Winter knew she hadn’t noticed his approach, her mind consumed, and he stopped and put her firmly in the frame of his Nikon FM2, rattling off a few shots before she or anyone else wondered what the hell he was doing. She was a picture of post-trauma and he had no doubt she would lead him to where he wanted to be.
The woman only looked up when he was a few feet away, his footsteps finally awakening her from her dwam of distraction.
‘Where is it?’ he asked her as gently as he could.
The woman’s eyes widened and she chewed on her lip again before weakly raising an arm and pointing behind her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled at him. ‘Sorry.’
Winter didn’t stop to explain that she had no reason to apologise, to tell her he understood that all she’d been guilty of was being unable to pass on the horror of what she had stumbled across further down the street. Instead he hurried towards it.
The head was sitting in the shade of a wall, at rest against a set of railings that kept it from the road, undisturbed and unnoticed, as everyone’s attention had been on the police activity nearer the station. The dark, thick hair that greeted Winter had also perhaps protected it from obvious scrutiny; the last thing a passer-by might imagine he or she was looking at was what it actually was. Winter stepped on by until he was able to turn and see the face of the man who had been unwise enough to step in front of a train.
Winter dropped onto his backside and immediately framed the bloodied head in his Nikon, seeing a man in his mid-forties, his eyes screwed shut and his mouth wide open. The bloodless skin was scraped at the cheek and temple, doubtless from where it had landed, but otherwise the face was surprisingly unmarked. The back of the head had taken a heavy blow and the matted hair had collapsed in like a sunken mine shaft. The head itself had been snapped clean off the neck, probably the only thing that had saved it from being obliterated by the force of the train. The seeping point of separation licked crimson onto the ground.
Winter’s lens also picked out pinched red marks across the bridge of the man’s nose and above his ears, clear signs of a pair of spectacles that hadn’t made the flight through the air with him. He saw a rosy blush on the man’s cheeks that could have suggested a fondness for alcohol. The teeth bared by the open mouth were well looked after, white and even, unstained by tobacco. His skin was smooth and freshly shaved. Middle aged, middle class and his head in the middle of the pavement.
What would drive a man to be so desperate as to take his chances with an express train, Winter wondered. He couldn’t help but think of the old joke about there finally being light at the end of the tunnel but that it was a train coming the other way. Whatever light this guy had been hoping to see, it had been swapped for a stare into the abyss. Winter would never be able to stop wondering what it was they saw there. But no matter how dark the thoughts that inhabited Winter’s mind, he couldn’t imagine how bad things would have to be before he did something like take his own life, particularly in such a violent, chaotic manner. A noise behind him made him jump and broke the trance he realised he’d been in. There were four people standing around him, all with their mouths open, unconsciously mimicking the head that lay on the concrete before them. Two of them were young boys in school uniform and the horror in their eyes was mixed with a joy in what they would soon be able to tell their pals. It was a conflict of emotions Winter knew all too well but he couldn’t let them see this.
‘Piss off,’ he told the group but the kids in particular. ‘Go on, get out of here.’
The gawpers backed off reluctantly, unable to take their eyes off the head but moving back about twenty yards so they could still see what was going on. Winter got to his feet, standing between them and the severed head, waving towards the police barrier at the station. A constable had already seen them, his attention grabbed by the knot of people, and was now hurrying towards them. Winter threw a number marker on the ground beside the photo scale that already lay there, kneeling again to shoot a final few frames of the head and mentally wishing its former owner farewell.
The clatter of heavy boots signalled the arrival of the uniformed constable, a young guy Winter didn’t know. He arrived as a picture of urgency and efficiency and became a bog-eyed tourist as soon as he saw what lay at Winter’s feet.
‘Jeezus.’
‘I know. Just keep that lot there back from it and radio for reinforcements and forensics. Don’t worry, it won’t bite.’
The constable raised his eyes from the head just long enough to throw an embarrassed glare at Winter, then turned back nervously to the severed head. Winter left him to it, content he had an image that would take its place on the wall of photographs adorning his Charing Cross flat. As ever though, he wanted more; ten paces on from the head he swivelled and captured the cop and the crowd and the bloodied prize between them.
As he neared the station steps again, Winter passed Burke rushing the other way, clearly having been called by the young cop.
‘You’ve missed out big time.’ Burke grinned at him. ‘They found a foot. Fucking thing was still wearing a sock and shoe. Seeing as you weren’t around, I had to photograph it. A belter, so it was.’
‘I think you’ll find it was you that missed out, mate,’ Winter told him. ‘I couldn’t give a flying fuck about your foot. Hurry along and you’ll get my sloppy seconds. You won’t be needing your camera.’
Two hours later, Winter stood in front of what he called his wall of excellence. Narey and Addison, the only two other people ever to have seen it, called it his wall of death. It was a label it was hard to argue with.
It was in the second bedroom in his flat in Berkeley Street in Charing Cross but, as he rarely had visitors, it served as an office and a chilling testimony to his love affair with the city’s dark side. There were twenty photographs in five rows of four, all carefully mounted and positioned, framed in black ash and hung for posterity. Each represented a moment of finality, death captured in stark monotones and bloody reds.
Winter had this thing about the colour of blood, how it wasn’t red at all but a myriad of shades depending on how long the vital stuff had been spilled for. He had seen and photographed so much of it that he had a keen eye for exactly where it sat on the palate that existed behind his eyes. It was a standing joke among the scenes of crime officers that Winter could give an accurate time of death long before it was rubber stamped by a pathologist. From crimson or candy apple, all the way through to sangria or rufous by way of falu, alizarin, carmine or firebrick, he knew every hue.
It took a lot for him to alter the photographs on his wall. A new print had to be pretty special to push out one of the twenty that were there. He had taken thousands of images of thousands of incidents and the wall represented the best — and worst — of them. A car crash, a street fight fatality, a frozen corpse, shootings, stabbings, even a crucifixion — all life and death was there, captured in the moment it crossed from one to the other. It had been months, nearly a year in fact, since he had last made a change but the severed head from Cambuslang railway station demanded to be included. A decapitation was a first even for him.
He hated having to choose which photograph to take down. It wasn’t as if he’d ever throw any of them out but his own unwritten rule was that once they were off the wall, then they were off for good. Instead they’d be filed away to be viewed on rainy days and dark moments when he simply felt the need, which meant they’d be looked at often.