Robert Parker - Snow Storm

He reached into his shooting bag and pulled out a length of rope, selected a fine stoical looking oak and in a dutiful orderly fashion with a minimum amount of fuss, hanged himself.

Brown had called four times in the last hour. In the end he had relented, despite his predilection for avoiding answerphones at all costs and left a curt message requesting that Burke call him back at some stage. Burke rarely took these things personally when dealing with phones and the older generation despite his being of the take-things-personally persuasion.

He’d been in a meeting for the last hour discussing training needs for his team. The force was putting a particular emphasis on diversity awareness this year, much like the year before and the year before that. He wondered why this was even an issue anymore. Surely people should be past all that. Surely society should have moved on and these things should come down to common decency and common sense. More water torture was all he needed. Then he thought about Campbell and wondered again.

“As I thought, it was definitely some kind of garrotte. Stainless steel cheese wire is the most likely. Probably used without any supporting device though, not attached to a chair or anything. There’s too much trauma at the back of the neck. If a chair or similar device was used I’d have expected to see less there. That area would have been shielded by whatever they braced the wire against as they twisted it. Having said that the blood pattern suggests he was sitting or standing up as he bled out.”

Burke nodded at the other end of the phone realising as he did that it was a pointless gesture.

“He was a big chap, six three and wide too. No identification but his build would suggest he was of Afro-Caribbean descent. Other than that I’m not sure what to tell you. He was young so no glaringly obvious signs of wear and tear save for stained teeth which would suggest he liked to smoke but as to what he liked to smoke, as with our friend yesterday, we wait in anticipation of the tox screen.”

“Any news on the other one?”

“Not as yet I’m afraid. I’ll let you know when I do, assuming of course that I can get hold of you.”

John Campbell came back after lunch like a dog with two tails. He hadn’t turned up any connection to the garrotte apart from saying that it had been used by the British Executive Service Overseas during the war which definitely seemed to make him proud. He produced a picture showing an example; a two foot piece of stainless steel wire with a four inch length of brass bar at each end serving as handles. It satisfied Burke’s curiosity as to the mechanics of the kill at least.

“Thing is boss,” Campbell began, “while I couldn’t find any connection to any particular group for this, I did investigate curved blades a bit more.”

“Ok.”

Campbell pulled out a sheet of examples pointing to one in particular. “So there are a good few variations on the machete design but this one in particular, the panga machete or cutlass has a pretty serious curve to it.”

“Right.”

“I know, you’re thinking what the hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, that kind of thing but you’re actually not far not far wrong. These things are most popular in the Caribbean and parts of Africa.”

Burke nodded as he surveyed the blade. The swept up curve thickened towards the end before coming to a sharp point.

Campbell smirked exposing a row of crooked teeth. “Kind of backs up my theory no?”

Burke decided to put in a call to the Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency on a hunch and after two hours got call back from a DI Mike Edwards at the Drug Strategy Unit in Paisley.

He explained the situation and Edwards listened with interest.

“So what I wondered,” Burke concluded, “is if anyone might missing any ex Eastern Bloc players.”

“Well seeing as you ask,” Edwards replied, “we have lost Vlad the Inhaler.”

They had no respect, these kids; no idea of the trials they had sidestepped, the brutal apprenticeship they had bypassed by virtue of being born to a particular generation.

Victor had to walk away from his luggage before the tall one; the one that looked like Lurch from The Adams Family on Prozac took the hint and picked it up. The short one seemed to be more interested in talking than anything else. They both knew he was just making noise in the hope something sensible would come out, trying to distract himself from jangling nerves. No strength of character.

He’d grown used to having this effect on people. It hadn’t always been this way. He’d earned it, paid for it in pounds of flesh, albeit other people’s flesh, those who’d met their demise at his behest.

What was this place? What kind of excuse was this for an international airport? He’d left home after noon, passing through a plush new terminal and arrived on the other side at this, a glorified goat shed. The west was on its knees, dying a slow lingering death.

The small one asked him a question about something; some kind of mindless small talk. He chose to dismiss it with a look and the man averted his gaze to the floor like a scolded dog, doubtless inwardly cursing.

They had brought a Mercedes four by four. Of course, why wouldn’t they? City cowboys; while they were swanning around the smooth city roads in something designed to tackle the Serengeti back home they were circumnavigating potholes the size of hot-tubs in battered saloons.

He missed his Maybach and he wanted some drugs. The pain behind his eyes had started to intensify. Maybe it was the small talk but he had a feeling they didn’t need to say very much to communicate their uselessness. From an evolutionary point of view they were surplus to the requirements of the species.

He checked his Blackberry. Nothing.

There had been a time when it all meant something, before the money and the gadgets, the cars, the villas and the women who stayed the same age as he greyed and sagged.

He’d been sent to the camp at fifteen. His excuse of a father had disowned him ten years before; some five years after his mother had died bringing him into the world. He’d been allowed to go feral, fallen in with the wrong crowd they said but the wrong crowd were at least something resembling family.

He started from the bottom, took the beatings when required and grew into dishing them out when need be. He’d become numb to it at home. He managed to find his way to the fringes of various rackets and found himself a niche “acquiring” things to order; what little there was to acquire back then.

They caught up with him eventually. He was no one and didn’t have the means to pay them off.

But there it all began. Sent away for 7 years, he was baptised in fire and Siberian ice, and reborn.

The press conference was a hastily cobbled together affair. Gray described it as an outreach, a term Burke was fairly certain he was trying to make catch on. The man himself gave off a sombre air, with plenty of implied annoyance at having to do this, though it was obvious to anyone with the mental capacity to breathe and stand upright at the same time that he was loving it. He just lived for moments like these. Probably paced round his room in the small hours addressing the assembled masses from his own private version of the world stage.

Burke did not love it. Maybe it was a dim view of human nature brought about by too much time investigating the inherent flaws, but he got the sense the press were out for blood. He sat, sandwiched between Gray who proudly wore his best ill-fitting suit, and Superintendent Steele who was doing her best to look sombre, in tune with the mood of the day and not like someone who saw things largely in the form of figures and stats.