Check my phone. No messages. 7:17. Ought to be getting back to work. Wonder how it went with Taylor explaining to Connor that we set out on a two-man mission to search every wood in Scotland.
Hopefully he lied. That's what I would have done.
14
Already dark.
The policeman, the journalist the social worker; the tailor, the baker, the candlestick maker.
The lucky three.
Police Constable Morgan. Lives on the outskirts of Dundee, works in Perth. Single, no kids. Has been friends with his killer online for nearly a year, although all this time has known the Plague of Crows as a twenty-seven- year-old woman named Dulcie.
Linette Grey. Lives in Bankfoot, works on the front line of social services in Perth. Single, no kids. Spends her days visiting families who hurt each other. Three-year-olds still in nappies who are never fed or changed, six- year-old children given alcohol and cigarettes and not much else, drug addicts, wife-beaters, husband abusers, child abusers. She deals with the police often; a couple of times it has been Constable Morgan. But just a couple, which isn't many, given the number of years she's been doing the job. The police, however, when it comes to looking for a connection between the victims, are at least going to be able to find one, and it will lead them off in entirely the wrong direction.
Malcolm Morrison. Lives in the centre of Perth in a modern, chic apartment. Small, but perfect for impressing women. Single, no kids. Works for the Dundee Courier amp; Advertiser. Fancies himself for a job on one of the big London tabloids, but there is plenty of time. For the moment he's compiling an interesting body of work. Some people might consider that they'd suffered by his hands along the way, but they could live with it. Or not. Has been friends with his killer online for nearly a year, although all this time has known the Plague of Crows as a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Dulcie.
Dulcie has a lot of friends. Dulcie knows how to cover her tracks.
Linette Grey awakens to find herself in a small clearing in the middle of a wood. She feels cold. It takes her some time to sort out all the sensations in her head. The cold. The fact that she can't move any part of her body. The low hills above the tree line. The two men strapped to chairs less than a couple of yards away. The fact that she recognises one of them but can't remember who it is. The fact that the one who isn't strapped down, the other person in the clearing doing something to the head of one of the men, she doesn't recognise at all. The fact that when she realises what's happening, and she tries to scream, no sound comes out.
From somewhere overhead comes the loud squawk of a crow. She can't compute that either. She tries to scream again.
They are in a small wood, about a mile from the A85 between Perth and Crieff. Even if she had been able to scream, no one would have heard, but the Plague of Crows doesn't like to take chances.
15
Worked until just after eleven, reviewing everything we have on the case, looking over all the potential murder sites trying to make some sort of informed guess about where we should check next, then home to a late supper and crawling into bed — on my own — about one. Started thinking about Gostkowski late in the evening and wondered if we might bump into each other at the cigarette hole, but it didn't happen.
Home alone, late, two nights in a row. Not about to end either, is it? We're no nearer catching this bloke or having even the faintest idea who it is. Long, late nights stretching immeasurably into the future. Jesus.
Slept all right, got to the station just before eight. Still have that feeling that I'm last to arrive. Feel everyone looking at me, like
I stop, look around. I'm imagining it. Most of our lot aren't involved in the war, and they don't give a shit that I wasn't at my desk by 6 a.m. They're like soldiers, trained and armed to the teeth, dispatched into the war zone, and then told,
Since the Leander business I've got it in my head that they're all wary of me, all looking at me. I'm thinking it's about me. The disease of conceit, as Bob says. Despite having been here for more years than I want to remember, I'm just not one of them. They don't give a shit about me, I don't give a shit about them.
Straight to Taylor's office. No point in even going to my desk. Ramsay at the front desk has been instructed not to send anything new my way. The endless piles of crap that are sitting there and have been waiting for weeks or months, can continue to sit and wait.
Shit day outside, low cloud, miserable. It's not been light for long, and it's one of those days when it'll never be anything other than gloomy as all fuck. The grey light of dawn will merge horribly into the grey light of morning and afternoon.
'Morning.'
Taylor glances up from a map and grunts.
'Made it in, then,' he says.
I'll ignore that.
'What's the plan?'
He waves a hand which I take to mean that he wants the door closed, then I pull up a seat across the desk.
'You go your way and I go mine?' I say.
He looks up. 'You're not going to start singing are you?'
He doesn't seem particularly chipper.
'Not get much sleep?' I ask.
He looks up again, the angry frown still on his face, then a moment of self-realisation kicks in and he shakes his head.
'No,' he says. 'Not much.'
He gets wrapped up in this shit. When he's given a job — I mean, a good job, an interesting job, one where peoples' lives are at stake — he throws himself into it. I'm still doing it because it's what I do, in the way that I breathe and eat and go to the bathroom. There's no option. Taylor has a social conscience, which frankly I find absurd. Most of the fucking public don't deserve to be watched over.
'Thought of anything else we could be doing?' he asks.
'What?'
'That'll be a no then.'
'You've been on this for three months,' I say.
'It changed two days ago,' he replies. 'And all we've thought of in those two days is this wild goose chase. Jesus.'
He shakes his head, sits back. Looks across the desk. I get the feeling that it's the first time he's looked away from one of these maps in about fourteen hours. At least he's not wearing the same shirt he was wearing when I saw him last night, so he must have been home for a little while.
'You've been on this for three months,' I say again. 'The only thing that's changed is that we're pretty sure he's going to repeat. Apart from getting ahead of the game, what else can we do? We could try contacting every police officer, journalist and social services bod in Scotland to make sure they're not currently getting their brains eaten out by a bunch of ravenous birds, but holy fuck, you know we can't. Even if we weren't working under these preposterous circumstances.'
Hands across his face. The usual gesture. However much sleep he got, it wasn't enough.
'We need to spend at least one more day doing what we did yesterday,' I say. 'Get a feel for the places, the kind of area he might be inclined to use. You must be getting that already. Sure there are hundreds of wooded
