A Plague Of Crows th-2

by Douglas Lindsay

  Nothing to say to that.

  'Reckless is a bad word for a police officer. Your affair with Mrs Leander, accompanied by a host of other incidents and affairs and marriages over the years, all point to an inherent recklessness.'

  I'm staring across the room at her. She's only four yards away. And she's right. I was reckless before I ever got to Bosnia — given that I went there just to check it out and have a look at war, death and suffering first hand, it was implicit in my even going — but I've been a lot worse since.

  'Do you have examples of any cases in which I've been involved where it's negatively impacted on the outcome?' I ask.

  Aye, there's the rub.

  She doesn't immediately answer.

  It's been close a few times, and maybe there'd be some legitimate suggestion that I should be dealt with before I negatively impact, rather than after, but really, there it is, there's the fucking rub. I always get by.

  'You don't think you negatively impacted the work of the station by hospitalising Inspector Leander?'

  'He hit me over the head with a bottle of wine.'

  'You slept with his wife.'

  'An act of love and affection. It was him that brought violence to the table.'

  She gives me a bit of an eyebrow for that one, and well deserved. Love and affection? Tuck it in, Hutton, you wanker. Still, I've got her pegged as a tree hugging liberal, the type who wants to believe in people, the type who wants to think there's good in everyone and that everyone can be rescued.

  'I was wrong,' I say, finally getting around to coming out with the kind of standard arsewipe that Taylor was looking for me to say. 'I shouldn't have slept with Maggie and, at the very least, I should have stopped when the Chief Inspector told me to stop. Leander only did what any self-respecting man would have done.'

  Apart from the fact that he took weeks to do it and then he came at me from behind my back because he's a pussy.

  She's melting. Piece of cake really. I haven't quite put the ball in the net yet, but I've made steady progression into her half. The main thing now is to concentrate and not blow it by asking her what she's doing after work.

  5

  Three o'clock, my first afternoon briefing. The keys to the castle have been returned to my good keeping, and I can once more join the police fold, once more strike boldly forth and legally kick the fuck out of people. Wouldn't have happened so fast without Taylor demanding it, but he's now the senior DCI around these parts and he's risen to the challenge. Knows what he's doing, gets results.

  This'll be the first time he's had to find the killer of three people who've ultimately had their brains eaten by crows, however.

  Seventeen people in the room. The walls are covered in the pictures Taylor tried showing me on the train. My head's in the right place now, which it wasn't yesterday. I can look at this shit without wanting to shut down. It's a constant adjustment process.

  I'm sure I'll start drinking again soon enough, and I've already bought my first packet of fags in over a month; on top of that, an hour alone with Dr Sutcliffe has got me thinking about women. It's been a while.

  With serenity comes lust.

  That there, what I just thought, has got to be some ancient piece of Chinese philosophy.

  Mind on the job. Taylor stands before us.

  'We're welcoming back DS Hutton today,' he says, pointing a desultory finger my way. They've all noticed me already of course. No one nods or says anything. One or two of them might have been glad to have me back, but I'm not the friendliest bastard in these parts. I'm just another copper in a room full of them. Well, I have slept with three of the women, but fortunately none of the WAGS.

  Of the three women, I used to be married to Sergeant McGovern, so you know, you can take sex for granted. It lasted less then a month — I mean the marriage, not the sex. I know I'm a bit fucking full of myself sometimes, but not even me… Then there's Constable Grant. Bit awkward. Had sex once as a result of there being a bit too much alcohol consumed on both sides. But then, I'm rarely embarrassed about it, while Grant could barely show her face around here for the next week. Assumed I'd tell everyone, and seemed downright shocked that I didn't. And then there's Constable Carr. That one was a bit more long term. And when I say long term, I mean four weeks. Maybe five, if you count the part where we weren't talking to each other but hadn't actually acknowledged that she thought I was complete bastard.

  So, on the SexPossibility-ometer McGovern is out, what with her being married to the other McGovern at the station. Grant, well she respects me a bit more now because I didn't publish a full account of our all-nighter in the Sun, but she's still pretty embarrassed about the fact that she got nailed by someone who's fifteen years older than her. And Constable Carr still thinks I'm a complete bastard.

  Which leaves the four other women in the room to be considered.

  I'm supposed to be listening to Taylor.

  '… planned out, to the last detail. Sgt Harrison, how's it going on trying to establish a link between the victims?'

  Sgt Harrison glances at her notepad. Best sergeant around these parts and several steps ahead of the likes of me in the promotion race. And it is a race.

  'Nothing,' she says. 'I think we can probably go so far as to draw a strict inference that these people definitely did not know each other and were not connected in any way whatsoever.'

  'You've spoken to…'

  'Done the rounds, been across the board. You can never be completely sure, of course, because how can you know? Not everyone documents every minute of their lives, albeit even that seems to be changing… Nevertheless, although Sparing worked in social services, we can't really call him a social worker. Apparently he only did that for a couple of months, couldn't handle it, and ended up as support staff. Paperwork. Had no connection with the police. Had never, his family says, had reason to speak to the police. Not, of course, that Goodwin worked in his area anyway.' She flicks the notebook, waves a rather mournful hand across it. 'I'll give you more details later, if you like. But these people didn't know each other.'

  'OK, thanks. Morrow, how's it going at pathology?'

  Detective Constable Morrow also has a notebook. A quick glance round the room. Everyone has a notebook. Seriously, everyone in the room is sitting there with a fucking notebook in their hands. Pen at the ready. Jesus.

  I, of course, don't have a notebook. I suddenly feel like I'm standing naked in the middle of the street. The weird thing is that they've all got the same notebook. I mean, all right, there's the standard police issue, but there's more than one notebook in the police service, and there's usually someone brings something a little idiosyncratic to the table. It's like some weird satanic worship thing where I'm the only one not involved.

  'They're sure now that Tucker died first,' says Morrow. 'Quite possibly as much as an hour before the others.'

  'So the journalist didn't suffer too much…' says Taylor ruefully. Dark, but well said.

  'Relatively speaking, no. The other two both showed signs of surviving much longer, and with much greater brain degradation, before they died.'

  Man, that's one of those situations where you're going to just hope that you go quickly, isn't it? Sometimes you're going to want to hang on as long as possible — say for example, if you're dying while Scotland are playing Brazil in the World Cup Final — and sometimes you're going to just want to fucking peg it.

  Maybe they clung on, their nerves twitching and bodily functions failing, in the hope that they'd be found. That they'd get to live on, live another day, live out their days in a quiet suburb, watching daytime television and visiting their therapist.

  'Anything else?' asks Taylor.

  'They're keen to point out the quality of the workmanship. They got a brain guy in from the Western to take a look, and he said the work was done with surgical precision.'

  'So do we think we're looking for a brain surgeon?'

  'Not necessarily. It wasn't as if the bloke performed surge
ry on the brains. He was just a dab hand at removing an area of the skull without inducing fatal bleeding. He could have practiced on animals. And maybe on humans. I did wonder if there were missing persons that he might be responsible for, where he practiced his craft before going public.'

  Taylor stares at him for a second, then looks at the floor. Thinking it over. That's a decent thought from Morrow, but it's a tough one to move on. Does he put one of his officers on something that might be a complete waste of time? Where would you start?

  Well, with a list of missing persons obviously.

  'Give it a go,' said Taylor. 'Yep, you know, don't spend a week on it or anything, but just stick your toe in the water.'

  'Yes, Sir.'

  'Constable Grant, you help him out. It'll be one of those you'll-know-it-when-you-find-it things.'

  'I'm used to that,' says Morrow, immediately shaking his head at the comment.

  Taylor ignores it, glances around the room. Eyes settle on DI Gostkowski. When she says her name, she still pronounces the w as a v, so it can't be too long since her family left eastern Europe, although there's no trace of an accent. She's the number two here, and he hasn't referenced her yet. Wonder what he's had her working on.

  She was brought in to replace Leander because, when he was finally able to return to work, he didn't want to come back here. Thought everyone would be talking about him. Which they were. He was packed off to the other side of the city. Just as well, or it would have been me being packed off to the other side of the city.

  'Stephanie, how's it looking on possible revenge motives?'

  She manages to talk without looking at her notebook. That's the talent that comes with being higher up the pay scale.

  'Blank,' she says. 'Sergeant Goodwin… well, you don't know what kind of petty grudge people are going to bear, but there's really nothing there. A regular policeman's life…' She shakes her head. This time she does glance at her notebook, although she's not actually looking at it. 'A regular police officer's life, no stand-out cases. Recently he's been spending a lot of time going round schools, speaking to youth groups.'

  'If this is revenge, it's old, been a long time in the planning,' says Taylor.

  'I know. It's hard to imagine that any of the people he's arrested over the years would want to do anything other than put a brick through his car window.'

  'All right. Tucker. He's a journalist. He must have fucked someone off. I'm fucked off at him and I'd never even heard of him…'

  She answers without any trace of the black humour that Taylor has just introduced into the conversation. I start to drift away, crossing her off the list as I go.

  Did I say list?

  She's too … I don't know… serious is probably the word. She's a grown-up. You know the sort. Has that air of humourless responsibility about her. You can imagine she's been this way since she was eight. Then later, when all her friends were doing standard teenage things, like getting drunk and listening to indie bands and smoking weird shit and getting annoyed at things that happened a hundred years ago and being outraged at that year's genocide, she was looking disdainfully upon it all and writing in her diary the precise plan of how she was going to become Chief Constable of the Met by the time she was forty-seven. And a half. Marry George. Take two months off to have a child. Harry or Imogen. She probably had the kid signed up to the nursery school of her choice even before she met George.

  No, I don't want to get involved with DI Gostkowski. And given the events that led her to be posted here in the first place, it's probably a good idea to leave well alone.

  She's still talking.

  With Sergeant Harrison being as interested in women as I am, that pretty much leaves Constable Corrigan and Sergeant Jones. Don't know either of them particularly well. They don't usually get dragged into this kind of shit, but it's obviously all hands to the deck. Corrigan looks like she's barely out of school. Really not a great idea for me to be hitting on girls that are damned near twenty-five years younger than me anymore.

  Which leaves Sgt Jones. Bobbed blonde hair. Bit of a, I don't know, thirtysomething policewoman cut. And she's young enough amongst our lot to still be pretty fit. Slim. Not bad looking. I don't think I'd be over-snagging. Just need to overcome the fact that she'll know all about me and will more than likely not want anything to do with me.

  DI Gostkowski is still talking. I like to think I've heard enough to make a judgement in the case, thereby excusing myself from listening.

  Wonder what Jones is doing after work.

  6

  'What d'you think?'

  Taylor and I are sitting in the pub. Our usual. Not the Whale, where the rest of the gang are likely to be, if they're at the pub at all. The younger police officer tends to spend less time in the pub and more time at the gym. Fuck's sake. Of course, I'm banned from the Whale, so it's not as though it's an option. Shouldn't have gone there in the first place.

  'For the moment, you're fucked,' I say.

  First vodka and tonic in a long time. Since the Leander thing. God it feels good. Crisp and cold and fresh, and perfect on a warm summer's day. There's something to be said for living on the side of a mountain being a Buddhist monk, but not as much as there is to be said for a crisp, cold vodka tonic.

  'You're forgetting you're back on the team, Sergeant. You mean, we're fucked, not you're fucked.'

  'I stand corrected, Sir,' I say, acknowledging him with a small movement of the glass.

  Taylor looks pissed off, takes another sip from his pint, glances around the bar. There's football on the TV. Never seems right in early August. For me the football season doesn't really get going properly until it's pishing down, freezing cold, and the Thistle are playing against Cowdenbeath in a mudpit.

  'Care to elaborate?' he says. 'I didn't bring you off the substitutes bench to state the bloody obvious.'

  OK. Still getting back into the groove.

  'Everything about this says planning. Planning to the absolute nth detail. A perfectly executed crime. This is a scary fucking guy. None of your drunk aggressive, not even your psycho, can't-keep-his-knife-to-himself type. This is cold and devious. This is… you know, it's the equivalent of the German death camps against the Rwandan thing. Rwanda, a bunch of guys with machetes going about their business, making no attempt to cover up what they did. It was brutal, nasty, vicious. There was no artifice. The Germans. They burnt bodies, they dug deep graves, they used camps and then tore them down when the Russians closed in. They had a system. They systematically murdered. And that's what this guy is doing. He has a system. He's going to do the same thing again. We have no idea when that'll be, but he knows exactly when. Exactly.'

  Taylor is looking at me while I talk. Face expressionless. I know it's why I'm here. To say what he already knows.

  'And worse than that,' I continue, 'he'll already know who he's going to kill, and they won't have any idea. Maybe he's already taken them.'

  'We should be looking for missing persons,' says Taylor. 'And not the usual kind, the seventeen-year-olds, the ones who'll have gone out on the piss and ended up on the bus to Aberdeen or in the wrong person's bed.'

  'If he really didn't know the three victims and he selected them at random, then we're about to find out if he just selected any old person or whether he has a gripe against these professions. Did he choose social worker, policeman and journalist for a reason, or might it just as likely have been butcher, baker, candlestick maker?'

  'We need to get ahead of the game,' says Taylor.

  'We always do.'

  'So we start by establishing if any police officers have gone missing in the last day or two, because the way he carried out that first murder, he must have grabbed the victims some time before they died. There had to be a gap.'

  'Were any of them reported missing?'

  Taylor stares at me for a second than shakes his head, drops his eyes.

  'He had that covered as well. None of them were missed.'

  'Why?'<
br />
  'A combination of things, and it all points to the fact that this was immaculately planned. Either they lived alone, or the ones who didn't had time off work previously planned. They had arranged to go away. It was… it was like he was inside their lives, knew what they were doing, knew that he could secret them away and nobody would notice. How do we counteract that?'

  'He was doing it online? Facebook, that kind of shit?'

  He stares at me again. 'You weren't paying attention at the briefing, were you?'

  Look a bit sheepish.

  'Fuck, Sergeant, head in the game. The next time you're in the same room as a bunch of women, stop trying to work out which one you want to sleep with.'

  Hide behind my drink. No one likes to get read like a damned book.

  'We're checking it out, but we've found nothing so far.'

  'So, realistically, we're not going to know if there are any officers missing?' I ask, to move the conversation on from Facebook.

  'No.'

  'What do we do about that, then?'

  He takes a long drink. Drags his hand across his face.

  'If it was just the one station, if we knew it was on our patch, we could introduce a system… I don't know, a checking-in system, a buddy system… But shit, we can't city-wide. And what do we know? Maybe it's country-wide. Maybe the next one'll be in the south of England. Or in France. This level of planning, how in the name of God are we supposed to know?'

  V amp;t to my lips. Getting near the end, and it's losing a little of its crispness. Clearly I'm going to need another one.

  'He knows,' I say.

  Taylor drains his pint and places it on the table. He looks into it as the last of the froth hugs the side of the glass and slides down.

  *

  Second night back at home. Already changed the sheets, did a bit of a tidy. Glad I did it yesterday, as I've already reverted to where I was four months ago. The weeks of clean living and communing with the Gods of the Scottish highlands have gone. I woke up yesterday morning at the foot of a mountain. This evening it feels like a hundred years ago.