A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller

by Douglas Lindsay

  'It wasn't a Glasgow policeman,' says Taylor, more a statement than a question, as the name of the officer is already on record.

  'No, it's all Tayside, work and homes of the three split between Perth and Dundee and thereabouts.'

  A moment while she tries to remember if she's missed anything.

  'What are they working on?' asks Taylor.

  'The CCTV thing's pretty big. They're working on the basis that he will strike more quickly this time, now that he's gone public. He's contacted all police forces, and from tomorrow they'll be instigating procedures whereby every police officer in Scotland will have to check in on a regular basis. That's going all the way to the Justice Minister to establish what they feel is practical.'

  I look at Taylor, because that sounds unbelievably mental. We're supposed to check in? Like we're children off on a trip on our own for the first time and need to keep calling our dad? Holy all kinds of shit. How about, let's all be careful out there, or something?

  'Hmm,' is pretty much all Taylor says.

  'And they're speaking to local authorities and to the NUJ about implementing similar procedures across those professions.'

  Taylor finally glances at me, a slightly troubled look on his face.

  'Seems excessive,' he says eventually.

  'They claim duty of care,' she says.

  'Do you agree?'

  She gives it a second, then says, 'Not paid to have opinions on policy, Sir.'

  Taylor smiles unattractively and then glances back at the pictures he's been studying for the last half hour.

  'Anything else, Stephanie?' he asks.

  'Think I've covered it all.'

  'OK, thanks. Go home and get some sleep.'

  'Thank you, Sir.'

  'Aim to do your seven o'clock thing with the sergeant tomorrow unless something comes up. Presumably, with the level of planning this guy puts in, even if he doesn't wait three months before the next time, he won't be trying anything again tomorrow.'

  'Good night, Sir,' she says, then turns to leave.

  I watch her go for a moment – in fact, until she's out of sight – and then turn to Taylor. Had a weird feeling there of not being in existence. Taylor glances back at me.

  'She didn't seem to be aware that you were in the room, Sergeant. I presume you've slept with her at some point.'

  'Stop saying that,' I reply, a bit testily. 'I haven't shagged everyone.'

  He grunts, looks back at his photographs. I wait for some other throwaway insult, and when it doesn't come I get to my feet. Everyone's tired.

  'Do I get to go home now too?' I ask.

  And suddenly I do feel tired. Tired and melancholic. If it was a regular day I'd be heading to a bar, to be followed by a really bad headache with potential vomiting. But even I'm not going to try to find something to drink at this time of night. A long day, with far too much of it spent staring intently at screens trying to see something that more than likely isn't there. The morning, when I ended up curled in a ball, seems a very long time ago. Yet I haven't slept since then and the life had been taken out of me all those hours ago.

  He looks at his watch and indicates with a dismissive movement of his hand. I turn to head off, then look back at him, getting over my general annoyance.

  'You shouldn't work much longer either, Sir. Go home.'

  He looks up, irritation on his face, but it immediately leaves him. He nods and waves me out.

  20

  Only kept in touch with one guy after Bosnia. A Canadian journalist. Eddie. By kept in touch, I mean that we saw each other one time maybe, and he'd leave me a message on the phone or something like that when he had a piece from some distant war-torn shit hole in one of the British papers. We'd just about hung on to each other by the time e-mail really got started, so that kept us going for a while. Always said that he'd end up living in London – as if that was something to look forward to – but he never made it.

  He used to say that he was comforted by the thought of suicide, that the possibility of it cheered him up. The idea that he could just walk away, turn his back on the memories and the visions and the demons, turn his back on the horrors that played out in his head when he closed his eyes. Then, having been dragged from the depths by the thought of suicide, he no longer needed to do it. And he'd say that it was a vicious circle he needed to break. One way or the other.

  He finally broke it. One night in a hotel in Dubai. He'd gone there for a break from Afghanistan some time in late 2002. Dubai killed him off, sitting alone in the bath with a razor blade, listening to Turin Brakes' The Optimist.

  I found out some time during the summer of 2004.

  *

  Wake up at 4.37am. Sweating, like I've left the heating on full, but the room is cold as I sit up out of the sheets. Rest my head back against the wall, stare into the orange light of a room with the curtains open, illuminated by the streetlights. A car drives past, and then there's silence.

  Listen to see if a noise in the house woke me up. A policeman's expectation that around every corner a guy in a mask is waiting to bean you over the napper with a crowbar. Nothing. The dead of night, but I'm wide awake now.

  4:38. The chances of getting back to sleep before I need to get up for work are slim. Can feel it already. Brain in overdrive.

  The forest. The crows with human remains in their stomach. That's what woke me up. Then I remember my brain freeze in the woods the previous morning, something that seems a long time ago, and suddenly a warm evening in a Bosnian forest is back in my head and there's nothing I can do about it.

  Fuck it. Fuck all that shit. I'm not lying here thinking about it, and if I stay in bed that's all I'll be able to think about.

  Instant decision, even more awake than I was two minutes ago. Swing my legs out the bed and stand up into the cold night. Map out the next two hours: shower, coffee, toast, get into the station, start going over the whole thing again and this time find something I've not been looking for.

  *

  Taylor sits at Morrow's desk, what with Morrow not being in yet, and looks at me suspiciously. Checks his watch.

  'What time'd you get in?' he asks.

  '5.30.'

  'Couldn't sleep?' he says. It's not like he's never been in at 5.30. Nod. He drags his hand across his face and leans back, as if just the thought of my sleeplessness affects him.

  'Find anything new?'

  Pause, long sigh, in the end don't even bother answering. Nothing found, other than a few random thoughts.

  'I did wonder if we should apply the same methodology to each aspect of the case as we have to the woods, and then see if we get a convergence.'

  He thinks about this for a second then indicates for me to go on.

  'We only needed to speak to one person about the woods. That one person talked us through all the woods we need to look at. So, if we take other aspects of the case, we know there are crows. Now we spoke to a couple of guys about crows in the summer. Just a couple. Let's throw the net wide and talk to everyone we can find who might have some knowledge. Maybe we'll even stumble across the actual guy, given that there seems to be an innate understanding of how crows are going to act, or react. We already chased down every angle on the possible provenance of the bone-cutting tool, so let's revisit that and see if anything ties in with the woods and the crows. Same with the Ford Transit. It all seems so disparate, so unlikely that they could be drawn together, so – you know, in the case of the woods – so random, that it might be highly improbable. But let's start getting that together, and then if the Inspector brings us anything from the other lot, we feed that in too, and maybe we get a break.'

  Pause. He's thinking about it. I've been thinking too. Need to think. Try to keep the rest of the shit out of my head.

  'Pretty fucking lucky break,' I admit, 'but you never know.'

  He's been looking at me, and now he's looking at the desk, computing it all. Let's face it, all I've suggested is let's do basic police work. What the fu
ck else are we going to be doing?

  'And you've got to ask for more people,' I say. He glances up. 'If this was a regular case, a few definite leads, a specific area of inquiry, the two of us might be able to make some headway. But this… a thousand different strands, a thousand people to see or places to visit. It's nuts. In one way we were onto something with the woods. We had that place on our list, but it's so damned far-fetched, so many to choose from, we were never going to just stumble across it at the same time. At the very least, we need someone else doing the woods.'

  He's thinking about it, contemplating taking it to Connor and how that will go.

  'We don't know the bloke's time scale, whether this is an escalation, whether he'll wait another three months, whether he just does it when he's ready… but the leaves are gone until April or May. Any survey of possible woods that he could use will be extant until late spring. I say four guys on the job for a few days. If he's got any favours to call in with stations further afield, then go for it. Otherwise, get a team on to it. Split the country up, tell them to get going. We can concentrate on the other shit.'

  He claps his hand down on the desk before I can get into my full dogs-of-war, up and at 'em speech, and stands up.

  'You're right. If he wants us to make some headway, he's going to have to staff it properly. I'll ask for eight guys and hope we get four.' Glances at his watch. 'Right, you get us a list of bird experts. I'll put a submission together for Connor, and before we head out today you can get everything together on the cutting saw that we dug up last time.'

  'Yep,' I say, and immediately turn back to the screen. Have already started work on the bird experts thing, and so I get back down to it, nine names already on my list. Taylor marches off to put together his submission for Connor. Connor likes submissions. Makes him feel like a government minister. Hates people to approach him with an idea that's not been thoroughly thought out, laid down under a variety of headings and fully costed.

  You'd think all that FOI shit would have put him off having his people write ideas down – because let's face, there are a lot of people around here thinking all kinds of shit that would have the media pishing excitable anti-police diatribes all over the TV and newspapers if they ever found out it had been put in writing – but he's obviously not yet been burned. It'll happen one day.

  *

  9:15am. Left Taylor back at the station fighting his corner. He managed to finagle a few more staff out of Connor, and was gathering them together to give them their brief. Now I'm sitting in a small office at the University of Glasgow. Some part of me is attracted to the notion that we are likely to stumble across the killer completely by accident. The man is getting crows to apply the finishing touches to his sick death rite, and I have it in my head – in a way that I didn't in the summer – that he knows crows in some way. Not that he has a power over crows like someone might have in a superhero movie or some shit like that, but that he has some affinity with them, knows how to manipulate them, how to get them to do something.

  The man sitting across from me, Professor Tolbet of the Zoology Department, is putting me right on that one.

  'To me, they're the rats of the sky,' he says. 'They'll eat anything. I'm never like… holy shit, a crow ate that? The thing a crow won't touch, that's the thing that surprises me.'

  You know that saying about police officers looking younger as you get older? Well, it's not like us older police officers don't think that about all the spotty barely post-pubescent kids who pitch up in uniform on a daily basis, but in reality it applies to every walk of life. Like university professors, for example. This guy looks about twenty-three, and you can tell by the way he talks he's priming himself to be on some fucking documentary about birds on BBC4; a documentary that ultimately will be about him. Like there, I asked him a question about crows, and in his brief answer he mentioned himself three times. That's what they're all like these days.

  'So you think that if a crow is hanging around in a tree, and it looks down and sees exposed brain, it's just going to swoop on down there for breakfast?'

  He smiles, as if he's smiling at the camera. He's going to use the word extraordinary in a moment.

  'It's extraordinary,' he says. 'And I'll say this. To me crows are the most intelligent birds in Britain. Those guys are just shit-smart. If I'm walking along a street, a crow will make a determination about how threatening I am. Sure, at the last second, he'll get out my way just in case. But if I've got a gun, or anything that might look like a weapon, that sucker'll see it and it'll be off much faster. Now, they're animals, and like all animals they constantly want one thing. Food. That's all they're interested in, except obviously when they're trying to get laid. But food's their number one priority. I've seen crows peck at anything. Anything. They don't give a shit. If, after a peck, they don't like it, then sure, they'll move on. But in my experience, it's pretty rare that they move on.'

  'So you're saying they'd eat brains?'

  'Not only am I saying they'd eat brains, they'd recognise that there was no implicit threat in a human who was bound and gagged. And even if they were wary, we're talking about a flock of crows, man, and one of those suckers is going to get brave enough to come and have a look, and as soon as that happens, and he doesn't get nailed in some way, that's when the others follow.'

  'You ever been on TV?' I ask.

  That one came out of the blue for him but he takes it in his stride and smiles.

  'I've got a show in development with the BBC,' he says. 'Not been green-lit yet though. I'm still waiting. Apparently with that lot you wait and wait and wait and then suddenly someone higher up says, yeah, we'll take this, can we have it in the schedule in eight months? And everyone starts running around in a panic.'

  'Maybe now that everyone's talking about crows you'll have an in,' I say.

  'Oh, my show's not about birds, it's me trying to survive on nothing but insects in the Amazon for two months. It'll be, like, my most amazing adventure ever.'

  *

  The younger generation, that lot you see on television all the time, I reckon they pick their career based on what they think is most likely to get them on television in the first place. Or else they elect to not have a career, other than a career based around trying to get into television. Rather chew my face off than be on TV.

  The next chap is at least more traditional. Two offices along the corridor from Talbot. Older, not a professor. Dr Weinstein. Wearing a shirt, bow tie and waistcoat. That's the kind of thing you want from an old duffer at a university. Now this guy might well go on TV, but if he did, he'd talk with enthusiasm on the subject that the show was about, not My Part In The Evolution Of The Species, in the way that they all do now.

  'Yes, pretty much,' he says eventually. I'd asked if crows would eat anything, as it appears to be the general consensus. He could have answered immediately, but likes to think things over before committing himself. I like this chap. Bet he's a Dylan fan. 'It's understandable where you must be going with this. Is it possible that some fellow might be in a position to manipulate these birds. Has he trained them or…' and he waves his hand in a dismissive manner '… is he able to control them? Maybe he keeps them in cages and lets them out beside the victims. Yes, it's understandable what you might be thinking, and I've given it a lot of thought since speaking to your colleague in the summer. But really… they are the vermin of the sky. They will, genuinely, eat anything. And once one of them has the courage to investigate a possible food source, and it proves successful, then that will just open up the floodgates.'

  He stares across the desk. I left the station forty minutes ago, full of energy and bravado and sure that a positive attitude would help bring a positive development. But what had I been expecting at this stage? For one of these guys to say, 'Well, as a matter of fact, these crows are showing just the kind of exceptional behaviours learned through extensive training, and there's only one man in the whole of Europe capable of manipulating an avian species to that extent
. You need Dr Hans Wankoff of the University of St Andrews. Here's his phone number.'

  I just need to keep going. Someone, somewhere, might have something to add. Something different. This guy, despite being all the more professional and a much easier person to talk to, is just saying the same stuff as the last guy. Perhaps they all will.

  'You like Dylan?' I ask.

  He stares blankly across the desk.

  21

  I have a list of eleven people to talk to in and around Glasgow. From the professors and the civil servants to the enthusiastic amateurs.

  The opinion on crows appears to be fairly universal. They will eat any old shit. Including brains.

  Make it back to the station just after one.

  I'd left Taylor with the brain tools information, and he's spent the morning with that, making calls, trying to extend the little information that we have into something more meaningful.

  'How we doing?' I ask.

  'Nothing new. Got four officers, as we wanted, sent them out with instructions to find the perfect secluded woods, crows' nests combo. And to keep schtum. You?'

  'Crows are as crows do,' I say.

  'No one willing to go out on a limb and say that we're clearly in an Emma Peel type situation?'

  'Not so far. The consensus is pretty much as we had in the summer. Give a crow something a bit shiny and gloopy looking and they'll be all over it.'

  'People have started killing them,' says Taylor.

  'What?'

  'We've had a couple of reports this morning. Morrow called around a few other stations and they're getting the same kind of thing. It'll make the news by the end of the day.'

  'People are killing crows?'

  He nods.

  'So they don't get their brains eaten?'

  He nods.

  'Jesus. People are so…'

  'I know. First report was of a guy shooting them in the woods behind his garden.'