got to Bosnia — given that I went there just to check it out and have a look at war, death and suffering first hand, it was implicit in my even going — but I've been a lot worse since.
'Do you have examples of any cases in which I've been involved where it's negatively impacted on the outcome?' I ask.
Aye, there's the rub.
She doesn't immediately answer.
It's been close a few times, and maybe there'd be some legitimate suggestion that I should be dealt with before I negatively impact, rather than after, but really, there it is, there's the fucking rub. I always get by.
'You don't think you negatively impacted the work of the station by hospitalising Inspector Leander?'
'He hit me over the head with a bottle of wine.'
'You slept with his wife.'
'An act of love and affection. It was him that brought violence to the table.'
She gives me a bit of an eyebrow for that one, and well deserved.
'I was wrong,' I say, finally getting around to coming out with the kind of standard arsewipe that Taylor was looking for me to say. 'I shouldn't have slept with Maggie and, at the very least, I should have stopped when the Chief Inspector told me to stop. Leander only did what any self-respecting man would have done.'
Apart from the fact that he took weeks to do it and then he came at me from behind my back because he's a pussy.
She's melting. Piece of cake really. I haven't quite put the ball in the net yet, but I've made steady progression into her half. The main thing now is to concentrate and not blow it by asking her what she's doing after work.
5
Three o'clock, my first afternoon briefing. The keys to the castle have been returned to my good keeping, and I can once more join the police fold, once more strike boldly forth and legally kick the fuck out of people. Wouldn't have happened so fast without Taylor demanding it, but he's now the senior DCI around these parts and he's risen to the challenge. Knows what he's doing, gets results.
This'll be the first time he's had to find the killer of three people who've ultimately had their brains eaten by crows, however.
Seventeen people in the room. The walls are covered in the pictures Taylor tried showing me on the train. My head's in the right place now, which it wasn't yesterday. I can look at this shit without wanting to shut down. It's a constant adjustment process.
I'm sure I'll start drinking again soon enough, and I've already bought my first packet of fags in over a month; on top of that, an hour alone with Dr Sutcliffe has got me thinking about women. It's been a while.
With serenity comes lust.
That there, what I just thought, has got to be some ancient piece of Chinese philosophy.
Mind on the job. Taylor stands before us.
'We're welcoming back DS Hutton today,' he says, pointing a desultory finger my way. They've all noticed me already of course. No one nods or says anything. One or two of them might have been glad to have me back, but I'm not the friendliest bastard in these parts. I'm just another copper in a room full of them. Well, I have slept with three of the women, but fortunately none of the WAGS.
Of the three women, I used to be married to Sergeant McGovern, so you know, you can take sex for granted. It lasted less then a month — I mean the marriage, not the sex. I know I'm a bit fucking full of myself sometimes, but not even me… Then there's Constable Grant. Bit awkward. Had sex once as a result of there being a bit too much alcohol consumed on both sides. But then, I'm rarely embarrassed about it, while Grant could barely show her face around here for the next week. Assumed I'd tell everyone, and seemed downright shocked that I didn't. And then there's Constable Carr. That one was a bit more long term. And when I say long term, I mean four weeks. Maybe five, if you count the part where we weren't talking to each other but hadn't actually acknowledged that she thought I was complete bastard.
So, on the SexPossibility-ometer McGovern is out, what with her being married to the other McGovern at the station. Grant, well she respects me a bit more now because I didn't publish a full account of our all-nighter in the Sun, but she's still pretty embarrassed about the fact that she got nailed by someone who's fifteen years older than her. And Constable Carr still thinks I'm a complete bastard.
Which leaves the four other women in the room to be considered.
I'm supposed to be listening to Taylor.
'… planned out, to the last detail. Sgt Harrison, how's it going on trying to establish a link between the victims?'
Sgt Harrison glances at her notepad. Best sergeant around these parts and several steps ahead of the likes of me in the promotion race. And it is a race.
'Nothing,' she says. 'I think we can probably go so far as to draw a strict inference that these people definitely did not know each other and were not connected in any way whatsoever.'
'You've spoken to…'
'Done the rounds, been across the board. You can never be completely sure, of course, because how can you know? Not everyone documents every minute of their lives, albeit even that seems to be changing… Nevertheless, although Sparing worked in social services, we can't really call him a social worker. Apparently he only did that for a couple of months, couldn't handle it, and ended up as support staff. Paperwork. Had no connection with the police. Had never, his family says, had reason to speak to the police. Not, of course, that Goodwin worked in his area anyway.' She flicks the notebook, waves a rather mournful hand across it. 'I'll give you more details later, if you like. But these people didn't know each other.'
'OK, thanks. Morrow, how's it going at pathology?'
Detective Constable Morrow also has a notebook. A quick glance round the room. Everyone has a notebook. Seriously, everyone in the room is sitting there with a fucking notebook in their hands. Pen at the ready. Jesus.
I, of course, don't have a notebook. I suddenly feel like I'm standing naked in the middle of the street. The weird thing is that they've all got the same notebook. I mean, all right, there's the standard police issue, but there's more than one notebook in the police service, and there's usually someone brings something a little idiosyncratic to the table. It's like some weird satanic worship thing where I'm the only one not involved.
'They're sure now that Tucker died first,' says Morrow. 'Quite possibly as much as an hour before the others.'
'So the journalist didn't suffer too much…' says Taylor ruefully. Dark, but well said.
'Relatively speaking, no. The other two both showed signs of surviving much longer, and with much greater brain degradation, before they died.'
Man, that's one of those situations where you're going to just hope that you go quickly, isn't it? Sometimes you're going to want to hang on as long as possible — say for example, if you're dying while Scotland are playing Brazil in the World Cup Final — and sometimes you're going to just want to fucking peg it.
Maybe they clung on, their nerves twitching and bodily functions failing, in the hope that they'd be found. That they'd get to live on, live another day, live out their days in a quiet suburb, watching daytime television and visiting their therapist.
'Anything else?' asks Taylor.
'They're keen to point out the quality of the workmanship. They got a brain guy in from the Western to take a look, and he said the work was done with surgical precision.'
'So do we think we're looking for a brain surgeon?'
'Not necessarily. It wasn't as if the bloke performed surgery on the brains. He was just a dab hand at removing an area of the skull without inducing fatal bleeding. He could have practiced on animals. And maybe on
