'Good. It's good that you didn't miss anything previously.'
All the doors are closed. The floors are wood, a long rug from the Middle East lines the hallway leading to the kitchen. The walls are magnolia, hung with three or four original watercolours. Pastels. Sea and sand and old harbours.
'Nice place for a waitress,' he says.
Hutton had thought the same thing, but he had parked the thought. Sex first, plenty of time to ask questions later.
'Don't like this,' says Taylor. Not used to working with women. 'Stick together.'
Gostkowski doesn't know that he and Hutton would have split up.
When he starts moving he does it boldly and confidently. Having established his bearings he is not about to creep around.
First room, on the left; a study, generally used as a dumping ground for unneeded things. There's a baby grand piano, cluttered and unused.
Second room, on the right. Sitting room. Television. Photographs of the same two children, and of a similar vintage, that Clayton has in his house. Taylor scans the room, takes everything in, turns and walks out. Down the hall, stops to open the door under the stairs. The cupboard has been converted into a very small bathroom. He looks at the floor, wonders if this is where there would be a trap door to the basement. On first inspection it is tiled and solid. He will come back later if he finds nothing else.
Into the kitchen. Light on. Modern, redesigned and fitted some time in the previous two or three years. Nothing obvious. This person lives alone with no reason to assume that the house is about to be infiltrated. There's no reason why she would have to keep secrets hidden.
Taylor walks out, back down the hall. Gostkowski hesitates a little longer in the kitchen, then follows. Up the stairs. A door straight in front of them, slightly open. Taylor walks right in. A spare room. A single bed. Everything very neat. He quickly notices the film of dust. There is a sadness and an emptiness about the room. Something about it, so great, that there almost seems a physical manifestation of the emptiness. A spare room that is never used because there are no visitors.
Perhaps there is something more fundamentally amiss with the room than that. Gostkowski shivers. They walk out. Quick look in the bathroom, nothing to see. They can rake through the cabinets later. Another door beyond that, another bedroom. The double bed has been made, there is order. There is no sign that this was where Hutton lay back, where Hutton was euphoric, where Hutton was so brutally immobilized.
Taylor turns, walks back past Gostowski along the corridor to the final door. She follows.
The third bedroom, but this one a bedroom transformed. All traces of the room's original use have been removed. Here is a large desk in the middle of the floor, the walls have been stripped and hung with maps and lists of names. Photographs are everywhere.
They both feel the jump of nerves. Taylor steps forward.
'Call it in,' he says.
Gostkowski doesn't move. Looks around the room. The wolf's lair. The operations centre, almost as if it had been laid out for them. Photographs of some of the previous victims on the wall. A large map of Scotland, pins inserted in various places around the central belt. Satellite images of woods. The desk is littered with paperwork, which Taylor is already looking through.
He notices the silence and turns.
'Inspector?'
'How do we know?' she says.
'What?'
'How do we know it's not a set-up?' she says. 'This is perfect. It's too perfect. I see the photograph in Clayton's house, and now we're here. He might as well have told me where to look, and now we pitch up and we find this. All the evidence we'd ever need, right there in front of us.'
Taylor stares at her, a piece of paper in his hand. Closes his eyes, tries to think it through.
'They could be working together,' she says, 'Clayton and this woman, the café woman, to get the police to make an even bigger idiot of themselves. For us to make idiots of ourselves. They want us to call it in, they want us to turn up here with thousands of SOCOs. This could just be…' and she lets the sentence drift off and waves a hand at the pictures on the walls.
Taylor opens his eyes, turns and looks over the evidence before them. Goes to the map of Scotland on the wall. There are seventeen pins in place, three red, fourteen yellow. Recognises the three red as being the spots where the Plague of Crows previously committed murder. The others are spread around the central belt.
What would they find when they got there, to these fourteen woods. Trees? Crows' nests? A jack-in-the- box, all part of Clayton's deception and joke? Hutton and two others, bound and gagged and scalped?
He runs a mental cross reference with woods that he's looked at over the previous few months. Some of these might only be useful for the summer. He quickly reduces the list of fourteen to six or seven. He turns back to Gostkowski.
46
She's been gone for a while. Not sure how long. Maybe half an hour. I've got under her skin, yet she didn't kill me. She's angry. Too angry to be coldly removing part of someone's skull, preparing the food for crows. She'll make mistakes. Something that she won't see coming, something she will miss because she's not in control.
She's been in command throughout every one of the murders so far. This time she's lost concentration. I know that's what she's doing when she shuffles around, out of sight. Occasionally there's the sound of footfalls on dead leaves, the noise of someone walking through the forest.
She is pulling herself together. Getting a grip. It's not about me, and she had made this murder about me.
The guy is still blubbing. Soft moaning, whimpering noises. Tears. He can't stop looking at the dead journalist. He is wrapped up in her, that bloody corpse. Occasionally I lift my head to look at the two of them.
I won't ask myself if I'm heartless. I know I'm heartless. Beyond caring, about me or anyone else.
The Plague of Crows flits in and out of my thoughts. It comes together, with wonderful clarity. I have none of the facts, and yet I know everything. Instinctively know that what is pieced together in my head is what brings me here, what brings the Plague of Crows out into the woods to avenge herself.
I see it in her face, just a flash, but it sparks the thought process. It's her eyes. The same as the look on photographs of Clayton's wife that we looked at.
If only we'd kept looking. If only we hadn't turned our backs on the case when Connor kicked us off it. Strangely I blame Taylor and myself, rather than Connor. He was just doing what he had to do. We shouldn't have taken his word. We should have kept at it. We would have come to the sister-in-law soon enough.
Clayton was just the way we found our path in. It was chance, but one of those chances that happen in life. Meant to be. I wasn't attracted to Clayton because he was the killer, but because the killer was connected to him. Quite probably he didn't know anything about it, yet it drew me in. There's no reason for it, other than some sixth sense saying that the path to the Plague of Crows lay through Clayton.
And so it did.
She comes back to the fray. Calm. Renewed. Concentration intact. She doesn't even look at me. The guy is whining slightly more loudly now. He must recognise the new coldness in her. She's back, she's determined, she's going to get on with the job.
She has the duct tape in her hand. Doesn't bother gagging me. Knows I'm not going to say anything. The social worker is already gagged, now she grabs his head and straps it firmly to the back of the seat. His eyes are wide with fear, tears flowing freely.
'You're next,' she says, without looking. Wants to be in control, but can't help herself.
Perhaps she's thinking some level of humanity will kick in and that I'll start pleading for the social worker's life. There would be no point, even if I felt like it. I'm not saying anything.
He looks at me. Beseeching, demanding.
