The Photographer

by Craig Robertson

  The long blonde weaved in and out of human traffic on Buchanan Street, her height and hair making her easy to follow. He kept far enough back, sure not to lose her, sure not to be seen. Is this what it felt like? Being a wolf.

  He felt dirty and yet his mouth was dry. Thirty yards behind her as she turned into Nelson Mandela Place. Turning with her, dropping further back with fewer people there. She wound her way round to West Nile Street, turning left and continuing down the hill.

  Cops. Two uniformed cops in high-vis vests were walking up the hill. Winter’s heart leapt in irrational fear. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, except he was. He was following a woman, quite literally stalking a stranger. His camera was loaded with photographs of the woman he was trailing.

  He knew the law. It wasn’t illegal to take photographs of people in a public place. Stalking and harassment were, though. The cops had the right to examine his digital images and if they did, he’d surely be done for breach of the peace.

  The blonde and the cops were closer now, passing each other, one of the officers nodding and smiling at her.

  They didn’t smile at him though. They looked at him suspiciously, staring him down as he tried not to look at them, glancing down at the camera in his hand. They picked up on his unease, their cop sense tingling at whatever vibes he was giving off. In turn, he could feel them turn to look as he passed them. The blonde was ahead, continuing down the street. He felt exposed and guilty.

  At the lights, she walked straight on. He took the first left at All Bar One onto St Vincent Street without looking back.

  CHAPTER 32

  Leah Watt. Walking down Union Street onto Argyle Street, passing KFC and Waterstones. The film was the usual crappy quality but it was definitely her. Jeans, green polo neck and the black hooded waterproof. She had her phone in her hand and was following it.

  Narey and Giannandrea watched mostly in silence, occasionally stating the obvious just for the sake of breaking the hush. She was finding it hard, seeing Leah walking to whatever fate awaited her at Templeton’s and unable to do anything about it.

  ‘The sooner they invent time travel the better.’ Giannandrea’s thoughts echoed her own.

  The cameras lost her then picked her up again on the pedestrianised precinct, the phone in front of her like a divining rod, and then again on the Trongate, heading east. The techs had spliced the sightings together so that it tracked her journey like a broken dream, a filleted film where the star hopped off stage and on.

  There she was passing the Barras, the camera catching her head on. Her expression was unsmiling, even grim. From there, they picked her up twice more on the straight shot along London Road until she reached the Calton Bar and crossed the road into Binnie Place.

  ‘Why would she walk?’ Narey asked out loud. ‘From the city centre to Templeton’s is a couple of miles. Not that far but why wouldn’t she take a taxi?’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t know how far it was. Maybe she didn’t want anyone seeing her who might remember.’

  ‘And maybe she just wasn’t thinking at all. Unlike me. I’m overthinking everything.’

  It had been daylight when the cameras first saw her on Gordon Street but the light had all but gone as they watched her approach the old carpet factory. She faded in and out of the darkness, a ghost in the gloom on the green.

  ‘She puts the phone away there. That’s when the internet connection stopped.’

  ‘That’s Broome’s offices she’s standing looking up at. Surely someone saw her even with the light as it is.’

  ‘What the hell was she trying to achieve?’

  The camera saw her go around the corner but didn’t see her return. She was back on the front lawn again a few minutes later, head raised as she stared up at the offices as before. The last film of her, she was walking left, past the WEST bar and round to the side of the building that faced London Road.

  ‘There’s an entrance just there,’ Narey told him. ‘It’s not the main one but there’s a small lift that takes you to the upper floors. Anyone can go in.’

  ‘But can they get out again?’

  It was the last they saw of Leah. No clear indication that she went in but real doubt she could have gone anywhere else. A camera on the car park showed plenty of others on the way out. Narey recognised faces at 5.24 – the receptionist and the woman named Claudia, two of the male staff who had peered at her from over their screens. The staff leaving for the night.

  ‘No sign of Broome?’

  ‘Not till 6.17.’ Giannandrea fast forwarded the tape. ‘Here is he leaving and getting into his car, nearly an hour after his staff.’

  It was dark and the film quality poor but Broome was clearly on his own, carrying nothing other than a briefcase. He didn’t rush, didn’t seem in a hurry or worried about being seen. He got into his car and drove off as if it was any other day.

  ‘They’ve been though the film on every street surrounding Templeton’s for two hours after Leah got there. There is no sighting of her anywhere. Not on London Road, not on Templeton Street, Monteith Row or on Glasgow Green. They’ve gone a couple of streets back too but found nothing.’

  The film spooled a succession of streets, glowing yellow in the dark. Couples and dogs, a car briefly stopping, runners, groups of teenagers. No Leah.

  ‘Let’s talk through the timeline. Leah arrives at Templeton at 4.27. Our last sighting of her on camera is at 4.48. She’s heading towards the entrance and entering the building.’

  ‘Broome’s staff are seen leaving at 5.24. That’s thirty-six minutes later.’

  ‘Then, a further, fifty-three minutes later, Broome leaves too. The staff haven’t seen her, I think we can be sure of that. So has she hidden until they’ve gone?’

  Rico shrugged. ‘There’s no shortage of places in there she could have hid. Even if she was seen, no one would have paid much attention. The security is pretty much non-existent.’

  ‘So, say she’s hidden herself. Then gone into the HardWire office after the rest have left the building. To challenge Broome or to attack him.’

  ‘And he kills her.’

  Her instinctive reply stuck in her throat. ‘Okay, let’s say he did. What has he done with the body? There’s no way he’s got it out of there.’

  ‘It’s a big place.’

  ‘And we’re going to have to find a way to search every inch of it.’

  CHAPTER 33

  The Standard still had a cuttings library. It was proper old-school stuff but Winter remembered Archie Cameron waxing lyrical about it and how all staff should make use of it and not just rely on the interweb. Archie was as old school as Mr Chips or Billy Bunter.

  His mantra was that the cuttings had been put together by professionals, done with journalists in mind, whereas search engines just produced what they wanted you to find. Google wasn’t for real journalists, he regularly lectured. Google was like a press release or some other shit fed to you by PR firms. Real journalists wanted the story they didn’t want to give you.

  There used to be a librarian but she’d been humanely destroyed during the march of the machines, along with the copytakers, linotype operators, switchboard operators and most of the journalists. Her name had been Eleanor, a legend of the Standard, and although she’d been dispensed with a couple of years before Winter started, the cuttings files were still habitually referred to by her name.

  So it was that Winter descended to the floor below editorial to venture in search of Eleanor’s Cuttings. His thinking was that if they were all that Archie said they were, there might just be a chance of him finding something. Or someone. Above all, he was hopeful that the cuttings would have one thing often missing from archived news results – photographs.

  In the Standard’s old offices, Eleanor’s Cuttings had hung in rows of purpose-built adjustable shelving that opened and closed at the turn of a wheel, all arranged by topic and alphabet, cross referenced on master files that were kept with a precision the military could only have
dreamed of. Now they were dumped in a bunch of boxes.

  Archie’s face had lit up when Winter told him he was going to search the cuttings. Like a man despairing of the modern world who’d been told that digital watches and computers had been uninvented. Like Santa Claus might have looked if a child’s Christmas wish was for an apple, an orange and a hula hoop.

  He’d been apologetic about the state of the resources, now packed and stacked like an afterthought in little more than a stationery cupboard, but evangelical about what Winter might find within. ‘Missing people?’ he’d enthused. ‘There’s definitely files on that. If you want to find missing people then Eleanor’s Cuttings is the place to look.’ Winter had to dismiss a mental image of Lord Lucan, Amelia Earhart and Shergar hanging out in the room downstairs.

  Archie had been so happy at someone wanting to hunt through the files that he hadn’t bothered to ask what Winter was looking for. Which was just as well, as Winter didn’t quite know. It was more scattergun than laser-guided missile. His stepping-off point was Jennifer Buchanan and Leah Watt but he’d also considered the possibility of other women in Broome’s photographic collection having disappeared.

  His heart sank when he saw the boxes though. Piled up against a wall, gathering dust and in no order that a librarian would recognise. More Huey and Louie than Dewey Decimal. He grabbed at the first box and pulled out a few pink file folders to find they’d been rearranged into alphabetical hell. He could only imagine the fabled Eleanor sighing in disappointment.

  He nearly turned tail and gave up on it but steeled himself to the task. One by one, he worked his way through dozens of boxes and hundreds of folders, in an ironic search for a file labelled ‘Missing’.

  There were folders on people and places, on exhibitions and explosions, football and factories, murders and marriages. Curiosity pulled him into some and he found carefully clipped newspaper pages, old-fashioned fonts and hazy black and white photos, packed with type and odd adverts, all yellowing with age.

  It took almost an hour before he found the folder labelled ‘Missing (1 of 3)’, and a further twenty-five minutes before he found its partners. All three were packed with cuttings.

  There were names and faces that he recognised, cases that had made nationwide headlines. A blue-eyed, blond-haired toddler who disappeared from his grandmother’s garden. An eighty-eight-year-old woman last seen heading to the shops. A twenty-year-old not seen since being with friends at a farmhouse in Aberdeenshire.

  Others had only made local newspapers, fleetingly famous until they were found or else forgotten except by those closest to them. It was the way of the world that the very young, the very old or the very attractive could grab the national consciousness while the rest struggled to take up any ink or airtime.

  One cutting suggested ninety people were reported missing in Scotland every day. The vast majority turned up within forty-eight hours but there were over 600 open cases of people termed as long-term missing, which meant they’d been gone for twenty-eight days or more.

  He ploughed on. Some of the missing had earned one single article, others had their own catalogues. Often, the real story was between the lines. Among those who’d disappeared were the vulnerable, perhaps with a history of mental illness. Children, left briefly unattended or walking to and from school, who were assumed to have been abducted. Some of the adults, the women in particular, were thought to have been murdered, their bodies buried deep.

  It was easy enough to identify the reports where the police were in no doubt there had been foul play, often sure who the killer was but lacking a body and the evidence to prove it. Such stories tended to come back again and again, resurrected from unknown graves to make new headlines and to ask new questions of old suspects.

  He got lost in some of them, dragged off track into tangled webs of deceit and gossip, finger pointing and brazen denial. There were often no such things as facts in these cases, just conflicting opinions dressed up as the truth and memories distorted by time and prejudice. There was a whole lot of ‘he said, she said’ and a whole lot of lies.

  After two hours, he had to take a break from it. Mining the catalogue of despair with not a single good-news story in sight was emotionally draining. It was death by a thousand cuttings. He had to stretch his legs and free his mind.

  He checked in briefly at his desk, greeted by a happy Archie as if he were a soldier returning from the front. The news editor pinned on him the most valuable of medals – a free pass to the pub for an hour. Winter made a note to use the cuttings library more often.

  He walked to the Admiral Bar and oiled the wheels with two pints of Guinness. He studiously avoided eye contact or conversation, wary of the punter who might ask how he was when they really wanted to tell him their own woes. He didn’t have room in his head for any of that.

  As a shield, he took out his phone and scrolled through the photographs. It had become a spare moment habit, something between mind training and obsession. He’d look at face after face after face. He had them in two folders, one with every photograph in Broome’s collection, and one with the regulars, the favourites. Both were well thumbed.

  Archie’s honour hour had come and gone. With a glare at the clock on the wall, Winter wiped the last drops of Guinness from his lips and put the phone away. It was time to get back to it.

  The files hadn’t moved and the pile didn’t seem to have shrunk. It was a slog. A slow, painful and mechanical trudge through the past.

  Every time he came across a photograph, he made mental comparisons between the images in Broome’s collection and those fading in ink. He’d tell himself it was unlikely he’d see any of them here but then argue, knowing he’d no real idea what Broome was capable of. He looked at the faces of the lost and tried to match them against those they’d found.

  He sat with his back against the wall, folders in his lap, legs cramping up and his mind a mess of misdirection. Was the personal trainer who left home to meet friends but never got there the same person as the woman photographed walking out of Central Station and having a coffee outside the Italian Centre? Was the accountant who was last seen en route to babysit her nephew the same woman pictured on three occasions in the West End?

  For another two hours, faces morphed somewhere between memory and hope. He knew he was seeing them where they weren’t, realising he was almost willing the women in the collection to be missing and how wrong that was.

  That’s why he stopped warily when the next face grabbed him. The name was familiar but he hadn’t seen the photograph or heard of her in a number of years. Was it . . .? It looked like her but his mind had played enough tricks already for him not to trust it.

  The woman was missing, thought murdered. The page was from 2009, the cutting still in good condition, the photograph looking out at him pleadingly like a stray in a rescue centre. He was sure. He thought he was sure.

  He brought up the folder of photographs in his mobile and worked his way through till he found the three images of the sad-looking brunette. The woman he’d christened Maggie May.

  He held one photo against the other, thinking yes, thinking no. So similar and yet the hair was different, the angle not helping. The other cuttings had the same photograph of her. Shit.

  Did she have her own file? That might be the answer. He scrambled round, trying to remember which of the boxes had most folders listed under P. They were all over the place but some of the people had been thrown in together alphabetically. In the far corner, he thought.

  It was the third box he looked in but there it was. There she was. A slim folder but it held cuttings not in the Missing file and it had other photographs. Different angles, different ages.

  He looked long enough to be sure, to be excited and scared. He said a silent prayer to the Blessed Eleanor of the Cuttings, stuck the folder under his arm and closed the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 34

  Twitter wasn’t Danny’s world. He was born at least thirty years too early for it to
be a natural playground. He knew the rules though. They were the same as the street.

  Most people, the vast majority of them, played nice. Policing them was easy because they wanted to do the right thing, wanted to be liked. They helped each other out, shared good news and consoled bad, introduced friends to other friends. Sure, a lot of what they said was trivial stuff, pointless even, but they meant no harm. Everyone could get along.

  There were others, there were always others, who would be different.

  It wasn’t Twitter that made them like that though. Twitter, Facebook, social media, the entire internet come to that, didn’t make people behave badly. It just enabled their bad behaviour. It was nothing new. People had been arseholes since arses were invented. It didn’t need digital technology for them to be malicious, they’d managed it fine long before that came along.

  It had taken him longer than it probably needed to choose a user name for his new account. He wanted something suitably stupid and macho, something that would fit in with the bullies and the haters. He tried variations on gender-based names but they seemed too forced, so in the end settled for ‘BigD @BigDog92’.

  He was portraying himself as being twenty-five. A bit of a risk when it came to the lingo but he was hopeful he could pull it off as long as he just copied a lot of what was around him. Text speak covered a multitude of sins and as much as he hated it, he’d picked up enough from his granddaughter, Chloe, that he could bullshit his way through.

  Twenty-five again, Dan, he thought. You remember the moves? All gallus, knowing everything and knowing nothing. Testosterone sweating out of every pore, horny twenty-four hours a day and able to eat like a horse without a danger of putting on an ounce, drink what he wanted without a hangover, do what he wanted without a conscience. The main thing he had to remember was that he was an idiot.

  He needed a profile pic and obviously couldn’t use his own. Twenty-five he wasn’t. He could have just nicked a photo of any young guy but it didn’t have the right feel. What were twenty-five-year-old trolls into? Same as the good guys, he guessed. The Walking Dead, Star Wars, Marvel’s Avengers, football and twenty-five-year-old women. He couldn’t bring himself to do the zombie thing so settled for a Star Wars baddie. Darth Vader was too obvious so he went for Darth Maul. Blood red and black with horns. Seemed about right.