It was just ten more minutes before the road in front of the old Great Eastern was flooded with flashing lights, police cars, an ambulance and some unmarked cars. Two minutes after that, the area was taped off and people had started to gather to gawp. He still just sat there in the dark and shivered some more.

When there were maybe twenty to thirty people on his side of the tape, Remy slid quietly out of the car and joined them. He was just another rubbernecker. Not a witness. Not the person who found the body.

There was a lot of chat behind the tape. It’ll be a junkie. Bound to be, man. Remy knew it wasn’t a junkie. Some’dy try to drown themselves? In that wee burn, don’t be stupid. I heard some’dy was shot. No they weren’t. It’ll be gangsters, man. Yeah, maybe. Maybe.

Chapter 3

There’s a phenomenon in astronomy called light echo. When a rapidly brightening object such as a nova is reflected off interstellar dust, the echo is seen shortly after the initial flash. It produces an illusion, of an echo expanding faster than the speed of light.

Tony Winter didn’t know all that much about astronomy but after years of photographing dead bodies, he knew all about the differences between light and dark.

The echoes of the flash from his camera bounced from wall to wall in the close confines of the Molendinar Tunnel, reverberating from brick to opposing brick in a heartbeat. Even if he cared, he couldn’t tell which flash was a reflection of the other. All he knew was that they were lighting up death and giving its ugliness a sheen of undeserved beauty.

The tunnel was bathed in it, the bricks glowing golden and warm and making the corpse with the wide, empty eyes seem even colder by comparison. Winter was tight against the bricks now, feeling their rough edges against his skin and clothing as he fought to get enough room to capture the body from every angle he could without disturbing it. The head, what was left of it after the tunnel creatures had gnawed and nibbled, filled his viewfinder. Dead for a month or so, he guessed. A patchwork face of pale purples and washed-out reds on a canvas of dirty beige. Most definitely not a pretty sight but an irresistible one.

The gaping, festering wound to the throat had been a clean cut once. A sharp blade had let life rush out, just as surprise had escaped from the mouth and terror from the eyes. Whoever he was, he quite literally hadn’t seen this coming. There was something else about him though, something that Winter couldn’t quite . . .

‘What do you see, Tony?’

The shout from twenty yards or so behind him came from Rachel. Newly promoted Detective Inspector Rachel Narey. His significant other. His girlfriend. His partner. Rachel.

They both had new jobs, on paper at least. She’d become part of the West’s Major Investigation Team while his paymasters had been rebranded from the Scottish Police Services Authority to the snappier Forensic Services. The truth was that this brave new world was much the same as the bad old one. She investigated murders, he photographed them.

The difference for Narey was that killer-chasing was now more of a full-time occupation. The MIT was part of Police Scotland’s newly formed Serious Crime Division and they’d taken responsibility for all homicide inquiries. There would still be other crimes on the sheet but the murders were theirs.

There was an average of a murder a week in the West of Scotland, more than enough to keep a squad on its toes. If they got backed up then the new regime meant MITs could be brought in from the other two Scottish areas to help out with cases. Inevitably, those being shipped in were about as welcome as a clown at a funeral. This time though, it was as local as it could get. It belonged to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow toon.

Narey and Winter had been meant to be going out for dinner before the call came in. It was to have been a rare and, for him, encouraging venture out together as a couple. She still wanted their relationship to be kept from her colleagues in the force but she was less agitated about that than she had been. He wasn’t what you might call an expert on relationships, particularly his own, but he was sure they were in a good place. Well, they were but for the fact they were in a damp tunnel in the dark. No one could say he didn’t know how to show a girl a good time.

Her voice came to him again, sharper this time. ‘What do you see, Tony?’

‘Just what the uniforms said. Dead guy. Throat cut.’

‘Hurry up, will you?’ The more distant voice was the pathologist, Angie Morton. ‘I don’t want to be down here any longer than I need to be.’

It had been like the start of a very bad joke. A cop, a photographer and a pathologist go into a tunnel. The difference was everyone knew the punchline.

Normal procedure hadn’t been an option. There was no way a team of forensics could have gone in there and done their stuff. Instead it had been decided to send in a mini task force of talents instead. They were to do what they could and then get the body the hell out of there.

Winter had gone first, as was always the way. At any crime scene, photographs had to get done before anything else. It had to be recorded as was. Not as was after forensics had brushed, scraped, daubed and dusted. The photographer’s work was always primary but in Winter’s case it was also primal.

‘I’ll be as long as it takes.’

His voice rolled back down the Molendinar towards where Narey and, a bit further back, Morton were waiting, obviously impatiently, to take their turn. He had to do his job first though and do it thoroughly. It was down to him to record the scene and take it back above ground so that it could be re-created by everyone that needed a bit of it.

‘Yes, well, don’t enjoy yourself too much. Get your snaps and get back out.’

Enjoy yourself. The jibe hurt more when it came from Rachel.

Winter’s liking for his work was well known and not particularly approved of by the cops. He had an enthusiasm for it that they and forensics regarded as unhealthy. Or else they just thought he was weird. Maybe he was but they didn’t get it because they simply didn’t understand.

Maybe he didn’t either.

He’d been trying to change, trying to be less . . . less like he was. Or at least be less obvious about it, he wasn’t sure which. He’d never shake it but he could handle it better.

How could you not find this interesting though? He had been buzzing with anticipation from the moment the tunnel walls had started to shrink in on them. Dead. Down here. Throat cut. It set off old feelings and memories that ran deep.

They’d tried to keep the darkness at bay with jokes as they’d walked, the kind of whistling through the graveyard stuff that was the default for those who had to see and do things that most would run a mile from. Through all the nonsense, Winter’s nose had twitched. He doubted the other two were so different though. You couldn’t, wouldn’t, get into the game if crazy stuff like this didn’t get your blood flowing. Winter’s arteries had a tsunami pumping through them.

The wide-eyed screamer in front of him was perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties. So difficult to tell beneath the decay. The damp denims that held his legs in place were soaked from the knees down and looked set to disintegrate. He wore a light blue cagoule over a white T-shirt and a navy-blue fleece, decent walking shoes on his feet, and a backpack that threatened to pitch him head first into the burn. His scalp, scarred with tracks and bites, was visible below dirty reddish-blond hair.