Douglas Lindsay - A Plague Of Crows

No, I don't want to get involved with DI Gostkowski. And given the events that led her to be posted here in the first place, it's probably a good idea to leave well alone.

She's still talking.

With Sergeant Harrison being as interested in women as I am, that pretty much leaves Constable Corrigan and Sergeant Jones. Don't know either of them particularly well. They don't usually get dragged into this kind of shit, but it's obviously all hands to the deck. Corrigan looks like she's barely out of school. Really not a great idea for me to be hitting on girls that are damned near twenty-five years younger than me anymore.

Which leaves Sgt Jones. Bobbed blonde hair. Bit of a, I don't know, thirtysomething policewoman cut. And she's young enough amongst our lot to still be pretty fit. Slim. Not bad looking. I don't think I'd be over-snagging. Just need to overcome the fact that she'll know all about me and will more than likely not want anything to do with me.

DI Gostkowski is still talking. I like to think I've heard enough to make a judgement in the case, thereby excusing myself from listening.

Wonder what Jones is doing after work.

'What d'you think?'

Taylor and I are sitting in the pub. Our usual. Not the Whale, where the rest of the gang are likely to be, if they're at the pub at all. The younger police officer tends to spend less time in the pub and more time at the gym. Fuck's sake. Of course, I'm banned from the Whale, so it's not as though it's an option. Shouldn't have gone there in the first place.

'For the moment, you're fucked,' I say.

First vodka and tonic in a long time. Since the Leander thing. God it feels good. Crisp and cold and fresh, and perfect on a warm summer's day. There's something to be said for living on the side of a mountain being a Buddhist monk, but not as much as there is to be said for a crisp, cold vodka tonic.

'You're forgetting you're back on the team, Sergeant. You mean, we're fucked, not you're fucked.'

'I stand corrected, Sir,' I say, acknowledging him with a small movement of the glass.

Taylor looks pissed off, takes another sip from his pint, glances around the bar. There's football on the TV. Never seems right in early August. For me the football season doesn't really get going properly until it's pishing down, freezing cold, and the Thistle are playing against Cowdenbeath in a mudpit.

'Care to elaborate?' he says. 'I didn't bring you off the substitutes bench to state the bloody obvious.'

OK. Still getting back into the groove.

'Everything about this says planning. Planning to the absolute n thdetail. A perfectly executed crime. This is a scary fucking guy. None of your drunk aggressive, not even your psycho, can't-keep-his-knife-to-himself type. This is cold and devious. This is… you know, it's the equivalent of the German death camps against the Rwandan thing. Rwanda, a bunch of guys with machetes going about their business, making no attempt to cover up what they did. It was brutal, nasty, vicious. There was no artifice. The Germans. They burnt bodies, they dug deep graves, they used camps and then tore them down when the Russians closed in. They had a system. They systematically murdered. And that's what this guy is doing. He has a system. He's going to do the same thing again. We have no idea when that'll be, but he knows exactly when. Exactly.'

Taylor is looking at me while I talk. Face expressionless. I know it's why I'm here. To say what he already knows.

'And worse than that,' I continue, 'he'll already know who he's going to kill, and they won't have any idea. Maybe he's already taken them.'

'We should be looking for missing persons,' says Taylor. 'And not the usual kind, the seventeen-year-olds, the ones who'll have gone out on the piss and ended up on the bus to Aberdeen or in the wrong person's bed.'

'If he really didn't know the three victims and he selected them at random, then we're about to find out if he just selected any old person or whether he has a gripe against these professions. Did he choose social worker, policeman and journalist for a reason, or might it just as likely have been butcher, baker, candlestick maker?'

'We need to get ahead of the game,' says Taylor.

'We always do.'

'So we start by establishing if any police officers have gone missing in the last day or two, because the way he carried out that first murder, he must have grabbed the victims some time before they died. There had to be a gap.'

'Were any of them reported missing?'

Taylor stares at me for a second than shakes his head, drops his eyes.

'He had that covered as well. None of them were missed.'

'Why?'

'A combination of things, and it all points to the fact that this was immaculately planned. Either they lived alone, or the ones who didn't had time off work previously planned. They had arranged to go away. It was… it was like he was inside their lives, knew what they were doing, knew that he could secret them away and nobody would notice. How do we counteract that?'

'He was doing it online? Facebook, that kind of shit?'

He stares at me again. 'You weren't paying attention at the briefing, were you?'

Look a bit sheepish.

'Fuck, Sergeant, head in the game. The next time you're in the same room as a bunch of women, stop trying to work out which one you want to sleep with.'

Hide behind my drink. No one likes to get read like a damned book.

'We're checking it out, but we've found nothing so far.'

'So, realistically, we're not going to know if there are any officers missing?' I ask, to move the conversation on from Facebook.

'No.'

'What do we do about that, then?'

He takes a long drink. Drags his hand across his face.

'If it was just the one station, if we knew it was on our patch, we could introduce a system… I don't know, a checking-in system, a buddy system… But shit, we can't city-wide. And what do we know? Maybe it's country-wide. Maybe the next one'll be in the south of England. Or in France. This level of planning, how in the name of God are we supposed to know?'

V amp;t to my lips. Getting near the end, and it's losing a little of its crispness. Clearly I'm going to need another one.

'He knows,' I say.

Taylor drains his pint and places it on the table. He looks into it as the last of the froth hugs the side of the glass and slides down.

*

Second night back at home. Already changed the sheets, did a bit of a tidy. Glad I did it yesterday, as I've already reverted to where I was four months ago. The weeks of clean living and communing with the Gods of the Scottish highlands have gone. I woke up yesterday morning at the foot of a mountain. This evening it feels like a hundred years ago.

Brought a prostitute home with me. I know. Filthy. Picked her up in town. Had to drive on the back of four v amp;ts to go and find her. No hookers on the streets of Cambuslang and Rutherglen anymore.

She wanted to do it in the car. I wanted her to come back to my place. She refused, which is quite right of course. These people are mental if they go home with anyone. Being a bit pissed, I showed her my badge. She still refused, but at least began to enter into negotiations. I paid through the nose in the end. She wouldn't come until I'd gone to a cash point and got several hundred. It's just sweetie money to me at the moment, because I've got four months wages in there that I've hardly spent.

Back to my place. I made her shower first. Didn't ask how many she'd scored earlier in the evening, didn't want to know. I was gallant enough to shower too. After all that, it was worth it. Every penny. Great tongue on her, absolutely beautiful body, she had the decency to try to earn her money and got stuck into it. Great fun.