Her guts told her to change the set-up. She rearranged the displays, pushing Hepburn, Cairns and Feeks to one side, and the remainder to the other. It wasn’t what she knew, it was what she felt. She’d just finished and was looking at the faces afresh when she heard footsteps behind her.

A constable had walked in, mug of tea in hand, and was waiting to speak to her.

‘DI Narey? You’d asked for CCTV footage to be pulled overnight. We’ve got some images for you.’

She felt a rush that she knew was the first sign of good news in a long time. ‘Great. Let’s go see them.’

The constable, Tom Brightman, stood beside her as another, Lyndsay McEwan, operated the video. The image that came up was typically grainy and not helped by the falling light at the time it was filmed.

‘We have shots of three people, we think all men, all going separately towards the Gray Dunn building on Stanley Street,’ Brightman explained. ‘None of the images are particularly good and I’d say at least two of them were making an effort to keep their heads down and faces out of sight.’

‘Show me.’

One by one, the operator showed the stop-start images. The digital time display in the top corner stated that there were eighteen and then twelve minutes between the men appearing on the corner of Stanley Street. The first was about six foot tall and wore a light blue fleece with his head kept low. After him came Remy Feeks, his fair hair obvious and the only one of the three not shy of being seen. Maybe he ought to have been. Finally, came a taller man wearing a hoodie and what might have been a dark balaclava.

The camera had picked each of them up a couple of times and had done the same for two of them, Feeks and the hoodie-wearer, on Milnpark Street.

‘I can hopefully pick them up elsewhere and trace them back a bit but it’s a real needle in a haystack job,’ McEwan told her. ‘There’s not a lot of cameras down there so it will be a case of guessing where they’d come from. I’ll do my best but it will take time.’

Narey said nothing. Her mind was working overtime, joining dots and hoping against hope.

‘This is what we’ve got of them on the way out,’ McEwan continued. ‘Just man number three. He’s in a hurry and goes onto Admiral Street and that’s where we lose him. He’s probably headed for Paisley Road West but as yet we haven’t picked him up again. If he changed his jacket or ditched the balaclava—’

‘What about man number one?’ She hardly dared to ask.

Brightman shrugged. ‘If he came back out onto Stanley then we haven’t been able to see him.’

‘Show me him again.’

It was the way he walked, hunched and hurried. It was the fleece he was wearing. It was the height and the build.

More than that. It was Euan Hepburn. It was the forum user with the login name of Metinides. It was curtailed conversations and a feeling of distance. It was a lack of questions about a case that would normally have produced far too many. It was the feeling in her guts that had been niggling away at her for over a week.

She excused herself and hurried back to the incident room, to the phones where the anonymous call had been received about the witness in the Molendinar. The tip-off about Remy Feeks. She checked the log then called up the recording.

The voice was slightly muffled and deliberately low. The man was putting it on, trying to disguise himself. It might have fooled most people but not her. Not for a moment. She felt her stomach sink and lurch. The room had shifted on its axis and her throwing up was a distinct possibility.

‘DI Narey?’

She put the phone down and stepped away from it before she turned. Constable Brightman was by the door.

‘Sorry, DI Narey, but do you want me to get these images on Stanley Street enlarged and sharpened up so they can be made available for posters or media use?’

She looked back at him. The question should have been expected but it managed to take her by surprise.

‘Yes. Please.’

‘All three men?’

She paused just for a heartbeat. ‘Yes. All three.’

Chapter 50

Winter woke on Sunday morning with the biggest hangover he’d ever had without touching a drop of alcohol. Sleep had come late if it had come at all and he’d tossed and turned the whole night, plagued by memory and guilt as much as by the pain in his leg and his back.

He’d dragged himself into the shower and suffered the sting of the jets of water against his bruised and broken skin. However painful it was, he deserved it.

Somehow, when the buzzer went at the front door, he knew instantly who it would be. It didn’t occur to him that it could be anyone other than Rachel.

A couple of minutes later, he stood at his open door and watched her come up the stairs with the wind at her back. Her speed didn’t mean that much in itself; for her that kind of urgency could mean many things. He sought clues in her eyes but couldn’t quite read her. She wasn’t happy but he could have told that without looking. The question was whether she was unhappy with him. And how much.

She paused briefly as she got to the door, a hand rising unexpectedly and caressing the side of his face as she looked into his eyes. Her touch electrified him as if she’d plugged his veins into a power socket. He was still trying to work out just what it signified when she walked past him into the flat. He trailed in her wake, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his leg and doing his best not to limp. She slipped off her coat and dropped it onto a chair before dropping herself onto the sofa.

She let her eyes slide shut and air escape wearily from her lips like someone who’d been told they’d only have to run one more marathon that day. When she opened them again, her eyes were full of questions. She kept them to herself for a bit, weighing him up as if deciding whether to kiss him or kill him.

When she finally spoke, she sounded tired but there was also a low flame under her voice that scared him. ‘What the hell are we in the middle of here, Tony?’

Truth or lies? Maybe it was too late for either. ‘Nothing good.’

She laughed softly and with no humour. ‘Oh I’d figured that much out. I’ve had a lovely night and a fun morning. Do you want to hear about it?’

He was a mouse and she was the cat, flicking him from one clawed paw to the other.

‘Sure.’

‘Sure? Okay. Well last night I got called to the Gray Dunn biscuit factory. Maybe half an hour after you’d taken your photographs and left. Someone had the sense to realize that the location fitted with my investigation. I had the pleasure of dealing with that little shit Denny Kelbie but he was the least of my worries. I had another urbexing death. At least number three, possibly number six. The pressure I’ve been under ratcheted up another notch. But even that wasn’t my biggest problem.’

His stomach fell a couple of feet and he wasn’t sure he could swallow.

‘I managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep and got back in this morning to find the nightshift had called in all the CCTV we could get our hands on. The interesting images were of three men walking, separately and at different times, towards the factory in the hour or so before the services were called. The images weren’t great quality but one of them was recognizable. If you knew them very well.’

He said nothing. He couldn’t speak.

‘I think it was the fleece that gave it away. I bought that for you last Christmas.’