A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller

by Douglas Lindsay

  'You there yet, Sergeant?' he asks.

  'What?'

  'You at the stage where you wonder what the fucking point is? You're there to catch criminals, to keep order, then you catch one and you're immediately hit with paperwork and human rights lawyers and all the rest of the crap. Fucking signs up on every wall of every station telling you how to conduct every single moment of your life in uniform. And you're always the bad guy. The scum… the bastards who rape and steal and assault and murder… they're the ones with the rights. The human fucking rights. Isn't that a joke? You there yet? You got to that point where you think, what in the name of fuck am I doing this shit for?'

  No answer to that. I've been there a long, long time. I've just never had the guts to get out. What else am I going to do?

  'He was the final straw. Clayton. Pushed me over the edge sure as I was standing on a cliff. Knew what he was doing as well. Picked his moment. Then he told me. Told me what he'd done to her, all that shit that hadn't been in the papers. Told me, as he was walking away with his three quarters of a million quid.'

  'He told me it was a couple of hundred thousand.'

  Another snort. 'From us, maybe, but he got more from the papers. He did all right out of it. Slaughtered a young girl, and earned seven hundred and fifty grand… Is that what it takes to be rich?'

  'Did you wonder whether this might be him?' I ask. 'All this stuff with the crows, did you ever think it could be him?'

  He's still flicking the line, although I can see that it's a more mechanical movement now than it was when I first arrived.

  'Hadn't even crossed my mind,' he says. 'I'm not wrapped up in him, or my old work. Barely ever watch the news. I just do this… go and watch the Celtic at the weekend. Sometimes I can't even be bothered with that. I don't watch the news. I don't think about Clayton. He beat me, that's all. He beat me, and I've had to live with it. I don't think about him.'

  'Now that you are,' I say, continuing to push him, although it's not like I'm unsympathetic to the oppressive weight of defeat that hangs over him, 'what do you think?'

  He continues the movement of the line, but it's becoming less and less focussed. Suddenly realise that I'm completely fucking him up as I stand here. He'd been doing fine, and now I bring him this. And if this guy, this Clayton, turns out to be the Plague of Crows, then there are now a great list of victims who wouldn't have been killed if Lynch had been able to get his man in the first place. How shit is that going to make him feel?

  I have a vision of Lynch at home, hanging from a light fitting, the cord around his neck, his face black and purple, tears dried on his cheek, a bottle of vodka on its side, the dregs having dribbled onto the carpet.

  Or maybe that's me.

  'Yes,' he says. 'Now that you make me think about it. Yes. He was intelligent, knew everything we'd try to uncover, and he had it all taken care of. He was on top from the start, and he stayed there. And…'

  Finally he stops the continuous movement of the rod, the flick of the line.

  '… and he was a sick fucker. The things he did to that girl. Is he sick enough to carry out this weird stuff that your Crows bloke is accused of doing….?'

  'There's no accused about it,' I mutter.

  'Yes,' says Lynch. 'It could be him. Let me know when he walks away and laughs in your face.'

  He coughs, stares down at the water.

  'Nothing's biting the day,' he says, then he lays the rod down on the grass and looks around. There's a bench a few yards away, and he lifts his small bag and walks over to it. Glance at my watch. Lunchtime, more or less, and he's taking a break. I realise that we're finished. He's not about to ask me to join him. He's said all he has to say.

  Think of something else just as I'm about to leave.

  'Has anyone else been asking about him?'

  He turns and looks at me. Just a glance. Curiosity mixed with contempt, before moving quickly onto complete disdain. Doesn't even bother answering.

  I'll take that as a no.

  I watch him for a few moments and then turn away as he takes a small flask from his bag.

  31

  Back in the office with Taylor and Gostkowski. Ramsay tried to grab me on my way in, Gostkowski had already been grabbed, but I put him off and managed to get Gostkowski out of her interview with some little wanker who assaulted a couple of pensioners, so that the three of us can have a chat about Clayton.

  More work to be done, more research into his family and what he's been doing for the past eleven years of his life, but for the first time since last August we actually have someone to investigate.

  I've just finished laying it all out. My senior officers have listened without interrupting.

  'Either of you know DCI Lynch?' asks Gostkowski when I'm done.

  Shake my head.

  'I remember the case,' said Taylor, 'but it was nowhere near us. Didn't know the guy. I might have had an opinion on it at the time but…' and he waves a dismissive hand in the air. 'And no sign of the wife?'

  'None.'

  'And no photos…'

  'No photos. But, she was on High Road, apparently, so that might make her slightly easier to track down. Although, it's liable to have been in the early days of the internet, maybe there won't be too much online. We'll need to go and find someone at STV.'

  'If there's a wife, if she's still around…'

  'He said she was out getting her hair done.'

  'Well that proves bugger all. If there's a wife then she's pretty crucial to it. We know how well executed this whole thing has been,'

  He hesitates to glance at Gostkowski, who has reached over and taken the iPad that was lying on the edge of Taylor's desk. Fairly confident that she probably isn't checking the weather, the football transfer window or a recipe for that night's dinner, he ignores her and continues talking.

  'She's going to be aware of him having been away for a while. Presumably she's thinking he's on some business trip or other.'

  'He said she was a victim of the press as well. Maybe she's involved.'

  He stares at the desk as he thinks about it.

  'Maybe. Maybe. Don't like it. Everything we think about the Plague of Crows is based around him being in control. The second you bring someone else into it, no matter how much you trust them, you start to lose the control. There's also the matter of someone else being able to, in some way, moderate your insanity. This guy… this guy is a fucking basketcase. You've been married. Take the stupidest, weirdest, ugliest thing you ever did before or after your marriage, and then imagine if you'd have done it if your wife had known about it.'

  We look at each other while we think about weird, ugly, stupid things we've done. Gostkowski glances up with a curious smile on her face, then looks back at the tech.

  'Fair point,' I say. Didn't actually think of anything. Didn't want to.

  'The whole thing is difficult enough to imagine, but the idea that two people – one of them the mother of two young children – would get carried away with this… I'm not convinced.'

  'You're very old fashioned, Sir,' says Gostkowski without looking up.

  'And I shall stay that way,' says Taylor.

  'You have her name?' asks Gostkowski, turning to me. 'The wife?'

  'Caroline…' I say, then realise I don't know her maiden name.

  'There's a list on imdb of everyone, well, a shitload of people at least, who appeared in High Road.'

  'Jesus. Who takes the time to write down that shit?' mutters Taylor.

  A pause while we both look at her, then she nods.

  'There's a Caroline Strachan, appeared in one episode at some point. Doesn't say when. There's no link to anything else.'

  'I'll get the second name. Got the impression, from the way he said it, that she'd done a bit more than that. That she was some kind of regular. Maybe she used a different name for her acting career.'

  Gostkowski's fingers are flying over the small keypad, then she starts nodding at it, understanding somethi
ng that she's not letting us in on.

  'There's the same plethora of information on the internet that there is about anything. We can look at it later.' She switches off the iPad, lays it back on the desk.

  Taylor taps a quick beat out on the desk.

  'Right, get going. I'll speak to Ramsay, make sure he leaves you out of the rest of it. You two get digging on Clayton and the missus. Discretion from both of you, no blundering phone calls. Obviously he knows we have some interest in him, after yesterday, but don't let him know for the moment that we're following it up.'

  'You going to speak to Edinburgh?' she asks. 'Assuming Clayton wasn't winding the sergeant up, Edinburgh have already talked to him. It'd be wise to find out what they know.'

  Taylor taps his fingers again. He's already been thinking about it. Ever since they were brought in they've been part of every one of his thoughts on the investigation.

  'Yes,' he says. 'Wise. You're right. I'll run it by Montgomery, see what he thinks. Say enough so we don't look like we're over-reacting, but not enough to make him swoop in and take the thing off us and then do a shit job...'

  He waits, and when we don't immediately stand up, he nods in the direction of the door and turns side on to us to look at his monitor. I glance at Gostkowski as I get to my feet, but she's already on her way out.

  'We going to split this up?' I say, as we walk across the office.

  She stops, stares at the floor while she's thinking about it.

  'Yes, makes sense,' she says. 'I'll do the wife. I used to watch that stupid show when I was younger, maybe something'll ring a bell. I'll track down the story that her husband says ruined her career, and then find out what she's doing now. You stay on Clayton. Where he works, what he does in his spare time, that kind of thing. What about the kids? What age were they?'

  'Photos looked pretty young. Both under five, I'd have said.'

  'And there was no sign of them?'

  'None. So maybe they were at school or nursery school, the mum took them to the hairdresser's…'

  She's nodding, already mentally getting on with the job.

  'Fine,' she says. 'See you later.'

  She turns, then stops and looks back, a little unsure, as if that last line had been a slight overstep of the fuck buddy rules. We stare at each other, she shakes her head to lose the moment and turns away.

  See you later. Those three words. That's all it takes, and I'm already there, thinking about the night ahead. Take a moment, a delicious moment to sink into it, to think about the two previous nights of fuck buddy heaven, and to think about what it might be like this evening.

  Sigh, switch back on to the general tumult of an open-plan police office, get the image of Michael Clayton in my head, the image of a naked DCI Gostkowski out of it.

  *

  People don't entirely realise the extent of it these days. The amount of information that the police – and no end of other bodies and organisations – have at their fingertips on virtually everybody.

  Doesn't take long, and I can tell you where Clayton goes shopping and what his favourite type of breakfast cereal is, how often he plays golf, how much money he has in the bank, the last time he went to the theatre, what kind of movies he likes. If I wanted to do the Sherlock Holmes shit I could probably have extrapolated that he and his wife don't have sex any more and that his kids don't love him. But then I'd already found out that he and his wife split up three years earlier and he hasn't seen her, or those ugly kids of theirs, since then.

  Those picture-perfect images of two young children adorning every wall and every mantelshelf in the house are at least three years old because he's had no contact with them.

  Living in a big house, earning a decent amount of money working self-employed as some kind of sales consultant in the stationary business. He's a big thing in paper clips. I mean, even if I didn't have my suspicions about this bloke being some kind of deranged crow-controlling super-villain, I'd still hate him. A theatre-going, golf-playing consultant. In my world, punching people like that in the face would be an Olympic sport.

  Of course, the more your read, the sadder it looks. Come across a lot of lawyers letters from three years ago, and quite a number since then. Split from the wife, she didn't want anything to do with him, didn't want the kids anywhere near him. She left in the middle of the night, he hasn't seen them since.

  I suspect that Gostkowski will have trouble even finding where she is now. He wasn't married when he was previously arrested, but he managed to take the money he made out of that scandal and put it into a nice house, a wife and a decent job. Been earning quite a lot since, in the usual money-follows-money kind of way.

  But whether or not he turns out to be the Plague of Crows, this is just a portrait of a sad little life. Of course, if Lynch is correct, then a sad little life is far more than he deserves. But this is the trouble with police work. So much of it revolves around people whose lives have been fucked up, or who have chosen to fuck up their own life, that you end up wallowing and trawling through these endless sad stories. Your days become one long episode of Eastenders. And every now and again, such as when you're looking at a divorced bloke who never sees his kids and whose life is filled with all sorts of pointless shit in some desperate attempt to compensate, it's like looking in a mirror.

  *

  At the Costa across the road, me and Gostkowski, two cups of Americano. Just because we're having sex, doesn't mean we can't also hang out and talk and stuff. That's part of the contract. The things you don't do are have expectations, fight, and get neurotic.

  Boiling bunnies is also right out.

  'So, no sign of the wife?'

  'She did a Lucan,' says Gostkowski. 'And a pretty spectacular Lucan at that. Middle of the night, fleeing the country with the kids. Nice job.'

  'You think he looked for her? I mean, I know he got his lawyer to write a lot of letters to the courts and police, but…'

  She shrugs. 'Presumably. But did he ever get on a plane? I doubt it.'

  'Well, he doesn't have a passport.'

  'Ah. Well, there's your answer, because I'm pretty sure that she left the country.'

  Sip the coffee. As usual there's too much coffee in the cup, not enough space for milk. Even though I asked. There must be people who complain if their cup isn't filled to the last millimetre.

  There are always people who complain. And then there are the people who complain about the people who complain. Like me.

  'And High Road? Turn up in one episode, did she?'

  'No episodes,' she says.

  'What?'

  She shrugs.

  'Really, it was hard to find out about his wife, because there wasn't a lot to be found. Regular family life. There was a sister and a brother. Studied mathematics at Glasgow, couldn't get a job, eventually worked for a while in an office job for Woolworths, etc., etc. She'd been a bit political at uni, kind of anti-government. You know, she was a student, they're supposed to be anti-government. Maybe she still had some of that when she met Clayton. Sympathised with him for having been manipulated by the system.'

  'Maybe she never knew.'

  'Maybe. Although, he never changed his name and it was in the papers, a lot, at the time, so she'd have to have been walking around with her eyes shut. Which doesn't tie in with her having been reactionary. At least to some level.'

  A waitress hoves into view, clearing one of the other tables, so we stop talking for a second. Drink coffee. Look out of the window. Late afternoon, low cloud, street lights already on. Chill in the air. Snow would be nice, I suppose. At least it would brighten up the drabness, but you can tell this will be a winter without snow.

  'Everything all right for youse?'

  We look round at the waitress. Late thirties. Slim. Attractive. I know, I know, but that's just how it is. Look at a woman, and my brain makes an instant judgement. Just as well I don't project.

  I nod. Gostkowski says, 'Yes, thanks.' The waitress shimmers off to another table, lad
en with the detritus of mochaccinos and muffins.

  'You're a piece of work,' says Gostkowski. Smiling.

  'What?'

  'You just undressed her.'

  'No, I didn't.'

  'Yes. You. Did.'

  Funny. She actually just did that. Said three words as individual sentences. I'm not playing that game.

  'I just said everything was fine.'

  'Actually, you said nothing, and while you were saying nothing, you were deciding whether or not you'd sleep with her.'

  'Maybe. But that's not the same as undressing her.'

  She stares at me. I am, of course, drawn to look round at the waitress, but I make sure I don't.

  'So, was she slim?'

  I give her the look. 'Yes,' I say eventually.

  'Hair colour?'

  'Mousey blonde, kind of tousled, shoulder length.'

  'Nice breasts?'

  I'm not answering that one.

  'All you're proving is that I have decent powers of observation,' I say. 'And what with my job title 'n' all…'

  'Sergeant, I'm just teasing, not going all high maintenance on you. But honestly, have you, or have you not, just imagined what that woman looked like naked?'

  I stare across the table. So, that thing I was saying about not projecting…

  'Yes… all right, I did. And she looks damned good without clothes on. You know…'

  'All right, Sergeant, I've got the picture. You're not down the pub with your mates.'

  'You started it.'

  'You were the one undressing her, while thinking you were being discreet.'

  She's got me there. I hide behind the cup of coffee, then say, 'Anyway, I never talk to men about naked women. That's… I don't know…'

  'Vulgar?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well, I'm honoured. We should probably get back to talking about the investigation now.'

  'Yes.'

  'So Mrs Clayton leaves her husband, taking the kids with her. I spoke to a couple of people who weren't very forthcoming. Also spoke to the brother, couldn't get hold of the sister. I'll keep trying. But I think we can take it that he wasn't necessarily abusive, just not a nice bloke to live with, and pretty demanding. She felt threatened ultimately, but was never actually harmed. Bottom line is, she's not part of this, and he told you quite a lot of lies. Which is odd.'