A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller (9 page)

Taylor nods, drains his coffee.

'We can't go everywhere with this. We need to keep it grounded. Small steps. We've got a wood or forest, we've got crows, and we've got crows' nests. He needs cover so he's likely to have to use an evergreen forest…'

'But not a densely populated one, not one of those they plant just so they can chop them down again a few years later…'

'Too dense for the crows, less likely to find a convenient, natural clearing in the middle of it.'

'Yes.'

'Yes, yes…' says Taylor, his mind going over the options, '…but there are still going to be woods with bare trees that just by their sheer volume or location provide cover, so we'll have to consider those too.'

Suddenly Taylor straightens, shoulders back, head up.

'You finished?'

He still drinks faster than me.

'No,' I say.

'Leave it then.'

'Where are we going?' I ask, as we make for the door.

'No point in us sitting around talking about trees. What do you know about trees?'

'Bugger all.'

'Same here. Let's go and find someone who knows about trees.'

'You know wh–'

'No, but we'll find someone who knows someone who knows about trees.'

There's probably a website for that.

In the office of the tree expert. Forestry Commission out at Aberfoyle. Forty-five minute journey. I drove. Might have been a waste of time for us both to come out here, but this is how Taylor works. He likes the time in the car. We can stick Bob on the CD player and think. Or we can stick Bob on the CD player, turn it down a little, and talk things through. Only in the most serious of circumstances is Bob sacrificed to the necessity of quiet.

Alice Whittaker is standing at the window looking out over the local woods. We can see the edge of the golf course. Played a round there once on a station day out. I think I shot a handy 136 or so. 70 over par. Not my best round, although sadly not my worst either.

Taylor is looking at maps on the walls, I'm standing with my bum against a ledge, arms folded. There's an informality about the whole thing that wouldn't be there if we were seated around a desk.

So far all we've had is general chitchat and a couple of questions about crows and trees. Nothing much. We didn't say why we were here, but it became pretty obvious the minute crows got a mention.

Taylor spoke to a crow expert last time. Maybe we'll go and see him again. What kind of job is that? Crow expert. I don't suppose it was his actual job title.

'You think your man is going to strike again?'

Taylor can do artifice and bullshit as much as the next man, happy to tell an interviewee as little as possible. He'll gauge the woman, make a call.

Alice Whittaker is all right. You can tell. She won't call a newspaper as soon as we walk out the door and let them know what the police are thinking. She probably won't even tell her husband over dinner tonight that the police called.

'Yes,' says Taylor.

'Which would explain why the man responsible has gone public with footage he's kept tucked away for several months.'

'Yes.'

We're on the first floor, allowing that view up to the woods and the golf course. Taylor, clutching the mug of tea we were given when we arrived, goes over and stands beside her and they look out at the view together. I'm a couple of yards away, feeling a bit left out.

No, really, I don't feel left out. Take a sip of tea. My mug has Arbroath FC written on the side, and I wonder why anyone would have an Arbroath FC mug.

'What are you looking for exactly?' she asks.

'I know this sounds absurdly far-fetched, but we need to know if there's any way we could narrow down his next kill site. You've seen the footage?'

She nods, making the appropriate expression of horror.

'We have to make some assumptions at this stage. So we assume he's doing the same again. But we also assume he's going to need cover to carry out his work. He's not going to be using a wooded area where the trees have shed.'

She's nodding. Thinking it through. Some people would already have laughed at him and told him not to be so fucking stupid. The notion is absurd. It's Scotland. There are trees all over the place. Not as many as there were a thousand years ago, but enough to make it needle-in-a-haystack territory.

'OK,' she says. 'We can lose the densely populated planted forests, as that won't suit his purposes. We can discount some of the deciduous woods, although I'm not sure you can dismiss them completely. Maybe not areas as close to suburbia as the one where the first murders were committed, but there are going to be woods in the middle of Perthshire, and further afield, where there's going to be the opportunity to carry out that kind of work. Around here even. Where it doesn't matter that the leaves have shed, because there are enough trees in the middle of nowhere to provide adequate protection.'

'This guy doesn't leave things to chance,' says Taylor. 'Every angle covered. Spare bit of ground in the country, someone's out walking their dog.'

Slight movement of the head. She doesn't completely agree. But we need to make some calls to narrow down the list. We need something.

'All right…'

'Do you have… is there some kind of reference work, easily referenced map, something like that, where we can look at it and say, right, it can be here or here or here? That's what we're getting at. If we did that, how many areas are we going to need to check out and how many are we likely to miss because we're looking at a map?'

She glances at him, then turns and takes a quick look at me. Making sure I'm still there. Or that I'm not stealing anything.

'Might as well start with Google Earth,' she says.

'What?' Taylor looks annoyed. 'I already looked at Google Earth. I was looking for…. I don't know, something that…'

'You were looking for something that showed all the wooded areas in Scotland, with an overview of the position of those woods in relation to urbanised areas?'

'Yes.'

'Well, let's look at Google Earth. To make you feel better, I'll do it with you, tell you what kinds of trees you're looking at and give you my opinion on whether or not any particular wood is a plausible place for your chap. Happy?'

Taylor makes a throwaway gesture. It is, despite himself, exactly what he was looking for.

'Will you scream if I say you're looking for a needle in a haystack?' she says.

He doesn't scream, but doesn't reply. Takes a step away from the window, goes and looks at an ordnance survey map on the wall.

'That's south Devon,' she says. 'Won't help you.'

He shakes his head, glances round at me.

'How many men have you got?' she asks. 'Are you going to be able to put officers out in every town and every area? How long are you going to be able to do that? If this guy is smart, he's probably planned for you to be looking out for him.'

'There are two of us,' said Taylor.

She stares at him, and then back at me. Back to Taylor. There's a beautiful silence in the air. With the hills in the background it's taking me back to the summer. A long quiet summer without any of this shit.

'There are two of you on the whole investigation?' she says. 'You're kidding.'

'There are two of us on this part,' says Taylor. Not giving her any more, despite the look she gives him. 'Look, this is shit. It's shit that the guy's done what he's done, it's shit… whatever, it's all shit. We just need your help to try and get ahead of the game. I want to walk out of here with a list. That's all. An ordered list. If the list has a hundred thousand individual small areas of woodland on it I don't care, as long as there's a top and a bottom, a note of what kinds of trees they are, a most likely and a not really much of a chance, a list that we can check out. If there are crows' nests and the wood is in any way secluded, it stays on the list. This guy has given us nothing. We need to get lucky, and all we're trying to do is make our own. Can you help?'

It's obvious she likes the speech. She nods.

'Well, Chief Inspector, it's not like I've nothing else to be doing today, but what the hell. Might as well give it a go. Let's get to work. You can use separate computers, split up the country, and I'll move between the two of you letting you know what I think.'

She moves around her desk and logs onto a monitor that is yet to be activated today.

'We've only got an hour,' says Taylor. 'Don't want to lose too much daylight.'

'Dream on, sunshine,' she says, smiling and shaking her head.

*

Four-and-a-half hours later we're sitting in the car. We have a long list, hastily arranged into order of likelihood. Sadly the top of the list starts with pretty unlikely and then gets progressively more far-fetched.

'We starting around here since we're in the area?' I ask.

He shakes his head. We've been concentrating on the absurd task we've set ourselves, but I know he'll have been thinking ahead. Mentally, I realise that I've been playing the part of the subordinate, waiting to be instructed on what to do next. I'll catch up eventually.

'No,' he says. 'We're going back home, split up, start looking at potential areas as close to the previous. Really, if it turns out the next killings are in Dundee or Inverness or Perth then we are, as Corporal Hicks says in
Aliens
, fucking fucked, man. We look at the places around our patch and hope for the best.'

Start the car, head off, quickly onto the A95 back towards Glasgow. Look up the hill to my nemesis of a golf course.

'We're just wasting our time,' I say after a while, as the pale green countryside passes by. Sudden melancholy, feeling a little bit lost. Put on a hopeless mission, driving around being told what to do. A cold couple of hours ahead, checking on small clumps of trees. And for what? A man cementing chairs into the floor?

'If he never kills again, we're wasting our time,' says Taylor. 'If he kills again, but this time he's gone to Sweden or Normandy or somewhere, then we're wasting our time. But if he picks somewhere that happens to be on that list… even if we don't catch him, it doesn't matter. It means we're on the right track, and we'll have more to work with… next time. So, no…'

Feeling tired after a sleepless night. Would love to fall asleep, but then, I'm driving, so that would be bad. Nevertheless, there isn't any more talking to be done. There really hasn't been any talking to do since early August. It's all been about waiting, and now this rather desperate attempt to force the pace of the investigation.

Get back to the station at 2:43pm. Time to grab a sandwich, then take about 0.005% of the list and get going.

6.33pm. Trudge back into the office, stop in the middle of it all. No sign of the hired hands from out of town. Everything seems to be normal, the usual kind of shit and general level of activity for this time of day, midweek. Morrow looks up from his desk and nods. I nod back. Presumably, after one day on the job at all-out speed, he's been removed and put back onto the mundane day-to-day stuff of the Cambuslang/Rutherglen area.

Taylor's in his office so I wander through. Smoked enough fags during the afternoon not to be feeling deprived. Could use a coffee. Maybe some alcohol. Alcohol later, coffee first. Would have stopped off at the Costa on the way in, but thought I should report back. Had hoped that Taylor wouldn't be here yet.

Stand in the doorway. 'How'd you do?' I ask.

He's got one of the maps spread out in front of him, which he's been marking off.

'Looked at around twenty spots. Some of them are definitely out, some 50/50… found two, maybe three that would be good places for our man, nests in place, definite signs of crow activity. How about you?'

'You didn't catch him in the act then?'

'Sadly it's not an episode of Scooby Doo, Sergeant.'

I grunt and walk round behind him to look over his shoulder at the map.

'You make notes?' he asks.

'Yes.'

Annoyed at the suggestion that I might not have done, although generally my paperwork is so shit that I oughtn't to be.

'Right, grab a seat and mark them off.'

'Yes, boss.'

Pull up a seat across the desk from him, turn the map around and start to mark it up. He watches me for a few seconds and then turns back to the computer. Quick glance to see what he's looking at. Twitter. Ah yes, the modern way. That's how we'll find out.

For the moment Plague of Crows isn't trending, having been usurped by four tags related to Justin Beiber, two about John Terry and #replacemovietitleswithcock. Society knows what's important, and here's us worrying about this shit. But he's right to look. While we're running headlong down our tunnel-vision wild goose chase, and the boys from Edinburgh are throwing money and resources at every aspect of the investigation, you can guarantee that the next piece of information will first come to the attention of the police via social networking.

He's searching Plague of Crows, tracking the most recent stuff. A quick glance doesn't reveal anything new.