A Plague Of Crows

'Fair point,' I say. Didn't actually think of anything. Didn't want to.

'The whole thing is difficult enough to imagine, but the idea that two people — one of them the mother of two young children — would get carried away with this… I'm not convinced.'

'You're very old fashioned, Sir,' says Gostkowski without looking up.

'And I shall stay that way,' says Taylor.

'You have her name?' asks Gostkowski, turning to me. 'The wife?'

'Caroline…' I say, then realise I don't know her maiden name.

'There's a list on imdb of everyone, well, a shitload of people at least, who appeared in High Road.'

'Jesus. Who takes the time to write down that shit?' mutters Taylor.

A pause while we both look at her, then she nods.

'There's a Caroline Strachan, appeared in one episode at some point. Doesn't say when. There's no link to anything else.'

'I'll get the second name. Got the impression, from the way he said it, that she'd done a bit more than that. That she was some kind of regular. Maybe she used a different name for her acting career.'

Gostkowski's fingers are flying over the small keypad, then she starts nodding at it, understanding something that she's not letting us in on.

'There's the same plethora of information on the internet that there is about anything. We can look at it later.' She switches off the iPad, lays it back on the desk.

Taylor taps a quick beat out on the desk.

'Right, get going. I'll speak to Ramsay, make sure he leaves you out of the rest of it. You two get digging on Clayton and the missus. Discretion from both of you, no blundering phone calls. Obviously he knows we have some interest in him, after yesterday, but don't let him know for the moment that we're following it up.'

'You going to speak to Edinburgh?' she asks. 'Assuming Clayton wasn't winding the sergeant up, Edinburgh have already talked to him. It'd be wise to find out what they know.'

Taylor taps his fingers again. He's already been thinking about it. Ever since they were brought in they've been part of every one of his thoughts on the investigation.

'Yes,' he says. 'Wise. You're right. I'll run it by Montgomery, see what he thinks. Say enough so we don't look like we're over-reacting, but not enough to make him swoop in and take the thing off us and then do a shit job…'

He waits, and when we don't immediately stand up, he nods in the direction of the door and turns side on to us to look at his monitor. I glance at Gostkowski as I get to my feet, but she's already on her way out.

'We going to split this up?' I say, as we walk across the office.

She stops, stares at the floor while she's thinking about it.

'Yes, makes sense,' she says. 'I'll do the wife. I used to watch that stupid show when I was younger, maybe something'll ring a bell. I'll track down the story that her husband says ruined her career, and then find out what she's doing now. You stay on Clayton. Where he works, what he does in his spare time, that kind of thing. What about the kids? What age were they?'

'Photos looked pretty young. Both under five, I'd have said.'

'And there was no sign of them?'

'None. So maybe they were at school or nursery school, the mum took them to the hairdresser's…'

She's nodding, already mentally getting on with the job.

'Fine,' she says. 'See you later.'

She turns, then stops and looks back, a little unsure, as if that last line had been a slight overstep of the fuck buddy rules. We stare at each other, she shakes her head to lose the moment and turns away.

See you later. Those three words. That's all it takes, and I'm already there, thinking about the night ahead. Take a moment, a delicious moment to sink into it, to think about the two previous nights of fuck buddy heaven, and to think about what it might be like this evening.

Sigh, switch back on to the general tumult of an open-plan police office, get the image of Michael Clayton in my head, the image of a naked DCI Gostkowski out of it.

*

People don't entirely realise the extent of it these days. The amount of information that the police — and no end of other bodies and organisations — have at their fingertips on virtually everybody.

Doesn't take long, and I can tell you where Clayton goes shopping and what his favourite type of breakfast cereal is, how often he plays golf, how much money he has in the bank, the last time he went to the theatre, what kind of movies he likes. If I wanted to do the Sherlock Holmes shit I could probably have extrapolated that he and his wife don't have sex any more and that his kids don't love him. But then I'd already found out that he and his wife split up three years earlier and he hasn't seen her, or those ugly kids of theirs, since then.

Those picture-perfect images of two young children adorning every wall and every mantelshelf in the house are at least three years old because he's had no contact with them.

Living in a big house, earning a decent amount of money working self-employed as some kind of sales consultant in the stationary business. He's a big thing in paper clips. I mean, even if I didn't have my suspicions about this bloke being some kind of deranged crow-controlling super-villain, I'd still hate him. A theatre-going, golf-playing consultant. In my world, punching people like that in the face would be an Olympic sport.

Of course, the more your read, the sadder it looks. Come across a lot of lawyers letters from three years ago, and quite a number since then. Split from the wife, she didn't want anything to do with him, didn't want the kids anywhere near him. She left in the middle of the night, he hasn't seen them since.

I suspect that Gostkowski will have trouble even finding where she is now. He wasn't married when he was previously arrested, but he managed to take the money he made out of that scandal and put it into a nice house, a wife and a decent job. Been earning quite a lot since, in the usual money-follows-money kind of way.

But whether or not he turns out to be the Plague of Crows, this is just a portrait of a sad little life. Of course, if Lynch is correct, then a sad little life is far more than he deserves. But this is the trouble with police work. So much of it revolves around people whose lives have been fucked up, or who have chosen to fuck up their own life, that you end up wallowing and trawling through these endless sad stories. Your days become one long episode of Eastenders. And every now and again, such as when you're looking at a divorced bloke who never sees his kids and whose life is filled with all sorts of pointless shit in some desperate attempt to compensate, it's like looking in a mirror.

*

At the Costa across the road, me and Gostkowski, two cups of Americano. Just because we're having sex, doesn't mean we can't also hang out and talk and stuff. That's part of the contract. The things you don't do are have expectations, fight, and get neurotic.

Boiling bunnies is also right out.

'So, no sign of the wife?'

'She did a Lucan,' says Gostkowski. 'And a pretty spectacular Lucan at that. Middle of the night, fleeing the country with the kids. Nice job.'

'You think he looked for her? I mean, I know he got his lawyer to write a lot of letters to the courts and police, but…'

She shrugs. 'Presumably. But did he ever get on a plane? I doubt it.'

'Well, he doesn't have a passport.'

'Ah. Well, there's your answer, because I'm pretty sure that she left the country.'

Sip the coffee. As usual there's too much coffee in the cup, not enough space for milk. Even though I asked. There must be people who complain if their cup isn't filled to the last millimetre.

There are always people who complain. And then there are the people who complain about the people who complain. Like me.