Strathie before now. Before McConachie and Addison were shot and before Forrest and these four were murdered. Before it was all too late…
The fourth man had a hood over his head, his neck slumped at an unnatural angle. There was something wrong about his legs too, dangling askew from the knees down, bones seemingly jutting out where they shouldn’t. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt, both dirty as if he’d been rolled on the ground, maybe taking a kicking as well as what was most probably a baseball bat beating.
‘Photograph him, Winter,’ ordered Alex Shirley. ‘And get a fucking move on. I want that hood off him.’
Winter found his feet the moment the superintendent spoke, glad to be able to move and not simply standing and staring. He circled the broken man, snapping as he went, aware of the open-mouthed, fearful cops in the rear of his shot. ‘Right, enough,’ barked Shirley. ‘Out of the way.’
Winter was done, anyway. He wanted to see the guy’s face as much as anyone else. Shirley strode forward, pulling the hood off the guy’s head and dropping it into an evidence bag that Baxter held out for him.
The right side of number four’s face was caved in, his eye out its socket, the skull and jaw both smashed. It brought images of Addison’s head screaming into Winter’s consciousness and he had to banish them fast. Had to concentrate or he’d be in deep shit. He knew he was close to losing it completely.
He stared at the guy’s left eye, saw that it in turn was staring away from the damage to the skull, either looking out for trouble from the other side or just desperate not to see what had happened. For a second he wished he was wherever number four was looking, somewhere safe, somewhere out of sight and out of mind. He snapped back into reality.
The guy only had half a face left but it was enough for him to be identified.
‘Harvey Houston?’ asked Shirley, looking for confirmation.
‘Yes, sir.’ Sandy Murray was the first to answer. ‘I’ve run into him a few times over the years.’
Shirley made a small nod of his head, looking angrier than Winter had ever seen him.
‘And the rest of them? Get them all fucking photographed, Winter. Names, people. Now.’
Winter focused on Houston’s shattered skull and photo graphed as he heard names being confirmed by Murray, Boyle, Williamson and Monteith, the last two having joined the party along with another two forensics that he recognized: Paddy Swanson and Lucy Stark. They would have their hands full.
The bloody mess was Jake Arnold, known as Beavis, bleed-to-death guy was Ginger George Faichney, and the gutted-stomach victim was Benjo Honeyman. All as expected and nothing that anyone could have seen coming. Four missing men and one missing cop, all snug as bugs in the same rug. Winter’s stomach was rumbling in a way that meant he was either very hungry or about to puke.
He moved from one man to the next as if he were in a dream, sidestepping the forensics as everyone tried to do their job at the same time. No sooner had he finished photographing every angle of Arnold’s battered-in nose or Faichney’s sliced veins than Swanson was daubing them with Luminol and waiting to see what developed. Winter snapped at Honeyman’s stabbed chest, zooming in on the signature rip of the knife, standing back to be replaced immediately by Baxter dusting the chair for prints that they both knew wouldn’t be there. None of it was futile but none of it was going to help.
Winter heard the shout from somewhere over his left shoulder.
‘Sir!’
It was Murray, his face ashen. Everyone followed his arm to the far corner of the warehouse and saw the homemade poster on the wall. Letters and cuttings from newspapers. From a distance all that could be made out was a headline, THE DARK ANGEL.
As they all moved closer en masse they could make out the two words that were pasted below.
Dirty
Cops
They were drinking in those words, swallowing hard on their implications, when another voice burst through the door. Narey. She stopped in her tracks for an age when she saw the four bodies, her jaw dropping before she recovered her composure and went up to Shirley.
She spoke to him quietly, out of earshot. Winter watched Shirley’s face wrinkle and his brow furrow. His eyes were blazing but he gave her a curt nod, before placing a reassuring arm on hers. He stood for a moment, weighing up his options before coming to a decision.
‘Constables,’ he barked, looking at Boyle and Murray. ‘Will you excuse us, please? Mr Baxter, your people, too.’
None of them looked too pleased but they had no choice. They left the warehouse and closed the door behind them.
Shirley looked at Winter, narrowing his eyes.
‘I think you should hear this too,’ he said, hesitating before going on. ‘The calls that DI Addison and DS McConachie received a few minutes ago have been identified from their phones. McConachie’s was from George Faichney. Addison’s was from Mark Sturrock, the mule from Harthill Services.’
Winter wanted to throw up the emptiness in his stomach or to deck Shirley. The two words on the poster screamed at him, mocking him.
Dirty. Cops.
CHAPTER 33
They were sitting on the bedroom floor in Highburgh Road, holding each other tight, head on the other’s shoulder. Him looking north and her south, neither seeing anything. They’d been like that for an age without saying a word. His guess was that they were silent because there was just too much to say.
It was only nine at night but it felt like past midnight. From the early morning dash to the industrial estate to the final visit to intensive care at the Royal, it had been a long, long day. Addison was alive but only just. They said the next twenty-four hours would be critical.
They’d both wanted to wait but Shirley was having none of it. He understood why they wanted to be there but his job was to catch the shooter and to do that he needed his team rested. There was also the small matter of whether Addison was shot because he was involved with the dealers. Shirley was insistent: they were to go home and get some sleep whether they liked it or not.
Sleep. That was a joke.
They’d climbed the stairs to the flat and Rachel had the fridge door open before the front door had shut. She cracked open a bottle of wine, picked up two glasses and poured. Winter didn’t even have the energy to make his usual moan about white wine.
She’d kicked off her shoes then fell out of her trousers and her blouse, causing him a pang of guilt at watching her body when he should have been thinking about Addison. Then he remembered that Addison would have been exactly the same, if not worse, and he’d laughed out loud before he knew it, strangling it once he caught the thought. Rachel threw him a look of surprise but didn’t bother asking. Instead she pulled on pyjama trousers and a T-shirt and padded into the bedroom.
Winter followed her through, losing his own shoes and got down on the floor where Rachel knocked her glass of wine back in one gulp. She immediately poured a second but left it untouched. She put her arms out without looking at him and he fell into them. That’s the way they were nearly an hour later. It was Rachel who finally broke the spell.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course you can,’ he replied.
‘You probably won’t like it.’
He tensed.
‘Go on.’
How much worse can things get, he thought?
‘When Addy was shot, why did you get up and take his photograph? Why did you do that when the Temple told everyone to stay down? You knew that maniac was probably still out there.’
‘It was my job.’
