Free Cold Grave by Craig Robertson

moving at the speed of blur and shouting at the top of their voices. As Winter got out of the car and made to get his gear from the boot, a bottle smashed a few feet away, sending glass flying in all directions. Cops were roaring at the kids. The situation was very close to becoming completely out of control.
    ‘More o’ the bastards,’ yelled one voice to his left, seeing the SOCOs get out of the car. It didn’t matter that they weren’t in police uniform, these kids could spot cops at two hundred yards. As soon as they were all togged out in coveralls, they made their way towards a scrum of neds, who were jumping about with their backs to them, with the intention of pushing their way through. Winter slowed his step long enough to fire off a scene-setting photograph of the crowd, seeing that hoodies, low baseballs caps and football scarves over their mouths were the order of the day. He quickly caught the other two up, getting there just as Burke took a punch on the back as they made their way through the throng. The forensic half-turned, angrily intent on giving as good as he got before Sanchez grabbed his arm and dragged him on.
    ‘The wild beasts in their natural habitat,’ scowled Burke, in his best David Attenborough voice. ‘Completely feral and exceedingly dangerous to approach.’
    Winter was first through the throng and the first to glimpse the scene where the body was being attended to, his heart pounding at the sight of it. A tent was still being hurriedly erected to shield the corpse from the view of the baying mob. The sooner that was managed the better. The smell of blood was in the air and clearly powering the pack mentality. Given how much of it Winter could see trickling towards the gutter, it was hardly surprising. There were two separate pools of it but they were forming a single pond of crimson round the half-hidden body.
    He strode straight towards the corpse, his camera in hand, pausing only to get a grab of the figure crouching over the body. He moved on quickly, reaching the cop, and was about to look over his shoulder to see the victim for the first time, ready to let it fill his vision and his viewfinder. He wasn’t going to allow himself his usual luxury of revelling in the moment before he saw his subject — the moment that always filled him with equal measures of excitement and fear — but as he saw the body through his lens, he stopped and let it swing away from his view.
    ‘Fucking hell,’ he exclaimed.
    ‘Don’t see that every day, do you?’ said the cop below him, his voice deadpan.
    ‘No. You certainly don’t.’
    Splayed out before him and neatly cut in two was the body of a dog. It was some sort of bullmastiff breed, the kind that the tabloids liked to call devil dogs. This one was already on its way to doggy heaven or doggy hell, depending on just how much of a devil it had been when it was alive.
    The dog’s mouth hung open and a thick pink tongue hung pathetically between razor sharp teeth. A broad, bejewelled collar was round its chunky neck, a piece of bling that looked even more stupid on the dog when it was dead than it must have done when it was alive.
    Towards its middle, the animal’s short white fur was streaked in crimson, flecks of red spreading out from its gory core. The sight of the dog’s division was nothing short of spectacular. Winter’s camera was a blur of clicks and motors as he flashed shot after shot of the beast’s deliverance from evil.
    The dog’s inner organs were spilled unceremoniously onto the frozen concrete of Swanston Street: heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas, large intestine, small intestine, gall bladder, spleen. All sitting piled one on top of the other in a stew of the remains of its last meal, making a smorgasbord of dubious delight for all to see.
    As if that wasn’t unpleasant enough, the dog had inevitably shit itself as it went to meet its maker. The resultant smell was horrific — not a treat for anyone’s