A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller (34 page)

She's not getting any tears from me. Nothing. I'm not scared. I'm not scared. I'm empty.

'Let the woman go,' says the bloke.

How can you appeal to the chivalry in a female killer, you idiot?

'You?'

I don't look up, although I know.

'You!' Voice sharper this time. Don't raise my head. Sinking. I just want to sink. Keep going down until it's all darkness. Dark and cold. And there's nothing left. I don't want there to be anything left.

I hear the crack and fizz of the taser as she lets it go just to my side. Grabbing my attention as it zings into a tree behind me. Lift my head slowly. It's coming. Death is coming. And pain. Maybe I don't even care if she hits me with that thing again. Yet I've lifted my head.

'You,' she says again. 'Look at me. Look at me!'

I'm already looking at her. But I know what she means. My eyes are dead. What's the point of terrorising someone if they're not interested? How can you instil fear into someone when they feel nothing?

'You invited me in,' she says. 'You looked in the camera. You asked for this. Now look at you. Not so fucking… tough now.'

I continue to look at her with dead eyes. So bereft of spirit that I'm not even interested in telling her that I couldn't care less about this. Go on. Kill me. Kill the three of us. Go on killing until you've got everyone in Scotland.

All those things that mattered. Partick Thistle getting into the SPL. Going to see Bob. Cigarettes and alcohol. Perfect, redemptive sex. Italy beating Scotland 2-1 at Hampden in 2007. Archie Gemmill's goal against the Netherlands. Ullapool. Peggy. The kids. Alison and Jean. Stupid politicians. Stupid newspapers. Stupid questions. Arrests, charges, convictions. Getting wasted. Forgetting. Bosnia. Rape. Death. Guilt. Anger. Fear.

None of it. None of it matters.

Anyway, I always thought it. Right from the start. It's worse for people watching than the people to whom it's happening. It looks horrific. Sure, you know what's happening to you, but you can't really feel it. You can't feel your brain getting eaten. That's why she does it this way. That's why the victims are arranged like this. So they can watch the others, and know what's happening to them.

I suppose some people are going to be freaked by that. I just thought, fuck it. Fuck it.

I thought it, I really did. But not as much as I think it now. And she knows. That's why she's angry. I bet she's not usually angry. I bet when she does this she's committed and cold and calculating. Doesn't make mistakes. But this time she's angry. She's angry at me, and she's off her game.

Maybe she'll make mistakes. Probably will. Won't save me. Won't save these two sad fuckers sitting with me, but it'll allow Taylor to get that bit closer. Close enough to make a difference.

Do I want to make her angrier? Do I care enough about this to try to throw her off her game? Do I care if she gets caught? Fuck, I'll be dead. Like I give a shit about the rest of society.

'Sex was good until you ruined it,' I say.

Suddenly find myself glancing at the social worker. Did she get him into bed too? Bastard. Doesn't look like it.

I get the back of her hand across my face. Compared to the rest of the pain she's been doling out, this is pretty insubstantial. An angry gut reaction, rather than all the rest of the calculated brutality.

'Fucking police,' she says.

I've been holding her gaze for a few moments, but can't any longer. My head drops.

'Don't you pretend you don't fucking care,' she growls at me.

'Thought you were someone else,' I say.

My voice is dead. Has to be disconcerting. I hear a whimper, but it's from the bloke, not the journalist. The journalist has silent tears streaming down her face.

'What? What? What the fuck does that even mean?'

I don't look at her. No, I've thought about it. I'm not interested in getting her even more annoyed than she already is. It makes no difference. Yet, my indifference is what will get her more annoyed, whether it's what I'm after or not.

'Fuck!'

She screams. That's got to be upsetting to the crows. She turns her back. The other two are watching her as I look up. Two shit-scared people, as well they might be. She has lost control. Because of me. Because of someone who is hitting the exact opposite end of the scale. Someone who has switched off. Someone who is not as impressed as he's supposed to be.

She turns around. She's holding a vicious-looking surgical tool. This will be the GPC oscillating & rotary thing. Whatever. Quite familiar with it, having done our research on what equipment the Plague of Crows had been using, even if I can't think of its precise designation for the moment.

She obviously has some power source somewhere, although it must be running quietly. Can't hear anything. She's looking at me. Standing between the whimpering bloke and the journalist. She lifts the bone saw, so that's she's holding it like she might hold a gun, and presses her thumb down on the controls.

It buzzes into action with a low sound. An expensive sound. The sound of top of the range bone-cutting equipment. She snarls. Wonder, in an almost disinterested way, what she's about to do. My head isn't strapped down; she'll never get the clean cut that would allow me to stay alive long enough for the crows to get involved.

'Fucking watch,' she says. 'See how you like it.'

Then she turns quickly and thrusts the bone saw into the eye socket of the journalist. Her mouth opens in a silent scream. No reason for there to be no sound coming out, except perhaps her vocal chords are frozen in horror. She wriggles her head desperately, but that just increases the damage as the Plague of Crows presses down tightly with the saw and it begins to cut down through her face.

She then draws it out and starts using it to stab at her, repeatedly, in the face, briefly drilling into her skin and bone. Chops off an ear. Drags it across the other cheek. A nick at the throat. Teasing her and taunting, a brutal display of torture.

The social worker guy is wailing. It's a horrible sight, the journalist crying out now in pathetic little squeals, blood flowing, as the Plague of Crows deprives her beloved birds of a kill. Slashing and thrusting with the saw, her own breaths coming quickly with the excitement and the anger.

'Fuck!' she shouts again, and soon, very soon, the journalist's bloody head falls forward into her chest. The Plague of Crows stands, engrossed in her slaughter, then holds the saw at the top of the woman's head. Presses down.

'Come on!' she says, exhorting it to cut through bone, as she scythes into the journalist's skull. Already dead, this one is just for show. Just for fun. Just for the Hell of it.

Suddenly she lets the power off and straightens up, gasping for air, her mouth dry, her heart racing. The bloke is wailing. Loud sobs. Jesus, what an awful sound.

'Would you shut the fuck up!' she barks at him, but he doesn't. I don't think he can. Probably hasn't seen that happen to anyone in real life before. I mean, you've got to see some amount of fucking awful shit when you're a social worker, but probably not that.

'God!' she shouts, as if exasperated with her children.

She lets the bone saw fall to the floor, then steps quickly to the side. Stands back between us with the masking tape, then ties it roughly and tightly around his mouth. Round and round she puts it, several times more than is necessary, until there's no sound coming out.

She hasn't strapped his head back yet though, and he continues to move it around frantically. Eyes wide. With all that sobbing his nose is probably full of snot and tears so he's going to have trouble breathing for a few moments. He'll likely get past it, but his future prospects aren't looking too great.

'Fucking happy?' she sneers at me.

The journalist's body drips blood onto the forest floor. I'm not looking at her. I look at the Plague of Crows.

'You killed her,' she says, which is some kind of fucking logic. But then, if you're insane enough to come up with her crows plan… 'You fucking killed her, and you're supposed to protect people. Didn't fucking protect her, did you? You're all the fucking same. How did you fucking like that, you prick?'

I hold her gaze this time. Eyes are still dead. I expect she was looking for some kind of movie reaction. I was supposed to be shouting,
no, no, leave the innocent civilian, take me instead!

I missed my lines. If there'd been an actual choice, I would have been happy to take the saw. But there wasn't. She was just looking for some desperation from me, and she didn't get it.

'Seen worse,' I say.

It sounds Python-esque, but fuck it, I'm not lying. I have. I have seen worse. For all my guilt, I haven't done worse, but I've seen it. I've taken the photographs and I've sent them back to London newspaper picture editors, and they've said,
you are fucking kidding me, we're not printing that…

'Seen worse,' I repeat, and my head drops.

She arrives first. Sits and waits. The house is dark.

She isn't usually so unsure of herself, but this is different. This is the Plague of Crows. Gostkowski is convinced. It's based on nothing more than a coincidence, because why couldn't Clayton's ex-sister-in-law be working as a waitress on the other side of Glasgow? But she knows, absolutely and without doubt.

She'd called it in; hadn't bothered going to anyone other than Taylor. The sister-in-law who worked at the café across the road. First thing he did was run over there to see if there was anyone who met the description. Then he was back and tracking her down. Jane Kettering poured out of distant police files in great torrents of disaffection. From an early age. He cursed that they had given up on the search when they had. Even just a couple of more hours of Gostkowski's investigation and she could have tracked her down.

There was an address, in the hills behind Gourock. Gostkowski was closer. He'd told her to wait for him. As he'd said it she doubted that she would, but now that she's here she hesitates. Turns off the engine and the lights, finds herself making sure the car doors are locked. Sudden fear. Where has that come from?

Five minutes pass. She wonders if she should go in. Starting to steel herself. Starting to prepare for it. Seven-and-a-half minutes and Taylor arrives. She hasn't moved.

She gets out her car as Taylor pulls up.

'Where are the others?' she asks, as Taylor walks quickly towards her.

'It wasn't enough,' he says.

That's all that is needed.

Gostkowski hadn't had much to tell him. A face in a photograph, Clayton's former sister-in-law in a café paying attention to her and Hutton. Now Hutton is missing.

Six months ago it might have been enough, but now there have been too many mistakes, too many conclusions jumped to that have not been proven. More than anything, Taylor has been working on this since the previous summer and has got nowhere in all that time. To believe that he's gone from nowhere to identifying where the killer lives in a matter of minutes seems preposterous. Neither does the connection to Clayton help. To anyone else it is going to seem like another plan from Clayton to fool the police. Only Gostkowski, who has been there, who worked it out for herself, knows that it isn't.

Perhaps there are doubts lingering, too deep yet to come to the surface.

They approach the door, ring the bell. A detached house, not too large, a small front garden. Taylor turns and looks across the road and around at the neighbour's homes while they wait. Quiet Scottish suburbia. The kind of place where the police would get called out to adjudicate over a hedge dispute or to answer a complaint about someone parking their car in front of someone else's house.

He steps away from the front door to take a broader view of the house, bathed in the orange glow of the street lamps. A few bare trees in the front garden lessen the effect of the lights.

'Open the door,' he says.

Gostkowski first of all tries the handle, then finding it locked looks around the garden. There are stones lining the border between the lawn and the path and she lifts one of them and quickly puts in the glass panel on the door closest to the lock. Reaches round, key in the lock, which is all just marginally less difficult than the door being open in the first place.

They enter quickly, Taylor moving in front, close the door and turn on the light. A regulation hall, stairs leading up ahead of them, door to the left and right, another door at the end of the hall beside the cupboard beneath the stairs.

Silence.

'What was it that was suspicious about her in the café?' asks Taylor.

Gostkowski pictures the woman chatting to them.

'Nothing,' she says.

Taylor nods.

'Good. It's good that you didn't miss anything previously.'

All the doors are closed. The floors are wood, a long rug from the Middle East lines the hallway leading to the kitchen. The walls are magnolia, hung with three or four original watercolours. Pastels. Sea and sand and old harbours.

'Nice place for a waitress,' he says.

Hutton had thought the same thing, but he had parked the thought. Sex first, plenty of time to ask questions later.