came up to town every week for my psych, gym and dinner afternoons. I'd get them charged while I was there, then listen to them at will over the next few days, then start to ration myself as it got closer to the town trip and the charge started to run low. I bought one of those Ray Mears books, but there was nothing about how to charge your MP3 whilst living wild.
I tried building a shelter one day, thought that would be a natural extension of what I was doing. Do away with the tent. Had even begun to imagine that I might be there, trying to see myself through the winter out in the wilds, even though the winter was some way off. Anyway, my shelter was shit. I slept under it a couple of nights, but that was only because it wasn't raining and the wind wasn't blowing. As soon as some weather happened I was back in the tent.
Suppose I could have stuck at it, but I was too busy catching rabbits.
It's 7.30 in the morning, Taylor and I are heading up to the woods to check out the site where the bodies were found. It's been closed off to the pubic for three days, will remain so for quite some time. Eventually they'll have to let it go — for no other reason than we won't have the manpower available to keep people away from it — and then the tourists will arrive, the great ghoul collective who like to visit murder sites. Weird bastards the lot of them. I mean, I get stopping to stare at something as you drive by or if you just happen to be walking down the same street on which someone got gunned down. But going out of your way, and in some cases a long way out your way, to check out where someone got stiffed…
It's a short drive. He needs me to speak to Sutcliffe again before I get authority to come back to work, but she's not free until ten. He can't wait. I'm just an observer for the moment. If we come across any other crime while we're out there, I'm not allowed to produce my I.D. and nick some bastard.
Bob's playing on the CD. Another Side Of.
I know Taylor doesn't like it either, but he doesn't believe in skipping tracks.
Had a quick look through the folder, got an outline of the case. Three victims. One police officer, Constable Goodwin from Royston. 33 years old, divorced, no family. The journalist, a staffer on the business pages of the Herald, Morris Tucker, 29, degree in business from Stirling University, no kids, one girlfriend. Due to get engaged next year, she said. I've been married three times without being engaged once. If you're going to do it you might as well just get on with it. These two, they were engaged to be engaged. That's just spinning it out for the sake of attention and presents. Well, if the lassie got any pre-engagement presents, she might as well give 'em back. The third was a social worker from the centre of the city. Lived in a small flat not far from Bridgeton. Nothing noticeably to connect him to the other two, just as they weren't connected to each other. Angus Sparing, 42. Wife and kids. Three of the little bastards. Given how shittily social workers get paid, it might not make that much difference to the family household him not bringing any money in.
That's me not considering the effect of the father and husband being gone. No empathy. That's one of my issues, apparently.
'You know Bob's playing the SECC in a couple of days?' says Taylor, casually.
'What the fuck?'
He doesn't say anything else. He's driving. Pretending to concentrate. Haven't seen Bob in two years.
'How come nobody told me?'
That's kind of a stupid question, which Taylor's only too happy to answer.
'You've been living on the side of a mountain shagging sheep,' he says.
'You get me a ticket?'
'Yes.'
'Seriously? You got me a ticket?'
'Well, I got two tickets. To be honest, if I'd found some woman to ask in the last month I would have asked her, but we're now only two days away and the ticket's still free, so the chances are it's yours. So, it's slightly disingenuous to say that I got you a ticket, but you can have it if you like.'
I nod. Good man. He was never likely to ask a woman. I mean, really, you hit it off with some new bit of skirt at our age, the last thing you want to do is scare them away by offering to take them to see Bob. Living legend 'n' all that, but really, not designed for getting women into bed.
'We should talk about the case now,' he says.
Although we don't.
'I didn't shag any sheep,' I feel the need to point out.
*
The entire wood has been cordoned off. And you know, it's a wood in central Scotland not too far from Glasgow, so we're not talking about the Black Forest here. It's a few acres worth of trees where not many people go. I don't even know who found the bodies, but it'll have been one of the usual suspects: a dog walker, kids playing or illicit lovers. Although I'm not sure kids go out playing in woods anymore, so that probably rules that one out.
The victims were placed in a small clearing. A natural clearing, and not a bespoke space created for the task at hand. The killer dug out three small pits. He took three large wooden armchairs and sharpened the base of the legs. He then planted the three chairs in the ground adjacent to the holes. We don't know how far in advance he did this, but the whole thing seems to have been well thought out, so presumably he had it all set up before he arrived on the spot with his victims.
It's like serving a full Scottish to a group of people. There are so many things that don't take long, like bacon and frying eggs and making toast, that you can't start those and then start setting the table and making the coffee and whatever. You do as much preparation as possible before you start so there's no last minute panic.
So this is what he did. He killed three people like he was making bacon, sausage, egg, tomatoes, haggis, mushrooms and toast for fifteen people.
He prepared his area, and then he brought his victims out to it. They had all been drugged, so that he was able, one by one, to take them from the back of a van — the nearest identifiable tyre tracks suggest a Ford Transit, but you know, they suggest in a vague, well maybe, maybe not, kind of a way, so that's not exactly piling on the evidence. They had each already been strapped into chairs, then he placed the chair legs in pre-prepared holes in the ground, placed the feet in the larger pits in front of them, and filled all the area around the legs and their feet with concrete. The concrete set.
This was no movie-type bondage situation. In movies, people always find a way to wriggle their way free. Of course they do. Most of those types of movies wouldn't happen if Bruce Willis didn't have a convenient paper clip secreted away up his arse. But this was no Bruce Willis movie. Bruce Willis was not getting out of this.
Once he had them in place, he got to work with a saw. They reckon he used the proper tool, something like the electric bone saw that a brain surgeon would use. In the old days that would have helped narrow it down because it would have been much easier to trace anyone who bought a GPC Electric Bone Saw, Oscillatory amp; Rotary Model, but in these times when you can buy nuclear weapons over the internet from a guy shipping armaments, machine tools and cosmetics from his bedroom in Almaty, it's an entirely more convoluted ballgame.
Pretty easy to have someone bleed to death on you while you're removing the scalp, and he hadn't gone to all this trouble so that these people would die before the fun started. He had superglue to hand to stop any bleeding, but this fellow knew what he was doing, and he didn't need to use the glue very often.
We're not sure at what stage he woke them up. We're not sure if he stayed to watch. Perhaps he stood in front of them to intimately share his triumph with his victims. Perhaps he watched from the sidelines. Perhaps he just walked off, left them to it.
How did he know that crows would come and eat their brains? Can't say. He did select, with foresight one must presume, an area with crows nests in the trees. Maybe he'd trained those crows. Maybe he'd been leaving brains lying out in these woods for months, getting them used to it. Maybe he just left them there, assuming that the birds would look down, be curious and have a nibble, decide that they quite liked what they tasted.
Either way, he had these three people staring into each others' eyes, bound and gagged and helpless. And the first time a crow landed on someone's brain, put its feet on the soft surface and took a peck, the one to whom it was happening very possibly was unaware, depending on whether the crow landed on the edge of the skull or
