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bowels of Strathclyde Police HQ in Pitt Street since returning from Blochairn. The room was empty but for him and his photographs of Sammy Ross’s plundered chest. If the pics had been more interesting, like Addison’s murdered hooker, then it might well have been enough for him. But Sammy just wasn’t cutting it.
    Winter hated paperwork every bit as much as Addison did. The mindless purgatory involved in filing and barcoding his crime scene photographs was bad enough but even worse was when he was forced to do the same thing for other people. Being his own secretary was dull as either dishwater or ditchwater, whichever it was. Being someone else’s made him want to puke.
    He wanted to be out there, at the scene of car crashes, shootings and suicides as soon as they happened, hitting the shutter minutes after the body hit the ground. Not stuck under diffused lighting, filling boxes and killing time.
    Winter hadn’t given up what passed for a career in IT and retrained at college just to be a frigging data processor. Or maybe he had. It had taken him six years to get to the stage where he was doing something that was this dull. When it was like this, suddenly running network applications didn’t seem quite so bad. In fact, worse than that, it didn’t seem so different.
    Of course the irony was that the cops were where he’d wanted to be in the first place. Uncle Danny Neilson had been in the force all his days and when he was young there wasn’t much that Winter wanted more than to do what Danny did. So he’d applied and strolled through the Standard Entrance Tests and the fitness tests at Jackton but managed to stuff up the formal interview by telling the truth. Maybe if he had kept that fascination with death to himself then he wouldn’t have had to fall into computer programming instead. Still, he always wondered how he’d been considered too much of a risk to be allowed to walk around the city centre all day but it was perfectly okay for him to be in charge of millions of pounds of software or to photograph dead people. Winter settled for believing it said more about the police and psychometric testing than it did about him.
    People told him he was crazy when he gave up his job as an IT hunchback to become a police photographer. Everyone said he was nuts throwing away his degree but what they didn’t understand was that he hadn’t wanted to spend any more time at a keyboard. He’d had the itch from the moment he first saw Metinides’s photographs in London. It wasn’t exactly following in Danny’s size elevens but maybe it was better. Winter had got such a buzz looking at the Mexican’s work and he’d known that was going to be multiplied by ten when he took his own. The photos he was filing for one of the scene examiners, Caroline Sanchez, had been taken on the corner of Dullsville. A Mazda MX-5 had gone through a red light and had been smacked by a bus going smartly through green coming the other way. The driver of the car had escaped with a fractured arm but there was a lot of broken glass to be photographed and filed. Give him strength. Sanchez was back out there working the skid marks from an assault and robbery in Summerston and he was stuck deep in the Pitt, doing her electronic paperwork.
    It was all part of what Winter thought of as his bargain with the devil, the strange set-up that allowed him to be one of only two proper photographers to be still working for Strathclyde cops. The rest of the work was now done by the monkeys in bunny suits, button-pushers who didn’t know their aperture from their exposure. Oh, they knew everything there was to know about grave wax, petechial marks and ridge characteristics, but they knew bugger all about taking photographs. Point, fiddle with the focus and fire off as many shots as they could in the hope that one of them would be on the money. And, of course, money was what it was all about. Getting the scene examiners to double on the camera was all to do