She checked names against posts, looking in vain for someone who had recently walked the Molendinar or explored the Odeon. No one had done the cinema but there was one report on the burn, all of seven years earlier. That didn’t hold out much promise but she’d try to check it out.

What she got from the website, more than anything, was that it all felt right. The kind of person that might walk the Molendinar would have been on OtherWorld. It was their home. And the Odeon too. It just fitted. Where it left her or the investigation, she didn’t know but she was on the right page. That much she was sure of.

Winter had sometimes wondered how many people on the site had ever wondered about his user name. Chosen after Enrique Metinides, the great Mexican tabloid photographer. The man who’d chased fires, crashes, shootings and suicides on the streets of Mexico City for over fifty years. The man who inspired Winter to pick up a camera and photograph dead people for a living.

Even if some knew or guessed then they wouldn’t think too much of it. Most of the forum users took photographs; it was intrinsic to the whole thing. Sure, some just went where they went and did nothing more than look but most took images away with them. Some for their own records, some to share the spoils with others, some just to show off. It didn’t matter, each to their own.

There were two messages lying unread in his inbox. One just an administrative memo about forum changes, the other from a name from the past. PencilPusher. Haven’t seen you online for a while, mate. Hope you’re doing okay. Stay safe. It was dated four years ago.

It wasn’t someone he knew, not as such. They’d swapped messages online, talking about places they’d been or would like to go. Stay safe. That advice would have been better sent to someone else.

Winter’s fingers moved to the search function and he typed in PencilPusher. A flurry of results came up, the most recent being just ten days old. Nothing remarkable about the post, just talk of a potential explore. It meant PencilPusher was still on the go though. Someone he could talk to. All he had to do was send him a message.

Damn it. He still wasn’t sure this was something he wanted to do and knew it was something he shouldn’t. This stuff was supposed to be locked away in a drawer marked history, only to be opened in memories and even then only when he was sufficiently drunk to turn maudlin.

You couldn’t always pick your moments though and sometimes it came to him when he least expected or wanted it. Like when his mind drifted back to the last time. To the one that made him give it up.

Chapter 26

Six years earlier

He hadn’t wanted to make the climb. Not that night anyway. It was too wet and too windy and it was madness to even consider it in conditions like that. Euan was adamant that they should do it though. You didn’t chicken out of climbing Everest because there was snow on the mountain, he’d said. If they waited for a dry night in Glasgow, they’d be waiting a long time.

The argument went on for a while. Winter’s position had been pretty simple. The Glasgow Tower at the Science Centre was a big beast and needed to be respected. Climbing it in the rain when they didn’t have to was plain stupid. Euan said they’d picked a night to do it and should stick to it. He’d already told his girlfriend Lisa that he and Winter were going for a drink that night and he’d be out late. Winter had said that was fine - they should just go for the drinks instead. No, Euan insisted, they’d checked the tower out, knew where and when to climb, it was all in place and they should just do it. Winter had said the risk wasn’t worth it. Euan responded by saying the risk was what made it worth it. Then he accused Winter of being scared. It was a simple tactic but always effective. Few men were capable of resisting it even though they knew that was why it had been said.

Winter hadn’t been happy, far from it, but he’d finally given in.

As they stood at the foot of the tower looking up into the night sky, they stared into rain swirling in the black and the neon. The tower itself was a ghostly white, rising ominously for as far as they could see.

‘You know this is stupid, right?’

‘It’s going to make us legends, mate. Anyone can do it when it’s dry. Come on, let’s climb this bad boy. You know you want to.’

Did he want to? He really wasn’t sure. Part of him did. The part that got him into this in the first place was desperate to do it, rain or not. On the other hand, he was pretty sure if Euan wasn’t standing there goading him on then he’d have turned round and gone home, waiting for another day. But he was, so they climbed.

The tower was one of those typically Scottish things that people could be proud of yet took the piss out of at the same time. It was a hundred and twenty-seven metres high and the tallest tower in Scotland. It was actually the tallest tower in the world capable of turning through three hundred and sixty degrees. Capable was the key word as it hadn’t worked for more than 80 per cent of its life. Instead it just stood there, crying out for a pair of idiots like them to climb it in the rain in the middle of the night.

They had to scale the outside of the tower, within the wide cage of curved white metal beams that was attached to the main structure and rose with it into the night. The loops that he and Hepburn passed through flamed almost orange in the artificial light and they at least gave Winter a grudging sense of security. They weren’t climbing the loops though but the frame that fastened them to the tower and provided a ready-made ladder all the way to the sky. It was the scenic route.

Euan went first, climbing arm over arm, occasionally glancing down to grin infuriatingly at Winter. See, he was saying, told you we should have done it. You can’t tell me it doesn’t feel good. And it did.

The handholds were wet but manageable under gloved hands. They called for care and attention to be paid but maybe that was a good thing, concentrating the mind as it did. It was a long way straight back down. Euan, being Euan, said it was fine because if he fell then he’d land on Winter.

He had to admit it felt great. Clambering higher and higher, the city spreading out before them like food on a plate, there to be devoured by his eyes and his camera. The adrenalin rush grew with every rung that he scaled, surging through him, empowering him. Higher and higher, bolder, stronger. The rain continued to fall but Euan was right, it was only rain. The risk was why they went urbexing at all, a huge part of the thrill of it.

They were almost at their target, the maintenance platform just a few metres below the observation deck, so maybe a hundred metres from the ground, and Winter felt like Glasgow was his.

The Squinty Bridge was winking at him, its purple arc reflected in the midnight black of the Clyde. The Science Centre and the BBC headquarters blazed in blue while the Finnieston Crane glowered disapprovingly grey from the opposite bank. Beyond all that, the city celebrated his ascent in a glow of twinkling gold. What a picture.

That’s when his foot slipped.

In an instant, the skyline swept past in a blur of neon and a rush of blood, metal handhold after handhold racing past the desperate grab of his hands. His right wrist smashed against a beam, his left knee did the same, his face clattered into something hard and his heart and stomach lodged somewhere tight beneath his throat. He plummeted, hurtling through the metal frame towards the ground, his hands flailing at the crossbars, his camera swinging wildly but strung to his shoulder.