Snapshot

by Craig Robertson

  There was little doubt in his mind. Grahamston was where he’d find McKendrick. The only real question was whether he wanted to find him.

  Winter was scared, there was no getting away from it. He was a photographer, a recorder, a witness. What the fuck was he doing? The fear was in his chest, like a battalion of butterflies eating away at him. It was only images of Addison and Rachel that were making him go on. If he was right then McKendrick had shot his best mate who was lying wired up to a machine that was keeping him barely alive. He had tortured Sammy Ross to get the names, places addresses, whatever it was he needed to let him take out the people at the top, the middle and the scummy bottom of the drugs trade. Now he had mobile phones that had provided him with a death list and maybe Rachel’s name was on it. No way could Winter stop now.

  He had next to no idea what he was going to do when he got to Grahamston, or at least to wherever McKendrick was hiding in the maze under the station, but he knew he was going to look. Maybe he could find enough proof to take Alex Shirley there, catch Ryan and clear Addison, save Rachel. Fuck it, he didn’t know.

  Over the years he’d heard various stories of how to get into the areas below ground at Central that the public aren’t meant to. Uncle Danny had got him interested enough that he had always listened out for the tales that spilled from office workers, engineers, electricians and plumbers that had been down there for one reason or another and said too much once they’d had a drink. All the shops in the Argyle Street area had large areas below them and many, maybe most, had access that led to others, although most were blocked off these days.

  Some guys told of knowing someone who had been down there and seen the street with shopfronts intact. Some had seen a butcher’s shop, others mentioned a spirit merchant. Another who said his uncle was a telecom engineer and did work down there said the access was via the stairs from platform 3 and that under the platform was a lift that took you into the bowels of the place. It opened up into a pitch-black area with tunnels going off in all directions. Down one of those was Alston Street. According to him it ran from the edge of the foundations of the station to the edge of where Debenhams stands. But it was always a friend of a friend; he’d never met anyone who claimed to have been down there themselves and seen it. Probably with good reason.

  There was truth in the spaces down there though, he was sure of that much. He knew there was a massive maze-like area under the Arches because he’d been down there once while a friend that worked in the Argyle Arcade said there was a tunnel that ran the length of it too, below all the jewellers’ shops. There used to be a basement below the old What Every’s that allowed you to go down one side of Argyle Street, inside the shop, and back up on the other. More tunnels than the Great Escape and Colditz combined. Whatever lay below the station, old street or not, there was no end of places that a man could hide if he had a mind to. Or if he was out of his mind.

  The most likely story he’d heard of how to get in came from someone who didn’t believe a word about Alston Street and that was maybe why Winter believed him. A pal of his, Jamie Rowan, said that there was a passage which ran behind McDonald’s at the corner of Argyle Street and Jamaica Street, across the road from the Grant Arms and right above the heart of old Grahamston. Jamie said that when he was young, he and a couple of mates used to lift this metal sheet in the middle of the passage and spend their day below ground getting full of Buckie and White Lightning and wandering around feeling the reverberation of the trains.

  That was years ago though, Rowan would only have been about fifteen and he was over thirty now. Chances were that health and safety had put an end to it. But you never knew.

  The passage itself was easy enough to find coming in off Jamaica Street and the bits of bush that sprang across the entrance wasn’t a problem. Winter waited till there was no one passing by and pushed his way through. The place was a tip and there was the usual collection of broken bottles and used condoms at his feet. It was narrow, just enough space to walk through, and there wasn’t much light but he was happy enough with that as it hid what he was up to. He edged along warily until he got about halfway back and, sure enough, he heard metal ring beneath his shoes.

  It was partly overgrown but he ripped the weeds back and found the edges of the half-inch thick, rusted cover. It must have slipped through the safety net because it wasn’t bolted to the ground, just lying there. Maybe because it wasn’t covering anything, he thought.

  He managed to get his fingers under a corner of the sheet but could barely budge it. Then he got both hands under, wondering if he’d ever get them out again, and heaved. Christ it was heavy. He could only lift it a few inches but pulled it to the side, rested then lifted and pulled again. He lifted and yanked it best he could till he’d moved it maybe a foot from where it was. He looked and couldn’t believe it: there was a hole beneath it. Jamie had been telling the truth. It took him ten minutes but he wrestled with the sheet enough till he could see the top of a flight of wooden stairs and had made a space big enough for him to get through. Shit.

  It was starting to get dark which didn’t do much for his confidence. Not that there was exactly going to be much in the way of sunlight anyway down in the old foundations of Alston Street or the disused platforms of Central but it made him even more unsettled. He’d seen enough old horror movies to know that going into the monster’s lair as the sun went down was a really stupid idea.

  One last look to make sure no one was watching and he dropped onto a step a few feet down, glad of the torch that he could feel nestled in his back pocket, and began to descend. He climbed down maybe a dozen steps then felt his feet hit level ground. He turned and saw he was in a room like a hallway with a corridor leading off to the right, north he was guessing it was, towards Central Station. It was why he was there and no matter how shit-scared he was, he was going on.

  The torch picked out walls that were tiled to maybe four feet high in yellow ceramic and painted in dirty yellow above that. Other parts were whitewashed and it rang of a Romanian hospital or a lunatic asylum. All of a sudden, there was unexpected daylight and he realized he was under one of the reinforced glass walkways on the street above. Footsteps rang over his head and his guess was that he was somewhere under Union Street. He could see double doors at the end of the current corridor and made his way tentatively towards them. Thankfully, they were unlocked and he went through. The walls in the next passage were white tiled to above shoulder height but clearly hadn’t been touched for donkey’s years. They led to another set of double doors then another. He edged along in the gloom, having no idea what was in front of him or behind.

  At the next set of doors were stairs and he followed them down two flights, all too aware of the growing chill and the smell of damp. He could hear dripping water too and had the impression that it was running behind the wall nearest to him. Abruptly the wall on his left shrunk back and he could make out a large recess that held the remains of what looked like a generator, some polystyrene blocks and planks of wood. A storeroom of some sort. After flashing his torch into the corners, he moved on, becoming aware of every footstep rattling round him. He determined to walk as softly as he could. If there was anyone down there then he was in no hurry to warn them that he was coming.

  A sheen of dust covered the walls and the floor, giving off a stale odour that mixed unpleasantly with the damp. His nose tickled and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck but his sgriob didn’t budge. All he sensed was his own fear and uncertainty. Another pair of doors and another set of stairs. It was colder, damper and darker. He had a choice of two ways to go and followed his nose, passing low brick walls, no more than a couple of feet high which he took to be old boiler supports. Other walls held the ghosts of doors long since vanished and behind them were what seemed to be the arches of the foundations. He surely couldn’t go much lower.

  Wary of his footing as the ground below him got rougher, he flashed the light on the floor and saw the nestle of dust had been distu
rbed. He crouched and was fairly sure it had been footsteps but the big question was how recent they were. Days or months? He nibbled his lip and looked ahead into the darkness, realizing he had no real idea of how long he’d been down there – fifteen minutes maybe – and only a vague idea of how to return to the surface. At the end of that corridor, he again had a choice of directions but was able to see that on only one of them did the dust seem to have been displaced. That was the way to go.

  It was much wider down there now, the narrow hospital corridors having been replaced by large spaces that seemed to have no edge and he hugged close to the wall for fear of staggering in the wrong direction. Then something else caught his eye, picked out by the torchlight amid the murk. He reached down and picked it up, an empty two-litre bottle of Diet Coke. It looked pretty new. Everything else down there was covered in the dust of a hundred years, or at least since the last time anyone had ventured down to clean up the rubbish. He picked up the plastic bottle and checked the sell-by date. January 2012. It had been dropped very recently. Shit, wasn’t he the proper little detective?

  So he knew he was probably on the right track. He threw the bottle back onto the ground a few feet away, knowing immediately it had been a mistake as it rattled off the floor and the sound reverberated up to the arches. But as the sound settled, it was joined then taken over by something else. The noise made by the bottle moved seamlessly into a growing crescendo of squeals that came from his left, squeaks that became a screech rising from behind a closed door. Then in an instant he saw them. Rats.

  They stormed out from the space beneath the door and towards him, fleeing, angry, scared. Christ, there was an army of them and they were huge, the size of large puppies or small dogs, but much fiercer and scurrying at top speed.

  Winter froze, his heart racing and yet stopped at the same time, every hair on his body on edge. He was scared shitless of rats. There must have been twenty of the little fuckers and they scuttled across his path at a hundred miles an hour. Two, maybe three of them actually ran across his feet, scampering across his shoes without giving a damn.

  He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, just had to stand and watch them run. They’d vanished from sight in an instant, the only evidence that they’d been there at all being the distant sound of their shrieking but he was still rooted to the spot, silent, wary of breathing too loudly, shaking. The only wonder was that he hadn’t crapped himself. He had to try and slow his heart down.

  Stop shaking, he told himself. Get a grip.

  What was behind the door? Much as he didn’t want to, he had to know what had made the rats interested enough to go in there in the first place. He was guessing food. Maybe whatever had been washed down with the Diet Coke. Only one way to find out, he thought, and cursed himself for thinking it.

  There was an image from the movie Ben that was growing stupidly large in his head. The one where the kid goes into a small room and stands up to see the entire place filled with rats. Every shelf filled with the dirty little bastards, surrounding him. That scene scared the crap out of him for years. And now, he was actually going to go in there and perhaps be confronted with exactly that.

  He steeled himself, grabbed the door’s handle and pulled, stepping quickly back as far as he could as he did so in case they came running out. Nothing moved and there wasn’t a sound. He skirted slowly past the edge of the door, bringing what turned out to be a large storage cupboard into full view. There wasn’t a rat to be seen, thank God, but there was plenty else there.

  In the gloom he could make out a blanket bundled in the corner, a cardboard box that looked like it had packets of food in it. On a shelf sat not rats but a notebook and a pile of photographs. There were boxes too, four of them about a foot square, marked Naval Issue.

  He was in the tight grip of his shallow breathing, a pounding heart and a head crowded by creeping fear but despite all that, his brain still functioned enough to know that he was undoubtedly in the right place. And the wrong place. His senses were overloaded by what he could see but slowly the others were kicking in too and he realized that the cupboard smelled. It was an odour that he knew fairly well but worse, much worse, than he normally experienced.

  He wanted to run but he couldn’t, his feet didn’t know how and anyway, he’d as likely run into McKendrick coming back to his lair. He had to stay and he had to deal with something. The voice in his head was telling him to do it, to stop ignoring what was in front of him and just do it. He reached down and took a hold of the corner of the blanket with the ends of his fingers, wary of it. He pulled it slowly towards him but realized he was just making things worse by delaying.

  He swallowed hard, gripped the blanket properly and whipped it away in one movement, unveiling what lay below. But no matter that he tried to do it quickly, he still saw it inch by revealing inch. A foot, a leg, fingers, blood, chest, head, eyes, blood, mouth, blood, hair. A whole body, yet not whole. He staggered back, crashing into the shelf behind him and cracking his head off the wall. The shock spiralled through him, stealing his breath away. Now he knew what the rats had been doing in there.

  His hands went to his temples, holding his head tight. He wanted to scream but couldn’t. His breathing was rapid, trembling, wheezing like an old man or an idiot. He’d seen death, seen lots of it but nothing like this. Usually, he was ready for it, called to it, but this, this was different.

  Maybe it was because of the mess that the rats had made. The man’s right eye had been eaten away completely, a hole left where the soft tissue had been munched from. His pale lips and cheeks had been partially eaten, half a feast that had been interrupted. His fingertips had been chewed too and the soft of his belly gnawed, all tasty morsels for hungry mouths.

  No, it was all of that but it was more to do with the fact that as Winter recovered his breath and his heart restarted, he looked at the body and knew beyond a shadow who it was.

  CHAPTER 40

  The face in front of him, what was left of it, wasn’t the good-looking, confident young guy from the photograph on his mother’s mantlepiece. The pride that Winter had seen in his eyes was gone from the one that he had left shrunken in his skull, the close-cropped hair was grimy and stained with blood, the strong determined jaw was slack and bore the sharp incisor marks of the rats. But it was definitely him.

  Ryan McKendrick. His brother’s avenger. The man-boy who ran away to Grahamston. Dirty and dead and half-eaten by rats. Winter’s head spun. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this.

  His head had been full of some straight-line thinking that was all too simple. McKendrick wanted to even the score for his wee brother’s death and became some kind of human wrecking ball against the scum that fed drugs to Keiran. He was Special Boat Service, he had the training, the motive, the access to the hardware. He’d tortured Sammy Ross and pumped him for information before he’d killed him. He’d then shot drug dealers, gangsters and crime bosses and he was hiding out somewhere in a hellish version of Brigadoon.

  It was McKendrick. He’d been sure of it. The Dark Angel. The new-age hero. The killer. It was all so fucking simple and he was the smart-arse who had worked it out.

  The only problem was the evidence in front of him. Winter was no expert on forensics but he’d regularly ridden shotgun with Baxter or Cat so he was more informed than people who watched CSI. He knew enough about rigor and lividity to be able to confidently predict a time of death that wouldn’t look foolish in court.

  There was a greenish-blue tinge to McKendrick’s head and neck, large blisters were starting to form on his skin from the gases below, he was beginning to bloat, rigor had been and gone, fluids were beginning to seep from all visible orifices and he smelled. Really bad.

  McKendrick wasn’t killed in the last few hours, he hadn’t been killed in the last twenty-four. Winter’s guess, his very educated guess, was that he’d been dead for two days, more likely three. Days. Before Addison was shot, before Forrest, McConachie and Johnstone were killed, before
those four guys were tied to chairs and tortured to death.

  Whatever Winter thought he knew, he clearly didn’t. This guy hadn’t shot Addison. But someone had and someone had also killed McKendrick. And what was he doing down here if he wasn’t the Dark Angel?

  Winter took a deep breath then quickly lifted McKendrick’s shirt to see that there were dark red-purple pools across his back, meaning he’d been moved after he was dead. The dark pools were lividity. When the heart no longer pumped blood around the body then gravity caused the heavy red cells to sink through the serum. If McKendrick had been killed where he lay then the hypostasis would have settled more on his side.

  Winter didn’t think he could have been moved too far. Ryan was too heavy to carry any kind of distance – unless it was more than one person – and manhandling him up and down the narrow staircases seemed a big job. His guess was that he was killed down there but maybe out in the main passageway then dumped in the storage cupboard a few hours later.

  The Dark Angel or killed by the Dark Angel? Hero or villain? Or both?

  Winter reached, almost self-consciously, into his back pocket and drew out the compact camera that was tucked in there. It was beyond him why he felt at all bad about it but he knew this was a different kind of death, more real. More frightening.

  The compact had twelve megapixels and a decent flash yet it fitted into the palm of his hand. Which suddenly struck him as ironic because what he was about to do was some form of photographic masturbation. Maybe Rachel had been right, maybe it was necrophotographilia after all.

  He stood with his back to the wall, letting as much light in as possible and also because he was scared of what might creep up behind him. He flicked the zoom up then down again, focusing and framing as best he could, aware of the tremble in his fingers and took a full-frame shot of McKendrick’s hunched body.