DS Hutton Box Set

by Douglas Lindsay

  ‘Bollocks,’ he mutters. ‘Did you try calling her again?’

  ‘Her phone is switched off or she’s gone somewhere with no signal.’

  He mutters some other curse under his breath, stares away off to the side.

  ‘Fuck it. Shouldn’t have let her go.’

  ‘We couldn’t really bring her in, could we?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sergeant,’ he says. ‘Maybe. But this, now, having let her go... it’s just weird, and we have absolutely no idea why. Fuck... Come on, we need to go in and see Connor.’

  I get up, start walking a step behind him.

  ‘You didn’t leave any trace of your break in, did you?’ he asks.

  ‘I was the Pink Panther.’

  He stops just outside Connor’s door and gives me the look.

  ‘You left a white glove with your initial on it?’

  ‘I was discreet.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Let’s leave it at that.’

  He turns, knocks once, and then we walk into Connor’s office.

  ‘I’M THINKING OF TAKING early retirement.’

  The words ease their way out into the middle of a brief silence. Taylor has been giving him the rundown on where we haven’t got to. Connor appeared at least to be paying attention, before turning away and staring off into a corner.

  Taylor gives me something of an eyebrow, then says, ‘I thought there didn’t have to be any staff cuts, sir?’

  Connor turns back, the momentary wistfulness having passed.

  ‘No, no there aren’t. But I’m done, I might as well admit it. My time here has been plagued, we all know that.’

  I don’t think it’s about you, to be honest, but if that’s how you want to paint it. I mean, it was pretty damn fucking shit before you arrived.

  ‘We just seem to lurch from one disaster to another. And now we’ve got this. I mean, we could potentially have been completely under the radar on this one. Even if someone else had pulled all these bloody murders together, we’re still the smallest, the least interesting. There have been six deaths now, and only one on our patch. We could have... yes, under the radar, we could have sailed under the radar, if it hadn’t been for those damn e-mails.’ He waves his hand, gives me a reassuring look, for which I’m obviously exceptionally grateful. ‘I’m not blaming you, Sergeant. I’m sure you no more wanted them sent to you than I wanted you getting them, and you did entirely the right thing bringing it to everyone’s attention.’

  Well, thank you for saying so, I feel vindicated.

  ‘But it promotes us into the Premier Division and suddenly everyone’s looking at us, and what do we have...?’

  And he waves a pathetic hand in Taylor’s direction.

  ‘I’m an organiser, I put things in order. That’s my superpower.’ What a dick. ‘I came here to sort things out, and the place has been cursed since the day I arrived. I’ve been cursed. Whatever God intended for me here, it wasn’t an easy ride, that’s for sure. I think perhaps, when all this is over, it might be time for someone more suited to the task to take over.’

  He laughs ruefully, sharing the smile with both of us. Neither of us smiles back.

  ‘No doubt as soon as I’m gone, things will settle down. That’d be just like the thing...’

  Palms of his hands on the desk, he looks between the two of us. Time to wrap it up. Thank God.

  ‘So, basically gentlemen, we have nothing to take to the boss tomorrow? Having made our pitch... if Mr Clayton is not involved, well, we have nothing to add, and if he is, he continues to run rings around us.’

  Taylor nods, looking extremely pissed off at that assessment.

  ‘We need to find Dr Brady again,’ he says.

  ‘You had her a few hours ago.’

  ‘We had no reason at the time –’

  Connor cuts him off with a wave.

  ‘And you’re no nearer working out what he meant today, this morning. What was it, his last e-mail?’

  ‘The first one didn’t quite work out the way I intended, so I had to do it over, that’s all,’ I say.

  ‘That’s what he said, or that’s what you’re saying to me now?’

  ‘That’s what he said,’ I say, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice. We might as well be back out in the office getting on with this shit, rather than sitting here listening to him.

  ‘And you’ve got nothing?’

  It’s almost not even a question. More of a taunt. He’s owning the hopelessness of the investigation. He wants us to be shit. He wants us to not have a clue. He’s that miserable cunt Denethor in The Return Of The King. He wants to be able to take nothing to the Chief Constable, so we can disappear back into the shadows, and he can blame his detectives while he’s doing it.

  ‘There was blood,’ says Taylor. ‘That’s all we can think. The murder down at Cambuslang station had no blood, when one might well have expected some. For some reason, who knows why, he wanted there to be blood, so he staged another murder on the railway line where blood was guaranteed.’

  Connor looks mournfully at his desk.

  ‘Huh,’ he mutters. ‘He wanted blood on the tracks. Maybe he’s a Dylan fan.’

  ‘What?’ escapes my lips. Not at the words blood on the tracks, just at the fact Connor mentioned Dylan.

  Connor waves away the question, and the wave more or less turns into a dismissal in the direction of the door.

  ‘Just a stupid comment. Goodbye gentlemen. I’ll need you both here in the morning and we can go over our lines for the Chief Constable.’

  ‘Didn’t know you liked Dylan,’ says Taylor, getting to his feet. Introducing a more conversational tone, even though I suspect he wants to boot Connor in the face just as much as I do.

  ‘He lost me in the ‘80s, but I do sometimes enjoy his earlier work,’ says Connor, but he’s already lost interest, looking back down at some paperwork on his desk. Probably his pension plan.

  Taylor looks at me, the same thing running through his head – and it’s not about Connor – and we walk from the room, then wordlessly through the station, and together into Taylor’s office, closing the door behind us.

  He goes to stand by the window, looking out on the early Sunday evening. A bland, mild to warm, crappy day.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he says. ‘You thinking what I’m –’

  ‘Blood on the tracks...’

  ‘Blood on the tracks. That’s what he wanted to be different. He wanted blood on the tracks. Is it a thing, other than a Dylan album title? I don’t know, can’t be Shakespeare, can it? I guess they wouldn’t have had, I don’t know... did they call roads tracks back then. Or is it a Holocaust thing? The train tracks.’

  ‘Dylan didn’t mean train tracks, though, did he? He meant the songs. The tracks on the album are bitter, bloody, angry. I always presumed he just meant the songs.’

  ‘Jesus,’ mutters Taylor. ‘But there’s something, and it’s still what our killer meant, wasn’t it? The first murder didn’t work because there was no blood. And the second murder...? Lots of blood.’

  ‘Unbelievers. He wrote unbelievers next to the decapitated bodies.’

  ‘Infidels,’ says Taylor.

  ‘Yeah, I thought that before. But... yes, he could have used the word infidels, but he chose to use unbelievers. And spell it wrong.’

  ‘Which doesn’t sound like Clayton.’

  ‘Unless he was trying not to make it too easy for us,’ I say. ‘If he’d written infidels, we’d at least, you know, maybe it would have struck us Dylan fans, the name would have stuck out. This way, didn’t occur to us at all. Not until now.’

  Taylor lets out a long sigh.

  ‘So he wants to give us murders suggested by two Bob Dylan album titles. Apart from the obvious question – which is why the fuck would he even do that – there’s the question of why just two? What about the other two?’

  ‘The Basement Tapes!’ I say. Mind whirring, suddenly got some sort of weird buzz. I mean, from
just doing my job. Getting a buzz from doing my job! It’s like all those years of listening to fucking Bob finally paid off.

  ‘The girl in the basement, killed with tape,’ says Taylor, thinking aloud.

  ‘Exactly. Basement tapes.’

  ‘Hmm, okay...’ he says. ‘This is beginning to sound like us stretching the balloon into the shape of the animal we want it to be, but let’s keep going...’

  ‘The only other one is the guy. Knocked unconscious, killed with drugs.’

  The answer was bound to come quickly, and inevitably I get it first, as I’m buzzing and Taylor is riffing on scepticism.

  ‘Knocked Out Loaded,’ I say, and start laughing at the thought.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Well, it fits, I suppose. Or, at least, the balloon stretches that far.’

  ‘Fucking Clayton,’ I say.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘He’s going after us. I mean seriously, the guy is coming after us, and he’s taking the fucking piss. He knows we’re Dylan fans. Or, God, I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t know about you, but he knows about me. He’s coming after me. He’s taunting me with Bob!’

  Laughing out loud now. Coming off the work rush. Seriously. What a dick!

  Taylor’s shaking his head, not looking at me, not sharing my enthusiasm for the absurdity of it.

  ‘I can’t take that to the Chief Constable.’

  I suppose it’s not really funny, is it? How fucking hilarious? A decapitated eleven year-old girl on the train tracks!

  ‘We need to think it through,’ I say eventually, after I’ve brought myself back and silence has crept through the room. ‘I mean, try to pin it down. Yes, it sounds stupid. Unbelievable. But then, if it’s Clayton, we’re dealing with a guy who orchestrated mass killing by crow. This seems tame by comparison. And if he’s specifically setting out to taunt us, or taunt me, then fucking good on him. He’s done his research. Taunt me with Dylan. Do these fucking awful murders, in some really obvious way, and yet it’s not obvious... it’s stupid, it’s contrived, it’s batshit crazy.’

  Taylor’s head has bowed a little further, hands go into his pockets. I give him the space to think it over. Do I really believe it myself?

  ‘So, what do we do now?’ he asks. ‘Wait to see what tomorrow brings? See if he murders two blondes on top of each other, or, fuck, I don’t know, kills someone in front of a slow train...’ Voice tails off.

  ‘Did that already,’ I say. ‘He got two for the price of one this morning.’

  ‘Fuck,’ mutters Taylor. ‘All right, put something together for me. Think of a way where we can present this to the boss tomorrow without sounding like we’re the fucking jokers.’

  I put my hand on the door, then stop, turn back.

  ‘Then there’s the other thing,’ I say. ‘He said work it out and I’ll stop. So, let’s say we’re right, and that’s us worked it out. What now?’

  Taylor turns at last and looks at me.

  ‘That simple, you think?’

  Open my hands. How the fuck should I know?

  ‘You can’t reply to the e-mails?’

  ‘No, no point,’ I say.

  ‘So how are we supposed to let him know?’

  ‘Go on TV. We know he watches.’

  ‘Go on TV? Go on, I don’t know, Reporting Scotland, and start calling them the Bob Dylan Murders. Are you serious?’

  Don’t have an answer. He’s damn right though, so I’m not going to argue.

  ‘Go,’ he says. ‘Pull something together, and I’ll try to work out how we’re going to communicate to the fucker without looking like clowns.’

  I open the door, walk back into the office. Seems even quieter out here than it was previously. Back to my desk, the usual check of the e-mails. And there it is. The latest one waiting for me.

  Did you like it? Two for the price of one.

  32

  ‘We could give a press conference where everything we say is a line from a Bob Dylan song.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t know Dylan well,’ says Taylor.

  ‘He sounds like he knows Dylan.’

  ‘I’m not sure. You could do five seconds of research, go onto Wikipedia, and you’d get the list of Dylan albums. As far as we can work out, he hasn’t even bothered learning any of the songs. The lines could easily mean nothing to him.’

  ‘So, we do the press conference in Dylan album titles then.’

  ‘Seriously? Ladies and gentlemen of the press, welcome to the empire burlesque...’

  ‘Well, there are a tonne of albums to choose from. Let’s go through them, discard the obviously useless ones like Another Side of Bob Dylan and Nashville Skyline, and see what else we’ve got we could use. I mean, I know there’s no album entitled We’ve Detained A Man Who’s Helping Us With Our Enquiries, but it wouldn’t be much use if there was, because it would hardly be code. We need something that’s out of place enough he’s going to know we said it as a message to him, but not so out of place people are saying who the fuck is John Wesley Harding and why do they want to interview him?’

  He smiles. We’re sitting across the road in the café. The place is pretty quiet. Would much rather have gone to a pub, but Taylor thought we should a) stay nearer the office and b) not go out drinking.

  We’re here because the tech guys are currently checking his room to see if it’s bugged. We’ve also handed over our phones. Now, the phrase two for the price of one is enough of a cliché that the e-mail I received could have been a total coincidence. In fact, it’s a pretty dull platitude to say, and depressingly anyone would have said it. I’m inclined to suppose I’m dull enough for it, but that Clayton has too much wit for such banality, thereby pointing to the fact he, by whatever means, heard me say it.

  ‘OK,’ he says, ‘we might as well talk about it, but I don’t want to go anywhere near the possibility of anyone else picking up on it, because we’d either have to explain what we’re thinking, in which case we’re going to look unbelievably stupid, or else we’re going to have to say we stuck Dylan titles in there for a laugh.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be a good look.’

  ‘No, Sergeant, it wouldn’t. And, of course, if he has bugged the place he’ll already know we’ve worked it out. Presumably, though, he’ll want us to do something public anyway. All part of the game. So... what have we got?’

  ‘Album titles?’

  ‘Go for it.’

  I take the notebook out of my pocket, pen out, ready to jot some down.

  ‘How about Bringing It All Back Home?’

  Look up, waiting to see his reaction. I mean, none of them are going to be great, but we’ve got to try something.

  ‘Keep going,’ he says. ‘Just write down what you think is best.’

  ‘You know the album titles too,’ I say.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ he says glibly.

  I start scribbling, reading them out as I go.

  ‘Self Portrait... New Morning... Before The Flood... Hard Rain... Street-Legal... Under The Red Sky... World Gone Wrong... Modern Times... Tell Tale Signs...’

  Look up at that one, as it’s the only really obvious one to be able to use. He indicates for me to continue.

  ‘Shadows In The Night. Fallen Angels.’ Shrug. Think on in silence for a while. ‘That might be it. All the others are too basic or too completely inappropriate for you to be saying in a news conference.’

  ‘Not me,’ he says. ‘You.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘This whole thing is aimed at you. You’ve been getting the e-mails, it’s you who needs to bring it to an end.’

  He’s got me there.

  ‘So, yes, some of them would be ridiculous,’ he says, ‘but there are one or two that might be do-able. Work on something, show me in the morning. We can work out what else you’re going to say and how we’re going to play it.’

  Take my first drink of coffee, immediately realising I’ve left it too long and the heat has gone.

  �
�Maybe we can also manage to work out his next means of murder,’ I say.

  Taylor takes a long drink of coffee.

  ‘Counting on you to stop it before it happens,’ he replies.

  THE TECH GUYS CAME up empty. If Clayton really is pulling some shit, and knows everything we’re saying, he’s hiding it well.

  Still sitting at my desk, a little after ten in the evening. Have a few words jotted down, but largely working on other things. More inclined to just stand in front of the press and wing it, a course of action that’s unlikely to be popular with my many superiors.

  For now I’m going for opening with the phrase Before the flood of murders began... and throwing in tell tale signs somewhere along the way. That ought to be enough for Clayton, but not quite enough to have Drunk Copper In Dylan Outrage As Glasgow Put To The Sword newspaper headlines on Tuesday morning.

  Eileen stops by the desk. On her way out, out of uniform, jacket on.

  ‘Hey,’ she says.

  ‘Sgt Harrison.’

  ‘Good day?’

  ‘Any day that starts with the decapitation of an eleven year-old girl seems set fair.’

  ‘Yeah, Jesus,’ she says. ‘Any nearer anything?’

  ‘Well... the boss and I came up with a theory. I don’t think we’re ready to go public yet.’

  ‘Do I count as public?’

  Hold her gaze, take a quick look around the station room, turn back. Might as well run it by a non-combatant, non-Dylan fan and see what she thinks.

  ‘We think he’s using Bob Dylan album titles as inspiration for methods of murder, which would tie in with the killer sending me, in particular, the e-mails, because he knows I’m such a big Dylan fan.’

  She stares at the floor, and then walks round and sits down opposite. Leans forward, her elbows on the desk.

  ‘I’m not terribly familiar with Bob’s work.’