Douglas Lindsay - A Plague Of Crows

'Yes,' says Taylor. 'Gostkowski will do a good job.'

'She'd better,' says Connor. 'I'm going to ask her to play both sides.'

Holy crap, now we're talking.

Oh. He didn't mean that , did he?

'Sir?' says Taylor.

He's genuinely curious, while I'm sitting here with an image in my head of DI Gostkowski playing both sides. Need to get a grip.

'I'm not letting this investigation get away from me,' says Connor. 'I'm not happy about it. I want you two to stay on it. You'll need to be discreet and you'll need to keep out of Edinburgh's way. You've been working it for three months now, Chief Inspector, so hopefully you'll be a few steps ahead. Should be, at any rate.'

He pauses, looks from one of us to the other. Office politics. Holy shit. They all condemn me for the office affair, but shit, that's nothing compared to office politics. That's a fucking battleground, plagued by all sorts of evil pitfalls.

'You will report to me, and Edinburgh will not know you're involved. DI Gostkowski will liaise with you. It will be one way. She'll let you know what's happening with their side, but will not reciprocate, unless I gauge that we should. I very much doubt that she will be given anything like full access to the investigation, but she'll be on the inside and we'll have to wait and see what she can generate.'

'PC Grant?' I ask.

'Will not be in on any of it. She'll be liaising with the task force as intended.'

Taylor sits back. Thinking it through. This has potential to be ugly. There are power games going on, and we're getting sucked into it. That's what he's thinking. Is there a way out? How can he avoid this? It is tempered, of course, by the thought that he'll want to do it too. He really does hate Edinburgh getting brought in.

'OK,' he says. 'How do you want us to work?'

'You do your own thing,' says Connor. 'I'm not a detective, I'm leaving you to it. It's… it's rogue, going rogue. I don't like it, but I like that lot coming here much less. And like I said…'

He hesitates then looks at me.

'… be discreet.'

He nods in the direction of the door.

Taylor rises and I follow him out. Not sure that I've taken a breath in the last minute or so, Connor built up such an air of tension.

We get out his office, the air clears and we stop for a second to look at each other.

'Fucking rogue,' is all that Taylor says, shaking his head.

'You be Danny Glover, I'll be Mel Gibson?'

He gives me the look then heads for his office, his discreet and obedient sergeant in tow.

When I say office… Twenty minutes later we're sitting in Starbucks in Hamilton. Just got off our patch, come for morning coffee. The place is jumping. Why make yourself a cup of instant at home, when you can give Starbucks a few quid plus some other stupid amount of money to eat something you didn't know you wanted until you got in here? This is the coal face of the recession. People with nothing better to do than drink over-priced coffee.

As we were walking out of the station, the cavalry were arriving. I wondered if they'd all be dressed in black suits, wearing shades, and have toothpicks sticking out the corners of their mouths. But they were just a bunch of guys. And women. The alpha male wasn't obvious as they walked by. Perhaps they're an autonomous collective.

'I don't know how this ends well,' I say, to break the long silence. Taylor has been drinking coffee and thinking. He shakes his head. In agreement. 'They catch him and we don't, we're wasting our time,' I continue. 'None of us catch him, we're all fucked. We catch him… then what do we do? We take him in there, throw him to the wolves and say, Boom! In your face, you Edinburgh wankers …'

'There is no end game,' says Taylor. 'Connor's not thinking that far ahead. His nose is out of joint and he's doing the first thing he thought of to fight back. Not a lot else he could do.'

'He could have sucked it up and accepted his place.'

'No one sucks anything up any more, Sergeant.'

We both drink. Neither of us bought anything to eat. Another customer arrives, but they won't find anywhere to sit. Cold morning again, feel the draught as the door opens and closes.

'He's coming again,' says Taylor. 'He has to be. Why start all this shit off unless that's what he's doing? And he's confident he's not going to get caught at it. He knows he's not going to get caught. How does he know he's not going to get caught?'

He looks earnestly at me. I've just been thinking that my coffee could be warmer.

'I'm thinking.'

Rubs his chin. We both find ourselves looking over at a kid in a pram agitating to be given more chocolate, which the father inevitably hands over.

Have barely seen my own kids this year, which is shit. Can't think about that now, although that appears to be what I usually think when I think of my own kids. No time.

'Maybe we need to start looking at woods, the woods around here, further afield. Work out where he strikes next.'

'That's a lot of woods,' I say. 'An unworkable amount of woods. And we're assuming he does the same the next time.'

'Exactly,' says Taylor. 'He may have called himself the Plague of Crows, but maybe next time he's going to be the Plague of Chainsaws and tuck his victims away in a disused warehouse.'

I laugh, but we both know that's not going to happen.

'He's established an instantly identifiable corporate image,' I say. 'I don't think he's changing that.'

'Which means, if he's coming back, chances are he's doing the same thing again. Multiple killings in a wood. So how does he know he won't get caught?'

'He doesn't do it around here,' I say. 'Unless he's already done it.'

'Yep.' Quick, unnecessary glance at his watch. 'We've known about this less than twenty-four hours. Not impossible that it's happened in a wood in central Scotland, or anywhere else in Scotland, and the victims haven't been discovered yet. For all his careful planning, that is one thing he must have left to chance. How could he know that someone wouldn't be out walking? A hiker, someone walking the dog, whatever.'

'He could take care of them. Add them to the list. A more regular murder.'

'But he wouldn't know that they hadn't told someone where they were going. That's chance again. They don't come home, odds are someone goes looking for them… Shit, we've been over this before… He knew he was safe, and whatever it was he put in place the last time, he could have done it again.'

'One thing's different,' I say. 'The trees.'

'Fuck, aye. Decent thought, Sergeant, he's not going to have the same level of cover.'

'Which reduces the number of woods or forests he's going to be able to use.'

'Hmm…' he mutters. Hand drawn over the face, more coffee, another look around the joint. The whining kid is demanding something else. The dad immediately capitulates and hands it over. We ought to be able to arrest people for that kind of thing. Sure, they'd object at the time, but they'd thank us in the long run.

'We're looking for an evergreen forest,' says Taylor. 'You think that's it? A pine forest, something like that?'

'Do crows like pine?' I ask. He doesn't answer, but he isn't likely to. How the fuck do we know if crows like pine?

'All right,' he continues, 'since we've picked up the ball… We've got our pine forest. Where the fuck is it? There's not a lot of pine around here, but one of the things he's done in the last twenty-four hours is take it global. Why Scotland? He could be anywhere. Hell of a lot of pine in the world.'

'And if he was somewhere else, it wouldn't necessarily be pine. Could be any kind of forest. Could be in the middle of the fucking desert.'

Taylor nods, drains his coffee.

'We can't go everywhere with this. We need to keep it grounded. Small steps. We've got a wood or forest, we've got crows, and we've got crows' nests. He needs cover so he's likely to have to use an evergreen forest…'