well as the small pool of falu that had formed below his jet-black hair where his skull had crashed against the pavement. The boy had been curled into the foetal position for protection but by the time Winter had arrived he’d been laid out flat on the ground to let a paramedic fight in vain to revive him. All that was left for him to do was record the injuries and shake his head in wonder.
It was the same with the battered wife whose photograph was on the bottom row, her face lacerated with the cuts delivered by her drunken husband and a broken glass. Neighbours had heard her screams and called the police or else the attack in her plush home in Newton Mearns would have gone unreported. Middle-class Marie whose face was a road map of sliced skin and whose eyes shouted shame and resentment.
She lived a long way from the ned in the neighbouring photo who had a screwdriver embedded in his skull. For him, it was all part of the job. Winter had photographed the little scrote in A amp;E at the old Southern General and the picture was mostly notable for the scowl on his pockmarked face and the raised fist of triumph. You should have seen the other guy, he’d said.
Above the ned was a photograph of a junkie mother whose partner’s flat had been raided. Winter had been there to photograph the four bags of ecstasy found stashed under the sink. The woman – her name was Ashleigh, old way before her time and had already lost the looks she once had – screamed at them for taking away her boyfriend and asked how she was expected to cope and look after her wee girl. The daughter was about five or six, a pretty thing but in torn clothes and in need of a good wash.
Winter had asked if he could photograph the two of them but maybe she had sensed he was over-eager to take their picture because she immediately asked for a hundred pounds to do it. Addison had been there and laughed in the woman’s face but Winter had agreed. Of sorts.
He left and returned twenty-five minutes later with four full bags from the nearest supermarket, putting them down in front of the mother. It was a hundred pounds worth of shopping. Milk, bread, food to get them through the week, plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, a few T-shirts and other clothes for the girl. The mother had sworn and ranted but eventually agreed when he said it was that or nothing. She hadn’t known he would have given her the stuff even if she’d said no.
Her anger at not getting what she’d hoped for had earned Winter the aggrieved glare that looked back at him from the photograph on his wall now. Ashleigh Morgan, junkie-chic skinny, eyes drained and wasted, her teeth soft and disappearing. Six-year-old Tiffany smiling happily. Hopefully both still alive and well but a couple of bags of decent food could only do so much.
Next to angry Ashleigh and her daughter was a black-and-white photograph of an empty street.
Arlington Street was in the west end, just off Woodlands Road. It ran long and narrow with sandblasted traditional tenements on one side of the road and red-and-cream modern versions on the other. You could see the Twenty’s Plenty sign at the beginning of the street and around eight parked cars on each side, but that was it. No people, no blood, no guts.
He didn’t think of it as his favourite photograph and it was far from the most eye-catching, but it was probably the most important. It was the progenitor, the catalyst, the reason for all of it.
The other Metinides copy he had was of his haunting photograph of a woman hanging from the tallest tree in Chapultec Park. It is otherworldly, quite surreal and you have to really look to see what is in front of you. The tree is obvious enough but it is only when you look again that the penny drops and you think, oh my fucking God. The realization eats away at you.
Metinides’s secret was the knowledge that people are so used to seeing death in the cinema or on television that, often, the real thing just doesn’t feel real. So he puts it right there in a photograph and messes with your mind, leaving you uncomfortable, unsettled, unsure. Winter had felt that way for a long time and knew that was why the Mexican’s photographs resonated so much with him.
It turned out that the woman had gone to Chapultec, asked which tree was the biggest, pulled a rope out of her purse and hanged herself. When they took the body down, they found a photograph of a young girl in her purse along with a note explaining that her husband had taken her daughter away six years before. That day was the girl’s birthday and she couldn’t take the pain any longer. It was a sad little story in a big city full of sad little stories and that was something Winter knew all about.
He loved what Metinides did and what a photograph could do. A picture painting a thousands words and all that. Recording history, exposing lies, showing life in the raw, witnessing reality, framing the shit and the shitters. But a photograph can do more than that, it can also give up hidden truths.
He didn’t claim that he could do what Metinides could but he was a witness to his bit of the world. There were rules though. Roughly speaking they ran along the lines of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. He was there to observe and to document. Sometimes, though, whether you sought it or not, when you bent down to photograph the gutter, reality crept up and bit you on the arse. Something had nagged away at him from the moment he photographed Stevie Strathie but this was the first chance he’d had to do anything about it.
The A5-sized print that he’d run off showed Strathie lying in his own life spill. And he couldn’t help but be pleased at the way he’d flash-filled it, making his bloodless face contrast with the sangria puddle that lent him an unholy halo. Those shit-scared eyes locked fast in the very moment that he crossed over – seeing his past, his future and nothing at all. He was bloodless and blood, empty and full, life and death. The bastard had made a career out of selling it and now he’d met it face to face.
The mark on the right of his chest was a little more than half an inch wide, maybe two centimetres in new money. It curved as if it would make a complete circle although it only punched a crescent into his chest. There were other distinct marks within it and they looked like they formed some sort of pattern. Winter realized that he’d probably known as soon as he’d seen it, maybe in the back of his mind, but he knew.
He sat the print next to the photograph he’d taken of Rory McCabe, the teenager who’d been battered around the knees with a baseball bat, the photo that hadn’t been worthy of a place on his gallery wall but was now lying on the desk on the other side of the room.
There it was on McCabe’s chest, shown up by the infrared on his IS Pro, a circular bruise the size of a five- pence piece. It also had marks within the circle that Winter hadn’t noticed before. A darker, horizontal indentation that he guessed could have been vertical depending on the angle that it had hit the kid’s chest at. The raised marks caused by the vertical/horizontal feature were maybe three millimetres wide. Same as the mark within Strathie’s crescent.
As per procedure, he’d placed a photo scale at the side of both shots when he’d taken them so that sizes could be accurately measured. He was already sure of the answer he’d get but a quick calculation showed that the two circular marks were identical in size.
Winter breathed hard and thought harder. He wasn’t much for believing in coincidences and Addison had always told him that they were to be trusted as much as a chimpanzee with a tin opener.
Rory McCabe. Stevie Strathie. A victim of neds with a baseball bat. A victim of the Dark Angel.
No doubt about it, he thought to himself. They had got absolutely nothing to do with each other. Move on here, nothing to see. Nothing to tell.
Look but don’t touch. Record but don’t interfere. Observe but don’t violate. Chronicle but don’t contaminate. He focused, he shot, he looked but he wouldn’t tell. Not just yet anyway.
CHAPTER 22
Friday 16 September
The road to hell is also paved with bad intentions. Winter’s mobile rang a few minutes before eight, bringing him crashing out of a deep sleep peppered with dreams of flashbulbs and bodies.
It was Addison. He sounded as rough as a badger’s arse.
‘Drop your cock, pick up your sock and meet me at Glasgow Harbour five minutes ago.’
‘What the hell?’
‘He’s done it again. Two more dead. Glasgow Harbour. Now.’
‘Christ. By the way, that old joke doesn’t work in the singular. It would need to be…’
Addison had already hung up.
Glasgow Harbour is a relatively new residential development on the side of the Clyde, opposite the Govan
