No, really, I don't feel left out. Take a sip of tea. My mug has Arbroath FC written on the side, and I wonder why anyone would have an Arbroath FC mug.
'What are you looking for exactly?' she asks.
'I know this sounds absurdly far-fetched, but we need to know if there's any way we could narrow down his next kill site. You've seen the footage?'
She nods, making the appropriate expression of horror.
'We have to make some assumptions at this stage. So we assume he's doing the same again. But we also assume he's going to need cover to carry out his work. He's not going to be using a wooded area where the trees have shed.'
She's nodding. Thinking it through. Some people would already have laughed at him and told him not to be so fucking stupid. The notion is absurd. It's Scotland. There are trees all over the place. Not as many as there were a thousand years ago, but enough to make it needle-in-a-haystack territory.
'OK,' she says. 'We can lose the densely populated planted forests, as that won't suit his purposes. We can discount some of the deciduous woods, although I'm not sure you can dismiss them completely. Maybe not areas as close to suburbia as the one where the first murders were committed, but there are going to be woods in the middle of Perthshire, and further afield, where there's going to be the opportunity to carry out that kind of work. Around here even. Where it doesn't matter that the leaves have shed, because there are enough trees in the middle of nowhere to provide adequate protection.'
'This guy doesn't leave things to chance,' says Taylor. 'Every angle covered. Spare bit of ground in the country, someone's out walking their dog.'
Slight movement of the head. She doesn't completely agree. But we need to make some calls to narrow down the list. We need something.
'All right…'
'Do you have… is there some kind of reference work, easily referenced map, something like that, where we can look at it and say, right, it can be here or here or here? That's what we're getting at. If we did that, how many areas are we going to need to check out and how many are we likely to miss because we're looking at a map?'
She glances at him, then turns and takes a quick look at me. Making sure I'm still there. Or that I'm not stealing anything.
'Might as well start with Google Earth,' she says.
'What?' Taylor looks annoyed. 'I already looked at Google Earth. I was looking for…. I don't know, something that…'
'You were looking for something that showed all the wooded areas in Scotland, with an overview of the position of those woods in relation to urbanised areas?'
'Yes.'
'Well, let's look at Google Earth. To make you feel better, I'll do it with you, tell you what kinds of trees you're looking at and give you my opinion on whether or not any particular wood is a plausible place for your chap. Happy?'
Taylor makes a throwaway gesture. It is, despite himself, exactly what he was looking for.
'Will you scream if I say you're looking for a needle in a haystack?' she says.
He doesn't scream, but doesn't reply. Takes a step away from the window, goes and looks at an ordnance survey map on the wall.
'That's south Devon,' she says. 'Won't help you.'
He shakes his head, glances round at me.
'How many men have you got?' she asks. 'Are you going to be able to put officers out in every town and every area? How long are you going to be able to do that? If this guy is smart, he's probably planned for you to be looking out for him.'
'There are two of us,' said Taylor.
She stares at him, and then back at me. Back to Taylor. There's a beautiful silence in the air. With the hills in the background it's taking me back to the summer. A long quiet summer without any of this shit.
'There are two of you on the whole investigation?' she says. 'You're kidding.'
'There are two of us on this part,' says Taylor. Not giving her any more, despite the look she gives him. 'Look, this is shit. It's shit that the guy's done what he's done, it's shit… whatever, it's all shit. We just need your help to try and get ahead of the game. I want to walk out of here with a list. That's all. An ordered list. If the list has a hundred thousand individual small areas of woodland on it I don't care, as long as there's a top and a bottom, a note of what kinds of trees they are, a most likely and a not really much of a chance, a list that we can check out. If there are crows' nests and the wood is in any way secluded, it stays on the list. This guy has given us nothing. We need to get lucky, and all we're trying to do is make our own. Can you help?'
It's obvious she likes the speech. She nods.
'Well, Chief Inspector, it's not like I've nothing else to be doing today, but what the hell. Might as well give it a go. Let's get to work. You can use separate computers, split up the country, and I'll move between the two of you letting you know what I think.'
She moves around her desk and logs onto a monitor that is yet to be activated today.
'We've only got an hour,' says Taylor. 'Don't want to lose too much daylight.'
'Dream on, sunshine,' she says, smiling and shaking her head.
*
Four-and-a-half hours later we're sitting in the car. We have a long list, hastily arranged into order of likelihood. Sadly the top of the list starts with pretty unlikely and then gets progressively more far-fetched.
'We starting around here since we're in the area?' I ask.
He shakes his head. We've been concentrating on the absurd task we've set ourselves, but I know he'll have been thinking ahead. Mentally, I realise that I've been playing the part of the subordinate, waiting to be instructed on what to do next. I'll catch up eventually.
'No,' he says. 'We're going back home, split up, start looking at potential areas as close to the previous. Really, if it turns out the next killings are in Dundee or Inverness or Perth then we are, as Corporal Hicks says in
Start the car, head off, quickly onto the A95 back towards Glasgow. Look up the hill to my nemesis of a golf course.
'We're just wasting our time,' I say after a while, as the pale green countryside passes by. Sudden melancholy, feeling a little bit lost. Put on a hopeless mission, driving around being told what to do. A cold couple of hours ahead, checking on small clumps of trees. And for what? A man cementing chairs into the floor?
'If he never kills again, we're wasting our time,' says Taylor. 'If he kills again, but this time he's gone to Sweden or Normandy or somewhere, then we're wasting our time. But if he picks somewhere that happens to be on that list… even if we don't catch him, it doesn't matter. It means we're on the right track, and we'll have more to work with… next time. So, no…'
Feeling tired after a sleepless night. Would love to fall asleep, but then, I'm driving, so that would be bad. Nevertheless, there isn't any more talking to be done. There really hasn't been any talking to do since early August. It's all been about waiting, and now this rather desperate attempt to force the pace of the investigation.
Get back to the station at 2:43pm. Time to grab a sandwich, then take about 0.005 % of the list and get going.
13
6.33pm. Trudge back into the office, stop in the middle of it all. No sign of the hired hands from out of town. Everything seems to be normal, the usual kind of shit and general level of activity for this time of day, midweek. Morrow looks up from his desk and nods. I nod back. Presumably, after one day on the job at all-out speed, he's
