DS Hutton Box Set

by Douglas Lindsay

  The gun goes off and I, at least, flinch. Maybe the others do too. Another quick couple of shots, accompanied by the fleeing of crows and the frantic flutter of wings and the crowing and squawking.

  I step away – nothing more to see here – and walk into the middle of the clearing. Montgomery is approaching, large strides through small trees. I hear Taylor say, 'What are the chances I'm going to be able to talk to her?' and one of the medics snorts in reply.

  I step further away, to the edge of the clearing, looking around. A couple of constables are already doing the same thing, and I wonder if they've been told to or whether they just want to get away from the murder scene. Is that what I'm doing? Do I think there's worth in looking around the area, or do I just not want to look at a grisly murder site in the middle of a wood?

  Too many times grisly murder scenes in woods play out in my dreams. Can't stand to look.

  But has the killer waited in the undergrowth to watch? Or does he have another camera hidden somewhere in the trees? That would make sense. A camera. Maybe he did that before, although the surrounding areas were thoroughly searched. Yet there are changes each time to the way he operates, and those changes have been related to filming and release of video.

  Is there another camera, which is already relaying details of the investigation live onto the web? Not so likely, because then we'd get to hear about it, and would be able to take the camera down before we'd finished. He might want to see the whole thing play out.

  Montgomery and Taylor are talking, but I've walked out of earshot. Low voices. They're not arguing though, which is good. Back in November, Montgomery came in like he was General Haig, expecting to have everything solved and wrapped up long before Christmas, but as time's gone on he's likely grown just as desperate as Taylor. Doesn't want stuck with this for the rest of his life.

  Walk over to the two constables, who have now been joined by a third.

  'Looking for anything in particular?' I say.

  'Just anything out of the ordinary,' says one, as the other two shake heads.

  'Listen, the guy obviously knows what he's doing with a webcam. Let's check around, look to see if we can find a camera. And let's be aware, he has some resources going on here. He may well have access to some cool-as-shit, microscopic little fucker that'll be easy to miss. So, check trees, bushes, at a decent level off the ground.'

  We get to work in the trees. As soon as I've had the thought I know we're going to find something. I throw a 'Don't touch anything that you find,' over my shoulder at them.

  Like the boss, I don't care who does the business that works out, as long as it gets done. The call goes up a few minutes later. In the meantime, Taylor has already been over to ask what we're doing, leaving the horrible twitching victim to the paramedics. They haven't even taken the gag out of her mouth yet, worried that the second the bonds get loosened she'll become a spasming horror. They're trying to sedate her, but so far her brain isn't recognising whatever it is they're pumping into her.

  Taylor liked the sound of the camera search and left us to it. Wandered around the small clearing, breathing the place in. Won't be happy that all we found were two dead bodies and a convulsing wreck.

  The camera is near the top of a bush, tucked in behind some leaves in the middle, but with a clear view through the foliage to the scene. It's one of the local guys who finds it, and it was me who sent them out on their task, but there's no doubt that this is in Montgomery's hands the second the cry goes up.

  He walks over, doesn't immediately grab it and put it in his pocket. There's nothing to be gained from bringing the filming to an end the second we have confirmation of another camera, and he'll take a moment to consider whether there's anything to be gained by letting it run.

  We can speak to him. The killer.

  Do we want to speak to him? Have a one-way conversation, where we don't even know if he's listening? We don't know yet if there's a microphone.

  While I stand to the side of the discussion between Montgomery and one of his sidekick Inspectors – Marqueson I think – I realise that I'm in the camera's line of vision.

  I stare into it for a moment. Wonder if he's somewhere watching right at this moment. Calls back to the station have indicated that he's not broadcasting this anywhere online just now, not that we can find – and he's been pretty adept at advertising himself to the world – so I'm not worried that at that moment I'm being ogled by millions of people around the planet. But maybe I'm being ogled by the one guy. The Plague of Crows. And if not right at this minute, later, when he's looking at the footage in the comfort of his own bedroom or his own basement, whichever hovel it is that he inhabits.

  I feel no fear. Indeed, as I stand in his line of sight, I suddenly think that maybe this is what I'm waiting for. The brutal, unpleasant death. The death that makes people feel sorry for me, a death that makes people regret I'm gone, and forget why it is they want nothing to do with me at the moment.

  Of course, I also believe that I wouldn't be sucked so easily into his trap, in the way that these others were. The police officers in particular, assuming that one of these three women is one of us. They know what's out there, they know we're being targeted. How in the name of fuck are they allowing themselves to be taken?

  Not me. I have a moment, not of invincibility, but of knowing that this guy, currently watching me in the stinking depths of his festering fleapit, would not be able to get to me. I'll see him coming. Or her coming. Whichever, it won't matter. Maybe he'll take me down, maybe I'll die trying to take him down, maybe we'll go together, Holmes and Moriarty plunging hand-in-hand into the waterfall, but he won't get me out here, he won't get me bound and gagged, the top of my head removed.

  I stare into the camera. Don't speak, but he can read my face. I know what he's thinking, I know he understands.

  Come and fucking get me, you prick.

  One of those moments when I don't care. I've lived long enough. Done enough. Seen enough. Had enough women, drunk enough vodka. And, more than anything, I've done things I deserve to die for. Or not done things.

  Come and fucking get me, you prick. I know my lips aren't moving, but fucking read them anyway. Come on.

  Marqueson moves in front of me and blocks out the camera. By the time the view is clear again I've moved out of sight.

  26

  Mostar, in the middle of Bosnia, was a bunfight in the war. Centre of the whole thing. The Bosnian Serbs bombed it, took it. The Bosniaks took it back. The Bosnian-Croats fought them for it. Back and forth, a shitstorm of war, death and destruction.

  When I arrived in the early autumn of '93 the Serbs had moved on and the Croatians were laying siege. They held the city to the west, had ethnically cleansed, raped and murdered the Bosniaks out of that part of town, back over the main road and the Neretva river to the east of the city, and were shelling all kinds of shit out the joint. It was war, that's what happens.

  Of the ancient architecture in Mostar, the shining light was the Stari Most, the old bridge. The Croatians shelled it to destruction in November that year. I watched it happen. It wasn't strategic in any way, wasn't like you could get a tank across it. They just did it for the Hell of it, for the effect on the morale of the besieged population. They did it because they could.

  I arrived in town thinking that the Serbs were the bad guys, because that's what I'd been told, only to discover that everyone was a bad guy. Yep, the Serbs had already destroyed the Franciscan monastery and the Catholic cathedral and fourteen mosques and the library with 50,000 books, they just hadn't waited for me to turn up to see it. Weirdly it wasn't shocking, because I already knew that was the kind of thing they did. But I arrived to find the Bosniaks and Croatians doing the same to each other. For some reason I was surprised. Must have been young and innocent.

  The Croatians, so innocent themselves, who would later be so offended when the Serbs dared to lay siege to Dubrovnik. How could the Serbs shell an ancient walled city? How could they damag
e an historically important site, the heartless fuckers? Poor Croatia, they would never do such a thing. They were the victims. Look at us world, we're the victims. Victims. The world agreed.

  Some say they set tyres on fire in Dubrovnik to make it look worse, that when foreign journalists drove into the city after the siege was lifted, there wasn't as much damage as they'd been expecting. I wasn't there then. I was in Bosnia, in the middle of the forest. Maybe it's not true. Maybe rather than the burning tyres being propaganda, it's the story of the burning tyres that's propaganda.

  Who knows any of that shit? That's what happens in war. Everyone leaps up and down saying they're innocent, and if their absolute guilt is established, then they leap up and down justifying why they were just doing what they had to do.

  No one wins.

  There were crows in the forest. Were there crows in the forest? Probably. Once. Sometimes when I wake up, now that the Plague of Crows is in all our heads, I see the crows in the forest in Bosnia, even though I know there were no crows. No birds at all. Birds are smart. They may not be so smart that they can play chess or solve mathematical puzzles or design an iPad, but they're smart enough to get the fuck out of Dodge when the bullets start flying.

  Maybe people are smart too, they've just got nowhere to go.

  They destroyed the bridge at Mostar. The Croatian Army. I was there. I saw it. They say it's been rebuilt, but I'm never going back. I'm never going to see it again.

  They destroyed the ancient bridge. Mortar attack. 9th November 1993. The bridge at Mostar. The ancient bridge. Yet they were the good guys. That's what we were told.

  Good guys don't blow up bridges just for the hell of it.

  Now isn't that a fucking joke?

  IT HAPPENS THAT NIGHT. Me and Stephanie. Gostkowski, the Detective Inspector. We work late. All of us. No one leaves before eleven. A long day. Some stay until two or three in the morning, but in general we're told to leave, go home and get some rest, come in again early the following day. Clear heads.

  We meet where I first really talked to her, last August, which already seems a long, long time ago. Like that time, she's already out there, smoking, coming to the end of her cigarette when I walk out.

  We nod, not a lot to say. Think I know right there and then. She stubs her cigarette under her foot and says, 'Let me try one of them.'

  I light it for her and hand it over. Lighting a cigarette for a woman and then handing it to her is one of those things that's just innately erotic. Don't know why, it just is. You're passing her death on a stick, but it doesn't matter. Still laced with tension.

  'It's all right,' she says after a while.

  I smile, sort of, but there's not much smiling tonight. This has been too long a day, too shit a day. A really, really shit day.

  I'm tired, but I need something else before I go to sleep. I don't want to spend the day buried up to my eyes in this grotesque murder enquiry, be unconscious for six hours, and then get back to it. I need distraction, and it's going to have to be a pretty fucking mental one. No use watching a documentary on BBC4 or eating a fish supper.

  This is why people in war zones, all the soldiers and the NGOs and the paper pushers that are sent to places like Baghdad and Kandahar, just fuck, bonk, bang and shag their way through their time out there. The working environment is too stressful, so that when they do get some down time, it needs to be high quality, needs to be an experience. So they shag their way around the compound, or wherever the hell they're living.

  I'm about to bluntly suggest that she comes back with me to my house, and I know she'll say yes, and I also know that we likely won't be the only two doing it at the station this evening.

  'You want to sleep with me tonight?' I say. I think when I started the sentence I'd intended asking if she wanted to stay over, or some shit like that, but out-and-out honesty just took over.

  'Of course,' she says, as if we'd been fucking for years. Or like she was some blunt non-native English speaker. Dutch or German. For sure.

  WE DON'T SPEAK. I WALK into the bathroom and turn on the shower. She follows behind me, and stands unmoving as I undress her. Slip the blouse off her shoulders. Walk round behind her to undo the bra strap. Kiss the middle of her back. Let my hands rest lightly on her shoulders. Even at that she lets out a small gasp, the gentleness of touch, the caressing of the skin. Then I unbutton her skirt and let it fall to the floor.

  The naked DI Gostkowski is as I'd imagined. Slim, not skinny. Deliciously proportioned breasts, great butt. I bend down, my hands holding tightly onto her hips, and bite her butt cheeks. Two, three times. Then I start working my way up, kissing and nibbling at her back. Standing behind her, I continue to kiss while I quickly undress, so that by the time I'm kissing her neck, I'm naked. I reach round and take her breasts into my hands and press against her, my erect cock thrusting hard against her buttocks. She gasps again, and now I turn her round so that we're facing each other.

  As usual at this point I want to do everything at once. I want to kiss her all over, I want her lips on mine, I want her tongue all over me, I want her breasts in my mouth, I want to sink my cock deep inside her.

  I kiss her gently, teasing her, biting at her lips, she seems to gasp with every enticement, and then I press against her, take her into my arms and kiss her fully and passionately and she gives in to it and I love the feel of her hands as they grab my back, and of her breasts pressed against my chest.

  I step into the shower and take her with me, and then wonderfully, she takes over. Presses me against the wall, her hand immediately grabbing at my erection, squeezing my balls. Holy fuck, that glorious mixture of pain and pleasure.

  She pulls away, grabs the nearest bottle of shower gel and squirts it over my chest, then starts rubbing it in, as the water – just a little bit too hot – cascades over us. She's not really concerned with washing my chest, as she massages the soap over my aching cock and testicles. She looks intoxicating, the water bouncing off her shoulders and her hair, the soap splashing onto her breasts.

  Her hands are all over me, massaging my cock and my buttocks, and now she starts biting at my stomach, quickly getting lower. And then she pushes me slightly to the side so that the warm water is landing directly on my cock and she rinses off the soap, and then suddenly grabs the base of my erection, runs her tongue along the length, and then plunges onto it and starts fucking me gloriously with her mouth.

  This is what I'm talking about. Who on earth is going to be thinking about work at this moment? I'm standing in the shower, hot water all over me, and a woman on her knees in front of me, gloriously sucking my cock. Holy shit. Start thrusting, and she takes it, takes every thrust of my hips, and now it's hard to know who's in charge, if she's fucking me with her mouth or I'm fucking her mouth with my desperate, inflamed cock.

  Thirty minutes later we're dried off and lying in bed. Well, I'm lying in bed, she's on top of me. Stopped myself coming in the shower, because I didn't want it to end there. She didn't stop herself coming, as I pressed her against the wall, my tongue probing inside her, my lips and teeth massaging and nibbling her clitoris. And now she's sitting on top of me, her shoulders straight, almost leaning back, fucking me desperately, crying out with every thrust.

  I've got my hands on her hips, watching the movement of her breasts. I love just watching them, but I want to reach up and touch them, hold them, grope them and squeeze them, those fucking glorious breasts, the nipples protruding and desperate for my touch. Finally I give in to it, and as she's moaning and thrusting and driving her cunt onto me, I take her breasts into my hands, and there's nothing tender or romantic, it's all wonderful, desperate sex, and then I lean up and take her right breast into my mouth, biting and sucking, my tongue desperate for her, and at the same time I'm driving my cock into her as hard as I can...

  THERE WERE RIGHTS AND there were wrongs, and there was very little truth. That was the Balkan war. That's every war. Generally there aren't good guys. There are just a bunch
of people doing whatever it is they can to try and win. Maybe the guys who start it are always the bad guys, but then that would depend on why they started it in the first place.

  That's why we're still talking about WWII in the UK, that's why it's nearly impossible to turn on the television without finding something on there about it, a documentary or a commemoration or a TV drama. We were the undisputed good guys. The other lot were stomping across Europe, murdering people for not being blond enough. We stood up to them. We were the good guys, so good that in general we can ignore the questionable stuff, like when we slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians in bombing raids. The overall cause was so indisputably right that we're still happy to talk about it. Over and over and over, long after everyone else has moved on.

  There were bad guys on every side in the Balkans. But there's no ignoring some things. There's no ignoring Srebrenica, for example. There was no other side did anything else on that scale. No other side lined up thousands of men and boys and slaughtered them all. They all did some fucking horrible shit, but no one else did that. Just the Serbs. The Bosnian Serbs.

  The side that I took.

  27

  Get into work for 6:53am. Not bad, under the circumstances, but I'm pretty wired as soon as the alarm goes at six. Very commendably, DI Gostkowski did not stay over, barely even lay in bed, me with my arm draped around her, after we'd finished. She came, she fucked, she came, she left.

  Thinking about her as I sit at my desk, but not in any proactively vomit-inducing romantic way. Would be nice if we quickly developed into fuck buddies. Been a while since I had an out-and-out fuck buddy. Such a rare thing to find. There's usually one of you, if not both, ends up thinking romantic thoughts, and before you know it something's said, and there goes the fuck buddy relationship and then not long afterwards, there goes any kind of relationship.