Witness the Dead
WITNESS
THE DEAD
During his 20-year career in Glasgow with a Scottish Sunday newspaper, Craig Robertson interviewed three recent Prime Ministers, attended major stories including 9/11, Dunblane, the Omagh bombing and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. He was pilloried on breakfast television, beat Oprah Winfrey to a major scoop, spent time on Death Row in the USA and dispensed polio drops in the backstreets of India. His debut novel,
Random
, was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger and was a
Sunday Times
bestseller
Also by Craig Robertson
Cold Grave
Snapshot
Random
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Craig Robertson, 2013
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Craig Robertson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-0-85720-419-6
Ebook ISBN 978-0-85720-421-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
To Isaac Paul Berman,
born 2nd February 2013.
Contents
Chapter 1
Early Saturday morning
They called it the City of the Dead. The sprawling Gothic land scape that perched over Glasgow and contained the remains of fifty thousand lost souls. Now it held fifty thousand and one.
The flash from Tony Winter’s camera lit up the Necropolis and threw fleeting shadows across the nearby gravestones and the twisted figure of the young woman who lay broken below them.
Along with the dark-blonde hair that was wetly plastered across her ashen face was a look of terror fitting for someone seeing their last in a Victorian graveyard. Winter shut out the angry buzz from the throng around him and saw only the girl, her skirt pulled obscenely above her waist, her arms and legs splayed wide across the flat top of the raised gravestone that she had been laid out on.
Her bare feet, streaked with dirt, hung stiffly from either side of the tomb and were being tickled by rogue blades of grass that grew tall by the grave’s edge. But the grass couldn’t cause her to shiver any more than the dank morning air or the chill wind that whirled and whistled round the Necropolis. She was as cold as the stone slab she lay on.
Under the make-up she could have been anything from eighteen to thirty, but Winter took her to be in her early twenties, Saturday-night glam turned Sunday-morning grim. Her steel-silver skirt had been short enough before her attacker left it high and, to all extents and purposes, absent. Her knickers were minimal, designed more for show than to be practical, and now lay on the grass below her. Her sparkly black top was cut low and set off by the ornate silver necklace that was now wound tightly round her throat. Its sharp edges were biting her skin and had persuaded a dry slither of burgundy to trail towards her cleavage.
Winter focused on the necklace, his lens picking out its flashy knots and the sharp tips that now met the girl’s torn flesh. He photographed her hands, placed palm up as if in supplication, the pale pink fingernails, which showed no obvious signs of having clawed at an assailant. Her skin was tanned.
Her light-blue eyes were now staring into some hell beyond her worst nightmare. Her mouth, its pink lipstick smeared, was locked in mid-scream. Winter circled her, patiently, diligently, capturing her from every angle, seizing scale, perspective and horror. Finally, he stood back and took a full-length shot, encapsulating the dignity that had been stolen from her along with her life.
Words from behind him began to invade his focus, distracting him from the job he had to do.
Raped
.
Strangled
.
Ritualistic
.
Barbaric
.
Winter realised it was probably the first time he had truly taken in what anyone else was saying from the moment that he and DI Derek Addison had crossed the Bridge of Sighs into the Necropolis itself. As soon as they had got out of Addison’s car, he knew that his
sgriob
, that tingle of anticipation at the prospect of photographing what lay ahead, was flaring furiously. He’d itched to see what lay on top of the hill that loomed darkly before them and it tingled again when he’d seen the faint glow of light behind the summit that signalled where the others had already gathered.
He’d been almost in a dream as Addison led him through the knot of people gathered around the girl. As they’d parted to reveal the brutal sight on top of the tomb, Winter was struck as much with the guilty pang of an undeclared pleasure as with revulsion. Photographing the dead, particularly those so horrifically murdered, gave him an inexcusable thrill that he didn’t dare try to explain, far less justify, even to himself.
They stood almost reverentially and watched while he worked, their own disgust largely subsumed by professionalism. It was Addison’s words that finally broke his focus.
‘So where are her shoes?’ the DI muttered. Then, louder, ‘Where are her fucking shoes?’
‘We’ve looked within a forty-yard circle of the grave, sir,’ piped up Sandy Murray, the first of the uniformed constables at the scene. ‘But we haven’t seen anything. We’ll do a wider search once the sun is up properly.’
Addison nodded but one of the new DCs, Fraser Toshney, interrupted him before he could reply.
‘Maybe they turned back into something else at midnight.’ He grinned blackly. ‘Along with her pumpkin coach and ball gown made from rags.’
The rest of the team held their collective breaths as Addison fixed Toshney with a furious stare.
‘Son, you’re new round here, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that that was a nervous mistake. But if the phrase Cinderella Killer appears in any fucking newspaper, then I’m holding you personally responsible. Do you understand me?’
Toshney reddened and stammered an apology.
‘Yes, boss. I was only . . . Sorry. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. Just go and find me a witness from some of the scumbags here in the middle of the night. Anyway, the slippers don’t turn back into anything. They were given to her by her Fairy Godmother, you ignorant bastard. Now piss off.’
Addison knew that the breathing part-time residents of the Necropolis, the neds and drunks with their bottles of Buckfast, sleeping bags and discarded needles, had doubtless scattered at the first sign of the approaching plods. Even if Toshney was able to find any of them, it would most likely achieve the square root of hee-haw in terms of useful information. The DC knew it too but wasn’t stupid enough to annoy Addison further, so disappeared over the hill with a nod to one of the uniforms to follow him.
‘Okay,’Addison barked as Toshney left.‘Now that we are one fuckwit less, let’s continue. Her handbag is just off the path, money in it but no ID. Not a robbery, then, as if we hadn’t already guessed. And any ID that was in there was probably taken to slow us down. Constable Murray, you and your troops search on the perimeter for places he might have dumped it.’
The cop nodded without much enthusiasm.
‘Mr Baxter,’ Addison continued, ‘if you could examine any ground that hasn’t been trampled all over and see if you can tell me if she was wearing shoes on her way up here. Presuming that she did walk here, that is.’
Campbell Baxter, the rotund, grey-bearded crime-scene manager, frowned at being told how to do his job but acquiesced grimly.
For the first time, Winter looked across the gravestone and saw DS Rachel Narey looking back at him. It was barely a month since they, or more accurately she, had agreed it would be better if they split up, and here they were, staring at each other across the cold of an early Glasgow morning, a body between them. Their relationship had always been a secret from everyone else and now its ending was similarly wrapped in silence.
He saw her seek his eyes above the mêlée, a shared moment, nothing more than a raising of eyebrows, but it said everything. This was bad.
They watched Addison crouch by the girl’s body, slowly working his way round the tombstone, his head at times uncomfortably close to the girl’s semi-naked body. Narey’s expression flashed distaste.
Addison finished his circumnavigation and stood, his eyes briefly closing over and exhaling hard. Even for a flippant, war-weary soldier like him, it was harder going than he wished to admit.
He finally turned to Cat Fitzpatrick, the pathologist at the scene, and gestured for her to join him.
‘External signs would suggest she’s had sex recently,’ he said to her. ‘Agreed?’
Fitzpatrick nodded her accord.
‘So, Ms Fitzpatrick,’ Addison continued, ‘I would be grateful if you could tell me two things. One, was she raped? Two, was she alive when it happened?’
Fitzpatrick sighed.
‘We’ll need to get her back to base to give you a definitive answer, but I’ll give you an opinion before we get off this hill. Although I’ll give you an opinion on something else for nothing. The bastard who did this needs his bollocks cut off.’
‘No argument here,’ Addison said softly.
As Fitzpatrick went to work, Addison went over to Narey to get her take on the night’s events, leaving Winter to quietly take shots of the small but busy crowd of cops and forensics gathered in the gloom above the city. He reeled off as many scene-setting pictures as he could despite the risk of the flashgun alerting his subjects to what he was up to. He caught the look of compassion on Cat Fitzpatrick’s face as she worked her way up from the dead girl’s shoeless feet. He framed the solemn discussion between Addison and Narey, his best mate and his former girlfriend, the pair charged with the heavy responsibility of finding out who had done this. He also photographed a young WPC standing on the edge of the group, looking lost and frightened, her damp eyes always returning to the body on the slab. Moving back six feet, he changed his angle and managed to position a seated angel behind the girl, the sculpture’s shadowy head turned away as if the pain of looking was all too much. It was all he needed.
As he lowered his camera and walked towards Addison and Rachel, he slowly tuned into their terse conversation.
‘Is this place not supposed to be locked up at night?’ she was asking him.
‘It is, but there’s always a way in,’ he replied. ‘You can’t keep people out of a place like this if they’re determined enough.’
‘Yes, but surely they can be kept out if they’re carrying a body,’ Narey countered. ‘I don’t see how he could have slipped through or over railings if he had to carry her as well.’