The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter (Glasgow Trilogy) (15 page)

To the scene. There’s nothing else to get out of her. Fisher has what he needs for now anyway. It was a professional hit. Very professional. They knew exactly what they
needed to do, and they did it without a single hiccup. Didn’t even speak a word. Most of the idiots who try to set themselves up as killers are just dreamers. Small brains, big ambition. They
see these things in the movies and they think it’s all so easy. They go in all guns blazing. They shout their mouths off. They want credit when they get it right. They want to be celebrities.
They get caught. The depressing truth is that the gunmen who get caught are the shitty ones. The talented ones know how to avoid that fate. Talented ones, like these two.

Nearly four o’clock in the morning now. Fisher gets out of the car and takes in the street. Not hard to see how they did it. Sit in the car somewhere down the street. Watch them come home.
Wait five minutes. If she takes him upstairs, she switches on the light in the bedroom. Then switches it off, goes downstairs and switches on the light in the living room. They know how many people
are in the house, and they can guess where each is. Easy. Going to need to get a hold of the taxi driver. He might have spotted something. And this guy who shared the taxi with them. Might be
interesting to find out who he is. Could be very interesting.

They kick the door in. Does that tally? He’s thinking as he walks up the front path. If you know it’s just the two of them in there, and one of them’s downstairs, do you need
to kick the door in? Surely they guess that he’s upstairs and she’s down. So you knock, don’t you? You knock, and when she answers, you force your way in. That’s how they
tend to do it. Make as little noise as possible before you fire the gun. That’s the way the pros try to do it. She said the first she heard of them was a bang on the door, like someone
throwing something at it. The first kick. Then they kick it in. Doesn’t sit well with their professionalism elsewhere.

Into the house. A forensic team already there. A DC comes across and shakes his hand, tells him where to find the body. Fisher nods, but doesn’t say anything. He’s trying to see what
they saw. They come in the door, go straight to the living room. She’s there, drinking a glass of whiskey. There’s a glass on the cabinet on the far side of the room. A single glass, he
notes. Okay. So one of them stays with her, pointing the gun at her. She stays there, not moving. Not speaking. And the second one goes upstairs.

Fisher makes his way up the stairs. The body is still in the house, going to be moved in the next hour. Single bullet wound, he knows that already. There’s a smell as he walks in through
the open bedroom door. Piss. The figure is lying on the bed. Not a lot of blood. A little has run down the side of his neck from a wound under the chin. Sort of thing you see when someone kills
themselves with a small handgun, he’s thinking. The man’s pissed himself. Before or after being shot? Wasn’t from fear anyway – no way he was awake when he was killed. Not
unless there’s a second wound that he can’t see. He must have been lying like this when the killer entered the room. May have pissed himself after he was shot. It happens.

He looks more closely at the man. Typical middle-aged small-time dealer. A little overweight. Not too handsome. If his knowledge of Winter is correct, then not a big player. Not a big earner.
Surprising that he has a house this decent. Surprising that he has a girlfriend who could obviously do better. Need to find out more about their relationship. Find out how long they’ve been
together, what sort of life they lived. He’s looking round the room. No sign of any struggle. Even if you’re pissed, you fight for your life. He was already unconscious. All the killer
had to do was put the gun to his head and pull the trigger.

‘Bullet’s still in there,’ one of the forensic team says to him, breaking his train of thought.

Taking in the room. Two wine glasses on the dresser, one empty wine bottle. She hadn’t mentioned that. Need to find out about that. He can see that the forensic mob want him out of their
way. They have their scientific wonderment to be getting on with, and he’s blocking the path to the body. Fisher steps back to the bedroom doorway. So the killer kills. Then what? You turn
out a light when you leave a room. Did he? Need to find that out as well. Find out the ID of the first cop on the scene, get some proper detail. Don’t rely on a report. Get it from the
horse’s mouth. Few people write with the same sense of detail as they speak. You don’t get the mood of the place and people from a report.

Back down the stairs. His mate standing just inside the living room. The living-room door is directly opposite the bottom of the stairs. His cohort hears him coming down the stairs, no need to
speak. They leave. Back out the front door, back to their car. Did they have a driver? Could be looking for three men rather than two. May not have felt they needed one. They didn’t. Textbook
job. Easy. You avoid using a third man if you can. The pros make sure they use no more people than is necessary. Probably no driver. Can’t rule it out, though. Got to talk to that taxi
driver, and the guy who shared the taxi.

Fisher is standing out on the front doorstep. Breathe in the cold night air. Did any of the neighbours hear the gunshot? They’re all up now. Lights in every house. Nosy bastards peeping
around curtains. Heard the sirens, heard the chatter. One of them might have something interesting to say about their deceased neighbour and his girlfriend. One of them might have seen a strange
car in the street. Sort of place where people notice that sort of thing. Sort of place where people have nothing better to do. If one of them hears the gunshot and runs to a window, they might have
seen the killers leave. Might have seen what car they got into.

Hard to catch a pro. Relying on a lot of unreliable things. Give her a few hours, then question Cope again. Find out what club they were at. Get CCTV from there. They might have been followed
home from the club. Slim chance, but worth the trouble. It’ll help them to ID the taxi driver who took them home. That’ll help. She won’t know who it was. Don’t trust the
taxis. Too many of them tied up in the criminal business. Find out who the driver was. Find out if he might have tipped people off about movements. Then question the guy who shared the taxi. Is he
involved in the criminal world? Was he there to make sure Winter got home safe and sound? Get him home pissed. Make the hit that much easier. Possible.

Not a lot more that he can glean from the scene. The first thing he’ll do is find out who the first cops on the scene were. If they’re still on shift, then have them come and see
him. If not, get them as soon as they’re back on tomorrow. Not urgent enough to warrant getting them out of bed if they’ve already gone home. They’ll have filed reports.
That’ll do for now. Only for now.

Fisher is driving back to the station. You never know how these investigations will pan out, but it already feels like a long shot. As the police become more professional, so do the people
they’re up against. People learn how to avoid all the new tricks they develop. More and more, the ones they’re catching are the dregs. They get the occasional good one, but that takes
so much more work than it used to. Smart lawyers make life difficult. The police spend so much time on that one good catch that they lose sight of other targets. Fisher has become convinced that
the approach is wrong. They need to better target the people at the top of the tree, forget about the gunman halfway down.

It’s after ten o’clock when Calum wakes up. He often sleeps late. He still feels the exhaustion of last night. It was after four when he finally got to sleep. Most
people don’t sleep at all after that sort of job. The adrenalin won’t let them. They stay up, they do things. There’s not a lot that can be done in the middle of the night.
Perhaps those with girlfriends have something to do, he’s thinking. And then he’s thinking about what sort of girlfriend he could have in his life. One who understands what he does for
a living. One who knows the business. Otherwise he would have to try to hide it all from her. Impossible. It would have to be one who knows the business, and he doesn’t want the sort of woman
who knows the business.

It’s the buzz after the job that catches a lot of people out. They go and do something that draws attention to themselves. A lot of people get caught by drink. They can’t sleep; they
can’t slip back into a proper routine. They go home and they open a bottle. Deadens the nerves. Helps them get to sleep. A necessary part of the job, they say. It becomes a bottle after every
job. Then they’re using it more often – a tonic to cope with the work they do. Every time their nerves jangle they go for a bottle. Before too long you can’t even do the job
because of your dependency. Not a mistake Calum will make. He doesn’t drink. Not at all. He just copes. No great secret to it. No great skill. Just deal with it.

He’s getting out of bed and going through the same routine he goes through almost every single day. Toilet. Brush teeth. Shower. Breakfast. Something light. He’s not in the mood to
eat. Not in the mood to do much. It’s the comedown. An inevitable consequence of the highs of the job. Something else a lot of people don’t cope well with. The higher the buzz from the
job, the steeper and more damaging the comedown when the buzz wears out and it’s back to life as you knew it. Some people chase that buzz. Some do a lot more jobs than is safe. Again, not
Calum. Studied. Methodical. Keep the jobs spaced safely apart; don’t do too many or too few. Don’t get too high during the job, don’t get too low afterwards.

It’s a solitary job. If you want to do it well, then you must learn to work alone. You must learn to live alone. You must be a solitary person. The best gunmen all are. It gets harder as
you get older. The need to have other people around you. The need to be a part of something bigger than yourself. So far, that’s not an issue for Calum. He’s used to being alone, used
to living alone and working alone. This job required a second pair of hands, so he used George. Usually he works alone and is more comfortable that way. He’s lived alone since he was nineteen
years old. He’s had girlfriends, some who stayed over, but he has never allowed a relationship to reach the point where they expected to stay over every night. No danger of them moving in. He
needs space. Needs it to the extent that he now worries he can’t live any other way.

You see a lot of them in the business. Guys in their forties and fifties, chasing younger women. Not just chasing them for sex. They look like dirty old men, but there’s more to it. They
want a younger woman they can settle down with. They want a family. They want all the things they avoided earlier in life. To hell with the risk – life isn’t worth it any more if they
can’t have the things they want. It’s a chilling thought. You work hard, take risks and make sacrifices when you’re younger, and all you end up with is a craving for the things
you sacrificed. There are so many of them. Of course, those old guys won’t admit that they were mistaken in their youth, but it seems obvious.

He’s sitting at the kitchen table, dressed and eating a bowl of cereal. Thinking about the usual things gunmen think about when they find themselves with time and opportunity to think
after a job. What did I do wrong? Were there any mistakes that might catch me out? What are the police doing right now? What are the other people involved doing right now? It’s impossible not
to think about the consequences when they’re so monumental. A lifetime in prison. He’s never been inside. Knows some people who have. Hears the stories. Some bad, some terrible. Mostly
about how crushingly boring life is. How you’ll want life to end, because carrying on is too tedious for words. His one consolation is that he’s good at coping with boredom.

No mistakes. No obvious mistakes anyway. Take nothing for granted. Try to remember every detail. No mistakes. The police? It’s possible to find out how their investigation is progressing,
but it’s better not to. There’s danger in asking questions. People will wonder why you want to know. Better to stay silent and glean what you can without asking. Sometimes they make it
easy for you. A murder is likely to get some reporting, certainly in the local media. But it won’t go big these days unless the police want it to.

A lot of gangland killings don’t get reported on the national news. Not newsworthy enough – niche story. If the police make an issue out of it, then it is reported. The police do a
public appeal; ask people if they saw anything. Then it is reported. Then the journalists flock around and speculate about death, destruction and the moral collapse of society. They link one crime
to a number of others. It becomes a good story. You don’t want that. You don’t want the killing that you carry out to be the one the media latches onto. You don’t want it to get a
name for itself. The ‘something’ killing. Once it has that profile, you have problems. Potential employers don’t like working with people whose crimes gain notoriety; even if the
crime itself was no better or worse than any other gunman’s.

There are two reasons the police go to the media. One is that they have nothing. They have no clues, no leads, nothing that can point them in the right general direction. They need help.
Desperately. They go begging for clues. Sometimes people see a police appeal on the TV and decide that they remember something. Sometimes that something can lead to a conviction. The begging is
worth it. The other reason is that they have something very specific. They have a clue that they know will nail the killer – they just need other people to see it. Maybe a piece of clothing,
an accurate description. Something. They put it on TV and they know that people will recognize it. Then they get the name they need.

If it makes the news, then he’ll read about it, or see it. If not, then he waits. Typically you hear nothing for some time. Sometimes you never hear another word about it. You know the
police are investigating, but if it’s obviously gangland, and the victim is obviously scum, then the motivation to catch the killer is slighter. The police won’t admit it, but they want
to help victims who deserve their help. They’ll say they never differentiate. They’re human – they differentiate. They want to help people who have been treated appallingly and
don’t deserve it. Their emotions lead them towards the undeserving victims of crime. They’re human. That’s their weakness.