oncoming train. Not that the motives mattered – not to Winter – all that counted was the end result.

  Winter had never quite got round to confirming the legal, let alone the moral, position regarding the photographs he had hanging in his spare room. It had suited him not to ask the question given that there was an answer he didn’t want to hear. He thought of them as his own intellectual property but it was admittedly a possibility that the Procurator Fiscal could have taken a differing view. Some were taken on the department-issued Nikon FM2; others were taken on his own Canon EOS-1D. A couple, like the blood-soaked body of druglord Cairns Caldwell, were even taken on his mobile phone because he’d had nothing else to hand. All, however, were taken while on the clock and that was what gave the cops or the Scottish Police Services Authority a legal claim over them, if only they’d known they were there. The moral claim to have them on his wall was a different matter altogether and Winter couldn’t afford to spend too much time debating that with himself.

  He turned away from the wall, suddenly feeling the need to see the outside world. His Berkeley Street flat looked out on to the pale sandstone walls of the Mitchell Library on the other side of the street and he drew in the view in a single gulp. He had to press himself close to the glass to see pink sky above the library and found condensation licking against his nose as he did so. It would probably have helped if he’d turned the heating up in the flat, seeing it was a degree or two below freezing outside, but he hated being too warm. Rachel’s flat was always like an oven and yet she’d be wearing heavy jumpers or a fleece while he’d be in a T-shirt.

  It wasn’t the only difference between their flats. Her place was over a hundred years old with rooms you could fly a kite in, the ceilings were so high, antique fireplaces in every one and no parking space within a country mile. His end of Berkeley Street was modern and clinical, devoid of cat-swinging room but with trellised balconies you almost had room to step onto. The style would probably be classed as minimalist but for the clutter. Hers suited her and his suited him.

  The Mitchell used to be one of his favourite buildings in the city – until he’d moved in opposite it. It was the largest public reference library in Europe and the font of all Glasgow and global knowledge. He used to love its late Victorian splendour and the sheer physical statement it was designed to make about the importance of knowledge. The building was always lit up at night and undoubtedly a spectacular sight when you zoomed past on the M8 but it was a pain in the arse when you had a giant Christmas tree permanently positioned outside your window. Winter had always been a man more in favour of the dark than the light.

  He watched a small group of people hurry along the street, all waddling as quickly as three layers of clothing would allow. There wasn’t more than a dusting of snow on the pavement but all the forecasts said there was plenty more to come.

  His mind drifted back a couple of weeks and two decades and thought of Lily lying in her snowy grave on Inchmahome. An uncharacteristic shiver ran through him as he closed his eyes and tried to picture her face. Did she have green eyes or blue, was her face lightly freckled to go with her blonde hair? Was she pretty or plain?

  Winter opened the cupboards where he kept some of his older prints and the plethora of camera paraphernalia he had amassed, much of it never used as it hadn’t proved as handy as the trade magazines had promised. There were a few extra black ash frames in there too, each exactly the same
as the ones that held his collection. He took one out, along with a bracket and a couple of panel pins.

  He picked a spot on the wall opposite the five rows of four and carefully knocked the pins and bracket into position. Conscious that he was doing so with unnecessary ceremony, Winter placed the empty frame onto the wall and stood back to consider it.

  The blank frame blinked back at him, the plain white mounting taunting him with promises of an image unknown. He closed his eyes again and made a silent promise to the girl whose face he couldn’t see – his fellow orphan.

  ‘Abandoned and alone,’ he said out loud. ‘But not for long.’

  CHAPTER 24

  Saturday 8 December

  The R2S system was one of Winter’s favourite bits of computer geekery. Normally he didn’t approve of anything that took away from the simple beauty of a photograph. He barely tolerated the addition of a frame beyond its practical uses and always shunned any suggestion of digitally enhancing a photograph. It was what it was, warts and all, and would only lose some sense of its identity if you tried to fanny around with it in Photoshop or anything similar.

  The difference with R2S was that the guys who invented it had been in the job and thankfully knew just what cops, forensics and photographers needed from it. One of the pair who had come up with it had actually been a photographer with Grampian Police and that probably explained why it ticked so many boxes for Winter. The system allowed him to drop photographs, 360-shots, information, 999 audio calls, whatever, onto the big picture and the whole lot was a joined-up signature that was accessible not only to Strathclyde cops, but all of the Scottish police forces and beyond.

  It made Winter’s job a lot easier in the court room too. Instead of having to stand there like a spanner holding a glossy A3-sized photograph or handing it round the jury, the whole business was much slicker. The images could be displayed on a screen, enlarged or viewed in sections, turned upside down or back to front. They could be viewed from any other point in the crime scene, giving jurors the chance to see how it would actually have looked from wherever a witness was standing.

  There were instances when his work was just too much for some juries to handle. Ironically, the more he liked a crime scene, the less other people seemed to want to look at it. So, in some instances, the R2S team would create a 3D virtual replica of a scene, or perhaps of a body, so it would be more palatable to the sensitive souls on the jury than the real thing. He was pretty sure that would happen in the unlikely event the suicide had to go before a jury, though a fatal accident inquiry was far more likely.

  During an investigation, whenever any fresh bit of info became available – whether a new photo or witness statement, a name or place or a blood type – it flashed up to all users of the system. They were even alerted by text message to say that something new had been added. It was an obvious but long-awaited piece of common-sense thinking that meant all parties in an enquiry could communicate with each other.

  The R2S for the Cambuslang suicide was split into two distinct parts: the platform from which the guy had stepped in front of the express, thereby leaving various bits of himself behind, and the street where the head was found. In both, Winter had first photographed the scene with the spherical camera, which produced the 360-degree image that every other bit of audio and visual evidence could be dropped onto. It meant he was now able to sit in the cold comfort of his Pitt Street office and pan round both scenes, taking in witnesses, tarmac and platform, disembodied head, severed hand and shoulder bone. He grudgingly admired Paul Burke’s picture of the foot that was still wearing a shoe and a sock despite being rudely separated from the rest of the leg.

  It had only been a day since the suicide and they still didn’t have a name for the victim. He was tagged up as ‘Unidentified Male’ while the cops waited for someone to realise they had lost a husband or father or son. The portrait photo Winter had taken wasn’t exactly the kind of thing they could show on the six o’clock news.

  His reverential study of the Cambuslang pics was rudely interrupted by his mobile phone ringing. It was Addison.

  ‘Awrite, wee man? How’s things in the boiler room of police investigations? I’m bored off my tits being stuck in here all day. You fancy a pint later?’

  There were no medium-sized people in Glasgow; everyone was either ‘wee man’ or ‘big man’. Winter stood six feet tall but Addison’s extra four inches in height meant he was duly obliged to label his mate ‘wee man’. The two of them were best pals, something that didn’t please everyone in the Strathclyde cops but neither of them gave a monkey’s. They had shared many a night propping up the bar together or sitting beside each other at Celtic Park. Their shared but differing knowledge of police operations worked for both of them. They knew enough to be able to talk about each other’s work but they also knew when to shut up – at least Winter did. Sometimes Addison never knew when to stop and that had only got worse since he’d been off active duty.

  However, Winter knew that having a drink with a grouchy Addison would be as nothing compared to how bad tempered he’d be the next time if he didn’t. The only way to keep the DI relatively happy these days was to go along with whatever he wanted. Anything for a quiet life, Winter thought.

  ‘Aye, sure. I’m just about finished up in here anyway.’

  ‘Music to my ears, wee man. Why don’t you haul your lazy arse over to the TSB and I’ll see you in there. Say, in an hour?’

  The Station Bar in Cowcaddens was their favourite drinking haunt but it always rankled with Winter that it was round the corner from Addison’s station in Stewart Street and nowhere near as handy for him, as he was usually stuck in Pitt Street. Still, he’d long since stopped trying to win that argument as well. Anyway, they kept a good drop of Guinness and that overcame all objections.

  When Winter got to Port Dundas Road and pushed his way through the main door of The Station Bar, he saw that Addison had unsurprisingly beaten him to it and was standing at the bar, pint in hand and half of it already gone. He saw Winter coming and tapped his glass, signalling to the barman to pull another two pints.

  ‘Let’s grab a seat,’ Addison said with a nod of his head to the tables in the rear lounge. ‘With all the time I’m spending parked on my arse, I’m losing the ability to stand for more than two minutes at a time.’

  Addison slid his lanky frame behind a table in the corner, puffing out his cheeks and exhaling bitterly. Winter immediately sensed a rant coming on and tried to cut his pal off at the pass.

  ‘Have you seen the forecast for tonight? They’re saying we’re going to get heavy snow.’

  ‘Aye? Brilliant. Just what I bloody need: another reason for me to be cooped up inside. That probably means the game won’t be on tomorrow either. Fucking great. It’s not bad enough that I can’t do any proper police work but now I’m going to have to do without the football as well. This shit is really ripping my knitting, I’m telling you.’

  So much for stopping him from going off on one, Winter thought.

  ‘I tell you, wee man, I don’t know how much longer I can put up with this,’ Addison continued. ‘Every other fucker is out there doing the fun stuff and I’m playing at strategy planning with jumped up admin assistants and wet nursing cops who couldn’t lace my boots when it comes to proper police work.’

  Addison’s rant was interrupted by the beaming face of a grey-haired lady, who thrust both it and a rattling can between the two men. She looked at Addison without a response so she shook the can once more.

  ‘For a Christmas party for disadvantaged children,’ she announced cheerily.

  Addison’s face didn’t crack. ‘Let me see your ID.’

  The woman’s smile fell as she reached, embarrassed, into her bag and produced a laminated card that proved she was indeed genuine.

  ‘Okay,’ Addison nodded, still not putting his hand in his pocket. ‘I didn’t say I was going to give anything, I just wanted to check you weren’t at it.’

  ‘He
re.’ Winter dropped a couple of pound coins in the woman’s tin and smiled apologetically for his friend.

  ‘I hate bloody Christmas,’ Addison muttered.

  ‘So you’ve said a thousand times.’

  ‘Aye, and here’s another thing. You know that Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer? See how the other reindeer laugh and call him names, right? And then when he leads Santa’s sleigh, they all want to be his pal? Well, if I was Rudolph, I’d have told them to fuck right off.’

  Winter knew it was going to be a long session. He began to switch off and let the tirade flow over him, becoming engrossed not for the first time with the ugly yet beautiful scar visible under Addison’s hairline: the sniper’s bullet had nearly torn his head off his shoulders; it had left a thick, jagged and permanent reminder.

  ‘Will you stop looking at my scar, you sick fucker?’ Addison demanded.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it. I’m not an exhibit on your freaky Wall of Death. I’m the one with the scar but you’re the one who needs your head examined, wee man. You have serious problems between those ears.’

  ‘Aye, okay. I said I was sorry. It’s just a bit . . . magnetic.’

  ‘Only for a sicko like you,’ Addison blustered. ‘And the chicks, of course. They love it. Actually, talking of the ladies . . . Narey’s up to something as well. I don’t know what it is yet but I’ve got a bad feeling the silly cow is getting herself into bother over something.’

  Winter tried not to seem too interested. If anyone suspected he and Rachel were an item, it was Addy. It would be just like him to be fishing in the hope that Winter would bite.