A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller (13 page)

'Where was the van parked?' he says, looking at Montgomery.

This is where we find out how much of a wanker we're dealing with. If Taylor had asked before the phone call, Montgomery would have been obliged to tell him to clear off. Now, however, he knows he's won. He can afford a moment of magnanimity.

'Need to know basis,' says Montgomery, nailing his colours high on the wanker mast, 'and you don't need to know. I'll trust you not to interfere any further in the investigation.'

He takes a step closer.

'Now fuck off,' he adds.

Take a quick glance around the clearing while the two bulls mentally wrestle over shagging rights. The logical thing would be for the van to have approached the same way as the rest of us, up the track that leads most quickly back to the A85. Logic doesn't enter into it though.

There's another track on the far side of the clearing, leading away in the opposite direction, and there are three of the white jump suit collective in the vicinity examining shit on the ground. That'll be it then.

'Come on, Sir,' I say, to break the Mexican stand-off. Although, to be honest, it's not really a Mexican stand-off, is it? These days Mexican stand-offs usually last about a second-and-a-half and then fifty innocent civilians get massacred. 'We parked our car over this way,' I say to Montgomery, and nod.

Start to walk off, Taylor alongside. He's staring at the ground, fighting the annoyance, trying to gather as much information as he can in the short time that we have.

The short time that we have… Fuck's sake. Sound like a pair of cancer patients. Bucket list: walk the Silk Road, sleep with Kate Beckinsale, climb Kilimanjaro, establish if the killer's tyre tracks were the same as the last time.

'Don't tread on anything, don't speak to anyone, don't tamper with any evidence, and keep on walking,' gets thrown after us.

Into the trees on the other side. Taylor glances back over his shoulder. The camera never looked this way, there was never a shot from the other side showing this part of the clearing. He kept the van behind him the whole time.

We stop behind the forensics fellows.

'Same tracks as the last time?' he asks.

Can feel Montgomery's bitter little eyes burrowing into the back of us, but Taylor has hardly slowed down.

'Think so, Sir,' comes the reply.

And on we go, without breaking stride. We walk on down the track up which the killer drove his van packed with prospective victims, and soon enough we come to the police cordon and walk once more out of the crime scene.

Long day. 11:32pm. Sitting in Taylor's office. This time last year we would have conducted this part of the discussion in the pub. Suddenly it all seems much more grown-up around here, and it all comes from Taylor.

He had a shit time of it while his wife left him and DCI Bloonsbury was flushing his life down the toilet, taking as much of the station with him as he could. Nevertheless, he came out of all that a much stronger man. He was already a good detective; that whole shambles made him a better man, and that filtered through to his work. The added responsibility hasn't weighed him down either, and now even at 11:32pm, when the investigation is going nowhere and the circumstances just got a hell of a lot worse, he still looks switched on and determined, rather than stressed and miserable and knackered.

One day that great attitude might rub off on me, but it hasn't happened yet. Most days I still feel like a twelve-year-old playing at being a policeman; and I reacted to the general tumult of the Bloonsbury business by sleeping with the new Detective Inspector's wife. Very mature.

We have some still-shot close-ups of the killer's mask, still-shots of the look on the faces of the victims. We've written up everything we can recall about the crime scene and cross-checked it with the previous one to see if he's given us anything else. So far, he hasn't.

Connor had Taylor in for an hour or so going over it all. Connor seems quite chipper. He feels that we have as much chance of solving the crime as the Edinburgh lot, but we have none of the responsibility. For months it's weighed on him, and he was worried that Edinburgh would come in and arrest someone in the first twenty-four hours. Now that they haven't, now that someone else has looked at it and not managed to discover the really obvious, glaring thing that we must have missed, he's relaxed a little. The pressure is off and suddenly he sees the chance of some one-upmanship.

That's the kind of man he is. Maybe they all are by the time they get to that pay grade.

'Fucking crow mask,' says Taylor. 'Really.'

'There was you saying we weren't in an episode of Scooby Doo.'

'It's like Batman, some shit like that. Holy crap, what is the matter with people? It's like they can't just commit crime anymore. They want to be seen committing the crime, they want their name in the newspaper, even if it's a false name. The next thing the guy'll do is get a TV camera crew lined up to record his thoughts before, during and after the crimes…'

'Plague of Crows Confidential…'

'And he'll burst into fucking tears when he's talking about his victims, then the camera will follow him to the gravesides as he pays his respects…'

'And when we ask the TV crew for his address they'll protest client confidentiality and make us out to be the bad guys.'

He sighs, shakes his head. 'We're always the fucking bad guys, Sergeant, no matter what happens.'

There's a knock at the door. In comes DI Gostkowski. She looks tired. Haven't seen her most of the day, and we missed our seven o'clock at the coffee shop.

'Sir,' she says, nodding at Taylor. Doesn't even look at me.

'Should you be in here?' asks Taylor. 'We already pissed them off once today.'

'I heard,' she said. 'Your name's mud.'

She glances over her shoulder then turns back.

'DCI Montgomery went home for the night about half an hour ago. There aren't many of them left, Sir. Thought it would be safe to come up. For a minute or two.'

'All right. Just stand in the doorway, like you're stopping for a passing chat. Nothing official. Be precise.'

I feel like I'm in another room, watching a tense and intimately shot detective drama on TV.

'A replica of the previous job. The van appears to be a Ford Transit. He has a team looking through footage of the nearest CCTV to see if there's any sign of Transits on the roads out of Perth. Not a lot of CCTV around there, however, once you're out of Perth. Time of death between six and eight this morning, the journalist the first to go, maybe an hour before the others. They presume it was when the skull was removed.'

'Sloppy,' I say, with my inability to go five minutes without saying something glib. To the credit of DI Gostkowski, she completely ignores me.

'They ended up killing seven crows at the scene, and this evening they got word back that all seven contained human brain matter in their stomachs, so there's added confirmation on the crows. The video isn't just some set up.'

'Jesus,' mutters Taylor.

'Everything else that's been gleaned from the site so far coincides with what we saw in August. The same goes for the victims. One police officer, one social worker – and this one was a door-to-door, dealing on the front line with all the fuck-ups social worker – and a journalist.'

'It wasn't a Glasgow policeman,' says Taylor, more a statement than a question, as the name of the officer is already on record.

'No, it's all Tayside, work and homes of the three split between Perth and Dundee and thereabouts.'

A moment while she tries to remember if she's missed anything.

'What are they working on?' asks Taylor.

'The CCTV thing's pretty big. They're working on the basis that he will strike more quickly this time, now that he's gone public. He's contacted all police forces, and from tomorrow they'll be instigating procedures whereby every police officer in Scotland will have to check in on a regular basis. That's going all the way to the Justice Minister to establish what they feel is practical.'

I look at Taylor, because that sounds unbelievably mental. We're supposed to check in? Like we're children off on a trip on our own for the first time and need to keep calling our dad? Holy all kinds of shit. How about, let's all be careful out there, or something?

'Hmm,' is pretty much all Taylor says.

'And they're speaking to local authorities and to the NUJ about implementing similar procedures across those professions.'

Taylor finally glances at me, a slightly troubled look on his face.

'Seems excessive,' he says eventually.

'They claim duty of care,' she says.

'Do you agree?'

She gives it a second, then says, 'Not paid to have opinions on policy, Sir.'

Taylor smiles unattractively and then glances back at the pictures he's been studying for the last half hour.

'Anything else, Stephanie?' he asks.

'Think I've covered it all.'

'OK, thanks. Go home and get some sleep.'

'Thank you, Sir.'

'Aim to do your seven o'clock thing with the sergeant tomorrow unless something comes up. Presumably, with the level of planning this guy puts in, even if he doesn't wait three months before the next time, he won't be trying anything again tomorrow.'

'Good night, Sir,' she says, then turns to leave.

I watch her go for a moment – in fact, until she's out of sight – and then turn to Taylor. Had a weird feeling there of not being in existence. Taylor glances back at me.

'She didn't seem to be aware that you were in the room, Sergeant. I presume you've slept with her at some point.'

'Stop saying that,' I reply, a bit testily. 'I haven't shagged everyone.'

He grunts, looks back at his photographs. I wait for some other throwaway insult, and when it doesn't come I get to my feet. Everyone's tired.

'Do I get to go home now too?' I ask.

And suddenly I do feel tired. Tired and melancholic. If it was a regular day I'd be heading to a bar, to be followed by a really bad headache with potential vomiting. But even I'm not going to try to find something to drink at this time of night. A long day, with far too much of it spent staring intently at screens trying to see something that more than likely isn't there. The morning, when I ended up curled in a ball, seems a very long time ago. Yet I haven't slept since then and the life had been taken out of me all those hours ago.

He looks at his watch and indicates with a dismissive movement of his hand. I turn to head off, then look back at him, getting over my general annoyance.

'You shouldn't work much longer either, Sir. Go home.'

He looks up, irritation on his face, but it immediately leaves him. He nods and waves me out.

Only kept in touch with one guy after Bosnia. A Canadian journalist. Eddie. By kept in touch, I mean that we saw each other one time maybe, and he'd leave me a message on the phone or something like that when he had a piece from some distant war-torn shit hole in one of the British papers. We'd just about hung on to each other by the time e-mail really got started, so that kept us going for a while. Always said that he'd end up living in London – as if that was something to look forward to – but he never made it.

He used to say that he was comforted by the thought of suicide, that the possibility of it cheered him up. The idea that he could just walk away, turn his back on the memories and the visions and the demons, turn his back on the horrors that played out in his head when he closed his eyes. Then, having been dragged from the depths by the thought of suicide, he no longer needed to do it. And he'd say that it was a vicious circle he needed to break. One way or the other.

He finally broke it. One night in a hotel in Dubai. He'd gone there for a break from Afghanistan some time in late 2002. Dubai killed him off, sitting alone in the bath with a razor blade, listening to Turin Brakes'
The Optimist
.

I found out some time during the summer of 2004.

*

Wake up at 4.37am. Sweating, like I've left the heating on full, but the room is cold as I sit up out of the sheets. Rest my head back against the wall, stare into the orange light of a room with the curtains open, illuminated by the streetlights. A car drives past, and then there's silence.

Listen to see if a noise in the house woke me up. A policeman's expectation that around every corner a guy in a mask is waiting to bean you over the napper with a crowbar. Nothing. The dead of night, but I'm wide awake now.

4:38. The chances of getting back to sleep before I need to get up for work are slim. Can feel it already. Brain in overdrive.

The forest. The crows with human remains in their stomach. That's what woke me up. Then I remember my brain freeze in the woods the previous morning, something that seems a long time ago, and suddenly a warm evening in a Bosnian forest is back in my head and there's nothing I can do about it.

Fuck it. Fuck all that shit. I'm not lying here thinking about it, and if I stay in bed that's all I'll be able to think about.