20
Only kept in touch with one guy after Bosnia. A Canadian journalist. Eddie. By kept in touch, I mean that we saw each other one time maybe, and he'd leave me a message on the phone or something like that when he had a piece from some distant war-torn shit hole in one of the British papers. We'd just about hung on to each other by the time e-mail really got started, so that kept us going for a while. Always said that he'd end up living in London — as if that was something to look forward to — but he never made it.
He used to say that he was comforted by the thought of suicide, that the possibility of it cheered him up. The idea that he could just walk away, turn his back on the memories and the visions and the demons, turn his back on the horrors that played out in his head when he closed his eyes. Then, having been dragged from the depths by the thought of suicide, he no longer needed to do it. And he'd say that it was a vicious circle he needed to break. One way or the other.
He finally broke it. One night in a hotel in Dubai. He'd gone there for a break from Afghanistan some time in late 2002. Dubai killed him off, sitting alone in the bath with a razor blade, listening to Turin Brakes'
I found out some time during the summer of 2004.
*
Wake up at 4.37am. Sweating, like I've left the heating on full, but the room is cold as I sit up out of the sheets. Rest my head back against the wall, stare into the orange light of a room with the curtains open, illuminated by the streetlights. A car drives past, and then there's silence.
Listen to see if a noise in the house woke me up. A policeman's expectation that around every corner a guy in a mask is waiting to bean you over the napper with a crowbar. Nothing. The dead of night, but I'm wide awake now.
4:38. The chances of getting back to sleep before I need to get up for work are slim. Can feel it already. Brain in overdrive.
The forest. The crows with human remains in their stomach. That's what woke me up. Then I remember my brain freeze in the woods the previous morning, something that seems a long time ago, and suddenly a warm evening in a Bosnian forest is back in my head and there's nothing I can do about it.
Fuck it. Fuck all that shit. I'm not lying here thinking about it, and if I stay in bed that's all I'll be able to think about.
Instant decision, even more awake than I was two minutes ago. Swing my legs out the bed and stand up into the cold night. Map out the next two hours: shower, coffee, toast, get into the station, start going over the whole thing again and this time find something I've not been looking for.
*
Taylor sits at Morrow's desk, what with Morrow not being in yet, and looks at me suspiciously. Checks his watch.
'What time'd you get in?' he asks.
'5.30.'
'Couldn't sleep?' he says. It's not like he's never been in at 5.30. Nod. He drags his hand across his face and leans back, as if just the thought of my sleeplessness affects him.
'Find anything new?'
Pause, long sigh, in the end don't even bother answering. Nothing found, other than a few random thoughts.
'I did wonder if we should apply the same methodology to each aspect of the case as we have to the woods, and then see if we get a convergence.'
He thinks about this for a second then indicates for me to go on.
'We only needed to speak to one person about the woods. That one person talked us through all the woods we need to look at. So, if we take other aspects of the case, we know there are crows. Now we spoke to a couple of guys about crows in the summer. Just a couple. Let's throw the net wide and talk to everyone we can find who might have some knowledge. Maybe we'll even stumble across the actual guy, given that there seems to be an innate understanding of how crows are going to act, or react. We already chased down every angle on the possible provenance of the bone-cutting tool, so let's revisit that and see if anything ties in with the woods and the crows. Same with the Ford Transit. It all seems so disparate, so unlikely that they could be drawn together, so — you know, in the case of the woods — so random, that it might be highly improbable. But let's start getting that together, and then if the Inspector brings us anything from the other lot, we feed that in too, and maybe we get a break.'
Pause. He's thinking about it. I've been thinking too. Need to think. Try to keep the rest of the shit out of my head.
'Pretty fucking lucky break,' I admit, 'but you never know.'
He's been looking at me, and now he's looking at the desk, computing it all. Let's face it, all I've suggested is
'And you've got to ask for more people,' I say. He glances up. 'If this was a regular case, a few definite leads, a specific area of inquiry, the two of us might be able to make some headway. But this… a thousand different strands, a thousand people to see or places to visit. It's nuts. In one way we were onto something with the woods. We had that place on our list, but it's so damned far-fetched, so many to choose from, we were never going to just stumble across it at the same time. At the very least, we need someone else doing the woods.'
He's thinking about it, contemplating taking it to Connor and how that will go.
'We don't know the bloke's time scale, whether this is an escalation, whether he'll wait another three months, whether he just does it when he's ready… but the leaves are gone until April or May. Any survey of possible woods that he could use will be extant until late spring. I say four guys on the job for a few days. If he's got any favours to call in with stations further afield, then go for it. Otherwise, get a team on to it. Split the country up, tell them to get going. We can concentrate on the other shit.'
He claps his hand down on the desk before I can get into my full dogs-of-war, up and at 'em speech, and stands up.
'You're right. If he wants us to make some headway, he's going to have to staff it properly. I'll ask for eight guys and hope we get four.' Glances at his watch. 'Right, you get us a list of bird experts. I'll put a submission together for Connor, and before we head out today you can get everything together on the cutting saw that we dug up last time.'
'Yep,' I say, and immediately turn back to the screen. Have already started work on the bird experts thing, and so I get back down to it, nine names already on my list. Taylor marches off to put together his submission for Connor. Connor likes submissions. Makes him feel like a government minister. Hates people to approach him with an idea that's not been thoroughly thought out, laid down under a variety of headings and fully costed.
You'd think all that FOI shit would have put him off having his people write ideas down — because let's face, there are a lot of people around here thinking all kinds of shit that would have the media pishing excitable anti- police diatribes all over the TV and newspapers if they ever found out it had been put in writing — but he's obviously not yet been burned. It'll happen one day.
9:15am. Left Taylor back at the station fighting his corner. He managed to finagle a few more staff out of Connor, and was gathering them together to give them their brief. Now I'm sitting in a small office at the University of Glasgow. Some part of me is attracted to the notion that we are likely to stumble across the killer completely by accident. The man is getting crows to apply the finishing touches to his sick death rite, and I have it in my head — in a way that I didn't in the summer — that he knows crows in some way. Not that he has a power over crows like someone might have in a superhero movie or some shit like that, but that he has some affinity with them, knows how to manipulate them, how to get them to do something.
The man sitting across from me, Professor Tolbet of the Zoology Department, is putting me right on that one.
