A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller (30 page)

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 have 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.

'Tommy, you need to have sex with the girl. Now.'

I looked at her at last. Looked her in the eye. She never spoke, but her look said everything. She was begging me. That's what her eyes were doing. Begging me. What did she care if another man raped her, if another man came inside her? She didn't want to die.

I got to my feet. One of the other three started a slow hand clap and then they were all laughing, clapping slowly in unison. John wasn't laughing. He kept the gun at her head.

Her eyes begged me. Her eyes said, come on. Rape me. Don't think that I care. I don't care. It's not rape, not really. I want you to do it. Come on. Come on! Please!

I stood there. The laughter and the clapping increased. I was wearing jeans, no belt. A button, a zip. What was I thinking? Right there, at that moment, what did I think was going to happen?

I was never going to be able to have sex with her, whether I'd decided that I was going to do it or not. I couldn't.

I'd been sitting there in fear and abject poverty of spirit, consumed by self-loathing, for all that time. And now they were laughing at me and mocking me and threatening this woman, and the responsibility of whether or not she lived was on my shoulders. It was up to me to enter her. To fuck her. On their command.

I couldn't get an erection. I was never going to be able to get an erection. Did I think that by dropping my trousers they'd feel some sympathy for me? By showing them that I was incapable, that they'd let her go?

The clapping stopped, the laughter increased ten fold. The look in her eyes became ever more desperate. In a final pathetic gesture, she even squeezed one of her dirty, bite marked, bloody breasts in an effort to get me excited.

I fell to my knees. It felt like my penis shrivelled into nothingness.

John put a bullet in her head.

'You could have saved her, Tommy,' he said. 'But you're not a real man.'

He put a gun in my hand. That seemed strange at the time. He took a gun from one of the others – think it was Ringo – and put it in my hand.

'Kill the old guy,' he said. 'If you don't, the other women will die. If you kill the old guy, I'll let them go. You think you can do that much for me, Tommy?'

I had a gun in my hand. That's the moment I think most about when I think about that night. The moment he gave me a gun, knowing I would do nothing with it other than what he was telling me to do.

I should have shot him. John. I should have shot John when I had the chance. Then I would have died. Or I should have turned the gun on myself.

Except, I believed him. The whole idea was to mock me further, to complete my humiliation. He fully intended to let those women live if I killed the grandfather, so that I would know that he would have let the first woman live if only I'd been able to penetrate her.

I looked at the grandfather. His dead eyes looked back. His dead eyes. I stood there, my trousers still at my knees, my pathetic, impotent penis resting woefully on my balls, and I shot him. Twice. In the chest.

John didn't kill the other women. A man of his word.

*

Right from that night, that first night, I woke up gasping, my voice straining, silently screaming into the dark. In the forest, in the dead of night. Woke up, sweating, the guilt of a million years crawling over my skin like cockroaches. I'd wet myself.

They were sleeping. One of them was supposed to be the guard, but he was keeled over as well. The Bosnian women were gone. They weren't a threat.

They were gone. The bodies of the dead were gone.

I stood up. The dead of night in a forest in the middle of a war. Picked up my bag, picked up my camera, and stinking of piss and cheap booze and shame I walked out of there. Didn't look back. Some part of me wondered whether I should pick up a gun and kill the four of them while they slept. Then I could have turned the gun on myself.

I didn't pick up the gun. I kept on walking. I wondered if they'd come after me, or whether they'd search through the forest for the women. Didn't even look over my shoulder. Didn't care. They could have come after me if they'd wanted. They could have caught me, tortured me. They could have come invisibly from behind, a sniper in a tree, and taken me out.

I walked on. Every now and again I came across evidence of the war. I realised I wanted to see the women. I wanted to see them, wanted to apologise, as if that would make everything all right. As if that would bring back the old man, as if that would mean I'd stood up for them, or at the very least, that I'd been able to save her. The woman who'd been desperate for me to penetrate her. I'd apologise, they'd forgive me and I would receive absolution. Instant. There and then. Or else I could give them a knife and offer myself to them for vengeance.

I wake up. There is no sound. I can open my eyes, but there is total darkness. Darkness so complete that it appears solid. As if I'm inside a solid block. Wonder if I've been buried alive. Maybe I'm not alive.

But then there's the pain.

Taylor looks at his watch. Just after two in the afternoon. His heart sinks, although he immediately questions himself. The day is already dragging and there's a long way to go. But what is it he's looking forward to that evening?

Gostkowski beside him, they walk back upstairs from the interrogation room. An ugly day questioning people, most of whom were lying; or, at the very least, skewering their stories as far as possible from the truth.

What is Gostkowski doing that night? He's never wondered before. He knows she's not married, but that's all he knows. He would probably have heard from Hutton, but they haven't seen much of each other. Even when they were working together, he didn't talk about her. Which was peculiar, for Hutton.

Taylor glances at her and understands. Of course. He smiles ruefully to himself. Fucking Hutton.

He envies him. A carefree life, happily drinking and shagging. Slight glitch every time the possibility of getting back together with his wife comes along, and a moderate amount of remorse about the fact that he rarely sees his children, but that aside, a guilt-free life devoted to indulging himself in his pleasures of women and alcohol, both of which he finds in endless supply.

'You talk to Sgt Hutton much since the Plague of Crows thing?' he asks.

Hasn't seen Hutton and Gostkowski talk at all, but knows that his sergeant is capable, on occasion, of a degree of discretion.

Gostkowski glances briefly at Taylor, then looks away as she surprises herself with a rare moment of candour.

'We got a bit too involved during the Crows investigation, Sir,' she says. 'It was unprofessional. I haven't really spoken to him since.'

'Hmm,' says Taylor.

That they'd had sex in the first place was entirely in keeping with Hutton's character, that the DI had ended it because it was unprofessional in keeping with hers.

They come to the front desk, Ramsay holding dominion over his territory, never seeming to be off duty.

'Sergeant,' says Taylor. 'We'll release Masters later, but I'm not in a rush. Leave him for another hour or two, make him think the worst.'

Ramsay nods.

'Hutton around?' asks Taylor.

'Haven't seen him today,' says Ramsay.

Taylor has talked as he walked, but now he takes a couple more paces and then stops.

'What's he been working on the last couple of days?'

'Principally the school beating.'

'He passed that onto Dorritt,' says Taylor.

'He was writing up a report on it for him. I presumed he was continuing to work for the DCI…'

'What else have you given him?' asks Taylor sharply, aware that Dorritt would no more have wanted Hutton working for him on the school beating than the other way round.

'He had several ongoing cases, and I know it was logged in yesterday evening that he was given first sight of an insurance fraud case involving a small building firm in Westburn,' said Ramsay firmly. Undaunted by his superior officer's sharpness of tone, having been many years in the job.

'You didn't think to check his whereabouts this morning when he didn't come in?' said Taylor.

'If he was late,' said Ramsay firmly, 'it would hardly be the first time. He has prior. If he was out on a case, then I can't be expected to keep minute-by-minute checks on all our detectives.'

'These are hardly normal times,' says Taylor.

'It's been two months,' replies Ramsay.

'Jesus,' says Taylor, 'it was two months between the last two. There isn't a set length of time after which it's all right.'

'And there isn't enough manpower in the station for us to keep any kind of regular check on the precise whereabouts of everyone who works here. There has to be a certain amount of personal responsibility. Sir.'

Taylor stares for a little while longer then turns away, takes out his mobile. Gostkowski stands slightly awkwardly. She thinks Taylor is overreacting. Thinks that the men are having some kind of ridiculous, testosterone-laden alpha male power struggle. Also believes that Hutton is liable to have been too hungover to come in, or is off on some absurd tangent of an investigation.

An unreliable officer, that's how she sees him. Does not feel very good about getting carried away in January and allowing herself to be added to Hutton's absurdly long list. The sex was good, once or twice. The third had been too much.

Taylor turns back. Softened a little. Holds his hand up to the sergeant.

'Not answering his mobile or home number. I know on some level I'm probably being melodramatic, but the Plague of Crows is coming back, and some police officer somewhere is going to end up under the knife. Would you mind calling the folk running the bracelet scheme and finding out where he is?'

'Not at all, Sir,' says Ramsay.

'Thank you,' replies Taylor, and then he leaves him, heading back to his office.

Gostkowski and Ramsay share a glance as she follows.

*

There are in Taylor's office three minutes later when the phone rings. Taylor lifts it abruptly, barks, 'Yes?'

'The Sergeant is at his house, Chief Inspector,' says Ramsay.

'You have confirmation of that?' says Taylor.

Slight pause.

'The bracelet is at his house, Sir. There's no alarm gone off to suggest it's been broken or tampered with, so we can assume that the Sergeant is there with it.'

Taylor hangs up without saying anything else. He looks across the desk at Gostkowski.

'The bracelet says he's at his flat.'

'So that's where he'll be,' she says.

Taylor looks at her while he lifts the phone. Dials Hutton's home number, lets it ring. No answer. Uses his mobile to dial Hutton's mobile. Waits for a few rings, then hangs up. Has looked at Gostkowski throughout.