Start to walk off, Taylor alongside. He's staring at the ground, fighting the annoyance, trying to gather as much information as he can in the short time that we have.
The short time that we have… Fuck's sake. Sound like a pair of cancer patients. Bucket list: walk the Silk Road, sleep with Kate Beckinsale, climb Kilimanjaro, establish if the killer's tyre tracks were the same as the last time.
'Don't tread on anything, don't speak to anyone, don't tamper with any evidence, and keep on walking,' gets thrown after us.
Into the trees on the other side. Taylor glances back over his shoulder. The camera never looked this way, there was never a shot from the other side showing this part of the clearing. He kept the van behind him the whole time.
We stop behind the forensics fellows.
'Same tracks as the last time?' he asks.
Can feel Montgomery's bitter little eyes burrowing into the back of us, but Taylor has hardly slowed down.
'Think so, Sir,' comes the reply.
And on we go, without breaking stride. We walk on down the track up which the killer drove his van packed with prospective victims, and soon enough we come to the police cordon and walk once more out of the crime scene.
19
Long day. 11:32pm. Sitting in Taylor's office. This time last year we would have conducted this part of the discussion in the pub. Suddenly it all seems much more grown-up around here, and it all comes from Taylor.
He had a shit time of it while his wife left him and DCI Bloonsbury was flushing his life down the toilet, taking as much of the station with him as he could. Nevertheless, he came out of all that a much stronger man. He was already a good detective; that whole shambles made him a better man, and that filtered through to his work. The added responsibility hasn't weighed him down either, and now even at 11:32pm, when the investigation is going nowhere and the circumstances just got a hell of a lot worse, he still looks switched on and determined, rather than stressed and miserable and knackered.
One day that great attitude might rub off on me, but it hasn't happened yet. Most days I still feel like a twelve-year-old playing at being a policeman; and I reacted to the general tumult of the Bloonsbury business by sleeping with the new Detective Inspector's wife. Very mature.
We have some still-shot close-ups of the killer's mask, still-shots of the look on the faces of the victims. We've written up everything we can recall about the crime scene and cross-checked it with the previous one to see if he's given us anything else. So far, he hasn't.
Connor had Taylor in for an hour or so going over it all. Connor seems quite chipper. He feels that we have as much chance of solving the crime as the Edinburgh lot, but we have none of the responsibility. For months it's weighed on him, and he was worried that Edinburgh would come in and arrest someone in the first twenty-four hours. Now that they haven't, now that someone else has looked at it and not managed to discover the really obvious, glaring thing that we must have missed, he's relaxed a little. The pressure is off and suddenly he sees the chance of some one-upmanship.
That's the kind of man he is. Maybe they all are by the time they get to that pay grade.
'Fucking crow mask,' says Taylor. 'Really.'
'There was you saying we weren't in an episode of Scooby Doo.'
'It's like Batman, some shit like that. Holy crap, what is the matter with people? It's like they can't just commit crime anymore. They want to be seen committing the crime, they want their name in the newspaper, even if it's a false name. The next thing the guy'll do is get a TV camera crew lined up to record his thoughts before, during and after the crimes…'
'Plague of Crows Confidential…'
'And he'll burst into fucking tears when he's talking about his victims, then the camera will follow him to the gravesides as he pays his respects…'
'And when we ask the TV crew for his address they'll protest client confidentiality and make us out to be the bad guys.'
He sighs, shakes his head. 'We're always the fucking bad guys, Sergeant, no matter what happens.'
There's a knock at the door. In comes DI Gostkowski. She looks tired. Haven't seen her most of the day, and we missed our seven o'clock at the coffee shop.
'Sir,' she says, nodding at Taylor. Doesn't even look at me.
'Should you be in here?' asks Taylor. 'We already pissed them off once today.'
'I heard,' she said. 'Your name's mud.'
She glances over her shoulder then turns back.
'DCI Montgomery went home for the night about half an hour ago. There aren't many of them left, Sir. Thought it would be safe to come up. For a minute or two.'
'All right. Just stand in the doorway, like you're stopping for a passing chat. Nothing official. Be precise.'
I feel like I'm in another room, watching a tense and intimately shot detective drama on TV.
'A replica of the previous job. The van appears to be a Ford Transit. He has a team looking through footage of the nearest CCTV to see if there's any sign of Transits on the roads out of Perth. Not a lot of CCTV around there, however, once you're out of Perth. Time of death between six and eight this morning, the journalist the first to go, maybe an hour before the others. They presume it was when the skull was removed.'
'Sloppy,' I say, with my inability to go five minutes without saying something glib. To the credit of DI Gostkowski, she completely ignores me.
'They ended up killing seven crows at the scene, and this evening they got word back that all seven contained human brain matter in their stomachs, so there's added confirmation on the crows. The video isn't just some set up.'
'Jesus,' mutters Taylor.
'Everything else that's been gleaned from the site so far coincides with what we saw in August. The same goes for the victims. One police officer, one social worker — and this one was a door-to-door, dealing on the front line with all the fuck-ups social worker — and a journalist.'
'It wasn't a Glasgow policeman,' says Taylor, more a statement than a question, as the name of the officer is already on record.
'No, it's all Tayside, work and homes of the three split between Perth and Dundee and thereabouts.'
A moment while she tries to remember if she's missed anything.
'What are they working on?' asks Taylor.
'The CCTV thing's pretty big. They're working on the basis that he will strike more quickly this time, now that he's gone public. He's contacted all police forces, and from tomorrow they'll be instigating procedures whereby every police officer in Scotland will have to check in on a regular basis. That's going all the way to the Justice Minister to establish what they feel is practical.'
I look at Taylor, because that sounds unbelievably mental. We're supposed to check in? Like we're children off on a trip on our own for the first time and need to keep calling our dad? Holy all kinds of shit. How about, let's all be careful out there, or something?
'Hmm,' is pretty much all Taylor says.
'And they're speaking to local authorities and to the NUJ about implementing similar procedures across those professions.'
Taylor finally glances at me, a slightly troubled look on his face.
'Seems excessive,' he says eventually.
'They claim duty of care,' she says.
'Do you agree?'
She gives it a second, then says, 'Not paid to have opinions on policy, Sir.'
Taylor smiles unattractively and then glances back at the pictures he's been studying for the last half hour.
'Anything else, Stephanie?' he asks.
'Think I've covered it all.'
'OK, thanks. Go home and get some sleep.'
'Thank you, Sir.'