Is there another camera, which is already relaying details of the investigation live onto the web? Not so likely, because then we'd get to hear about it, and would be able to take the camera down before we'd finished. He might want to see the whole thing play out.
Montgomery and Taylor are talking, but I've walked out of earshot. Low voices. They're not arguing though, which is good. Back in November, Montgomery came in like he was General Haig, expecting to have everything solved and wrapped up long before Christmas, but as time's gone on he's likely grown just as desperate as Taylor. Doesn't want stuck with this for the rest of his life.
Walk over to the two constables, who have now been joined by a third.
'Looking for anything in particular?' I say.
'Just anything out of the ordinary,' says one, as the other two shake heads.
'Listen, the guy obviously knows what he's doing with a webcam. Let's check around, look to see if we can find a camera. And let's be aware, he has some resources going on here. He may well have access to some cool-as-shit, microscopic little fucker that'll be easy to miss. So, check trees, bushes, at a decent level off the ground.'
We get to work in the trees. As soon as I've had the thought I know we're going to find something. I throw a 'Don't touch anything that you find,' over my shoulder at them.
Like the boss, I don't care who does the business that works out, as long as it gets done. The call goes up a few minutes later. In the meantime, Taylor has already been over to ask what we're doing, leaving the horrible twitching victim to the paramedics. They haven't even taken the gag out of her mouth yet, worried that the second the bonds get loosened she'll become a spasming horror. They're trying to sedate her, but so far her brain isn't recognising whatever it is they're pumping into her.
Taylor liked the sound of the camera search and left us to it. Wandered around the small clearing, breathing the place in. Won't be happy that all we found were two dead bodies and a convulsing wreck.
The camera is near the top of a bush, tucked in behind some leaves in the middle, but with a clear view through the foliage to the scene. It's one of the local guys who finds it, and it was me who sent them out on their task, but there's no doubt that this is in Montgomery's hands the second the cry goes up.
He walks over, doesn't immediately grab it and put it in his pocket. There's nothing to be gained from bringing the filming to an end the second we have confirmation of another camera, and he'll take a moment to consider whether there's anything to be gained by letting it run.
We can speak to him. The killer.
Do we want to speak to him? Have a one-way conversation, where we don't even know if he's listening? We don't know yet if there's a microphone.
While I stand to the side of the discussion between Montgomery and one of his sidekick Inspectors — Marqueson I think — I realise that I'm in the camera's line of vision.
I stare into it for a moment. Wonder if he's somewhere watching right at this moment. Calls back to the station have indicated that he's not broadcasting this anywhere online just now, not that we can find — and he's been pretty adept at advertising himself to the world — so I'm not worried that at that moment I'm being ogled by millions of people around the planet. But maybe I'm being ogled by the one guy. The Plague of Crows. And if not right at this minute, later, when he's looking at the footage in the comfort of his own bedroom or his own basement, whichever hovel it is that he inhabits.
I feel no fear. Indeed, as I stand in his line of sight, I suddenly think that maybe this is what I'm waiting for. The brutal, unpleasant death. The death that makes people feel sorry for me, a death that makes people regret I'm gone, and forget why it is they want nothing to do with me at the moment.
Of course, I also believe that I wouldn't be sucked so easily into his trap, in the way that these others were. The police officers in particular, assuming that one of these three women is one of us. They know what's out there, they know we're being targeted. How in the name of fuck are they allowing themselves to be taken?
Not me. I have a moment, not of invincibility, but of knowing that this guy, currently watching me in the stinking depths of his festering fleapit, would not be able to get to me. I'll see him coming. Or her coming. Whichever, it won't matter. Maybe he'll take me down, maybe I'll die trying to take him down, maybe we'll go together, Holmes and Moriarty plunging hand-in-hand into the waterfall, but he won't get me out here, he won't get me bound and gagged, the top of my head removed.
I stare into the camera. Don't speak, but he can read my face. I know what he's thinking, I know he understands.
Come and fucking get me, you prick.
One of those moments when I don't care. I've lived long enough. Done enough. Seen enough. Had enough women, drunk enough vodka. And, more than anything, I've done things I deserve to die for. Or not done things.
Come and fucking get me, you prick. I know my lips aren't moving, but fucking read them anyway. Come on.
Marqueson moves in front of me and blocks out the camera. By the time the view is clear again I've moved out of sight.
26
Mostar, in the middle of Bosnia, was a bunfight in the war. Centre of the whole thing. The Bosnian Serbs bombed it, took it. The Bosniaks took it back. The Bosnian-Croats fought them for it. Back and forth, a shitstorm of war, death and destruction.
When I arrived in the early autumn of '93 the Serbs had moved on and the Croatians were laying siege. They held the city to the west, had ethnically cleansed, raped and murdered the Bosniaks out of that part of town, back over the main road and the Neretva river to the east of the city, and were shelling all kinds of shit out the joint. It was war, that's what happens.
Of the ancient architecture in Mostar, the shining light was the Stari Most, the old bridge. The Croatians shelled it to destruction in November that year. I watched it happen. It wasn't strategic in any way, wasn't like you could get a tank across it. They just did it for the Hell of it, for the effect on the morale of the besieged population. They did it because they could.
I arrived in town thinking that the Serbs were the bad guys, because that's what I'd been told, only to discover that everyone was a bad guy. Yep, the Serbs had already destroyed the Franciscan monastery and the Catholic cathedral and fourteen mosques and the library with 50,000 books, they just hadn't waited for me to turn up to see it. Weirdly it wasn't shocking, because I already knew that was the kind of thing they did. But I arrived to find the Bosniaks and Croatians doing the same to each other. For some reason I was surprised. Must have been young and innocent.
The Croatians, so innocent themselves, who would later be so offended when the Serbs dared to lay siege to Dubrovnik. How could the Serbs shell an ancient walled city? How could they damage an historically important site, the heartless fuckers? Poor Croatia, they would never do such a thing. They were the victims. Look at us world, we're the victims. Victims. The world agreed.
Some say they set tyres on fire in Dubrovnik to make it look worse, that when foreign journalists drove into the city after the siege was lifted, there wasn't as much damage as they'd been expecting. I wasn't there then. I was in Bosnia, in the middle of the forest. Maybe it's not true. Maybe rather than the burning tyres being propaganda, it's the story of the burning tyres that's propaganda.
Who knows any of that shit? That's what happens in war. Everyone leaps up and down saying they're innocent, and if their absolute guilt is established, then they leap up and down justifying why they were just doing what they had to do.
No one wins.
There were crows in the forest. Were there crows in the forest? Probably. Once. Sometimes when I wake up, now that the Plague of Crows is in all our heads, I see the crows in the forest in Bosnia, even though I know there were no crows. No birds at all. Birds are smart. They may not be so smart that they can play chess or solve mathematical puzzles or design an iPad, but they're smart enough to get the fuck out of Dodge when the bullets start flying.