by Gavin Graham
The screams and noises that were heard that night were barely human and could only be compared to the slaughtering of an animal. As Spector Gladwell yelped, howled and growled the gay rapist kissed the man’s neck and whispered things in his ear like: “You’re a good piece of white meat.” Normally videos were not allowed, but, in this case Vlad wanted it taped for his own private collection.
Black Bean had been asked by the heavies: “What is your ultimate fantasy, Big Man, for when you’re fucking these guys?”
His answer had been as clear as it was violent and horrific.
So, after a brief discussion with Vlad, it was decided that his wish would be granted. Once the serial killer had been bludgeoned internally a heavy emerged with a bucket of honey which was poured all over the bleeding body.
All the men began to chant and the women soon followed in unison: “Eat him! Eat him! Eat him!”
Black Bean began to eat the man alive and revelled in his own paradise of honey, flesh and blood.
When the black man was finished his face was completely bloodied and he began to cry and howl like a child. That was his signature reaction after destroying a victim and when the police found him he was like that too; just an emotional mess. A heavy put a towel around his massive shoulders and consoled him as he was walked to the kitchen with fresh blood dripping from his lips and teeth and smudge all over his dark skin. “C’mon, Big Man, let’s get you a hot cup of tea and get you home, aye?”
A heavily-tattooed man stood up from one corner, no girl on his lap, but a joint hanging from his lips.
“Well? Did we enjoy the show?”
The men and woman laughed jovially in agreement.
“Now, we must make a clear statement with this piece of shit’s body, I want him Hung, Drawn and Quartered! Old school. Is it understood?”
“Yes, Vlad, it is perfectly understood…” the men responded and they soon went to work on the blood-drenched corpse.
Chapter 58
The war room
“It’s ironic, that Vlad got to him, before we did…” Colin said with a smile.
“What are you saying, that he got what he deserved?” Rose asked.
“I think there is nobody alive who wouldn’t agree that the sick bastard got what he deserved. Anyway, we can’t prove that Vlad did it, there’s no clear evidence…” Jimmy forced his opinion back onto her.
“God’s hand works in mysterious ways, I suppose…” said the man from Aberdeen.
“What’s that?” Colin turned to him.
“Oh nothing. Does anyone know where Mac is, I need to head back home today, I just wanted to say bye to him before I shoot off.”
“He took the news about his mate pretty badly.”
“What news?”
“You didn’t hear? Professor Sinclair, his best friend, when he got the news about his niece being found in the serial killer’s basement he slashed his wrists.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, no…”
“Yep.”
“I better go and find him.”
“He’ll be off on a bender somewhere, best leave him alone, he won’t want to be approached.”
“Aye, right, well I’ll be off then. Take care all and remember to call me anytime you need to discuss a case. OK?”
The team rose to their feet and embraced the man from Aberdeen before he quietly left them in peace.
Chapter 59
The angel of death
It was a miserable little café but Fairly knew that it was right to go and find Mac before he jumped town.
“Mac, can I sit?”
“It’s a free country.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend, Professor Sinclair, is he OK?”
“No, he died in the ambulance, blood loss. That’s what happens when people torture your family and you see suicide as the only option. He failed to protect his niece and he couldn’t deal with it. So, Angus, I don’t know exactly what your involvement was here but I smell a rat. I think I deserve some answers,” Mac sipped his tea, soberly, wondering why on earth he wasn’t drinking something stronger.
“Certain conundrums are not supposed to be understood, Mac, we just accept them, happy enough in the knowledge that justice was done and that a vicious killer was stopped, for better, or for worse…”
“I want a proper explanation, not riddles, you can’t scam a scammer.”
“It’s pretty twisted, Mac, seriously…”
“I don’t care, I’ve been around the block enough times, just tell me.”
“First of all, I have to tell you, Professor Sinclair is dead because of me.”
Mac’s expression turned cold and hateful in a quickened heartbeat.
“It was him, or, you. The Candy Man wanted it to be your daughter locked in his basement, but, I convinced him to pick someone else.”
“That’s what he meant when he said I have a guardian angel. You are the angel? You were in his back pocket?”
“Let me explain.”
“I think you’d better.”
“I sold my soul to The Devil. The Candy man killed a woman I had once loved back home because I told him that I hated her and wished that she was dead.”
“What?”
“We were a wee group of damaged souls back in Aberdeen. Three of us, used to sit in a private corner of The Mighty Protestant pub, getting filthy drunk and consoling each other like brothers-in-arms. Then Spector came along with his old sob story and he joined the circle too. He was so innocent, likeable, a charming sort of chap. We’d all been betrayed by women that we loved and trusted. They’d killed off our babies by having abortions. The only thing we had in common was our shared hatred from them.”
“Them?”
“Aye, these women, and all the rest like them. We were sat one night in the local boozer and he came to the table and asked if he could join us. I didn’t know it then because it all seemed so natural but he was plotting to use me all along. He knew all about me and you and all the scandals that you were involved in at the time back here in Glasgow.”
“Why had he taken such an interest in me?”
“You used to take back-handers from certain illegal abortion clinics in the city and it was one of those clinics that facilitated the killing of his child. His ex-girlfriend had an abortion and then fled the city. He was losing his mind but established an illusion of normality by getting married to a woman and taking on her kids as his own. Eventually, he went completely crazy and started to go on random killing sprees at home and away.”
Mac remembered Samara Cleland and the abortion; she was the one who’d really pushed him over the edge by having Spector’s child terminated.
He started to reflect on certain verses from the killer’s Bible of Kink, it made his agenda somewhat clearer, shedding light upon the method in his madness.
She too is a stone-cold killer…only I may judge them as the redoubtable master of all crimes of which the masses and authorities do not recognise…like the flowers of youth tortured and destroyed at the hands of soul-deprived monsters…she is temptress to one and all…sister to many…a daughter…foe of all foes…mother of no lands…her sons and daughters were dispensed with heartless glee…they are destined to drown in their own blood…to die as their children die…
“So, he saw that as his calling, was that it?”
“To begin with, yes, that was it. Eventually, however, he just wanted to kill all women, and rope you into his grand finale of blood and mayhem. He’d lost the plot, saw himself as some kind of Messiah, he came to terms with the fact that he didn’t even need a reason to kill. That was his ultimate game, he wanted you to figure something out, when there was actually nothing to figure out. Wonderful, isn’t it?”
Mac shook his head painfully.
“At the end of the day, evil needs no reason, and he knew that such a notion would be your ultimate frustration. So, as well as keeping girls locked in his basement he was travelling the country and committing murders on the
road, hitchhikers, hookers, homeless, druggies, he was a murder addict. The ex-girlfriend was his ultimate prize though and he never stopped wanting to kill her, so, he wanted to play a game with you and hoped that it would somehow reel her in. It did. Little did he know that I was playing him at his own game, reeling him in all at the very same time. It was beautiful.”
“Complicated, not beautiful.”
“It’s the nature of this work, at times, it isn’t like in the movies and dramas. You are hunting a beast by outsmarting him and playing his game by his rules.”
“My head is about to fucking explode. Can you just rewind a little? It’s all just a little too much information too quickly. Just go back to those initial events in Aberdeen.”
“OK. It was like he saw himself as our mighty avenger. He picked them off one-by-one and it was completely out of our control, he killed all the women who’d betrayed us, unasked, uninvited, just tracked them down and slaughtered each one in the night. He was the Granite Lane Rapist.”
“I thought you said vigilantes got that guy?”
“I put the local thugs on the trail of the wrong guy. It was good for publicity though. It was Spector, he went by other names across the country too, he was a killer with many faces and many names.”
Mac was staring at him in disbelief and slowly shook his head. “Jesus Christ…”
“We all kept quiet about it because he would have killed us and our extended families. He was a cool cucumber, manipulative, and he put the fear of God into us. He’d killed hundreds of women, Mac, hundreds. He really was The Devil. You cannot imagine how evil that man is or what he’s gotten away with over the years. That is why I knew that to beat him I had to play dirty, against the rules, against all odds.”
“What was he doing in Aberdeen?”
“I don’t know. He was everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. An enigma. He travelled all over Scotland killing women, the true extent of his crimes will never be known, but I knew he wanted to make a big public show here in Glasgow so that he could drag you into it and make you look incompetent and useless.”
“So, you agreed to be a part of it?”
“My plan was to protect you, Mac, never to hurt you. He told me what week and month the whole thing would start, sending the snuff films and all that, and he said he wanted me to be present for the beginning of this great show. Did you think it was a coincidence me just turning up like that when this was all kicking off? No way, Mac, no way. It was all premeditated and planned with absolute precision and genius.”
“So, he wanted you to be his informant, to help him continue to get away with murder? You were feeding him with information that entire time? No wonder he was always one step ahead!”
“It was me who was one step ahead, Mac, not him. The ball was in our court the whole time and you have to understand that. There was always a clear plan to have him eliminated. He said if he ever went down he’d blame me and take me down in a ball of flames, so, I needed to have him killed somehow without getting my own hands dirty.”
“It was you who led that mental prostitute into his path?”
“It was also me who facilitated her escape.”
There was an angel who came down from heaven and helped me to escape from The Devil’s Playroom…
“I knew that once Vlad found out what he’d done to one of his girls he’d eventually have him killed. It was all part of a plot to bring this monster to justice and it worked. I put myself on the Russian’s payroll too and he used me as an informant.”
“You played the role of a double-agent with two of the most dangerous men in Glasgow? You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that…”
“It was me who was using him, to bring down The Candy Man and his empire of evil. What better way to destroy a killer than to pitch him head-to-head with the most ruthless and violent gangster that Scotland has ever known? Everybody knows that you don’t fuck with Vlad The Russian’s girls and get away with it. I also saw it as an opportunity to show others like him, sadistic torturers, rapists, murderers, that there are other authorities in Glasgow that deal with criminals of their ilk; not just the coppers. You get me?”
“You used these girls as bait and could be sitting here with a lot more blood on your hands…you got lucky…”
“Luck wasn’t a part of it, I took risks, calculated risks.”
“None of this can excuse the fact that you had a woman killed in Aberdeen, you are no better than him, you are in fact responsible for murder just as much as he is.”
“I swear I never asked him to do it, Mac, you have to believe me he committed those crimes uninvited. I never wanted her to die, not really, it was just talk. We all knew though how it would look and that he was smart enough and wicked enough to see us all go down if we opened our mouths. I know how it must look to you too, but, I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I had to play dirty and break the rules. It was the only way. Surely you of all people can relate to that, Mac, eh?”
McGreavy sniffed and looked to the side as though seeing a ghost waltz into the café.
“I have nightmares, Mac, like you wouldn’t believe, most nights I can’t even sleep, I just lay awake having suicidal thoughts. I’ve become an alcoholic, a habitual drug-user, just to take the pain away and to help me get through the days and nights. Can you somehow understand, Mac? Can you sympathise?”
“Sadly, Angus, I can. Perhaps you and I are more alike than I first realised.”
“Does that mean that I can trust you to keep this between us?”
Mac nodded, reluctantly. “Aye, listen, do you fancy coming with me to the pub for a few jars? I need a drop of the hard stuff…”
“No, Mac, maybe another time. I’ve got a train to catch to Aberdeen. All the best, friend, all the best,” he spoke to him like a brother and grudgingly picked up his bag.
They shook hands and Angus walked out of the Govan café into the pissing rain.
Mac wasn’t to understand the truth that day, as he sat there, staring into his paper cup. One killer had been stopped by unconventional methods, that much he knew, yet he was oblivious to the fact that another was walking away scot-free right in front of his very eyes. The man who had just sat before him was not only a cunning police officer, but, was in fact the real Granite Lane Rapist; his story to Mac, whilst utterly convincing, had been totally false.
Angus Fairly was a serial killer worse than Satan.
And, of course, you remember what they say? The greatest trick The Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist…
Harlots fall into the sea; a poem
the hellion-perch, poetic invite, a castle of madness to create,
those who dare to hunt and snare, our mistress, inviting her sinister fate,
gleeful snigger, such a hoot, the devil is never late,
power attained, crimson-stained, damnation in published hate,
pain,
pleasure,
all will be given to thee,
serpent’s hiss, blood-laced kiss, harlots fell into the sea…
in rags, we slink, a thrill for a fee,
go there, sink, death is yours to see,
nights rage with tainted fire,
the devil shall be thy worthy sire,
majestic and sweet, what will be?
behold, such a corrupted sight,
thunder roars, madness, a plight,
monsters to dwell, the stories I tell, because harlots fell into the sea…
Also by Gavin Graham
Mr. Voodoo Jack (Book 4) - PRE-ORDER NOW!!!
The Glasgow Noir Novellas (Books 1 - 3)
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