Witness the Dead

by Craig Robertson

  ‘Interested in the case, is he?’

  ‘Isn’t everybody? Two murders in two days. Bound to be the talk of the town. Only natural that people want to know if you’re any closer to catching the guy.’

  ‘I suppose it is. And Danny being a former cop… Guess that instinct never leaves you. You think he still wishes he was on the job?’

  ‘You know what they say. Old policemen never die: they just cop out.’

  ‘And old photographers never die: they just stop developing. Was that answer a cop-out?’

  ‘I don’t know. Was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. You know what, though?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m tired. I think maybe we should call this a night before one of us actually has to give a straight answer to a straight question.’

  ‘You know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think you’re right.’

  Chapter 25

  West Lothian, Wednesday

  It was officially named HMP Central Scotland, but was known universally as Blackridge for the small town in West Lothian that it was nearest to. It was generally pronounced as Blackrigg, the same way the locals said it. The town picked up a bit of business from the prison but, for all that, they’d just as rather it weren’t there. The supposed £100 million that it cost to build ‘the big hoose’ outside the town would have gone a long way in Blackridge, a tiny place still recovering from the closing of the colliery fifty years before.

  The jail sat almost plumb between Glasgow and Edinburgh, as near midway as the planners could make it, so as to avoid offending the sensibilities of either end of the M8 corridor. Prisons were as political as anything else when it came to disputes between the capital and the biggest city.

  The stark, grey structure, its anonymous walls fifteen feet high topped with coils of barbed wire, seemed to have been dropped into the lush, rain-sodden countryside from outer space. All care had been given to its security and none at all to its being sympathetic to its surroundings. It stood alone but for a large car park that might have been pinched from outside a major supermarket. Only a red-brick building that resembled the gable end of a nondescript modern family home broke the monotony of the grey wall. It was the gatehouse, Union and Saltire flags billowing in the fresh spring wind before it. Winter and Neilson made their way towards it in silence.

  In the car, as they drove along the M8, Danny at the wheel, he’d talked at length about Atto and his crimes — the ones they knew about and the ones that they didn’t. The latter list was longer than the former.

  ‘Atto was an English teacher, specialised in offering extra tuition for kids that needed to up their grades to get into university, or to get into a better university. He made good money but never stayed in one place too long. He had excellent references and always came highly recommended. Never worked in schools, though — kept under the radar in that sense. Seems he was popular with the pupils, particularly the girls. Paid them a lot of attention.

  ‘In 1999, he was convicted of killing two sixteen-year-olds, Beverley Collins in Dumfries and Emma Rutherford in Leicester. By the time Beverley’s body was found, ten years after she was killed, it was impossible to tell if she’d been sexually assaulted. Her corpse was still bound at her ankles and wrists and she’d been gagged. Emma was found by chance in a shallow grave just three days after she’d gone missing. A springer spaniel partially dug her up and the dog’s owner called the cops. Emma’s throat had been cut and she’d been both raped and anally assaulted. Atto’s DNA was found on her clothing.

  ‘At this point, he had made headlines, quite a few of them. But maybe it hadn’t been enough for him. He let a name drop in a police interview, nothing accidental, mind. I’ve seen and heard the tapes and he hesitates for an age before he says it, making sure everyone there is hanging on his every word. He lets them know that he used to live in a street named Huntington Road in Coventry. It doesn’t mean anything to any of the cops or lawyers present but they go check it out. It turns out Huntington Road is two hundred yards away from where a nineteen-year-old named Melanie Holt went missing in 1991. Sure enough, they find out that Atto lived very close to her.

  ‘They go back to Atto and say, “Did you kill Melanie Holt?” Atto smiles and says yes. They say, “Where’s her body?” and he smiles but says nothing for ages. Then he says, “Greening Place in Ipswich.” Obviously, they say, “Is that where Melanie’s body is?” He gives this sly grin and says no, that he lived there.

  ‘They check out the address and, sure enough, a girl had gone missing from there too. Louise Shillington had been twenty-one when she was last seen in 1993. Atto had lived on the same street. So they ask him, “Did you kill her?” Yes. “Where is her body?” Nothing. For months they questioned him and for months he stonewalled them. Melanie and Louise’s parents both wrote to him but he wouldn’t budge.

  ‘Then the case team, now three times the size that it had been, create a timeline of Atto’s movements: jobs, houses, medical records, the lot. They come up with a list of nineteen possible victims: eleven murders of young women and eight violent rapes. They confront Atto with the list and he looks at it curiously, making a big show of remembering things, some of them obviously very pleasurable to him. Then he looks at them and coldly asks, “Is that all you could come up with? You underestimate me.”

  ‘So they ask if he’s admitting he killed and raped those girls. He says no. He says he’s admitting nothing, wasn’t in those places, didn’t ever meet those girls. Sure enough, none of them was girls he taught. Then, a year later, when the media interest in Atto is dying down, he asks to talk with the case team again. Says he made a mistake. He did meet Heather Ryan, he remembers now. “Did you kill her?” “Maybe. I don’t really remember.”

  ‘The bastard has been dicking the case team and the families around ever since. So he’s serving four consecutive life sentences when it should perhaps be seventeen or more. Some people say it doesn’t matter because he’ll only ever leave prison in a box. But that’s not the point. These families, they need to know. They need to have a funeral and they can’t because he won’t tell them where the bodies are. So, yeah, I’m glad he’ll die in prison, but part of me wants that to be right now and another wants him to rot in there until he tells everything he knows.

  ‘Archibald Atto is a psychopath, a nasty, vicious, brutal, murdering piece of shit. But he’s more than that. He’s clever. Devious. He has a dangerous combination of high intelligence and low cunning. He tortures people’s emotions because he can, because he believes he’s smarter than them.’

  ‘So is he Red Silk?’ Winter asked. ‘Did he carry out the Klass killings?’

  ‘He’s never admitted to it. Never even acknowledged that it might have been him. He did live in Glasgow at the time and moved away not long after the final murder. But so much of it is similar to what happened later. Beverley Collins’s skeleton was bound in a way that it was believed she’d been forced into a kneeling, praying position. Her hands were bound in front of her rather than behind. Emma Rutherford was buried on her back, her arms spread wide. Not the thing you’d do if you wanted the grave to be as small as possible and reduce the chance of it being found.

  ‘After Atto was convicted the police went back to witnesses from 1972 and showed them his photo. Of course, they’d all seen him on the news by this time and impressions had formed in their minds. Plus, they were a lot older and memories were playing tricks. The person with the best look at Red Silk, Frances MacFarlane, was dead. But plenty of those asked said aye, that’s the man. That was the guy that was in Klass when those girls were murdered.’

  To get a visit to a convicted prisoner in Blackridge, the visit has to be booked by the inmate. You couldn’t just turn up at the door and ask to visit the infamous serial killer Archibald Atto. They didn’t encourage that kind of thing. Atto had no family, his elderly mother having died a year after he was convicted, and, not surprisingly had no known friends. Or at
least no one who would admit to it. His visitor schedule rarely got near to fulfilling even the statutory minimum of two hours in any period of twenty-eight consecutive days.

  Danny, inevitably, knew a man who knew a man who worked in Blackridge. The warder got a message to Atto saying that an Anthony Winter and a Daniel Neilson wished to visit him, with news of Christine Cormack. He also let it be known that the news was something that was likely to interest the media. Danny knew that Atto hadn’t had his face on the front pages for a while.

  They were sitting in the prison car park, a couple of hundred yards from the main building, the only sound the intermittent squeak of windscreen wipers tackling the softly falling rain. Danny was staring ahead, psyching himself up for what was to come.

  Winter could almost see the play that was going on behind Danny’s eyes, seeing them tighten as hard thought followed bad memory. ‘Stop me if I do something stupid, son.’

  ‘You likely to?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know I want to. I know I’m going to want to punch his lights out.’ Danny’s voice got louder. ‘I’m going to want to want to rip his head off.’

  Danny lashed out, banging his fist into the steering wheel, causing the horn to blast and making a couple of people walking across the car park look and wonder what the hell was going on. Winter waited till he was finished.

  ‘The anger’s not doing you any good, Danny.’

  An ironic little laugh escaped from Neilson. ‘You think not? Look at my hand, Tony.’

  Danny held out the back of his hand in front of Winter. ‘What do you see?’

  Winter looked at the large, beefy hand dotted with liver spots, a road map of thick veins showing the way from wrist to fingers. The skin was loose and sat in dishevelled folds, the fingers broad and strong. He shrugged. ‘It’s a hand.’

  ‘It’s an old man’s hand, son. Look at the loose skin. But watch this.’

  Danny slowly clenched his hand into a fist and the skin tightened until the loose folds disappeared, leaving the back of his hand as taut as the day he was twenty-one.

  ‘That’s why the anger’s doing me good. It takes years off me. You’ll always have a reason to live if you have something to make you angry enough.’

  ‘So that’s your only reason for living?’

  Danny sighed. A noise that came from deep within him. ‘No. Not the only one. I met Chloe yesterday.’

  Winter swung round to look at him. ‘Seriously? How long’s it been since you’ve seen her?’

  ‘Too long, son.’

  ‘And does Barbara know about this?’

  A bitter laugh was followed by a long silence. Then, ‘What do you think?’

  They walked from the car park to the gatehouse, a shimmer of smirry rain dusting them as they made their way across the tarmac. Winter saw Danny’s jaw clench tighter with every step they took towards the prison.

  ‘You okay now, Dan?’

  ‘I’m fine, son. I’ve waited a long time for this, that’s all. Forty bloody years.’

  From the gatehouse, they were directed to the visitor centre, a dark-grey building just thirty yards away. Apart from staff, there were a handful of people inside, all mooching about in various states of embarrassment and shamelessness. Winter noticed that a couple of likely lads in tracksuits clocked Danny and immediately saw cop, instinctively turning away so he didn’t see their faces.

  A broad, shaven-headed officer had a Labrador on a lead and was wandering in and out of the waiting crowd, the dog clearly sniffing for drugs and causing anxious looks on a few faces. The man on the other end of the lead looked a lot meaner than the dog, his dark-blue tie knotted uncomfortably round a thick, fatty neck as he stared aggressively at everyone in turn. Danny, being Danny, stared back, giving as good as he got. The officer clocked it and walked over, keen to check out the unfamiliar faces.

  He pulled his dog over to where Winter and Neilson stood, forcing the dog to go through the routine of sniffing them even though it didn’t seem remotely interested. Danny made a show of looking at the guy’s name badge, CRIGHTON, and lingered on it just enough to annoy him. It worked.

  ‘Visitor forms,’ he demanded, standing confrontationally close to Danny and thrusting his hand out to receive the request form they’d been issued. Danny didn’t take his eyes from the officer’s as he fished in his pocket and brought out both forms and handed them over.

  The man scanned through the forms, checking their names and the date and making his authority clear. He seemed about to hand the forms back when something he read made him stop and his face creased in consternation. He looked up at Danny and Winter, obviously unhappy, and gave the forms back without saying anything.

  ‘Nature’s always full of surprises, isn’t it, Mr Crighton?’ Danny asked him, causing the officer’s face to show further confusion.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s no’ every day you see a bulldog taking a Labrador for a walk, is it?’

  Crighton took a step towards Danny, eyes furious, but halted himself. ‘Your first time here, is it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Aye, and maybe your last. See that desk over there? Get yourselves there now. The officer there will take your photographs.’

  Danny grinned at the officer before he and Winter strolled casually over to the spot Crighton had indicated. Another member of staff clicked a remote button and a desktop camera took individual photographs of them. Winter, in particular, was irked at the process, never being comfortable on the other side of the lens. They then had to offer up photographic ID of their own, and supporting proof of their names and addresses. ‘You’ll be in the system now and we’ll be able to confirm your identity if you return,’ they were told.

  Both men were given keys for lockers where they had to leave everything they had on them, before having to remove their jackets and shoes and being frisked. The officer had already told them they could take up to ten pounds in cash into the visit room but they’d both declined, figuring that there wasn’t a whole lot they would want to spend it on. The niceties over with, they were passed on to another officer at the end of the holding area, being told that he would lead them into the visit room.

  The officer, tall and thin, eyed them suspiciously when they approached. ‘First visit?’ he asked stony-faced. Both men nodded.

  ‘Rules. The visit will last for forty-five minutes. You will enter the visit room and take a seat at a table. I will give you a number and you will sit at the table I tell you and not at any other. You and the prisoner will not share food or drinks of any description from the same container. You will keep your hands in sight at all times. Chairs will remain in a face-on position at all times. When time is called at the end of the session, the prisoner will exit the room. You will remain seated at the end of the session until you are invited to leave. You will not approach or converse with any other prisoner throughout the duration of your visit. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. Names?’

  ‘Neilson and Winter.’

  The officer consulted the sheet of paper on the clipboard in his hands. He looked up at them again and then back at the sheet, just to make sure, his eyebrows slowly rising as he did so.

  ‘Well, well. It’s not every day, that’s for sure. Relatives? Friends?’

  ‘Naw.’ Danny growled.

  The officer glowered at Danny’s bluntness. ‘Okay. This way, gentlemen. Mr Atto awaits you. You’re in for a treat.’

  Chapter 26

  Wednesday mid-morning

  They were driving to Bridgeton again, Narey at the wheel, wondering about the whereabouts of the mysterious Mr Grey, and Toshney whistling something exasperating that was managing to burrow its way into her head. Although they were investigating a double murder, she was seriously considering whether a third body would make things that much worse. Perhaps she could convince him that there was something on the road in front of the car and then, just accidentally, step on the ac
celerator. Who would doubt her? Which jury in the land would convict her? In the end, she decided against murder on the basis that it wouldn’t look good on her record. Instead, she settled for regular sighs, tuts and glares in his direction. When that failed she told him to shut up.

  They parked on Tobago Street, a rundown spot even by East End standards that lay in the old badlands between the Gallowgate and London Road. Much of the surrounding area was being regenerated as part of the Commonwealth Games project but this strip of scrub and boarded-up buildings was more in need of a revival than most. Ritchie Stark’s sandstone tenement sat atop a small row of shops at the corner with Stevenson Street, although it was difficult to tell whether the shops were closed or abandoned. Certainly forsaken was a boarded shack with a hand-painted sign that read JOHN’S BAR. It propped up the flats above, but John, whoever he was, had long gone.

  The area across the street had once held a row of houses but they too had disappeared years before and the foundations were grassed over, home now only to two mongrels who were sniffing and snapping at each other in an age-old mating dance.

  ‘Why the hell would you come here if you moved up from Nottingham?’ Toshney asked aloud.

  ‘You’ve obviously never been to Nottingham,’ Narey told him. ‘Although you do think he’d have been able to get something a bit more salubrious than this.’

  ‘Do you think he could have got somewhere less salubrious? He must be a real charmer to persuade his bird to come here.’

  Stark’s girlfriend, Faith Foster, had confirmed they had been at the flat on both the Friday and Saturday nights of the murders and that Stevo Barclay, Stark’s boss at the tattoo parlour, had been drinking with them on the Saturday.

  Addison and Narey had both wanted to know more though and, on the part-pretence of confirming the alibi, she was going to take the opportunity to ask Faith about Barclay. Addison was suspicious of Barclay’s lack of credible proof as to where he was those nights. Rico Giannandrea had originally asked Barclay about his whereabouts only on the night that Kirsty McAndrew was murdered and the explanation that he’d been at the flat on the Saturday had been something of an afterthought.