DS Hutton Box Set

by Douglas Lindsay

  Edinburgh has so far turned up the same level of information as Glasgow, except for this guy I'm meeting now in a café at Leith docks. Not far from Britannia. Said he couldn't meet me at his work place as it's not suitable. Works in a lab. This bloke is from the enthusiastic amateur cadre. I buy coffee. He has some shit with mocha in the title, I have an espresso because I don't want to drink too much and I don't want to be too long about it.

  He has the look about him. You know, the look. The one that fires warning shots. If you try to put your finger on what it is about them that makes you think, ah, wait a minute, this might be what we're looking for, you can't do it. But there's something. Almost as if you can spot the imbalance.

  He plays with his coffee as he tells me he's been studying crows as a hobby ever since he saw The Omen.

  'Wasn't that a raven?' I say.

  'I study all the corvids,' he says. 'But crows are my favourite. Fascinating birds. Much misunderstood.'

  'Go on,' I say.

  He looks around him as if gathering inspiration from the absurdly uniform surroundings of a café that could be any café in any town or city in the western world.

  'Down through history people have misunderstood them,' he begins. 'They treat them as carrion, implicitly unpleasant. Evil even. The raven is often seen as a harbinger of ill times, and the crow is sucked along in its wake. And you know, the reason for it is simple. Extremely simple. They're black. All black. That's all it is.'

  'Hooded crows aren't all black,' I say to stop him in his tracks. His intensity is annoying, although I ought to be letting him talk as he's the kind of bloke I'm looking for. An over-enthusiastic nutter.

  'Yes, there are variations, Sergeant,' he says. 'In general, the genus corvus are black, and throughout history they have been discriminated against. It's avian racism.'

  Holy Jesus fuck. I'd say those words to Taylor if he was here. People get wound up about the stupidest shit.

  'You hear that people have started killing crows?' I say.

  'Outrageous. I hope the police are going to clamp down on this with extreme prejudice.'

  'Of course,' I say, ignoring the stupidity of anyone using the phrase extreme prejudice.

  'Crows don't eat brains,' he says. 'Not unless, seriously, not unless someone taught them how to do it.'

  'Most people I've spoken to don't agree.'

  He smarts and shakes his head.

  'That makes me very cross,' he says. He leans forward on his elbows. 'Very cross. If these crows really are eating human brains – and I very much doubt that they are – then...'

  'We've found crows at the scene with human brain remains in their gullet.'

  'Have you?'

  'Yes.' Saying a bit too much there, but it just slipped out.

  'Well, then, in that case it's definite. Someone is training those poor birds to do this. They would not automatically attack a human in this way.'

  I suppose this is the kind of thing that I've come out looking for, but when presented with it, it's so opposed to everything else I've been told, and it sounds so absurd, this bloke sounds so absurd, I just stare at him. Waiting for the moment when he implicates his arch nemesis in the enthusiastic amateur bird world.

  He never does.

  Make it back to Glasgow not long before seven. Don't bother checking in with Taylor, assuming he's at his desk, and head straight for the coffee shop. Seem to be spending a lot of time drinking coffee, but from the amount of the bloody places that are now open, and the amount of people who are always in them, I'm not alone. The world of the west is now conducted in Starbucks.

  Not sure that I want anything, so I buy a bottle of water – water, for fuck's sake, am in need of something much stronger – and wait at a table for her. She arrives with precision timing.

  'Get you anything?' she asks, heading to the counter and barely stopping at the table.

  'Large cappuccino, please,' I say for some reason, then immediately worry that it makes me look cheap, because I never bought it myself.

  Better just not to think.

  Elbows on table, stare straight ahead. People come and go. This place used to shut at six, then seven; now it's open until eight-thirty. It'll be twenty-four hours soon enough, then they'll invent some kind of weird time thing, so that there can be more than twenty-four hours in the day. They say that people are spending less money on alcohol, which is something. You're a lot less likely to chib some other bastard after a skinny latte, although people do talk just as much pish in here as they do in the pub.

  'What are you thinking?'

  She sits down opposite, placing my coffee in front of me.

  Fuck's sake. 'I was thinking that I might have appeared cheap because obviously I could have got myself a coffee, but I genuinely didn't feel like one when I came in, and then you asked, so now I feel a bit bad about it, and I was wondering if I should offer you money, but then I thought, maybe that might offend you a bit since you'd offered, and maybe I ought to just let you buy it.'

  She kind of smiles and shakes her head.

  'Usually men just say 'nothing'.'

  Yep, ain't that the truth? But start telling a woman what you're thinking and the next thing you know she's lying naked in bed. But don't keep telling her what you're thinking or she'll come to see you as marriage material, and that never ends well.

  Obviously I speak for myself there. I knew someone once who was happily married for a long time.

  'Thanks for the coffee.'

  Now I naturally look introverted and slightly awkward, as if I've said too much, which is what I would do anyway, but just serves to make her think that I'm slightly more complex than your average bloke, but in a good way.

  She's thinking, he knows when to talk and he knows when to shut up... more than likely he's also a very considerate lover.

  'How d'you get on this afternoon?' she asks.

  'Continued the bird quest,' I say. 'Found one guy who disagreed with everyone else and insisted that some evil genius must be training the crows.'

  'Who're you going to go with?' she asks. 'The majority, or the one? Much more interesting sometimes to go for the one, don't you think?'

  'Yes,' I say. Find myself smiling. 'Unfortunately he had the credibility of a shouty man on a radio phone-in. Still, it all helps. How about you? They let you in on any inside information?'

  'Quite the reverse,' she says. 'Montgomery told Connor they didn't need me anymore. Or PC Grant.'

  'Ah.'

  'Connor's pissed off, but it's not entirely unexpected. They got out of me what they could, they didn't tell me anything, and then they got rid of me. Should have seen it coming. Well, of course, I did see it coming.'

  Nothing to say to that. I hadn't seen it coming, but then I hadn't been thinking about it. In fact I'd rather enjoyed the whole clandestine thing.

  'What now?'

  'I get to work with you guys,' she says.

  For some stupid reason that information goes straight to my groin.

  'Just for a couple of weeks, see how it goes. Well, I'll be working for the DCI, doing whatever he thinks it's best that I do. So, I've got a message from him.'

  'For me...?'

  'Get your arse over there.'

  I look down at the cups. For the first time the great detective notices that instead of getting mugs of coffee, she got takeaway cardboard cups. With lids.

  'We're leaving,' she says, getting to her feet.

  It's only at this point that I realise I'd been presuming we'd sit there over cooling cups of coffee until they'd gone completely cold and the place closed for the night, then we'd go somewhere for dinner and then she'd come back to my place; and if that latter part didn't happen, it would only be because I went back to her place.

  She heads off, presuming that I'll trail along obediently in her wake. And I'll bet she's the kind of woman who won't have sex with someone with whom she's working on a case.

  January

  23

  MONTHS
PASS. THE PLAGUE of Crows disappears, and we don't know if he'll ever come back. We must assume that he will, that's all.

  Edinburgh is still here, but they have slimmed down. For a while, for a month or so, they threw more men at the crime, and with no more free space in our building for them to occupy, they rented rooms along the street. Resources flooded in. At some point they had the same idea as Taylor, of narrowing down the likely areas the Plague of Crows might use; when he heard that that's what they were looking at, Taylor offered them the information we'd gathered. All in it together, after all, and Taylor's not worried about credit. He doesn't want his name in the paper, or a framed photo of the First Minister presenting him with an award.

  In mid-December the Scotsman did a nicely detailed study on the level of resources Edinburgh were committing to these crimes that had happened – in Scottish terms – nowhere near Edinburgh, with some dubious statistics and the usual absurd anecdotal evidence to indicate just how badly Edinburgh's policing had been disrupted by this redistribution of resources. The Edinburgh police and the Justice Minister fought their corner, then as soon as they thought no one was looking they withdrew eighty per cent of the officers they'd brought through, relinquishing the new offices at the same time, even though they'd paid a six-month lease in advance.

  Montgomery is still here, with his runt force, chasing down ever more fractured and implausible leads. Which is what Taylor has been doing since August. It would have made sense for Montgomery to go back to his office in Edinburgh and continue the investigation from there. The first lot of murders might have been on our patch, but the second was nowhere near. Who knows where the third will be? So there's no reason for Montgomery to stay in Glasgow, except he wants to. Argued his case and he's still here. His case was based on not interrupting the operation that he's established at the station; Taylor and I assume it's because he likes the expenses, or he's worried that if he takes the operation back to Edinburgh it'll get swallowed up and ultimately he won't be the one to break the back of it.

  Gostkowski stayed on the case for a fortnight, and then Connor was forced to move her on. I lasted into December, but as the Christmas season approached, and there was the usual rise in drink, depression and desperation related crime, they had to shift me back on to regular duties.

  Taylor has stayed on the Plague of Crows throughout. It's not been good to him. Too long with nothing to do and no progress to be made. Day after day searching through the same old stuff, an increasingly desperate search, knowing that the killer is coming again, at a time of his own choosing.

  When someone plans a crime, before it's been committed, when only they know it's going to happen, they hold all the cards. The course of an investigation is the act of taking those cards away from them, transferring the cards until it's the police who are in charge.

  It's just over five months since the first set of victims was discovered, and so far the Plague of Crows is still in full possession of all fifty-two. Taylor is gradually suffering, gradually being dragged downhill.

  Not all police officers will have a nemesis in their career, indeed most won't. But sometimes it happens, and pity those that do.

  FORTUNATELY FOR ME, my nemesis continues to be sleeping with women that I really ought to stay away from. Got to the Christmas night out and imagined that it might be the time to finally consummate all that electric sexual tension that had been going on with Gostkowski. Then I got slaughtered on vodka and ended up taking home one of the waitresses. Not my proudest moment.

  Caught DI Gostkowski's eye as I was walking out, absurdly young woman draped around me. Not sure how to describe how she looked. Not judgemental. Sensible.

  Anyway, the waitress – and for the life of me I can't remember her name – was old enough to know what she was doing, and I think it was pretty good fun. It's supposed to be, after all. No point in casual sex if you're not going to have fun with it. She was gone in the morning.

  Maybe she nicked something, although I haven't noticed.

  Slim pickings otherwise. Some other night in the pub I ended up alone at a table with Alison – ex-wife number three – and she wasn't sounding so happy about her recent marriage to Sergeant McGovern. McGovern, at the time, was off at Ibrox watching the Rangers embarrass themselves further in the Stygian depths of Scottish lower division football. Really it was just early days marriage blues, something that she and I crashed and burned at, our faithful union before God not surviving into the second month, and some mature ex-husbands at this point would have comforted her with reassuring words about the future and how everything would settle down.

  Me, I hit on her, asking her if she wanted to come back to my place for a shag. I'd been drinking. And I did actually use the word shag. Classless wanker.

  She left shortly afterwards, and when I say shortly afterwards, I mean she was putting her coat on before I got to the 'g' in shag.

  Oh, there was another one, another crappy night in the pub. Went to her place. Rubbish sex. One of those where you crawl out the door afterwards, struck low by the colossal weight of your own depression and self-loathing. Horrible night. Didn't drink for nearly two days after that, and then, because I'd sworn I wouldn't drink again, like ever, I was full of self-loathing again when I went back to the bar. Having never seen her before, seems like every time I'm in the bar now she's there, and we look at each other with ill-disguised contempt.

  Saw the kids a couple of times over Christmas, but things have been pretty ropey since I nearly got back with their mother, screwed it up and then bailed without giving her any say in the matter. We're drifting into disinterest and the kids are getting more and more distrustful of me at the way I've treated her as they get older. I'm losing them.

  No, I've already lost them. All I can do is try not to completely fuck it up during their teenage years and then hope for some sort of rapprochement once they reach adulthood.

  Taylor's moved office, now in a smaller room at the far end of the station. This one has a window on the outside world, however, unlike the last office, which just had windows staring at the rest of the station open-plan. There's a new DCI been put in his place in that office. Dorritt. Newly promoted, brought in from South Lanarkshire. A junior DCI, he's no threat to Taylor. Even if he was, in some way, a nominal threat, I doubt Taylor would see him as such. He doesn't care, too wrapped up in the Plague of Crows. If anything, thankful that there's someone else filling the void, leaving him to concentrate on the task that consumes him.

  His office walls are covered in photographs of woodland areas around the country. Potential murder sites. His hunch is that next time the Plague of Crows will be even bolder. There will be a natural progression. From much delayed video, to video filmed only hours earlier, to something altogether more sinister. Next time, he thinks, it will be a live webcam. Sure of it.

  And he's right. After all this time, trying to get inside the head of this killer, a killer who has been calculatingly brilliant in everything he's done, it's the natural progression. Live webcam, taunting us, laughing at us, mocking the entire force, every station and unit in the country. That's what's coming.

  Taylor spends his days getting to know these places. There's not enough space on his walls for the photos, so he rotates them. Studies the photographs as he takes them down and puts them up. Has them on his computer, so he can watch them flash by when he's sitting thinking. When the next piece of footage starts to circulate around the web, and has gone viral within minutes, he wants to know where it is. Right there, that first instant.

  In this regard, he needs the killer to strike again before late spring, because once the leaves come back, the number of potential woodland sites increases exponentially and we're fucked.

  It seemed preposterous to start with. Of course it does. Just look out your window or pay attention when you drive to work or sit on the bus. There are hundreds of potential sites. Thousands. How could one man learn them all? But he's taken the time, visited them all. Stood in the middle of th
em and worked out what the killer will have worked out. Natural clearing. No one, or at least no more than the occasional house, within close range. Crows' nests. Good cover, even in winter. Decent access to allow him to get a Transit in.

  Taylor worked at it, he narrowed it down, which meant his list was just incredibly long, rather than ridiculously unworkable.

  Some are going to think he's obsessing, but all he's doing is giving himself the best chance of success. Although, of course, what will it do for us? The killer would be incredibly bold, and taking the kind of chance he appears not to take, if he were to hang around while the murders were broadcasting. He would have to make the assumption that some police officer somewhere might know where it was and therefore be long gone by the time the webcam went live.

  And Taylor has started drinking again. The Plague of Crows would love what this is doing to him. He's not an alcoholic, it's not getting in the way of his work, but for a while, for a long while, he became the job, he became the authority figure in the station, he became his work; stronger, fitter, healthier. So now that he's started going back to the pub, and is having a drink when he gets home after work, regardless of time, it shows on him. He's not coming into work drunk or reeking of it, he's not drinking any more than your average middle-aged, middle-class bloke, but you can tell on his face. And I can tell from the fact that he's started coming to the pub with me.

  Walk into his office, catch him standing at the window looking out at the car park. The same view, from one storey up, that you get from the back door area where all us smokers congregate these days.

  'How's it going?' I ask.

  He shrugs without turning.

  'Nothing to report, Sergeant,' he says.

  I stand at the window beside him, looking down on a sea of Hondas and dull Fords and cars that were in their prime fifteen years ago.

  'It's coming,' I say.

  'Seventeen days,' he says.

  We've been working to a calendar. The number of days it will be before the next killing, if the Plague of Crows waits the same number of days as the last time, as if there might have been a specific reason for choosing that precise time gap.