There was a two-car pile-up outside the Cramond Brig Hotel, in which Skinner and Masters counted eight bodies, before the DCC ripped the negative from the viewer. There were shots of pedestrian accidents, most of them involving children, but one of a man, his head and upper body protruding from beneath the double front wheels of a heavy vehicle. Not all the deaths had been road casualties. There were scenes of a family of three burned to death in a house fire, bodies shining white in the negative image. There was film from another incident on a railway line, in which they could make out a woman’s severed torso beside the track.
Three times, Skinner asked Pamela to leave him to the grim task, and three times she refused, saying that if he wanted her to leave he would have to order her. Each time, smiling at her tenacity, he had pulled out another rack of negatives.
They had been surveying the grim scenes for almost three hours when they found the negatives which they were beginning to fear had been lost after all. There were four strips each bearing file number FA 4782. As soon as Skinner fed the first image into the viewer and switched on the back-lit screen, he knew. They had learned to read colours in negative, and when the DCC saw the light-brown shape of a tree, he stiffened and recoiled slightly.
It was a long shot, taken from the other side of the road, but the shapes of the car against the tree, and of the figure inside were clearly visible. All of the photographs on the strip had been taken from a distance, recording the crash from all around the vehicle, most of them showing the direction in which the Cooper S had been travelling.
Skinner withdrew the strip and fed in the next. The first frame, the second, the third and the fourth showed, from different distances and angles, deep tyre tracks in a patch of mud on the road. He pulled the strip through to the fifth photograph.
Pamela Masters cried out in horror as it appeared. It had been taken through the shattered windscreen and showed a close-up of Myra’s body in the car, the steering column through her chest, her eyes staring wide at the sheer surprise of her last second of life.
Bob Skinner sucked in his breath and looked away. Suddenly he was back in his dream, thrust back into the depths of his recovered memory, seeing everything, hearing everything, smelling everything.
‘Come on,’ he said, thickly, to Pamela. ‘This is what we came for.’ He forced himself to look back at the screen, ripping images through quickly, one by one, looking for the right angle, hoping against hope that it was there.
It was the eighth shot on the fourth strip. The attending officer had taken the photograph from the exact point at which Skinner had looked into the car. The field of vision of the lens seemed to replicate his memory exactly.
He picked up a small magnifying glass which he had found in the studio, and held it close to the bottom right-hand corner of the negative image, searching, millimetre by millimetre. Suddenly, he stopped. His left hand shot out and grabbed Pamela’s arm. ‘There, Pam, there. Look.’ He leaned back, holding the glass steady to allow her to see the spot upon which it was trained.
‘I can’t make out detail from this, but I’ll swear that’s the brake fluid pipe. You can see, it’s been broken.
‘When Tam gets back, I’ll have him make me a print of this section, big as he can. Then, pray God, I . . . we’ll . . . have what we need.’
55
The drive down to Alnwick took just over two hours: because Martin, driving his swift silver Mondeo with McIlhenney in the passenger seat, did not wish to suffer the embarrassment of tripping one of the many speed cameras on the A1; because behind them came a dark blue Ford Transit with black barred windows, and six burly uniformed policemen inside; and because, for the first time in several days, there was, simply, no need to rush.
Martin had never been to the old Northumbrian town before, but street signs took him, without difficulty, to its police station, past its castle and its prison.
Leaving the escort officers outside in the Transit they announced themselves to the Sergeant in reception, and were greeted within seconds by a uniformed Chief Inspector. ‘Howay, gentlemen,’ the forty-something man said, cheerily, ‘I’m Frank Berry. Hope we didn’t spoil your Sunday, but my lads were very pleased at catching your fugitive for you. They couldn’t wait for me to tell you about it, in fact.’
‘You didn’t spoil our Sunday, Chief Inspector,’ said Martin, with a grin. ‘In fact you made it. We’ve had a parade of cock-ups in our investigations this weekend, so we were needing a break like this.
‘Where are you keeping McCartney and Kirkbride?’
‘We’ve got them banged up in separate cells. McCartney’s already been charged with failing to stop for a police signal, and with doing almost a hundred and thirty trying to get away from my guys. We’ll want him back for our magistrates on both those counts.’
Chief Inspector Berry shook his head in wonderment. ‘You wouldn’t have thought one of those big old round-bodied Rovers could go that fast, but it did. We only just got the roadblock in position in time. Just for a second, my lads thought they were going to try to crash through it.’
He looked at Martin as he led the two Scots through to a room behind the reception desk. Its window overlooked the station’s secure car park. ‘That’s the flying machine across there,’ said Berry, pointing to a big white Rover 3500s, reversed into the far corner of the yard. Its registration bore an A prefix, and in another era it might have been a police vehicle.
‘What do you want to do with these two?’ the Chief Inspector went on. ‘You’ll want to caution McCartney formally and arrest him on the attempted extortion charge. You can interview him here if you like, or you can just lift him straight away. I assume we’ll just let his mate go. We’ve nothing to hold him on.’
Martin smiled and shook his head. ‘Oh no, Frank, we want Willie Kirkbride too. We’ve got another matter to discuss with him and McCartney, one that’s far more important than a wee bit of half-hearted intimidation for a loanshark. Let’s have a word with them both now, if we may.’
‘Okay, sir.’ Berry opened the door and barked an order to the Sergeant on reception. One minute later, the door opened once again and two men were bustled into the room, each in the grasp of two Constables.
Ricky McCartney was just under six feet tall, and built like a barrel, with black greasy hair and heavy brows, over dark, brooding, threatening eyes. His jutting jaw was black with a day-old stubble. Beneath his crumpled grey jacket he looked to be massively built, with long arms, which lent a simian look to his overall appearance. His companion, Kirkbride, was an inch or two taller. His pinched face was unshaven like McCartney’s, with a greying beard which looked as long as the remaining hair on his bald head. He had mean, nasty eyes which darted all around the room, save at Martin and McIlhenney.
The escort officers shoved both men down, roughly, into seats at the interview table. McCartney, a heavy hand on each of his shoulders, looked up at Martin, briefly, then across at McIlhenney. ‘You!’ he said, with a snarl. ‘I might have known you’d show up.’
The big Sergeant nodded. ‘Bet on it, Ricky. I’ve never forgotten that time I broke your nose, see. I’d go anywhere for another shot. You’re all right, guys like you and Tommy Heenan, with someone you’ve got outnumbered, or you know you can lean on. But you never fight in your own weight division, because you haven’t got the fucking bottle.’
‘Heenan?’ said McCartney, ‘What about Heenan?’
‘Come off it, Ricky,’ said Martin. ‘You know damn well. As soon as you heard that we had lifted Heenan for Carl Medina’s murder, you did a runner. Because you were with him last weekend at Medina’s house when you went to give him an eighteen hundred-pound message, and because you knew that we’d be after you too.’