Witness the Dead by Craig Robertson Read Free Book Online Page A

him.
    Run faster. Reach the church. She’d never make it: the sounds on the pavement behind were getting closer with every breath. As soon as the bridge support vanished on her left, she pushed off into the scrubland where a beaten path ducked in behind the church walls. She told herself it was a shortcut. Her only hope.
    Get your heels off, she thought. Can’t run in heels. She slowed just enough so that she could push her right instep down against her left heel. Now the other . . .
    Something hit hard against her back, low on the right side just above her hip. Breath rushed out of her, choking out in a single painful gasp of surprise. Worse, it threw her off her stride, pitching her forward awkwardly. His footsteps were so close and the church walls just a yard away.
    Turn. Fight. She could hear Gary saying it. Turn and fight. She spun clumsily on her single shoe, bracing her legs so that she could swing, claw, punch at whoever, whatever, was there. Too late. As she turned, a gloved hand was in her face, blinding her, pushing her back and down, into the shadow of the old church.
    She could feel the dampness of the woollen glove, its fibres tickling her skin, scratching it. Her heart screamed and she slowly, quickly began to drown in fear and adrenalin.
    Darkness came.

Chapter 7
    Early Sunday morning
    For the second morning running, Winter had been woken by the sound of the phone ringing. For a few seconds, just long enough to depress him when he realised the reality, he’d thought he was in Rachel’s bed rather than his own.
    He fumbled for his mobile, anxiety making his fingers buttery. Early-morning calls were rarely good news.
    ‘Yeah. Um, yeah. What? Fuck. Yes, got it. Okay. I’m leaving now.’
    He pressed the button to end the call and blew a stream of air from his lips before letting the phone tumble onto the bed. It had been Denny Kelbie, a DCI at New Gorbals. The news was the sort of wake-up call that had you doubting you’d ever been asleep in the first place.
    A dead girl. Seminaked and found draped round a monument in a cemetery.
    The facts assaulted him, stirred him. But for the fact that she’d been found not in the Necropolis but in the Southern Necropolis across the river, Winter might have thought it was some macabre form of déjà vu.
    After a quick drive through the ghost of a Sunday-morning city, he parked his Honda Civic on Caledonia Road in the shadows of the tower blocks and directly across from the Gothic gatehouse that formed the entrance to the Southern Necropolis. The imposing sandstone edifice, looking for all the world like the gateway to a medieval castle that was no longer there, was guarded by two of Scotland’s finest and a line of police tape.
    The gatehouse was dwarfed by its modern neighbours on the other side of the street, yet managed to retain its own sense of size and an odd, almost surreal, grandeur. The twenty-foot-high archway and the avenue of trees beyond it were the entry point to another world, one where the residents, two hundred and fifty thousand of them, were all dead.
    After taking his camera bag from the boot of the car, he crossed the road and flashed his ID at the cops. They nodded him on without a word and he crossed through the archway into the city that always sleeps.
    The cobbled roadway that ducked under the bowed arches of ancient yew trees was bordered by verdigris headstones, most nearly two hundred years old, each of them winking at Winter as he marched deeper into the bowels of the cemetery in search of the urgent voices he could hear within. It was another damp morning, and a rising mist clung mournfully to the crypts, lending the Southern Necropolis an eerie air that it didn’t need.
    The cemetery was huge – space enough to hold an endless array of football pitches, studded with teeth of headstone granite. Pathways were guarded by twisted arboreal sentries, their gnarled arms reaching down to touch gravestones choked with ivy or crumbling under