A Plague Of Crows

humans. I did wonder if there were missing persons that he might be responsible for, where he practiced his craft before going public.'

Taylor stares at him for a second, then looks at the floor. Thinking it over. That's a decent thought from Morrow, but it's a tough one to move on. Does he put one of his officers on something that might be a complete waste of time? Where would you start?

Well, with a list of missing persons obviously.

'Give it a go,' said Taylor. 'Yep, you know, don't spend a week on it or anything, but just stick your toe in the water.'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Constable Grant, you help him out. It'll be one of those you'll-know-it-when-you-find-it things.'

'I'm used to that,' says Morrow, immediately shaking his head at the comment.

Taylor ignores it, glances around the room. Eyes settle on DI Gostkowski. When she says her name, she still pronounces the w as a v, so it can't be too long since her family left eastern Europe, although there's no trace of an accent. She's the number two here, and he hasn't referenced her yet. Wonder what he's had her working on.

She was brought in to replace Leander because, when he was finally able to return to work, he didn't want to come back here. Thought everyone would be talking about him. Which they were. He was packed off to the other side of the city. Just as well, or it would have been me being packed off to the other side of the city.

'Stephanie, how's it looking on possible revenge motives?'

She manages to talk without looking at her notebook. That's the talent that comes with being higher up the pay scale.

'Blank,' she says. 'Sergeant Goodwin… well, you don't know what kind of petty grudge people are going to bear, but there's really nothing there. A regular policeman's life…' She shakes her head. This time she does glance at her notebook, although she's not actually looking at it. 'A regular police officer's life, no stand-out cases. Recently he's been spending a lot of time going round schools, speaking to youth groups.'

'If this is revenge, it's old, been a long time in the planning,' says Taylor.

'I know. It's hard to imagine that any of the people he's arrested over the years would want to do anything other than put a brick through his car window.'

'All right. Tucker. He's a journalist. He must have fucked someone off. I'm fucked off at him and I'd never even heard of him…'

She answers without any trace of the black humour that Taylor has just introduced into the conversation. I start to drift away, crossing her off the list as I go.

Did I say list?

She's too … I don't know… serious is probably the word. She's a grown-up. You know the sort. Has that air of humourless responsibility about her. You can imagine she's been this way since she was eight. Then later, when all her friends were doing standard teenage things, like getting drunk and listening to indie bands and smoking weird shit and getting annoyed at things that happened a hundred years ago and being outraged at that year's genocide, she was looking disdainfully upon it all and writing in her diary the precise plan of how she was going to become Chief Constable of the Met by the time she was forty-seven. And a half. Marry George. Take two months off to have a child. Harry or Imogen. She probably had the kid signed up to the nursery school of her choice even before she met George.

No, I don't want to get involved with DI Gostkowski. And given the events that led her to be posted here in the first place, it's probably a good idea to leave well alone.

She's still talking.

With Sergeant Harrison being as interested in women as I am, that pretty much leaves Constable Corrigan and Sergeant Jones. Don't know either of them particularly well. They don't usually get dragged into this kind of shit, but it's obviously all hands to the deck. Corrigan looks like she's barely out of school. Really not a great idea for me to be hitting on girls that are damned near twenty-five years younger than me anymore.

Which leaves Sgt Jones. Bobbed blonde hair. Bit of a, I don't know, thirtysomething policewoman cut. And she's young enough amongst our lot to still be pretty fit. Slim. Not bad looking. I don't think I'd be over-snagging. Just need to overcome the fact that she'll know all about me and will more than likely not want anything to do with me.

DI Gostkowski is still talking. I like to think I've heard enough to make a judgement in the case, thereby excusing myself from listening.

Wonder what Jones is doing after work.

6

'What d'you think?'

Taylor and I are sitting in the pub. Our usual. Not the Whale, where the rest of the gang are likely to be, if they're at the pub at all. The younger police officer tends to spend less time in the pub and more time at the gym. Fuck's sake. Of course, I'm banned from the Whale, so it's not as though it's an option. Shouldn't have gone there in the first place.

'For the moment, you're fucked,' I say.

First vodka and tonic in a long time. Since the Leander thing. God it feels good. Crisp and cold and fresh, and perfect on a warm summer's day. There's something to be said for living on the side of a mountain being a Buddhist monk, but not as much as there is to be said for a crisp, cold vodka tonic.

'You're forgetting you're back on the team, Sergeant. You mean, we're fucked, not you're fucked.'

'I stand corrected, Sir,' I say, acknowledging him with a small movement of the glass.

Taylor looks pissed off, takes another sip from his pint, glances around the bar. There's football on the TV. Never seems right in early August. For me the football season doesn't really get going properly until it's pishing down, freezing cold, and the Thistle are playing against Cowdenbeath in a mudpit.

'Care to elaborate?' he says. 'I didn't bring you off the substitutes bench to state the bloody obvious.'

OK. Still getting back into the groove.

'Everything about this says planning. Planning to the absolute n^th detail. A perfectly executed crime. This is a scary fucking guy. None of your drunk aggressive, not even your psycho, can't-keep-his-knife-to- himself type. This is cold and devious. This is… you know, it's the equivalent of the German death camps against the Rwandan thing. Rwanda, a bunch of guys with machetes going about their business, making no attempt to cover up what they did. It was brutal, nasty, vicious. There was no artifice. The Germans. They burnt bodies, they dug deep graves, they used camps and then tore them down when the Russians closed in. They had a system. They systematically murdered. And that's what this guy is doing. He has a system. He's going to do the same thing again. We have no idea when that'll be, but he knows exactly when. Exactly.'

Taylor is looking at me while I talk. Face expressionless. I know it's why I'm here. To say what he already knows.

'And worse than that,' I continue, 'he'll already know who he's going to kill, and they won't have any idea. Maybe he's already taken them.'

'We should be looking for missing persons,' says Taylor. 'And not the usual kind, the seventeen-year-olds, the ones who'll have gone out on the piss and ended up on the bus to Aberdeen or in the wrong person's bed.'

'If he really didn't know the three victims and he selected them at random, then we're about to find out if he just selected any old person or whether he has a gripe against these professions. Did he choose social worker, policeman and journalist for a reason, or might it just as likely have been butcher, baker, candlestick maker?'

'We need to get ahead of the game,' says Taylor.

'We always do.'

'So we start by establishing if any police officers have gone missing in the last day or two, because the way he carried out that first murder, he must have grabbed the victims some time before they died. There had to be a