A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller (26 page)

For the moment he's gone to ground.

Managed to get hold of a couple of cups of coffee, and me and Taylor are standing by his car looking at the surrounding crime-fighting stramash. So far no one has found any evidence that implicates Clayton in anything other than being a social climbing fuck.

We're not speaking, just standing there, one hand in pocket, the other clutching caffeine and both of us thinking the same thing. What was he thinking? Why attract attention to yourself when the only thing that really makes anyone suspicious is that you're attracting attention to yourself?

'You feel like we've been set up?' I say after a long silence.

Taylor doesn't immediately answer. Turns and looks at the house, and in every window we can see evidence of the investigating team. And on the ground floor there is, of course, the evidence of us smashing a window to try to get after him.

'I have that feeling, Sergeant, yes,' says Taylor.

'What about Montgomery?'

'Not sure yet. The jury's still out, but we can hardly be optimistic about a verdict in our favour. They're going to have to find something in there.'

'Has he gone national?'

'No. Needs to find something first. Something we can hang onto as proof.'

'And there's no proof.'

'Exactly. He just acted suspiciously. Strangely, in fact. Don't know what's going on in his head.'

We turn at the crunch of footsteps on gravel as Montgomery approaches. Looking round at the house I can see a few of the guys walking out the front door, and suddenly there's no evidence in the windows of the SOCOs going about their business. Like the ghosts have all left.

'Got a phone call,' says Montgomery.

Taylor gives him the eyebrow. I look away. Montgomery doesn't speak to me. Not worthy of his time. If I want to know what he's saying, I just need to blend into the background and he'll ignore my presence. I'm like the royal servant who got to hear all the shit from Charles and Diana because they just acted like he wasn't in the room.

'Mr Clayton has been to see his lawyer. Indeed, he's at his lawyer's office right now. Claiming harassment. Prepared to speak to us, if that's what we want, but only with his lawyer present.'

Montgomery and Taylor stare at each other, Montgomery searching for any sign of weakness or excuse from Taylor.

'You think he set us up?' says Taylor, which was what he'd already been thinking.

'Starts to look that way,' says Montgomery.

Taylor rubs his chin. Stares at the ground. Make the decision to chip in, even though the other DCI would prefer I keep my mouth shut.

'He thought that out pretty quickly,' I say. 'He didn't know I was coming yesterday, had no reason to believe I was coming. Why would I question him, rather than anyone else? Again, he didn't know we'd be coming back today. So he told us lies yesterday to set us up for today, even though he didn't know that either visit was going to happen. That just… just doesn't seem right.'

'Hardly impossible,' says Montgomery. 'He's manipulated the police before, he could easily have thought of it again. We spoke to him two months ago and eliminated him from the investigation, but it wasn't as though we told him that. He might well have been ready for someone coming back.'

'He knows that we don't like him,' I continue. 'He knows he got the better of us before, and that we're not going to like him. So this could easily just be some kind of impromptu plan. Or even a well practiced plan to throw us off the scent should we get on it.'

'But why are you on the scent?' says Montgomery. 'He was just a name on a list, and then you blunder in full of accusation and bravado. You don't like the way he acts, and so he gets worse. Starts firing off lies. Maybe it's been his strategy since day one, ever since he got his payout from the police. If they ever turn up again, lie to them, make things up, let them act foolishly and see where it gets him. Goodness knows he might have tried it with DI Marqueson, but at least he had his wits about him. At least he didn't do anything stupid.'

Neither Taylor nor I speak.

'You two gentlemen, however, played right into his hands. Perhaps his actions suggest that he's guilty of something, but we have absolutely nothing to attach him to the Plague of Crows other than you getting over-excited.'

He looks at us, one after the other. He's not Taylor's senior officer, but he's spoken to him like he is. The tone was judgemental, the judgement being passed down from above. Glance at Taylor. He's not looking at him. I dare say he possibly never even heard him. Won't have been listening. Wrapped up in the case, thinking through Clayton's actions, trying to straighten them out in his head.

Since he's not getting anything else from us Montgomery walks off to his car. All around us the police are starting their withdrawal. Immediate and all out. Complete capitulation in the face of a lawyer with some metal. I lean back against the car and join Taylor in staring at the ground.

*

Later on we sit in his office, the BBC news on his computer, and watch the lawyer in action. The usual beautiful stuff from any lawyer, fully implicating the police and fully casting his client as the victim.

Everyone's a victim these days. Everyone.

Even the Plague of Crows.

Long day. Shitty day. One of those long, shitty days you just want to end. It would end more quickly if you just got the fuck out of Dodge and went and sat in the pub from about five, but you've been made to look stupid, so you sit in work even later than normal, and normal's already become pretty fucking late.

Leave halfway between midnight and one in the morning. Got called into Connor's office, along with Taylor and Gostkowski, at some point during the evening. Informed that Mr Clayton was suing the police for £1.3million. Under the circumstances, and given that for the most part the superintendent is a complete bell-end, one would have expected him to tear into us, rip the fuck out of us, and at least kick us off the case, if not suspend us.

He did not disappoint, although he kept the red suspension card in his pocket.

'It's time to hand the case in its entirety over to Montgomery,' he said. Looking tired again. He looks tired every day. Sorting out this station was going to be the making of his career. It was going to get him his gong of whatever colour it is these senior plods get. He was going to be turning up at Buckingham Palace, Mrs Superintendent and two mini-superintendent kids in tow. Instead he got here, and immediately the Plague of Crows struck him down. The Plague of Crows has been the bane of this station since not long after Connor arrived, and now it is already too late. His time here has been dictated by it, and even if it gets solved in the next few days, his term in charge of the station will always be remembered for it and defined by it. And now, pretty obviously, the call has come from higher up to yank his men completely. So even if it is solved – and that's not looking very likely – it's someone else's officers that'll be doing the solving.

'Inspector Gostkowski and Sgt Hutton, you are reassigned with immediate effect. You will spend the remainder of this evening passing everything you've compiled on the case over to DCI Taylor. When you're done with that, then you can speak to Sgt Ramsay and begin to get back into the routine of the station. Chief Inspector, you can spend tomorrow with DCI Montgomery handing over the case files. I know you've done a lot on this. Ditch anything you think extraneous, hand over everything else.'

He looked at him, and having dealt with me and Gostkowski, we might as well not have been there.

'And I mean everything, Dan. It's finished. It looks like this Clayton character was just waiting for someone to come along, a police officer to come along, and it just happened to be you. Could have been any one of us, although I must say I do hope that if it'd been me I'd have been a little more circumspect, as Montgomery's man appears to have been.'

Fuck. You.

'So you pass it all along, and then you're finished. I don't want to see any sign of you continuing the investigation. The pictures on the wall, that absurd spot-the-forest nonsense, get rid of it. To be honest, don't even pass it on to Montgomery, he'll probably laugh at you.'

None of us spoke. Me and Gostkowski weren't really there to talk in any case – we were the seen and not heard children of the little drama – and Taylor was saying nothing. Presumably, sitting there wondering how he would go about continuing the investigation without the superintendent knowing.

He looked one last time at all three of us and then dismissed us with a flick of the hand. Then he added, 'Get out,' as he obviously thought the silence needed filling by a random sentence of futility.

We left.

Heard him having a quiet word with Taylor later on. So, you know, not that quiet a word. 'I'm a reasonable man, Chief Inspector, I realise this is bad luck. Bad timing. Could have happened to any one of us… I'm a reasonable man, I really am, but you have to acknowledge that the shit's hitting the fan on this.'

Wanker.

Shitty, long day. Spoke to Stephanie outside at the cigarette point some time around eleven. I was tired and miserable, feeling haunted. Feeling stupid. I needed my fuck buddy. I needed her to come back to my place. I needed to forget about the shitty, long day. And weirdly, I just presumed she'd feel the same.

'Not tonight,' she said.

'How come?' I said quickly, immediately breaking the terms and conditions. You wait for an explanation, and if none is forthcoming, you leave it at that and accept that your buddy is doing something she doesn't want you to know about it. Such as sleeping. Low maintenance rules the day, and whatever it is, it's none of your business. Move along.

I didn't think I was being high maintenance, but then, no one ever thinks they're being high maintenance. Even the most high maintenance person on the planet thinks that all their actions are justified. If you know your actions are high maintenance and do them anyway, then it means you're probably not high maintenance, you're just doing it out of badness. You're mean, vindictive, spiteful or malevolent maybe. Which is possibly worse, although I'm not sure.

'Just… not tonight,' she said. Sounded tired, which was natural, but in those few words I detected unease at being questioned on it, so I attempted to make a tactical withdrawal. It's hard, though, once the initial burst of high maintenanceness is out there.

'Sorry, fair enough,' I said.

I didn't immediately stub out my fag and head back into the office, as that would have looked like I was throwing my teddy into all kinds of corners, so we stood there, smoking in silence, an awkwardness around us that hadn't been there before. Eventually she finished her smoke, pressed the stub into the metal ash tray attached to the railing like a good little soldier, nodded vaguely in my direction and went back inside. Didn't see her again.

So now it's one-thirty in the morning and I'm tired and miserable but my head's still buzzing, and there's something there, something right in the middle yet way out of reach, something that I saw today that's saying
Me! Me! Look at me!
but I just can't pin down what it is and it's driving me nuts and filling me with an ugly, spirit-sapping uneasy feeling, and I'm thinking about forests and all the things I've done that I shouldn't have and I'd presumed I'd have company and I don't, so instead of wildly fucking DI Gostkowski, I'm trawling through the internet looking for some decent porn, and having been here many times before, it's not like I don't know where to look. I've got Bob playing loud, you know those mid-sixties numbers that sound raunchy and laid back and hedonistic,
Temporary Like Achilles
, that kind of thing, that sound like he was getting sucked off while he was singing. Tonight, however, in the words of the blessed Saint Mick, I can't get no satisfaction.

Blessed Saint Mick. I'm such a stupid fucker.

March

Sitting in a school in Rutherglen. The headmaster's office. Called out after a teacher attacked a pupil. A bare-handed job, smacking the kid about the head. The kid fought back. The teacher ended up really laying into him, kicking him repeatedly. All in front of an English class, half of them horrified, the other half training their phones on the action and probably uploading onto Facebook simultaneously.

Badly hung over. Me, not the teacher. Again. Third morning in a row. Late for work today, and I could tell DCI Dorritt was annoyed. Can see I'm getting lax. Haven't made any mistakes yet, just managing to keep ahead of the game, but he's poised with his arse-kicking for when it happens.

And I ought to learn. Going to bed at three in the morning completely hammered out of my face isn't stopping me from waking up a couple of hours later, the image of those women in the forest in my head, the sound of their screams in the air. The silence of the woods with no birds and no insects. The silence that is always shattered by their screams. Their screams that become my screams.

Why am I screaming? Why do I always wake up screaming? Nothing bad is happening to me.

I can believe that if I concentrate hard enough. Nothing bad is happening to me. They can scream. The women can scream. They're dead now. All of them. Are they dead? What the fuck do I know? I just hope they're dead, that's all, because sometimes I can tell myself that I don't have to feel so bad anymore if there's no one left who I hurt.