Craig Robertson - Snapshot

He knew full well what was winding her up and, although it wasn’t his doing for a change, he was always going to be the one in the firing line. Which was ironic.

He got out of bed and sat on the floor with his back to the wall, leafing through the newspapers that she’d kicked away. A quick look was enough to confirm the source of her anger.

The Sun had started it the day before when they began sneaking words into their reports of the killings. Vigilante. Clean up. Crackdown. They liked the last one a lot and the pun helped. Then the phrase that was the real killer – anti-hero.

The Evening Times had carried on the good work that afternoon. From the minute that he blew up the cocaine and gave Glasgow city centre a high it would never forget, he went from being a murderer to a maverick.

Now the morning’s Daily Mail had done it in a heading. Crackdown continues. It implied something good, something that should have happened a long time ago. The Daily Record ’s editorial followed suit. It was a carefully crafted piece but it could neatly be summed up as saying, ‘We could never condone murder but…’ It was open season on drug dealers and that was fine by them.

The prize went to the Daily Express though. It was them who came up with the name that was to stick, Dark Angel. He supposed that it suggested someone good doing something bad.

Winter had heard a couple of radio phone-ins before he went to the Celtic game and they were the same. Callers didn’t hold back and at first the stations cut them off when they came out with lines like, ‘Serves them right’, ‘Not before time’, and ‘Good riddance’. The presenters pretended to be outraged and were all apologetic about how they couldn’t support such opinions. At first. That didn’t last long though and when the calls became more regular and more insistent then they couldn’t and wouldn’t stem the tide. The Dark Angel was doing what the cops couldn’t, doing what they were paid to do but were too scared or too incompetent to do. Presenters shooed them along when callers suggested the cops hadn’t done anything because they were in the dealer’s back pockets but they didn’t stop them from saying it.

Sky held a discussion panel on Hard News debating the moral values of a bad man doing bad things to bad people but Winter could see that it was the Daily Star that had now jumped off the high board. NEW AGE HERO, they screamed. No anti, just plain old-fashioned hero.

No wonder Rachel was mad. Every new notch on this Dark Angel’s credibility scale was a rat’s bite at the collective police scrotum and they didn’t like it one bit. The impression Winter got from her was that some of them agreed with the media line that dead drug lords was a good thing but they didn’t want it said publicly. They’d felt hamstrung for years at not being able to get at the bastards they knew full well were responsible for feeding the city’s habit. The cops didn’t give a toss that Caldwell and Quinn had been shot but they’d be fucked if some trigger-happy psycho would get praise for doing it and at the same time caused them to get a slagging.

They could even live with all the knock-on effects of gangsters taking each other out as retribution although it would be a pain in the arse to clean up the mess. But now this Dark Angel had burned the cocaine and made a statement of intent. He was the one doing the cleaning up and the police didn’t like that one little bit.

All the papers carried the hooker killing too but it was pushed way back. Some only had half a dozen paragraphs and it was obviously just getting in the way of the real story.

Winter must have rustled the paper too much because Rachel woke with a start and saw him sitting on the floor, his eyes fixed on the Daily Star and its shrieking banner headline. She glared at him.

‘What are you reading that pish for?’

He’d had just about enough of this. He knew she was stressed but to keep taking it out on him was out of order.

‘But it’s okay for you to read them?’ he replied testily.

‘It’s work for me. You seem to be enjoying it too much.’

‘But it’s not work for you,’ he blurted out. ‘You’re not on the case.’

As soon as he said it, he regretted it but it was too late.

‘Maybe you should just go home,’ she spat.

‘Yeah, whatever.’

He really could do without this and heading to his own place suited him just fine. Going home meant the opportunity of a couple of guilt-free drinks and the chance to have a guilt-free look over his photographs. Staying meant getting a hard time from a stressed-out maniac. No contest. However he wasn’t about to go without leaving a cowpat of guilt behind.

‘No problem, I’ll get out of your way. I know how hard it is with everything that’s going on at work and it’s only fair you get some rest.’

‘Fuck off, Tony.’

‘No, no, I completely understand. You’ve had a tough day being removed from a high-profile case so it’s perfectly reasonable that you get me round here, get shagged, fall asleep and chuck me out onto the street. Nice.’

‘Don’t even bother trying to make me feel bad.’

But he had, though, and they both knew it. He didn’t slam the door behind him, realizing full well that she wanted him to. Instead he closed it with as much indifference as he could muster and phoned a taxi from his mobile. It was about two and a half miles to his own place in Charing Cross and he couldn’t be bothered with the walk at that time of night.

His own place, that was a bit of a joke, he thought. It was his official home but it was empty more than half the time. He was usually only there to get a change of clothes or when she had friends or family visiting. Or when he wanted to do some work with his photo collection. Or when she was a total pain in the arse. The rest of the time he was chez Narey even though no one was supposed to know.

He was her guilty little secret and that annoyed him. Not just because he couldn’t agree with her insistence that it was better for everyone – by which she meant her – that they kept their relationship quiet, but also because as secrets went it was poor. He knew he had her beat easy on the guilt front. Try having killed both your parents and see how that compares.

The taxi dropped Winter off at his front door and he was inside a minute later, sighing at the mess the flat was in. Tidiness wasn’t a natural instinct for him and the only time the place tended to be presentable was when he knew someone was likely to visit.

He put on the light in the living room but went straight on through to the second bedroom that doubled as his office. He tumbled back onto the bed, hands behind his head, and surveyed the far wall, taking it in impassively as he always did. He’d never been quite sure what anyone else would make of it but then that didn’t matter; only Rachel and Addison had seen it and they were both, usually, on his side.

It wasn’t that the sight of it didn’t move him, it always did. It was just that he chose, forced himself, to try to look at it with as little emotion as possible. He believed there was a solution in there somewhere, an answer to be found even if he wasn’t entirely sure what the question was.

Wall-to-wall death and misery. Twenty carefully positioned and evenly spaced photographs in five rows of four. It was the best of his collection, eighteen of his own and two by Metinides, each photo mounted on white card and framed in black ash, most in black and white but a few in colour. Usually the colour was varying shades of red.

Exhibit number one was his first, Avril Duncanson, wearing her shroud of glass near Muirhead. What made the photograph for him was the stunned look on the face of the middle-aged witness who couldn’t take his eyes off the body. He’d obviously never seen anything like it and was praying to his God that he never would again. It was that and her face, all but unmarked, her eyes screwed shut hoping for the best but not getting anywhere close.