Craig Robertson - Snapshot

Wary of his footing as the ground below him got rougher, he flashed the light on the floor and saw the nestle of dust had been disturbed. He crouched and was fairly sure it had been footsteps but the big question was how recent they were. Days or months? He nibbled his lip and looked ahead into the darkness, realizing he had no real idea of how long he’d been down there – fifteen minutes maybe – and only a vague idea of how to return to the surface. At the end of that corridor, he again had a choice of directions but was able to see that on only one of them did the dust seem to have been displaced. That was the way to go.

It was much wider down there now, the narrow hospital corridors having been replaced by large spaces that seemed to have no edge and he hugged close to the wall for fear of staggering in the wrong direction. Then something else caught his eye, picked out by the torchlight amid the murk. He reached down and picked it up, an empty two-litre bottle of Diet Coke. It looked pretty new. Everything else down there was covered in the dust of a hundred years, or at least since the last time anyone had ventured down to clean up the rubbish. He picked up the plastic bottle and checked the sell-by date. January 2012. It had been dropped very recently. Shit, wasn’t he the proper little detective?

So he knew he was probably on the right track. He threw the bottle back onto the ground a few feet away, knowing immediately it had been a mistake as it rattled off the floor and the sound reverberated up to the arches. But as the sound settled, it was joined then taken over by something else. The noise made by the bottle moved seamlessly into a growing crescendo of squeals that came from his left, squeaks that became a screech rising from behind a closed door. Then in an instant he saw them. Rats.

They stormed out from the space beneath the door and towards him, fleeing, angry, scared. Christ, there was an army of them and they were huge, the size of large puppies or small dogs, but much fiercer and scurrying at top speed.

Winter froze, his heart racing and yet stopped at the same time, every hair on his body on edge. He was scared shitless of rats. There must have been twenty of the little fuckers and they scuttled across his path at a hundred miles an hour. Two, maybe three of them actually ran across his feet, scampering across his shoes without giving a damn.

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, just had to stand and watch them run. They’d vanished from sight in an instant, the only evidence that they’d been there at all being the distant sound of their shrieking but he was still rooted to the spot, silent, wary of breathing too loudly, shaking. The only wonder was that he hadn’t crapped himself. He had to try and slow his heart down.

Stop shaking, he told himself. Get a grip.

What was behind the door? Much as he didn’t want to, he had to know what had made the rats interested enough to go in there in the first place. He was guessing food. Maybe whatever had been washed down with the Diet Coke. Only one way to find out, he thought, and cursed himself for thinking it.

There was an image from the movie Ben that was growing stupidly large in his head. The one where the kid goes into a small room and stands up to see the entire place filled with rats. Every shelf filled with the dirty little bastards, surrounding him. That scene scared the crap out of him for years. And now, he was actually going to go in there and perhaps be confronted with exactly that.

He steeled himself, grabbed the door’s handle and pulled, stepping quickly back as far as he could as he did so in case they came running out. Nothing moved and there wasn’t a sound. He skirted slowly past the edge of the door, bringing what turned out to be a large storage cupboard into full view. There wasn’t a rat to be seen, thank God, but there was plenty else there.

In the gloom he could make out a blanket bundled in the corner, a cardboard box that looked like it had packets of food in it. On a shelf sat not rats but a notebook and a pile of photographs. There were boxes too, four of them about a foot square, marked Naval Issue.

He was in the tight grip of his shallow breathing, a pounding heart and a head crowded by creeping fear but despite all that, his brain still functioned enough to know that he was undoubtedly in the right place. And the wrong place. His senses were overloaded by what he could see but slowly the others were kicking in too and he realized that the cupboard smelled. It was an odour that he knew fairly well but worse, much worse, than he normally experienced.

He wanted to run but he couldn’t, his feet didn’t know how and anyway, he’d as likely run into McKendrick coming back to his lair. He had to stay and he had to deal with something. The voice in his head was telling him to do it, to stop ignoring what was in front of him and just do it. He reached down and took a hold of the corner of the blanket with the ends of his fingers, wary of it. He pulled it slowly towards him but realized he was just making things worse by delaying.

He swallowed hard, gripped the blanket properly and whipped it away in one movement, unveiling what lay below. But no matter that he tried to do it quickly, he still saw it inch by revealing inch. A foot, a leg, fingers, blood, chest, head, eyes, blood, mouth, blood, hair. A whole body, yet not whole. He staggered back, crashing into the shelf behind him and cracking his head off the wall. The shock spiralled through him, stealing his breath away. Now he knew what the rats had been doing in there.

His hands went to his temples, holding his head tight. He wanted to scream but couldn’t. His breathing was rapid, trembling, wheezing like an old man or an idiot. He’d seen death, seen lots of it but nothing like this. Usually, he was ready for it, called to it, but this, this was different.

Maybe it was because of the mess that the rats had made. The man’s right eye had been eaten away completely, a hole left where the soft tissue had been munched from. His pale lips and cheeks had been partially eaten, half a feast that had been interrupted. His fingertips had been chewed too and the soft of his belly gnawed, all tasty morsels for hungry mouths.

No, it was all of that but it was more to do with the fact that as Winter recovered his breath and his heart restarted, he looked at the body and knew beyond a shadow who it was.

The face in front of him, what was left of it, wasn’t the good-looking, confident young guy from the photograph on his mother’s mantlepiece. The pride that Winter had seen in his eyes was gone from the one that he had left shrunken in his skull, the close-cropped hair was grimy and stained with blood, the strong determined jaw was slack and bore the sharp incisor marks of the rats. But it was definitely him.

Ryan McKendrick. His brother’s avenger. The man-boy who ran away to Grahamston. Dirty and dead and half-eaten by rats. Winter’s head spun. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this.

His head had been full of some straight-line thinking that was all too simple. McKendrick wanted to even the score for his wee brother’s death and became some kind of human wrecking ball against the scum that fed drugs to Keiran. He was Special Boat Service, he had the training, the motive, the access to the hardware. He’d tortured Sammy Ross and pumped him for information before he’d killed him. He’d then shot drug dealers, gangsters and crime bosses and he was hiding out somewhere in a hellish version of Brigadoon.

It was McKendrick. He’d been sure of it. The Dark Angel. The new-age hero. The killer. It was all so fucking simple and he was the smart-arse who had worked it out.

The only problem was the evidence in front of him. Winter was no expert on forensics but he’d regularly ridden shotgun with Baxter or Cat so he was more informed than people who watched CSI. He knew enough about rigor and lividity to be able to confidently predict a time of death that wouldn’t look foolish in court.