Winter scanned the rows of photographs, studying them even though he was intimate with every pool of blood, every rip and every scream. Avril Duncanson, his first job: a young woman who had vaulted head first through her car windscreen. Salim Abbas, the innocent schoolboy victim of a gang attack; all broken, bruised and bloodied, his body a roadmap of vicious intent. Marie Wylde, the middle-class victim of a drunken middle-class husband, her face lacerated with a thousand cuts. Graeme Forrest, a uniformed cop, an inspector who’d paid the ultimate price for being on the wrong side of the law and been nailed to a door with a pool of blood and fear at his feet. Jimmy Adamson and Andrew Haddow, underworld minions who’d died by the sword they’d chosen to live by, laid out in puddles of rosso corsa, taken out by bullets of vengeance.
Those were the bare descriptions, the things other people might have seen if they were given the chance to see them. Winter saw more. He saw the unmarked loveliness of Avril Duncanson’s face: not remarkably pretty but with flawless skin that was all the more astonishing for having somehow survived the windscreen shower. In the dark brown eyes of the boy whose only crime had been to have the wrong colour skin, he saw not only fear but also pity for assailants who were scarred by hate. He saw splendid retribution in the luscious blood pools of the career criminals. He saw beauty where others simply saw death. Choosing which photograph to take down was like deciding which of his children had to leave the bosom of the family home.
With regret verging on guilt, he finally opted to remove his photograph of the body of Bridgeton Elvis. The old man had frozen to death at the foot of a tree near the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green one bitterly cold January morning three years before. He’d been a harmless jaikie, fond of the Bucky or whatever other booze was going cheap, and always used to greet the east end cops with a tuneless rendition of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ every time he saw them. Winter’s photograph showed Elvis in the middle of his longest sleep with powder blue cheeks and icicled beard. Winter loved the shot of the old guy but he loved the others more. It had to go.
In its place he hung the Cambuslang commuter. With his eyes screwed shut, the suicide victim stared back at Winter with mouth wide and hope extinguished. Winter had managed to get low enough on the pavement so that he was level with the head and had constructed an angle that gave the impression of a portrait. It would, however, have fulfilled few of the criteria demanded of a passport photograph: it was taken against concrete rather than a light grey or plain cream background; the mouth was open and the eyes were not; the expression was not neutral and the rest of the body was missing.
The shoe that had been attached to the severed foot forensics had found was relatively new, dressy and well polished. It didn’t exactly scream poverty. The man’s face had been recently shaved and didn’t suggest any lack of care. His full head of dark hair might have hinted at someone whose life wasn’t full of worry or just a set of generous genes that precluded male pattern baldness. Winter knew that psychological problems ran much deeper than money or material possessions though, and he could only guess at the demons that had made this guy step in front of an oncoming train. Not that the motives mattered — not to Winter — all that counted was the end result.
Winter had never quite got round to confirming the legal, let alone the moral, position regarding the photographs he had hanging in his spare room. It had suited him not to ask the question given that there was an answer he didn’t want to hear. He thought of them as his own intellectual property but it was admittedly a possibility that the Procurator Fiscal could have taken a differing view. Some were taken on the department-issued Nikon FM2; others were taken on his own Canon EOS-1D. A couple, like the blood-soaked body of druglord Cairns Caldwell, were even taken on his mobile phone because he’d had nothing else to hand. All, however, were taken while on the clock and that was what gave the cops or the Scottish Police Services Authority a legal claim over them, if only they’d known they were there. The moral claim to have them on his wall was a different matter altogether and Winter couldn’t afford to spend too much time debating that with himself.
He turned away from the wall, suddenly feeling the need to see the outside world. His Berkeley Street flat looked out on to the pale sandstone walls of the Mitchell Library on the other side of the street and he drew in the view in a single gulp. He had to press himself close to the glass to see pink sky above the library and found condensation licking against his nose as he did so. It would probably have helped if he’d turned the heating up in the flat, seeing it was a degree or two below freezing outside, but he hated being too warm. Rachel’s flat was always like an oven and yet she’d be wearing heavy jumpers or a fleece while he’d be in a T-shirt.
It wasn’t the only difference between their flats. Her place was over a hundred years old with rooms you could fly a kite in, the ceilings were so high, antique fireplaces in every one and no parking space within a country mile. His end of Berkeley Street was modern and clinical, devoid of cat-swinging room but with trellised balconies you almost had room to step onto. The style would probably be classed as minimalist but for the clutter. Hers suited her and his suited him.
The Mitchell used to be one of his favourite buildings in the city — until he’d moved in opposite it. It was the largest public reference library in Europe and the font of all Glasgow and global knowledge. He used to love its late Victorian splendour and the sheer physical statement it was designed to make about the importance of knowledge. The building was always lit up at night and undoubtedly a spectacular sight when you zoomed past on the M8 but it was a pain in the arse when you had a giant Christmas tree permanently positioned outside your window. Winter had always been a man more in favour of the dark than the light.
He watched a small group of people hurry along the street, all waddling as quickly as three layers of clothing would allow. There wasn’t more than a dusting of snow on the pavement but all the forecasts said there was plenty more to come.
His mind drifted back a couple of weeks and two decades and thought of Lily lying in her snowy grave on Inchmahome. An uncharacteristic shiver ran through him as he closed his eyes and tried to picture her face. Did she have green eyes or blue, was her face lightly freckled to go with her blonde hair? Was she pretty or plain?
Winter opened the cupboards where he kept some of his older prints and the plethora of camera paraphernalia he had amassed, much of it never used as it hadn’t proved as handy as the trade magazines had promised. There were a few extra black ash frames in there too, each exactly the same as the ones that held his collection. He took one out, along with a bracket and a couple of panel pins.
He picked a spot on the wall opposite the five rows of four and carefully knocked the pins and bracket into position. Conscious that he was doing so with unnecessary ceremony, Winter placed the empty frame onto the wall and stood back to consider it.
The blank frame blinked back at him, the plain white mounting taunting him with promises of an image unknown. He closed his eyes again and made a silent promise to the girl whose face he couldn’t see — his fellow orphan.
‘Abandoned and alone,’ he said out loud. ‘But not for long.’
CHAPTER 24
The R2S system was one of Winter’s favourite bits of computer geekery. Normally he didn’t approve of anything that took away from the simple beauty of a photograph. He barely tolerated the addition of a frame beyond its practical uses and always shunned any suggestion of digitally enhancing a photograph. It was what it was, warts and all, and would only lose some sense of its identity if you tried to fanny around with it in Photoshop or anything similar.