Craig Robertson - Snapshot

‘Like what? Shirley turns a blind eye to Riddle putting his feet under Quinn’s desk in return for info?’

Addison gave him an odd look.

‘Let’s just say he’s helping with our enquiries.’

‘What? I’m getting the stock media answer now? I’m in the same boat as the twats from the tabloids?’

‘For now anyway.’

‘Thanks for nothing. There’s no “I” in team Addy and there’s no “Fuck U” in it either.’

‘Oh calm down for fucksake. You know the score.’

‘Doesn’t mean I like it.’

‘Christ, here we go again. Get over it.’

If Winter had been in any doubt then that made his mind up for him. Whatever it was he knew about the marks on Rory McCabe and Stevie Strathie was staying with him. He was Addison’s mate and he reckoned that should have been reason enough for the DI to let him in. If he wasn’t going to then neither was Winter. Of course, he knew that he was telling himself a steaming pile of shite but he didn’t give a toss.

Addison must have bored of messing with him because he’d turned his fire on McConachie instead. She was still scowling at the two bodies and shaking her head.

‘DS McConachie, any chance you could get your finger out your arse and join in this investigation. There’s a hundred witnesses in those flats need interviewing.’

She nodded slowly, her eyes never off Adamson and Haddow.

‘I’ll talk to them, sir. I’m just wondering if it will be a terrible thing if they haven’t seen anything.’

Addison spat on the ground.

‘What, you buying into this “Dark Angel anti-hero” shite? I thought you had more sense.’

‘No, course I’m not. But…’

‘But what?’

‘But maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world that these two scumbags have been taken out. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘Is that right? Well what I’m saying is that I need a fucking breakthrough on this or the Temple is going to burst my baws. This fucker is taking the piss big time and he’s not getting away with that on my watch so I want everything you’ve got whether you like it or not. We’re the law round here, not some nutter with a rifle. Remember that, DS McConachie.’

The sergeant was stung and desperate to come back with something but she gnawed on her tongue and let her eyes blaze instead, settling for a stone-cold, ‘Yes, sir’ as an answer.

He was glaring at her and daring her to disrespect him. Addison would take plenty of banter at the right time and place but clearly this wasn’t it. He wanted answers, not arguments.

Part of Winter was still bursting to tell him about the link, but he knew he wasn’t going to. He was going home to look at photographs again instead.

‘Who is fucking doing this?’ he raged. ‘Who is fucking doing this to me?’

McConachie thought she could hear self-pity in the voice on the other end of the phone. It was beneath the fury and hidden behind the thunder but it was there. Self-pity wrapped up in fear. The Dark Angel, whoever he was, was getting closer and Terry Gilmartin was bricking himself.

That was bad news for Jan and she knew it. If Gilmartin was scared then he’d also be desperate and that put Amy at risk. There wasn’t a single day that she didn’t regret taking his money but few times that she’d regretted it more than right then. It had seemed so simple at first that she’d ignored just how wrong it was.

Amy had needed that tutor, she’d convinced herself of that and her class teacher had agreed. It wasn’t that she wasn’t bright, that was the thing – it was that she wasn’t fulfilling her potential. It had been Jan’s fault that her daughter had been badly affected by the break-up with Amy’s dad. Her school work suffered as a result and she needed the tutor to catch up and be all that she could be.

She’d always told herself that if she hadn’t needed that money right then she’d have told Gilmartin where to go. But he’d somehow sensed her desperation or her weakness. All he wanted was some information, an advance warning of impending trouble. Once the tutor was paid for then she’d get back on the straight path, he could look out for himself and no one would be any the wiser. How could she have been so stupid to think it could ever be that simple?

He had his claws into her and he’d never let go. When she’d sent one of his heavies back to him with the cash still in his pocket then Gilmartin turned the screw. Jan picked up Amy after school to find her beaming all over her face, happily showing off a new pair of trainers that her mum had never seen before. It turned out that a friend of Mummy’s had got there before she did and given her the present, trainers that fitted perfectly. He’d told Amy that he could bring her presents any time because he knew where she lived. Amy was much happier at that prospect than her mummy was.

From that day, Terry Gilmartin still paid her for information but there was never any doubt that he no longer had to. She would do what he wanted and Amy wouldn’t get any more visits from her new uncle George. Instead George Faichney initiated regular meetings with her, sometimes in person but usually by phone, to get whatever it was that Gilmartin wanted that week. Jan’s co-operation kept Amy safe. Until now. Now Gilmartin wanted more than she was able to give and that made everything dangerous.

‘Who is fucking doing this to me?’ he repeated.

‘It isn’t just to you,’ Jan told him. ‘This guy is targeting every senior drugs figure in the city.’

‘Don’t tell me it isn’t me,’ he screamed down the phone. ‘My son is in intensive care. Jimmy Adamson and Andrew Haddow are dead. This bastard is knocking on my front door. You tell me what the fuck is going on.’

So she did the only thing she could do. She told him everything that the police knew and everything that they didn’t. It didn’t please Gilmartin that there was much more of the second than the first.

Thursday 15 September

Winter had Rory McCabe’s address in his records from his visit to see the teenager in A amp;E at the Royal. The boy lived with his parents in a close in Whitehill Street, just a couple of hundred yards from where his mates found him lying in Craigpark Drive with a busted knee.

Dennistoun was tenement land, built by the Victorians to house the middle class but instead taking in respectable working-class families when they couldn’t attract enough white collars. Whitehill Street was in the heart of it, a long line of four-storey terracotta-and-blonde stone buildings behind neatly hedged gardens. Mostly there were eight families to a close, hiding secrets behind lace curtains.

Winter hadn’t exactly worked out what he was going to say or how he’d explain being there. But he figured that saying little was the way to go. In this case, less was more. He parked up outside, climbed the stairs of the tenement to the second floor, knocked sharply on the door and prepared to wing it.

A blonde woman in her late-forties answered almost immediately, well dressed and polite.

‘Yes? Can I help you?’

Winter held his SPSA identification up in front of him, hoping she wouldn’t look too closely at it.

‘Mrs McCabe? I’m Tony Winter, I was part of the investigation into the attack on your son and spoke to him while he was in hospital. I was hoping to speak to him today as part of a follow-up enquiry.’

‘Oh. Has there been a development?’ the woman piped up excitedly. ‘Do you know who did it?’

‘Not yet, but we are still investigating. Today’s visit is partly to reassure you that we haven’t given up on finding who did this.’

This seemed to please the boy’s mother because she smiled at him and pulled the door wide, standing back to let him in. The house was tidily kept and looked as if it had been recently decorated. Mrs McCabe ushered Winter into the living room from where he could hear the noise of a movie or maybe a computer game.