Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

  He’d seen it before – many times. The guy was young and nervous, aggressive in his uniform because he was trying to cover the fact that he was shitting himself. Other people might have been riled at his attitude or thought he should ‘man up’ and get on with it; not Winter. He just wanted to know what was so bad behind the lines that it made the cop look so utterly lost. The second Winter saw the guy’s eyes, shifting left and right in near panic, he had a hard-on for whatever was waiting to be photographed.

  As soon as he got behind the tape, he sought out Aaron Sutton and spotted him waving his arms around furiously and yelling at his cops to get the gathering crowd of locals further back. Winter looked round but could see nothing that merited the level of chaos that was ensuing. There were definite shades of the crowd in Swanston Street when the dog had been sliced in two: loonies baying at the cold moon and a powder keg of resentment that just needed an excuse to blow. There was no sign of blood but there was the smell of it in the air and that was always guaranteed to get crowds going loopy. As Winter scanned the scene from inside the line, he got a real sense of people pushing in and on edge. With a sinking feeling, he wondered if that was all that was responsible for the young cop wetting himself. Then he saw Aaron Sutton and the look on his face.

  It was way different from the constable’s – Sutton was far too long in the tooth to suffer those kind of nerves – but his weary and worried look was all the more telling for that. Winter felt the potential for terrible things tickling his adrenalin.

  He hurried over to Sutton; the DI saw his approach and studied Winter with something that looked a whole lot like he was seriously pissed off. Winter didn’t have any doubt that the enraged look in Sutton’s eyes was aimed directly at him.

  ‘So what have we got?’ Winter asked him, trying to preempt the questions that seemed certain to come from Sutton.

  The DI stared back at him and Winter instinctively knew that Sutton was struggling between giving him a hard time and having to get on with the job at hand.

  ‘Two hands. Sliced clean off and left lying in the snow.’

  ‘Where are they? And where’s the guy they were cut from?’

  ‘One over there,’ Sutton pointed. ‘And one over there. And it’s “guys”. Plural.’

  ‘How do you know it’s not just one victim?’

  ‘Well, it’s possible. But only if he had two right hands.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keep up. We have a right hand over there and another right hand over there. This ring any bells with you, Tony?’

  Winter ignored the loaded question as best he could and asked one of his own, more in the hope of deflection than anything else.

  ‘So what have we got? A Sharia law vigilante ninja? Someone cutting the hands off thieves?’

  Sutton’s head tilted to the side and he raised his eyebrows in a show of scepticism. It was a look straight out of the Addison school. Winter gabbled a response to the unasked query.

  ‘I will tell you as soon as I can, Aaron. I promise you that. How about I take some photographs?’

  Sutton grimaced.

  ‘Forensics were here ahead of you. Give me one reason why I need you to take photographs of this scene.’

  ‘Look through my camera,’ he suggested to Sutton, turning the viewfinder towards the cop.

  ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve got two bastards running around somewhere with their hands cut off plus a mob ready to go Tonto at any minute. And you want me to say cheese?’

  ‘Just do it. It’ll show you why you need me to do this job.’

  Sutton muttered something but did it anyway.

  ‘Okay. So what the fuck am I supposed to be looking at? I can’t see a thing.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what you’ll get if the forensics do pics of the scene in the dark. They will be okay with close-up stuff, not exactly technically brilliant but usable, I guess. But if you want a shot of this scene, then they’ll be as much use as a chocolate teapot.’

  Sutton looked sceptical.

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘You need a timed exposure. I can do that; they can’t.’

  Sutton swore under his breath.

  ‘Okay but this better be good. And you better tell me what you can when you can. I don’t need any of this crap. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.’

  Winter knew the secrets of night-time photography, particularly the first rule, which was that it was as tricky as hell. Basically, all photographs rely on light reflecting back to the camera; when you don’t have light, that’s a problem. In US crime dramas they’ll most likely bring in large floodlights or generators and illuminate the scene. The problem with reality is that American television has a bigger budget than Strathclyde cops. A good camera flash does the job for evidence you can get within a few feet of but if you want something more, then the photographer has to get tricky too.

  ‘I want all the cop cars to turn off their lights,’ Winter told Sutton.

  ‘You’re joking me, right?’

  ‘Nope. They’ll mess up what I’m going to try to do. They need to go. I’ll set up, then tell you when I want the lights off. It will take . . .’ Winter looked at the sky. ‘Four minutes.’

  He walked over to where Sutton had pointed previously and saw the first of the two hands, ivory pale but peppered with blood and severed neatly just above the wrist. A blood trail ran off across the snow and ice in the direction of Croftspar Place and there were already yellow numbered markers dotting the direction in which the victim had disappeared. Winter managed to resist the urge to photograph it there and then, knowing the entire scene shot wasn’t going to keep for much longer. He checked out the second hand and, sure enough, it too had the thumb on the left as it faced down into the snow, blotchy patches of firebrick red staining the white pillow it lay on.

  He pulled himself away from the hands and went to his car, battling his way through the angry crowd of onlookers, and dragged a tripod back to the scene. Given the length of time his shot was going to take, there was no way he could take the chance of any movement that would ruin it. He switched his camera to the ‘bulb’ setting and fixed it to the tripod, making sure his lens was taking in both spots where the hands were.

  ‘Right,’ he told Sutton. ‘Ready.’

  ‘Make this as quick as you can.’

  Sutton turned to signal to the cops and in an instant the lights of five police cars and two ambulances were switched off, causing an anxious buzz to break out from the gathered mob.

  ‘Hey, whit the fuck’s going on?’

  ‘What are they bastards up tae?’

  Winter shut out the crowd as best as he could and opened the shutter. Normally, the shutter speed is like the blink of an eye, open for no more a thirtieth of a second – plenty of time for light to flood in. To open it enough to light up this scene was going to take a whole lot longer and, although he could have programmed a setting on the camera, he preferred to do it by hand, judgement and feel. There was no getting away from the fact that he liked the sense of power it gave.

  The hordes roared round him and he longed to photograph them too but knew that his flash wouldn’t do them justice. Nor could he move the camera now that the process of opening the shutter had begun. All he could hope was that some of the faces behind the line, inquisitive, angry and vengeful, would be captured above the focus of the scene itself.

  ‘They’re up tae something!’

  ‘Why’ve they switched the lights aff oan the motors?’ ‘Let’s riot these cunts.’

  Winter held firm, the shutter lead steady in his hand, loving it. Some of the cops didn’t look like they were enjoying it quite so much. They were anxious, fretfully looking round the crowd and urging the darkness to end. They stared at Winter too, as if they could force him to end the exposure simply through the power of thought.

  ‘Get the lights on.’

  ‘Get the pigs.’

  ‘Get oot of here, ya bastards.’

  From t
he corner of his eye, Winter saw something move from the right. He whirled his head round but whatever it was had already gone by him, landing with a crash of breaking glass on the road. One of the local eejits had thrown a bottle, causing a huge cheer to go up and the crowd to swell forward.

  ‘Winter! Get this over with,’ Sutton shouted at him. ‘McKie, Collins, find whoever threw that bottle and drag him out of the crowd.’

  ‘How do we know who it was, sir?’ PC Collins shouted back over the rising din.

  ‘It doesn’t fucking matter,’ Sutton blasted. ‘They’re all guilty of it. Just grab someone.’

  There was still more than a minute left on the time Winter had estimated it was going to need to get a decent exposure and he was determined to give it every second. The time was being stretched to breaking point by the nonsense going on around them and the cops on the front line were getting more antsy with each passing second. Glares were being fired at him as he stood by the camera, seemingly doing nothing. His head raced with thoughts of Sam Dunbar and Tommy Baillie, of how he was going to square things with both the leader of the Stirling travellers and Aaron Sutton.

  Thirty seconds left and he saw two bodies being plucked out of the mob by McKie and Collins and being tossed into the back of a van. All it did was enflame the situation and make the crowd surge and yell. Twenty seconds and Sutton was standing right beside him now. He was talking but all Winter could hear was the roaring pack, the rush of blood in his ears, the pounding of his heart. The more pressure he was under to finish the shot, the more his adrenalin coursed through his veins. Ten seconds. A hooded figure broke the ranks and charged towards a copper. Five seconds. They could wait. Four. Three. Two. One. Done.

  Winter ended the exposure and the moment. Chaos ensued all around but he had his photograph. Dipping his head to the display, he saw immediately that he had indeed turned night into day, seeing detail, contour and evidence where there had previously been just darkness.

  He nodded at Sutton and the DI cursed softly before turning to wave at his drivers and the vehicle lights were immediately switched on, flooding the area and inevitably causing fresh consternation among the crowd.

  ‘You’re a prick,’ Sutton muttered, with a resigned shake of his head. ‘You going to make all this hassle worth my while?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘You’d better. I’m not having some nutter running around chopping hands off people. It’s bad for business.’

  Winter watched with a pang of jealousy as the crime scene guys moved in on the two severed hands, removing them and taking them back to the lab for the easiest bit of fingerprint analysis they’d ever do. The chances of the victims being on record were high and they’d know their identities within the hour. Getting them to talk would be a different matter but Winter was sure he knew who the swordsman was. The big question was what the hell was he going to do with the information.

  Nearly two hours later a newly printed image was hot in his hands, the result of the timed exposure. He was pleased with the effort; the scene was nicely and spookily lit up. The two bloodied hands could easily be seen, as could the crowd behind the police barriers. Winter was fascinated by the contorted faces of the mob, all twisted rage and vented spleen, rough-hewn figures straight out of a Peter Howson painting, caricature products of their environment. Because of the exposure time, most of them had moved and wore blurred expressions of fury that only seemed to exaggerate their sense of being beyond reason. Only one figure was almost completely in focus and must have remained still despite the chaos around him.

  Tall and broad, he had thick dark hair and wore a full-length black leather coat. He was serious and surly rather than angry like those around him. Above all, he stood out from the rest because he was calm. He seemed to be staring not quite directly at the camera but close enough, perhaps at DI Sutton or the other cops nearby. Winter had only been given the vaguest of descriptions of him before but there was little doubt in his mind that he was looking at Sam Dunbar.

  CHAPTER 32

  Friday 14 December

  All it had taken was a single phone call to the General Teaching Council for Scotland and one returned to where Narey sat impatiently in Stewart Street. Within minutes, identity confirmed, she was given the home address of Gregory Alexander Deans. He was head of the maths department at Cleveden Secondary and lived just three miles away in Vancouver Road, Scotstoun.

  It was a long frustrating day waiting for a time when she could be confident that Deans would be home. Narey had been tempted to pay him a visit at school but decided against it in the end. Storming into a classroom, a staffroom or even the head teacher’s office had its appeal but she knew it could ultimately work against her. She didn’t have that much she could use as leverage against the man and knew he would be well within his rights to demand that she leave the school.

  If Deans was a blackmail victim, then there were a couple of things she could deduce from that. First of all, he had something to hide; innocent people don’t get blackmailed. Secondly, he hadn’t been to the cops to tell them; innocent people don’t do that either. If he was afraid, then she wanted him to be more afraid; she didn’t want him in a place where he felt secure and protected. No, she decided she would wait until he was home and in the bosom of his family. She was pretty sure they wouldn’t be in on whatever dirty little secret he was trying to keep quiet.

  She couldn’t stay away completely though and drove out to Vancouver Road just before noon to check the place out. It was a leafy, middle-class street but the set-up was slightly odd, with housing on one side and expansive rear gardens on the other, trees peering down onto the road. The Deans residence was a whitewashed mock Tudor house, which neatly matched the snowy lawn that sat behind a low railing. There was something comfortable and welcoming about it, Narey decided as she sat in her car with the engine running and the heat at full blast. It would clearly cost a right few quid but it had no air or graces – a house far too Scottish to do anything as brash as boast about what it was worth. There were few clues as to the kind of people who lived there though; all she could see through the windows was the dark promise of something unknown.

  Narey knew she couldn’t sit too long on the quiet street, her car billowing exhaust fumes into the frozen air, without someone calling the police. She imagined it was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else and strangers and their cars stuck out like sore thumbs. She wasn’t going to gain anything by having Deans tipped off about her arrival.

  Instead she put the car into gear and moved off, turning onto Earlbank Avenue and heading for Milngavie. She hadn’t been to see her dad in five days and the sudden realisation filled her with guilt. She had been so busy thinking about putting the lake killing right she’d forgotten about the person she was doing it for in the first place.

  As she drove along Victoria Park Drive North, heading for Balshagray Avenue, she got stopped behind a bus that had pulled in to pick up passengers. She turned her head to see a bunch of kids and adults playing in the park and was at once taken back to snowy days with her dad when she was young. He always seemed to be there, no matter how much work she now knew he must have been doing. He’d take her and her pals sledging, build snowmen and happily be pelted with snowballs until they tumbled home cold and wet to Mum, who would always greet them with a despairing shake of the head that she didn’t mean. A car horn blared impatiently behind her, dragging her back to the present, and she stuck an apologetic arm up at the other driver as she moved off.

  Twenty-five minutes later she took a deep breath and closed the car door, the nursing home in front of her. She pulled her coat tightly to her, hugging it as much for comfort as for protection against the snow flurry, and made her way down the path into Clober Nursing Home. She hadn’t phoned ahead and had no idea if it was visiting time or not but she was going to see him anyway. Good luck to anyone who tried to stop her.

  As it turned out, she hadn’t even finished stamping the snow from
her feet when a concerned-looking young woman came up to her and opened the inner door to allow her inside. Something about her rush to help made Narey uneasy.

  ‘Miss Narey, isn’t it? Come on in. It’s terrible out there. You have to wonder how long this weather can keep up. The snow is nice at first but I’ll be glad to see the back of it.’

  The heat hit Narey immediately. Even for someone who hated the cold as much as she did, this was excessive. She tugged her coat off, eager to escape the stifling temperature.

  ‘I know. It’s hot, isn’t it?’ the woman sympathised. ‘We have to have the heating up at full blast for the residents. We can’t take any chances with them and it’s freezing out there.’

  A resident. Was that what her father had become? She thought of him as many things: a protector, a provider, a parent, a rock, but not a resident. Never that. She followed the staff member through the corridors of the home till they came to the day room where she knew her dad was usually to be found. They kept going though, past a bunch of old dears who sat together, some chatting, some looking out the window at the falling snow. Narey was about to ask why he wasn’t there when it occurred to her that she perhaps didn’t want to hear the answer.

  They continued until they reached her dad’s room and, after the most cursory of knocks, the carer opened the door and stuck her head round it.

  ‘Mr Narey? How are you, Mr Narey? Your daughter’s here to see you . . . No, no, your daughter.’

  Narey eased her way past the woman and stepped into the room, recoiling instantly as she saw him propped up in bed with his head bandaged. Even worse, he just looked at her blankly, clearly trying to work out who she was.

  She hurried over to his side, sat on the edge of the bed and hugged him. He let her do it, neither hugging her back nor trying to stop her. After a bit, he put his arms on her shoulders and eased her away from him so he could take a look at her.