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he was on site at all. He didn’t say anything, just glowered. Well, he could get to fuck. Winter only had one chance to record this scene and he wasn’t going to rush it even if it was just yet another stabbing.
    He lined up a full-length shot of the body and focused. Two Soups was shut out and so was the rest of the world. It was just him and Sammy Ross.
    He took in the look on the face below him for the first time. Resignation. Total defeat. Not shock though. Sammy Ross had seen this coming. Now he had this thousand-yard stare and it didn’t look as if he liked what he saw.
    Winter did, though. For all its ugliness, it was a thing of beauty.
    Rigor mortis had begun to kick in so he must have been dead for a few hours. The knees that had given way as he buckled and fell were already locked. One arm bent under him, clutching at the hole in his chest, the other twisted at his side where he had tried to break his fall. No chance of breaking a fall like that though – it descended straight into hell.
    The burgundy bloodspill soaked his jeans and drenched his light-blue T-shirt but was already drying on both. His skin was alabaster pale, his lips kissed with blue.
    It was a deep incision. Through the torn, bloodied scraps of cotton, Winter could see the ripped skin where the knife had been stuck. An initial entry wound then it rose sharply up the chest tearing skin as it went. The killer had stuck it in then twisted the knife before pushing it up deeper and deadlier, seeking out vital organs to destroy. Whoever did it had used a knife before. In Glasgow, that narrowed it down to maybe a quarter of the male population between twelve and twenty-five.
    Winter focused on the wound. It was almost big enough to reach inside and grab those punctured organs, enough room to get in and search for the spirit that was no longer there. The skin was split and smiling up at him, the treasures behind already starting to fester without the beat of life to sustain them.
    Focus. Shoot. Every detail, from every angle. So tempting to lift the T-shirt and see the full extent of the damage but that was strictly forbidden. Look but don’t touch. Record but don’t interfere. Observe but don’t violate. Chronicle but don’t contaminate.
    Designer trainers, at least £120 the pair. Hideous, flash shoes in black and gold. The Burberry cap that had tumbled off his lank, unkempt hair and lay by the side of his sleeping head. The navy-blue Ben Sherman jacket sprayed with his own blood and the Tag Heuer that was smashed on his wrist but still ticked even though his heart had stopped. It all said money. It all said bad taste. It all said trash with cash.
    His blue-purple lips said no. His eyes said please. A rabbit caught in the headlights of his own destiny. Bastard child of greed and poverty.
    All that was laid out in the broken body before him, writ large in the wound in his middle and on his freeze-frame face. Sammy was a picture all right.
    This was why Winter took photographs. To show it how it was, every wart, every insult, every injury, because every city is defined just as much by its ugly wounds as its architecture. He’d always imagined that if you cut Glasgow’s gutterbelly, you’d see it run blue and green with bitterness but with as much hope as there was bile. It was a great city where terrible things happened, things that should never be ignored but should be captured for ever.
    His job had taken him to dark places that most civilians never go, seeing bloody puddles where life used to be, recording the moment before the mourners descended. All life was there, sitting cosy right next to death.
    That was the bit that always got to him, just how close they sit next to each other. A split second, a nanosecond, an angstrom from one to the next. And he was there to ensure that that precise moment, where life turns to death and hope turns to shit, is always recorded right there on their face. Recorded for ever by a Nikon FM2 and a Canon