CHAPTER 20
Highburgh Road was always a wee bit too west-end trendy for Winter’s liking. Sure, the rooms had all the Victorian wood panels, stained-glass windows, cornicing and character that you’d want if you were into that kind of thing. But he never really saw the point in boasting that your flat had a butler’s pantry when you couldn’t get parked within a mile of the place. There were a ton of pubs and restaurants on its doorstep but it wasn’t a whole lot of use for him seeing as they weren’t allowed to go to them together. It was like being a liver-damaged eunuch serving champagne in a bordello.
Rachel liked it, though. She’d always wanted a pad in the west end and the truth was it was much more her style than his. When she spent all day, or sometimes all night, chasing the bad guys she wanted to get home and lock herself away behind three inches of security door, pour herself a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and chill under twelve-foot high ceilings while eating Kettle Chips. He was happy to lay his hat there, so to speak, four or five times a week.
He rang the intercom and waited. He virtually lived there but he didn’t have a key. It was her flat. Her flat, her remote control, her bed, her rules. If he had a key then the next thing he’d be expecting a say in what they watched on the television and that just wouldn’t do. It took her a while to pick up the phone upstairs and, as usual, she didn’t say anything, just left him listening to the crackly line.
‘It’s me,’ he said wearily.
The buzz meant she’d pressed the entry release so he leaned against the door, went up to the second floor and through the open door into the flat where he found Rachel sitting back on the bed with a selection of newspapers spread out before her. She didn’t look up when he went into the room, just tossed a paper to the side of the bed and picked another one up. She was wearing a pair of pyjama bottoms, a vest top, a seriously pissed-off expression and was almost shaking with anger.
‘Wankers.’
‘Today’s papers or tomorrow’s?’ Winter asked.
‘Tomorrow’s chip papers,’ she scowled. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking but I went out to Queen Street station to get the morning editions.’
‘What? You’ve always said-’
‘Aye, okay. I know that, alright? Just gimme peace. I’m annoyed enough as it is. They are making this sniper out to be some kind of fucking superman. I can’t believe it. And in the middle of all this ridiculous glorifying of a killer, “Melanie” or whatever her name really is, gets ignored. I’m sick of this.’
‘I was wondering…’ he started.
She looked at him doubtfully, sensing something she wouldn’t like.
‘Go on.’
‘If you had the choice, would you rather catch the guy who’s been shooting gangsters or the one who killed your prostitute?’
‘Jesus. What kind of question is that?’
‘One I’m interested in the answer to.’
She pondered, wondering whether to give him an honest reply, even if she wasn’t sure of it herself. Against her better judgement, she did.
‘For the sake of my career, I’d rather catch the sniper. If that didn’t come into it, then for the sake of the greater good I’d rather catch Melanie’s killer.’
‘Is that not some sort of moral fuck-up? To want to catch the killer of one person rather than the killer of five?’
Narey threw a copy of the Sun across the room, kicked the other papers off the bed and glared at him.
‘So are you here to screw me or what?’ she demanded. ‘Because if you’re not then I’m not really in the mood for talking. And if you are then hurry up, I’m on early in the morning.’
‘Who said romance was dead?’
‘Is that a no?’
‘Fucksake. You are a pain in the arse. It’s a yes but think yourself lucky.’
‘Oh aye, I’m so flattered.’
With that she pulled her vest top over her head and tilted her head to one side questioningly. It was discussion over. It was hard for a man to argue with perfect tits and she knew it.
He pulled his clothes off with an attempt at a grudging look on his face but another part of his anatomy gave the lie to it. Maybe he was cursed by the fact that she never looked better than when she was angry and those nut-brown eyes blazed. He grabbed the waistband of her pyjama bottoms and hauled them off her, throwing them to the side of the room. In turn, she grabbed at him and massaged him to the desired state, pulling him down and onto her. It was fast, furious and completely lacking in any social niceties. They wrestled, grabbed, slapped, swore, stabbed and thrusted. Speed, for once, seemed to be rated way higher than subtlety or technique. He pinned one of her arms with one hand and kept a tight hold of her hair with the other. It was enough for her to be pushed and pulled over the edge, coming a good bit before he did, barely bothering about waiting for him to join her.
She was asleep two minutes later, out like a light. Winter liked the idea that he had worn her out but he knew it was someone else that had done it. He had maybe sorted out her body but her mind had been fucked by the sniper and the prostitute killer. He also knew a lot of it was down to the Cutter murders and how badly she had come out of that. It was all happening again and she felt like she was chasing a runaway train.
He knew full well what was winding her up and, although it wasn’t his doing for a change, he was always going to be the one in the firing line. Which was ironic.
He got out of bed and sat on the floor with his back to the wall, leafing through the newspapers that she’d kicked away. A quick look was enough to confirm the source of her anger.
The Sun had started it the day before when they began sneaking words into their reports of the killings. Vigilante. Clean up. Crackdown. They liked the last one a lot and the pun helped. Then the phrase that was the real killer – anti-hero.
The Evening Times had carried on the good work that afternoon. From the minute that he blew up the cocaine and gave Glasgow city centre a high it would never forget, he went from being a murderer to a maverick.
Now the morning’s Daily Mail had done it in a heading. Crackdown continues. It implied something good, something that should have happened a long time ago. The Daily Record ’s editorial followed suit. It was a carefully crafted piece but it could neatly be summed up as saying, ‘We could never condone murder but…’ It was open season on drug dealers and that was fine by them.
The prize went to the Daily Express though. It was them who came up with the name that was to stick, Dark Angel. He supposed that it suggested someone good doing something bad.
Winter had heard a couple of radio phone-ins before he went to the Celtic game and they were the same. Callers didn’t hold back and at first the stations cut them off when they came out with lines like, ‘Serves them right’, ‘Not before time’, and ‘Good riddance’. The presenters pretended to be outraged and were all apologetic about how they couldn’t support such opinions. At first. That didn’t last long though and when the calls became more regular and more insistent then they couldn’t and wouldn’t stem the tide. The Dark Angel was doing what the cops couldn’t, doing what they were paid to do but were too scared or too incompetent to do. Presenters shooed them along when callers suggested the cops hadn’t done anything because they were in the dealer’s back pockets but they didn’t stop them from saying it.
Sky held a discussion panel on Hard News debating the moral values of a bad man doing bad things to bad people but Winter could see that it was the Daily Star that had now jumped off the high board. NEW AGE HERO, they screamed. No anti, just plain old-fashioned hero.
No wonder Rachel was mad. Every new notch on this Dark Angel’s credibility scale was a rat’s bite at the collective police scrotum and they didn’t like it one bit. The impression Winter got from her was that some of them agreed with the media line that dead drug lords was a good thing but they didn’t want it said publicly. They’d felt hamstrung for years at not being able to get at the bastards they knew full well were responsible for feeding the
