‘Hm.’
‘It’s all you can do, Rach.’
‘Do you not think I fucking know that?’
Tony didn’t react. He knew she didn’t mean it. He’d never known her hurt the way she had been the past couple of weeks and he was beginning to feel the hurt pushing him aside. He settled for pulling her closer and letting her blow herself out.
‘Shit. I’m sorry,’ she breathed, her hands rubbing at her temples. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean that. This is doing my bloody head in.’
‘It’s okay. I understand. Just remember that I’m on your side.’
‘I said I was sorry.’
‘Just making sure.’
She dug her elbow into him a bit. ‘Sod.’
‘So where do we go next?’
‘We find Dixie and Paddy. God knows where they are or who they are but if we find them, then we start to get to the bottom of this. At least one of them knows what happened. At least one of them knows who’s blackmailing them. We’ll find them.’
‘And Lily?’
‘Don’t start on me with the forgetting about Lily stuff. I’ve never forgotten about her, despite what you and Danny might think. I’m sure your sick mind is full of images of her lying on the island but, just because mine isn’t, that doesn’t mean I don’t care about finding who did that to her.’
He said nothing, feeling guilty for something he couldn’t control, knowing she had him nailed and not feeling any better for that. His head was his own place — or so he thought. He didn’t like the idea of it being an open book, even to Rachel. His dreams should be his own grubby little secrets.
‘It’s okay,’ she told him. ‘I think I understand. As much as I understand anything about you, sicko.’
‘Ha ha. You should give up policing and become a comedian.’
He began to kiss her neck and move his body against hers, hoping for a reaction but not the one he got.
‘Forget it,’ she slapped a hand against his leg. ‘Not tonight.’
‘Jeezus, the sooner we find out who the fuck killed these bastards the better.’
Despite everything, she giggled. ‘So that you can get your end away?’
They both laughed and she turned and they kissed before she hugged back into him again, leaving him to his thoughts. He knew she was right — of course she was. When night closed in, his mind was full of Lily.
He did wonder, in his more reasoned moments, why he obsessed about her quite so much. It wasn’t because he had photographed her, her shattered skull displayed on his wall with the other trophies of his labours. No, eventually he realised it was because he hadn’t photographed her. She was a stray soul like him yet she had eluded his lens and his inner itch ached to put that right.
It wasn’t that he dreamt about her, more that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. In truth he probably couldn’t tell where his thoughts stopped and his dreams began; it was just the way his head worked. The image of her filled his mind, her face becoming formed ever more clearly as each day passed. Behind his eyes he could see her pale skin and the light freckles on her nose. There was a cheeky grin in defiance of all they knew had happened to her. Lily was a pretty girl and probably looked even younger than she was — a face that was never going to grow old.
Sometimes he’d think about her like that, fully formed, even though he knew his imagination was taking a leap. Mostly, though, he thought of her as half-finished, the way Fairweather was describing her, the picture becoming fuller and clearer with every passing telephone call or email.
But other times… other times he thought of her as she was found: blackened, battered, bloodied and broken. That wasn’t how he wanted to picture her but there was no way he could stop himself. That image was buried away in a dark corner of his mind he couldn’t help but visit. Fighting it was always going to be a losing battle.
In his waking hours, he could realise the moment when the insects came was a sure sign that he had passed over from imagination to dreams. But there and then, in the depths of the dark night, the line was blurred and his mind recoiled at the illusory sight of ants, blowflies and dermestid beetles gorging on Lily. He had to watch in fascinated horror as flies, maggots and beetle larvae feasted on her flesh. He could hear too: the buzz and the crawl and the chomp. It was his own perfected method of self-torture.
This night, however, the insects hadn’t yet come to take their fill of Lily and so he was fairly sure he was still awake and therefore simply tormenting himself. Lily and Paton and Mosson had formed an unlikely chorus line of characters, flitting through his mind in various stages of distress, each leaving a bloody footprint on his fading consciousness. It was somewhere in the midst of this dark meandering that his eureka moment came.
His eyes flashed open and he let the thought run through his head once more for confirmation that it made some kind of sense. Sure enough that it did, he reached for the bedside lamp and switched it on, getting out of bed in the same movement.
‘What the fuck?’ Rachel grouched, immediately awake and staring at the sight of Tony groping around, naked, among the papers on the desktop. He didn’t reply but kept searching until he picked up a sheet of A4 and held it up to the light.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she asked again.
Tony looked up at her, then back down at the paper.
‘Dixie,’ he told her.
‘Dixie? As in dixie1970? The other name on Paton’s email?’
‘Yes. This probably sounds nuts but it occurred to me that… well, Dixie is a nickname for footballers. Or it used to be.’
‘Right…’
‘There was a guy called Dixie Dean who played for Everton between the wars. Scored sixty goals in one season. And there was a Celtic player in the seventies, John Deans. He was known as Dixie as well — wee barrel of a guy. I was sure I’d seen the name Deans on the Jordanhill list but I had to check.’
Winter held the papers up in front of him.
‘And?’ Rachel demanded.
‘And I’ve checked his age against the record as well. This guy was born in 1970. Dixie 1970. His name is Gregory Deans.’
CHAPTER 31
‘Tony?’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s Aaron Sutton. You might want to get yourself over to Mansionhouse Drive in Springboig. Right away.’
‘Sure. What is it?’
‘Let’s just say that the key words are samurai sword.’
‘Leaving right now.’
He drove as fast as he could get away with towards the east end in the evening traffic. As he ran to his car, he tried Danny’s mobile but didn’t get an answer and left a message saying where he was going. Danny would see the connection right away. Springboig was just five minutes from Terry Gilmartin’s home turf in Easterhouse.
There were lots of streets in Glasgow where Winter would have a fair idea what to expect as soon as he heard their name. Mansionhouse Drive didn’t fall into that category. It was one of the strangest streets in the city, the product of two very different building eras. If you came from the western end of Hallhill Road, you could see how it got its name: maybe not mansions exactly but big, expensive homes at the end of leafy drives, behind high manicured hedges on a tree-lined street — until you came to the junction of Croftspar Place. The street abruptly changed, from mansion house to Eastern European prison cells: ugly grey mono blocks that were barely worthy of the word house never mind mansion. Croftspar Place marked the point in the road where house prices fell by over a hundred grand and life expectancy by ten years.
Surprise, surprise. When Winter came off Springboig Road onto Hallhill Road, there were no signs of flashing lights and the echoes of sirens were still in the distance. It was only when he was halfway along the more salubrious section of Mansionhouse, the road rutted with ice and snow, that he saw the circus ahead. Sure enough, the cars and cops were en masse a hundred yards past the turn into Croftspar Place. Winter parked as near as he could, battled his way through a fuck-muttering crowd, and flashed his identification at the first constable who tried to block his path. It was the look on the cop’s face that gave him the first clue all was not well on Mansionhouse Drive.