A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller

by Douglas Lindsay

  I answer with a small wave of my hand. Nothing to say. Nothing to do. Nothing.

  'You want to come back to my place tonight?' she says.

  Look up at her again. She's taking pity on me. That's my first thought. I'm sitting here feeling utterly pathetic, wallowing in self-fucking-pity, and she's been sucked in. I don't think about the other thing.

  'You don't have to do that,' I say.

  'What?' she says, and she's smiling, that lovely smile, although this time there's a bit of an edge to it. Not a nasty edge though. Not sure what the word is for the kind of edge it is. Naughty maybe. A naughty edge.

  She lowers her voice.

  'I don't have to take you back to my place and fuck the life out of you?'

  Now that is not something I've heard her say to the other customers.

  'All right.'

  Life is sucked back into me.

  'I get off in about half an hour. I'll get you another coffee while you wait, Sir. On the house.'

  And off she goes, flashing that lovely smile again.

  *

  I like lying on my back in bed because it makes my fat stomach flatten out. Five minutes earlier I was behind her, ramming my cock inside her as far as I could, my hands on her hips and loving every second of it, every moan and every thrust and every gasp from her as my cock slammed into her. It was absolutely glorious, but I'd look down and my bloated fat middle-aged stomach was there in front of me, fatter than I'd ever noticed it before.

  Now she's on top of me, ten years younger than me at least, and slim. Beautifully slim, with delicious small breasts. The breasts I've been thinking about since Gostkowski made me picture her naked. And there they are, moving around in front of me as she fucks me with fabulous, wonderful energy, an energy that I seem to have lost.

  She started off slowly, just for half a minute or so, half a minute of complete deliciousness, but then she got carried away, as you do, couldn't stop herself, and for the past couple of minutes she's been frantic, closing in on her orgasm, moaning loudly, taking all of my cock, taking it as hard as she can, her hands all over me in her frenzied, erotic desperation.

  I'm watching her face, watching her breasts, watching the movement of her nipples, trying not to come. Don't want to come yet. This is just what I needed and I want it to last so much longer. There are so many other positions I want to fuck her in, I want her tongue all over me, I love listening to her orgasm and I want to hear it again and again.

  And then, with an 'Oh fuck, yes!' she reaches her climax, her shoulders straight, nipples pointing into the air, her hands raised to the side like she's just scored the winner in the World Cup Final.

  Holy crap, I wish there was video. I really wish there was video.

  Finally she stops moving, after grinding on to me for another short while, and she lifts herself off and kneels down beside me. She looks at me, that smile even broader.

  'Fuck,' she says, then she leans over me and takes the entire length of my shaft into her mouth, and I gasp and squirm and am so glad I stopped myself coming.

  I've just put my hand on her hair, when she straightens up and looks up the bed at me, devilishness in her eyes. She hesitates, I smile.

  'What?' I say.

  'I've got something,' she says, and she looks so wonderfully fucking naughty I could spank her.

  'Go on.'

  She giggles. She actually fucking giggles. I could shag that laugh of hers.

  She reaches down under the bed, struggles to find what she's looking for, and so steps onto the floor. I lie there waiting for her, my cock hard and aching and desperate

  She stands up. She's holding something in her hand. So completely out of context is it that I don't immediately recognise it. If I'd seen it in the office, I'd have known straight away, obviously. Fuck, I've even used them. Not only that, when they were first introduced, I had it used on me as a demonstration. So that we'd all know what we were doing when we used them on the drunken scum of the streets of Glasgow.

  A taser.

  She smiles. This smile is different.

  She aims the taser at my cock and does not hesitate. In an instant I'm hit by the most incredible, debilitating, excruciating pain. I've never had anyone try to bite my penis off before, but Jesus fuck, it must feel like this. Imagine it. You have an erection, and then someone bites it as hard as they can. Feel it.

  Except the pain doesn't stop at my cock, it travels. It shoots over me, every part of my body. The worst is the point where it strikes, but the rest of it is abominable. A monstrous agony.

  When we zap our customers we do it for less than two seconds. A quick blast. She holds it, sustains it. I don't know for how long. The pain is awful, and when it's done, I'm lying there, completely washed out, genitals throbbing with the worst pain I've ever experienced, and I can't fucking move. Can't move.

  That's the point.

  Everything's hazy and sore, pain and numbness and torture are washing over me. I look at her. She's leaning over me again. This time she's got a large tool or instrument. Not sure what it is.

  I'm not even thinking about the bracelet. The panic button. I'm not thinking about anything yet. But she is.

  She takes my left hand and places it between the jaws of the pliers and then squeezes. Swiftly, brutally, powerfully. Vaguely I can see the muscles in her arms tense, and then all I know is the horrendous pain in my hand as she crushes it. Crushes the bones between the jaws of the pliers. I can hear them crack. All those bones in the hand.

  I try to cry out, but nothing comes. That's what happens with a taser. You can't do anything.

  My entire body is wracked by pain, the agony fizzing out and spiralling around me from the two main points that have been attacked.

  The pain in my left hand is so great that I don't even notice as she removes the bracelet from around my wrist.

  38

  Just after nine in the morning. DCI Taylor at his desk, the remnants of a cup of coffee cooling at his right hand. His morning will be spent speaking to various family members of a man who lies in hospital after being attacked with a knife. Given that it was someone from within his family who attacked him with the knife in the first place, it made sense to keep the investigation close to home.

  Funny, he often thought, television crime drama. Crime novels. Movies. There was always a case to investigate, a killer or a rapist or a thief to unearth. Real life? It was usually the brother or one of the parents or the best friend, and you knew right away. You always knew.

  'What the fuck is the Plague of Crows, then?' he mutters, staring past his coffee. 'Someone who's related to all the victims?'

  'Talking to yourself, Sir?'

  He looks up. DI Gostkowski is standing in the doorway. Taylor looks at her with no trace of embarrassment, although he does lift the cold coffee to his lips and drain the cup.

  'I was just thinking,' he says, and then he smiles ruefully and adds, 'discussing with my other insane half, obviously, that it's usually someone from the victim's family. That's who we always end up looking for. It's not about catching someone, but about compiling the evidence against them.'

  'And how does that work with the Plague of Crows?' she says.

  'Exactly. I hate it…' He glances at her, wondering if it was all right to talk the way he usually did with Hutton, before continuing anyway, 'I hate it when the day–to-day stuff ends up being like an episode of Lewis.'

  'And that's what the Plague of Crows was…'

  'Aye,' he says. He rubs the bridge of his nose as if he's just removed a pair of glasses. 'I like your optimism,' he adds.

  'How d'you mean?'

  'Saying that's what he was.'

  'I meant it more from the point of view that it's not our problem anymore.'

  'Well, Inspector, that's optimistic in itself. I may never officially work another day on that case in my life, but it's going to bother me for the rest of it.'

  'Officially? You're still working on it? I mean, surreptitiously?'<
br />
  'No… Thought I needed to deal with Clayton before I could move on, but it was just driving me mad. How could I do that without talking to people? The ex-wife, the girlfriend. All that stuff he told us… for all the stuff you get on the web these days, all that information, you can't just put into Google, was this man talking shit? and it'll spit out the answer. God knows how many lies he told us. Was he just taking the piss, or was he covering up?'

  She shakes her head. No answer.

  'You never checked up on the girlfriend, found out if she really did work on High Road?' he asks.

  He had never asked Gostkowski. Knew what the answer was going to be, not sure why he's asking now. Hadn't wanted to drag Gostkowski back in once she was well out of it.

  'I just left it alone, Sir,' she says.

  Just as she'd been told to do.

  'Of course,' he says.

  A slightly awkward silence. They don't often work together, have only been involved in the same investigation twice in the past two months.

  'What is it today, Sir?' she asks.

  He drags himself back from some aimless wandering and indicates the notebook on his desk, in which he's been making a few random notes about what needs to be done.

  'This attempted murder,' he says. 'Need to get to the bottom of all the claims and counter-claims about domestic provocation.'

  'Sounds lovely,' she said.

  'Oh, yes,' says Taylor.

  *

  Trees. It's always trees. That's what I see first. That's why the Plague of Crows business has had such an effect. The trees. That's why it's had an effect, more than any other crime I've had to deal with since I got back from Bosnia and started this shit-awful career.

  It's not the brain-being-eaten-by-crows thing. Fuck, the press love that shit, they love to wallow in the horror of it. I don't think it's horror. It's, I don't know, gauche maybe. It's gauche. Showy. It's Grand Guignol, that's all. It's almost too horrible, too ostentatious, to produce genuine horror.

  Too horrible to be horror? What? Crow got your brain?

  It's just the trees.

  I arrived in Bosnia with the same prejudices as everyone else. The prejudices that the government wanted us to have. The Serbs were the bad guys. The Serbs were the bringers of war. The other guys, they were all victims. When the Bosnian Muslims were fighting the Croats they didn't want to talk about it. That was a horrible civil war, victims on all sides. Massive reluctance to join in with that. Nobody wanted to take sides, because there wasn't a bad guy. Just two good guys. We wanted to be on both sides. Neither of them was particularly nasty. That was our view. No one said it, of course. The British government weren't issuing those kinds of statement.

  It was easier when the Serbs fought them, because they were the bad guys. Suddenly it was easier to take sides.

  I went out there properly brainwashed, knowing who the bad guys were. The first fighting I came across was Croat-Bosnian. It was fucking horrible. My first experience of war. First-hand war. It'll fuck you up as soon as you look at it. There was no honour here.

  At some point I decided that the Serbs were the victims. I know. Victims of a particular kind. Victims of the world's prejudice. Victims of the west's desire to show the Muslim world it could come in on their side. Just fighting for their land.

  That close to the action, that close to the war and the horror of it, you missed so much. I began to distrust the other journalists. Thought they were all playing along with the government and editorial line. Saying what they'd been told to say. What they were expected to say.

  The truth? Was there a truth? It was war. There was no truth. They were all fucking bad guys, but the Serbs were bigger and better armed than the others, so they were the worst. They certainly didn't need my sympathy.

  But they had it for a time, and that was how I ended up hanging in the forest with a small company of them. Bosnian Serbs. They were fucking rogue, man, but that whole damn conflict was rogue. No one had any control. There were scores of guys, teams of them, at large in the forest of Bosnia doing what the fuck they liked. It was feral. Mediaeval.

  Thought I'd get some good photos, and oh fuck, but did I ever. But if I'd wanted to be doing a piece on how the Croats and the Bosniaks could be just as horrible as the Serbs, I probably wanted to be hanging out with the Croats or the Bosniaks. Or maybe living in a small Serb village populated by Serb women, children and old guys with no teeth, hoping that one of those rogue bands of Croats would come through and kick all kinds of fuck out of everyone.

  Roaming with a band of thieves was never going to do anyone any good. In the end, instead of reporting on them, I became one of them.

  I became one of them.

  When they sat in the forest, drinking, talking about women, masturbating, casually firing their guns at trees, whatever the fuck they were doing, I wasn't sitting on the sidelines taking a series of great shots. I was with them. I was drinking and shooting and talking about women.

  That was how it started.

  It was never going to end well.

  I was drunk that night. I like to think that it could have turned out differently if I hadn't been, but fuck, I was drunk every night.

  We came across a family of Bosniaks making their way through the woods. A family trying to survive. Who knows where they were escaping to, or why they'd chosen that night in a war that was already two years old.

  There were three younger men. Several women, I don't even remember how many, from teenagers to a couple of grandmothers. Then there was the grandfather. I remember him. Jesus, I remember him.

  None of them were armed.

  The first thing that happened was the murder of the three younger men. My guys, my band of happy thieves, tried to rile them, tried to make them fight, but they were having none of it. They seemed to think that if they kept their heads down and avoided confrontation, they might be allowed to pass unhindered through the forest.

  In the end, all that keeping their heads down meant, was that they each got a bullet in the top of their skull rather than the forehead. That was the moment when I started to sober up, but it took a while.

  Genuinely hadn't seen it coming. Thought my guys were having a bit of fun. It was cruel, yes, but I was drunk, I was one of them, I was laughing with them. After the three shots, the three bloody exploding heads, after the screams from the wives and daughters, the alcohol started to weep slowly from my system. I didn't think of myself as one of them after that.

  They didn't immediately notice. Too busy enjoying themselves.

  They made the grandfather watch. I think that was what they took the most pleasure in. The humiliation of the head of the family. The respectable leader, brought to his knees as his family was put to death and shame.

  They raped the women. Gang rape. I sat and watched. What a useless, pathetic, complicit sack of shit. They were laughing, having fun. The animalistic nature of the horde.

  I sat there intending to do something. But what was it I was going to do against four guys with guns?

  I couldn't even lift my camera.

  'Come on, Tommy.'

  I can still hear them. The first exhortations to join in. One of them said it, then they all did, in the same high pitched mocking voice.

  'Come on, Tommy!'

  I could have run. Maybe they would have shot me in the back, but they were drunk, there were trees, they all had their trousers at their ankles. Odds were in my favour.

  I can barely claim any honour, but I know I didn't run because I thought I should do something. I can't turn my back on these people, I thought. I'm the west. I'm representing the west here. All of it. The responsibility of the NATO alliance rests on my shoulders. I should do something.

  I sat and watched, that's what I did. Getting less and less drunk with every second.

  If that was it, if it had ended there, I'd still be living with it. I'd still be consumed by what a bloody awful, pusillanimous arsehole I'd been. A coward.

  If I couldn't hav
e saved those people, I ought at least to have died trying.

  The mood turned. I don't know what it was that turned it. Perhaps they'd had enough. They'd had enough sex, enough fun debasing the Bosniaks. Or perhaps they'd finally realised that there was someone there who was neither a victim nor a perpetrator. There was a witness.

  What happened next plays in my head on a continuous loop. Over and over and over. Like a television drama, stuck on the same ten-minute scene, playing in the corner of every room you're ever in. You can try to ignore it all you like, but it's loud and demanding. It insists that you watch it.

  Look at me! it screams. Look at what you did.

  They encouraged me to join in. They wanted me to join in. At some stage they realised they needed me to join in. That was when everything changed. I was no longer to be defined by my pusillanimity.

  I never knew their names, these four guys I got drunk with for a few nights in the forest. They told me they were John, Paul, George and Ringo. Funny. John was the leader, that was all I knew him as.

  John aimed his gun at me. Suggested that I might like to take a turn. He offered me one of the women. The prettiest, curled in a heap on the forest floor, clothes torn, blood on her thighs, dirt on her face. Tears running through the dirt. Not yet at the place where she could shut down and accept that she would be better off dead. Still wanted to live.

  'Do it,' he said.

  I couldn't speak. I didn't look at her. I shook my head.

  'Tommy,' he said. 'Come on, come on. Look at her. Now do it.'

  I didn't look at her.

  He smiled. He pointed the gun at the pathetic abused woman on the forest floor.

  'I can tell you don't care about yourself, Tommy,' he said. 'But you don't want her blood on your hands. Now do it.'

  I didn't move. Sat there, head down, just as pathetic and paralysed as I'd been for the past half hour.

  He kneeled down beside her and put the gun at her head.

  'Tommy,' he said, and just like that his tone had changed. He'd been mocking beforehand, and suddenly, there it was. Business-like. Mundane, almost, but full of threat.