Cold Grave (22 page)

Sutton sighed heavily.

‘Okay. Here’s what I’ll do: if I get a minute, I’ll look through the computer and see if there’s anything else like this on the go. If there is, I’ll tell you. And if I do, then you tell me what you know. And don’t piss me about. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘And Tony…’

‘What?’

‘You’re wrong about Horatio Caine. The guy who plays him is supposed to be as cheesy as that.’

‘You think?’

‘Yeah. Mind you, that thing with the sunglasses gets right on my tits.’

‘How’s your dad?’

‘Not good. The home say he seems to be getting a bit worse each week. They’re seeing him more than I am and I think they’re right. I just can’t stand the thought of him slipping away. I feel like I’m losing him.’

They were in bed together, Rachel lying facing the window, staring at the slate-coloured sky, and Tony tucked in behind, his arms around her. He was naked; she was in pyjamas and still cold despite the heating being on twenty-four hours a day since the cold snap began. According to the telly, the temperature would drop to minus fifteen that night and she was feeling every degree of it. It was just after midnight and they were both on in the morning but, despite being tired, neither was ready for sleep.

‘I want to tell you that everything will be all right but I can’t.’

‘I know. He won’t get better. But maybe… maybe he won’t get worse. That’s the best I can hope for.’

‘But you’re doing all you can do for him. You’re pushing yourself to the edge as it is.’

‘Hm.’

‘It’s all you can do, Rach.’

‘Do you not think I fucking know that?’

Tony didn’t react. He knew she didn’t mean it. He’d never known her hurt the way she had been the past couple of weeks and he was beginning to feel the hurt pushing him aside. He settled for pulling her closer and letting her blow herself out.

‘Shit. I’m sorry,’ she breathed, her hands rubbing at her temples. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean that. This is doing my bloody head in.’

‘It’s okay. I understand. Just remember that I’m on your side.’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘Just making sure.’

She dug her elbow into him a bit. ‘Sod.’

‘So where do we go next?’

‘We find Dixie and Paddy. God knows where they are or who they are but if we find them, then we start to get to the bottom of this. At least one of them knows what happened. At least one of them knows who’s blackmailing them. We’ll find them.’

‘And Lily?’

‘Don’t start on me with the forgetting about Lily stuff. I’ve never forgotten about her, despite what you and Danny might think. I’m sure your sick mind is full of images of her lying on the island but, just because mine isn’t, that doesn’t mean I don’t care about finding who did that to her.’

He said nothing, feeling guilty for something he couldn’t control, knowing she had him nailed and not feeling any better for that. His head was his own place — or so he thought. He didn’t like the idea of it being an open book, even to Rachel. His dreams should be his own grubby little secrets.

‘It’s okay,’ she told him. ‘I think I understand. As much as I understand anything about you, sicko.’

‘Ha ha. You should give up policing and become a comedian.’

He began to kiss her neck and move his body against hers, hoping for a reaction but not the one he got.

‘Forget it,’ she slapped a hand against his leg. ‘Not tonight.’

‘Jeezus, the sooner we find out who the fuck killed these bastards the better.’

Despite everything, she giggled. ‘So that you can get your end away?’

They both laughed and she turned and they kissed before she hugged back into him again, leaving him to his thoughts. He knew she was right — of course she was. When night closed in, his mind was full of Lily.

He did wonder, in his more reasoned moments, why he obsessed about her quite so much. It wasn’t because he had photographed her, her shattered skull displayed on his wall with the other trophies of his labours. No, eventually he realised it was because he
hadn’t
photographed her. She was a stray soul like him yet she had eluded his lens and his inner itch ached to put that right.

It wasn’t that he dreamt about her, more that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. In truth he probably couldn’t tell where his thoughts stopped and his dreams began; it was just the way his head worked. The image of her filled his mind, her face becoming formed ever more clearly as each day passed. Behind his eyes he could see her pale skin and the light freckles on her nose. There was a cheeky grin in defiance of all they knew had happened to her. Lily was a pretty girl and probably looked even younger than she was — a face that was never going to grow old.

Sometimes he’d think about her like that, fully formed, even though he knew his imagination was taking a leap. Mostly, though, he thought of her as half-finished, the way Fairweather was describing her, the picture becoming fuller and clearer with every passing telephone call or email.

But other times… other times he thought of her as she was found: blackened, battered, bloodied and broken. That wasn’t how he wanted to picture her but there was no way he could stop himself. That image was buried away in a dark corner of his mind he couldn’t help but visit. Fighting it was always going to be a losing battle.

In his waking hours, he could realise the moment when the insects came was a sure sign that he had passed over from imagination to dreams. But there and then, in the depths of the dark night, the line was blurred and his mind recoiled at the illusory sight of ants, blowflies and dermestid beetles gorging on Lily. He had to watch in fascinated horror as flies, maggots and beetle larvae feasted on her flesh. He could hear too: the buzz and the crawl and the chomp. It was his own perfected method of self-torture.

This night, however, the insects hadn’t yet come to take their fill of Lily and so he was fairly sure he was still awake and therefore simply tormenting himself. Lily and Paton and Mosson had formed an unlikely chorus line of characters, flitting through his mind in various stages of distress, each leaving a bloody footprint on his fading consciousness. It was somewhere in the midst of this dark meandering that his eureka moment came.

His eyes flashed open and he let the thought run through his head once more for confirmation that it made some kind of sense. Sure enough that it did, he reached for the bedside lamp and switched it on, getting out of bed in the same movement.

‘What the fuck?’ Rachel grouched, immediately awake and staring at the sight of Tony groping around, naked, among the papers on the desktop. He didn’t reply but kept searching until he picked up a sheet of A4 and held it up to the light.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she asked again.

Tony looked up at her, then back down at the paper.

‘Dixie,’ he told her.

‘Dixie? As in dixie1970? The other name on Paton’s email?’

‘Yes. This probably sounds nuts but it occurred to me that… well, Dixie is a nickname for footballers. Or it used to be.’

‘Right…’

‘There was a guy called Dixie Dean who played for Everton between the wars. Scored sixty goals in one season. And there was a Celtic player in the seventies, John Deans. He was known as Dixie as well — wee barrel of a guy. I was sure I’d seen the name Deans on the Jordanhill list but I had to check.’

Winter held the papers up in front of him.

‘And?’ Rachel demanded.

‘And I’ve checked his age against the record as well. This guy was born in 1970. Dixie 1970. His name is Gregory Deans.’

‘Tony?’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s Aaron Sutton. You might want to get yourself over to Mansionhouse Drive in Springboig. Right away.’

‘Sure. What is it?’

‘Let’s just say that the key words are samurai sword.’

‘Leaving right now.’

He drove as fast as he could get away with towards the east end in the evening traffic. As he ran to his car, he tried Danny’s mobile but didn’t get an answer and left a message saying where he was going. Danny would see the connection right away. Springboig was just five minutes from Terry Gilmartin’s home turf in Easterhouse.

There were lots of streets in Glasgow where Winter would have a fair idea what to expect as soon as he heard their name. Mansionhouse Drive didn’t fall into that category. It was one of the strangest streets in the city, the product of two very different building eras. If you came from the western end of Hallhill Road, you could see how it got its name: maybe not mansions exactly but big, expensive homes at the end of leafy drives, behind high manicured hedges on a tree-lined street — until you came to the junction of Croftspar Place. The street abruptly changed, from mansion house to Eastern European prison cells: ugly grey mono blocks that were barely worthy of the word house never mind mansion. Croftspar Place marked the point in the road where house prices fell by over a hundred grand and life expectancy by ten years.

Surprise, surprise. When Winter came off Springboig Road onto Hallhill Road, there were no signs of flashing lights and the echoes of sirens were still in the distance. It was only when he was halfway along the more salubrious section of Mansionhouse, the road rutted with ice and snow, that he saw the circus ahead. Sure enough, the cars and cops were en masse a hundred yards past the turn into Croftspar Place. Winter parked as near as he could, battled his way through a fuck-muttering crowd, and flashed his identification at the first constable who tried to block his path. It was the look on the cop’s face that gave him the first clue all was not well on Mansionhouse Drive.

He’d seen it before — many times. The guy was young and nervous, aggressive in his uniform because he was trying to cover the fact that he was shitting himself. Other people might have been riled at his attitude or thought he should ‘man up’ and get on with it; not Winter. He just wanted to know what was so bad behind the lines that it made the cop look so utterly lost. The second Winter saw the guy’s eyes, shifting left and right in near panic, he had a hard-on for whatever was waiting to be photographed.

As soon as he got behind the tape, he sought out Aaron Sutton and spotted him waving his arms around furiously and yelling at his cops to get the gathering crowd of locals further back. Winter looked round but could see nothing that merited the level of chaos that was ensuing. There were definite shades of the crowd in Swanston Street when the dog had been sliced in two: loonies baying at the cold moon and a powder keg of resentment that just needed an excuse to blow. There was no sign of blood but there was the smell of it in the air and that was always guaranteed to get crowds going loopy. As Winter scanned the scene from inside the line, he got a real sense of people pushing in and on edge. With a sinking feeling, he wondered if that was all that was responsible for the young cop wetting himself. Then he saw Aaron Sutton and the look on his face.

It was way different from the constable’s — Sutton was far too long in the tooth to suffer those kind of nerves — but his weary and worried look was all the more telling for that. Winter felt the potential for terrible things tickling his adrenalin.

He hurried over to Sutton; the DI saw his approach and studied Winter with something that looked a whole lot like he was seriously pissed off. Winter didn’t have any doubt that the enraged look in Sutton’s eyes was aimed directly at him.

‘So what have we got?’ Winter asked him, trying to preempt the questions that seemed certain to come from Sutton.

The DI stared back at him and Winter instinctively knew that Sutton was struggling between giving him a hard time and having to get on with the job at hand.

‘Two hands. Sliced clean off and left lying in the snow.’

‘Where are they? And where’s the guy they were cut from?’

‘One over there,’ Sutton pointed. ‘And one over there. And it’s “guys”. Plural.’

‘How do you know it’s not just one victim?’

‘Well, it’s possible. But only if he had two right hands.’

‘What?’

‘Keep up. We have a right hand over there and another right hand over there. This ring any bells with you, Tony?’

Winter ignored the loaded question as best he could and asked one of his own, more in the hope of deflection than anything else.

‘So what have we got? A Sharia law vigilante ninja? Someone cutting the hands off thieves?’

Sutton’s head tilted to the side and he raised his eyebrows in a show of scepticism. It was a look straight out of the Addison school. Winter gabbled a response to the unasked query.

‘I will tell you as soon as I can, Aaron. I promise you that. How about I take some photographs?’

Sutton grimaced.

‘Forensics were here ahead of you. Give me one reason why I need you to take photographs of this scene.’

‘Look through my camera,’ he suggested to Sutton, turning the viewfinder towards the cop.

‘Are you kidding me? I’ve got two bastards running around somewhere with their hands cut off plus a mob ready to go Tonto at any minute. And you want me to say cheese?’

‘Just do it. It’ll show you why you need me to do this job.’

Sutton muttered something but did it anyway.

‘Okay. So what the fuck am I supposed to be looking at? I can’t see a thing.’

‘Exactly. That’s what you’ll get if the forensics do pics of the scene in the dark. They will be okay with close-up stuff, not exactly technically brilliant but usable, I guess. But if you want a shot of this scene, then they’ll be as much use as a chocolate teapot.’

Sutton looked sceptical.

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘You need a timed exposure. I can do that; they can’t.’

Sutton swore under his breath.