A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller

by Douglas Lindsay

  'Woods on our list?'

  'No. Too small, too populated. Neighbours reported him, we show up, he's shooting crows with a hand gun. Missed more than he hit, but he appeared to have plenty of ammunition.'

  'Did he have a licence for the gun?'

  Shakes his head. 'Said he was doing a public service.'

  'Didn't take to being arrested, I suppose.'

  'Not at all. The fault appears to be ours. Then there were a couple of kids throwing rocks at crows. Didn't get any, but they did put in a few windows. They told Constable Forsyth to take a fuck to himself, that they were doing the police's job for them.'

  Big sigh. Need food. Enthusiasm slips away at the thought of heading out to do more speculative interviews with crow experts afterwards. There are so many people not really worth saving.

  'Lunch?' I ask.

  Quick check of the watch.

  'Sure, but just fifteen minutes across the road. If Connor sees us taking time to eat, he'll probably vomit indignation and outrage out his arsehole.'

  *

  Small soup-and-sandwich place. Been here for years. Most of our lot come in here at some point during the day, so we usually don't. Taylor likes to stand apart because he's the senior detective. I just like to stand apart.

  Pea and ham soup and a roll for me. He's got a prawn mayonnaise with side salad. That, of course, would be a Glasgow side salad, which features half a tomato and some chips.

  Taylor looks at his sandwich. A shadow crosses his face.

  'I shouldn't be sitting here,' he mutters.

  Typical. He'll be thinking that it's all right for me to take a break, and in fact, that I ought to take one, but that he doesn't have the time. I don't say anything. Spoon up some soup, yet his annoyance and hopelessness and need to keep banging his head against the brick wall of the investigation are infectious.

  He crams some chips into his mouth and at that point DI Gostkowski, who has entered the building without either of us noticing, sits at the table. Taylor looks at her, his mouth bulging with food. She looks amused in an annoyingly superior way, as if she never crams food in her mouth. She probably doesn't.

  'In a rush?'

  'Yes,' he says, through his chips, then he swallows and takes a drink to wash them down. 'You shouldn't be sitting with us, Inspector, too much chance your Edinburgh lot will come in here.'

  As he says it he lowers his voice and takes a quick glance around. He doesn't know who they all are, so they might already be here.

  'They sent out for food,' she says. 'Anyway, I believe there's no point pretending we're not speaking to each other and ultimately, if the Sergeant and I are seen together a lot, the likelihood, given his reputation, is that people will believe we're sleeping together.'

  'The Edinburgh lot aren't going to think that,' he says.

  'They'll ask around. They've already been asking around the station about you two, trying to get the full inside information.'

  'Did they ask you?' I say, to bring her attention to the fact that I'm at the table.

  'Yes,' she says, still looking at Taylor.

  Taylor lifts his sandwich from the plate and stands up.

  'Very well, Inspector, you're the one at the coal face. I need to get on. You two enjoy yourselves. Maybe you want to hold hands, keep the cover going.'

  He doesn't even smile at his own hilarious joke, and then he's off, leaving behind a small plate of chips and a bottle of freshly-squeezed hand-picked sun-ripened orange juice. Gostkowski pulls them over beside her and takes a chip.

  'I get the feeling you're not talking to me,' I say. I sound like some monstrously high-maintenance woman of the kind that I generally think should be carted off to a mental institution. She enhances the feeling of self-hatred by glancing at me as if I'm monstrously high-maintenance, and doesn't even bother humouring me with an answer.

  'The politics are picking up pace,' she says.

  Take some soup, don't look at her. But suddenly I have masses of respect for the woman. Me. Respect for a woman. Must be some sign that I'm maturely growing into my forty-five-year-old brain. Or not.

  'What's up?'

  'They've detailed a guy to shadow the pair of you so they know what you're doing.'

  Pause with the soup. Glance at her.

  'They tell you they were doing that?'

  'No, they didn't. The guy himself told me. Think he fancies me, thought he'd have some sort of in. Maybe thought that it would help get me on their side.'

  'So where is he now?'

  'Back at the office. He knows you came over here for lunch, so he'll have nipped back to grab a sandwich. He'll be hovering soon enough, waiting to see where you head off to.'

  'And he followed me this morning?'

  'Oh, yes.'

  Jesus. How fucking stupid is that? If it's not bad enough that I'm wasting my time, there's someone following me noting down how I'm wasting it.

  'Fuck,' is how I express my unease at that level of stupidity.

  'Yes,' she says. 'Quite.'

  'So, they're going to be aware of you and me seeing each other to talk over the case?'

  'Yes.'

  Glance at her – she's sitting next to me, a foot away, so it feels kind of weirdly uncomfortable to be looking at her, which is probably a sign that I'm not as mature as I thought I was a minute ago – then go back to my soup.

  'So what did you say about me?'

  'I said we were in a relationship, which would explain why we see each other at the Costa. And here.'

  Pause, soup spoon halfway to mouth. Another glance. She's eating chips, seems matter of fact.

  'Won't they be worried then about pillow talk?'

  She nods.

  'I expect so. Not a lot to be done. I didn't say to the DCI, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're phone tapping. I wanted to get all the facts before I took it to him.'

  Keep eating soup. Wonder if there's someone standing across the road, behind me, watching us.

  'Maybe they're tapping into this conversation through our mobiles,' I say.

  'Possible, although they're not MI5, so I don't think we should get too paranoid.'

  This is just too stupid. Too monumentally fucking stupid.

  'So they're just going to exclude you,' I say.

  She nods again. Nearly finished the chips. There hadn't been many left.

  'I expect so. They were heading down that road anyway. They needed me right at the start…'

  'The day before yesterday.'

  'Yes. The day before yesterday. I was there to help them bed down, but now they've got their feet under the table and they've been apprised of everything they need to know about the investigation up to this point. I was always going to be pushed to the outside. The initial premise of the Superintendent was a little fanciful. But we might as well spin it out as far as we can.'

  Another quick glance. She's wrapped up the chips and is dabbing at her lips with a paper napkin.

  'Enjoy yourself in Edinburgh this afternoon,' she says. She knows I'm going to Edinburgh. Of course. 'Unless we hear from each other, I'll see you at Costa at seven.'

  I nod. She leans over and kisses me on the cheek, then gets up and walks out.

  I look across the table, as if I'm in a sitcom and I'm staring at the camera. She just kissed me on the cheek. All part of the act, because we're apparently pretending that we're sleeping together.

  I think I need to talk to her about the fact that it's not really working. We'll need to take it a bit further.

  22

  People are killing crows. By mid-afternoon they're not just killing crows, but all kinds of birds, and the Chief Constable of Strathclyde is on air telling people there's no need to panic, and no need to become involved in avian slaughter. And it's a crime, apparently. Not sure how much of a crime it is, but he's telling people they're getting nicked if they're caught.

  People are such lemmings. I believe what we need is for the Justice Minister to introduce a bird protection, sho
ot-to-kill policy, wherein all police officers are armed and permitted to instantly gun down anyone caught shooting an unarmed bird.

  Now, don't go thinking I'm a Daily Mail-reading right-wing wanker. I firmly believe there should be a law in place permitting the police to shoot anyone caught buying the Daily Mail. Call it natural selection.

  Some part of me knows it's wrong to shoot someone just because of their newspaper choice.

  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 co
ld 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.

  23

  January

  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.