Craig Robertson - Snapshot

Where was the beauty in this? He shifted a foot to the right and focused again but saw the other movement through his viewfinder. All bar Rachel had turned their backs away from him and from McConachie and were walking quickly towards the now-open warehouse door where Forrest still hung. Baxter stood beside it, a look of utter confusion on his face as the cops filed past him and inside. Seconds later, Sandy Murray appeared again, waving at Winter. The look on his face didn’t encourage Winter at all. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

Without a final look at McConachie, he followed the wave of Murray’s arm. His bag over his shoulder and his Nikon now in his hand, he hustled through the door. No more than a few steps inside, he ran straight into the broad back of Shirley, bouncing off him and almost falling to his knees. He looked where Shirley was looking and saw four men tied to four chairs arranged in a sort of semi-circle facing the door. All dead.

The first was a bloody mess, his face battered beyond recognition. Lips burst, nose flattened and cheekbones smashed, his shirt soaked so deep in blood that you couldn’t have guessed what colour it had been originally. The whites of his lifeless eyes were like beacons among the blood, staring emptily into nowhere. Behind the gore he might have been nineteen, he might have been thirty. His jeans were damp with God knows what and his shoes seeped. Most of what had been inside him was now leaking out.

To his right sat a wiry ginger-headed guy in his mid-thirties, tied with wire at his hands and feet, unmarked compared to his neighbour but alabaster-white on account of the deep slashes at his wrist through which every drop of blood had poured. His lips were the palest blue, as if he’d been left out in the snow too long, his eyes rolled back in his head. The swimming pool at his feet was purest crimson, a gorgeously horrendous bath of unadulterated jus de vie. His blood streamed to the feet of the third victim. Not that the next guy needed it, he had plenty of his own. He had been gutted, a deep vertical incision into his chest from which gushed a mess of lust. His head was back staring at the ceiling or beyond, his last act maybe, screaming or straining against what was being done to him. The tips of his fingers were bleeding too from where he’d been gripping onto the chair for dear life. He was in his early twenties, a skinny ned with flinty features and a shock of dirty, blond hair. Winter looked at the cut in his chest and wanted to get Baxter to check something that he couldn’t ask. Was it the same knife that had been used to kill Sammy Ross? He couldn’t ask because he should already have told them of the link between Ross and Strathie before now. Before McConachie and Addison were shot and before Forrest and these four were murdered. Before it was all too late…

The fourth man had a hood over his head, his neck slumped at an unnatural angle. There was something wrong about his legs too, dangling askew from the knees down, bones seemingly jutting out where they shouldn’t. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt, both dirty as if he’d been rolled on the ground, maybe taking a kicking as well as what was most probably a baseball bat beating.

‘Photograph him, Winter,’ ordered Alex Shirley. ‘And get a fucking move on. I want that hood off him.’

Winter found his feet the moment the superintendent spoke, glad to be able to move and not simply standing and staring. He circled the broken man, snapping as he went, aware of the open-mouthed, fearful cops in the rear of his shot. ‘Right, enough,’ barked Shirley. ‘Out of the way.’

Winter was done, anyway. He wanted to see the guy’s face as much as anyone else. Shirley strode forward, pulling the hood off the guy’s head and dropping it into an evidence bag that Baxter held out for him.

The right side of number four’s face was caved in, his eye out its socket, the skull and jaw both smashed. It brought images of Addison’s head screaming into Winter’s consciousness and he had to banish them fast. Had to concentrate or he’d be in deep shit. He knew he was close to losing it completely.

He stared at the guy’s left eye, saw that it in turn was staring away from the damage to the skull, either looking out for trouble from the other side or just desperate not to see what had happened. For a second he wished he was wherever number four was looking, somewhere safe, somewhere out of sight and out of mind. He snapped back into reality.

The guy only had half a face left but it was enough for him to be identified.

‘Harvey Houston?’ asked Shirley, looking for confirmation.

‘Yes, sir.’ Sandy Murray was the first to answer. ‘I’ve run into him a few times over the years.’

Shirley made a small nod of his head, looking angrier than Winter had ever seen him.

‘And the rest of them? Get them all fucking photographed, Winter. Names, people. Now.’

Winter focused on Houston’s shattered skull and photo graphed as he heard names being confirmed by Murray, Boyle, Williamson and Monteith, the last two having joined the party along with another two forensics that he recognized: Paddy Swanson and Lucy Stark. They would have their hands full.

The bloody mess was Jake Arnold, known as Beavis, bleed-to-death guy was Ginger George Faichney, and the gutted-stomach victim was Benjo Honeyman. All as expected and nothing that anyone could have seen coming. Four missing men and one missing cop, all snug as bugs in the same rug. Winter’s stomach was rumbling in a way that meant he was either very hungry or about to puke.

He moved from one man to the next as if he were in a dream, sidestepping the forensics as everyone tried to do their job at the same time. No sooner had he finished photographing every angle of Arnold’s battered-in nose or Faichney’s sliced veins than Swanson was daubing them with Luminol and waiting to see what developed. Winter snapped at Honeyman’s stabbed chest, zooming in on the signature rip of the knife, standing back to be replaced immediately by Baxter dusting the chair for prints that they both knew wouldn’t be there. None of it was futile but none of it was going to help.

Winter heard the shout from somewhere over his left shoulder.

‘Sir!’

It was Murray, his face ashen. Everyone followed his arm to the far corner of the warehouse and saw the homemade poster on the wall. Letters and cuttings from newspapers. From a distance all that could be made out was a headline, THE DARK ANGEL.

As they all moved closer en masse they could make out the two words that were pasted below.

Dirty

Cops

They were drinking in those words, swallowing hard on their implications, when another voice burst through the door. Narey. She stopped in her tracks for an age when she saw the four bodies, her jaw dropping before she recovered her composure and went up to Shirley.

She spoke to him quietly, out of earshot. Winter watched Shirley’s face wrinkle and his brow furrow. His eyes were blazing but he gave her a curt nod, before placing a reassuring arm on hers. He stood for a moment, weighing up his options before coming to a decision.

‘Constables,’ he barked, looking at Boyle and Murray. ‘Will you excuse us, please? Mr Baxter, your people, too.’

None of them looked too pleased but they had no choice. They left the warehouse and closed the door behind them.

Shirley looked at Winter, narrowing his eyes.

‘I think you should hear this too,’ he said, hesitating before going on. ‘The calls that DI Addison and DS McConachie received a few minutes ago have been identified from their phones. McConachie’s was from George Faichney. Addison’s was from Mark Sturrock, the mule from Harthill Services.’

Winter wanted to throw up the emptiness in his stomach or to deck Shirley. The two words on the poster screamed at him, mocking him.