by Gavin Graham
It wasn’t the Ritz, but it was private and discreet.
Mad Dog knew that importance of laying low, like he’d laid low on the Swinstie farms.
It was a good place to plot his own death too; his resurrection.
The rent was cheap.
Facial reconstruction, on the other hand, was not; even in Thailand.
So, he had found his solace in a ghostly tower that was ridden with poverty, despair and disease. Where sex-for-sale was the order of the day and the Thai Police turned a blind eye. A popular spot for Western men of all nationalities - farangs - who came in droves. For weeks at a time, or months, or even to retire.
Some would come here, to die…
He blended in.
Just another stupid farang walking the streets.
Drunk and alone.
Looking for good times in the Big Mango.
Sex was everywhere; as was death.
He murdered a whore in that very room and he wasn’t sure if he’d done it out of boredom or necessity; or, perhaps, for some other reason.
He paid her 500 Baht for ‘short-time’, then forced her face-down on the bed and penetrated her the only way he knew how.
The hard way.
Primitive.
Violent.
With a hand tightly gripped around her mouth, he pinched her nose and held his grip, suffocating her as he used her body from the back, jutting into her with eratic jerks. She had struggled, tried to scream, kicking for dear life in a feeble attempt to free herself from his wieldy arms.
And, just like that, she was gone.
Right there, on the filthy mattress.
It turned him on, just like the farm house girl had turned him on, but this time he hadn’t used a condom. He hadn’t stopped penetrating her, not for a second, like a crazed animal. He went hard and fast, even when he knew she was dead, enjoying the residual heat of her caramel-hued corpse. The bed frame had thumped relentlessly against the wall, squeaking and clanking as he pounded her, gritting his teeth as specks of spit sprayed upon the back of her head.
He caressed her dead shoulder blades amidst the morbid sexual act, noticing how her skin ran pale as he abused her in death. He forced her head sideways, with curiosity, to look at her dead face. Strands of shiny black hair were strewn across her cheek and he saw that her lips seemed more plump; almost ‘pouty’.
Her features seemed softer now, less harsh.
Funny, how the dead could be more beautiful than the living.
Holding her tight, her body still gave heat, he kissed the back of her deceased neck and felt an eruption brew in his loins.
Electricity.
He flexed his buttocks and whispered in her ear as he came, inside a body that had zero pulse. “Don’t cry,” he whispered, “you know Daddy loves you,” like his own father had said to him, with a creepy kind of semi-human sensuality.
He had been lost in the moment, completely.
A sublime whirlwind chilled his gut as his pelvis convulsed and he emptied his demon seed in her bone-dead cunt, the morbid sensuality of it making his heart thump relentlessly at the inner wall of his chest.
It had been the best sex of his life, thus far.
He felt nothing, either, about finishing her. It was just something that had felt right at the time. It was an easy kill too and he certainly hadn’t needed a baseball bat or a fish-gutting knife, just his bare hands.
He thought back to the trial at the High Court in Glasgow, all those years ago, as he lay heavy upon the dead whore’s body.
I mean, attempted murder?
That charge in itself was a joke.
Because, if you’re going to do it, you do it, pure and simple.
He hadn’t known Charlene Ferguson, had never met her, or even seen her before.
Nothing.
But, if he’d wanted to kill her, then for sure he would have done it properly. If it had been him, she would have been dead in seconds. There would have been no DNA left behind and no dumb-fuck witness to testify.
In all honesty, the charge was an insult.
Almost as insulting as the fact that his best mates had done him up like a kipper, framing him with the blatant botch-up of a murder.
He would have his moment though.
He would have the last laugh.
His bag was packed and he was finished now in Bangkok. A new fake passport in the name of William Cruikshank, his new alias, had finally came through. It was a thing of beauty, too. Absolutely flawless, amazing what these Thai people could do when it came to fake ID.
Yes, it was time to go back home, for several reasons.
One being that he could end up getting carried away if he stayed in Thailand and end up going on a massive killing spree. Tempting in itself, but he didn’t want to compromise the important plans that he’d already made. It was just a matter time, too, before the Thai Police found the body of this junkie whore that now lay beneath him on the bed.
He would dump her body, out on the street, behind the bins; and, eventually, should would be found.
The last thing he wanted was the pigs sniffing around asking awkward questions about dead whores, or worse, examining the body…finding his sperm…and the DNA of one Frankie Murdoch inside the corpse.
No, he couldn’t hang around.
It was time to head back to Glasgow and have a killing spree there instead.
Chapter 31
The dark mistress & her ways of seduction
Better The Devil you know than The Devil you don’t…
An old-fashioned heater ticked away, all bars blazing.
Tick…tick…tick…
It wasn’t just warming the interview room, but roasting it. Electric filaments burning aglow beneath a synthetic orange hue and a metallic grill that had stood the test of time; rusted and scorched.
The daily shadow, dark and grey, lumbered behind a solitary square window. A dreary picture as the first snow fell upon the residents of Glasgow, shivering and shuffling on the pavements below.
Office workers, surviving the grind.
Students, full of hope.
Immigrants, hard-working.
Hard men, scarred.
Junkies, desperate.
Asylum seekers, looking for better lives.
Elderly men, sleeping rough and touting the Big Issue.
A dynamic saga of human perseverance.
Spare a few ‘bob’ for the homeless, Mister?
It was a desolate sight.
Like a gloomy painting, a panoramic industrial landscape, melancholic and dark. On spoiled canvas, dusky and dank. Crafted by the hand of a sectioned visionary, in a secure cell with four stone walls, but no square window.
Prophetic.
Not of fore-coming festive cheer, but inevitable suffering and certain death.
The blood of the damned, soon to spill.
The square window trembled on loose hinges, shuddering from the outside, absorbing the impact of a blustery gust. It’s frame, once painted white, but now a dirty shade of ivory - blistered and flaking - had been hoisted up a few inches from the sill. It invited a wintery chill, sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, to cut through a dense blanket of air, thick and suffocating.
All bars blazing.
Tick…tick…tick…
Two men in suits sat staring at each other, expectantly, in the unavoidable confines of claustrophobia. One thought carefully about the questions he should ask, whilst the other was haunted by a ghost of death, an image in his mind’s eye. A headless torso, arms and legs chopped off, fished out the River Clyde just yesterday, the only identifying feature to go on being a massive Crucifix tattooed on the dead man’s back. McGreavy could still smell the vile freshness of the bluish, washed-out, putrid corpse.
It made his hairs stand on end.
The thinking one spoke. “Did you have a moment of clarity, that’s what alcoholics call it, isn’t it?” enquired Cameron McLeod, the Strathclyde Police Psychiatrist.
“I�
��m not an alcoholic,” replied DCI Mac McGreavy, the haunted one. “I was a drunk,” he added, matter-of-factly.
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes, a pretty big one, actually.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“Well, can you elaborate, please?”
“Look, the difference is simple. Drunks are Hell-raisers who just love the bottle and don’t know when to stop. Alcoholics, on the other hand, are physically dependant. For them, drinking is an absolute necessity, it controls them. You see, you can be a drunk and stop drinking and no longer be a drunk. But, if you are an alcoholic and stop drinking, you will always be an alcoholic. The difference is subtle, yet drastic. Potentially fatal, if you fall into that latter category and lapse out of recovery. That’s why I said I’m not an alcoholic, but I was a drunk, you follow?”
He nodded his agreeance, enthusiastically, but his squinting eye and wrinkled brow suggested otherwise. “So, there was no specific moment of clarity?”
“No, that sounds too much like self-righteous bullshit to me. Don’t glorify the inglorious McLeod, you could upset the Gods doing a callous thing like that, and that can be bad for a man’s karma. You see, I’m a simple bastard, deep down, so it would help me a lot if you could just try to use simple words, like, perhaps…realisation?”
“OK,” agreed McLeod. “So, you came to some kind of realisation?”
“No.”
“Sorry?” McLeod’s face recoiled impatiently, pained in frustration.
“I didn’t come to it, it came to me.”
“What did?”
McGreavy thought for a few seconds, before answering. “A sobering jolt, McLeod,” he grinned at the Psychiatrist, seemingly satisfied by such a concise choice of words. “Scribble that down in your notebook, by the way, good shrink material that is,” he smirked briefly but swiftly regained a composure of gravity. “You see, the danger of being a drunk is that the persistence of your habit may lead you down a much more dangerous path, albeit unwittingly. That was a frightening realisation, McLeod…”
“Were you suicidal?” the Psychiatrist interjected, abruptly.
“Would you bloody let me finish?” he snapped back at the young man, putting him in his place. “No, I wasn’t suicidal, but I know that such darkness can seduce a man dressed as a beautiful mistress. She seduces, not with sex, but the beautiful addiction. It was her - that dark mistress - the raw power of her cask-strength seduction made me want to stop. I was afraid, you see, of being powerless to her. Whatever, that was your so-called moment of clarity,” the last three words were drawn out, theatrically, with a grandiose gesture of open arms.
“You have quite a way with words, Inspector. And, what else?”
“And, nothing else. That’s it, I’ve quit.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes, just like that,” McGreavy subdued the snap of his rhetoric and resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. He tolerated the lad, with patience, as one might entertain a simple child. All the while, it was fundamentally clear who was the smartest man in the room.
“What’s to say you don’t go back to the drink, let’s say as soon as you leave this room?”
“Why, are you gettin’ a round in?” the Inspector smirked but could see that the younger man didn’t appreciate the joke. “Honestly, there is no such thing in life as absolute certainty. Words are just words, McLeod. I can’t say anything for sure. My strength today can be my weakness tomorrow, it’s the eternal curse of mortality, my friend. But, if I do go back to the drink, it will be on my terms. Purely because I want it, but never because I need it, but I will be in control.”
The Psychiatrist huffed, a weary exhalation of acceptance and defeat, he knew it was all bollocks. The Inspector would never be in control of his drinking and he would most definitely go back to it. He did respect the man, though, for his brutal attempt at honesty and his unusual capacity for self-appraisal, but the fact of the matter was - McGreavy was a TIME BOMB - waiting to blow.
Drunk or sober, he was a Hell-raiser.
But, it didn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. McLeod knew what he had to do - sign him off - FIT FOR DUTY. At the end of the day, the Force needed him, even though he was a liability.
A risk.
But, when it came to the business of crime and murder, nobody could replace DCI Mac McGreavy. Not in Scotland, nor in Great Britain; and for that, he was widely held in the highest esteem. As the man himself had once told a superior, as a young Police Constable. “You can like me or hate me, Sir. But, sooner or later, you will respect me.”
That was to be his destiny, for better or worse.
Chapter 32
The bookkeeper
Sometimes, when The Devil knocks on your door, it’s best to let him in…
The office was almost empty.
“That’s me off, see you on Monday,” said Mary Barrowman, placing a fresh cup of coffee down on her Boss’s desk.
“Aye, have a good one sweetheart, say hello to your old man,” said Stan ‘The Bookkeeper’ Ferris, peering up over the top of his thick frames as he wished his secretary well for the weekend. She’d be off on a ‘dirty’, up Loch Lomond or somewhere like that and he’d still be cooped up in here, slogging away on Arthur McConnell’s casino accounts, the most important of all his accounts.
You see, running a legitimate gambling establishment is a key move for any enterprising gangster, never mind a kingpin. All that dirty cash coming in off the street from drugs, prostitution and armed robbery was easily placed into the hands of select members of the Syndicate, who in turn spent their days buying chips and fluttering money away at the tables. No surprise, they seldom won, and if they did the winnings were handed over on the way out and put into the safe in Arthur’s office. A simple, but effective, way of processing street cash so that Arthur could continue to present himself to the people of Scotland as a respectable businessman whilst the foot soldiers got their hands dirty.
Stan’s job was simply to keep the books in order.
It was around twenty years ago now when the tall, well-dressed gentleman walked into his old practice on Sauchiehall Street.
“Do you remember me from school, Stanley?” the shadowy figure had asked, taunting him.
Of course he remembered Arthur, they all did. He’d left school to work the pubs and clubs as a doorman but soon became notorious as one of the toughest minders in the city, a man capable of extreme levels of violence, willing to kill for those he protected. In time, it was recognised that Arthur also had a head for business and would soon put himself forward as a contender in the ranks of organised crime; as a proper gangster.
Soon he was running a few places of his own and from the outset his mission was to take the ‘number one’ spot.
That meant going to war with all those who stood in his way.
It meant abduction, torture, contract killings.
Beatings, stabbings, drive-by shootings.
It meant burning people alive, chopping their heads off, throwing them in the Clyde with concrete boots.
It meant everything and it meant nothing.
“Well I remember you, Stanley. Thing is, I need an accountant to keep my affairs in order, someone I can trust. How’s the wife and kids, by the way?” he had this way of threatening you without having to do or say anything directly. Never swore or raised his voice or used any violent talk. Didn’t have too, his actions and reputation spoke louder than any words ever could. The mere fact that he wanted to talk to you, itself, would be enough of a threat. You see, that’s how it is with a Godfather and even back then, everybody knew it, you couldn’t say no to him without expecting there to be grave consequences.
And, here he was, twenty years down the line - a gaunt skeleton of a man who was scared shitless of his own shadow. Stan laid down his gold-plated Cross pen and went to grab the hot mug of coffee but something made him flinch.
A sudden
noise.
A bang, from back in the kitchenette. “Hello! Somebody back there?”
Something didn’t feel right.
He felt it in his gut, without question, a dreadful sense of panic.
A sudden feeling of solitude and anxiety.
It was like being alone in a graveyard on a foggy night.
Lost.
Scared.
Nowhere to run.
Was he just being paranoid?
The staff were all gone.
There could be nobody else here.
It was just him, alone, or so he thought.
He surveyed the area with darting eyes before bringing his focus back to the small room in the corner. He focussed on his breathing and with a wavering arm he blindly reached for one of the drawer handles.
The drawer that held the thing.
The thing he hoped he would never have to reach for.
Such is life.
You live in fear of a gunman that never comes. Until the day that he does and the fear turns into a living nightmare. One where the walls get painted in blood, your blood. He tensed his jaw upon opening the drawer as it grinded on unoiled hinges and he swore silently, cringing.
And, there it was.
His pulse quickened at the mere sight of it, a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. Fully loaded with nameless bullets, had been for years. Just sitting there, waiting to be fired in anger. He’d never shot a gun, never mind killed anyone.
Fuck.
Would he even have the balls, to pull the trigger?
He wasn’t made for murder, or prison, he was just an accountant for fuck sake. Perhaps, in the face of it he would choose death instead, just lower his weapon and wait for the bullet. His one-way ticket, to the freedoms of Hell. Like those KGB agents with their suicide pills, the ones who would opt for certain death in the face of a torturous enemy.
But, this wasn’t Russia, or America.
This wasn’t the Cold War.
This was Glasgow.
And if things got hot it was whoever pulled the trigger first that would be walking out of here tonight. You can do it, the voice inside him said, just take the gun and blow his fuckin’ heid’ aff’. Yes, that’s it, he would just blast the guy and Arthur would send somebody in to help - a ‘cleaner’ - to make the body vanish.