He’d seen it before — many times. The guy was young and nervous, aggressive in his uniform because he was trying to cover the fact that he was shitting himself. Other people might have been riled at his attitude or thought he should ‘man up’ and get on with it; not Winter. He just wanted to know what was so bad behind the lines that it made the cop look so utterly lost. The second Winter saw the guy’s eyes, shifting left and right in near panic, he had a hard-on for whatever was waiting to be photographed.
As soon as he got behind the tape, he sought out Aaron Sutton and spotted him waving his arms around furiously and yelling at his cops to get the gathering crowd of locals further back. Winter looked round but could see nothing that merited the level of chaos that was ensuing. There were definite shades of the crowd in Swanston Street when the dog had been sliced in two: loonies baying at the cold moon and a powder keg of resentment that just needed an excuse to blow. There was no sign of blood but there was the smell of it in the air and that was always guaranteed to get crowds going loopy. As Winter scanned the scene from inside the line, he got a real sense of people pushing in and on edge. With a sinking feeling, he wondered if that was all that was responsible for the young cop wetting himself. Then he saw Aaron Sutton and the look on his face.
It was way different from the constable’s — Sutton was far too long in the tooth to suffer those kind of nerves — but his weary and worried look was all the more telling for that. Winter felt the potential for terrible things tickling his adrenalin.
He hurried over to Sutton; the DI saw his approach and studied Winter with something that looked a whole lot like he was seriously pissed off. Winter didn’t have any doubt that the enraged look in Sutton’s eyes was aimed directly at him.
‘So what have we got?’ Winter asked him, trying to preempt the questions that seemed certain to come from Sutton.
The DI stared back at him and Winter instinctively knew that Sutton was struggling between giving him a hard time and having to get on with the job at hand.
‘Two hands. Sliced clean off and left lying in the snow.’
‘Where are they? And where’s the guy they were cut from?’
‘One over there,’ Sutton pointed. ‘And one over there. And it’s “guys”. Plural.’
‘How do you know it’s not just one victim?’
‘Well, it’s possible. But only if he had two right hands.’
‘What?’
‘Keep up. We have a right hand over there and another right hand over there. This ring any bells with you, Tony?’
Winter ignored the loaded question as best he could and asked one of his own, more in the hope of deflection than anything else.
‘So what have we got? A Sharia law vigilante ninja? Someone cutting the hands off thieves?’
Sutton’s head tilted to the side and he raised his eyebrows in a show of scepticism. It was a look straight out of the Addison school. Winter gabbled a response to the unasked query.
‘I will tell you as soon as I can, Aaron. I promise you that. How about I take some photographs?’
Sutton grimaced.
‘Forensics were here ahead of you. Give me one reason why I need you to take photographs of this scene.’
‘Look through my camera,’ he suggested to Sutton, turning the viewfinder towards the cop.
‘Are you kidding me? I’ve got two bastards running around somewhere with their hands cut off plus a mob ready to go Tonto at any minute. And you want me to say cheese?’
‘Just do it. It’ll show you why you need me to do this job.’
Sutton muttered something but did it anyway.
‘Okay. So what the fuck am I supposed to be looking at? I can’t see a thing.’
‘Exactly. That’s what you’ll get if the forensics do pics of the scene in the dark. They will be okay with close-up stuff, not exactly technically brilliant but usable, I guess. But if you want a shot of this scene, then they’ll be as much use as a chocolate teapot.’
Sutton looked sceptical.
‘So what do you suggest?’
‘You need a timed exposure. I can do that; they can’t.’
Sutton swore under his breath.
‘Okay but this better be good. And you better tell me what you can when you can. I don’t need any of this crap. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.’
Winter knew the secrets of night-time photography, particularly the first rule, which was that it was as tricky as hell. Basically, all photographs rely on light reflecting back to the camera; when you don’t have light, that’s a problem. In US crime dramas they’ll most likely bring in large floodlights or generators and illuminate the scene. The problem with reality is that American television has a bigger budget than Strathclyde cops. A good camera flash does the job for evidence you can get within a few feet of but if you want something more, then the photographer has to get tricky too.
‘I want all the cop cars to turn off their lights,’ Winter told Sutton.
‘You’re joking me, right?’
‘Nope. They’ll mess up what I’m going to try to do. They need to go. I’ll set up, then tell you when I want the lights off. It will take…’ Winter looked at the sky. ‘Four minutes.’
He walked over to where Sutton had pointed previously and saw the first of the two hands, ivory pale but peppered with blood and severed neatly just above the wrist. A blood trail ran off across the snow and ice in the direction of Croftspar Place and there were already yellow numbered markers dotting the direction in which the victim had disappeared. Winter managed to resist the urge to photograph it there and then, knowing the entire scene shot wasn’t going to keep for much longer. He checked out the second hand and, sure enough, it too had the thumb on the left as it faced down into the snow, blotchy patches of firebrick red staining the white pillow it lay on.
He pulled himself away from the hands and went to his car, battling his way through the angry crowd of onlookers, and dragged a tripod back to the scene. Given the length of time his shot was going to take, there was no way he could take the chance of any movement that would ruin it. He switched his camera to the ‘bulb’ setting and fixed it to the tripod, making sure his lens was taking in both spots where the hands were.
‘Right,’ he told Sutton. ‘Ready.’
‘Make this as quick as you can.’
Sutton turned to signal to the cops and in an instant the lights of five police cars and two ambulances were switched off, causing an anxious buzz to break out from the gathered mob.
‘Hey, whit the fuck’s going on?’
‘What are they bastards up tae?’
Winter shut out the crowd as best as he could and opened the shutter. Normally, the shutter speed is like the blink of an eye, open for no more a thirtieth of a second — plenty of time for light to flood in. To open it enough to light up this scene was going to take a whole lot longer and, although he could have programmed a setting on the camera, he preferred to do it by hand, judgement and feel. There was no getting away from the fact that he liked the sense of power it gave.
The hordes roared round him and he longed to photograph them too but knew that his flash wouldn’t do them justice. Nor could he move the camera now that the process of opening the shutter had begun. All he could hope was that some of the faces behind the line, inquisitive, angry and vengeful, would be captured above the focus of the scene itself.