DS Hutton Box Set

by Douglas Lindsay

  The ends of his fingers tap slowly together, the clockwork wheels click round in his head.

  26

  And so 11:03pm finds me at home, drinking wine. Couldn’t even be bothered stopping off at the bar on the way back here. Felt like drinking vodka, but there’s none in the house. There’s wine, and it’ll do.

  Couldn’t get hold of the agent, so I e-mailed. Left it at that. Not surprisingly, Taylor couldn’t get the psychiatrist either. The rest of the evening dribbled away in a descent into the old, familiar oblivion. Fucking hated being there by the end, but didn’t want to leave to come home.

  Yet what else is there? Go out? Sit in amongst people? Listen to them talking, laughing, arguing, whatever the fuck else they were going to be saying?

  And so here I am home, fuelling my descent. I don’t want anything else. I don’t want anyone else. There have been plenty of times when this would have had me trawling the streets, picking up someone, regardless of whether or not I had to pay for it. Hey, you always have to pay, one way or another.

  Philo, that was as good and as healthy as it was ever going to be, and I’m sure as fuck paying now.

  But no matter how shit I feel, and no matter how shit I want to feel, I don’t want any piece-of-fucking-shit woman who I’m going to hate the absolute fuck out of, lying in my bed.

  So, no drugs – there are never drugs – and no one else. Just wine, and my favourite lesbian porn DVD. Haven’t watched it in, fuck, I don’t know... Haven’t watched any porn in God knows how long. Haven’t needed to. Haven’t cared.

  You want to judge me? On any of it? Who gives a shit? Who gives a damned shit? Judge away, you bloody fools, then hide in your own corruptions.

  Still drinking wine from the glass – soon enough it’ll be straight from the bottle – and flicking between scenes trying to find one that really gets me going, because I’m sitting here naked from the waist down, thinking I’d be spending my evening drinking and masturbating, but my cock is just like, ‘oh for God’s sake Hutton, you fucking arsehole, are you seriously doing this?’ when my front door buzzer goes from out on the street.

  Down the rest of the glass, pour some more from the bottle, take another drink.

  He knows where I live. That’s my first thought. There’s a peculiar moment of fear, because I don’t want him coming up here now, seeing me like this. Defences are down – yeah, as well as my trousers – and I’m no match for him. Not now. But he’ll know. He’ll know I’m here. He’s a sly fucker who knows things. That’s who he is.

  The buzzer goes again.

  Another slurp of wine, some of it splashing on my chin, wipe it away with my sleeve, stand up, trousers back on, leaving those M&S briefs that are made with, God I don’t know, some sort of NASA technology, lying on the floor, and go to the door. Pause, my head resting on the wall.

  Maybe I could just let him kill me. That would be easy. You win. On you fucking go!

  He doesn’t want to kill me yet, though, does he? Too much sport still to be had.

  The buzzer goes again, and I angrily jab the button.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hey,’ says the unexpected voice of Eileen Harrison. ‘Thought I’d come and check up on you.’

  The tension floods out of me. Great waves of it. It could bring tears if I let it. Where was I ten seconds ago? Getting ready to die, right? Yep, that was it. Ready to stand before that fucker and let him do whatever he wanted.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Still here.’

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you doing up there?’

  I laugh, a wretched, contrived, desperate, stupid laugh.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Drinking wine and watching lesbian porn,’ I say.

  A small pause, then she says, ‘And you didn’t invite me?’

  I put my head back against the wall as I buzz open the door from the street, then I open the door to the flat and stand there, like the fucking wasted loser I am, listening to her footfalls on the steps.

  Have a brief thought Clayton will be beside her, a gun at her head, but he’d hardly need the cover of Harrison to get in.

  I stand away from the door as she comes up, she pushes it further open, looks at me, then closes the door and walks into the flat. She surveys the situation.

  Nearly empty bottle of wine on the carpet beside the settee. A single glass. NASA technology M&S briefs on the floor. She looks at the television. It’s your classic scene of the older woman and the neophyte, played out in porn movies around the world and, I’m guessing, virtually never in real life.

  ‘Mum and the babysitter?’ she says.

  I smile. You know, one of those black humour, everything’s fucking shit smiles.

  ‘I think it might be a stepmum and her son’s girlfriend, or something,’ I say. ‘The dialogue was a little complex. I got lost.’

  She watches it for a few seconds, then bends down and lifts both the NASA pants and my wine glass. She tastes the wine, approves – you can’t go wrong with a Sauvignon Blanc – and feels the texture of the underwear.

  ‘Hmm, that’s nice, what kind of material is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it might be from space... Maybe we’re getting a little too personal here, Sergeant.’

  ‘You think? Hey, we’re about to watch lesbian porn together, and I rarely do that with my underwear on either, so you know... I’ll get myself a glass.’

  She throws the NASA pants at me, gives me a look that is understanding and compassionate, just a glance, just a if-this-is-what-gets-you-through-the-night look, then turns in to the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a glass, another bottle of wine and the bag of Doritos I’d neglected to bring through in the first place.

  She opens the bottle, fills her own drink, settles into the sofa beside me and clinks my glass.

  ‘So, what are we watching?’

  ‘Lesbian Bonanza,’ I say.

  ‘Hmm... I thought I’d seen it, but I don’t remember this.’

  ‘This is Lesbian Bonanza 6.’

  ‘Ah.’

  She opens the Doritos and offers me the bag. We both take a handful, stick them in our laps and then settle back. Wine, Doritos and porn.

  The stepmum is lying back on the sofa, her clothes hanging off, her breasts glorious, and also oiled for some reason that is not entirely clear, while the babysitter or the son’s girlfriend or the plumber or the accountant or whoever the young lady is, is on her knees, completely naked, teasing the mum, her tongue running over the older woman’s thighs.

  ‘Fuck me with your tongue,’ gasps the mum.

  ‘I know it’s wrong,’ says Harrison, ‘but if I had to choose, I’d go for the twenty year-old.’

  It’s a small sofa, her leg is unavoidably touching mine. At long last my penis starts to wake up to the fact there’s porn on the TV and a woman beside me.

  27

  Into the office just after eight. Wouldn’t have predicted that ten hours earlier. Weirdly feel all right, despite the three and a half bottles of wine we got through. Even managed to stumble into bed before falling asleep.

  There was some recovery done, although it was from a long way back, so let’s not get excited about how switched on I’m going to be today, right bang smack in the middle of something this big. And I say we’re in the middle, but really, fuck knows where we are. If this is Clayton, God knows how long we could be here. He certainly played the long game with the Crows business. What was that in the end? Nine months maybe. Spun it out, kept us hanging, toyed with us perfectly.

  Maybe he does the same again.

  Maybe I need to take matters into my own hands. Go round there, put a bullet in his stupid fat head. I couldn’t be doing with a murder trial, any of that shit, I wouldn’t want the Police Service as a whole to take the brunt of it, as it would, so I’d probably have to also kill myself in the process.

  There’s rarely a day when it sounds like a bad idea. At
the moment I don’t feel horribly depressed. Just dead. Just like it wouldn’t matter.

  I wonder if I can go back and see Philo today. Will she have forgiven me yet?

  Probably not. And she might not have approved of last night either.

  Run into Sgt Harrison at the coffee machine. We smile.

  ‘You look better than anticipated,’ she says.

  ‘I shaved and drank three flagons of water.’

  ‘That’ll be it.’

  ‘You managed to put yourself together all right too.’

  ‘Same routine,’ she says. ‘Minus the shaving.’

  The coffee machine spurts and coughs and gargles. It’s kind of a pain in the arse listening to it sometimes when it’s other people standing here getting a drink, but I like it when it’s me. I suspect everyone feels like that.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  I wondered if there’d be some awkwardness this morning. I mean, it was made for awkward, after all. Eight hours ago we were sitting together on a sofa, legs touching, naked from the waste down, masturbating together to lesbian porn. That’s not the kind of thing one generally does with one’s best bud. I don’t think. Anyway, it was a first for me.

  It was an innately tough situation, of course. Because there was Eileen, naked, turned on, very horny, and right next to me. At that point, I wasn’t caring she was a lesbian. I was drunk, and I’d have given anything to be able to fuck her. Eileen, though... Well, she’s a lesbian. The thought of having sex with me would be on a par with the idea of me having sex with Morrow or Taylor. And that, my friends, is something no one wants to think about.

  So I did my thing, and Eileen did her thing, and beyond the pressing together of the legs, nothing else happened. Which was weird, right enough, but on the other hand, it means we’re standing having a nice chat this morning over the coffee machine, and I like her even more than I did yesterday, rather than the alternative, which would have been the two of us barely speaking to each other again, which is the case with me and virtually every other woman in this place.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she says. She knows what I’m thanking her for. ‘You too.’

  The coffee machine spits and gurgles. We stand in companionable silence.

  The warm feeling of early morning coffee machine good humour lasts all the way back to my desk, and then, as I sit down, I see the next e-mail in the series.

  He brought you Have you worked it out yet? He followed that with the record-breaking If you work it out, I’ll stop, and the one the critics loved, You seem stressed. Relax. Maybe turn on the news. Something I prepared earlier. Now, in conjunction with Microsoft and whichever fucking server he’s using this time, the cunt who’s messing with your shit brings you:

  The first one didn’t quite work out the way I intended, so I had to do it over. That’s all.

  That’s all.

  The boss is in his office, but that’s not my first move. Lift the phone, straight on to the transport police. I have the number sitting there from having called them the previous day.

  I get the same guy in the same office in Glasgow.

  ‘It’s Detective Sgt Hutton, Cambuslang...’

  That’s as far as I get.

  ‘I was just about to call you,’ says the constable whose name I don’t recall, the same sense of urgency in his voice.

  THE FRESHNESS OF MORNING has yet to disappear. The sky is grey, but the clouds high. The sun will appear at some point, and soon enough this freshness will vanish, and the day will be just another mild to warm miserable, crappy day in the west of Scotland. With a chance of rain.

  Victim number six of the week lies dead on the tracks, in a small siding near Dalmarnock, train tracks all around, but most of them obviously no longer in use.

  Head severed.

  She’d been dressed in black, and tied to the tracks. Interestingly, though, not in the traditional old western movie way. Her body had been pinned down, perpendicular to the track, with her head placed in between the two rails, her neck tied down onto a single rail. When the train came slowly along, as it would have done so close to the end of the line, the wheels ran over her neck, but not the rest of her body. She would have died instantly, and then the repeated running of sets of wheels over her neck eventually decapitated her.

  She looks no more than twelve years old, which makes this even more shit and, of course, even more newsworthy.

  ‘So what happened,’ says Morrison, the guy who seems to be in charge around here, ‘is that Big Mac would have run over the girl’s neck –’

  ‘Big Mac being the driver of the train?’ asks Taylor.

  The guy gives him a bit of a, well it’s not a fucking burger, mate, look.

  ‘Obviously he’s going slowly at this stage, so he’s like that, notices something, notices, you know, like a blip on the line. But it’s late, he hasn’t seen anything. And it’s... you know, this is the kind of thing that happens, you know. Branches on the line, you know. People just use train tracks as fucking dumping grounds, man. We get all sorts, man, all sorts of shit on the lines. Those people, you know the jokes they make, leaves on the line, the wrong kind of rain...’ Shakes his head, spits. ‘They should fucking see it, man, see the shit we have to put up with. Fucking tampons, fucking everything, man.’

  ‘And Big Mac’s over in the office?’

  Morrison turns and looks over at the small grey building, the windows dirty and cracked, paint peeling on the frames.

  ‘Aye. The other guy’s talking to him at the moment.’

  The transport police are all over the place, including the inspector who’s going to be in charge of the investigation. He’s already spoken to Morrison, before passing him onto us. Now he gets Big Mac before we do.

  Morrison looks like the kind of guy who’s going to be happy speaking to anyone. The television crews will be along shortly, and he’ll speak to them too. He’s probably already thinking about how this will play on Facebook.

  ‘So, as a murder, it was intended to cause minimum disruption,’ I say. Not asking any questions, just trying to keep focused. ‘Middle of the night, no rail services affected, she was tied in such a way the train driver would barely notice he’d run over anything...’

  ‘Never seen that done to a young girl,’ Morrison throws in, as if that’s going to help anyone, as if he’s seen it done to adults and pet dogs. Just never a child.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Taylor, ‘we’ve got everything we need now.’

  Morrison looks surprised, grunts, glances at me, then turns and walks away. He pauses, wondering how he can possibly regain the initiative of the situation – he is supposed to be the one in charge, after all – and then decides it can best be done by sticking his nose into the Big Mac interview.

  Taylor and I look back down at the scene, as officers start to place the tent around the victim. Last look at the sad, bloody, mangled face, and then she’s gone. We step away from the edge of the track and look around.

  ‘Tell me what the e-mail said again,’ he says.

  ‘The first one didn’t quite work out the way I intended, so I had to do it over. That’s all. The ‘that’s all’ was his.’

  Taylor lets out a long sigh, hands are thrust into his pockets. The tent continues to go up, and he turns away, looks up at the sky. Head back down, stares around the grim surroundings of post-Commonwealth Games Dalmarnock.

  ‘You know the worst thing about this,’ he says. ‘We’ve been here twenty minutes already, and we haven’t asked if anyone knows who she is. She’s a young girl, she’s dead, and her identity barely even matters. She’s just another victim, we presume, of whoever’s been killing people this week. Does it matter if she’s a runaway, whether she’s a kid on the game, a junky, a Ukrainian refugee, or the daughter of some stockbroker living in Bearsden? We won’t care, will we? It won’t be us telling her parents. She’s just another victim along the way, like the unidentified woman in the basement, like the victims of the Plague of Crows...’
r />   Another mumbled curse.

  ‘Fuck it, let’s get back to the station. Get Morrow in, get our heads together, try and sort out where this fucking thing is going.’

  We stare down, one last time, at the scene of the crime, now covered by a white tent. For a moment one of the SOCOs holds the entrance to the tent to the side, and we get a final look inside at the girl, her head bloody and crushed, lying detached in between the two rails. A single eyeball, slightly removed from its socket, looks up at us.

  28

  We’re sitting in the small room we’ve set up for the investigation. Just Taylor, Morrow and me. Taylor has cleared the whiteboard on the middle of the front wall and written simply: The first one didn’t quite work out the way I intended, so I had to do it over. That’s all.

  None of us are sitting down, we’re not in a teacher/pupil formation.

  ‘So what could it have been that didn’t quite work the first time round?’ he says. ‘What’s different this time?’

  Well, we may not be sitting in your classic teacher/pupil formation, but clearly our business is going to be conducted along those lines, except in this case the teacher doesn’t know any more than the pupils.

  Maybe that’s usually the case. I certainly thought it often enough. Especially with that prick Herring.

  Concentrate!

  ‘On Tuesday he shut down the line,’ says Morrow. ‘Caused massive disruption, all day. This time it looks like he went out his way to make sure that didn’t happen.’

  ‘Yep,’ says Taylor.

  He writes disruption on the board.

  ‘However,’ says Morrow, just before either Taylor or I say it, ‘he would surely have known on Tuesday it was going to cause disruption when he pushed someone onto the line in the first place. It was never not going to cause disruption.’

  Taylor adds a question mark.

  ‘The same goes for the driver knowing what happened,’ I say. ‘This time the driver didn’t realise he’d killed anyone, but again, when our guy pushed someone in front of the train, the driver was always going to see it.’