Snapshot (27 page)

Winter heard the thud of Addison hitting the tarmac then nothing. His ears were full of gunshot, ringing with horror. The cops who were still standing, some having thrown themselves to the ground, were frozen to the spot. He looked over Addison’s stricken body and saw Rachel looking back at him, her eyes locked on his. He held his breath for another shot and in the hour that seemed to flash by in a split second, or the split second that lasted an hour, he had time to hope the next bullet would hit him and not her.

Shirley found his voice, piercing the hush and roaring at everyone to get down. Lying flat, Winter saw the spurt of blood pooling round Addison, gathering quickly round him like a shroud. He thought his heart was going to burst. Death didn’t seem so beautiful after all.

What was he doing lying there, he thought? He got back to his feet, shakily, turning to face away from the warehouse door where Forrest was hanging. Turning to face where the shots were coming from.

‘Get fucking down, Winter,’ Shirley bellowed. Winter ignored him, staring out to wherever the bastard with the gun was, his heart hammering at his ribs and his throat dry. He stared the shooter down even though he couldn’t see him. He gave him ten long seconds and then made his move, turning towards Addison with his camera in his hand. The sniper with the rifle wasn’t going to shoot him, he’d have done it by then.

A few feet in front of Addison, Winter stopped and took a photograph, realizing for the first time that he had tears in his eyes. Addison was lying on his back, one leg caught under him, one arm at his side, the other across his chest, his mobile a foot away.

His skull was torn and bathed in red, his eyes wide in shock and his mouth contorted in a final grimace. Fuck, he was tall, stretched out long and getting cold. Winter ripped off his jacket and knelt beside his friend, suffocating a scream that he could feel building up inside him, trying to stem the wound with the coat but only succeeding in getting it saturated with blood in seconds. Addison’s eyes were lost somewhere and though Winter turned his cradled head towards him, he couldn’t see. How could this be? Then he felt it, a kicking somewhere below him. Addison’s legs were convulsing like a man suffering a mild electric shock. Did it mean he was alive, did he mean he was dying? Winter was panicking.

From behind him, he felt an arm on his shoulder. He tensed, ready to tell whoever it was to fuck off. The voice surprised him though.

‘Ease his head back down slowly. You could paralyse him, you fool. Then get out of the way. Please.’

Winter looked back and saw that it was Campbell Baxter. He hadn’t heard him arrive. The tone of his voice was gentle and understanding but firm. Winter looked from him to Addison and back, unsure.

‘Look, Winter. I know I’m more used to dealing with dead bodies but I have more knowledge on how to help him than anyone else here right now. The ambulance is two minutes away. He’s still alive. Let me help him.’

Winter nodded wordlessly, helplessly, pushing the sleeves of his jacket on the ground below Addison’s head and letting Baxter reach his hands underneath his and place the DI gently on it. Sound rushed into his ears again, hearing Shirley roaring to get every cop within miles to the spot they thought the shots had come from and to shut off every road leading to and from it.

Baxter took Addison’s wrist in one large paw and searched for a pulse, finding it and declaring it very weak. Winter felt more hands on his shoulders, pulling him up and away. He gave in to them, letting the hands turn him. He stood and looked and fell into Rachel’s arms. His face was smothered in her hair and the smell of it filled his senses, making him realize how much he’d missed it. She hugged him tight, facing him away from Addison, seemingly not caring that they were in public. He wanted to kiss her, lifting his head to do so, but she grabbed him back towards her, locking his head to her shoulder.

It was only the blare of the arriving ambulance that made Winter rip himself away, pulling free to see paramedics jump from the vehicle and run to Addison. Baxter had already wrapped something round the wound and had seemingly stopped the flow of blood. He spoke quickly to the paramedics then stepped aside as they secured his neck, eased a stretcher under him and lifted him into the ambulance. Rachel held Winter again as the doors closed, a last glimpse of tubes and wires being fitted as the engine fired up and it left, siren blaring.

The ambulance turned the bend and disappeared out of sight. Winter looked around and saw Alex Shirley standing over the body of Jan McConachie, realizing that the ambulance hadn’t taken her because she was dead.

‘Let me go,’ Winter told Rachel.

Her eyes pleaded with him not to but he leaned in and whispered to her.

‘It’s okay. I’m okay. Let me go.’

She nodded, reluctantly releasing him and looking to see who had been watching them. He didn’t know and he didn’t care. He had other things to do. Jim Boyle, the PC, saw him coming and cut across his path. Boyle was a burly big guy, shaven-headed under his hat, and Winter couldn’t have pushed him aside very easily but he would if he had to.

‘You don’t have to do this, Tony,’ he was telling him.

‘It’s my job, Jim.’

‘Fucksake, Tony. There will be others on their way. Get someone to take you and follow the ambulance. Addy’s your best mate.’

Winter shook his head.

‘Work to do. It’s the only thing I can do for him now. Let me past.’

The constable held Winter’s eyes for a second or two then stepped back, letting him push on by. Superintendent Shirley heard his footsteps and turned, looking Winter up and down. His face was set, grim and angry, chewing on his bottom lip, and Winter couldn’t tell what he was thinking. The look on his face could have been disgust or understanding; Winter didn’t know or care. They were pretty much the same feelings he had about himself.

Jan McConachie was flat on her back, arms and eyes wide. Winter’s hands were shaking as he framed the full-length shot but steadied with the first click. She was almost expressionless beyond the confusion she had registered at the phone call.

His mind was full of thoughts of Addison but he shook them out of his head. No time for that. McConachie was stone-cold dead, the circle in the middle of her head already turning fire-engine red before his eyes and her lost life juices spreading under her. Black trousers, flat shoes, a green blouse under a black waterproof jacket. Waterproof but not bloodproof: it was already soaking. Her phone was a couple of feet behind her right hand.

Winter didn’t know her beyond a few shared words. A hard ticket, a woman in a man’s world, just as good as any of the guys, swore like a fucking trooper but a good mum to her kid. Hair dyed blonde, a conceit offset by the careless cut. Dress-down clothes, nothing overtly sexual. Male cops probably thought her a hard bitch. Female cops probably thought her a cold bitch. Winter circled McConachie, using the spherical camera for the R2S as he swept round behind to photograph her in situ with the whole warehouse in sight. Not just it but the cops as well. Rachel, Shirley, Corrieri, the uniforms. They knew he had them in the shot but said nothing. They were frozen like they were when Addison was shot, frozen with fear and helplessness. Shirley was stern and glaring, Rachel was looking right into his lens, worried and on the edge, Boyle and Murray were both looking round like sentries, scared and strong.

Where was the beauty in this? He shifted a foot to the right and focused again but saw the other movement through his viewfinder. All bar Rachel had turned their backs away from him and from McConachie and were walking quickly towards the now-open warehouse door where Forrest still hung. Baxter stood beside it, a look of utter confusion on his face as the cops filed past him and inside. Seconds later, Sandy Murray appeared again, waving at Winter. The look on his face didn’t encourage Winter at all. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

Without a final look at McConachie, he followed the wave of Murray’s arm. His bag over his shoulder and his Nikon now in his hand, he hustled through the door. No more than a few steps inside, he ran straight into the broad back of Shirley, bouncing off him and almost falling to his knees. He looked where Shirley was looking and saw four men tied to four chairs arranged in a sort of semi-circle facing the door. All dead.

The first was a bloody mess, his face battered beyond recognition. Lips burst, nose flattened and cheekbones smashed, his shirt soaked so deep in blood that you couldn’t have guessed what colour it had been originally. The whites of his lifeless eyes were like beacons among the blood, staring emptily into nowhere. Behind the gore he might have been nineteen, he might have been thirty. His jeans were damp with God knows what and his shoes seeped. Most of what had been inside him was now leaking out.

To his right sat a wiry ginger-headed guy in his mid-thirties, tied with wire at his hands and feet, unmarked compared to his neighbour but alabaster-white on account of the deep slashes at his wrist through which every drop of blood had poured. His lips were the palest blue, as if he’d been left out in the snow too long, his eyes rolled back in his head. The swimming pool at his feet was purest crimson, a gorgeously horrendous bath of unadulterated
jus de vie
. His blood streamed to the feet of the third victim. Not that the next guy needed it, he had plenty of his own. He had been gutted, a deep vertical incision into his chest from which gushed a mess of lust. His head was back staring at the ceiling or beyond, his last act maybe, screaming or straining against what was being done to him. The tips of his fingers were bleeding too from where he’d been gripping onto the chair for dear life. He was in his early twenties, a skinny ned with flinty features and a shock of dirty, blond hair. Winter looked at the cut in his chest and wanted to get Baxter to check something that he couldn’t ask. Was it the same knife that had been used to kill Sammy Ross? He couldn’t ask because he should already have told them of the link between Ross and Strathie before now. Before McConachie and Addison were shot and before Forrest and these four were murdered. Before it was all too late . . .

The fourth man had a hood over his head, his neck slumped at an unnatural angle. There was something wrong about his legs too, dangling askew from the knees down, bones seemingly jutting out where they shouldn’t. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt, both dirty as if he’d been rolled on the ground, maybe taking a kicking as well as what was most probably a baseball bat beating.

‘Photograph him, Winter,’ ordered Alex Shirley. ‘And get a fucking move on. I want that hood off him.’

Winter found his feet the moment the superintendent spoke, glad to be able to move and not simply standing and staring. He circled the broken man, snapping as he went, aware of the open-mouthed, fearful cops in the rear of his shot. ‘Right, enough,’ barked Shirley. ‘Out of the way.’

Winter was done, anyway. He wanted to see the guy’s face as much as anyone else. Shirley strode forward, pulling the hood off the guy’s head and dropping it into an evidence bag that Baxter held out for him.

The right side of number four’s face was caved in, his eye out its socket, the skull and jaw both smashed. It brought images of Addison’s head screaming into Winter’s consciousness and he had to banish them fast. Had to concentrate or he’d be in deep shit. He knew he was close to losing it completely.

He stared at the guy’s left eye, saw that it in turn was staring away from the damage to the skull, either looking out for trouble from the other side or just desperate not to see what had happened. For a second he wished he was wherever number four was looking, somewhere safe, somewhere out of sight and out of mind. He snapped back into reality.

The guy only had half a face left but it was enough for him to be identified.

‘Harvey Houston?’ asked Shirley, looking for confirmation.

‘Yes, sir.’ Sandy Murray was the first to answer. ‘I’ve run into him a few times over the years.’

Shirley made a small nod of his head, looking angrier than Winter had ever seen him.

‘And the rest of them? Get them all fucking photographed, Winter. Names, people. Now.’

Winter focused on Houston’s shattered skull and photo graphed as he heard names being confirmed by Murray, Boyle, Williamson and Monteith, the last two having joined the party along with another two forensics that he recognized: Paddy Swanson and Lucy Stark. They would have their hands full.

The bloody mess was Jake Arnold, known as Beavis, bleed-to-death guy was Ginger George Faichney, and the gutted-stomach victim was Benjo Honeyman. All as expected and nothing that anyone could have seen coming. Four missing men and one missing cop, all snug as bugs in the same rug. Winter’s stomach was rumbling in a way that meant he was either very hungry or about to puke.

He moved from one man to the next as if he were in a dream, sidestepping the forensics as everyone tried to do their job at the same time. No sooner had he finished photographing every angle of Arnold’s battered-in nose or Faichney’s sliced veins than Swanson was daubing them with Luminol and waiting to see what developed. Winter snapped at Honeyman’s stabbed chest, zooming in on the signature rip of the knife, standing back to be replaced immediately by Baxter dusting the chair for prints that they both knew wouldn’t be there. None of it was futile but none of it was going to help.

Winter heard the shout from somewhere over his left shoulder.

‘Sir!’

It was Murray, his face ashen. Everyone followed his arm to the far corner of the warehouse and saw the homemade poster on the wall. Letters and cuttings from newspapers. From a distance all that could be made out was a headline,
THE DARK ANGEL.

As they all moved closer en masse they could make out the two words that were pasted below.

Dirty

Cops

They were drinking in those words, swallowing hard on their implications, when another voice burst through the door. Narey. She stopped in her tracks for an age when she saw the four bodies, her jaw dropping before she recovered her composure and went up to Shirley.