Snapshot

Craig Robertson
CHAPTER 1

Sunday 11 September

It was raining. Of course it was raining, it was Glasgow. It didn’t get to be the dear, green place without more than its fair share of rain.

The hundreds of hunched, angry shapes who were lined up in a disorderly queue outside Blochairn Market were getting pissed on and pissed off.

Pitches were allocated on a first-come, first-served basis and so people made sure they got there early. Some of them had been queuing since four in the morning. It was now just after seven – although to Tony Winter it still felt like the middle of the night – and these people had probably been crabbit even before they were told they had to leave their stall and get back outside the gates because some inconsiderate fucker had got himself stabbed.

Winter lifted his camera and took a quick shot of the entrance to the market. Scene setting. Not strictly procedure but it was always his way. It was the way Metinides did it and if it was good enough for the man then it worked for him.

They were all facing the entrance, some back in their cars and others pacing about on foot like mental bears in a zoo. It meant he was able to take a shot of them from behind without risking getting his head kicked in. Rows of cars and vans that had been stacked full to the gunwales with everything under the sun. Views out of rear windows still blocked with boxes and piles of clothes, impatient people crammed between paste tables and plastic sheeting. Bottled-up humanity, simmering in the rain and not giving a damn for the poor bastard that was dead, just desperate to get back inside and flog second-hand shoes and remnants of makeup.

The Sunday car boot at Blochairn, minutes north of the city centre, is the biggest in Scotland and one of the biggest in Europe. You can buy everything from nearly complete jigsaws to designer coats, second-hand books to antique jewellery and everything in between. You wouldn’t believe what people will buy.

He’d been before and saw two women fighting over threadbare dishtowels selling for ten pence each. There was probably a decade of grease and dirt on them but it was that or nothing. This was real poverty. Okay, maybe it could be eased by buying a few less packets of fags or less booze but that was the way it was and who was he to judge?

Cars would roll up to the market entrance from the early hours and they’d sit in the dark and wait for opening time, steaming up windscreens with half-hearted expectancy. They’d be there no time at all before torches would be shone at them and there would be a knock at the window. Sharp faces and searching eyes would reach in from the dark. What you selling? You shifting mobile phones? You selling gold? How much you looking for it?

The idea is to sell everything they bring as fast as they can and get out again. Not this day though. This day, one of those miserable September mornings doing a passable impression of a nasty December afternoon, was different. Two cops stood in front of the newly relocked gates at Blochairn, others were at work inside and Winter was about to join them.

He nodded at Sandy Murray and Jim Boyle, the two PCs on the gate, as he passed them and headed into the market.

‘Awrite, Winter? Another day, another dead body.’ Boyle made the same crack every time he saw him.

‘Word of warning, Tony. That cunt Addison is in a bad mood. As usual.’ Murray and Addison had never seen eye to eye and the DI had booted the constable’s arse on a couple of occasions. Chances were Addison wasn’t as grumpy as they were making out. It was just the same old, same old.

The body was waiting for Winter at the back. The early morning wake-up call had already told him much of what he needed to know. A lifeless heap in a dark puddle of blood, a knife wound to the heart. Found by a woman who had gone in search of carrier bags to keep the rain off teapots. The dead man was a number, a statistic. He might as well have had ‘cliche’ scrawled in blood on his forehead. Getting yourself stabbed to death in Glasgow showed a spectacular lack of originality.

They already knew his name. As the chip wrappers would put it, he was known to the police.

Sammy Ross, two-bit drug dealer, professional low-life. Now a no-life.

It was only September but this was already fatal stabbing number forty-six in Glasgow. There had been too many non-fatal ones to count.

Winter had personally photographed fourteen of the previous forty-five and it was becoming very dull. Number fifteen was likely to be no more interesting than the rest.

It wasn’t his job to do so but off the top of his head he could think of a dozen reasons why someone might have killed Sammy Ross. You didn’t work with cops all day without learning something.

Someone might have wanted to pay less. Someone might have wanted to pay nothing. Maybe Sammy was cutting his heroin with too much sugar or powdered milk. Maybe Sammy had been selling worming pills as ecstasy tabs again. Maybe he had made promises he couldn’t keep. He could have been shagging someone he shouldn’t have. He might not have been shagging someone he should. He could have owed money, he might have been defending a pal, he could have been done for the cash in his pocket. Maybe he just looked at someone the wrong way. Maybe he supported the wrong football team. In Glasgow there was no end of ways to get yourself stabbed.

It didn’t matter. Sammy Ross was Winter’s mess to photograph that morning. Happy days. There he was, lying empty, having leaked his life at the foot of Derek Addison. The DI had his hands thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, studying Ross with all the interest of someone finding shit under his shoe. Only September but it had already been a long year. Winter focused the camera on the two men, one live, one dead, and fired off a couple of shots. Scene two. The rapid clack-clack-clack of the motor made Addison whirl round angrily.

‘Where the fuck have you been, Tony? Some of us have been here for almost an hour. And stop taking my fucking picture.’

Winter knew he didn’t really mean it. Addison was just as pissed off at being there in the rain as he was.

‘Ah piss off, Addy,’ he fired back. ‘Some of us don’t have a flashing light and a car that goes nee-naw. Sammy Ross, I presume?’

‘You been watching CSI again? Aye, Sherlock. One dead drug dealer with regulation stab wounds. Hurry up and take his photo. I’m starving.’

‘You’re always starving.’

Police photographers didn’t always talk to cops this way, especially not detective inspectors, but Winter had earned the right over countless pints and drunken nights. He knew where Addison’s bodies were buried.

The thought of food was doing nothing for Winter. His head throbbed from the effects of the night before and his body was rebelling at being hauled out of a warm bed to come to this shit-hole. He couldn’t help thinking that she was still in there, curled up soft, smooth and cosy where he’d left her. Every splash of teardrops from the Glasgow heavens was taunting him, reminding him how much he’d rather be tucked in behind her.

Instead he was in the rain with a dead man. And the worst of it? Nobody would give a toss. Short of maybe Sammy’s mammy – and even that was doubtful – no one would care that he was lying in a pool of his own blood.

No one had time to be bothered. Not about Sammy at any rate. The next body would be along any minute. There would only be time to roll Ross out of the gutter to make way for the next scumbag who had drawn a target on his own chest and had to be immortalized on digital.

Pick up a Sunday paper any week and you’ll likely find a couple of paragraphs on someone stabbed to death. Two paragraphs. That’s all it was worth. Somebody’s wean knifed into oblivion and all they could be arsed giving it was half a dozen lines. Said it all.

Winter could see on their faces that everyone else on site was as scunnered with stabbing forty-six as he was. Scumbag stabbed by scumbag. City is one scumbag less. Only another few thousand to go. Case closed.

Uniforms, fed up with it. The DI, fed up with it. Campbell ‘Two Soups’ Baxter, the crime scene manager, clearly fed up with it.

It didn’t mean that any of them wouldn’t do their job. Sammy Ross would get the same duty of care and attention as the rest. He would be measured up, dusted down, forensically examined and given a good wash before going to a hole in the ground or the burny fire.

In the unlikely event that there would be witnesses then they would be questioned; doors would be knocked on; known associates would be talked to. Maybe, just maybe, the cops would find out who shanked the dealer. Maybe, just maybe, the great Glasgow public would give a monkey’s if they did.

There were probably worse places to be early on a wet, miserable Sunday than a damp corner of Blochairn, but right at that moment Winter was buggered if he could think of any. The natives at the gate were getting restless and Winter imagined he could hear the sound of pitchforks being sharpened. Little splashes of rain were falling into the burgundy pool that Sammy had drowned in, making waves that screwed up any blood splatter calculations that Two Soups and his forensics would try to make. Not that it mattered much.

Winter had just seen it too many times.

You were more likely to be murdered in Glasgow than any other city in Western Europe. And when it came to stabbings, the ‘no mean city’ was a match for anywhere in the world. It kept you in work if your job was to photograph the leftovers.

He’d been doing just that for six years and this moment, the point where he was about to look at the body for the first time, was always the same. From day one to this, it hadn’t changed. Excited and scared, fifty-fifty. What he was scared of was also exactly what he wanted to see. And part of the reason he was scared was because he knew just how much he wanted to see it.

Tony could kid himself all he wanted about how dull another stabbing was but he was still interested in the business end. It was what got him out of bed whether he liked it or not.

Being there, in the moment before the flowers and the football tops mourn another victim, when blood still runs hot in a body that has given up its ghost, is a strange privilege. You can see much of what the person had been and some of what they might have been if the city hadn’t cut them down. It was a moment that messed with his head every time.

You saw them caught in the very moment that they were claimed. He was already feeling the ache to see and to photograph the expression on Sammy Ross’s face as much as the wound in his belly. He knew that made him a sick fucker but it was his itch.

There’s a Gaelic word that he loved. Winter only knew a handful of words and phrases, the obvious ones like uisge beatha and slainte: whisky and cheers.

In fact when he thought about it, the words that he knew in Gaelic either said a lot about his drinking or about Scotland. Apart from words about boozing, he could count to five – aon, da, tri, ceithir , coig – and trot out ceud mile failte, a hundred thousand welcomes.

His favourite, though, was sgriob. An old boy from Skye named Lachie, who used to drink in the Lismore, taught him it. It means the itchiness, the tingle of anticipation that comes upon the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky. Brilliant. The Eskimos may have a hundred different words for snow but trust the Gaels to have a word for that.

Another old teuchter later told him that you had to say sgriob drama or sgriob dibhe for it to refer specifically to whisky or else it just meant a scratch or scrape. He preferred Lachie’s version, though.

Everyone had an itch and this was Tony’s. Sgriob death. The hot, smooth, soft woman that was lying curled up in his warm bed once called it necrophotographilia. It wasn’t sexual though. Not that. Every bit as much as he was tired of death, sick of it, he couldn’t help looking. He knew he was making himself wait. Prolonging the sgriob. Savouring the final seconds before he looked, wondering if Sammy boy would be scared or shocked, outraged or questioning. Would that stab wound be angry or clinical, lunatic or clean? How much blood and where?

The first dead body he ever saw was the first one he photographed. Day one on photo cop duty and called out to a car smash on the M80 just north of Muirhead. A woman no more than twenty-five had gone head first through the windscreen. No seat belt, no chance.

He’d been told what had happened on his way to the crash and his stomach was already doing somersaults. He nearly threw up when he saw her lying in a shroud of broken glass in front of her Renault Clio. A smart silver car with a pair of pink hanging dice that she had vaulted past on her hurry through the glass.

The cop on the scene said she must have managed to duck her head forward because there was barely a scratch on her face. The top of her skull was smashed and the steering wheel had wrecked her chest but her face was all but unmarked. She had this clear look of determination, had been doing all she could to stay alive and protect herself. Everything that is apart from putting her seat belt on in the first place.

Tony took one photo. He had knelt a few feet away from her, snapped one then was backing away towards the barrier when the uniform came over and hissed in his ear. Asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing. Told him he had to photograph the woman from every possible angle, make sure there was no doubt whatsoever as to position, trauma, depth, scale, everything, and then when he had done that he had to photograph tyre depths, skid distances, glass shatter and all approaching junctions. Winter had known all that of course but every bit of his training disappeared from his head when he saw the woman lying on the road.

Finally, he did what he was supposed to but he didn’t stop there. Beyond the caved skull and the battered torso, the glass pattern and the skid signature, he photographed the look of business on the face of the uniformed polis that covered her up and the frightened stare of the witness who couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.

Looking back, he wondered at the nerve of tucking his own Canon SLR away in his bag beside the digital Nikon that the department provided but was glad that he did. Something about the grain of the black and white film gave it a feel that he liked. More importantly, the shots weren’t on the official memory card.

Avril Duncanson, exhibit one. He didn’t suppose he would ever forget her name if he did a million jobs. Anyway, her photographs were in his collection so there was always something there to remind him. As if it was needed. Some things you never forget. Close your eyes and they are hiding there behind your lids.

Winter snapped backed to the dreich reality of Blochairn and realized that Two Soups was huffing about him getting on with it, pushing for him to get his photographs done so that the examiners could get in about the body. He was a miserable old sod, easily Winter’s least favourite of those that could have been on scene. If the lovely Cat Fitzpatrick was at one end of the scale then Two Soups was definitely at the other. He was a pain in the arse. An old-school type who had a hatred of amateur forensics, particularly cops, who had learned all they knew from the rush of telly programmes on the subject.

But sadly for Baxter, photography always comes first at a crime scene, recording everything as is before the SOCOs get in to touch anything. It meant his time was dictated to and that wasn’t the way he thought it should be. Monkeys with cameras ought not to take precedence over highly trained scientists. This morning he was clearly pissed off that Winter hadn’t been on site earlier as well as being annoyed that he was on site at all. He didn’t say anything, just glowered. Well, he could get to fuck. Winter only had one chance to record this scene and he wasn’t going to rush it even if it was just yet another stabbing.

He lined up a full-length shot of the body and focused. Two Soups was shut out and so was the rest of the world. It was just him and Sammy Ross.

He took in the look on the face below him for the first time. Resignation. Total defeat. Not shock though. Sammy Ross had seen this coming. Now he had this thousand-yard stare and it didn’t look as if he liked what he saw.

Winter did, though. For all its ugliness, it was a thing of beauty.

Rigor mortis had begun to kick in so he must have been dead for a few hours. The knees that had given way as he buckled and fell were already locked. One arm bent under him, clutching at the hole in his chest, the other twisted at his side where he had tried to break his fall. No chance of breaking a fall like that though – it descended straight into hell.

The burgundy bloodspill soaked his jeans and drenched his light-blue T-shirt but was already drying on both. His skin was alabaster pale, his lips kissed with blue.

It was a deep incision. Through the torn, bloodied scraps of cotton, Winter could see the ripped skin where the knife had been stuck. An initial entry wound then it rose sharply up the chest tearing skin as it went. The killer had stuck it in then twisted the knife before pushing it up deeper and deadlier, seeking out vital organs to destroy. Whoever did it had used a knife before. In Glasgow, that narrowed it down to maybe a quarter of the male population between twelve and twenty-five.

Winter focused on the wound. It was almost big enough to reach inside and grab those punctured organs, enough room to get in and search for the spirit that was no longer there. The skin was split and smiling up at him, the treasures behind already starting to fester without the beat of life to sustain them.

Focus. Shoot. Every detail, from every angle. So tempting to lift the T-shirt and see the full extent of the damage but that was strictly forbidden. Look but don’t touch. Record but don’t interfere. Observe but don’t violate. Chronicle but don’t contaminate.

Designer trainers, at least?120 the pair. Hideous, flash shoes in black and gold. The Burberry cap that had tumbled off his lank, unkempt hair and lay by the side of his sleeping head. The navy-blue Ben Sherman jacket sprayed with his own blood and the Tag Heuer that was smashed on his wrist but still ticked even though his heart had stopped. It all said money. It all said bad taste. It all said trash with cash.

His blue-purple lips said no. His eyes said please. A rabbit caught in the headlights of his own destiny. Bastard child of greed and poverty.

All that was laid out in the broken body before him, writ large in the wound in his middle and on his freeze-frame face. Sammy was a picture all right.

This was why Winter took photographs. To show it how it was, every wart, every insult, every injury, because every city is defined just as much by its ugly wounds as its architecture. He’d always imagined that if you cut Glasgow’s gutterbelly, you’d see it run blue and green with bitterness but with as much hope as there was bile. It was a great city where terrible things happened, things that should never be ignored but should be captured for ever.

His job had taken him to dark places that most civilians never go, seeing bloody puddles where life used to be, recording the moment before the mourners descended. All life was there, sitting cosy right next to death.

That was the bit that always got to him, just how close they sit next to each other. A split second, a nanosecond, an angstrom from one to the next. And he was there to ensure that that precise moment, where life turns to death and hope turns to shit, is always recorded right there on their face. Recorded for ever by a Nikon FM2 and a Canon EOS-1D.

A thing of beauty really.