A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller (3 page)

That's me not considering the effect of the father and husband being gone. No empathy. That's one of my issues, apparently.

'You know Bob's playing the SECC in a couple of days?' says Taylor, casually.

'What the fuck?'

He doesn't say anything else. He's driving. Pretending to concentrate. Haven't seen Bob in two years.

'How come nobody told me?'

That's kind of a stupid question, which Taylor's only too happy to answer.

'You've been living on the side of a mountain shagging sheep,' he says.

'You get me a ticket?'

'Yes.'

'Seriously? You got me a ticket?'

'Well, I got two tickets. To be honest, if I'd found some woman to ask in the last month I would have asked her, but we're now only two days away and the ticket's still free, so the chances are it's yours. So, it's slightly disingenuous to say that I got you a ticket, but you can have it if you like.'

I nod. Good man. He was never likely to ask a woman. I mean, really, you hit it off with some new bit of skirt at our age, the last thing you want to do is scare them away by offering to take them to see Bob. Living legend 'n' all that, but really, not designed for getting women into bed.

'We should talk about the case now,' he says.

Although we don't.

'I didn't shag any sheep,' I feel the need to point out.

*

The entire wood has been cordoned off. And you know, it's a wood in central Scotland not too far from Glasgow, so we're not talking about the Black Forest here. It's a few acres worth of trees where not many people go. I don't even know who found the bodies, but it'll have been one of the usual suspects: a dog walker, kids playing or illicit lovers. Although I'm not sure kids go out playing in woods anymore, so that probably rules that one out.

The victims were placed in a small clearing. A natural clearing, and not a bespoke space created for the task at hand. The killer dug out three small pits. He took three large wooden armchairs and sharpened the base of the legs. He then planted the three chairs in the ground adjacent to the holes. We don't know how far in advance he did this, but the whole thing seems to have been well thought out, so presumably he had it all set up before he arrived on the spot with his victims.

It's like serving a full Scottish to a group of people. There are so many things that don't take long, like bacon and frying eggs and making toast, that you can't start those and then start setting the table and making the coffee and whatever. You do as much preparation as possible before you start so there's no last minute panic.

So this is what he did. He killed three people like he was making bacon, sausage, egg, tomatoes, haggis, mushrooms and toast for fifteen people.

He prepared his area, and then he brought his victims out to it. They had all been drugged, so that he was able, one by one, to take them from the back of a van – the nearest identifiable tyre tracks suggest a Ford Transit, but you know, they suggest in a vague, well maybe, maybe not, kind of a way, so that's not exactly piling on the evidence. They had each already been strapped into chairs, then he placed the chair legs in pre-prepared holes in the ground, placed the feet in the larger pits in front of them, and filled all the area around the legs and their feet with concrete. The concrete set.

This was no movie-type bondage situation. In movies, people always find a way to wriggle their way free. Of course they do. Most of those types of movies wouldn't happen if Bruce Willis didn't have a convenient paper clip secreted away up his arse. But this was no Bruce Willis movie. Bruce Willis was not getting out of this.

Once he had them in place, he got to work with a saw. They reckon he used the proper tool, something like the electric bone saw that a brain surgeon would use. In the old days that would have helped narrow it down because it would have been much easier to trace anyone who bought a GPC Electric Bone Saw, Oscillatory & Rotary Model, but in these times when you can buy nuclear weapons over the internet from a guy shipping armaments, machine tools and cosmetics from his bedroom in Almaty, it's an entirely more convoluted ballgame.

Pretty easy to have someone bleed to death on you while you're removing the scalp, and he hadn't gone to all this trouble so that these people would die before the fun started. He had superglue to hand to stop any bleeding, but this fellow knew what he was doing, and he didn't need to use the glue very often.

We're not sure at what stage he woke them up. We're not sure if he stayed to watch. Perhaps he stood in front of them to intimately share his triumph with his victims. Perhaps he watched from the sidelines. Perhaps he just walked off, left them to it.

How did he know that crows would come and eat their brains? Can't say. He did select, with foresight one must presume, an area with crows nests in the trees. Maybe he'd trained those crows. Maybe he'd been leaving brains lying out in these woods for months, getting them used to it. Maybe he just left them there, assuming that the birds would look down, be curious and have a nibble, decide that they quite liked what they tasted.

Either way, he had these three people staring into each others' eyes, bound and gagged and helpless. And the first time a crow landed on someone's brain, put its feet on the soft surface and took a peck, the one to whom it was happening very possibly was unaware, depending on whether the crow landed on the edge of the skull or completely on the brain. But the other two would have watched it, and that person would have known something was happening. And then, as word travelled around the crow community, and the flock descended, they would have been covered in birds and through the mass of flapping wings they would have watched as the blood started to run. Probably not much space on the average scalped human head for more than two crows at a time, so there would have been a lot of avian squabbling.

Scalped? It's a bit more than scalped, isn't it? Superscalped, they'd call it in McDonald's.

Would any of them have stayed alive long enough to start losing various faculties of their bodies as their brains slowly disappeared? Baird and Balingol, the pathologists, don't have an answer to that yet.

'You all right?' says Taylor.

We're standing on the spot, looking down at the three chairs. He doesn't know my story. He doesn't know what happened to me in the Balkan forests eighteen years ago. I try not to think about it, and try to suppress it as much as possible. Maybe I don't really know any more.

What
happened
to
you? That's one way of putting it.

But this, this doesn't bring it back anyway. I saw some horrible things. Horrible. But they were random and spontaneous, brutal, vicious. Barbaric and indiscriminate acts that spoke of the general depths that humanity will sink to in wartime.

This is cold and calculated.

Genius.

'Sure,' I say. 'This is some fucking guy we're dealing with. Scary. And I mean, really fucking scary. With your usual nutjob kind of bloke, woman, whatever, there's a physical aspect, some sort of thing where you imagine that it'll come down to a fight and you'll be able to take them. It'll be brute force. If it ever gets tricky, there'll be a way out. But not this. This is one cool fucker we've got here. He gets his hands on you…'

Taylor's nodding.

'Let's just concentrate on catching him.'

'We know it's a man?'

'No,' he says. 'We're just making an assumption for the moment. My mind is open. Just don't want to be saying
him or her
every sentence. We'll call him
him
until we know otherwise.'

'A bit like God really.'

He glances up at me, looks to see if I'm being serious or anything, then shakes his head.

'Fucking Hutton,' he mumbles.

I'm staring at the same painting as before, but this time I've only just sat down, and I've only looked at the picture because I was following Sutcliffe's eyes.

'What do you think it represents?' she asks.

After spending some time back with Taylor I realise that part of the problem was that I just hadn't been speaking to anyone. I'd been out of practice. I'd stopped talking altogether, found that I didn't really need it, so that when I pitched up here at Sutcliffe's office, I was just thinking, what's the point? I'm getting by just fine without saying anything.

A few months ago, I may well have thought that Sutcliffe and her ilk were the real nutjobs and that it was all a waste of time, but I'd at least have made some effort in talking to her, even if it was just to try to get her into bed.

I look round at her and smile. Still haven't had any alcohol, eyes are bright, the hillside tan is still a few days away from fading. Suddenly I'm talking to an attractive, intelligent woman and I'm full of myself.

'Just a painting,' I say. 'Red on top, orange on the bottom. It could be a red sky over the desert, it could be strawberry jelly on top of orange jelly, but you know, I think the artist just thought it looked nice and he – or she – left it up to the viewer to make up their own mind about its meaning. In fact, they might not even have got as far as thinking that anyone would read meaning into it. But, of course, you stick a picture on a psychiatrist's wall and it immediately has to mean something.'

She smiles, doesn't nod or anything. She makes a quick note – although I reckon she's just doodling a bloke with a button nose and a moustache – and then looks up.

'My daughter painted it when she was six.'

Ah. She has a daughter. Doesn't mean she's still with the father, but it might not be a good idea to go hitting on any more married women. Just yet.

'How many times did you sleep with Detective Inspector Leander's wife?'

'You think I counted?'

'Possibly.'

'Seventeen.'

'Did you just make that up, is it a guess, or did you really count?'

'It's a guess. But a fairly good one.'

'Did you ever think about DI Leander? What this would do to him?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'I was too busy sleeping with his wife. It was sex. It happens. She's gorgeous and, as far as anyone knows, doesn't keep it to herself. I wasn't the only one. Am I proud of what I did? No. But the sex was great.'

'You were aware that it was becoming a scandal around the station. You'd been told to stop.'

Now that's true. It had started to get a bit uncomfortable. Taylor was getting pissed off at me. Everyone knew. Everyone. DS Hutton was shagging the DI's wife. Open secret. That was awkward. I did almost think about ending it one of the times that Taylor told me to, but then she called up and invited herself over and she stands on the doorstep of my flat, and I'm thinking, you know, I'm solid, this is it and I'm going to tell her she has to leave and that we're finished, and then she opens her coat and she's wearing black underwear. Just, you know, the kind that's supposed to go straight to a man's cock. And it does. And I sleep with her.

That was a couple of weeks before the bottle of wine at the Whale incident.

'Have you got a problem with sex?' Sutcliffe asks, when I don't say anything.

Hmm. Well, I haven't had any in the last four months.

'I don't think so,' I say.

She glances down at a thin file, looks at a couple of pieces of paper.

'Your history suggests otherwise,' she says. 'You seem insatiable. It's peculiar in a man your age.'

I give her the dead pan after that one. Saying nothing, although the words 'you can find out for yourself if you want, darlin'' aren't far from my lips.

'There's not much in your file about your time in Bosnia,' she says, cutting to the big one. But I'm in a good place today. Back in the zone. Back in the denial zone. 'You've never talked about it.'

'No, you're right.'

'Why is that?'

'It was horrible,' I say, but without accessing any of it in my brain. 'There's nothing about it that I want to talk about.'

'But there's some suggestion here that that's your problem. Your time there, your time spent in a war zone, it has impacted on you ever since you came back, made you reckless.' She takes another quick glance down. 'Even though it was a long time ago. If these things aren't dealt with properly, they can hang around in the head for a long time. Forever.'

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.