letting the chugger get to him but he had been a persistent sod. Worse than that it had got him irritated enough that he knew the crowd he could see gathered down the street would mean his anger level going up another notch. It meant a street entertainer.
He hated them. The escape artists, fire-eaters and magicians were bad enough but even worse were the living statues. He’d always wondered what kind of way that was for a grown man or woman to make a living. Getting yourself tarted up with paint and standing still for a while was not a talent. He walked on, past Diesel, Tiso’s and the White Company, past a statue decked out in black and with make-up, perched on a bicycle with a basket in front of him. Winter had the sudden but not unfamiliar urge to kick him off to see if he managed to stay still when he hit the ground. However he guessed the rest of the people in the street, some of whom actually seemed to be impressed by this crap, might not have understood so he let it go. Another barely living statue had got off his perch and was having a fag while making a call on his mobile. That was more like it.
Winter knew he could be bad-tempered and intolerant but he spent most of his time on the dark edges of the city where most of these people never ventured and it meant he could get annoyed at them simply for living normal lives. His temperament wasn’t quite up to photographing a suicide or a fatal pile-up or the victim of a drug overdose then watching halfwits gawping in wonder at a man who could stand still for five minutes. He’d stare through a lens at a fifteen-year-old kid stabbed through the heart then see people staring in shop windows at shoes costing three hundred quid and dresses going for a grand a time. So far he’d always resisted the urge to smack their heads against the window.
He’d passed the huge Vodafone store, with Princes Square, Hugo Boss and Frasers up ahead. He managed a laugh at a Hare Krishna with a crazy smile and a ponytail, asking some bewildered granny if she was a rocker. He guessed the answer was no. He had to be more tolerant of these muppets, it really wasn’t doing him any good to…
The noise hit him as he came to the corner of Gordon Street. He realized that until then it must have been drowned out by the towering high walls of shops and flats but it smacked him as soon as he reached the gap. Sirens. Both cops and ambulances. Shouting. Something big was going down. Winter bolted in the direction of the noise, driven by the itch to see what was happening. Judging by the number of 999s on scene it was major and he didn’t want to miss it. Fuck! He didn’t have his gear with him. He had a decent camera on his mobile but that was it. Everything else was in the boot of his car in Cambridge Street.
There was nothing he could do about that though, nothing else but run. The corner of Buchanan stayed pedestrianized till it reached the point where the road hit West Nile Street and Winter charged along it, dodging between two cars and onto Gordon Street. Ahead was Central Station and he knew that was where the clamour and the blaring were coming from.
The crowds grew thicker as he got nearer and he had to barge his way through, hearing swearing at his back and taking a couple of swipes for his trouble. The throng was even thicker at the sandblasted corner of the Central where Gordon Street ran out and Union Street started. Winter could see that four cop cars had cut off access points and were only allowing emergency vehicles through. What the hell had happened? There was already police tape up creating a cordon but he got the impression no one had been there too long.
Winter shouted ‘Police’ as he shoved his way through the undergrowth of the human jungle, cutting a swathe through the swearing till he was just a couple of ranks back from a front-row seat. There were uniforms forcing the crowd back as best they could and beyond them a no-man’s-land before there was another ring of cops shielding detectives and white-togged forensics. Two of them, Paul Burke and Caro Sanchez were his best guess under the bunny suits, were firing off cameras. There were anxious faces everywhere. Winter was pushing his way past two guys in leather jackets and getting a hard kick on his ankle when the high-vis screen suddenly parted and he saw a body lying in a pool of crimson blood, the head angled violently to one side. Just as suddenly the view disappeared again and his frustration began to boil over.
‘Gaz!’ he roared at a cop he recognized and was rewarded with a glance. ‘What the fuck’s happened?’ Winter asked him.
Gaz McKean looked round to make sure none of his bosses were watching and stepped a few feet away from his position just long enough to talk to Winter without the entire crowd hearing.
‘It’s Cairns Caldwell. Shot through the head. Looks like it was a sniper. No one saw a thing. Could have come from anywhere. The impact turned him round so they’re struggling to work out an angle. Look, I’ve got to get back.’
‘Christ’s sake. Can you have a word with your sergeant and get me past the line?’
‘Are you serious? We’re a wee bit busy, Tony, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Cairns Caldwell. Major gangster. Responsible for bringing in most of the heroin that came into Glasgow. Ex- public schoolboy now worth multi-millions. Well he was until some fucker put a bullet through his napper. The shit had officially hit the fan.
Winter had to get in and photograph this. Damn, why was his gear back in the boot of his car?
Then suddenly he saw Two Soups. Baxter had stood up, shaking his head and firing off an order. Winter managed to catch his eye and gestured that he wanted to get across the cordon. Baxter laughed, swiftly followed by a curt shake of the head. Damn him, thought Winter, he’s loving this. He tried to shout but his voice was taken away by the noise of the sirens and the crowd. There was no way that Two Soups was for listening anyway.
Winter pushed his way along the crowd till he was between two cops he knew, Rob Harkins and Sandy Murray. He put on his most confident face and strode between them.
‘Cheers, guys. Fucking crowds are mental. You’d think they’d never seen anyone shot in the head before.’
Murray didn’t even blink while Harkins only counted to five before he nodded Winter past him. Winter knew he was never getting past the inner ring, it was protecting the good stuff not just holding back the natives, but this was a start. He found the best gap he could in the cordon and slid onto his arse, then pulled his mobile out of his pocket to see what six megapixels could do from ten yards away.
Winter was aware that some of the cops were looking down at him in bemusement but was hopeful that enough of them would know him by sight that they wouldn’t ask why he was armed with a mobile phone rather than couple of grand’s worth of kit. He didn’t care anyway. He only had eyes for Caldwell.
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
