Snapshot (7 page)

The gangster’s eyes were wide open, forever shocked and horrified, his flop of fair hair soaking in an ocean of pillar-box red, his arms spread wide in an unheard plea for mercy. You’d think that someone who does what Cairns Caldwell did for a living might think there was a bullet out there with his name on it. Comes with the territory. The look on his face, though, gave the lie to that. Sheer surprise. Caldwell was so far up the ladder that he thought he was untouchable. But he’d been touched big time.

Winter bumped the focus on his iPhone up to the max and saw right away that he’d get nothing, scaling it back down a bit and hoping that technology in the lab or his own PC would sharpen it up. He saw a nice suit, easily £800 a throw, blood spray over a crisp blue open-necked shirt, a mouth wide open in a silent scream. Other legs and feet were walking by, alternatively blocking his view and framing Caldwell in a uniformed letterbox.

A big space opened up and he zeroed in as best he could on the hole in the drug lord’s head. A beautiful round hole, oozing dark life. Fuck, this was just what he wanted. Not even a single regret at thinking that. Not for a second. He knew what Caldwell was and he certainly wasn’t going to apologize for feeling like that. Bingo. House. Result. A quote from an interview that Metinides did suddenly fired into his mind.
‘I got to witness the hate and evil in men.
’

Winter fired off the iPhone as best he could, cursing the slow shutter and the age before it was fit to go again. Eyes, mouth, scream, blood, hands. Cops, forensics, scene setting. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Nothing existed except the inch by two-inch world that he could see through the phone. He caught cops and forensics, a patchwork of expressions set grim on their faces. Anger, fear, worry, intent, humour, maybe even satisfaction.

Instinctively, he swivelled on his bum and turned away from the cordon. Few of the rubberneckers were interested in him. They were all staring over his head, desperate to get another glimpse of the man with a bullet in his head.

Some were stunned, a few were laughing. Most were desperate to have something to tell when they got home or to the pub. They craned their necks and pointed, they gawked and drank in every drop of bloodlust that dripped from their lips.

He snapped a red-faced man, his eyes bulging at what was being played out before him, jostling shoulders with his neighbour in an effort to get that inch or two closer to the action. He caught him open-mouthed and impatient, desperate to see and to know. Agog, that was the word.

A couple of feet from him was a woman in tears, crying for a man she almost certainly didn’t know, maybe hadn’t even heard of. Her sensible jacket and cardigan said she lived in a different world from the man with the hole in his head. Would she have wept for Caldwell if she knew what he did for a living, knew how many lives he had ruined with the shit that he peddled? All Winter knew was that the tears that streamed down her face causing strands of fair hair to stick to her cheek were wasted on Caldwell. But for him they made a picture.

The woman must have become aware of Winter on the edge of her vision because her eyes fell onto him, causing him to turn uncomfortably back to the scene. All he could now see was the bulky, shaking body of Two Soups gesturing angrily towards him. The man was purple with rage and looked like he was about to have a fit. He was roaring at Winter but the photographer realized he could hear nothing. Not Baxter, not the sirens or the crowds, just the rush of blood that filled his ears and the pounding of his own heart. It was photographic gold. Dark gold that Metinides would have approved of.

Winter’s self-imposed deafness was the reason that he didn’t hear the scuff of oversized copper’s boots on the road or them asking him to get the fuck out of there. He knew nothing till his collar was grabbed and he was hauled off his feet.

Harkins and Murray were looking down at him, at once angrily and apologetically. He’d probably dropped them in it but they still didn’t feel comfortable throwing him about. Over their shoulders he saw Rachel Narey standing open-mouthed, looking at him in nothing short of disbelief. It broke a spell and the sound of the crime scene suddenly burst in on him, all discordant, angry and chaotic. He was breathing hard, elated yet embarrassed, like a teenager caught having a wank. This was not going to be good.

Evening, Tuesday 13 September

‘As far as I can see the only thing they can say you’re guilty of is over-enthusiasm. Two Soups is just getting his oversized knickers into a twist as usual. It’ll blow over in a couple of days. Although every cop on the shift will take the piss out of you for weeks. Sitting on your arse taking pictures of the crowd? I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Is that your considered professional opinion, Detective Sergeant Narey?’

‘I am never anything other than professional, Mr Winter.’

‘So how come you’re naked then?’

‘Are you complaining?’

‘I’ve never complained before, Sarge. Not going to start now.’

Rachel pushed Winter onto his back, leaning over him and grinning wickedly.

‘Good.’

He grabbed at her and rolled so that he was on top, pinning her arms. Just because she was a sergeant didn’t mean she was always in charge and he had to remind her of that. It was a mistake though. In her defensive position she lashed out.

‘You should have heard Baxter’s rant. He wanted us to do you for anything from breach of the peace to public indecency. The old bugger was virtually foaming at the mouth.’

She laughed.

‘He’s never liked you. Too pally with Addison for one thing and just too cocky for another.’

‘Thanks.’

She sniggered again.

‘Hey, I like you being cocky. It just doesn’t go down so well with everyone else. But Two Soups is an arse. He doesn’t like anybody. I’m not even sure he’s that good at his job. The man’s a dinosaur. You sometimes think he wished Watson and Crick hadn’t bothered discovering DNA.’

‘He’s a dick. Mind you, I can sort of see why he might not have been too pleased at me taking pics on my phone.’

‘Hm, just a bit. Everyone was stressed out of their boxes though. Cairns Caldwell. Jesus, it’s going to kick off big time. The papers and the telly are already going mental. That won’t be the end of it though. No chance.’

Cairns Caldwell ran most of the cocaine that came through Glasgow and had his fingers all over every gram that was sold south of the river. A former pupil of Kelvinside Academy and Glasgow Uni, he was born west-end middle class and worked his way up to south-side scumbag. His parents died in a car crash when Caldwell was seventeen, left him a bundle and a townhouse on Clarence Drive, and six years later he was shipping enough coke into Glasgow to turn the dear green place white. He worked his way up by the standard route – although he short-circuited it big time by having a lot of dosh to kick off with – undercutting the competition, freebies to draw in the mugs, arming himself with the best muscle that money could buy and stamping over all opposition. They also said he smoothed his path the middle-class way, greasing palms and making promises, shaking hands and giving nods in the right direction. The Kelvinside accent opened doors; his bully boys kicked them in. Either way, Caldwell was where he wanted to be.

Apart from coke, he ran hookers and security firms, private taxi hires and nightclubs. It was grey money – the dirty dosh funded the clean cash and it funded more dirty stuff. The snow laundered money till it was as clean as the driven slush fund.

Caldwell was untouchable of course; hard cash made sure of that. He supposedly earned deference from the lowlifes that worked for him by putting an axe through the head of a hard nut named Barney Reid who at one time fancied his chances of muscling him out of the way. That kind of thing tends to buy you respect.

It was reckoned he cleared four million a year. Spent his life putting two fingers up to the cops and coke up the noses of everyone he could.

Untouchable until someone put a bullet through his head. Twenty-nine years old and the brains educated at Glasgow’s finest were spilled over a pavement. Not so clever now.

‘What do you reckon is going to happen?’ Winter asked her.

‘Shit, I don’t know. You know the old Sean Connery film line about “they put one of yours in the hospital so you put one of theirs in the morgue”? Well, they’ve started off with the morgue so I hate to think where this is going to end up. One thing’s for sure, there’s no way his people are going to sit back and take it. Unless they did it but that seems unlikely.’

‘Why not? A man like that has as many dodgy friends as enemies, surely?’

‘For a start they never want to bite the hand that feeds them. And if they did then they would have a million opportunities to knife him, strangle him, push him off a high building. Shooting him from a mile away seems to be going to a lot of unnecessary trouble. Couldn’t rule it out but I’d say it wasn’t one of his.’

‘So who?’

‘Who knows? Could be anybody.’

‘And who cares?’

‘Never said that. I don’t care that he’s dead apart from the fact that all hell is going to break loose and we are going to have to deal with the shit. I
do
care about who killed him. So don’t start.’

Her eyes flared at him and Winter liked it.

‘Oh, calm down. You know I’m winding you up. You shouldn’t be so easy.’

‘Oh, easy is it? I won’t be so easy then, see how you like that.’

She ducked away from him with a giggle but he wrestled with her, pulling her back towards him. She fought for a bit and just as he was thinking how perfect her breasts were, her mouth fell onto his and her body disappeared from his view. All talk of murdered gangsters went out of sight. For half an hour at least. It was hard to worry about things like that when her dark hair tumbled over his face and her smooth curves locked onto his body. When her hands teased and taunted and worked their magic. When he rose to meet her and she smiled with satisfaction.

It was only when she fell off him again, laughing and panting, her hair sticking to the side of her glistening face in a way that reminded him of the woman who stared at Caldwell’s dead body, that it started again. He knew it would because she couldn’t leave it at that. She could never leave it.

‘So just what were you doing at Central Station?’

‘Christ, Rachel. You know what I was doing.’

‘Okay. I know what you were doing. Let me rephrase. Why the fuck were you doing it?’

‘Is this where you get the rubber hoses out?’

‘Only if it turns you on. Come on, why?’

‘Again, you know why. We’ve been through it before.’

‘Fucksake, Tony. What the hell are you worried about? It’s me. I know most of it. Spill the rest.’

He sighed. He really didn’t want to get into this. He didn’t want to get into it because he didn’t really understand it himself, so how could he expect her to.

‘It’s my thing. I like photographing accidents and the people. You know that.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t know you had it as bad as that.’

The bitch was as persistent as she was sexy, he thought.

‘How did you get into this anyway?’

Rachel had an annoying habit of asking questions she already knew the answer to. It was the price he paid for sleeping with a detective, even if one look at her was enough to know it was a price worth paying.

She knew all about Enrique Metinides and the exhibition that Tony had attended in London back in 2003 at the Photographers’ Gallery, just two minutes from Oxford Circus. He’d gone with a blonde named Jodi, a London girl. He didn’t really have much interest in going to a gallery or an exhibition but she was keen and he was keen on her. As soon as he was in the gallery, though, Metinides’s photographs blew him away. They were like nothing he’d seen before and tapped right into something deep inside him.

The images messed with his head, being truly brutal and yet truly beautiful at the same time. Car crashes. Floods. Suicides. Train crashes. Plane crashes. Fires. Murders. Accidents. Anything bad that resulted in death or destruction in Mexico City for over fifty years, Metinides was there and had photographed it for their red-top tabloids. Metinides started out taking photographs when he was just eleven. Chasing ambulances, running to fires and hanging out in front of the local cop shop waiting for criminals to be dragged in or out. The reporters and the other photo graphers called him
El Niño
, the kid, and the nickname stuck.

His photographs were intimate and unsettling, poetic and haunting. The critics said that he found humanity in catastrophe.

It was the faces that got to Winter, not the flames or the tangled wreckage. Nor was it just the faces of the dead but also those that had turned up to gawp at them. Metinides was the rubberneckers’ rubbernecker.

It was Mexico City and much of it was decades ago but to Winter it could have as easily been Maryhill or Mount Vernon right here, right now. The photographs reached the dark places inside him and Narey knew that too, although neither of them had ever said it. She knew how Metinides had inspired him, she just didn’t quite know why. That was why she teased and tormented him to try and get to the bottom of it.

‘Don’t be shy about it,’ she mocked now. ‘It’s cool that you are so into something. The passion is a turn-on. Tell me more.’

Part of him wanted to tell her to fuck off. Not in a bad way, just in a leave-it-alone kind of way. He reached an arm around, pulling her close and feeling her body yield to his touch.

‘A turn-on, is it? Come here then.’

‘I want to hear more first,’ she continued. ‘You’ve never really told me why you are so into it.’

Yeah well, there’s a reason for that, he thought. Guilty secrets. They’d played this game too often though, and he wasn’t ready to offer up any more of himself just yet.

‘There’s something you haven’t told me about either,’ he tried, to change the subject.

‘Oh yes?’ She looked doubtful. ‘What’s that then?’

‘The hooker that was found murdered in Wellington Lane. What’s happening with her?’