Craig Robertson - Snapshot

Constables Stevie Dwyer and Kenny Watt had been called to the scene just before eight that morning after a man taking a shortcut along the lane had spotted the heel of a black platform boot sticking out from behind the big red bin. Something had made him take a closer look and he discovered the owner’s body still attached to the boot. After nearly crapping himself on the spot, he called the cops.

Dwyer and Watt were there in minutes from the cop shop at Anderston and had the full forensic cavalry join them not long after. Neither of the cops recognized the girl and witnesses were thin on the ground. The man who’d found her had a solid alibi for the night before. The girl had been photographed in situ behind the bin before it was eased away so that she could be examined. When Fitzpatrick noticed the residue of blue paint in the girl’s hair, she’d looked up and down the lane, seeing likely locations nearby. The first was a window frame and doorway just a few feet away which were in the same shade of dark blue as the paint but neither area contained the blood spatter she would have expected from the blow to the girl’s head. Further down the lane, however, was a garage entrance, set in a few feet from the road and decked out in dark blue. It had taken Fitzpatrick just a few seconds to look around head height on the metal shuttered entrance to find skin tissue and blonde hair strands matted in blood where the girl’s skull had been cracked against it.

‘Looks a likely place for a girl to take a punter,’ Addison was saying to Narey. ‘Dark, set in off the lane, no street lighting, no cameras.’

‘A good place to kill someone for the same reasons,’ she replied.

‘Hm. So, premeditated or impulse? Stand up against the wall here. Next to where she would have been.’

‘You wish.’

‘Fucksake, just do it. Assume the position.’

With a shake of her head, Narey placed her back to the wall and looked defiantly at the DI.

‘Okay.’

He stood in front of her, far too close for her liking, and positioned himself with his hips close to hers. He raised both hands to her neck and mimed strangulation.

‘Sir?’

‘Yes?’

‘Fuck off, will you?’

‘Not just yet.’

Addison parodied the motion of knocking Narey’s head against the wall, then moved down in the direction she would have fallen, noticing further tiny traces of blood on the ground.

‘Now he wants to hide her,’ he continued. ‘He carries her, drags her maybe, towards the bins.’

The DI moved slowly along back towards the tented crime scene, careful to avoid stamping all over the actual route, finally standing by it.

‘Okay,’ he said eventually. ‘Thoughts?’

Narey could have done without the theatrics but could see some value in the process.

‘Okay,’ she began. ‘So he’s big enough to have hauled her along there, twenty metres or so, without getting seen.’

‘But -’

‘But perhaps not big enough or brave enough to put her in the bin where the body would have stayed longer without being found.’

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘I reckon if he could carry her that far fairly quickly – and he wouldn’t have wanted to hang about – then he could have got her in the bin. But he wanted away from there as quickly as possible. So, not premeditated. I’d say, rushed.’

‘An impulse sex killer,’ she concluded.

‘Rachel, do you ever get days when you wish you’d just never got out of bed?’

‘Boss, whenever you use sentences with the word “bed” in them I get nervous,’ she replied.

‘Because I certainly do and this is one of them,’ he said, ignoring her. ‘There’s something about the mess on that girl’s face where the bastard tried to remove her make-up that really bothers me. You know what I mean?’

‘Your second body this morning,’ she sympathized. ‘Hardly surprising if you are a bit spooked.’

Addison threw her an indignant look.

‘Spooked? Get to fuck. I’m hungry, that’s what I am. Starving. But the scrubbing of that make-up? The bastard that did that is making a point. You mark my words.’

Afternoon, Sunday 11 September

Winter had been stuck in his office in the bowels of Strathclyde Police HQ in Pitt Street since returning from Blochairn. The room was empty but for him and his photographs of Sammy Ross’s plundered chest. If the pics had been more interesting, like Addison’s murdered hooker, then it might well have been enough for him. But Sammy just wasn’t cutting it.

Winter hated paperwork every bit as much as Addison did. The mindless purgatory involved in filing and barcoding his crime scene photographs was bad enough but even worse was when he was forced to do the same thing for other people. Being his own secretary was dull as either dishwater or ditchwater, whichever it was. Being someone else’s made him want to puke.

He wanted to be out there, at the scene of car crashes, shootings and suicides as soon as they happened, hitting the shutter minutes after the body hit the ground. Not stuck under diffused lighting, filling boxes and killing time.

Winter hadn’t given up what passed for a career in IT and retrained at college just to be a frigging data processor. Or maybe he had. It had taken him six years to get to the stage where he was doing something that was this dull. When it was like this, suddenly running network applications didn’t seem quite so bad. In fact, worse than that, it didn’t seem so different.

Of course the irony was that the cops were where he’d wanted to be in the first place. Uncle Danny Neilson had been in the force all his days and when he was young there wasn’t much that Winter wanted more than to do what Danny did. So he’d applied and strolled through the Standard Entrance Tests and the fitness tests at Jackton but managed to stuff up the formal interview by telling the truth. Maybe if he had kept that fascination with death to himself then he wouldn’t have had to fall into computer programming instead. Still, he always wondered how he’d been considered too much of a risk to be allowed to walk around the city centre all day but it was perfectly okay for him to be in charge of millions of pounds of software or to photograph dead people. Winter settled for believing it said more about the police and psychometric testing than it did about him.

People told him he was crazy when he gave up his job as an IT hunchback to become a police photographer. Everyone said he was nuts throwing away his degree but what they didn’t understand was that he hadn’t wanted to spend any more time at a keyboard. He’d had the itch from the moment he first saw Metinides’s photographs in London. It wasn’t exactly following in Danny’s size elevens but maybe it was better. Winter had got such a buzz looking at the Mexican’s work and he’d known that was going to be multiplied by ten when he took his own. The photos he was filing for one of the scene examiners, Caroline Sanchez, had been taken on the corner of Dullsville. A Mazda MX-5 had gone through a red light and had been smacked by a bus going smartly through green coming the other way. The driver of the car had escaped with a fractured arm but there was a lot of broken glass to be photographed and filed. Give him strength. Sanchez was back out there working the skid marks from an assault and robbery in Summerston and he was stuck deep in the Pitt, doing her electronic paperwork.

It was all part of what Winter thought of as his bargain with the devil, the strange set-up that allowed him to be one of only two proper photographers to be still working for Strathclyde cops. The rest of the work was now done by the monkeys in bunny suits, button-pushers who didn’t know their aperture from their exposure. Oh, they knew everything there was to know about grave wax, petechial marks and ridge characteristics, but they knew bugger all about taking photographs. Point, fiddle with the focus and fire off as many shots as they could in the hope that one of them would be on the money. And, of course, money was what it was all about. Getting the scene examiners to double on the camera was all to do with saving cash at the expense of expertise. There were so many times that not only was a proper photographer needed but that it cried out for film rather than digital. Something like bite marks could never be done well enough on digital, you needed film to get the depth of detail you needed when you went into court. Winter had learned his trade on an old Hasselblad H4D that gave you just twelve shots and you had to make damn sure that every one of them counted. As far as he was concerned, the forensics wielded their cameras like scatterguns.