Beamer.
Dixon Blazes. Carnage. Forrest crucified to the front door with blood money stuffed in his mouth. The Temple. Jim Boyle and Sandy Murray. Paddy Swanson. Lucy Stark. It was a real party all right. The four stiffs were there too. Jake Arnold, Ginger George Faichney, Benjo Honeyman and Harvey Houston. McConachie and Addison lying shot, one dead, one dying.
Smeaton Drive. The images behind those he’d seen on TV. Caroline Sanchez. Paul Burke. Rachel. The Temple. Iain Williamson. Baxter. A whole host of bunny suits and uniformed cops making up a one-ring circus.
Blood and people. Death and crowds. Watchers and the watched. The guilty and the innocent and the guilty. Blood and snot and tears. Everything and nothing. Twelve souls separated from their mortal coils in one easy shuffle and two men who almost managed to dodge a bullet. He scanned every face, every expression, looking in the shadows of the eyes of the dead and the grimaces of the living. Looking for something, anything, aware he might only know what it was once he saw it.
Then it struck him. It wasn’t about what he could see. It was about who he couldn’t.
Winter had never read any Sherlock Holmes but he’d seen the films and he knew the lines. Well, two of them. ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, of course was one. The other was, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, then whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’
Eliminate. Take away. Deduct. He wasn’t a cop, he was certainly no detective but that didn’t mean he knew nothing.
He looked through every photo again, moving them quickly from one hand to another, faster and faster. Harthill, Dixon, Central, Dixon again, Smeaton Drive. From the first to the last then back again. His brain was ahead of his eyes and his hands, jumping from photograph to photograph and to a conclusion.
The most blindingly obvious thing of all was the one that had escaped him till then. The one person that wasn’t in the photos at Dixon Blazes and Smeaton Drive was the person behind the camera. He looked at them again and again and again, ticking off names on a list in his head. He wiped the whole lot from his brain and began going through them again from the beginning, coming up with the same name as before.
He pushed past the desk, sending some of the photographs spinning, and back to his computer. He brought up his pictures file and clicked on the entire set that he’d downloaded from the industrial estate. Sixty-two photos in all. He calmed himself as much as he could and began working his way through them, frame by frame.
A scene-setter as soon as he got out of the car. A group shot of Shirley, Rachel, McConachie, Boyle, Murray, three other CID and two other uniform. Open mouths and anxious glances. Distance shots of Graeme Forrest standing against the warehouse door. Close-ups of nails through his hands and feet. McConachie and Addison lying sprawled. Shock and fear on so many faces. Quickly past his frames of Addison to the butchery inside. Jake Arnold’s battered corpse with Sandy Murray standing behind him as if he’d never seen anything like it in his life. On past the bloodless ginger ghost, the bloody gutted stomach and finally the broken bones of the man in the hood. Alex Shirley and Colin Monteith stood by the last of the four, angry and spellbound.
Finally he logged into the Return to Scene images from all the crime scenes and viewed the virtual copies of who was where and when. He was pretty sure but he needed to be certain and it suddenly struck him how he could be.
CHAPTER 44
When Danny had finished telling Winter that he would look after Narey and that he had convinced her to get off the streets and stay somewhere safe, he turned and looked her in the eye.
‘Happy?’ he asked her.
‘No, I’d hardly say that. I don’t like lying to him any more than you do. But I don’t see that we’ve got any choice.’
‘There’s always a choice, Rachel.’
‘Yes, and I’m choosing to do it this way.’
‘Tony thinks you are in serious danger and he thinks I’ve got you somewhere safe. At least one of these things isn’t true.’
‘Hopefully both of them.’ She tried a laugh but he didn’t buy it.
‘He says this Dark Angel guy knows where you live and that you’re on his hit list. You sure you want to be out there and give him the chance to shoot you?’
‘Danny, with all due respect I’m a cop, not a kid. I don’t need a babysitter and I don’t need the advice of the halfwit that happens to be my… boyfriend. Christ, I don’t think I’ve ever called him that before.’
‘So this Dark Angel, he thinks your name is in some drug dealer’s mobile phone?’
‘He knows it is.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘I’m not corrupt, Danny. Never have been.’
He nodded.
‘I know you’re not. But I can see why it looks bad. That why Tony can’t take this shit to Alex Shirley or someone else in Strathclyde?’
She shook her head.
‘No, I don’t know how he knows what he does but I’m sure that somehow Tony’s got a handle on what’s going on. For all that he’s a halfwit, I think he’s managed to work out the same thing as me.’
‘Which is what?’
Narey held her head in her hands for a moment or two, suddenly feeling very tired.
‘The call to the Nightjar operation room from the Dark Angel came in at 6.04 but wasn’t picked up by the admin assistant until she started at 7.00. Every available CID officer was roused out of their beds and got there as fast as they could. By the time they got there all five men were dead but the bodies were still warm. You with me?’
Danny nodded slowly.
‘If the call had been picked up right away,’ he said, ‘and the cops were there an hour sooner, then the Dark Angel might not have finished his work and wouldn’t have been in place to make the shots. Whoever placed the call knew the shift system and knew he had that hour to spare.’
Narey smiled.
‘Tony always says you are the smartest person he ever knew.’
‘Yeah but he’s a halfwit so what the fuck does he know?’ he laughed. ‘You sure you shouldn’t stay somewhere safe?’
‘No chance,’ she replied. ‘Would you?’
‘No. Okay, so what are we going to do?’
‘We’re going out and we’re going now. This could be a long night.’
CHAPTER 45
Winter took all the photographs that had been spread across his desk, put them back into the drawer and stuck the prints that he’d made of the storage cupboard copies in beside them. On top of them he stuck a piece of paper with a single name written on it. Insurance. Just in case.
The thought of locking the drawer crossed his mind but so did thoughts of stable doors and bolted horses. He should have done it before. Anyway, there was a good chance that he’d need someone to be able to find what was in there.
He logged off and shut down his PC, knowing that the tech guys could get in there no problem without his password if it came to it. Once inside, it would take them all of two minutes to find the explanatory file he’d left for them.
He walked out of his own office and down the corridor to the stores where the various items of hardware that
