‘They’re up tae something!’
‘Why’ve they switched the lights aff oan the motors?’ ‘Let’s riot these cunts.’
Winter held firm, the shutter lead steady in his hand, loving it. Some of the cops didn’t look like they were enjoying it quite so much. They were anxious, fretfully looking round the crowd and urging the darkness to end. They stared at Winter too, as if they could force him to end the exposure simply through the power of thought.
‘Get the lights on.’
‘Get the pigs.’
‘Get oot of here, ya bastards.’
From the corner of his eye, Winter saw something move from the right. He whirled his head round but whatever it was had already gone by him, landing with a crash of breaking glass on the road. One of the local eejits had thrown a bottle, causing a huge cheer to go up and the crowd to swell forward.
‘Winter! Get this over with,’ Sutton shouted at him. ‘McKie, Collins, find whoever threw that bottle and drag him out of the crowd.’
‘How do we know who it was, sir?’ PC Collins shouted back over the rising din.
‘It doesn’t fucking matter,’ Sutton blasted. ‘They’re all guilty of it. Just grab someone.’
There was still more than a minute left on the time Winter had estimated it was going to need to get a decent exposure and he was determined to give it every second. The time was being stretched to breaking point by the nonsense going on around them and the cops on the front line were getting more antsy with each passing second. Glares were being fired at him as he stood by the camera, seemingly doing nothing. His head raced with thoughts of Sam Dunbar and Tommy Baillie, of how he was going to square things with both the leader of the Stirling travellers and Aaron Sutton.
Thirty seconds left and he saw two bodies being plucked out of the mob by McKie and Collins and being tossed into the back of a van. All it did was enflame the situation and make the crowd surge and yell. Twenty seconds and Sutton was standing right beside him now. He was talking but all Winter could hear was the roaring pack, the rush of blood in his ears, the pounding of his heart. The more pressure he was under to finish the shot, the more his adrenalin coursed through his veins. Ten seconds. A hooded figure broke the ranks and charged towards a copper. Five seconds. They could wait. Four. Three. Two. One. Done.
Winter ended the exposure and the moment. Chaos ensued all around but he had his photograph. Dipping his head to the display, he saw immediately that he had indeed turned night into day, seeing detail, contour and evidence where there had previously been just darkness.
He nodded at Sutton and the DI cursed softly before turning to wave at his drivers and the vehicle lights were immediately switched on, flooding the area and inevitably causing fresh consternation among the crowd.
‘You’re a prick,’ Sutton muttered, with a resigned shake of his head. ‘You going to make all this hassle worth my while?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘You’d better. I’m not having some nutter running around chopping hands off people. It’s bad for business.’
Winter watched with a pang of jealousy as the crime scene guys moved in on the two severed hands, removing them and taking them back to the lab for the easiest bit of fingerprint analysis they’d ever do. The chances of the victims being on record were high and they’d know their identities within the hour. Getting them to talk would be a different matter but Winter was sure he knew who the swordsman was. The big question was what the hell was he going to do with the information.
Nearly two hours later a newly printed image was hot in his hands, the result of the timed exposure. He was pleased with the effort; the scene was nicely and spookily lit up. The two bloodied hands could easily be seen, as could the crowd behind the police barriers. Winter was fascinated by the contorted faces of the mob, all twisted rage and vented spleen, rough-hewn figures straight out of a Peter Howson painting, caricature products of their environment. Because of the exposure time, most of them had moved and wore blurred expressions of fury that only seemed to exaggerate their sense of being beyond reason. Only one figure was almost completely in focus and must have remained still despite the chaos around him.
Tall and broad, he had thick dark hair and wore a full-length black leather coat. He was serious and surly rather than angry like those around him. Above all, he stood out from the rest because he was calm. He seemed to be staring not quite directly at the camera but close enough, perhaps at DI Sutton or the other cops nearby. Winter had only been given the vaguest of descriptions of him before but there was little doubt in his mind that he was looking at Sam Dunbar.
CHAPTER 32
All it had taken was a single phone call to the General Teaching Council for Scotland and one returned to where Narey sat impatiently in Stewart Street. Within minutes, identity confirmed, she was given the home address of Gregory Alexander Deans. He was head of the maths department at Cleveden Secondary and lived just three miles away in Vancouver Road, Scotstoun.
It was a long frustrating day waiting for a time when she could be confident that Deans would be home. Narey had been tempted to pay him a visit at school but decided against it in the end. Storming into a classroom, a staffroom or even the head teacher’s office had its appeal but she knew it could ultimately work against her. She didn’t have that much she could use as leverage against the man and knew he would be well within his rights to demand that she leave the school.
If Deans was a blackmail victim, then there were a couple of things she could deduce from that. First of all, he had something to hide; innocent people don’t get blackmailed. Secondly, he hadn’t been to the cops to tell them; innocent people don’t do that either. If he was afraid, then she wanted him to be more afraid; she didn’t want him in a place where he felt secure and protected. No, she decided she would wait until he was home and in the bosom of his family. She was pretty sure they wouldn’t be in on whatever dirty little secret he was trying to keep quiet.
She couldn’t stay away completely though and drove out to Vancouver Road just before noon to check the place out. It was a leafy, middle-class street but the set-up was slightly odd, with housing on one side and expansive rear gardens on the other, trees peering down onto the road. The Deans residence was a whitewashed mock Tudor house, which neatly matched the snowy lawn that sat behind a low railing. There was something comfortable and welcoming about it, Narey decided as she sat in her car with the engine running and the heat at full blast. It would clearly cost a right few quid but it had no air or graces — a house far too Scottish to do anything as brash as boast about what it was worth. There were few clues as to the kind of people who lived there though; all she could see through the windows was the dark promise of something unknown.
Narey knew she couldn’t sit too long on the quiet street, her car billowing exhaust fumes into the frozen air, without someone calling the police. She imagined it was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else and strangers and their cars stuck out like sore thumbs. She wasn’t going to gain anything by having Deans tipped off about her arrival.
Instead she put the car into gear and moved off, turning onto Earlbank Avenue and heading for Milngavie. She hadn’t been to see her dad in five days and the sudden realisation filled her with guilt. She had been so busy thinking about putting the lake killing right she’d forgotten about the person she was doing it for in the first place.