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

years of neglect. It was death on a grand scale.
    Winter followed the distant voices and the scent of death that tickled his nose, winding his way down grey paths amid the green until he came upon a gaggle of crime-scene officers and cops wrapped up in bunny-suit white. They faced him as he advanced down the cobbled track, one or two with hands on hips, including a diminutive figure at their heart who rocked from side to side with impatience.
    Denny Kelbie stood little more than five foot five and probably weighed no more than ten stone when soaking wet. Yet he was a carnaptious wee sod who was continually growling at people around him like a Jack Russell with distemper. Sure enough, he barked at Winter as soon he arrived.
    ‘And where the hell have you been? It’s been twenty minutes since I called you, get her photographed and get the fuck out of my way.’
    Kelbie was bristling, as if looking for a fight. His eyes were daring Winter to respond, the corners of his mouth already curling back to deliver his next putdown. To his annoyance, Winter took no offence and offered no rebuttal. Instead, he walked straight past the DCI and stepped into the breach as the crowd parted to reveal the reason that they were all there.
    She was clinging onto the base of the monument, her head resting against the cool of the stone as if sleeping off the effects of a hard night before. If that was the case, then it was the hangover from hell.
    His camera came up to eye level instinctively and he popped off shot after shot, his fingers curling, adjusting, moulding, capturing.
    Her hair was dark and short, bobbed, framing her pretty young face. Early, maybe mid-twenties. She was tall and long, her bare legs stretched away from her, one knee tucked crookedly under the other, her single black high heel scraped with dirt and grass. Her mouth hung open, flycatcher wide, lipstick smudged. Her skin was ivory white, bloodless and cold, kissed by the early-morning chill. Her hands were clasped together in front of her, in prayer or contemplation. At first look, her eyes seemed captivated by the grassy verge at the statue’s feet, but a closer examination showed she was glassily uninterested.
    The right side of her head was broken and bloodied. Vivid stains of firebrick red, occasionally speckled with pale fragments of flesh, streaked down the statue’s base, showing where the two had come into violent and fatal contact with each other. His camera picked out passive blood drops on the foliage and a spray of impact spatter on the granite. It seemed her head had been battered again and again against the stone.
    The young woman’s Saturday-night clothes looked cheap and incongruous draped over her Sunday-morning deathbed. Her black cotton top plunged in a cowl towards her cleavage and left her shoulders uncovered and dappled in dew. Her short black skirt was round her waist.
    Winter made his lens retreat so that it took in the statue that the girl hung onto, saying a silent apology for revelling in the vivid counterpoint it offered. The weathered figure of a woman, her head veiled and bowed, looked down sadly, curiously, at the girl who lay dead at her feet. The statue’s hands were missing, the victims of time or vandals, and an evergreen climbing plant had made her right side its own. She made a poor excuse for a guardian angel.
    ‘The White Lady,’ a familiar voice shouted out from behind him, breaking his dark reverie. ‘Careful she doesn’t look at you or you’ll turn to stone.’
    ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Addison?’ DCI Denny Kelbie sounded as if the vein on his forehead was going to burst. ‘You get lost looking for Stewart Street?’
    Addison feigned puzzlement. Narey was at his shoulder, the merest hint of a smile directed at Winter. Both of them were already suited up in uniform white.
    ‘No, sir, I didn’t,’ Addison told Kelbie pleasantly. ‘Do you know the story about the White Lady? It’s your patch, I’m sure you