Free Cold Grave by Craig Robertson Page B

them in half like that?’
    ‘My guess is a sword — samurai maybe. I’m tempted to say “who cares”. But I won’t. As much as these stupid little fucks are a waste of space, I’ll keep on caring because someone keeps on paying me to care.’
    ‘That’s so touching, Suttie. I could almost cry.’
    ‘You do that and while you do I’ll smack your face, you cheeky git. How’s your pal Addison getting on?’
    Winter’s best friend, Detective Inspector Derek Addison, had been confined to desk duties for the previous six months after being seriously injured while on duty. Pushing pens had done nothing to improve his infamously volatile temper.
    ‘He’s helping old ladies across the road, sending birthday cards to Rangers supporters and generally being indistinguishable from a ray of sunshine.’
    ‘A crabbit bastard as usual then?’
    ‘Oh, aye.’
    ‘Well, tell him I’m asking for him. And while you’re at it, ask him if he knows of any toerags that are handy with samurais. I’d just as rather catch the bastard that did this before he fancies trying it on anyone else. He still like a Guinness?’
    ‘Of course. He was shot in the head not the throat.’
    ‘Tell him I’ll see him in The Station Bar some time soon then. Anyway, nice as it is to chat, I have some rampaging hordes to put in line. Watch yourself, Tony.’
    Winter saw the DS sigh and move back into the fray, wondering how they all managed to keep doing it time after time after bloody time. Then he peered into the Canon’s digital display and saw the butchered halves of Klitschko and the bit of Jason Hewitt that had been left behind. Okay, maybe he didn’t know how or why the rest of them managed to keep doing it, but he knew why he did.

CHAPTER 13
Monday 26 November
    It was eight days since Winter and Narey had been to the Lake of Menteith Hotel and Rachel wasn’t happy at all. Despite the bombs she’d casually dropped at the hotel and in Callander, and regardless of the ad she’d placed in the Sunday papers, she hadn’t managed to kick up the shit storm she’d hoped for. The email address and PO box she’d provided had received no more than a few crank messages and chancers looking for a reward. She’d told Tony it was time to up the stakes.
    She should have been investigating an attempted murder of a drug dealer in Garnetbank. Or else a suspicious fatal fire in Cowcaddens that needed a further round of witness interviews. Or a gang-related beating that had been clogging her in-tray for weeks. It wasn’t a workload any heavier than any other DS in Strathclyde but Narey was having to keep her plates spinning alongside one of her own. If any of them fell because of that extra plate, then her arse would be on the line. That afternoon, as far as anyone else was concerned, particularly DI Addison, she was in Springburn chasing a lead about a missing grandfather. But she wasn’t.
    Laurence Paton lived in the Riverside area of Stirling; just ten minutes’ walk from the city centre yet quite removed from it, a middle-class area of handsome stone terraces built around the turn of the last century. Narey indicated left just before the railway station and crossed the bridge into the residential peninsula that was looped by the River Forth.
    The Ochil Hills cast a stunning backdrop as the road fell before them then rose again, a long if relatively low range of summits that separated Stirling and the Hillfoot villages from the Kingdom of Fife. To their left, the Wallace Monument rose high above the Abbey Craig in stark contrast to the snow-covered hills behind it. The monument, all 220 feet of Gothic sandstone perched on the hilltop, was a magnet for tourists and fans of Mel Gibson’s bastardised biopic
Braveheart
.
    ‘Left here,’ Tony told her, a set of printed directions in his hand. ‘Then right.’
    Rachel took them onto Millar Place, then quickly onto Sutherland Avenue before taking another left into Wallace Place, a narrow street