Craig Robertson - Snapshot

Inside, a nurse directed him to a curtained-off bed and he pulled back the screens to get a reproachful look from a bald surgeon in green scrubs who, along with a plump blonde nurse, was standing over the teenager in the bed. Winter just gave him a shrug in return and the surgeon shook his head before slipping through the curtain and letting him get on with it. The nurse, Karen according to her name tag, stayed.

Rory McCabe was a big lad for his age but soft with it. A tousled mop of reddish hair fringed his eyes and he’d barely begun shaving. Most local kids his age were seventeen going on thirty-seven but this one didn’t have the hard-edged look that they wore. He looked a stranger to Buckfast and baseball bats. Well, except the one that had wrecked his knee.

Narey said his mum and dad had sworn blind that Rory had never been in any bother but then lots of parents don’t have the first clue what their kids get up to. Winter was inclined to think the McCabes might be right though. No scars, no tattoos, no ned hair cut, no missing teeth, no needle marks. Just a busted knee, a big purple bruise on his jaw and a rash of skin torn off his face, presumably where he fell.

It seemed standard practice. Teenager gets the shit kicked out of him and he remembers nothing. No names, no pack drill. Cops take notes then close the book and the case. Next.

Rory was wearing a gown open to the waist and pulled off one shoulder, which was already bandaged and strapped to his side, his left leg hoisted up in a pulley. He looked at Winter but seemed far more interested in the pain that was coming from his knee. Aye, that knee, it was quite a sight. His amateur physiology said displaced patella and a severe haematoma. In new money, that’s a broken kneecap and badly swollen knee. Winter knew there were three bones that made up the knee joint – the patella and two others that he couldn’t remember. The odd, awkward angles pushing angrily at the skin around the knee suggested that all three of them were fucked. Someone had made a very good job of this.

There was already violent bruising colouring the sides of the knee; it was now blood-red and would turn purple then black before long. It had ballooned up to nearly the size of a football and looked ready to pop. The docs would be draining that soon to ease the pain but he had to do his stuff first. It was the same old routine. On the outside chance that anyone was nicked for it then the extent of the boy’s injuries would need to be shown in court so that the sheriff could decide between a smack on the wrist or a really stern telling-off.

Winter snapped off a photo without asking, catching the boy off guard. McCabe turned and just looked at him. Sullen. Glowering. Dour. Unsure. Resentful. Lost.

‘Awrite, Rory? My name’s Tony. I’ve got to take your photie.’

‘So I see,’ he muttered.

‘What happened to you anyway?’ he chanced. No harm in keeping in Narey’s good books if he did let something slip.

McCabe spat out the words. ‘Don’t know. No idea. Leave me alone.’

His mouth said no but his eyes said no way. The boy was scared shitless.

‘Fair enough,’ Winter said. ‘I’ll just do my job and leave you in peace. Couple of those nurses look pretty hot, eh?’

That gained him a sheepish smile from Nurse Karen but no reaction from the boy beyond a grimace. He guessed that was down to the pain in his patella rather than a lack of interest in the nursing staff. No problem, wee man. I’ll stick to the photographs and you stick to your story, he thought. See where that gets either of us.

This wouldn’t be a pic for Winter’s collection, too run of the mill. Something didn’t quite fit either because the scared rabbit look on McCabe’s face wasn’t right either. He’d seen more than enough of these kids and he would have expected angry and vengeful. The full-on, rebel-without-a-cause, going-to-get-my-mates-to-break-some-legs kind of angry. Not this; it was all a bit pitiful.

Winter shot the knee from every angle, seeing the bones that threatened to poke through the skin, closing in on the bruises and the distortions of the joint.

Next he pulled the Fuji IS Pro from the bag, a dedicated ultraviolet infrared camera that can pick up bruising that’s invisible to the eye. It wasn’t needed to see the mess round his knee but you never knew what else was hidden away. Winter took a shot of Rory’s face and chest too and sure enough there was a contusion on the right-hand side of the teenager’s chest that couldn’t have been seen without the filters.

Enough was enough. He was in no hurry to get back to the lab but what more could he do?

‘You take it easy, Rory,’ he told him. ‘Don’t go running after those nurses mind, let them chase you.’

The boy glared at him.

‘Fuck off.’

Winter got the feeling it was maybe the first time Rory had ever told anyone that. The blonde nurse scowled at him as well; it looked like he’d overstayed his welcome. As Tony pushed his way through the door out of the ward, he saw the close-cropped brick shithouse guy get to his feet and make for a water dispenser on the other side of the room. It took him within a couple of feet of Winter and the photographer had no doubt that it was deliberate. The guy was aged about twenty and looked like he could handle himself – and wanted Winter to know it.

‘You alright?’ Winter asked him when the man was almost in his face.

‘What’s it got to do with you?’ he growled back. ‘What’s your problem?’

‘No problem, none at all,’ Winter replied, without breaking his stride.

‘Keep it that way,’ said the voice at his back.

Fucking Glasgow, Winter thought. Every conversation is a confrontation. He sighed, realizing that he was on his way back to Pitt Street with as much admin to do as he had started the day with; a fresh bunch of photographs to file and precisely none that were worthy of a place in his collection. A pint of Guinness was sounding like a better idea with every passing step.

He didn’t know if it was intuition or some sense of being watched but Winter turned at the end of the corridor and looked back towards the door to the ward to see the tall, muscle-bound guy glaring at him from the other side of the glass.

Monday 12 September

A day after being in the red-light district, Rachel was back there again. She had ditched the rookie constable and instead had DC Julia Corrieri in tow again, heading for the Wish drop-in centre in York Street. Narey had explained that that was where her contact worked and was currently their best chance of finding out the name of the murdered prostitute.

Corrieri was a tall, angular woman in her early twenties with a mop of dark hair and an uncoordinated air about her. Narey knew that she was smart enough but wasn’t convinced that she always knew what day it was. The DS had been allocated the job of big sister and it was already proving a tiresome task.

Corrieri had spent the previous day going through the PNC as Addison had directed in the hope of finding a record of something similar to the killer’s act of trying to wipe away the hooker’s make-up but had come up empty-handed. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. In her determination to be thorough and her fear of missing something, she had produced a long list of weird offender fetishes including ear biting, house cleaning and tampon theft. All of which she handed over with an endearing solemnity that made Narey want to both hug her and slap her.

York Street was in the south-west area of the city centre, connecting Argyle Street to the Broomielaw, and only a few hundred yards from where the hooker was killed in Wellington Lane. Wish occupied the street level of a formerly imposing row of Georgian buildings but now the upper floors were largely deserted and the drop-in centre was squeezed between a Cantonese restaurant and a boarded-up shop. The place provided support and health care to the sex workers and had done for nearly twenty years. Cops weren’t exactly welcomed in with open arms but the people that ran Wish knew that they were basically on their side.