Craig Robertson - Snapshot

Addison liked to tell people that he used to be a Protestant atheist but that he was now a Catholic atheist. He was thirty-six but if anyone asked, he’d tell them that he was twenty-seven. It wasn’t that he was vain about his age, it was just that he didn’t count the years when Rangers won nine league titles in a row. As far as he was concerned, those years didn’t happen.

They had Celtic in common and then there was beer. They both liked that quite a bit and demonstrated it whenever they got the chance. Winter knew it helped that he wasn’t another cop – Addison didn’t want to talk shop when there was drink to be drunk but equally the nature of the photographer’s job meant he knew enough about what was going on if the DI did want to bitch about it. They also both liked women, just as much as they liked Guinness or Caledonian 80. Winter liked to think he was more discerning but Addison would have shagged the hole in a dolphin’s head. If he was in the mood, which was most days that ended in a Y, his motto was ‘go ugly, early’. He was a terrible man.

He knew something had been different with Winter the last year or so but had never come out and said it. There was no way he could have known about him and Narey, she’d made sure of that, but Addison had seen his mate was much less likely to disappear into the night with some piece of skirt. He’d done so a couple of times but it was never more than a diversion, dropping whoever it was off at theirs and continuing home in the taxi on his own. Addison knew he was no longer in the game but didn’t say anything. Winter was the wingman that no longer flew.

Winter knew that Addison got flak from the plain-clothes boys for being so pally with a photographer but he got that info from Rachel rather than Addison. She also told him that anyone who tried to slag off Winter got a verbal pasting from the DI. He was a good man to have your back. As far as Addison was concerned, if anyone was going to be giving Winter pelters then it was him. His current favourite was Winter’s insistence that Didier Agathe had been Celtic’s best right-back since Danny McGrain. Addison reckoned he should be shot for even mentioning Agathe and McGrain in the same sentence and that Didier was a diddy, a speed merchant who couldn’t cross the road. Winter would usually just tell him to shut the fuck up and that someone who’d written Henrik Larsson off after one game had no right to an opinion. That was the way it was between them.

Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn’t. Winter remembered the time they’d met in Jinty McGinty’s the night after Addison had to attend to a seventeen-year-old girl who’d died of an overdose. When Winter arrived in Jinty’s there were already two pints of Guinness poured and Tony had said, ‘Cheers’.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Addison complained. ‘Are we here to talk or to drink?’

Winter’s phone rang, waking him again from his memories. Talk of the devil. An hour after he first phoned, Addison was back on the line, sounding more like himself, the snap gone from his voice.

‘If you’ve been stuck in your broom cupboard then you won’t have seen the early edition of the Evening Times,’ he chirped. ‘Don’t know if they were guessing or some dick has tipped them off but they are running with the one-killer angle. It wasn’t you, was it?’

‘That killed them?’ Winter joked.

‘That phoned the Times.’

The photographer took the bait.

‘Fuck off, ya prick. I’d be less insulted if you had asked if I’d bumped them off. You know full well I would never go to the press with anything you tell me.’

‘Course I do. Calm down, wee man. Jeezus, you are too easy to wind up. Takes all the fun out of it. Anyway, the Times is going with one killer. They’re calling him an executioner. Bunch of dicks.’

‘They are that right enough. You’d fit in just fine.’

‘Ha. Cool your jets, wee fella. Still up for that pint? I should be finished here by six and I’ll get you at Pitt Street.’

Winter was just over six foot tall and Addison was one of the few people that had the opportunity to call him ‘wee man’ and the only one that had the cheek to do it. Hang on, he thought, why would Addison want to meet at Pitt Street if they were going drinking?

‘Why meet back here? Why not in the pub?’ he asked.

‘I’m going to have to sit through some CCTV before I can hit the boozer. It’s already been watched once and there was nothing but I’d like a look for myself. I thought you could keep me company.’

‘Oh, wait a minute…’

‘Look, just sit on your arse for half an hour then we can hit the pub. My shout. Deal?’

‘You want me to sweep the fucking floor while I’m waiting?’

‘I’m sure the cleaners would appreciate that. Thanks.’

‘Fuck off. Okay, I’ll wait. But we go to the Griffin, okay?’

‘You know I hate the Griffin.’

‘Exactly. Deal or no deal?’

‘See you at six.’

Winter was sitting with his feet up on the desk in front of the bank of CCTV screens, knowing full well it would irritate Addison. Small pleasures, he thought. It also earned him a disapproving glance from the CCTV operator, a WPC named Rebecca Maxwell.

Addison nodded at her and she began running the tapes from cameras around the red-light area in the time before and after the prostitute – who, thanks to Rachel, they now knew was called Melanie – was murdered. It didn’t make for pretty viewing. Men skulking round West Campbell Street and Waterloo Street and points in between, collars up and heads down. Hookers standing under streetlights, taking their chances with passing trade. All just two minutes’ walk from where they sat in Pitt Street.

It was a long, slow trawl. Sulphur-lit shadows loitering with intent didn’t make for riveting viewing. Maybe it was a voyeur’s paradise but it did nothing for Winter. Addison had Rebecca stop every now and again, freezing images of likely lads but more in hope than expectation. It was a needle in a haystack job. The girls might have a quiet word with the passing customers and direct them somewhere for business to take place. When the punters disappeared into the darkness of the lanes and the doorways there was no way of knowing who did what to who. Including strangle them.

‘Even if we could identify every punter in those frames, even if we pulled every one of them in, then we have to know which of them went with Melanie,’ said Addison. ‘And we have to know which of them killed her. If it even was one of them.’

For half an hour there was a succession of stops and starts and swearing while all the time the taste of the Guinness with Winter’s name on it was tickling his mind.

‘So who do you fancy to take over Quinn’s operation?’ he eventually asked Addison. ‘McGurk? Brother Lenny?’

Addison didn’t take his eyes off the tapes but shook his head.

‘McGurk lost his balls the second he saw Malky’s head blown open by that sniper’s bullet. I saw the look on his face and I’d say there’s no way he fancies some of the same. People I talk to say he was always a natural number two. Same with wee brother Lenny. He just didn’t have the cojones for the big job in the first place and certainly doesn’t now. The gunman might as well have shot them with the bullet that took out his brother.’

‘So who?’

‘Ten-million dollar question, mate. A name that’s kept coming up since yesterday is Ally Riddle. You know him?’

Winter shrugged.

‘Young guy, maybe only twenty-five but a smart cookie. Been with the Quinns since he was in his early teens and fast-tracked through the organization. He’s been running a scrap yard of Malky’s off London Road for a few years now and there’s a helluva lot of money goes through there. Shows Quinn rated him highly. He never put McGurk or Lenny’s nose out of joint by bigging it up but word is it was well known Riddle was the coming man.’