A Plague Of Crows th-2

by Douglas Lindsay

  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.

  45

  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.

  'Don't like this,' says Taylor. Not used to working with women. 'Stick together.'

  Gostkowski doesn't know that he and Hutton would have split up.

  When he starts moving he does it boldly and confidently. Having established his bearings he is not about to creep around.

  First room, on the left; a study, generally used as a dumping ground for unneeded things. There's a baby grand piano, cluttered and unused.

  Second room, on the right. Sitting room. Television. Photographs of the same two children, and of a similar vintage, that Clayton has in his house. Taylor scans the room, takes everything in, turns and walks out. Down the hall, stops to open the door under the stairs. The cupboard has been converted into a very small bathroom. He looks at the floor, wonders if this is where there would be a trap door to the basement. On first inspection it is tiled and solid. He will come back later if he finds nothing else.

  Into the kitchen. Light on. Modern, redesigned and fitted some time in the previous two or three years. Nothing obvious. This person lives alone with no reason to assume that the house is about to be infiltrated. There's no reason why she would have to keep secrets hidden.

  Taylor walks out, back down the hall. Gostkowski hesitates a little longer in the kitchen, then follows. Up the stairs. A door straight in front of them, slightly open. Taylor walks right in. A spare room. A single bed. Everything very neat. He quickly notices the film of dust. There is a sadness and an emptiness about the room. Something about it, so great, that there almost seems a physical manifestation of the emptiness. A spare room that is
never used because there are no visitors.

  Perhaps there is something more fundamentally amiss with the room than that. Gostkowski shivers. They walk out. Quick look in the bathroom, nothing to see. They can rake through the cabinets later. Another door beyond that, another bedroom. The double bed has been made, there is order. There is no sign that this was where Hutton lay back, where Hutton was euphoric, where Hutton was so brutally immobilized.

  Taylor turns, walks back past Gostowski along the corridor to the final door. She follows.

  The third bedroom, but this one a bedroom transformed. All traces of the room's original use have been removed. Here is a large desk in the middle of the floor, the walls have been stripped and hung with maps and lists of names. Photographs are everywhere.

  They both feel the jump of nerves. Taylor steps forward.

  'Call it in,' he says.

  Gostkowski doesn't move. Looks around the room. The wolf's lair. The operations centre, almost as if it had been laid out for them. Photographs of some of the previous victims on the wall. A large map of Scotland, pins inserted in various places around the central belt. Satellite images of woods. The desk is littered with paperwork, which Taylor is already looking through.

  He notices the silence and turns.

  'Inspector?'

  'How do we know?' she says.

  'What?'

  'How do we know it's not a set-up?' she says. 'This is perfect. It's too perfect. I see the photograph in Clayton's house, and now we're here. He might as well have told me where to look, and now we pitch up and we find this. All the evidence we'd ever need, right there in front of us.'

  Taylor stares at her, a piece of paper in his hand. Closes his eyes, tries to think it through.

  'They could be working together,' she says, 'Clayton and this woman, the café woman, to get the police to make an even bigger idiot of themselves. For us to make idiots of ourselves. They want us to call it in, they want us to turn up here with thousands of SOCOs. This could just be…' and she lets the sentence drift off and waves a hand at the pictures on the walls.

  Taylor opens his eyes, turns and looks over the evidence before them. Goes to the map of Scotland on the wall. There are seventeen pins in place, three red, fourteen yellow. Recognises the three red as being the spots where the Plague of Crows previously committed murder. The others are spread around the central belt.

  What would they find when they got there, to these fourteen woods. Trees? Crows' nests? A jack-in-the-box, all part of Clayton's deception and joke? Hutton and two others, bound and gagged and scalped?

  He runs a mental cross reference with woods that he's looked at over the previous few months. Some of these might only be useful for the summer. He quickly reduces the list of fourteen to six or seven. He turns back to Gostkowski.

  46

  She's been gone for a while. Not sure how long. Maybe half an hour. I've got under her skin, yet she didn't kill me. She's angry. Too angry to be coldly removing part of someone's skull, preparing the food for crows. She'll make mistakes. Something that she won't see coming, something she will miss because she's not in control.

  She's been in command throughout every one of the murders so far. This time she's lost concentration. I know that's what she's doing when she shuffles around, out of sight. Occasionally there's the sound of footfalls on dead leaves, the noise of someone walking through the forest.

  She is pulling herself together. Getting a grip. It's not about me, and she had made this murder about me.

  The guy is still blubbing. Soft moaning, whimpering noises. Tears. He can't stop looking at the dead journalist. He is wrapped up in her, that bloody corpse. Occasionally I lift my head to look at the two of them.

  I won't ask myself if I'm heartless. I know I'm heartless. Beyond caring, about me or anyone else.

  The Plague of Crows flits in and out of my thoughts. It comes together, with wonderful clarity. I have none of the facts, and yet I know everything. Instinctively know that what is pieced together in my head is what brings me here, what brings the Plague of Crows out into the woods to avenge herself.

  I see it in her face, just a flash, but it sparks the thought process. It's her eyes. The same as the look on photographs of Clayton's wife that we looked at.

  If only we'd kept looking. If only we hadn't turned our backs on the case when Connor kicked us off it. Strangely I blame Taylor and myself, rather than Connor. He was just doing what he had to do. We shouldn't have taken his word. We should have kept at it. We would have come to the sister-in-law soon enough.

  Clayton was just the way we found our path in. It was chance, but one of those chances that happen in life. Meant to be. I wasn't attracted to Clayton because he was the killer, but because the killer was connected to him. Quite probably he didn't know anything about it, yet it drew me in. There's no reason for it, other than some sixth sense saying that the path to the Plague of Crows lay through Clayton.

  And so it did.

  She comes back to the fray. Calm. Renewed. Concentration intact. She doesn't even look at me. The guy is whining slightly more loudly now. He must recognise the new coldness in her. She's back, she's determined, she's going to get on with the job.

  She has the duct tape in her hand. Doesn't bother gagging me. Knows I'm not going to say anything. The social worker is already gagged, now she grabs his head and straps it firmly to the back of the seat. His eyes are wide with fear, tears flowing freely.

  'You're next,' she says, without looking. Wants to be in control, but can't help herself.

  Perhaps she's thinking some level of humanity will kick in and that I'll start pleading for the social worker's life. There would be no point, even if I felt like it. I'm not saying anything.

  He looks at me. Beseeching, demanding. You're the police officer! Do something! Do something, you fucker! For all my genuine and heartfelt disinterest, I would be doing something if I could. But I can't. I'm as tied up as he is. Shouting won't get us anywhere.

  Head strapped tightly, she moves away for a second and then returns with an electric razor. One of those big round fuckers with which you can shave your own head in seconds, if you're of a mind to not care what you look like afterwards. She's in her groove now, working quickly and efficiently. He has reasonably short hair as it is, receding slightly. I expect there's a bit of a bald patch, although I can't see from here.

  Takes her less than a minute, then she rubs her hand over his shaved head to clear off the remnants of the cut. Turns away for a moment, replacing the shaver with the bone saw, and she's back a second later. She switches it on, the familiar low hum, holding it a couple of inches in front of his face. The eyes widen even more.

  Terror. That's what terror looks like.

  I've seen it before.

  I look away. Head drops. Maybe she glances over to see if I'm paying attention, but I won't notice if she does.

  The sound of the low hum is strangely all-consuming.

  *

  I wake up to her roughly grabbing my head and forcing it back against the chair, strapping it tightly. Quickly look over at the social worker guy. Scalped, skulled, still alive. His eyes are clipped open. His whole body seems to be trembling within the confines of his bondage.

  I must have fallen asleep. Would have been perfect to just never have woken up. Gripped, immediately on waking, by a dreadful, oppressive feeling of desolation. Had been almost phlegmatic before. Sitting in hopeless impotence, the pain in my hand occasionally throbbing.

  Now, the weight of it all is much heavier. The place I'd got myself into, the place where I didn't care and where pain could be ignored, has gone. Self-loathing has returned, much stronger than before.

  A woman was just brutally murdered in front of me and I did nothing. I did not care. Now I hate that I was in no position to do anything. I blame myself. I'm a police officer, for fuck's sake. How could I have taken so long to find the Plague of Crows? How could I have gone to bed with the woman? How could I not know? Whe
re was the gut instinct that I've been sitting here priding myself on?

  Notice the first signs of grey light in the sky. Dawn's coming, then the crows will be unleashed. How will the crows be unleashed?

  She's good. Sees it in my eyes straight away. The change. She stares for a moment, but she has nothing to say. Maybe thinks that I'll be the one to talk this time.

  She moves away for a moment then returns with the razor. Bizarrely, it's quite a nice feeling as she runs it over my head. She's careful not to cut the scalp, as she doesn't want too much bleeding. It has to be as smooth an operation as possible. The crows will do the killing, not her.

  When she's done, she runs her hand over the top of my head. Almost lingering. She was making love to me not so long ago. Jesus, not that I know how long ago that was. Lost all track of time.

  So convinced was I that it had all been part of some sort of Bosnian revenge tragedy, that it's still hard to get it out of my head. I still associate that moment with revenge. The moment when she broke off the lovemaking to taser me. It was revenge. Except it wasn't.

  'You spoke to the idiot,' she says.

  Standing slightly back, the razor switched off and at her side.

  I look at her. Anger going already. Had there even been anger?

  'You spoke to Michael?' she says.

  Michael. Clayton. Michael Clayton. Yes, of course I spoke to him. Michael Clayton. I spoke to Michael Clayton, didn't I?

  'Yes.'

  Can't nod, head strapped. But she hasn't gagged me again. Must want to chat while she slices my scalp off.

  'What put you on to him in the first place?'

  'Desperation.'

  She smiles. Laughs lightly almost.

  'Yet you didn't know I was the waitress working in Costa? Sloppy.'

  I hold her gaze for a moment. Have I been lying to myself all this time?

  'Maybe I knew,' I say. 'Some part of me knew.'

  She laughs harshly.