have a million opportunities to knife him, strangle him, push him off a high building. Shooting him from a mile away seems to be going to a lot of unnecessary trouble. Couldn’t rule it out but I’d say it wasn’t one of his.’
‘So who?’
‘Who knows? Could be anybody.’
‘And who cares?’
‘Never said that. I don’t care that he’s dead apart from the fact that all hell is going to break loose and we are going to have to deal with the shit. I do care about who killed him. So don’t start.’
Her eyes flared at him and Winter liked it.
‘Oh, calm down. You know I’m winding you up. You shouldn’t be so easy.’
‘Oh, easy is it? I won’t be so easy then, see how you like that.’
She ducked away from him with a giggle but he wrestled with her, pulling her back towards him. She fought for a bit and just as he was thinking how perfect her breasts were, her mouth fell onto his and her body disappeared from his view. All talk of murdered gangsters went out of sight. For half an hour at least. It was hard to worry about things like that when her dark hair tumbled over his face and her smooth curves locked onto his body. When her hands teased and taunted and worked their magic. When he rose to meet her and she smiled with satisfaction.
It was only when she fell off him again, laughing and panting, her hair sticking to the side of her glistening face in a way that reminded him of the woman who stared at Caldwell’s dead body, that it started again. He knew it would because she couldn’t leave it at that. She could never leave it.
‘So just what were you doing at Central Station?’
‘Christ, Rachel. You know what I was doing.’
‘Okay. I know what you were doing. Let me rephrase. Why the fuck were you doing it?’
‘Is this where you get the rubber hoses out?’
‘Only if it turns you on. Come on, why?’
‘Again, you know why. We’ve been through it before.’
‘Fucksake, Tony. What the hell are you worried about? It’s me. I know most of it. Spill the rest.’
He sighed. He really didn’t want to get into this. He didn’t want to get into it because he didn’t really understand it himself, so how could he expect her to.
‘It’s my thing. I like photographing accidents and the people. You know that.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t know you had it as bad as that.’
The bitch was as persistent as she was sexy, he thought.
‘How did you get into this anyway?’
Rachel had an annoying habit of asking questions she already knew the answer to. It was the price he paid for sleeping with a detective, even if one look at her was enough to know it was a price worth paying.
She knew all about Enrique Metinides and the exhibition that Tony had attended in London back in 2003 at the Photographers’ Gallery, just two minutes from Oxford Circus. He’d gone with a blonde named Jodi, a London girl. He didn’t really have much interest in going to a gallery or an exhibition but she was keen and he was keen on her. As soon as he was in the gallery, though, Metinides’s photographs blew him away. They were like nothing he’d seen before and tapped right into something deep inside him.
The images messed with his head, being truly brutal and yet truly beautiful at the same time. Car crashes. Floods. Suicides. Train crashes. Plane crashes. Fires. Murders. Accidents. Anything bad that resulted in death or destruction in Mexico City for over fifty years, Metinides was there and had photographed it for their red-top tabloids. Metinides started out taking photographs when he was just eleven. Chasing ambulances, running to fires and hanging out in front of the local cop shop waiting for criminals to be dragged in or out. The reporters and the other photo graphers called him El Niño , the kid, and the nickname stuck.
His photographs were intimate and unsettling, poetic and haunting. The critics said that he found humanity in catastrophe.
It was the faces that got to Winter, not the flames or the
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