The Candy Man: One of the most extreme serial killer novels you'll ever read... (DCI Mac McGreavy Book 4)

by Gavin Graham

  The killer now turned to the body that was tied to the rack and he circled the table slowly, ensuring that the constraints were tight and secure, talking to her through his chrome skull mask. “Throughout history man has been quite creative, inventing new ways to inflict pain on his fellow humans, increasingly grotesque ways to see them die. The flaying of skin…from head-to-to…the Chinese were good at that. Being boiled in a cauldron of scorching hot water…castrated…beheaded…burned alive at the stake. These days we simply have too much choice as it has all been done before. There are even textbooks we can buy online that tell us step-by-step how to go about the job. My personal favourite you will get to experience for yourself right here and now. Are you ready for it? It was considered by many to be the worst possible form of torture imaginable, in human history, can you imagine that? Huh? You are about to die in the worst way imaginable. How do you feel right now? Can you guess what it is? No? Well, allow me to shed a little light on the subject, and I may start by telling you that it is slow and excruciating,” as he spoke he bent down to whisper his next words into her ear so that they were not audible to the viewer.

  Whatever he said had put the fear of God into the woman.

  Her body shuddered from the centre and her eyes flared as she struggled on the hard wood.

  The killer laughed from his heart and it made his stomach rise and fall as his semi-hard member swayed in the air making it a morbid and creepy thing to view. “There are many ways to approach this method but the way that I do it I think beats them all,” he explained it to her with an enthusiasm that chilled the spine. “You see, on the first night that you came to me you enjoyed a delicious meal of venison and vegetables, I’m sure you recall the way that I ravished you upon the ledge of a stone oven afterwards. I had my piece of you.”

  She groaned and wept in feeble attempts to beg for her life.

  “Yes. I can see that the very memory of it moves you to arousal,” he murmured and looked between her legs to see a stream of urine flow from her. “Oh. I can see that it makes you wet?” he laughed mockingly. “Well, you don’t really turn me on like that anymore, because women like you only arouse within me the urge to kill. The stench of your piss will, however, drive the rats into a more manic frenzy.”

  The woman was in turmoil…shivering…sobbing…

  She was too sedated to speak, but, boy she would scream.

  “On that first night, you enjoyed a gourmet meal, so on this night you will be the meal.” He left the cell and returned rolling a trolley upon which was a dome-shaped cage. In the cage were four distinctly fat rats. “They’re starving,” he added with a smile. The cage was a modern looking device that had an almost medical edge about it. He lifted it and placed it directly down upon the fatty flesh of her stomach. He removed the base which slid out with ease and he lowered a latch which forced suction pads to fixate the cage securely to her body. No matter how much she moved and struggled the rats would have no place to go.

  Seeing them scurry on her skin made Jimmy’s skin crawl.

  They were hungry.

  They immediately began to work at her flesh with sharp teeth and claws, nibbling, gnawing, taking their piece of her.

  There was a button at the very top of the dome. He pressed it and this activated a filament of heat that would torment both woman as it burned her flesh and also the vermin that partook in eating her alive. The rats would be confused and try to escape. Knowing that they had no way out, they would attempt to eat their way to freedom, down into her gut.

  The hot iron was clearly felt even through the suction pads and her skin reddened as she screamed.

  The woman was in excruciating pain already.

  The terror that the killer saw before him had apparently brought him to full hardness.

  It was to be a long and agonising death and as he watched the hungry rats do the job for him he masturbated so hard his tense bicep shuddered with every jerk.

  Jimmy watched it all with gritted teeth. The vein in his neck throbbed visibly as he stared so fervently at the screen. He trembled with disgust and hate. “You bastard,” he muttered. “When I get my hands on you I’ll cut your fucking heart out, I’ll stab your eye sockets with an ice-pick, I’ll bust your face up so badly not even your own mother will recognise you,” all his threats and dark promises were as real as they could be.

  As angry as he was, he wanted to cry, and he continued to watch as the rats munched their way deep into her bowels.

  Chapter 24

  Unanswered questions

  “What’s with this Bible angle? You think he has a God complex?” Colin started the discussion as the atmosphere was clearly one of quiet shock.

  “He wants to fuck with our heads,” Jimmy said nonchalantly.

  “He’s an extreme narcissist so a God complex goes with the turf. But, there’s more to it, he has a message for us and he wants us to figure it out. This isn’t just about his ego or him wanting to screw with us mentally,” Mac reaffirmed.

  “What kind of message?” Colin still looked pale.

  “I don’t know, but, the clue is embedded somewhere in the verses and the video itself. Jimmy, what do you think?”

  “I think the killer sees himself as a redeemer of sins that have been committed by the victim. The victim may have committed murder and gotten away with it. Maybe that’s the angle we need to look at.”

  “They’re all female.”

  “There’s a sexual aspect at play.”

  “I don’t necessarily think there is. I think he just hates women.”

  “He talks in verse about women and children. Maybe there’s a link to child abuse. The victims have been involved in abuse rings as groomers, you know, in churches and schools, or their husbands had positions of power and abused that power?”

  “Maybe they had children aborted?” Rose suggested.

  “They are all plausible suggestions, but, we need to dig deeper, talk to people who knew the victims on a personal level, partners, friends, family members…”

  “The killer had each victim leave the exact same letter behind. And the way that it was written, in contract, like an actual Slave Agreement, it’s such a slick operation, too slick…”

  “Maybe it wasn’t them who left the note, it could have been him, he could have abducted them from their homes and made it look as though they left by their own choice.”

  “I think it was easier than that,” Mac stated.

  “What?”

  “What if these women are actually surrendering themselves to this psychopath by choice, their own free will, giving themselves into slavery.”

  “Such intelligent and upmarket women? I don’t get it, and, if they were really so independent then surely they would come up with a more personalised letter to explain the sudden departure, no?”

  “No, that’s not how the BDSM sub-culture works, a truly submissive girl has the strength of mind to give herself freely to be controlled by her dominant Alpha male. That strength, to submit totally, wanting to be dominated and to be enslaved, it’s a one-way street. They will do as he says, whatever he wants them to do, and they will obey. It’s like he is their God and she will worship him as such and bend to his will at each and every turn.”

  “In that case, with the note, he’s making it harder for himself not easier.”

  “It’s his calling card, he’s trying to send us a message, he wants us to know that he selects his women for a particular reason.”

  “You think there is a pattern?”

  “There must be, so let’s look at the victims individually and as a group, what can we say are the commonalities that might put them into a set-group.”

  “They are submissive, and, they indulge in a kinky lifestyle.”

  “Yes, but lots of women fall into that category, this is extreme stuff that they’re exploring.”

  “Yeah…like…extremist-masochism…real-life erotic horror…”

  “What else?”

  “They were
all rich women, they had money, nice houses.”

  “Were they rich in their own right, or, did they marry into money?”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “It might do, we have to assume that the killer is using very powerful methods of psychological persuasion to coerce these women into giving themselves unconditionally as victims, right?”

  “They don’t see themselves as victims, they see themselves as slaves, in the sexual sense.”

  “Deep-down, what makes a person want that, to want to be a slave. Fundamentally, they want to be victims of some sort, Self-victimisation Syndrome or Acute Victim Mentality could be the driving traits of a person that wants to subject themselves to this level of humiliation.”

  “They don’t just want the humiliation though, they want to be treated badly in order to appreciate being loved, getting pleasure from the Master who keeps them.”

  “We all want to be loved and appreciated but this is not just role-play, this is full-on, for a person to risk being tortured and even killed they must see it as a sort of viable punishment for some crime or sin that they have committed, in their own minds they deserve to be punished…to be enslaved…to be the victim…”

  “We need then to look at the victims as the ones who were guilty of something.”

  “Yes, address them first as sinners, then as victims…that is what we need to look for…view them as women who were rich and successful on the outside, but, on the inside they were haunted by the turmoil of their own sins and potentially the fact that they married into money. This burden they carried was strong enough to make them want to self-harm to the most extreme levels imaginable…”

  “Even if this is the profile that connects them, there must be thousands of women who could potentially fit into that category, and you’d have no way of ever knowing it. These issues are deep, deep-rooted and could escalate in many different forms – alcoholism, drugs, prostitution, domestic violence, suicide…the list could go on and on…”

  “You really think these are revenge crimes?” Colin didn’t sound convinced.

  “I think he’s an angry man that is full of hate, a hatred that has been growing inside of him for a long time and is the result of something that happened to him in his past, something that pushed him over the edge.”

  “Maybe the love of his life left him to marry a wealthier man?”

  “You could be right, maybe, but the bottom line is that this BDSM sub-culture works perfectly in the killer’s favour. The secrecy. The privacy. No names. No faces. No fingerprints. Just eye contact, that’s it, the eyes of a killer and the eyes of his victim as they meet for the very first time. What does he see?”

  “Something that gives him confirmation.”

  “Yes. He doesn’t just profile his victims, he needs to meet them in person, to look into their eyes and get that final reassurance as they submit to him. He needs to see that potential in them for absolute commitment, self-enlistment to his own murky world of sexual enslavement, to live the fantasy and walk out of the world they know and just disappear.”

  “Just like that. Gone. Vanished. To be kept as a prisoner, in a basement of torment, torture and death.”

  “You really think he’s profiling them so particularly?”

  “Yes. He has to. Somehow and in some way. His manipulations are too perfect. It’s all about him picking the ones who he knows want what he has to offer them. This new life. He optimises on a fantasy that they have, for a life of submission, under a dominant man who will love them in a certain way. Pleasure and pain. That is what they think they want. They have no idea who he really is though.”

  “It’s almost like the perfect crime.”

  “They might have an idea of the risk if there was some media exposure around this guy. Why is The Candy Man being kept so hush-hush?”

  “The Chief Superintendent wants it that way.”

  “And, why would that be? Does he have some connection to the case that we don’t know about?”

  “He’s convinced that serial killers prey on media attention and coverage that amplifies the societal fear that they crave to ignite. He sees the media as the machine that engineers the mystique of a repeat murderer, enhances the godliness that can surround them, makes them eternal.”

  “Like some kind of legends in the murder game?”

  “Or, maybe there is a deeper conspiracy at play here, like maybe he’s one of the perverts who visits these clubs and he’s afraid that he’ll be exposed. You think police officers are not into this kind of thing?”

  Colin blushed, winced, and frowned at the wall.

  “It’s nothing like that. He just doesn’t want us putting the ball in his court too early.”

  “Uch, this is all bullshit, I’m not buying any of it,” Jimmy spoke in an angered tone.

  “Excuse me?”

  “C’mon, Boss, the public have a right to know what’s going on here. It’s not right. More women will walk into The Candy Man’s trap and by keeping quiet we’re making his job easier. He’s probably laughing at us right now.”

  “He is laughing, just read the letter he wrote to Mac, he’s laughing right in our bloody faces.”

  “It’s him holding the power, not us, it’s a total injustice. Getting coverage of this will put all women on their guards. We need to smother his game, starve him of opportunity, put it to all potential victims that he must be stopped. Then, just maybe, we’ll have a much better chance at catching him.”

  “You think that will really stop women from wanting what he offers?”

  “If they know that he only wants to commit murder in his basement? Yes. Of course. Have you gone mad, Boss?”

  “What if all these women suffer from the condition known as Agonal Euthanasia Syndrome?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A form of mental illness that is fuelled by sexual fantasies whereby the subject is tortured and killed. It’s like the ultimate form of self-harm yet they put themselves voluntarily into the hands of a psychotic maniac to do the job for them.”

  “I think maybe that’s going a bit too deep.”

  “That’s our job now, to profile the victims the way he profiles them, what if he knows there medical and psychiatric histories? He understands the way their minds work? He knows what kind of sexual kinks they have, asphyxiation to the point of being unconscious during the moment of orgasm, being whipped till they bleed, humiliated, murderous role-play? None of that is far-fetched. It’s all real. These snuff films will shock the nation and bring the city of Glasgow to a state of extreme terror. But, for some women, it may turn them on.”

  “Women don’t get turned-on by snuff films.”

  “Yes, they do, they read and watch the most extreme of horror depictions that you could possibly fathom, and it can’t get real enough for them. People are sick in the head these days and this will excite a small percentage of people. They will worship him as a symbol of evil. They will see him as The Devil incarnate. Some women find that sexy. Remember Richard Ramirez? The Night Stalker?”

  “The satanic serial killer of Los Angeles and San Francisco?”

  “Yes. He, like Ted Bundy, had scores of groupies who sat through the court cases and hailed them like rock stars. They all were willing to give themselves to him for sex and whatever else came with it. That is the level of control such evil forces can embody when we put them in the public’s eye. Given the nature of the way that he stalks his victims he may well be right. Am I alone here?”

  “I agree, I think the Chief Superintendent could be correct, for the moment at least,” Colin said, contemplatively.

  “Why do you say that?” Jimmy retorted.

  “Well, think about it, right now the only people who’ve been in contact with the killer are either dead or presently locked-up in his basement awaiting execution.”

  “That’s not entirely true. There’s one who is still alive, but, I’m not sure how much use she’s going to be to us.”