A Plague Of Crows

'Quality,' is all I find myself saying, like I'm a football pundit talking about… fuck I don't know, just not anything that ever happens in Scottish football, that's for sure.

I look back at the picture, which is now upside down. Having my attention, Taylor turns the iPad round and flicks it onto another frame. It's a close-up of one of the victims. The photograph has been taken from a slightly elevated angle, looking into his face from the front and just a little above.

The face is dirty with congealed blood. The eyes are missing. The top of the brain is a bloody mess, but there appears to be a lot of it missing too. Weirdly, and this really is fucking weird, the photograph isn't grotesque. Not to me, at this moment. It looks like a damned good special effects job.

I take a slurp of coffee, start wondering if they have anything decent to eat here. He goes to flick over to the next picture, and this time I push the technology away from me.

'Don't show me anymore.'

It's the woods. I don't want to see the woods.

What's the matter, Numbnuts? Traumatised by Winnie the Pooh when you were a kid?

He looks at me, then turns back to the iPad. Another glance at a picture or two, then he turns it off and slips it back into his bag.

I have to ask.

'What happened to the brains?' The words sound empty. I take some more coffee.

'Birds ate them. Crows.'

He glances out the window as he says it, as though he can't look me in the eye while saying something that bizarre. Grotesque. Or maybe he's looking to see if there are any crows outside. I don't follow his gaze. There are usually crows. There are always crows.

'The guy controlled the crows?' I say. This has got a bit of life back into me. This is too weird to be real. 'That's like some sort of Steed and, what's her name, Emma Peel, kind of shit.'

'No, don't think so,' says Taylor. 'It's not the Avengers. He tied the victims up, stuck them out there in the wood, removed the scalp in situ, and then left them to it. Exposed brain. Almost an experiment to see how they'd go. The most obvious way would have been that they'd've bled to death. But as I said, he'd done a good job, made sure that wouldn't happen.'

'Why didn't they do something? Topple the chairs over, crawl through the wood. Something…'

'He cemented them into place.'

'Fuck.'

'Cemented them into place and left them there. I suppose he took the chance that they could be found and rescued, but as it was, they were found by birds. Glistening live brains proved to be too much of an attraction.'

'But they wouldn't feel the brain getting eaten, right?'

'Probably not. They were facing each other. They would have been able to watch as it happened to the other two, and they'd know it was happening to them. Who knows what part of the body went first.'

'Well, they could watch if their eyes didn't go first. I presume that was the crows too.'

Taylor nods. I hold his gaze for a moment and then look down at my coffee. Suddenly don't feel so much like drinking. I'd already given up on going back to the fresh air and the solitude of the side of a Scottish mountain, but now that reality strikes firmly home. Back on the job, and at a hundred miles an hour.

'So I'm cleared by Sutcliffe,' I say.

He shakes his head.

'No. You need to go back and see her first thing tomorrow morning.'

'What?'

'And you need to talk to her. I don't care what you say, just be… normal.'

I continue to stare across the table. This is bullying, right? This is new millennium Britain, and he's bullying me into coming back to work when I'm not ready. I could sue him. Right now. I could make a phone call and have a lawyer wedged a foot-and-a-half up Taylor's arsehole before he leaves the café.

'Whatever,' is all I can manage.

*

We don't talk for a while sitting on the train on the way back up to Glasgow. My tent is still up and waiting for me at the bottom of Ben Vorlich, in the lee of some trees. Some part of me still thinks I'll be going back there, but the further the train gets from Helensburgh, the closer we get to Glasgow and on our way to Cambuslang, the more I know that I won't be going back.

Not sure what happens to tents that are just left lying. Maybe someone will report me missing and there'll be hundreds of people searching for me for months. It'll be on the news, and I'll be watching it, thinking, miserable fucker, you deserve to be lost.

I should probably call someone about the tent.

The warm afternoon passes by. At all the stations there are women in summer clothes.

'So you've been hill walking?' says Taylor after a while.

'Aye.'

I answer without looking round. Watching the world go by, like a kid on his way home with his dad. Black Crow Blues has started playing in my head.

'Where were you staying?'

'In a tent.'

'You've been living in a tent for four months?'

'Aye.'

'Jesus. Thought you'd smell worse.'

'Had a shower today at the gym.'

'What've you been eating?'

'Rabbits and shit.'

'You've been catching rabbits?'

Look round at last. Shrug.

'You've been catching rabbits?' he says again.

'Aye.'

'Eating them raw, cooking them?'

'Cooking them.'

'Jesus, Hutton.'

He shakes his head and looks out the window.

'What does rabbit taste like?' he asks eventually.

'Don't know. Rabbit.'

'Thought it was supposed to taste like chicken.'

'Doesn't taste like chicken.'

He glances at me again, and then we both look out of the window as the warm summer's day passes by. All we can see are the banks of the railway line.

'Are you sure they were rabbits?' he says.

3

I have three MP3s on the go. One for studio Bob, one for live Bob, one for bootleg and miscellaneous Bob. (Bootleg and miscellaneous Bob is naturally largely live too, although it does include some of Bob's songs performed by other artists. I know, I wasn't sure about that either. It felt like I was debasing the MP3, or that I should have a completely separate fourth MP3 to accommodate them. But really, it's just versions where the artist has done a solid stand up job, like Tim O'Brien's Farewell Angelina or George's I Don't Want To Do It. Don't go thinking I've got that woman singing Feel My Love or any shit like that.) I had no way to charge them when I was out on the hills other than when I