A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller

by Douglas Lindsay

  'No, don't think so,' says Taylor. 'It's not the Avengers. He tied the victims up, stuck them out there in the wood, removed the scalp in situ, and then left them to it. Exposed brain. Almost an experiment to see how they'd go. The most obvious way would have been that they'd've bled to death. But as I said, he'd done a good job, made sure that wouldn't happen.'

  'Why didn't they do something? Topple the chairs over, crawl through the wood. Something…'

  'He cemented them into place.'

  'Fuck.'

  'Cemented them into place and left them there. I suppose he took the chance that they could be found and rescued, but as it was, they were found by birds. Glistening live brains proved to be too much of an attraction.'

  'But they wouldn't feel the brain getting eaten, right?'

  'Probably not. They were facing each other. They would have been able to watch as it happened to the other two, and they'd know it was happening to them. Who knows what part of the body went first.'

  'Well, they could watch if their eyes didn't go first. I presume that was the crows too.'

  Taylor nods. I hold his gaze for a moment and then look down at my coffee. Suddenly don't feel so much like drinking. I'd already given up on going back to the fresh air and the solitude of the side of a Scottish mountain, but now that reality strikes firmly home. Back on the job, and at a hundred miles an hour.

  'So I'm cleared by Sutcliffe,' I say.

  He shakes his head.

  'No. You need to go back and see her first thing tomorrow morning.'

  'What?'

  'And you need to talk to her. I don't care what you say, just be… normal.'

  I continue to stare across the table. This is bullying, right? This is new millennium Britain, and he's bullying me into coming back to work when I'm not ready. I could sue him. Right now. I could make a phone call and have a lawyer wedged a foot-and-a-half up Taylor's arsehole before he leaves the café.

  'Whatever,' is all I can manage.

  *

  We don't talk for a while sitting on the train on the way back up to Glasgow. My tent is still up and waiting for me at the bottom of Ben Vorlich, in the lee of some trees. Some part of me still thinks I'll be going back there, but the further the train gets from Helensburgh, the closer we get to Glasgow and on our way to Cambuslang, the more I know that I won't be going back.

  Not sure what happens to tents that are just left lying. Maybe someone will report me missing and there'll be hundreds of people searching for me for months. It'll be on the news, and I'll be watching it, thinking, miserable fucker, you deserve to be lost.

  I should probably call someone about the tent.

  The warm afternoon passes by. At all the stations there are women in summer clothes.

  'So you've been hill walking?' says Taylor after a while.

  'Aye.'

  I answer without looking round. Watching the world go by, like a kid on his way home with his dad. Black Crow Blues has started playing in my head.

  'Where were you staying?'

  'In a tent.'

  'You've been living in a tent for four months?'

  'Aye.'

  'Jesus. Thought you'd smell worse.'

  'Had a shower today at the gym.'

  'What've you been eating?'

  'Rabbits and shit.'

  'You've been catching rabbits?'

  Look round at last. Shrug.

  'You've been catching rabbits?' he says again.

  'Aye.'

  'Eating them raw, cooking them?'

  'Cooking them.'

  'Jesus, Hutton.'

  He shakes his head and looks out the window.

  'What does rabbit taste like?' he asks eventually.

  'Don't know. Rabbit.'

  'Thought it was supposed to taste like chicken.'

  'Doesn't taste like chicken.'

  He glances at me again, and then we both look out of the window as the warm summer's day passes by. All we can see are the banks of the railway line.

  'Are you sure they were rabbits?' he says.

  3

  I have three MP3s on the go. One for studio Bob, one for live Bob, one for bootleg and miscellaneous Bob. (Bootleg and miscellaneous Bob is naturally largely live too, although it does include some of Bob's songs performed by other artists. I know, I wasn't sure about that either. It felt like I was debasing the MP3, or that I should have a completely separate fourth MP3 to accommodate them. But really, it's just versions where the artist has done a solid stand up job, like Tim O'Brien's Farewell Angelina or George's I Don't Want To Do It. Don't go thinking I've got that woman singing Feel My Love or any shit like that.) I had no way to charge them when I was out on the hills other than when I came up to town every week for my psych, gym and dinner afternoons. I'd get them charged while I was there, then listen to them at will over the next few days, then start to ration myself as it got closer to the town trip and the charge started to run low. I bought one of those Ray Mears books, but there was nothing about how to charge your MP3 whilst living wild.

  I tried building a shelter one day, thought that would be a natural extension of what I was doing. Do away with the tent. Had even begun to imagine that I might be there, trying to see myself through the winter out in the wilds, even though the winter was some way off. Anyway, my shelter was shit. I slept under it a couple of nights, but that was only because it wasn't raining and the wind wasn't blowing. As soon as some weather happened I was back in the tent.

  Suppose I could have stuck at it, but I was too busy catching rabbits.

  It's 7.30 in the morning, Taylor and I are heading up to the woods to check out the site where the bodies were found. It's been closed off to the pubic for three days, will remain so for quite some time. Eventually they'll have to let it go – for no other reason than we won't have the manpower available to keep people away from it – and then the tourists will arrive, the great ghoul collective who like to visit murder sites. Weird bastards the lot of them. I mean, I get stopping to stare at something as you drive by or if you just happen to be walking down the same street on which someone got gunned down. But going out of your way, and in some cases a long way out your way, to check out where someone got stiffed…

  It's a short drive. He needs me to speak to Sutcliffe again before I get authority to come back to work, but she's not free until ten. He can't wait. I'm just an observer for the moment. If we come across any other crime while we're out there, I'm not allowed to produce my I.D. and nick some bastard.

  Bob's playing on the CD. Another Side Of. I once had a girl… Never liked that song, although it might be just because I read somewhere that Bob wished he hadn't written it. If that's what Bob thinks then, subconsciously or otherwise, that's what I think. I also wish he hadn't written it. Whatever. It'll be over in eight minutes.

  I know Taylor doesn't like it either, but he doesn't believe in skipping tracks.

  Had a quick look through the folder, got an outline of the case. Three victims. One police officer, Constable Goodwin from Royston. 33 years old, divorced, no family. The journalist, a staffer on the business pages of the Herald, Morris Tucker, 29, degree in business from Stirling University, no kids, one girlfriend. Due to get engaged next year, she said. I've been married three times without being engaged once. If you're going to do it you might as well just get on with it. These two, they were engaged to be engaged. That's just spinning it out for the sake of attention and presents. Well, if the lassie got any pre-engagement presents, she might as well give 'em back. The third was a social worker from the centre of the city. Lived in a small flat not far from Bridgeton. Nothing noticeably to connect him to the other two, just as they weren't connected to each other. Angus Sparing, 42. Wife and kids. Three of the little bastards. Given how shittily social workers get paid, it might not make that much difference to the family household him not bringing any money in.

  That's me not considering the effect of the father and husband being gone. No empathy. That's one of my iss
ues, apparently.

  'You know Bob's playing the SECC in a couple of days?' says Taylor, casually.

  'What the fuck?'

  He doesn't say anything else. He's driving. Pretending to concentrate. Haven't seen Bob in two years.

  'How come nobody told me?'

  That's kind of a stupid question, which Taylor's only too happy to answer.

  'You've been living on the side of a mountain shagging sheep,' he says.

  'You get me a ticket?'

  'Yes.'

  'Seriously? You got me a ticket?'

  'Well, I got two tickets. To be honest, if I'd found some woman to ask in the last month I would have asked her, but we're now only two days away and the ticket's still free, so the chances are it's yours. So, it's slightly disingenuous to say that I got you a ticket, but you can have it if you like.'

  I nod. Good man. He was never likely to ask a woman. I mean, really, you hit it off with some new bit of skirt at our age, the last thing you want to do is scare them away by offering to take them to see Bob. Living legend 'n' all that, but really, not designed for getting women into bed.

  'We should talk about the case now,' he says.

  Although we don't.

  'I didn't shag any sheep,' I feel the need to point out.

  *

  The entire wood has been cordoned off. And you know, it's a wood in central Scotland not too far from Glasgow, so we're not talking about the Black Forest here. It's a few acres worth of trees where not many people go. I don't even know who found the bodies, but it'll have been one of the usual suspects: a dog walker, kids playing or illicit lovers. Although I'm not sure kids go out playing in woods anymore, so that probably rules that one out.

  The victims were placed in a small clearing. A natural clearing, and not a bespoke space created for the task at hand. The killer dug out three small pits. He took three large wooden armchairs and sharpened the base of the legs. He then planted the three chairs in the ground adjacent to the holes. We don't know how far in advance he did this, but the whole thing seems to have been well thought out, so presumably he had it all set up before he arrived on the spot with his victims.

  It's like serving a full Scottish to a group of people. There are so many things that don't take long, like bacon and frying eggs and making toast, that you can't start those and then start setting the table and making the coffee and whatever. You do as much preparation as possible before you start so there's no last minute panic.

  So this is what he did. He killed three people like he was making bacon, sausage, egg, tomatoes, haggis, mushrooms and toast for fifteen people.

  He prepared his area, and then he brought his victims out to it. They had all been drugged, so that he was able, one by one, to take them from the back of a van – the nearest identifiable tyre tracks suggest a Ford Transit, but you know, they suggest in a vague, well maybe, maybe not, kind of a way, so that's not exactly piling on the evidence. They had each already been strapped into chairs, then he placed the chair legs in pre-prepared holes in the ground, placed the feet in the larger pits in front of them, and filled all the area around the legs and their feet with concrete. The concrete set.

  This was no movie-type bondage situation. In movies, people always find a way to wriggle their way free. Of course they do. Most of those types of movies wouldn't happen if Bruce Willis didn't have a convenient paper clip secreted away up his arse. But this was no Bruce Willis movie. Bruce Willis was not getting out of this.

  Once he had them in place, he got to work with a saw. They reckon he used the proper tool, something like the electric bone saw that a brain surgeon would use. In the old days that would have helped narrow it down because it would have been much easier to trace anyone who bought a GPC Electric Bone Saw, Oscillatory & Rotary Model, but in these times when you can buy nuclear weapons over the internet from a guy shipping armaments, machine tools and cosmetics from his bedroom in Almaty, it's an entirely more convoluted ballgame.

  Pretty easy to have someone bleed to death on you while you're removing the scalp, and he hadn't gone to all this trouble so that these people would die before the fun started. He had superglue to hand to stop any bleeding, but this fellow knew what he was doing, and he didn't need to use the glue very often.

  We're not sure at what stage he woke them up. We're not sure if he stayed to watch. Perhaps he stood in front of them to intimately share his triumph with his victims. Perhaps he watched from the sidelines. Perhaps he just walked off, left them to it.

  How did he know that crows would come and eat their brains? Can't say. He did select, with foresight one must presume, an area with crows nests in the trees. Maybe he'd trained those crows. Maybe he'd been leaving brains lying out in these woods for months, getting them used to it. Maybe he just left them there, assuming that the birds would look down, be curious and have a nibble, decide that they quite liked what they tasted.

  Either way, he had these three people staring into each others' eyes, bound and gagged and helpless. And the first time a crow landed on someone's brain, put its feet on the soft surface and took a peck, the one to whom it was happening very possibly was unaware, depending on whether the crow landed on the edge of the skull or completely on the brain. But the other two would have watched it, and that person would have known something was happening. And then, as word travelled around the crow community, and the flock descended, they would have been covered in birds and through the mass of flapping wings they would have watched as the blood started to run. Probably not much space on the average scalped human head for more than two crows at a time, so there would have been a lot of avian squabbling.

  Scalped? It's a bit more than scalped, isn't it? Superscalped, they'd call it in McDonald's.

  Would any of them have stayed alive long enough to start losing various faculties of their bodies as their brains slowly disappeared? Baird and Balingol, the pathologists, don't have an answer to that yet.

  'You all right?' says Taylor.

  We're standing on the spot, looking down at the three chairs. He doesn't know my story. He doesn't know what happened to me in the Balkan forests eighteen years ago. I try not to think about it, and try to suppress it as much as possible. Maybe I don't really know any more.

  What happened to you? That's one way of putting it.

  But this, this doesn't bring it back anyway. I saw some horrible things. Horrible. But they were random and spontaneous, brutal, vicious. Barbaric and indiscriminate acts that spoke of the general depths that humanity will sink to in wartime.

  This is cold and calculated.

  Genius.

  'Sure,' I say. 'This is some fucking guy we're dealing with. Scary. And I mean, really fucking scary. With your usual nutjob kind of bloke, woman, whatever, there's a physical aspect, some sort of thing where you imagine that it'll come down to a fight and you'll be able to take them. It'll be brute force. If it ever gets tricky, there'll be a way out. But not this. This is one cool fucker we've got here. He gets his hands on you…'

  Taylor's nodding.

  'Let's just concentrate on catching him.'

  'We know it's a man?'

  'No,' he says. 'We're just making an assumption for the moment. My mind is open. Just don't want to be saying him or her every sentence. We'll call him him until we know otherwise.'

  'A bit like God really.'

  He glances up at me, looks to see if I'm being serious or anything, then shakes his head.

  'Fucking Hutton,' he mumbles.

  4

  I'm staring at the same painting as before, but this time I've only just sat down, and I've only looked at the picture because I was following Sutcliffe's eyes.

  'What do you think it represents?' she asks.

  After spending some time back with Taylor I realise that part of the problem was that I just hadn't been speaking to anyone. I'd been out of practice. I'd stopped talking altogether, found that I didn't really need it, so that when I pitched up here at Sutcliffe's office, I was just t
hinking, what's the point? I'm getting by just fine without saying anything.

  A few months ago, I may well have thought that Sutcliffe and her ilk were the real nutjobs and that it was all a waste of time, but I'd at least have made some effort in talking to her, even if it was just to try to get her into bed.

  I look round at her and smile. Still haven't had any alcohol, eyes are bright, the hillside tan is still a few days away from fading. Suddenly I'm talking to an attractive, intelligent woman and I'm full of myself.

  'Just a painting,' I say. 'Red on top, orange on the bottom. It could be a red sky over the desert, it could be strawberry jelly on top of orange jelly, but you know, I think the artist just thought it looked nice and he – or she – left it up to the viewer to make up their own mind about its meaning. In fact, they might not even have got as far as thinking that anyone would read meaning into it. But, of course, you stick a picture on a psychiatrist's wall and it immediately has to mean something.'

  She smiles, doesn't nod or anything. She makes a quick note – although I reckon she's just doodling a bloke with a button nose and a moustache – and then looks up.

  'My daughter painted it when she was six.'

  Ah. She has a daughter. Doesn't mean she's still with the father, but it might not be a good idea to go hitting on any more married women. Just yet.

  'How many times did you sleep with Detective Inspector Leander's wife?'

  'You think I counted?'

  'Possibly.'

  'Seventeen.'

  'Did you just make that up, is it a guess, or did you really count?'

  'It's a guess. But a fairly good one.'

  'Did you ever think about DI Leander? What this would do to him?'

  'No.'

  'Why not?'

  'I was too busy sleeping with his wife. It was sex. It happens. She's gorgeous and, as far as anyone knows, doesn't keep it to herself. I wasn't the only one. Am I proud of what I did? No. But the sex was great.'

  'You were aware that it was becoming a scandal around the station. You'd been told to stop.'