Winter and Burke didn’t say much on the drive over from Pitt Street. Once Burke had filled him in on what had happened, they both lapsed into a brooding silence, their minds full of possibilities. Although they both had an appetite for what lay ahead, Burke’s was professional while Winter’s was obsessional. Burke would enjoy the unusual, visceral nature of the case; Winter would positively feast upon it.
As soon as they got on to Main Street in Cambuslang, the quiet organised chaos of the newly formed crime scene loomed large before them and they could see officers directing traffic and a few white-suited worker bees already busying themselves with the business of death.
Winter’s itch flared and he found himself hoping the carnage was every bit as bad as Burke had promised. The forensic pulled into the first available space, not having to worry about the double yellows because of the badge displayed on his windscreen. The pair tumbled out of the car and Winter hurriedly grabbed his camera bag from the boot.
As they ducked under the tape, Winter looked to his left and saw a woman standing, ashen-faced, a shopping bag in her hand, fifty yards or so away. She seemed to be rooted still in shock and the hairs on Winter’s neck tingled as he looked at her and wondered what she’d seen. He wanted to stand and stare at her but Burke called him on and in seconds they were running down the stairs to the station concourse, landing on the grim brick reality of Cambuslang station, all blackened stone and dreary concrete — a depressing sight at the best of times.
An anxious huddle of people, maybe a dozen of them, were standing against a wall, corralled there by two uniformed police officers, one of them taking notes at the front of the line. Winter could see the emotions on the would-be commuters’ faces ranged from disbelief to nervous excitement. A burly figure in a white coverall was waving his arms around theatrically, gesturing angrily at those near him to get a move on. Campbell Baxter’s actions were those of a man under pressure. He turned at the sound of Winter and Burke coming down the stairs, a glare immediately attaching itself to his face.
‘About time,’ he snapped at them. ‘Get yourselves covered up. Winter, do what you have to do but get it done quickly. There’s work to be done so I can get these people out of here.’
As ever, Two Soups had little regard for Winter’s photography skills and, as ever, Winter would pay him no heed and take as much time as he felt necessary. It was an arrangement only one of them was happy with.
‘Where’s the train?’ Winter asked him, regretting the stupidity of the question as soon as it was out of his mouth.
‘Glasgow Central,’ Baxter told him condescendingly. ‘It was halfway there before anyone knew anything about it. It can’t stop on a sixpence, you know. It will be examined, and photographed, there.’
Baxter caught the look of annoyance that crossed Winter’s face.
‘Oh, don’t worry, Mr Winter,’ Two Soups replied tersely. ‘There’s more than enough here to be keeping you busy. We haven’t found all of him yet. Speak to the sergeant. He’ll point you in the right direction. Well… directions.’
Sergeant Willie Scott was old school, the kind of copper who had been round the block twice and hadn’t been surprised by any of it the first time round. He nodded his head at Winter as he saw him approach, giving off nothing more than an air of mild bemusement at what was going on around him.
‘Awrite, son? I hope you’ve got plenty of film in that camera of yours. This poor bastard is in more bits than ten jigsaw sets.’
‘We don’t use film,’ Winter started to tell him. ‘It’s all digi—’
‘I know, son,’ Scott wearily interrupted him. ‘I’m not completely fucking stupid. Right, here’s the script. The guy was thought to be in his forties, stepped in front of the big choo choo train and was smashed to smithereens. We think his torso was blown away but there’s a hand way down the far end of the platform and something that might be a bit of shoulder near it. There’s pieces of him up on the main street too. We haven’t got a head and maybe we won’t get one. That do you?’
Winter nodded, trying not to give away the surge of adrenalin that was coursing through him. The general view of him among the cops was probably strange enough without making it worse. He turned and headed for the end of the platform where the suicide guy’s hand was.
The platform end was unguarded and Winter could hear the echo of his own feet as he approached, their beat marching in time to the pounding of his heart. There it was, right enough, a hand cut clean off just above the wrist. Whatever shirt or jacket had been worn by the arm it was attached to had gone. The hand was already deadly pale. The colour, or lack of it, reminded Winter of the woman outside the railway station and he craved to see what she had seen.
The fingers of the severed hand were pointing to the sky, its pallid flesh torn where it had skidded along the rough concrete, seeping tears of candy apple red. Winter zoomed right on it, capturing every pore, seeing it was a left hand and noting the soft skin and absence of any calluses. The owner, whatever he did, wasn’t used to hard labour.
The hand was tense, as if beginning to form a claw, perhaps a last-minute change of heart or simply the natural instinct for survival, fighting against the desire for death. The crash of nerve endings, tissue, bone and tendons that were exposed above the wrist didn’t display a clean break but a messy one; the victim of the bludgeon rather than the guillotine. Winter popped a yellow photographic marker down beside the hand and moved on in search of more.
It didn’t take him long to find the bloodied piece of fresh meat that was indeed a shoulder, stripped bare and broken off as easily as a piece of bread being torn into chunks. The remaining flesh carried no identifying marks, no moles or tattoos, and being devoid of visible expression it didn’t interest Winter much beyond the macabre nature of its demise. He picked over the rest of the platform, seeing and photographing shards of bone and slithers of skin, leaving markers at each of them.
As he walked back down the platform towards the shocked huddle of passengers, he held his camera at waist height and fired off shot after shot at the waiting crowd, looking the other way and vainly trying to cover the shutter noise with a cough. The allure for him had always been as much the witnesses as the victim, relishing the voyeurism among the rubberneckers and taking some consolation that they shared his grubby fascination for the ghoulish.
Winter’s hero was the great Mexican tabloid photographer Enrique Metinides and it was from him that he’d learned the value of crowd shots, holding them up as a mirror to the scene of death, a counterpoint to the central image in which a being had crossed from one world to the next. Their fear and enthralment, their tears and affectations — all whistling in the dark. Metinides was the king of car crashes, murders and suicides, taking irresistible photographs that also brilliantly captured those who were there to gawp.
Winter climbed the steps back up to Main Street, instinctively photographing the crowds peeking in wonder at the events behind the police tape. He didn’t spend much time on them though because he had only one person in mind whom he wanted to find. She was still there, frozen with her mouth open. As he got nearer he could see that she was in her mid-fifties, a neatly dressed woman with her hair tied back, an intended shopping mission now forgotten. She was wringing her hands and nibbling on her own lips as if it could somehow erase whatever it was that she’d seen.