she's holding it like she might hold a gun, and presses her thumb down on the controls.
It buzzes into action with a low sound. An expensive sound. The sound of top of the range bone-cutting equipment. She snarls. Wonder, in an almost disinterested way, what she's about to do. My head isn't strapped down; she'll never get the clean cut that would allow me to stay alive long enough for the crows to get involved.
'Fucking watch,' she says. 'See how you like it.'
Then she turns quickly and thrusts the bone saw into the eye socket of the journalist. Her mouth opens in a silent scream. No reason for there to be no sound coming out, except perhaps her vocal chords are frozen in horror. She wriggles her head desperately, but that just increases the damage as the Plague of Crows presses down tightly with the saw and it begins to cut down through her face.
She then draws it out and starts using it to stab at her, repeatedly, in the face, briefly drilling into her skin and bone. Chops off an ear. Drags it across the other cheek. A nick at the throat. Teasing her and taunting, a brutal display of torture.
The social worker guy is wailing. It's a horrible sight, the journalist crying out now in pathetic little squeals, blood flowing, as the Plague of Crows deprives her beloved birds of a kill. Slashing and thrusting with the saw, her own breaths coming quickly with the excitement and the anger.
'Fuck!' she shouts again, and soon, very soon, the journalist's bloody head falls forward into her chest. The Plague of Crows stands, engrossed in her slaughter, then holds the saw at the top of the woman's head. Presses down.
'Come on!' she says, exhorting it to cut through bone, as she scythes into the journalist's skull. Already dead, this one is just for show. Just for fun. Just for the Hell of it.
Suddenly she lets the power off and straightens up, gasping for air, her mouth dry, her heart racing. The bloke is wailing. Loud sobs. Jesus, what an awful sound.
'Would you shut the fuck up!' she barks at him, but he doesn't. I don't think he can. Probably hasn't seen that happen to anyone in real life before. I mean, you've got to see some amount of fucking awful shit when you're a social worker, but probably not that.
'God!' she shouts, as if exasperated with her children.
She lets the bone saw fall to the floor, then steps quickly to the side. Stands back between us with the masking tape, then ties it roughly and tightly around his mouth. Round and round she puts it, several times more than is necessary, until there's no sound coming out.
She hasn't strapped his head back yet though, and he continues to move it around frantically. Eyes wide. With all that sobbing his nose is probably full of snot and tears so he's going to have trouble breathing for a few moments. He'll likely get past it, but his future prospects aren't looking too great.
'Fucking happy?' she sneers at me.
The journalist's body drips blood onto the forest floor. I'm not looking at her. I look at the Plague of Crows.
'You killed her,' she says, which is some kind of fucking logic. But then, if you're insane enough to come up with her crows plan… 'You fucking killed her, and you're supposed to protect people. Didn't fucking protect her, did you? You're all the fucking same. How did you fucking like that, you prick?'
I hold her gaze this time. Eyes are still dead. I expect she was looking for some kind of movie reaction. I was supposed to be shouting,
I missed my lines. If there'd been an actual choice, I would have been happy to take the saw. But there wasn't. She was just looking for some desperation from me, and she didn't get it.
'Seen worse,' I say.
It sounds Python-esque, but fuck it, I'm not lying. I have. I have seen worse. For all my guilt, I haven't done worse, but I've seen it. I've taken the photographs and I've sent them back to London newspaper picture editors, and they've said,
'Seen worse,' I repeat, and my head drops.
45
She arrives first. Sits and waits. The house is dark.
She isn't usually so unsure of herself, but this is different. This is the Plague of Crows. Gostkowski is convinced. It's based on nothing more than a coincidence, because why couldn't Clayton's ex-sister-in-law be working as a waitress on the other side of Glasgow? But she knows, absolutely and without doubt.
She'd called it in; hadn't bothered going to anyone other than Taylor. The sister-in-law who worked at the café across the road. First thing he did was run over there to see if there was anyone who met the description. Then he was back and tracking her down. Jane Kettering poured out of distant police files in great torrents of disaffection. From an early age. He cursed that they had given up on the search when they had. Even just a couple of more hours of Gostkowski's investigation and she could have tracked her down.
There was an address, in the hills behind Gourock. Gostkowski was closer. He'd told her to wait for him. As he'd said it she doubted that she would, but now that she's here she hesitates. Turns off the engine and the lights, finds herself making sure the car doors are locked. Sudden fear. Where has that come from?
Five minutes pass. She wonders if she should go in. Starting to steel herself. Starting to prepare for it. Seven-and-a-half minutes and Taylor arrives. She hasn't moved.
She gets out her car as Taylor pulls up.
'Where are the others?' she asks, as Taylor walks quickly towards her.
'It wasn't enough,' he says.
That's all that is needed.
Gostkowski hadn't had much to tell him. A face in a photograph, Clayton's former sister-in-law in a café paying attention to her and Hutton. Now Hutton is missing.
Six months ago it might have been enough, but now there have been too many mistakes, too many conclusions jumped to that have not been proven. More than anything, Taylor has been working on this since the previous summer and has got nowhere in all that time. To believe that he's gone from nowhere to identifying where the killer lives in a matter of minutes seems preposterous. Neither does the connection to Clayton help. To anyone else it is going to seem like another plan from Clayton to fool the police. Only Gostkowski, who has been there, who worked it out for herself, knows that it isn't.
Perhaps there are doubts lingering, too deep yet to come to the surface.
They approach the door, ring the bell. A detached house, not too large, a small front garden. Taylor turns and looks across the road and around at the neighbour's homes while they wait. Quiet Scottish suburbia. The kind of place where the police would get called out to adjudicate over a hedge dispute or to answer a complaint about someone parking their car in front of someone else's house.
He steps away from the front door to take a broader view of the house, bathed in the orange glow of the street lamps. A few bare trees in the front garden lessen the effect of the lights.
'Open the door,' he says.
Gostkowski first of all tries the handle, then finding it locked looks around the garden. There are stones lining the border between the lawn and the path and she lifts one of them and quickly puts in the glass panel on the door closest to the lock. Reaches round, key in the lock, which is all just marginally less difficult than the door being open in the first place.
They enter quickly, Taylor moving in front, close the door and turn on the light. A regulation hall, stairs leading up ahead of them, door to the left and right, another door at the end of the hall beside the cupboard beneath the stairs.
Silence.
'What was it that was suspicious about her in the café?' asks Taylor.
Gostkowski pictures the woman chatting to them.
'Nothing,' she says.
Taylor nods.
