Sinclair

by Ryan Green

  Sinclair

  The World’s End Murders through the Eyes of a Killer

  by Ryan Green

  © Copyright Ryan Green 2018. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.

  Disclaimer

  This book is about real people committing real crimes. The story has been constructed by facts but some of the scenes, dialogue and characters have been fictionalised.

  Polite Note to the Reader

  This book is written in British English except where fidelity to other languages or accents are appropriate. Some words and phrases may differ from US English.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Early Days

  A Reformed Character

  Frances Barker

  Anna Kenny

  Hilda McAuley

  The World’s End

  Agnes Cooney

  Mary Gallacher

  Living in Fear

  Cold Cases

  Trial and Jeopardy

  Conclusion

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  Introduction

  It was close to ten o’clock, but the night was still young. Christine’s heels were clattering on the cobblestones as she marched them down the Royal Mile to the last pub of the evening. The chill of an autumn night was being held off by the warmth of bodies in the city but even the gin in their stomachs couldn’t keep the streets dry. Helen kept slipping on the cobbles, clinging to Christine’s arm and cackling every single time her ankle almost turned. Both girls were swaying to distant music, still following them along from the last bar. Up ahead were the old gates to the city, now long worn away to nothing but a scattering of brass cobbles across the street. There used to be a warning up on those gates that there was nothing beyond them. That this street was at the end of the world. Helen’s world didn’t stretch much further than the end of the street at the moment either. She was wrapped in a cloud of warmth, laughter and an alcoholic haze. Her whole world wasn’t much bigger than her and the echoes of Christine’s heels.

  Beyond that bubble of warmth, the city lay sleeping. The old town was still a hubbub of drunken antics and music, but further out the streets lay dark, damp and silent. For an instant, Helen’s stomach turned over looking down that street into nothingness. It was always there, just out of sight. Even beneath their feet, beneath the cobbles that were ringing out the sounds of their passage, there were dark catacombs cut into the very stone beneath the city, capturing the strange echoes and calls from above and reverberating with forgotten secrets. For a moment, Helen’s steps faltered, the smile slipped from her face—for one awful moment she felt the darkness pressing in all around her and the cold slipped in past her defences to send a shiver up her back. Then she heard it. The door to the pub swung open and the song pulsed out, wiping that moment of realisation away in a flood of giggles. The song had been following them from pub to pub all along the mile. Christine started to sing along, ‘Yes sir, I can boogie…’

  Helen collapsed into another fit of giggles in her friend’s arms, trying to join in as they swayed towards the inviting glow of the pub and the billow of blue smoke that escaped each time the door was opened. They shimmied through the door together cracking up as they tried to sing: 'If you stay it can’t be wrong…’

  They had to wait in the doorway for a long moment as a group pressed out, heading to one of the dozen other pubs in spitting distance, or heading home from the way that some of the girls were melting in the men’s arms. There was a pair of girls with the very same dresses on as Christine and Helen. Their hair was practically the same too. All four of them froze in place looking at their doppelgangers, then they burst out laughing and moved along. It was a small world with only a few shops where you could get a cheap dress to wear out on a Saturday night—this was hardly the first time this had happened. They were lucky to have a night out when one of their friends wasn’t wearing the same dress. It wasn’t strange enough to even remember once they were through the door and enveloped in the cigarette smoke and music. There was an atmosphere in the World’s End that you couldn’t find anywhere else on the mile. The pub was older than radio, the staff knew every one of their regulars by name. It felt like home in a way that the other pubs didn’t. At seventeen, Helen and Christine hadn’t been going to pubs for very long but of all the ones that they had tried, this was probably their favourite. The crowd wasn’t much different from the usual Saturday night, a hundred and fifty people crammed in until you barely had room to move for all the elbows. They were starting to trickle out now that it was getting closer to closing time, so the girls had to push against the flow of bodies to get to the bar and get a drink. The crowd was like a living, heaving ocean that could dash you against the rocks if you fought it or part around you gently if you knew how to swim through it. In the swirl of faces it took them a few minutes to find a familiar landmark, and even when they found their friends there wasn’t enough room at their table, so they were forced to linger, brushing up against the crowds as they moved through. Helen made her way to one of the raw stone walls, a relic of the old city that had somehow survived the centuries. She leaned her head back against it and let the cool steady presence of the stone seep into her and calm the spinning in her head. The music wasn’t as loud in here as in the other pubs. The World’s End was where you came to wind down at the end of the night or to get something decent in your stomach at the beginning. It was a little island of peace in all the chaos of a Saturday night on the town. A drunk in a leather jacket dashed past her towards the bathroom making retching noises. Peace was a relative term.

  She only had a moment to calm herself before her friends Toni and Jackie pushed through to get her attention, Christine following along at their heels looking hopeful. Toni leaned in close enough to be heard over the hundred conversations around them, ‘Alright, hen?’

  Helen gave her a smile and a nod. She was already a little hoarse from all the smoke in the last three pubs and didn’t want to yell over the racket in here without good cause. Toni came even closer, the tang of cider on her breath. ‘We’re going along to a party next, do you two want to come too? Should be some fit lads. Some dancing.’

  Helen chuckled. ‘Sorry love, I’m knackered, this is the end of the line for me.’

  Christine clucked. ‘Might get your second wind yet.’

  ‘Maybe next time, eh?’ Helen demurred.

  Toni rolled her eyes and grabbed Jackie by the arm before she could become a stick in the mud too. ‘Yeah, maybe. See you later.’

  The boy in the leather jacket came past again in Toni’s wake, trying to smile at them and just looking nervously queasy. The girls collapsed into giggles before he was out of sight. Christine had to lean on the wall too, to keep from falling under the weight of her laughter. Between gasps, she choked out, ‘What is wrong with men?’

  Helen put her face in her hands. ‘I swear…’

  From beyond the protection of her fingers, she heard a rumbling voice. ‘Can I buy you drink?’

  Christine burst out laughing all over again, but Helen managed a coy smile before waggling her full glass at the poor guy. His shoulders were already slumped in defeat. She tried to soften the blow.

  ‘Maybe later, eh?’

  He was mumbling as he backed away, but that brought a little smile to his face and he gave her a cheeky wink before vanishing into the crowd. In about five minutes Helen would forget what his face looked like, and he would probably have
found some girl who was thirstier. Christine hooked her arm through Helen’s elbow and dragged her off the wall. ‘Come on hen, I’m not standing around all night.’

  There were a lot of familiar faces in the crowd—some of them were friends, some were just such a regular feature in the nightlife of Edinburgh that their absence would have been noted, and once in a while, there was a boy in the crowd who had spent the night flirting with them. One of the disposable men that they might have kissed or might have just smiled at, men who had been forgotten about by Sunday morning. Near the back of the bar by the public telephones, they found themselves a table for two that had just been abandoned. There was still a cigarette butt smouldering in the ashtray, marked around its filter with scarlet lipstick. Christine stubbed it out along with her own and they settled in for a chat. Back here it was quieter and most of the heavy flirting was happening around them. Everywhere you looked there were hands resting on bared knees and the couple at the table in the corner were probably going to be chucked out before they were arrested for being indecent in public. The girls took it all in with a giggle and enjoyed each other’s company. They had been best friends since they were in school and even without the social lubricant that they were sipping, the conversation had always flowed easily for them. A pair of men sidled up to their table before long and here in this warm and happy place, it felt perfectly natural to chat with them. One of them had his hair cut short, and he had patches on his pockets that made Helen think he was a builder. The other one, the one who couldn’t keep his eyes off Christine, had a big black moustache like Burt Reynolds. They were older than the boys that you usually met on a Saturday night, more mature and confident. That self-assurance and the fact that they weren’t too painful on the eyes was enough to win Helen over. The men bought them their drinks and they chatted away happily with them until the bell rang for last orders. All the tiredness that had been dogging Helen’s steps along the Royal Mile had faded away, just as Christine predicted, and she found herself feeling sorry that the night was over, feeling a pang of regret that she hadn’t taken Toni up on her offer of a party. The drinks had been flowing steadily since they arrived, so she was happy to take a hand up when it was offered to her. The radio had cycled around again and ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ was playing once more. The girls wiggled their way across the room, arms flailing, and heads thrown back through the chorus. The crowd parted around them with a rippling wave of laughter and the men, their dates, couldn’t keep amused expressions off their faces. Christine wrapped her arms around Helen and they both boogied their way out the door.

  They made their exit with all of the same grace with which they had arrived in the World’s End. Christine tripped and stumbled as they came out of the pub, saved from landing face down in the gutter by one of the policemen who patrolled this stretch of town at closing time for pretty much that express purpose. She thanked him profusely and he handed her back into the waiting arms of the man behind her. ‘What do you say girls, shall we give you a lift home?’

  Helen chewed her lip. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘We’ll take you anywhere you want to go.’

  Christine met her gaze and Helen let her happiness get the better of her. A smile spread over her best friend’s face as she said, ‘Oh go on then.’

  They headed off down St. Mary’s Lane with their arms linked, still laughing at some stupid joke from the bar. Both of them chattering, warm and filled with so much life it was practically overflowing. Why shouldn’t she take a lift from a couple of nice guys? It wasn’t like she was going alone, Christine would keep her right, even if they had both had a bit too much to drink. They had nothing to fear and everything to look forward to. After all, they had their whole lives ahead of them.

  Early Days

  The Second World War had wrought death and destruction on the world on a scale that was unimaginable, and one month after it came to an end in Europe the true atrocities that had been committed were still being uncovered. It would take the world decades to come to terms with the evil that had been done, but for many people, this was considered a time of great hope. The war was over and now a new peace could be forged, a lasting peace that would persist through the rest of humanity’s time on this planet. Many babies were born in 1945 as a resurgence of hope spread around the world and people started to rebuild. How ironic that one of those babies of hope was Angus Sinclair.

  Angus Senior and Maimie Sinclair lived in Glasgow. Angus Junior was their third child. They had resided in a tenement flat on St Peter’s Street in Glasgow for over a decade and they were well known in the local community. Angus Senior was a joiner from Stirling who was often called on to help with odd jobs in the block. Maimie came from a long line of miners, the first of her clan to migrate to the city with hopes of a brighter future than lungs full of coal dust were likely to provide. Glasgow in the post-war years was far from the bright and bustling metropolis of today. You could not see six feet away from you thanks to the cloying smog, and the tenements where the Sinclairs lived were densely packed fire traps where the poor of the city were hidden from more civilised eyes. Despite Angus Senior’s much needed manual skills and ceaseless hunt for work, the family were always on the edge of starvation but for the ongoing rationing ensuring that they got the minimum they needed to live. Despite that, Angus was a happy child, playing with his older siblings and the children in the street. The lack of nutrition stunted his growth, so he was always the smallest child his age, and he wasn’t well liked among the rough and rowdy neighbourhood children, mainly being tolerated for the sake of his brother and sister.

  When Angus was four things took a turn for the worse. His father had been getting more and more tired and worn down over the course of the last few months, and while the family assumed it was caused by his work hours and the sudden cutback in available food after rationing was ended, the doctors disagreed, diagnosing Angus Senior with chronic leukaemia. For the next two years, Angus Senior weakened and withered, losing his job, spending more and more time in bed and eventually becoming Maimie’s full-time responsibility. She nursed him through the final two years of his life as the illness stole any trace of vitality from him and left him as little more than a living skeleton. Young Angus watched all of this without a word, although his mother would later claim that he missed his father terribly in the years that followed. His concerns were less mortal and more practical at the time. He had been attending Grove Street Primary School, directly opposite his tenement, for over a year by the time his father died and during that time he had not made a single friend. He was relentlessly bullied for being the smallest in the class, for being a little bit slower than his classmates and, ultimately, for his poor social skills. His older sister Connie was something of a social butterfly, but Angus became introverted and quiet in the face of the abuse until eventually he barely spoke at all.

  The people from his street and the tight-knit local community came to recognise his strangeness but attributed it to his unfortunate family circumstances. It would not be until later that they recognised the signs of the burgeoning monster living amongst them. Even his family ignored his increasing detachment from the world, with his mother still describing him as a ‘good boy’ until he started to attend secondary school several years later. When he became a teenager, he began to go through the usual changes that puberty brought, but when his sexual appetites began to develop, they had no healthy outlet. All of the boys picked on him and all of the girls ignored him. He became fixated on sex as a cure-all for his unhappy and unsatisfying life and his fantasies became more and more violent, focused entirely on dominating and punishing the girls who wouldn’t give him a second thought. In school, he was a failure both in his studies and in his social life, with one of the teachers bluntly describing him as being ‘not a simpleton, but of below average intelligence.’ In his frustration with life he began to act out, and at the age of thirteen, he had his first brush with the law.

  Maimie trudged to the door, weigh
ed down by the laundry of three perpetually filthy children. The all-too-familiar triple knock of the police came again. She let out a sigh and dumped the armful of washing onto the bed. She wasn’t even surprised when she saw Angus between the two policemen, just resigned. ‘What’s he done this time?’

  After a second of silence, one of the police rapped his knuckles off the back of Angus’ head. ‘He was caught stealing ma’am. Nicked the offerings box right out of a church.’

  Angus grumbled, but a quick slap around the back of his head silenced him again. He scowled furiously at his mother’s feet. The policeman prodded the boy forward. Angus was sporting a black eye. ‘We won’t be pressing any charges, but if we catch him at it again there’s going to be more trouble than a wee whack will fix.’

  Maimie’s breath caught in her throat. ‘He’s no getting charged?’

  The policemen glanced at each other and shrugged. ‘It’s a Catholic church. Once the Fenians got their money back they didn’t care. But we won’t forget about this anytime soon. That boy needs to get his head sorted or it is going to go very badly for him.’

  Angus still didn’t say a word. He tugged himself free of the policemen’s grip and brushed past Maimie on his way into the house. She had tears in her eyes as she mumbled her thanks. This time he wasn’t going to jail, but he was only going to get so many second chances.

  The robberies were just the tip of the iceberg, and while Angus was caught once or twice for breaking into the flats in the local area and ransacking them for valuables, the levels of crime in the tenements were so high that it was hard to assign the blame to a single thirteen-year-old boy when there were dozens of equally likely suspects. The fact that so many of the break-ins were happening in such close proximity to Angus’ home made the police overlook him as a suspect. Not only was he a needle in a haystack, he was also breaking from the known pattern of criminals in the poorest areas of Glasgow at the time. Crime had always happened, but there were strong communities in the tenements, and even the lowest petty criminal didn’t prey on their own people. On the few occasions when he was caught, Angus was given a swift beating and sent home. Criminal proceedings were a lot of trouble, and while Angus was a nuisance to the local police, he was mostly beneath their notice with so much real crime going on. Every time he got away with another robbery, his confidence grew along with his belief that the police would go on overlooking him. With that newfound confidence, he began pursuing his lifelong goals.