Craig Robertson - Snapshot

Winter could see on their faces that everyone else on site was as scunnered with stabbing forty-six as he was. Scumbag stabbed by scumbag. City is one scumbag less. Only another few thousand to go. Case closed.

Uniforms, fed up with it. The DI, fed up with it. Campbell ‘Two Soups’ Baxter, the crime scene manager, clearly fed up with it.

It didn’t mean that any of them wouldn’t do their job. Sammy Ross would get the same duty of care and attention as the rest. He would be measured up, dusted down, forensically examined and given a good wash before going to a hole in the ground or the burny fire.

In the unlikely event that there would be witnesses then they would be questioned; doors would be knocked on; known associates would be talked to. Maybe, just maybe, the cops would find out who shanked the dealer. Maybe, just maybe, the great Glasgow public would give a monkey’s if they did.

There were probably worse places to be early on a wet, miserable Sunday than a damp corner of Blochairn, but right at that moment Winter was buggered if he could think of any. The natives at the gate were getting restless and Winter imagined he could hear the sound of pitchforks being sharpened. Little splashes of rain were falling into the burgundy pool that Sammy had drowned in, making waves that screwed up any blood splatter calculations that Two Soups and his forensics would try to make. Not that it mattered much.

Winter had just seen it too many times.

You were more likely to be murdered in Glasgow than any other city in Western Europe. And when it came to stabbings, the ‘no mean city’ was a match for anywhere in the world. It kept you in work if your job was to photograph the leftovers.

He’d been doing just that for six years and this moment, the point where he was about to look at the body for the first time, was always the same. From day one to this, it hadn’t changed. Excited and scared, fifty-fifty. What he was scared of was also exactly what he wanted to see. And part of the reason he was scared was because he knew just how much he wanted to see it.

Tony could kid himself all he wanted about how dull another stabbing was but he was still interested in the business end. It was what got him out of bed whether he liked it or not.

Being there, in the moment before the flowers and the football tops mourn another victim, when blood still runs hot in a body that has given up its ghost, is a strange privilege. You can see much of what the person had been and some of what they might have been if the city hadn’t cut them down. It was a moment that messed with his head every time.

You saw them caught in the very moment that they were claimed. He was already feeling the ache to see and to photograph the expression on Sammy Ross’s face as much as the wound in his belly. He knew that made him a sick fucker but it was his itch.

There’s a Gaelic word that he loved. Winter only knew a handful of words and phrases, the obvious ones like uisge beatha and slainte: whisky and cheers.

In fact when he thought about it, the words that he knew in Gaelic either said a lot about his drinking or about Scotland. Apart from words about boozing, he could count to five – aon, da, tri, ceithir , coig – and trot out ceud mile failte, a hundred thousand welcomes.

His favourite, though, was sgriob. An old boy from Skye named Lachie, who used to drink in the Lismore, taught him it. It means the itchiness, the tingle of anticipation that comes upon the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky. Brilliant. The Eskimos may have a hundred different words for snow but trust the Gaels to have a word for that.

Another old teuchter later told him that you had to say sgriob drama or sgriob dibhe for it to refer specifically to whisky or else it just meant a scratch or scrape. He preferred Lachie’s version, though.

Everyone had an itch and this was Tony’s. Sgriob death. The hot, smooth, soft woman that was lying curled up in his warm bed once called it necrophotographilia. It wasn’t sexual though. Not that. Every bit as much as he was tired of death, sick of it, he couldn’t help looking. He knew he was making himself wait. Prolonging the sgriob. Savouring the final seconds before he looked, wondering if Sammy boy would be scared or shocked, outraged or questioning. Would that stab wound be angry or clinical, lunatic or clean? How much blood and where?

The first dead body he ever saw was the first one he photographed. Day one on photo cop duty and called out to a car smash on the M80 just north of Muirhead. A woman no more than twenty-five had gone head first through the windscreen. No seat belt, no chance.

He’d been told what had happened on his way to the crash and his stomach was already doing somersaults. He nearly threw up when he saw her lying in a shroud of broken glass in front of her Renault Clio. A smart silver car with a pair of pink hanging dice that she had vaulted past on her hurry through the glass.

The cop on the scene said she must have managed to duck her head forward because there was barely a scratch on her face. The top of her skull was smashed and the steering wheel had wrecked her chest but her face was all but unmarked. She had this clear look of determination, had been doing all she could to stay alive and protect herself. Everything that is apart from putting her seat belt on in the first place.

Tony took one photo. He had knelt a few feet away from her, snapped one then was backing away towards the barrier when the uniform came over and hissed in his ear. Asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing. Told him he had to photograph the woman from every possible angle, make sure there was no doubt whatsoever as to position, trauma, depth, scale, everything, and then when he had done that he had to photograph tyre depths, skid distances, glass shatter and all approaching junctions. Winter had known all that of course but every bit of his training disappeared from his head when he saw the woman lying on the road.

Finally, he did what he was supposed to but he didn’t stop there. Beyond the caved skull and the battered torso, the glass pattern and the skid signature, he photographed the look of business on the face of the uniformed polis that covered her up and the frightened stare of the witness who couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.

Looking back, he wondered at the nerve of tucking his own Canon SLR away in his bag beside the digital Nikon that the department provided but was glad that he did. Something about the grain of the black and white film gave it a feel that he liked. More importantly, the shots weren’t on the official memory card.

Avril Duncanson, exhibit one. He didn’t suppose he would ever forget her name if he did a million jobs. Anyway, her photographs were in his collection so there was always something there to remind him. As if it was needed. Some things you never forget. Close your eyes and they are hiding there behind your lids.

Winter snapped backed to the dreich reality of Blochairn and realized that Two Soups was huffing about him getting on with it, pushing for him to get his photographs done so that the examiners could get in about the body. He was a miserable old sod, easily Winter’s least favourite of those that could have been on scene. If the lovely Cat Fitzpatrick was at one end of the scale then Two Soups was definitely at the other. He was a pain in the arse. An old-school type who had a hatred of amateur forensics, particularly cops, who had learned all they knew from the rush of telly programmes on the subject.

But sadly for Baxter, photography always comes first at a crime scene, recording everything as is before the SOCOs get in to touch anything. It meant his time was dictated to and that wasn’t the way he thought it should be. Monkeys with cameras ought not to take precedence over highly trained scientists. This morning he was clearly pissed off that Winter hadn’t been on site earlier as well as being annoyed that he was on site at all. He didn’t say anything, just glowered. Well, he could get to fuck. Winter only had one chance to record this scene and he wasn’t going to rush it even if it was just yet another stabbing.