'No... Thought I needed to deal with Clayton before I could move on, but it was just driving me mad. How could I do that without talking to people? The ex-wife, the girlfriend. All that stuff he told us... for all the stuff you get on the web these days, all that information, you can't just put into Google, was this man talking shit? and it'll spit out the answer. God knows how many lies he told us. Was he just taking the piss, or was he covering up?'
She shakes her head. No answer.
'You never checked up on the girlfriend, found out if she really did work on High Road?' he asks.
He had never asked Gostkowski. Knew what the answer was going to be, not sure why he's asking now. Hadn't wanted to drag Gostkowski back in once she was well out of it.
'I just left it alone, Sir,' she says.
Just as she'd been told to do.
'Of course,' he says.
A slightly awkward silence. They don't often work together, have only been involved in the same investigation twice in the past two months.
'What is it today, Sir?' she asks.
He drags himself back from some aimless wandering and indicates the notebook on his desk, in which he's been making a few random notes about what needs to be done.
'This attempted murder,' he says. 'Need to get to the bottom of all the claims and counter-claims about domestic provocation.'
'Sounds lovely,' she said.
'Oh, yes,' says Taylor.
TREES. IT'S ALWAYS trees. That's what I see first. That's why the Plague of Crows business has had such an effect. The trees. That's why it's had an effect, more than any other crime I've had to deal with since I got back from Bosnia and started this shit-awful career.
It's not the brain-being-eaten-by-crows thing. Fuck, the press love that shit, they love to wallow in the horror of it. I don't think it's horror. It's, I don't know, gauche maybe. It's gauche. Showy. It's Grand Guignol, that's all. It's almost too horrible, too ostentatious, to produce genuine horror.
Too horrible to be horror? What? Crow got your brain?
It's just the trees.
I arrived in Bosnia with the same prejudices as everyone else. The prejudices that the government wanted us to have. The Serbs were the bad guys. The Serbs were the bringers of war. The other guys, they were all victims. When the Bosnian Muslims were fighting the Croats they didn't want to talk about it. That was a horrible civil war, victims on all sides. Massive reluctance to join in with that. Nobody wanted to take sides, because there wasn't a bad guy. Just two good guys. We wanted to be on both sides. Neither of them was particularly nasty. That was our view. No one said it, of course. The British government weren't issuing those kinds of statement.
It was easier when the Serbs fought them, because they were the bad guys. Suddenly it was easier to take sides.
I went out there properly brainwashed, knowing who the bad guys were. The first fighting I came across was Croat-Bosnian. It was fucking horrible. My first experience of war. First-hand war. It'll fuck you up as soon as you look at it. There was no honour here.
At some point I decided that the Serbs were the victims. I know. Victims of a particular kind. Victims of the world's prejudice. Victims of the west's desire to show the Muslim world it could come in on their side. Just fighting for their land.
That close to the action, that close to the war and the horror of it, you missed so much. I began to distrust the other journalists. Thought they were all playing along with the government and editorial line. Saying what they'd been told to say. What they were expected to say.
The truth? Was there a truth? It was war. There was no truth. They were all fucking bad guys, but the Serbs were bigger and better armed than the others, so they were the worst. They certainly didn't need my sympathy.
But they had it for a time, and that was how I ended up hanging in the forest with a small company of them. Bosnian Serbs. They were fucking rogue, man, but that whole damn conflict was rogue. No one had any control. There were scores of guys, teams of them, at large in the forest of Bosnia doing what the fuck they liked. It was feral. Mediaeval.
Thought I'd get some good photos, and oh fuck, but did I ever. But if I'd wanted to be doing a piece on how the Croats and the Bosniaks could be just as horrible as the Serbs, I probably wanted to be hanging out with the Croats or the Bosniaks. Or maybe living in a small Serb village populated by Serb women, children and old guys with no teeth, hoping that one of those rogue bands of Croats would come through and kick all kinds of fuck out of everyone.
Roaming with a band of thieves was never going to do anyone any good. In the end, instead of reporting on them, I became one of them.
I became one of them.
When they sat in the forest, drinking, talking about women, masturbating, casually firing their guns at trees, whatever the fuck they were doing, I wasn't sitting on the sidelines taking a series of great shots. I was with them. I was drinking and shooting and talking about women.
That was how it started.
It was never going to end well.
I was drunk that night. I like to think that it could have turned out differently if I hadn't been, but fuck, I was drunk every night.
We came across a family of Bosniaks making their way through the woods. A family trying to survive. Who knows where they were escaping to, or why they'd chosen that night in a war that was already two years old.
There were three younger men. Several women, I don't even remember how many, from teenagers to a couple of grandmothers. Then there was the grandfather. I remember him. Jesus, I remember him.
None of them were armed.
The first thing that happened was the murder of the three younger men. My guys, my band of happy thieves, tried to rile them, tried to make them fight, but they were having none of it. They seemed to think that if they kept their heads down and avoided confrontation, they might be allowed to pass unhindered through the forest.
In the end, all that keeping their heads down meant, was that they each got a bullet in the top of their skull rather than the forehead. That was the moment when I started to sober up, but it took a while.
Genuinely hadn't seen it coming. Thought my guys were having a bit of fun. It was cruel, yes, but I was drunk, I was one of them, I was laughing with them. After the three shots, the three bloody exploding heads, after the screams from the wives and daughters, the alcohol started to weep slowly from my system. I didn't think of myself as one of them after that.
They didn't immediately notice. Too busy enjoying themselves.
They made the grandfather watch. I think that was what they took the most pleasure in. The humiliation of the head of the family. The respectable leader, brought to his knees as his family was put to death and shame.
They raped the women. Gang rape. I sat and watched. What a useless, pathetic, complicit sack of shit. They were laughing, having fun. The animalistic nature of the horde.
I sat there intending to do something. But what was it I was going to do against four guys with guns?
I couldn't even lift my camera.
'Come on, Tommy.'
I can still hear them. The first exhortations to join in. One of them said it, then they all did, in the same high pitched mocking voice.
'Come on, Tommy!'
I could have run. Maybe they would have shot me in the back, but they were drunk, there were trees, they all had their trousers at their ankles. Odds were in my favour.
I can barely claim any honour, but I know I didn't run because I thought I should do something. I can't turn my back on these people, I thought. I'm the west. I'm representing the west here. All of it. The responsibility of the NATO alliance rests on my shoulders. I should do something.
I sat and watched, that's what I did. Getting less and less drunk with every second.
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.
39
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 come
s 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.
DS Hutton Box Set Page 46