Snapshot

by Craig Robertson

  Addison walked straight past her, only a raising of his eyebrows letting her know that he was duly pissed off, stopping inside to pull on coveralls and a pair of disposable gloves. She shook her head and followed him inside the tent where examiners were huddled over the woman’s body.

  ‘Okay,’ barked Addison. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit.’

  The white protective suit immediately in front of him turned and looked up.

  ‘The epitome of decorum as ever, Detective Inspector.’

  Addison saw the green eyes of Cat Fitzpatrick looking up at him disapprovingly but he wasn’t in the mood to be lectured to.

  ‘Aye, aye, whatever. I know it’s not even opening time yet but it’s already been a very long day. So if you don’t mind, doll, I’ve got a job to do.’

  ‘That’s fine, don’t mind me. I’m just waiting for my nail varnish to dry,’ she replied sarcastically.

  ‘That’s nice,’ replied Addison, not remotely listening but taking Fitzpatrick’s place as she moved out of the way.

  The girl lying tangled on the pavement was in her early twenties, her eyes and mouth wide open in shock, her short skirt rucked up above her waist and her underwear round one ankle. Her pale neck bore violent compression marks where her young life had been strangled out of her.

  The girl’s platinum-blonde hair was darker at the roots and her make-up was as thick as her lipstick was red. Her arms were skinny and her face gaunt behind the war paint. Addison noted the discolouration of her fingers, her decaying teeth and the raw red marks at her nostrils. They were as sure signs of her habit as the black platform boots, the micro skirt and the halterneck top were of her employment.

  The DI moved slightly to the side and saw a dark patch of dried blood on the back of the girl’s head that made a good match with her lipstick.

  ‘So which killed her?’ he asked the scene examiner. ‘The strangulation or the blow to the head?’

  ‘Either could have done it,’ Fitzpatrick replied. ‘But I’d suggest the injury to the skull was secondary, or at least incidental to the primary attack. As he compressed her neck, he forced her back and in doing so banged her head off whatever was behind her. Which wasn’t here, by the way.’

  ‘So where?’

  ‘Twenty metres further up the lane. There are flecks of blue paint in her skull which matches an opening there. If it took place here then she’d have traces of this brickwork but she hasn’t.’

  ‘We got a name for her yet?’ Addison asked.

  ‘No,’ replied Narey from behind him. ‘There was nothing on her, no bag, no ID. She’d either stashed it somewhere before she began working or someone stole it from her.’

  ‘Robbery?’ asked Addison doubtfully.

  ‘Doesn’t seem likely, I agree. It looks as if he killed her during or immediately after sex and that suggests a whole different kind of motive.’

  ‘Fucking great,’ muttered Addison.

  He gently lifted up one of the girl’s hands, noting the dirty fingers and cracked nails and, more importantly, no obvious signs of skin beneath the nails where she might have clawed at her attacker.

  ‘It looks like she didn’t fight back.’

  ‘Stoned out of her head, most likely,’ offered Narey. ‘She didn’t know if it was Friday or Falkirk and by the time she did, he’d strangled her.’

  ‘Looks that way,’ agreed Fitzpatrick. ‘I’ll need to wait on the toxicology tests and have a more thorough look beneath her nails but I think DS Narey is right.’

  Addison nodded soberly, their opinions confirmation of what he thought.

  ‘Okay, Rachel, seeing as you are on form, what do you make of this?’ he asked, pointing his finger at a patch on one side of the girl’s face where her make-up had been partially scrubbed away from her cheek.

  ‘It’s strange,’ admitted Narey. ‘Might just be part of the struggle or it could be some weird attempt by the killer to leave his mark on her.’

  ‘Could be,’ murmured Addison. ‘See the sweep of it? Looks like it was done with fingers then gone over again with something like the sleeve of a shirt to wipe away any fingerprints. Who have you got here with you?’

  ‘DC Corrieri,’ Narey replied. ‘She’s outside.’

  ‘When you get back to the station get her onto the Police National Computer and see if this marries up with any known sex offender, marking his territory kind of thing. It’s probably a long shot but if this fucker has done this before then we need to know about it. And I need you to find out who she is. You got people you know down here?’

  ‘I’ve got a contact over at the drop-in centre,’ Narey nodded. ‘But there’s not going to be anyone around at this time of day.’

  ‘Same goes for the other girls who would have been working down here last night. Okay, I’ll organize a sweep of the place for tonight and see if anyone will talk to us. In the meantime I’ll get someone to go through the CCTV. You find me a name for her.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Ms Fitzpatrick, do you have an approximate time of death for me?’ Addison asked.

  ‘For you, Detective Inspector? Any time soon, one would hope.’

  ‘Funny. I did mention that it had been a long day, didn’t I? When do you think she was killed?’

  ‘Best guess right now is around midnight. I’ll be able to give you a slightly better idea later.’

  ‘Okay, I guess that will have to do for now. Rachel, talk me through how and where she was found. I take it the cops who were first called are still here?’

  ‘Yes, PCs Dwyer and Watt. They’re outside with Corrieri.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go talk to them. Cat, do what else you need to then cover her up and get her out of here for fuck’s sake. The poor cow has suffered enough for one day.’

  Constables Stevie Dwyer and Kenny Watt had been called to the scene just before eight that morning after a man taking a shortcut along the lane had spotted the heel of a black platform boot sticking out from behind the big red bin. Something had made him take a closer look and he discovered the owner’s body still attached to the boot. After nearly crapping himself on the spot, he called the cops.

  Dwyer and Watt were there in minutes from the cop shop at Anderston and had the full forensic cavalry join them not long after. Neither of the cops recognized the girl and witnesses were thin on the ground. The man who’d found her had a solid alibi for the night before. The girl had been photographed in situ behind the bin before it was eased away so that she could be examined. When Fitzpatrick noticed the residue of blue paint in the girl’s hair, she’d looked up and down the lane, seeing likely locations nearby. The first was a window frame and doorway just a few feet away which were in the same shade of dark blue as the paint but neither area contained the blood spatter she would have expected from the blow to the girl’s head. Further down the lane, however, was a garage entrance, set in a few feet from the road and decked out in dark blue. It had taken Fitzpatrick just a few seconds to look around head height on the metal shuttered entrance to find skin tissue and blonde hair strands matted in blood where the girl’s skull had been cracked against it.

  ‘Looks a likely place for a girl to take a punter,’ Addison was saying to Narey. ‘Dark, set in off the lane, no street lighting, no cameras.’

  ‘A good place to kill someone for the same reasons,’ she replied.

  ‘Hm. So, premeditated or impulse? Stand up against the wall here. Next to where she would have been.’

  ‘You wish.’

  ‘Fucksake, just do it. Assume the position.’

  With a shake of her head, Narey placed her back to the wall and looked defiantly at the DI.

  ‘Okay.’

  He stood in front of her, far too close for her liking, and positioned himself with his hips close to hers. He raised both hands to her neck and mimed strangulation.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Fuck off, will you?’

  ‘Not just yet.’

  Addiso
n parodied the motion of knocking Narey’s head against the wall, then moved down in the direction she would have fallen, noticing further tiny traces of blood on the ground.

  ‘Now he wants to hide her,’ he continued. ‘He carries her, drags her maybe, towards the bins.’

  The DI moved slowly along back towards the tented crime scene, careful to avoid stamping all over the actual route, finally standing by it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said eventually. ‘Thoughts?’

  Narey could have done without the theatrics but could see some value in the process.

  ‘Okay,’ she began. ‘So he’s big enough to have hauled her along there, twenty metres or so, without getting seen.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘But perhaps not big enough or brave enough to put her in the bin where the body would have stayed longer without being found.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘I reckon if he could carry her that far fairly quickly – and he wouldn’t have wanted to hang about – then he could have got her in the bin. But he wanted away from there as quickly as possible. So, not premeditated. I’d say, rushed.’

  ‘An impulse sex killer,’ she concluded.

  ‘Rachel, do you ever get days when you wish you’d just never got out of bed?’

  ‘Boss, whenever you use sentences with the word “bed” in them I get nervous,’ she replied.

  ‘Because I certainly do and this is one of them,’ he said, ignoring her. ‘There’s something about the mess on that girl’s face where the bastard tried to remove her make-up that really bothers me. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Your second body this morning,’ she sympathized. ‘Hardly surprising if you are a bit spooked.’

  Addison threw her an indignant look.

  ‘Spooked? Get to fuck. I’m hungry, that’s what I am. Starving. But the scrubbing of that make-up? The bastard that did that is making a point. You mark my words.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Afternoon, Sunday 11 September

  Winter had been stuck in his office in the bowels of Strathclyde Police HQ in Pitt Street since returning from Blochairn. The room was empty but for him and his photographs of Sammy Ross’s plundered chest. If the pics had been more interesting, like Addison’s murdered hooker, then it might well have been enough for him. But Sammy just wasn’t cutting it.

  Winter hated paperwork every bit as much as Addison did. The mindless purgatory involved in filing and barcoding his crime scene photographs was bad enough but even worse was when he was forced to do the same thing for other people. Being his own secretary was dull as either dishwater or ditchwater, whichever it was. Being someone else’s made him want to puke.

  He wanted to be out there, at the scene of car crashes, shootings and suicides as soon as they happened, hitting the shutter minutes after the body hit the ground. Not stuck under diffused lighting, filling boxes and killing time.

  Winter hadn’t given up what passed for a career in IT and retrained at college just to be a frigging data processor. Or maybe he had. It had taken him six years to get to the stage where he was doing something that was this dull. When it was like this, suddenly running network applications didn’t seem quite so bad. In fact, worse than that, it didn’t seem so different.

  Of course the irony was that the cops were where he’d wanted to be in the first place. Uncle Danny Neilson had been in the force all his days and when he was young there wasn’t much that Winter wanted more than to do what Danny did. So he’d applied and strolled through the Standard Entrance Tests and the fitness tests at Jackton but managed to stuff up the formal interview by telling the truth. Maybe if he had kept that fascination with death to himself then he wouldn’t have had to fall into computer programming instead. Still, he always wondered how he’d been considered too much of a risk to be allowed to walk around the city centre all day but it was perfectly okay for him to be in charge of millions of pounds of software or to photograph dead people. Winter settled for believing it said more about the police and psychometric testing than it did about him.

  People told him he was crazy when he gave up his job as an IT hunchback to become a police photographer. Everyone said he was nuts throwing away his degree but what they didn’t understand was that he hadn’t wanted to spend any more time at a keyboard. He’d had the itch from the moment he first saw Metinides’s photographs in London. It wasn’t exactly following in Danny’s size elevens but maybe it was better. Winter had got such a buzz looking at the Mexican’s work and he’d known that was going to be multiplied by ten when he took his own. The photos he was filing for one of the scene examiners, Caroline Sanchez, had been taken on the corner of Dullsville. A Mazda MX-5 had gone through a red light and had been smacked by a bus going smartly through green coming the other way. The driver of the car had escaped with a fractured arm but there was a lot of broken glass to be photographed and filed. Give him strength. Sanchez was back out there working the skid marks from an assault and robbery in Summerston and he was stuck deep in the Pitt, doing her electronic paperwork.

  It was all part of what Winter thought of as his bargain with the devil, the strange set-up that allowed him to be one of only two proper photographers to be still working for Strathclyde cops. The rest of the work was now done by the monkeys in bunny suits, button-pushers who didn’t know their aperture from their exposure. Oh, they knew everything there was to know about grave wax, petechial marks and ridge characteristics, but they knew bugger all about taking photographs. Point, fiddle with the focus and fire off as many shots as they could in the hope that one of them would be on the money. And, of course, money was what it was all about. Getting the scene examiners to double on the camera was all to do with saving cash at the expense of expertise. There were so many times that not only was a proper photographer needed but that it cried out for film rather than digital. Something like bite marks could never be done well enough on digital, you needed film to get the depth of detail you needed when you went into court. Winter had learned his trade on an old Hasselblad H4D that gave you just twelve shots and you had to make damn sure that every one of them counted. As far as he was concerned, the forensics wielded their cameras like scatterguns.

  Winter knew he didn’t have too much room to complain on that front though because at least the previous Chief Constable had sense enough to value what he did, and didn’t kick him into touch with the rest of the snappers. Of course it hadn’t hurt that Sir Ed Walker was a camera buff and appreciated the finer points of agitation and hyperfocal distance. Nor did it do any harm when Winter made a first-class job of the Chief’s official photo for the Pitt Street reception wall and did a freebie family portrait of him with the wife and kids. Even when natural wastage and the ravages of Inhuman Resources took their toll on the force’s photographers, Walker ruled that someone should be kept on for specialist purposes. Winter was the cockroach that survived the nuclear holocaust.

  Being the exception didn’t endear Winter to everyone but that was hardly his problem. Two Soups could moan all he liked about wanting to standardize the department but Winter’s work spoke for itself and there was nothing he could do about it. The new chief, Grant Gordon, was happy enough with the arrangement.

  The only other proper snapper left in the west was an old-timer named Barrie Marshall who worked out of Argyll, Bute and West Dunbartonshire, covering everything from the edge of civilization to the islands and southern teuchterland. He’d been in with the bricks so long that HR seemed to have forgotten he was there so he’d also managed to escape the cull and spent his days happily photographing ransacked birds’ nests and break-ins at distilleries. Not that that would have worked for Winter; he needed more.

  He needed more than Sammy Ross too. It had been dull fare spending forty-five minutes filing every available bit of information they had on him. Twenty-two photographs from twenty-two angles and distances, every curl of skin, every tear of tissue, every bruise, entry point, exit wound and expression. It was all pretty mundane stuff.

 
; Only the disappointed look on Sammy’s face was of real interest on the basis that a glimpse into eternity is always worthwhile. Back in the day they believed you could see the reflection of the killer in the eyes of a murder victim. Of course it sounded bollocks but maybe no more ridiculous than Winter thinking he could see death through a lens. Look into the eyes of any of Glasgow’s victims and you’ll be staring into the same deep pool of murky darkness that Winter saw in the drug dealer’s pupils. All the very same shade of black.

  The phone mercifully rang and he found himself wishing for a bit of murder, mayhem or carnage. Maybe a nice shooting. Whatever it was, he wasn’t for sharing it.

  Two minutes later the phone was back on the hook and he was shutting down his PC. It wasn’t great but at least it was getting him out of there. A seventeen-year-old kid had been beaten up and one knee trashed with a baseball bat. The teenager was now holed up in the Royal where the cops were about to interview him.

  The Infirmary was a mile away across the city centre so he had the choice of taking twenty minutes to walk there from Pitt Street or nineteen minutes to drive. He’d drive.

  Glasgow Royal is like so many of the city’s hospitals. A two-hundred-year old maze that costs a fortune to heat and to repair. Next to no parking, under-staffed and under-funded, over-used and always in the crosshairs of the bean-counters’ sniper. It sits on the north-eastern edge of the city and has been on the same spot near Glasgow Cathedral and the Necropolis since George III was barking mad on the throne of the Empire and Glasgow was its second city. Which was about the last time the Royal had a lick of fresh paint.

  Millions of Glaswegians had been born there, died there, broken and mended there. It had seen more blood and guts than World War One and bits of it looked like they had been patched up with a bicycle repair kit. Over the years they’d torn down blocks, tagged on new buildings and added to it when they could and where they had to. New building here, maternity division there and plastic surgery unit somewhere else. It was an amazing building, architecturally stunning in parts and ugly blocks in others, so much more than the sum of its parts.