city’s habit. The cops didn’t give a toss that Caldwell and Quinn had been shot but they’d be fucked if some trigger-happy psycho would get praise for doing it and at the same time caused them to get a slagging.
They could even live with all the knock-on effects of gangsters taking each other out as retribution although it would be a pain in the arse to clean up the mess. But now this Dark Angel had burned the cocaine and made a statement of intent. He was the one doing the cleaning up and the police didn’t like that one little bit.
All the papers carried the hooker killing too but it was pushed way back. Some only had half a dozen paragraphs and it was obviously just getting in the way of the real story.
Winter must have rustled the paper too much because Rachel woke with a start and saw him sitting on the floor, his eyes fixed on the Daily Star and its shrieking banner headline. She glared at him.
‘What are you reading that pish for?’
He’d had just about enough of this. He knew she was stressed but to keep taking it out on him was out of order.
‘But it’s okay for you to read them?’ he replied testily.
‘It’s work for me. You seem to be enjoying it too much.’
‘But it’s not work for you,’ he blurted out. ‘You’re not on the case.’
As soon as he said it, he regretted it but it was too late.
‘Maybe you should just go home,’ she spat.
‘Yeah, whatever.’
He really could do without this and heading to his own place suited him just fine. Going home meant the opportunity of a couple of guilt-free drinks and the chance to have a guilt-free look over his photographs. Staying meant getting a hard time from a stressed-out maniac. No contest. However he wasn’t about to go without leaving a cowpat of guilt behind.
‘No problem, I’ll get out of your way. I know how hard it is with everything that’s going on at work and it’s only fair you get some rest.’
‘Fuck off, Tony.’
‘No, no, I completely understand. You’ve had a tough day being removed from a high-profile case so it’s perfectly reasonable that you get me round here, get shagged, fall asleep and chuck me out onto the street. Nice.’
‘Don’t even bother trying to make me feel bad.’
But he had, though, and they both knew it. He didn’t slam the door behind him, realizing full well that she wanted him to. Instead he closed it with as much indifference as he could muster and phoned a taxi from his mobile. It was about two and a half miles to his own place in Charing Cross and he couldn’t be bothered with the walk at that time of night.
His own place, that was a bit of a joke, he thought. It was his official home but it was empty more than half the time. He was usually only there to get a change of clothes or when she had friends or family visiting. Or when he wanted to do some work with his photo collection. Or when she was a total pain in the arse. The rest of the time he was chez Narey even though no one was supposed to know.
He was her guilty little secret and that annoyed him. Not just because he couldn’t agree with her insistence that it was better for everyone – by which she meant her – that they kept their relationship quiet, but also because as secrets went it was poor. He knew he had her beat easy on the guilt front. Try having killed both your parents and see how that compares.
CHAPTER 21
The taxi dropped Winter off at his front door and he was inside a minute later, sighing at the mess the flat was in. Tidiness wasn’t a natural instinct for him and the only time the place tended to be presentable was when he knew someone was likely to visit.
He put on the light in the living room but went straight on through to the second bedroom that doubled as his office. He tumbled back onto the bed, hands behind his head, and surveyed the far wall, taking it in impassively as he always did. He’d never been quite sure what anyone else would make of it but then that didn’t matter; only Rachel and Addison had seen it and they were both, usually, on his side.
It wasn’t that the sight of it didn’t move him, it always did. It was just that he chose, forced himself, to try to look at it with as little emotion as possible. He believed there was a solution in there somewhere, an answer to be found even if he wasn’t entirely sure what the question was.
Wall-to-wall death and misery. Twenty carefully positioned and evenly spaced photographs in five rows of four. It was the best of his collection, eighteen of his own and two by Metinides, each photo mounted on white card and framed in black ash, most in black and white but a few in colour. Usually the colour was varying shades of red.
Exhibit number one was his first, Avril Duncanson, wearing her shroud of glass near Muirhead. What made the photograph for him was the stunned look on the face of the middle-aged witness who couldn’t take his eyes off the body. He’d obviously never seen anything like it and was praying to his God that he never would again. It was that and her face, all but unmarked, her eyes screwed shut hoping for the best but not getting anywhere close.
It was his own version of what was Metinides’s most famous shot, the photograph of the death of Adela Legaretta Rivas. The poor photocopy he’d had blown up of that hung next to his own poor imitation of it. Life imitating art imitating life.
Edgar Allan Poe once wrote that ‘there is nothing more beautiful than the death of a beautiful woman’ and Metinides had the proof of it.
Adela was an actress, walking across the Avenida Chapultepec when she was struck by a white Datsun that had crashed into another car. Metinides caught her right on the cusp in a twisted pose between a metal pole and a concrete slab, eyes open, almost expressionless but for a trace of mild surprise and slight disappointment, as if she had forgotten her umbrella and there was a chance of rain. Her shiny red nails were manicured, her blonde hair perfectly coiffured, her clothes elegant and her jewellery understated. She looks alive, maybe caught in the car’s headlights like a startled rabbit. All that gives it away is the unnatural angle of her right arm, the line of blood that runs from the bridge of her nose to her cheek, the trickle of crimson slipping from the corner of her lipsticked mouth and the faraway look in her eyes.
The photo shows a paramedic standing over her and about to gently, almost reverentially, place a blanket over her mangled body. Other people look on staring and you can’t help but gawp alongside them. It’s unsettling, intimate and terribly beautiful.
Winter felt there was beauty in his own work too and he looked at the photograph on the far right of the top row for evidence of it: an old man slumped at the foot of a tree near the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green. He’d taken it first thing on a bitterly cold morning in the depths of January, just an hour after the man they called the Bridgeton Elvis had been found frozen to death. The cops said they all knew the old bloke pretty well and it was obvious they were choked up at seeing him like that. One had said that he’d always greet them with a chorus of ‘Jailhouse Rock’, dressed in a great coat that usually had the bulge of a bottle in one pocket or another.
Elvis must have had a fair share of the bottle inside him because he’d bedded down for the night with nothing more than a balaclava, his coat and some cardboard and newspapers for warmth. Temperatures dropped suddenly during the night and the old man didn’t wake in the morning. Winter’s photograph showed ice on Elvis’s beard and his balaclava, the powder-blue of his cheeks and the frosting on his eyelashes that had brought the shutters down. Elvis had left the building for good but there was something noble about the way he sat there, sanguine about the indignities thrown at him by a spiteful world, quite literally frozen in the moment between life and death.
The beauty in some of Winter’s other photos was perhaps more difficult to see. An Asian boy named Salim Abbas had been kicked and punched to death by a gang of white kids in Pollockshields. They’d chased him through the streets, throwing whatever they could at him before finally falling on him like a pack of hyenas, weighing in with boot and fist. The little bastards probably thought they’d given him no more than a right good doing but Salim never got up again.
The photograph documented every bruise and cut, the bloodied mouth, broken teeth and smashed ribs, as
