A Plague Of Crows: The Second Detective Thomas Hutton Thriller Read Free Page B

fuck?'
    He doesn't say anything else. He's driving. Pretending to concentrate. Haven't seen Bob in two years.
    'How come nobody told me?'
    That's kind of a stupid question, which Taylor's only too happy to answer.
    'You've been living on the side of a mountain shagging sheep,' he says.
    'You get me a ticket?'
    'Yes.'
    'Seriously? You got me a ticket?'
    'Well, I got two tickets. To be honest, if I'd found some woman to ask in the last month I would have asked her, but we're now only two days away and the ticket's still free, so the chances are it's yours. So, it's slightly disingenuous to say that I got you a ticket, but you can have it if you like.'
    I nod. Good man. He was never likely to ask a woman. I mean, really, you hit it off with some new bit of skirt at our age, the last thing you want to do is scare them away by offering to take them to see Bob. Living legend 'n' all that, but really, not designed for getting women into bed.
    'We should talk about the case now,' he says.
    Although we don't.
    'I didn't shag any sheep,' I feel the need to point out.
    *
    The entire wood has been cordoned off. And you know, it's a wood in central Scotland not too far from Glasgow, so we're not talking about the Black Forest here. It's a few acres worth of trees where not many people go. I don't even know who found the bodies, but it'll have been one of the usual suspects: a dog walker, kids playing or illicit lovers. Although I'm not sure kids go out playing in woods anymore, so that probably rules that one out.
    The victims were placed in a small clearing. A natural clearing, and not a bespoke space created for the task at hand. The killer dug out three small pits. He took three large wooden armchairs and sharpened the base of the legs. He then planted the three chairs in the ground adjacent to the holes. We don't know how far in advance he did this, but the whole thing seems to have been well thought out, so presumably he had it all set up before he arrived on the spot with his victims.
    It's like serving a full Scottish to a group of people. There are so many things that don't take long, like bacon and frying eggs and making toast, that you can't start those and then start setting the table and making the coffee and whatever. You do as much preparation as possible before you start so there's no last minute panic.
    So this is what he did. He killed three people like he was making bacon, sausage, egg, tomatoes, haggis, mushrooms and toast for fifteen people.
    He prepared his area, and then he brought his victims out to it. They had all been drugged, so that he was able, one by one, to take them from the back of a van – the nearest identifiable tyre tracks suggest a Ford Transit, but you know, they suggest in a vague, well maybe, maybe not, kind of a way, so that's not exactly piling on the evidence. They had each already been strapped into chairs, then he placed the chair legs in pre-prepared holes in the ground, placed the feet in the larger pits in front of them, and filled all the area around the legs and their feet with concrete. The concrete set.
    This was no movie-type bondage situation. In movies, people always find a way to wriggle their way free. Of course they do. Most of those types of movies wouldn't happen if Bruce Willis didn't have a convenient paper clip secreted away up his arse. But this was no Bruce Willis movie. Bruce Willis was not getting out of this.
    Once he had them in place, he got to work with a saw. They reckon he used the proper tool, something like the electric bone saw that a brain surgeon would use. In the old days that would have helped narrow it down because it would have been much easier to trace anyone who bought a GPC Electric Bone Saw, Oscillatory & Rotary Model, but in these times when you can buy nuclear weapons over the internet from a guy shipping armaments, machine tools and cosmetics from his bedroom in Almaty, it's an entirely more convoluted ballgame.
    Pretty easy to have someone bleed to