‘Tell me to keep my nose out, Addy, but is it one guy that’s done them both or was Quinn in retaliation for Caldwell?”
‘Keep this to yourself but the early word from the lab is that it was the same gun that took out the pair of them. So it doesn’t look like some tit for tat hit. More like one tit with big ideas.’
‘Fuck. Oh well, I guess if he’s killing gangsters then it can’t be all bad.’
‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ Addison snapped. ‘No matter how many you kill, there’s always an even uglier one waiting to take over.’
That wasn’t like Addison. Time to change the subject, Winter thought.
‘Awrite. Keep your hair on. So what’s the deal with the killing in Wellington Lane?’
‘Oh God knows. We’re getting nowhere. The timing couldn’t be worse either. I’m in danger of getting lumbered with this when I should be investigating Caldwell and Quinn. I’ve got to go. See you later.’
So much for Winter’s change of subject. The line went dead and he was left wondering what nerve he’d touched. Addison had been treading in the brown stuff at the bottom of the sewer for a long time but hadn’t made a habit of blowing his stack, not at him at any rate. Maybe this was just the shit that broke the camel’s back. Something chimed in the back of his head that Rachel had said, about Addison not being a happy bunny at the scene of the Quinn killing and that she had a theory about why. He dismissed it. Addison had plenty on his plate and was five or six hours away from a pint, easily enough to make him grumpy. Winter expected normal service would be resumed soon enough.
The pair of them went way back, almost to Winter’s first week on the force. It was just after he’d photographed Avril Duncanson after she’d gone through the windscreen of her Clio. The very tall, moaning DI with vicious one-liners that made other cops duck didn’t seem like someone Winter was going to get on with, not till Addison heard him say he’d been at Parkhead the night before to see Celtic beat Kilmarnock. That was all it took, a simple bond between two guys that supported the same football team.
They were Tims and they had to stick together. Tims as in Celtic fans, not as in Catholics; they understood the difference. Winter hadn’t been to Mass since he was fifteen, much to the disappointment of his family, while Addison was a Proddy who’d seen the light. Like Winter, he didn’t give a damn for religion but was mad for Celtic.
Addison liked to tell people that he used to be a Protestant atheist but that he was now a Catholic atheist. He was thirty-six but if anyone asked, he’d tell them that he was twenty-seven. It wasn’t that he was vain about his age, it was just that he didn’t count the years when Rangers won nine league titles in a row. As far as he was concerned, those years didn’t happen.
They had Celtic in common and then there was beer. They both liked that quite a bit and demonstrated it whenever they got the chance. Winter knew it helped that he wasn’t another cop – Addison didn’t want to talk shop when there was drink to be drunk but equally the nature of the photographer’s job meant he knew enough about what was going on if the DI did want to bitch about it. They also both liked women, just as much as they liked Guinness or Caledonian 80. Winter liked to think he was more discerning but Addison would have shagged the hole in a dolphin’s head. If he was in the mood, which was most days that ended in a Y, his motto was ‘go ugly, early’. He was a terrible man.
He knew something had been different with Winter the last year or so but had never come out and said it. There was no way he could have known about him and Narey, she’d made sure of that, but Addison had seen his mate was much less likely to disappear into the night with some piece of skirt. He’d done so a couple of times but it was never more than a diversion, dropping whoever it was off at theirs and continuing home in the taxi on his own. Addison knew he was no longer in the game but didn’t say anything. Winter was the wingman that no longer flew.
Winter knew that Addison got flak from the plain-clothes boys for being so pally with a photographer but he got that info from Rachel rather than Addison. She also told him that anyone who tried to slag off Winter got a verbal pasting from the DI. He was a good man to have your back. As far as Addison was concerned, if anyone was going to be giving Winter pelters then it was him. His current favourite was Winter’s insistence that Didier Agathe had been Celtic’s best right-back since Danny McGrain. Addison reckoned he should be shot for even mentioning Agathe and McGrain in the same sentence and that Didier was a diddy, a speed merchant who couldn’t cross the road. Winter would usually just tell him to shut the fuck up and that someone who’d written Henrik Larsson off after one game had no right to an opinion. That was the way it was between them.
Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn’t. Winter remembered the time they’d met in Jinty McGinty’s the night after Addison had to attend to a seventeen-year-old girl who’d died of an overdose. When Winter arrived in Jinty’s there were already two pints of Guinness poured and Tony had said, ‘Cheers’.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Addison complained. ‘Are we here to talk or to drink?’
Winter’s phone rang, waking him again from his memories. Talk of the devil. An hour after he first phoned, Addison was back on the line, sounding more like himself, the snap gone from his voice.
‘If you’ve been stuck in your broom cupboard then you won’t have seen the early edition of the Evening Times,’ he chirped. ‘Don’t know if they were guessing or some dick has tipped them off but they are running with the one-killer angle. It wasn’t you, was it?’
‘That killed them?’ Winter joked.
‘That phoned the Times.’
The photographer took the bait.
‘Fuck off, ya prick. I’d be less insulted if you had asked if I’d bumped them off. You know full well I would never go to the press with anything you tell me.’
‘Course I do. Calm down, wee man. Jeezus, you are too easy to wind up. Takes all the fun out of it. Anyway, the Times is going with one killer. They’re calling him an executioner. Bunch of dicks.’
‘They are that right enough. You’d fit in just fine.’
‘Ha. Cool your jets, wee fella. Still up for that pint? I should be finished here by six and I’ll get you at Pitt Street.’
Winter was just over six foot tall and Addison was one of the few people that had the opportunity to call him ‘wee man’ and the only one that had the cheek to do it. Hang on, he thought, why would Addison want to meet at Pitt Street if they were going drinking?
‘Why meet back here? Why not in the pub?’ he asked.
‘I’m going to have to sit through some CCTV before I can hit the boozer. It’s already been watched once and there was nothing but I’d like a look for myself. I thought you could keep me company.’
‘Oh, wait a minute…’
‘Look, just sit on your arse for half an hour then we can hit the pub. My shout. Deal?’
‘You want me to sweep the fucking floor while I’m waiting?’
‘I’m sure the cleaners would appreciate that. Thanks.’
‘Fuck off. Okay, I’ll wait. But we go to the Griffin, okay?’
‘You know I hate the Griffin.’
‘Exactly. Deal or no deal?’
‘See you at six.’
CHAPTER 10
Winter was sitting with his feet up on the desk in front of the bank of CCTV screens, knowing full well it would irritate Addison. Small pleasures, he thought. It also earned him a disapproving glance from the CCTV operator, a WPC named Rebecca Maxwell.
Addison nodded at her and she began running the tapes from cameras around the red-light area in the time before and after the prostitute – who, thanks to Rachel, they now knew was called Melanie – was murdered. It didn’t make for pretty viewing. Men skulking round West Campbell Street and Waterloo Street and points in between, collars up and heads down. Hookers standing under streetlights, taking their chances with passing trade. All just two minutes’ walk from where they sat in Pitt Street.
It was a long, slow trawl. Sulphur-lit shadows loitering with intent didn’t make for riveting viewing. Maybe it
