A taser.
She smiles. This smile is different.
She aims the taser at my cock and does not hesitate. In an instant I'm hit by the most incredible, debilitating, excruciating pain. I've never had anyone try to bite my penis off before, but Jesus fuck, it must feel like this. Imagine it. You have an erection, and then someone bites it as hard as they can. Feel it.
Except the pain doesn't stop at my cock, it travels. It shoots over me, every part of my body. The worst is the point where it strikes, but the rest of it is abominable. A monstrous agony.
When we zap our customers we do it for less than two seconds. A quick blast. She holds it, sustains it. I don't know for how long. The pain is awful, and when it's done, I'm lying there, completely washed out, genitals throbbing with the worst pain I've ever experienced, and I can't fucking move. Can't move.
That's the point.
Everything's hazy and sore, pain and numbness and torture are washing over me. I look at her. She's leaning over me again. This time she's got a large tool or instrument. Not sure what it is.
I'm not even thinking about the bracelet. The panic button. I'm not thinking about anything yet. But she is.
She takes my left hand and places it between the jaws of the pliers and then squeezes. Swiftly, brutally, powerfully. Vaguely I can see the muscles in her arms tense, and then all I know is the horrendous pain in my hand as she crushes it. Crushes the bones between the jaws of the pliers. I can hear them crack. All those bones in the hand.
I try to cry out, but nothing comes. That's what happens with a taser. You can't do anything.
My entire body is wracked by pain, the agony fizzing out and spiralling around me from the two main points that have been attacked.
The pain in my left hand is so great that I don't even notice as she removes the bracelet from around my wrist.
38
Just after nine in the morning. DCI Taylor at his desk, the remnants of a cup of coffee cooling at his right hand. His morning will be spent speaking to various family members of a man who lies in hospital after being attacked with a knife. Given that it was someone from within his family who attacked him with the knife in the first place, it made sense to keep the investigation close to home.
Funny, he often thought, television crime drama. Crime novels. Movies. There was always a case to investigate, a killer or a rapist or a thief to unearth. Real life? It was usually the brother or one of the parents or the best friend, and you knew right away. You always knew.
'What the fuck is the Plague of Crows, then?' he mutters, staring past his coffee. 'Someone who's related to all the victims?'
'Talking to yourself, Sir?'
He looks up. DI Gostkowski is standing in the doorway. Taylor looks at her with no trace of embarrassment, although he does lift the cold coffee to his lips and drain the cup.
'I was just thinking,' he says, and then he smiles ruefully and adds, 'discussing with my other insane half, obviously, that it's usually someone from the victim's family. That's who we always end up looking for. It's not about catching someone, but about compiling the evidence against them.'
'And how does that work with the Plague of Crows?' she says.
'Exactly. I hate it…' He glances at her, wondering if it was all right to talk the way he usually did with Hutton, before continuing anyway, 'I hate it when the day-to-day stuff ends up being like an episode of Lewis.'
'And that's what the Plague of Crows was…'
'Aye,' he says. He rubs the bridge of his nose as if he's just removed a pair of glasses. 'I like your optimism,' he adds.
'How d'you mean?'
'Saying that's what he was.'
'I meant it more from the point of view that it's not our problem anymore.'
'Well, Inspector, that's optimistic in itself. I may never officially work another day on that case in my life, but it's going to bother me for the rest of it.'
'Officially? You're still working on it? I mean, surreptitiously?'
'No… Thought I needed to deal with Clayton before I could move on, but it was just driving me mad. How could I do that without talking to people? The ex-wife, the girlfriend. All that stuff he told us… for all the stuff you get on the web these days, all that information, you can't just put into Google, was this man talking shit? and it'll spit out the answer. God knows how many lies he told us. Was he just taking the piss, or was he covering up?'
She shakes her head. No answer.
'You never checked up on the girlfriend, found out if she really did work on High Road?' he asks.
He had never asked Gostkowski. Knew what the answer was going to be, not sure why he's asking now. Hadn't wanted to drag Gostkowski back in once she was well out of it.
'I just left it alone, Sir,' she says.
Just as she'd been told to do.
'Of course,' he says.
A slightly awkward silence. They don't often work together, have only been involved in the same investigation twice in the past two months.
'What is it today, Sir?' she asks.
He drags himself back from some aimless wandering and indicates the notebook on his desk, in which he's been making a few random notes about what needs to be done.
'This attempted murder,' he says. 'Need to get to the bottom of all the claims and counter-claims about domestic provocation.'
'Sounds lovely,' she said.
'Oh, yes,' says Taylor.
*
Trees. It's always trees. That's what I see first. That's why the Plague of Crows business has had such an effect. The trees. That's why it's had an effect, more than any other crime I've had to deal with since I got back from Bosnia and started this shit-awful career.
It's not the brain-being-eaten-by-crows thing. Fuck, the press love that shit, they love to wallow in the horror of it. I don't think it's horror. It's, I don't know, gauche maybe. It's gauche. Showy. It's Grand Guignol, that's all. It's almost too horrible, too ostentatious, to produce genuine horror.
Too horrible to be horror? What? Crow got your brain?
It's just the trees.
I arrived in Bosnia with the same prejudices as everyone else. The prejudices that the government wanted us to have. The Serbs were the bad guys. The Serbs were the bringers of war. The other guys, they were all victims. When the Bosnian Muslims were fighting the Croats they didn't want to talk about it. That was a horrible civil war, victims on all sides. Massive reluctance to join in with that. Nobody wanted to take sides, because there wasn't a bad guy. Just two good guys. We wanted to be on both sides. Neither of them was particularly nasty. That was our view. No one said it, of course. The British government weren't issuing those kinds of statement.
It was easier when the Serbs fought them, because they were the bad guys. Suddenly it was easier to take sides.
I went out there properly brainwashed, knowing who the bad guys were. The first fighting I came across was Croat-Bosnian. It was fucking horrible. My first experience of war. First-hand war. It'll fuck you up as soon as you look at it. There was no honour here.
At some point I decided that the Serbs were the victims. I know. Victims of a particular kind. Victims of the world's prejudice. Victims of the west's desire to show the Muslim world it could come in on their side. Just fighting for their land.
That close to the action, that close to the war and the horror of it, you missed so much. I began to distrust the other journalists. Thought they were all playing along with the government and editorial line. Saying what they'd been told to say. What they were expected to say.