Witness the Dead (21 page)

Across the other side of Byres Road, he saw the corner of Highburgh Road, knowing Rachel’s flat was just yards beyond it. It had been only a month since he’d last been there but so much had happened in between that it seemed an age ago. Hell, so much had happened since they’d tried to meet for breakfast the day before. The rescheduled ‘catch-up’ was on her home turf.

A group of four young women passed in the other direction as Winter made his way down Ashton Lane’s cobbled access. One of them, a tall, attractive blonde, made eyes at him as they went by. Winter blanked her, as much out of confusion as to what he was supposed to do as anything else.

He climbed the stairs into the Grosvenor Cafe, picking out a booth in the corner and ordering a couple of drinks: a bottle of beer for himself and a glass of white wine for Rachel, putting them together on the table in front of him. He hadn’t seen her all day and had only her text from that lunchtime suggesting the meeting. He’d heard whispers through the forensic grapevine that something had been found on the route near the Southern Necropolis killing, but no one seemed to know if it had amounted to much. Ten minutes later, almost on time for her, she arrived, looking tired and grouchy.

‘Bad day?’

‘Long day,’ she sighed, rubbing at her eyes.

‘I took a chance and got you a glass of wine.’

She looked at it doubtfully – just what she needed and the last thing she should have. ‘Thanks.’

They fell into the kind of awkward silence that can happen only between people with lots to say to each other but are not sure where to start. She pushed at her glass without drinking it and he sipped at his beer for something to do.

‘Are you . . .’

‘What happened with . . .’

‘Sorry, you go first.’

‘No it’s okay. You.’

They both hesitated, words stuck, and reached for their drinks instead, their hands brushing against the other’s. His hand recoiled slowly, hers as if it had been electrocuted.

‘You go first.’ It was more of an order than an invitation.

He took a mouthful of his beer, buying time and drinking her in over the rim of the glass. Tired or not, she still looked good. He fought the need to tell her.

‘So how’s your dad today?’

Rachel sat forward and her hands flew to her head. ‘Oh, shit, no. With everything that was going on, I forgot to call the home.’ She looked at her watch, but one glance told her that it was far too late to phone him. ‘Shit.’

The symptoms of her dad’s Alzheimer’s had begun to emerge the year before and had, inevitably, got worse as the months had passed. Rachel’s guilt at his being in the nursing home never left her but she did phone or visit every day. Or at least she tried to. With her mum having died six years earlier, it was down to Rachel to be there for him, but her job didn’t exactly make that easy.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, trying to sympathise. ‘It’s not as if . . .’ – he faltered – ‘he wouldn’t understand the pressures of your job.’ Her dad had been a cop too but Winter knew it wasn’t a good enough save to stop her from working out the pause.

‘It’s not as if he would remember that I called, anyway? Is that what you were going to say? It’s not the bloody point and you know it. And he had a really good day yesterday, if you must know. He knew who I was as soon as he answered the phone. Do you know how good that makes me feel? If he’d been the same today . . .’

She wavered, her hands covering her face, then pushing back through her hair, fatigue and remorse making her look older. She pulled the wineglass to her lips but pushed it away again and rested it back on the table.

‘I don’t really want wine. Can you get me a Diet Coke, please? And see what they’ve got for eating behind the bar. Not something off the menu, just a snack. I should eat something.’

Winter, happy of the excuse to get away from talking about her dad and knowing that he’d put his foot right in it, shoved himself up from the seat and headed to the vast central bar, bottle of beer in his hand. He wove through people, not really seeing them, just aware of them in his way. A barmaid asked him what he wanted and he got the Diet Coke plus a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps, salted peanuts and a chocolate bar.

‘Andy Teven said he was speaking to some old copper at Pitt Street yesterday.’ She stretched as he returned. ‘He didn’t give a name but the description sounded like Danny.’

Winter held out the choice of the crisps, nuts and chocolate, and she took all three. He’d never understood why someone who loved food as much as Rachel did never got remotely fat.

‘Every old copper looks like Danny. Did I hear word about something being found on your sweep of the route that Hannah Healey took?’

‘I don’t know. Did you?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘There you go, then. Mystery solved,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of crisps.

When they’d been together yet secret, touching wasn’t allowed in public. Her rules. He didn’t like it but he could live with it as he could always touch her later. Now, not being allowed to touch her because they weren’t whatever it was they had been . . . that was much more difficult. It hurt.

Her bag abruptly beeped and she delved into it in search of her phone. He recognised the tone: she had a text. Pulling the mobile out, she seemed to make sure the screen was turned away from him as she studied it, her eyes flickering to his to see if he was watching.

‘Answer that if you want.’ The words were dry in his mouth.

‘No. It’s okay. I’ll get it later.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘So it wasn’t Danny at Pitt Street, then?’

He took a large gulp at the bottle in his hand, his mind racing.

‘You’d have to ask him. So, did you find something belonging to Hannah Healey?’

‘No idea. You know how long it takes the lab to get back with answers to anything. If only it was like on those
CSI
shows on the telly and we got immediate results. How is Danny these days, anyway?’

‘Oh, you know Danny. Never changes. He was asking for you, though. In fact he was asking how you were getting on with the case.’

‘Interested in the case, is he?’

‘Isn’t everybody? Two murders in two days. Bound to be the talk of the town. Only natural that people want to know if you’re any closer to catching the guy.’

‘I suppose it is. And Danny being a former cop . . . Guess that instinct never leaves you. You think he still wishes he was on the job?’

‘You know what they say. Old policemen never die: they just cop out.’

‘And old photographers never die: they just stop developing. Was that answer a cop-out?’

‘I don’t know. Was it?’

‘I don’t know. You know what, though?’

‘What?’

‘I’m tired. I think maybe we should call this a night before one of us actually has to give a straight answer to a straight question.’

‘You know what?’

‘What?’

‘I think you’re right.’

Chapter 25

West Lothian, Wednesday

It was officially named HMP Central Scotland, but was known universally as Blackridge for the small town in West Lothian that it was nearest to. It was generally pronounced as
Blackrigg
, the same way the locals said it. The town picked up a bit of business from the prison but, for all that, they’d just as rather it weren’t there. The supposed £100 million that it cost to build ‘the big hoose’ outside the town would have gone a long way in Blackridge, a tiny place still recovering from the closing of the colliery fifty years before.

The jail sat almost plumb between Glasgow and Edinburgh, as near midway as the planners could make it, so as to avoid offending the sensibilities of either end of the M8 corridor. Prisons were as political as anything else when it came to disputes between the capital and the biggest city.

The stark, grey structure, its anonymous walls fifteen feet high topped with coils of barbed wire, seemed to have been dropped into the lush, rain-sodden countryside from outer space. All care had been given to its security and none at all to its being sympathetic to its surroundings. It stood alone but for a large car park that might have been pinched from outside a major supermarket. Only a red-brick building that resembled the gable end of a nondescript modern family home broke the monotony of the grey wall. It was the gatehouse, Union and Saltire flags billowing in the fresh spring wind before it. Winter and Neilson made their way towards it in silence.

In the car, as they drove along the M8, Danny at the wheel, he’d talked at length about Atto and his crimes – the ones they knew about and the ones that they didn’t. The latter list was longer than the former.

‘Atto was an English teacher, specialised in offering extra tuition for kids that needed to up their grades to get into university, or to get into a better university. He made good money but never stayed in one place too long. He had excellent references and always came highly recommended. Never worked in schools, though – kept under the radar in that sense. Seems he was popular with the pupils, particularly the girls. Paid them a lot of attention.

‘In 1999, he was convicted of killing two sixteen-year-olds, Beverley Collins in Dumfries and Emma Rutherford in Leicester. By the time Beverley’s body was found, ten years after she was killed, it was impossible to tell if she’d been sexually assaulted. Her corpse was still bound at her ankles and wrists and she’d been gagged. Emma was found by chance in a shallow grave just three days after she’d gone missing. A springer spaniel partially dug her up and the dog’s owner called the cops. Emma’s throat had been cut and she’d been both raped and anally assaulted. Atto’s DNA was found on her clothing.

‘At this point, he had made headlines, quite a few of them. But maybe it hadn’t been enough for him. He let a name drop in a police interview, nothing accidental, mind. I’ve seen and heard the tapes and he hesitates for an age before he says it, making sure everyone there is hanging on his every word. He lets them know that he used to live in a street named Huntington Road in Coventry. It doesn’t mean anything to any of the cops or lawyers present but they go check it out. It turns out Huntington Road is two hundred yards away from where a nineteen-year-old named Melanie Holt went missing in 1991. Sure enough, they find out that Atto lived very close to her.

‘They go back to Atto and say, “Did you kill Melanie Holt?” Atto smiles and says yes. They say, “Where’s her body?” and he smiles but says nothing for ages. Then he says, “Greening Place in Ipswich.” Obviously, they say, “Is that where Melanie’s body is?” He gives this sly grin and says no, that he lived there.

‘They check out the address and, sure enough, a girl had gone missing from there too. Louise Shillington had been twenty-one when she was last seen in 1993. Atto had lived on the same street. So they ask him, “Did you kill her?” Yes. “Where is her body?” Nothing. For months they questioned him and for months he stonewalled them. Melanie and Louise’s parents both wrote to him but he wouldn’t budge.

‘Then the case team, now three times the size that it had been, create a timeline of Atto’s movements: jobs, houses, medical records, the lot. They come up with a list of nineteen possible victims: eleven murders of young women and eight violent rapes. They confront Atto with the list and he looks at it curiously, making a big show of remembering things, some of them obviously very pleasurable to him. Then he looks at them and coldly asks, “Is that all you could come up with? You underestimate me.”

‘So they ask if he’s admitting he killed and raped those girls. He says no. He says he’s admitting nothing, wasn’t in those places, didn’t ever meet those girls. Sure enough, none of them was girls he taught. Then, a year later, when the media interest in Atto is dying down, he asks to talk with the case team again. Says he made a mistake. He did meet Heather Ryan, he remembers now. “Did you kill her?” “Maybe. I don’t really remember.”

‘The bastard has been dicking the case team and the families around ever since. So he’s serving four consecutive life sentences when it should perhaps be seventeen or more. Some people say it doesn’t matter because he’ll only ever leave prison in a box. But that’s not the point. These families, they need to know. They need to have a funeral and they can’t because he won’t tell them where the bodies are. So, yeah, I’m glad he’ll die in prison, but part of me wants that to be right now and another wants him to rot in there until he tells everything he knows.

‘Archibald Atto is a psychopath, a nasty, vicious, brutal, murdering piece of shit. But he’s more than that. He’s clever. Devious. He has a dangerous combination of high intelligence and low cunning. He tortures people’s emotions because he can, because he believes he’s smarter than them.’

‘So is he Red Silk?’ Winter asked. ‘Did he carry out the Klass killings?’

‘He’s never admitted to it. Never even acknowledged that it might have been him. He did live in Glasgow at the time and moved away not long after the final murder. But so much of it is similar to what happened later. Beverley Collins’s skeleton was bound in a way that it was believed she’d been forced into a kneeling, praying position. Her hands were bound
in front
of her rather than behind. Emma Rutherford was buried on her back, her arms spread wide. Not the thing you’d do if you wanted the grave to be as small as possible and reduce the chance of it being found.

‘After Atto was convicted the police went back to witnesses from 1972 and showed them his photo. Of course, they’d all seen him on the news by this time and impressions had formed in their minds. Plus, they were a lot older and memories were playing tricks. The person with the best look at Red Silk, Frances MacFarlane, was dead. But plenty of those asked said aye, that’s the man. That was the guy that was in Klass when those girls were murdered.’

To get a visit to a convicted prisoner in Blackridge, the visit has to be booked by the inmate. You couldn’t just turn up at the door and ask to visit the infamous serial killer Archibald Atto. They didn’t encourage that kind of thing. Atto had no family, his elderly mother having died a year after he was convicted, and, not surprisingly had no known friends. Or at least no one who would admit to it. His visitor schedule rarely got near to fulfilling even the statutory minimum of two hours in any period of twenty-eight consecutive days.