A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller (20 page)

She looks fresh. I'm guessing – although it's not a word I would usually use to describe a forty-five-year-old, marginally overweight bloke who smokes too much – that I probably look reasonably fresh as well. Rather than go home and lie awake in bed thinking too much about the day gone by, we banged each other's brains out and sleep came very easily.

'Fuck buddy,' she says, and a small smile comes to her face.

Interesting etiquette. Some would say that just the acknowledgement of the notion that you might be fuck buddies is overstepping the mark, that the person saying it is laying down some sort of rule and talking about the situation, which in itself is denying the very nature of one's fuck buddy role. You have sex, you don't talk, you don't acknowledge. So this is a bold move, early on in the fuck buddy relationship. I'd never make the move myself, but it probably is the case that if anyone's going to do it successfully, it has to be the woman.

And that smile. Intriguing. Beautiful. Almost not even there before it's completely gone. I attempt what I hope will be an equally small and intriguing smile in return and nod. She taps her closed fist on the desk, as if asking to come in, and then walks on her way. I watch her go, and I'm pleased to say that as I look at her, all I think is how great she looks naked and that I can't wait to sleep with her again tonight, and barely a romantic thought crosses my mind.

*

I never thought the dates idea was up to much. If that was what the Plague of Crows has done, then he was leaving something to chance. Using specific dates might have been a tricky one for us to work out perhaps, but if we did it, then we might have an in. So it was a long shot, like Taylor said. Something that he probably thought of while lying awake in the middle of the night, because he didn't have a fuck buddy.

Anyway. Four-and-a-half hours later – and I realise that this is something I could spend much longer on, but four and a half hours somehow seems enough – I'm standing at the door of his office.

'Nothing,' he says, without looking up. Not even a question. He knows.

'Nothing,' I say.

He sits back. Stares out the window. Another grey, cold day in January. There's a guy snooping around the car park, looking in windows. It could be someone hoping to nick a car – it's not like there aren't people around here with the sheer balls to nick a car from outside a police station – but we both know it's a journalist.

He lifts up the phone.

'Sergeant,' he says, to Ramsay at the front desk, 'there's an intruder in the car park. Send a couple of guys out to put the wind up him, eh?'

He hangs up. Looks tired again. Indicates for me to come in and sit down. The walls are still lined with the photographs of the woods of central Scotland. Now they seem pointless. Now they're taunting him. How was it ever going to be any different? They told him where to go, but it was no use. It hadn't allowed him to save anyone, and neither had they ever been going to. Not unless the Plague of Crows chose a patch of wood within a couple of miles of here.

He lifts the phone again, says, 'Can you come in here, Stephanie, please?' and hangs up.

Neither of us speaks. He's vaguely looking at a couple of pieces of paper on his desk, but in such a way that I can tell he's not actually looking. I watch him for a second, then look away. Outside, the bloke in the car park has been confronted by Constable Carr. They're arguing. No doubt the journalist is stating his case that his human rights are being infringed and that this is undoubtedly just another example of a thuggish police force cracking down on innocent civilians engaged in perfectly innocent activity.

The police. Never the good guys.

DI Gostkowski walks into the room, stands for a second, then closes the door unbidden and pulls up the other seat. And in an instant we have the feel of a war room. The cabinet come to establish the strategic overview and map out the way forward. I prefer war rooms conducted in pubs, and it is lunch time. I'd probably suggest it, but somehow the very presence of Gostkowski puts everything onto a higher plain of maturity.

'All right, we've finally come to an agreement with Montgomery, although to be honest we've been working fine without it for some time. The three of us are going to be… I don't know…'

'Special Forces,' I chip in. 'Working to the same end, sharing information, but not actually part of the main force.'

He looks at me for a second. So much for the presence of DI Gostkowski. She says nothing.

'So the three of us are going to sit here until we decide what we do next. Look at dates, times, methods, places, woods, crows, brain-cutting equipment. We're going to do what we've been doing since last August, and at the end of it… I know we're not going to have solved anything, but we're going to have some direction we're heading in and we're going to be working together. And, despite the accommodation that's been reached with Montgomery, I don't give a flying fuck what they do or what they think. We're not relying on them for anything. If they work it out, then good for them, and we can all move on. But until that happens, we forget about them as much as we can. All this rests on our shoulders.'

He stops, looks between the two of us. Check my watch.

'Can we get sandwiches?'

'No,' he replies, then leans forward and turns the piece of paper that was on the desk in front of him. He's noted down six or seven points and listed off several strands from each of the central themes. I believe this is what is known these days as a mind map.

'Read through that, give me your comments,' he says.

Gostkowski automatically picks it up, and I find myself leaning towards her trying to see.

I'm standing in front of the press. Can see a couple of guys that I recognise, but most of these people aren't from Scotland. Sure, all the Scottish lot are here, but now they're outnumbered by the collective from England and Europe and the States. We've even got representatives from those weird news channels that no one watches like Russia Today and China Now and Al Jazeera in English and Breaking News Moldova. There are a tonne of them, and I ain't in my element.

I wasn't sure about it, but the thought started off early in the meeting and wouldn't go away. Maybe the thought had started standing in a wood, not really knowing what was happening, feeling helpless and stupid, knowing that this guy was giving us the runaround, knowing that he still held all the cards, all fifty-fucking-two, despite Taylor putting in the hours so that he knew exactly where to go the second the latest killings went viral. That wasn't us taking any of the cards from him, that was him showing us a card or two and then saying, 'Here's what they look like, now fuck off because you ain't getting 'em.'

If anything, it helped him for the next time. It let him know that there were police officers out there who knew, who had absurdly checked the woods and who had some idea where to go. And the next time – for none of us doubt there will be a next time – he'll know to be more careful, or he'll know which boundaries to push, which to rein in. He'll know how much he can toy with us.

And I looked at that camera, and I knew he was looking back, and I thought, fuck you, you arrogant prick. You don't scare me. You can't do anything to me. What can you do? Seriously. Cut off the top of my head? You think I give a flying fuck if you cut off the top of my head? You think a few crows sticking their beaks in there is going to make the mess that constantly fucks up my mind any worse? I'm not scared. Really, I'm not scared. Come and get me. Get me, you fuck. I don't know these people you're picking up, but I bet you're going for the soft ones, the easy targets. That's all part of your plan. The soft targets. The ones who won't fight back, the ones who'll be straightforward. Kill the easy ones, strike fear into the hearts of the nation.

Well, fuck you. Come and get me. Come on. Man up and come and get someone who isn't going to cry, who isn't going to be scared.

I'm not hard, not especially tough, I'm not fearless. I just can't care any more. About life. You can't do what I did and move on. I've tried. I've been trying for over eighteen years. It's always there, and that's why this guy doesn't scare me, and that's why I looked into the camera yesterday morning, with a look that said come and get me. Come, you cowardly little fucker, and get me.

And at some point this afternoon, after many hours sitting in that room with Taylor and Gostkowski, long enough that he'd even allowed me to go and bring lunch in, I suggested that I do what I'm doing now. Stand before the press and taunt the fucker who's been taunting us.

He's seen me already. He saw me yesterday. And there's no way he's not watching the press conferences. He loves the press conferences. He loves being in control, loves watching us being dominated.

I use the cards line. People like clichés. The press like clichés. Society likes cliché and shuns the original. That's how things like
Ice Age 4
happen.

'We're not going to promise the public anything we can't back up,' I'm saying. Got the prepared statement in front of me. Agreed with Taylor and Montgomery. Montgomery didn't look too desperate about putting me out front, probably just because I'm not one of his men, but then neither was Taylor, for different reasons. One side effect of saying 'Come and get me, yes me' might just be that he comes and gets me, dealing with me just as ruthlessly as he's dealt with three other police officers. I might well not care, but Taylor does. 'Nevertheless, with every crime this man commits, we are getting closer. With every crime he commits he makes mistakes. When he started he had all fifty-two cards, and with every crime he commits he hands some of those cards to us, so that he no longer holds anything like all of them. It is clear that the public at large do not need to worry about this man. His attacks have been profession specific, and…'

The Evening Times will lead its later editions with
One Last Crow Of The Dice
.

I burble on, saying all that shit that you have to say. The press conference. None of the rest of it is important. It's for the press, for the public.

But that first bit. That shit about the cards. That was for the Plague of Crows.

*

Back to the office afterwards. One or two looks from the rest of the brigade not used to seeing one of their sergeants on the TV, not used to that level of bravado. And all that shit about holding the cards… well, they know it's just that. Shit. We're holding nothing other than each other's impotent knobs.

Taylor and Gostkowski are still in his office. They barely look up when I re-enter and sit down. It's cold in here, since he opened the window some time during the afternoon and hasn't closed it yet. January seeps in.

'Nice job, sergeant,' he says. 'Might get you some work on The Bill, something like that.'

'They don't make that any more,' I say, pedantically.

He grunts.

'Long night ahead of us,' he says. 'You better get on.' Checks his watch. 'Don't work any later than eleven. Get some rest, back here before seven tomorrow.'

Since August, and even more so after November, we've been concentrating on people who might have had a grudge against the media, the police and the social services. There were more than you'd think. Well, perhaps not. Perhaps you might realise there are a lot of people with that kind of grudge. Given that the majority of the population are happy to blame everything that's wrong in their lives on someone else, there are probably many thousands with such a grudge.

All we could do was look for someone with an obvious chip on their shoulder. A documented case, something that we were going to be able to read about, and hopefully in the newspapers, rather than just in social services files, given the inclusion of journalists among the victims.

We identified about ten people who looked perfect for it, another fifty or so who weren't so perfect, another couple of hundred who were real outside shots. None of them fitted. It wasn't like they all had alibis for each of the murders, but we knew. These weren't people who were capable of doing this kind of shit.

So now, given the general air of desperation that hangs over the investigation, we've decided to expand the search by taking one of the three variables out of the equation, which we'd done a little of previously, but now adding in a broader scope and a more expanded timescale. Which one of the three – the police, the newspapers, the social services – is not obvious, not documented in any way. With someone like this, with this fantastic level of grudge, resentment and hatred, it might well be that the grudge is buried where only he can go, deep inside his head.

So we're spending the evening splitting it up, each of the three of us taking one of the variables out and searching for someone with obvious resentment against the other two. I get to look for someone who's mad at the police and the media. Holy shit. And I'm stopping at eleven, doing a little more first thing tomorrow morning, and then heading out to interview people.

Where am I ever going to find someone who distrusts the police and the media? Apart from on every street corner, in every pub, in every work place and in every house.

Ultimately it's not about finding a list of names, it's about prioritising and guesswork and hoping that the combination of the two pays off. And, of course, we're going to be covering much of the same ground as the Edinburgh lads. Trying to identify potential suspects working from no clues whatsoever was one of the mainstays of their investigation. They, very obviously, got nowhere. So with every name we pull out of a hat, there's a reasonable chance that they got there first and already crossed them off a list.