Craig Robertson - Snapshot

It maybe wasn’t the best plan in the world but it was all he had. He’d go back down into the bowels of the city and place one of these little beauties somewhere it couldn’t be seen. The sensor nodes would do the rest, triggering the camera and hopefully proving his theory. It needed to work because there was no plan B.

He hadn’t used these things much because there was generally no need but he knew a thing or two about them. In the early days they had video camera tubes as sensors but now they were more likely to have a CCD, a charge-coupled device, or a CMOS, a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, basically active pixel sensors. Those evening classes had come in useful after all.

The office issue had a five gig CMOS sensor chip, a wireless USB receiver and it was small. Perfect, in fact. He could set it up so that it ran to the laptop and because it was wireless he could hide the lappy somewhere else away from the camera. It would even have sent to his mobile phone but for the fact that he’d be so far below street level.

The beauty of it for Grahamston was that it had built-in infra red LED. It took colour pictures during the day – or outdoors – but at night or down in the gloom below Central Station it would photograph in black and white. But colour or mono made no difference to what he wanted. He only needed to see the fucker and to capture him. On film at least.

He liberated the camera from the store. For something as expensive as that, he should have filled out forms and sent in a request but somehow he didn’t see either Lewis or Baxter okaying a midnight requisition demand. But the important thing was that he needed it to catch a bad man and that was what the job was all about. If Baxter understood that then he’d have said yes so it was all good. Lenny Lewis would explode but he could go screw himself.

The temptation was to wait till morning before going down into Grahamston and the little common sense that Winter had left told him that attempting to find his way back to the cupboard where McKendrick’s body was stowed was going to be difficult enough with the little daylight that filtered through but nigh on impossible in the dark. The key was to get the first few turns right and he knew he probably needed the initial help from the glass walkways above.

He was knackered too. It was a toss-up whether his legs or his eyes were heavier and his energy levels were as drained as his emotions. Adrenalin could only take you so far.

But for all that, he wasn’t for waiting. Too much at stake, too much that could go so badly wrong if he did wait. Addison, Rachel, too many people that he owed to put things right. It was now or never.

Anyway, night was the one time that Winter figured he could be fairly sure not to bump into the shooter if he went down there. Sure it was possible that he’d be there overnight but he doubted it. McKendrick needed to hide there but he didn’t. Quite the opposite, he needed to be seen, needed to be visible in his everyday world, above ground and above suspicion.

He still had a job to do after all. He had shifts to fill and villains to catch. He was the cop chasing the killer and the killer chasing the cops. Winter was going to catch this bastard or…

The thought stopped him in his tracks. Catch him or die trying. That was what he doing here, that was the gamble he was taking. But he wasn’t afraid of it. It was all about death to him so what could there be to fear?

No, whatever the sense of it, he wasn’t for waiting. How would he sleep anyway with his head full of Rachel and worry? He wondered about calling her, hearing her voice but she would just demand that he abandoned his half-arsed plan and let the professionals do it. He’d tell her how they hadn’t exactly done a good job of it so far and that would start an argument. No, tempting as that was, he wouldn’t do it. That really could wait till morning.

He put the stores back into darkness and slipped out again, back along the corridor and straight past his own office towards the exit. The guy on the desk looked up half-heartedly and gave him a disinterested nod.

‘See you later,’ he mumbled.

Hopefully, Winter thought.

It took him all of three minutes to drive from Pitt Street to where he parked outside Fat Boab’s on Dixon Street and the same again on foot to McDonald’s. Late as it was, there were still plenty of people around, having tumbled out of pubs or clubs, but they weren’t paying him much attention. CCTV cameras crossed his mind but if anything he’d be happy enough if they’d picked up on him.

He didn’t even bother looking around when he got to the end of the lane, just walked straight through the bush-strewn entrance like a late-night drunk who was looking for a piss stop. It was virtually pitch-black down there with little in the way of either neon or moonlight finding their way down into the alley. As well as the camera, Winter had also liberated a torch from the stores but he was keeping that until he was below decks; there was no point in drawing unwanted attention.

It meant he couldn’t see where he was going but it was narrow enough that there was nowhere to go but forward with a hand on either wall for balance. His feet crunched over glass and squelched on God knows what as thorns pulled at his trouser legs. He was going slower than he’d done the previous time when there had been some light in the passage, edging ahead a shuffled step at a time. The different pace and the darkness made it harder to judge how far he’d gone…

Shit. His left foot suddenly dropped from beneath him, causing him to pitch forward and down, bumping off a succession of stairs, his right knee crashing down onto the edge of the metal sheet that now only half covered the opening and sending an almighty bang reverberating round the narrow passage and down into the depths below. He was left dangling, one leg a few feet below him, pain shooting through his kneecap. He eased himself back up onto his arse and nursed the torn scraps at his knee, feeling blood oozing through the skin. He couldn’t see it in the dark but he was guessing it seeped candy-apple red. His left ankle also throbbed and he might have sprained it. He cursed himself for being such an idiot; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known the hole was there. The pain was bad enough but the noise that he’d made was even worse. He could definitely have done without that.

Fuck it. If anyone was coming to investigate from Jamaica Street then it was better he wasn’t there when they had a nosey. He dropped down through the opening, ignoring the pain in both legs, and made his way down the wooden stairs into the tiny hallway below. He stood there for a bit, waiting for noises from above that meant someone was in the passage but there was nothing. Glasgow either didn’t hear or didn’t care.

He could see next to nothing down there but with a bit of memory and groping around, he located the corridor that headed off to the right towards what he had thought was north. As soon as he was in the corridor, he switched on the torch, glad of the comfort it brought him, glad even to see the grubby asylum yellow walls and ceramic tiles. When the wash of neon appeared in front of him, oozing down from the walkways above, he hastily put the torch off again although who the fuck he thought was going to notice it staggering along Union Street was beyond him.

He went through the first set of double doors, then the second and the third, becoming more confident that he knew where he was going. The two flights of stairs down rang more bells and so did the cold and the damp that attacked his nostrils. The thought occurred to him that there might be areas of this underground maze that mirrored each other and that one wrong turn could have taken him to somewhere that looked just the same but was hundreds of yards away. For all he knew, he was getting further away from McKendrick and the storage cupboard with every step he took.