The Photographer

by Craig Robertson

  The next day proved Danny to be right – the calls came from three different numbers. Two phone boxes a half mile apart in Battlefield on the south side and a pay-as-you-go that would be near impossible to trace.

  The cops kept an eye on those phone boxes the following night but saw nothing that tied in with the four silent calls that woke them in the wee small hours. Winter pressed the block button and shut them out. There were just two the night after that. Then only one the next.

  For three days, they had peace, but then it started again. Three or four of them a night and once they were traced they turned out to be much further afield. First Edinburgh and Dundee, then the north of England, then the south. The callers spiralled out as the viral hate grew in bigger and bigger circles.

  In the end, they had no choice but to change the number, giving a new contact out only to those that needed it. It meant giving in to them, but it meant getting peace.

  Before then, though, the first set of trolls had new ideas.

  CHAPTER 22

  It was too late to change Leah’s mind, Narey knew that full well, but she still had to speak to her. To say sorry, to say don’t worry, to say she understood. To say she’d still get him. Or at least that she’d do her damnedest to.

  It had been her job to get Leah into court, to fill her with the confidence to do it and hold her hand every inch of the way if necessary. But it was more than her job. She’d made a contract with Leah, a deal beyond cop and victim. She’d made it personal. She’d invested in Leah and she’d promised she’d do it for her. As a friend. And she’d meant it.

  She’d heard cops round the station sniping about Leah’s change of heart, bitching about the statement claiming she’d been wrong about Broome all along. They hadn’t been where she had though, they hadn’t suffered what she had. They were wrong to think Leah had let them down. It was entirely the other way round.

  Narey made the journey once again to the Watt family home in Knightswood, in the far west of the city. A nice semi-detached on Archerhill Gardens, a decent place to grow up. Narey wasn’t sure Heather and Charlie would be all that pleased to see her but she’d no choice. She had to speak to their daughter.

  She parked on the street and saw the curtains twitch as she got out of the car. The front door opened before she got to it, throwing light onto the darkness of the path. Heather Watt standing there, arms folded across her chest, her face like a kettle ready to boil. The body language wasn’t exactly welcoming.

  ‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage, Inspector?’ The woman’s voice was just loud enough for Narey to hear, trying to keep it from the prying ears of nosey neighbours.

  ‘I just want to talk to her, Heather. I just need to let her know I understand.’

  The woman’s eyes narrowed, suddenly confused. ‘Talk to her? You’re a bit late for that. Haven’t you heard? I thought that was why you were here.’

  A surge of panic rose in Narey’s stomach. ‘Heard what? What’s happened?’

  Leah’s mother looked left and right, seeing who was listening. ‘Come inside. Now.’

  Narey followed her inside and found the door firmly closed behind her. Leah’s dad Charlie was walking down the stairs to join them, looking like a man bereft. Narey’s heart sank further.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Charlie told her. ‘Leah’s gone.’

  The mother’s hand rose to her face, covering her mouth and her grief. Her husband, a thin, balding man in his early sixties, his face in a daze, took her in his arms and hugged her.

  ‘Charlie, what do you mean she’s gone? Where is she?’

  ‘You tell us. You made this happen. You told her she should go to court when she didn’t want to. When none of us wanted her to.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Narey repeated.

  ‘Gone. Just gone,’ he told her. ‘We phoned your lot an hour ago. Isn’t that why you’re here? Come to finish the job off.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  The Watts looked at each other. Heather answered. ‘Late this morning. She went into town, said she’d just be half an hour, but never came back. We told her to stay in. We’d have got anything she needed. We’ve called her phone a dozen times and there’s no answer. She’s gone.’

  Narey pulled her own phone out of her pocket and called Leah’s number. The number you have called is currently unavailable. Dead battery? Phone switched off? Neither seemed a positive option.

  ‘What did Leah take with her? Did she take a bag, anything of any size?’

  Heather shook her head. ‘Just a handbag. A large one but nothing other than that.’

  Stay calm, Narey told herself. It might still be nothing.

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  Charlie looked lost. ‘I don’t . . . Damn, I don’t know.’

  ‘Jeans and a chunky, dark-green polo neck,’ Heather told her. ‘And a heavy black waterproof with a hood.’

  Narey made a note of it. ‘Have you tried her flat? In case she’s gone back there.’

  ‘She wouldn’t.’

  ‘Have you?’ She cursed herself for biting at the parents but couldn’t help herself.

  ‘I went down there,’ Charlie barked back. ‘I knocked on the door and rang the buzzer but there was no one in. My wife’s right. She wouldn’t go there. I just wanted to check to make sure. She’s gone. Somewhere.’

  Narey hated to think just how far away Leah might actually have gone.

  ‘I’ll check the flat myself. Just in case. But I need to look in her room first.’ She saw the look of resistance on the mother’s face. ‘Heather, this is important. I need to look.’

  Mrs Watt said nothing but nodded her head in the direction of the stairs. Narey didn’t need to be invited twice.

  The bedroom looked as it had done. Kitted out for late-teens Leah rather than the woman she’d become. Narey rooted through drawers and the wardrobe, all packed with clothes, no sense of a planned evacuation.

  On her bed, half-hidden under a pillow, she found Oliver, Leah’s owl. The soft toy she loved, kept for luck and wouldn’t be parted from, her guilty childhood pleasure that she clung to. Now more than ever.

  Wherever Leah had gone, she hadn’t intended to go there.

  Leah’s ground-floor flat in North Kelvinside was empty. A young woman from the letting agents’ opened it up for Narey and Kerri Wells. They searched the place but had barely crossed the threshold before knowing they were the first to spend any time there in months.

  The flat was cold, heating running no more than intermittently to guard against frozen pipes. There was dust on the surfaces, not something Leah would have let slide. Junk mail was piled up on a table, placed there by staff from the agency who checked once a month and forwarded anything that looked genuine to her parents’ address. The kettle was stone cold, the fridge was empty, the bed hadn’t been slept in. It failed every test.

  Narey stared out of the window onto Garriochmill Road, cars wedged into the few available parking spaces. The area was called North Kelvinside or sometimes Kelvinbridge, probably depending on whether you were trying to buy a house or sell one. Either way it worked for the likes of Leah, who wanted to be in the West End but couldn’t afford the genuine article.

  Leah hadn’t been here, hadn’t run for a bolthole as obvious as this one.

  Had she run further? Had she run at all?

  She ordered up checks on Leah’s bank accounts, wanting to know if she’d used an ATM or bought a rail ticket or a flight. Hoping she had, fearing she hadn’t. She’d got a list of friends and was having each of them called, reaching out in optimism. She made sure the hospitals had been called too. And the morgue.

  Her mind had long since spun to Lainey Henderson’s story of the client who mirrored her own rape trauma. Jennifer Buchanan. The woman who wasn’t who she said she was. The woman who’d disappeared and was never seen again.

  The potential witness to William Broome who’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

  C
HAPTER 23

  Winter had a new office. Of sorts.

  He’d needed somewhere he could work on Broome’s photographs, somewhere with wall space and privacy. Home was out and so was the Standard, given the need to keep them away from both Rachel and other reporters. So, he’d rented just about the cheapest bit of property he could find, a room above a pub in Partick.

  It had been a flat but knocked into three separate small office spaces off a central hallway. He’d taken out such a short lease that the landlord must have thought he was using it as a knocking shop or a drug den but still took his cash. It was beyond basic but would do a job.

  Below him, on Dumbarton Road and opposite the bottom of Byres Road, was the Three Judges. It promised to be a place of refuge if the photographs proved too much.

  He fixed both a whiteboard and a corkboard to one wall, brought in a set of file folders and cleared a space for his laptop and a printer. All he needed was the answer to the question that bothered him most.

  Where the hell was he going to start?

  There were hundreds of photographs on the desk in front of him. He’d made a print of every photo that had been sent to him and looking at them now was overwhelming. Unknown face after unknown face, each of them a story, each of them possibly the key to whatever Broome had done.

  It’s like eating an elephant, he tried to tell himself, just take it one bite at a time.

  There was just so much of it though. So many of them.

  He needed to glean anything and everything he could from the photographs, even though there seemed to be precious little to go on at first sight.

  Those who had been photographed most frequently seemed likely to offer the best chance of that. He intended to identify those, place them on the wall and make them the focus of his search.

  He’d file them into broad groups to begin with. Start with hair colour, separate the blondes from the brunettes from the redheads. Then he’d divide the blondes by age or shape until he got down to those that appeared most often. It would work, with one exception.

  He lifted one of the prints from the stack, holding it up to the light. It was the photograph where the woman’s face had been cut out. Except, being just a printed copy of the digital image, it showed a solid white where the face had been.

  Winter took a pair of scissors from a drawer and began cutting along the lines of the marks on the print. He knew this one had to go up on the whiteboard, whether the woman appeared again or not. She was key.

  He made his last cut and stuck the photo on the wall, its centre raggedly cut away like the original.

  Okay, let’s get going.

  The woman with no face looked down on him as he worked.

  He already knew there were 524 photographs. In the time he’d had to look through them, he thought that maybe somewhere around twenty women had appeared multiple times.

  Sifting through them, quickly separating the blondes from the pack, he tried to make it a cold, calculated operation, but the faces defied being ignored, challenged him to see them as more than hair colour, more than objects to be sorted. People. We’re people.

  He couldn’t help but think of war photographs. It was like looking at innocent bystanders or boy soldiers in uniform, you knew what was coming and they didn’t. He thought of images by Robert Capa or Alexander Gardner, the Scot who photographed the American Civil War. They had the same sense of carefree foreboding, with a dark cloud hanging over them that they couldn’t see.

  These women were – hopefully – all alive and well, yet there was still a clear and obvious feeling of dread. The fear all belonged to him though, not the subjects of the photographs. It was for them not felt by them. Like this young woman who was in his hand now. One of the blondes. She was sitting on the steps in front of the Royal Concert Hall at the top of Buchanan Street, lunchtime sunning on a warm day. Her head was tilted back to catch the rays, her eyes closed and a smile spread across her face. She was very pretty, obviously happy and content in the moment. And oblivious to the man who was photographing her.

  Who was she? Had Broome followed her there or had he just chanced upon on her and liked what he saw? Did she ever see him, meet or talk to him? Maybe they worked together or had mutual friends, maybe he never saw her again. She couldn’t have been any more than twenty-five, probably a year or two younger. Doing nothing more than enjoying some rare Glasgow sun. And she became prey.

  She was someone’s daughter. Probably a sister, girlfriend or wife, work colleague, friend, maybe a mother. Broome had reclassified her with one click of a button. He’d made her prey. He’d objectified her. Made her a target. And then what?

  Damn. This was going to take a long time if he focused on every woman as he was doing this one. The only judgement he had to make for now was if she was blonde, and she clearly was. He needed to wear blinkers and push on past this.

  She was just sitting there, minding her own business. Looked like a nice person, nice smile. She deserved better. They all did.

  It struck a chord and he realised he’d seen her already. He rummaged through the pile of blondes until he produced another print. It was her. Different day though, different clothes, different weather for sure. Same smile. Different haircut.

  The background looked like the West End. A corner of a shop sign peeped into view and looked very familiar. He thought it was Cresswell Lane, near the arcade. It was a start.

  He placed the two photos together at the edge of the blonde pile and continued.

  It turned out there were 197 photographs of blondes of varying shades. Twenty-six of them appeared more than once. Of those, twenty-one featured just twice. The remaining five were found in no less than sixty-two photographs.

  Each time one of them appeared, his heart sank a little further. They represented weeks of photography, day after day of obsession in multiple locations.

  He pinned one photograph of each onto the whiteboard. These five were where he was going to start.

  There were seven photographs in all of the smiling woman in front of the concert hall. He’d christened her Smiley Susan, thinking he’d need to call her something. In five of them, she seemed dressed for work, businesslike but not overly formal, perhaps suggesting working in an office or a school. She was alone in some shots, with friends in others. Seven photographs taken on six different days.

  In just one of them did she face the camera. A full-on, posed head shot. It very obviously had not been taken by the same photographer or at least not in the same way. He was sure it had been lifted from her Facebook page.

  The same thing had been done with Blonde-bob Barbara and Little Lisa. Their personal Facebook pages had been invaded and their photographs stolen, no doubt along with whatever information Broome could garner from their pages.

  Winter hoped it was a strange kind of good news, reasoning that if Broome could trace them through Facebook then so could he.

  Blonde-bob Barbara looked like her new name suggested. Dyed-blonde hair cut close to her face. She smoked, enjoyed a cigarette and a chat standing outside The Counting House on St Vincent Place and in the beer garden in front of Sloans, off Argyle Street. She was also smoking as she strode down Hope Street under an umbrella, the shops in the background flagging where she was. Barbara was in her early twenties, a girl about town, switching between business suit and skinny jeans. Day to night, a camera following her.

  There were fourteen prints of Barbara. Fourteen different occasions.

  She was about five feet five, seeming taller in her heels, slim, always well dressed, fashion conscious. She could have been any one of a thousand young women in Glasgow. And yet she wasn’t. She was the one that he’d taken more photographs of than anyone else. She was target number one.

  He spotted a badge on her lapel in a few of the prints and had it blown up till he could see what it was. A circle with three lines dissecting it. The peace symbol and logo for CND. Another fragment of knowledge about her, another chance to find out who she was.

&
nbsp; He reckoned that Little Lisa Picasso was no more than five feet tall. A bundle of obvious energy even in a still photograph. She wore electric shades of red, orange and green, loud in-your-face fashions that screamed her personality. She was small with bigness bursting out of her. She might have been a student but seemed slightly too old to make that likely. He thought she was something artistic. Designer or painter or an office girl with a poet’s soul.

  Lisa Picasso wore her blonde hair up, wore it down, wore it in pigtails. In each of the eleven photographs of her, she had a different look entirely. Enough that he had to inspect them all carefully to make sure it was her and to guarantee he hadn’t missed any. She was pictured in the city centre, on Bath Street and coming out of Princes Square. There she was outside GoMA, and inside too. She was in a bar he didn’t recognise but was sure he could find, all wood and low-beamed ceilings, shouting hipster makeover. And there she was on her Facebook page, smiling at the world.

  The two other blondes were quite different. Both were elegant, expensively dressed types who never stepped out of character. In their early thirties, the way they looked was clearly important to them and probably to their jobs. Heels, tailored skirts or business suits, hair and make-up perfect. They could have been sisters even though they’d most likely never met.

  Sister Sara was mostly seen in the West End. Sister Mary shopped and drank and walked around Merchant City and the thoroughfares off Buchanan Street. Sister Sara was taller and curvier, Mary was as slim and straight as her stiletto heels.

  Were they company executives, art gallery directors, restaurant managers, bankers or jewellers? Always on show. Not just for their customers or employees but for whoever was watching as they sipped coffee or walked to subway stations.

  Winter suddenly realised he’d had enough.

  He was doing what Broome was doing. Labelling them, dehumanising them. Blonde this, brunette that. Big, small, slim. Like they weren’t real people. It felt like he’d been dragged into Broome’s world and was playing by his rules, thinking how he thought.