A Plague Of Crows

People are such lemmings. I believe what we need is for the Justice Minister to introduce a bird protection, shoot-to-kill policy, wherein all police officers are armed and permitted to instantly gun down anyone caught shooting an unarmed bird.

Now, don't go thinking I'm a Daily Mail-reading right-wing wanker. I firmly believe there should be a law in place permitting the police to shoot anyone caught buying the Daily Mail. Call it natural selection.

Some part of me knows it's wrong to shoot someone just because of their newspaper choice.

Edinburgh has so far turned up the same level of information as Glasgow, except for this guy I'm meeting now in a café at Leith docks. Not far from Britannia. Said he couldn't meet me at his work place as it's not suitable. Works in a lab. This bloke is from the enthusiastic amateur cadre. I buy coffee. He has some shit with mocha in the title, I have an espresso because I don't want to drink too much and I don't want to be too long about it.

He has the look about him. You know, the look. The one that fires warning shots. If you try to put your finger on what it is about them that makes you think, ah, wait a minute, this might be what we're looking for, you can't do it. But there's something. Almost as if you can spot the imbalance.

He plays with his coffee as he tells me he's been studying crows as a hobby ever since he saw The Omen.

'Wasn't that a raven?' I say.

'I study all the corvids,' he says. 'But crows are my favourite. Fascinating birds. Much misunderstood.'

'Go on,' I say.

He looks around him as if gathering inspiration from the absurdly uniform surroundings of a café that could be any café in any town or city in the western world.

'Down through history people have misunderstood them,' he begins. 'They treat them as carrion, implicitly unpleasant. Evil even. The raven is often seen as a harbinger of ill times, and the crow is sucked along in its wake. And you know, the reason for it is simple. Extremely simple. They're black. All black. That's all it is.'

'Hooded crows aren't all black,' I say to stop him in his tracks. His intensity is annoying, although I ought to be letting him talk as he's the kind of bloke I'm looking for. An over-enthusiastic nutter.

'Yes, there are variations, Sergeant,' he says. 'In general, the genus corvus are black, and throughout history they have been discriminated against. It's avian racism.'

Holy Jesus fuck. I'd say those words to Taylor if he was here. People get wound up about the stupidest shit.

'You hear that people have started killing crows?' I say.

'Outrageous. I hope the police are going to clamp down on this with extreme prejudice.'

'Of course,' I say, ignoring the stupidity of anyone using the phrase extreme prejudice.

'Crows don't eat brains,' he says. 'Not unless, seriously, not unless someone taught them how to do it.'

'Most people I've spoken to don't agree.'

He smarts and shakes his head.

'That makes me very cross,' he says. He leans forward on his elbows. 'Very cross. If these crows really are eating human brains — and I very much doubt that they are — then…'

'We've found crows at the scene with human brain remains in their gullet.'

'Have you?'

'Yes.' Saying a bit too much there, but it just slipped out.

'Well, then, in that case it's definite. Someone is training those poor birds to do this. They would not automatically attack a human in this way.'

I suppose this is the kind of thing that I've come out looking for, but when presented with it, it's so opposed to everything else I've been told, and it sounds so absurd, this bloke sounds so absurd, I just stare at him. Waiting for the moment when he implicates his arch nemesis in the enthusiastic amateur bird world.

He never does.

Make it back to Glasgow not long before seven. Don't bother checking in with Taylor, assuming he's at his desk, and head straight for the coffee shop. Seem to be spending a lot of time drinking coffee, but from the amount of the bloody places that are now open, and the amount of people who are always in them, I'm not alone. The world of the west is now conducted in Starbucks.

Not sure that I want anything, so I buy a bottle of water — water, for fuck's sake, am in need of something much stronger — and wait at a table for her. She arrives with precision timing.

'Get you anything?' she asks, heading to the counter and barely stopping at the table.

'Large cappuccino, please,' I say for some reason, then immediately worry that it makes me look cheap, because I never bought it myself.

Better just not to think.

Elbows on table, stare straight ahead. People come and go. This place used to shut at six, then seven; now it's open until eight-thirty. It'll be twenty-four hours soon enough, then they'll invent some kind of weird time thing, so that there can be more than twenty-four hours in the day. They say that people are spending less money on alcohol, which is something. You're a lot less likely to chib some other bastard after a skinny latte, although people do talk just as much pish in here as they do in the pub.

'What are you thinking?'

She sits down opposite, placing my coffee in front of me.

Fuck's sake. 'I was thinking that I might have appeared cheap because obviously I could have got myself a coffee, but I genuinely didn't feel like one when I came in, and then you asked, so now I feel a bit bad about it, and I was wondering if I should offer you money, but then I thought, maybe that might offend you a bit since you'd offered, and maybe I ought to just let you buy it.'

She kind of smiles and shakes her head.

'Usually men just say 'nothing'.'

Yep, ain't that the truth? But start telling a woman what you're thinking and the next thing you know she's lying naked in bed. But don't keep telling her what you're thinking or she'll come to see you as marriage material, and that never ends well.

Obviously I speak for myself there. I knew someone once who was happily married for a long time.

'Thanks for the coffee.'

Now I naturally look introverted and slightly awkward, as if I've said too much, which is what I would do anyway, but just serves to make her think that I'm slightly more complex than your average bloke, but in a good way.

She's thinking, he knows when to talk and he knows when to shut up… more than likely he's also a very considerate lover.

'How d'you get on this afternoon?' she asks.

'Continued the bird quest,' I say. 'Found one guy who disagreed with everyone else and insisted that some evil genius must be training the crows.'

'Who're you going to go with?' she asks. 'The majority, or the one? Much more interesting sometimes to go for the one, don't you think?'

'Yes,' I say. Find myself smiling. 'Unfortunately he had the credibility of a shouty man on a radio phone-in. Still, it all helps. How about you? They let you in on any inside information?'

'Quite the reverse,' she says. 'Montgomery told Connor they didn't need me anymore. Or PC Grant.'

'Ah.'

'Connor's pissed off, but it's not entirely unexpected. They got out of me what they could, they didn't tell me anything, and then they got rid of me. Should have seen it coming. Well, of course, I did see it coming.'

Nothing to say to that. I hadn't seen it coming, but then I hadn't been thinking about it. In fact I'd rather enjoyed the whole clandestine thing.

'What now?'

'I get to work with you guys,' she says.

For some stupid reason that information goes straight to my groin.

'Just for a couple of weeks, see how it goes. Well, I'll be working for the DCI, doing whatever he thinks it's