by Ryan Green
Fixing up the mess he had made in the campervan wasn’t going to be quick or cheap, and having it out of action meant that Angus had lost one of the main weapons in his arsenal. Life had gone in an instant from being a pleasure cruise to a hard grind once again. He needed money and he needed release. His fairly lucrative business supplying nude models to Eddie Cotogno was starting to dry up, with the old man getting more and more reluctant to hand over cash for the few girls that Angus was delivering. Without the campervan, transporting the girls to Eddie was getting too complicated, and even if he did manage to snare a girl, in his current agitated state he would be as likely to take her for himself as sell her along. Acting out like that was a good way to get caught and Angus had no intention of ever going back to jail. Not when the world was full of such sweet and easily plucked fruit. He had to control himself, and the easiest way to do that was to keep himself out of situations where he might be tempted.
His ‘fishing trips’ with Gordon had wound down over the last few weeks, ending entirely when the campervan was put out of action. Gordon got the impression that he had failed some sort of test, and that Angus didn’t consider him cool anymore, but he was so scared of the man it was almost a relief to get away from him. He didn’t let any of this slip to Sarah of course, he just said that the cold weather had made fishing into a chore and went on lavishing his usual praise on her husband.
Without the cash from Cotogno, and with the drudgery of regular working life looking as appealing as it ever had, Angus fell back on his old favourite money maker as a way to vent some of his violent impulses while also moving towards his goal: muggings. He committed a string of brutal attacks around the estates of Glasgow, never even giving people the chance to hand over their cash before stabbing them or beating them unconscious. He soon lost count of how many of these vicious attacks he had committed, and despite his business interests earning little-to-no money over the last few years, Angus always had enough money for a new car, a deposit on a new house or to cover his skyrocketing bar tabs. Before long he had the money to refurbish his campervan, but he went on mugging while he waited for the repairs to be completed as a means to alleviate the other, internal, pressures.
Mary Gallacher was just 17 years old when she left her family home in Glasgow to go and visit a pair of friends a few streets over. She didn’t bother with a coat despite the chill because she was only going to be outside for a few minutes, taking a shortcut over to Avonspark Street. She had no way of knowing what was lying in wait for her in the waste-ground between the streets of Springburn. Angus had been out hunting fruitlessly for most of the early evening. The only other people he had seen risking this well-tread shortcut had been in groups, or homeless, and while there might have been some fun to be had stabbing some useless old codger, there was no way they were going to have any money, and mugging was ostensibly still what he was doing. If he was out here just for the fun of hurting people then that would make him sick and twisted, but robbing people was normal, even if it did feel good. He had met plenty of perverts in prison, people who had wires crossed and did sick things because it got their motors running. He wasn’t like that. He wasn’t willing to be one of them. He did what he had to do to get what he wanted but what he wanted was the same perfectly normal thing that every other man wanted. He was sure of that.
He forgot all of that justification almost instantly the moment that Mary came into sight. He felt stirrings in his gut, and his hand tightened around the hilt of the knife hidden in his pocket. She might not have any money, but she had something that he needed even more. It didn’t matter that there was nowhere to go. It didn’t matter that the sun had only just dipped below the horizon. He wanted her, and he was going to have her. He followed her across the waste-ground, stalking her like a wild animal following its prey, stepping softly and keeping quiet until she was close enough to touch. At the last moment, when they were almost touching, he pulled out the knife and pressed it against her back with a growl. She let out a yelp of surprise before he could clamp his hand over her mouth. He leaned in so close that his breath was tickling across her cheek. ‘Make another noise and you are dead. Do what I say, and you get to walk away alive. Got it?’
She froze for a long moment, then nodded, pressing against his grip with each movement. Angus grinned. ‘Start walking. That way.’
He led her further out into the empty space where construction was yet to begin. A desolate land of abandoned furniture, half-stolen building supplies and toppled fences. When he felt sure that they were far enough out, he twisted her around and pushed her down to the ground. In the dim light, he loomed over her like an obelisk, barking orders. ‘Strip.’
Mary started to cry but he took a step closer, letting the moonlight shimmer off the blade of his knife. ‘Take off your kit or you’re never going home.’
Mary fell into quiet sobs, her shoulders shuddering as she slowly pulled up her top. Angus’ grin threatened to take the top off his head. Her pale skin looked ghostly in the moonlight. Her face was so deep in shadows that it looked like a skull. He grabbed her by the hair and tilted her head back, a brief spike of anxiety washing away when the light played over her features. Tears were streaming down her cheeks in a pale shimmer. He yanked the straps of her bra off her arms and dragged it painfully down around her waist as she tried desperately not to scream.
‘Take off the trousers.’
She managed to splutter, ‘Why?’
‘Why do you think? Take them off or I’ll cut them off.’
With shaking fingers, she unbuttoned them and pushed them down. He grabbed one of the legs and yanked as hard as he could, but it just caused Mary to topple over. He tugged on them again and again, dragging her bare back across the rough ground and drawing more screams from her. He got them off and dropped down on top of her, crushing her into the stony ground and driving the air out of her lungs.
She slapped him, almost accidentally, as she flailed around and for a moment he froze. She hit him again as he fumbled with her underwear, then she hooked her fingers into claws and raked them across his face as he pushed inside her. It was his turn to scream. One of her nails scraped over his eye and he tried to jerk away. Now that he was on top of her, now that the worst was already happening, all her fear seemed to have left her. She started to scream at the top of her lungs, she beat him around the head with her fists as he tried to rape her.
‘Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. You’re ruining everything,’ he growled at her, but she couldn’t hear him over her own hoarse shrieking. She scraped her nails down his neck, drawing blood, and that was enough. His fury erupted. He was only allowed one thing in this world, one moment of satisfaction and she was ruining it. Why couldn’t she just do what she was meant to do? Why wouldn’t she just submit?
She bellowed right in his ear, ‘Help! Help me!’
Fear blossomed up inside of Angus, strangling his lust and anger before they could even truly form. She was being too loud. She was going to draw attention. He should never have done this out here. He should have just waited until it was safe. Until he had somewhere safe to take her. This was stupid. He was going to get caught. He was going to go back to jail.
He started to wilt, and that just gave Mary more confidence. She dug her fingers into his eye, she bit his hand when he tried to muffle her screaming and every little interruption made it more difficult for him to keep going. He fell back off of her and felt something soft under his hand instead of the mud and grit he expected. Her trousers. He lunged forward again, with his new garotte in hand. He wrapped the leg of the trousers around her throat and as she gurgled and choked he felt his strength and vigour returning. He thrust down into her like he was trying to drive her under the earth. Like he was trying to bury her alive. He could hear himself think again. He could hear his own laboured and ragged breathing. Now that silence had fallen again it was as though his sense of hearing had become hyperacute. He was straining to hear anything that might be going on. Straining for
the first sign of danger. He was still distracted. He still couldn't enjoy himself. She had ruined it. He hammered into her harder. Her dragged the trouser leg tighter around her throat, but no matter how much he choked the life out of her she still pushed against him. She still made gurgling sounds that sounded deafening in his ears. It wasn't enough. He still wasn't in control. He fumbled around on the ground beside her until his fingers brushed over the sharp edge of his knife. He dragged it over her throat and waited for the usual bliss to wash over him, but it never came.
Blood soaked into the trouser leg but somehow, she was still moving. Still making the wet gargling sounds that were echoing out across the barren land and back from the sides of the abandoned, half-made buildings scattered all around them. Her eyes were still open. She was still glowering at him, even as her hot blood spurted out all over his hands. She was still alive. He could see her hands balling into his fists. She was going to hit him again. He hated her. He hated every inch of her. He regretted the moment he had laid eyes on her. She had ruined everything. He cut into her neck again, deeper this time. Still she writhed beneath him. He cut again and again. Finally, he dragged himself up her body and put his full weight behind the blade. He cut so deeply that the knife scraped over bone and finally she stopped fighting him. He let out a shuddering breath and felt all the strength leaving his body. He collapsed on top of the rapidly cooling corpse and sobbed. Relief washed over him, but not release. She had stolen that from him. She had made him kill her for nothing. He forced himself to get up and fasten up his clothes, but that was all that he had the energy for. She had ruined everything. All of the confidence. All of the power that he had been gathering around himself since he left prison had been stripped away. He felt like the terrified child that he had been back when he first started touching little girls. He could feel all the eyes of the world on him. Seeing him for what he was. Seeing the terrible things that he had done. He staggered away from Mary’s corpse without a backward glance. He broke into a stumbling run as soon as he could draw a breath. She had ruined everything.
Living in Fear
Even with the campervan back in action and his wife’s suspicions fading away to almost nothing, Angus still couldn’t bring himself to abduct another woman. He was a coward at heart, and while he had managed to convince both himself and those around him that he was well adjusted and confident, those things could not be further from the truth. Even his muggings, the only outlet that he had for all of his aggressive sexual energies, began to drop in number as he lost his confidence. Eventually, he resorted to the same route that weak and cowardly men have throughout history when they needed to feel powerful again. He bought a handgun.
While gun ownership was still legal in Scotland after the Firearms Act of 1968, it was restricted to those who had a license to own a weapon—generally, rural workers who would need the weapon for their work or members of fairly elite gun clubs. Angus wasn’t a farmer, he didn’t go to a rifle club, and if you had asked him about clay pigeons he probably would have assumed it was slang for some sort of drug. He purchased his gun from a man in a pub, entirely illegally, and stored it in the campervan, as a totem of strength more than as an actual tool—he never actually pointed it at another person as long as he owned it.
Without the confidence to abduct and murder women, Angus was becoming more and more withdrawn and miserable. His already paper-thin façade of civility to his neighbours began to fray and his relationship with his wife suffered to the point where he was spending half of his time living with his sickly brother rather than with his family. He knew that if he didn’t do something soon, he was going to have a dangerous outburst that would likely land him back in prison.
He returned to doing what he knew best. He would travel around the housing estates, using his ice-cream van as cover, and lure young girls into the closes of tenements where he would brutally rape them. He used a variety of methods and lies to snare the girls, being careful not to link anything back to his ice cream selling business. A favourite trick was to claim he had lost his dog and needed the girl to check in the close for it while he searched the street. He even carried a leash to accentuate the lie. Every week he would go out hunting and almost as often, he would find a young girl between the ages of six and fourteen, about the same age as his own son, and have his way with her. Before long, even he lost count of how many girls he had molested and raped. When questioned about it by the police, decades later, he said that it could have been fifty or five hundred.
One of the more unusual reports about the way he was hunting his victims didn't come until decades later when his face was recognised in a newspaper by someone who had been a little girl at the time. She claimed that Angus had approached her in his car outside the school, trying to convince her to get inside. Obviously, Angus was known to the police by this point in his life, and there were a great many people about, so he was forced to adopt a disguise. According to this witness, Angus was wearing a sundress and had caked makeup on over his usual dark stubble to try and pass himself off as a woman. The girl at the time had been too mesmerized by the strange juxtaposition of what was obviously a man speaking in a falsetto voice to get the idea that he could be dangerous in any way. She almost got into the car with him out of pure curiosity before her mother spotted her and Angus sped away. If this cross-dressing was normal for Angus, it might explain what he had been doing with all of the clothing that he had stolen from his victims as trophies through the years, but in all likelihood this story is just one of the many folk tales that spread out in the wake of Angus' capture and the public interest in the case.
It became commonplace for Angus, and with time he was able to get his compulsions back under control and draw his family back together once again. His family moved in with Maimie in a semi-detached house in Glasgow, along with his sister’s daughter Heather. Maimie was now in her 70s and her health was beginning to deteriorate to the point that she needed almost daily assistance.
The rapes and molestations were all being reported to the police, but without any evidence to draw the cases together, they had no reason to suspect that they were all the actions of a single sick man. It was enough to keep Angus behaving like a sane man on normal days, but when he was put under pressure, his true nature would come out.
Eddie Cotogno had been a steady source of income over the years, and now with his other hobbies lapsed, Angus began to spend more time with the old man and learning about photography. Angus’ interest extended beyond simply snapping pictures. Like Eddie, he wanted to be able to develop any photographs that he took without having to worry about the curious eyes of the local pharmacist. The old man had taken the time to teach him how to develop black and white pictures quite early in their partnership, but with more free time, Angus was now pushing him to teach him how to develop colour. Eddie had more important things to do, so he kept fobbing the man off with excuses. He had no idea that Angus had become a ticking time bomb without the steady release that abducting and murdering women had granted him.
Angus still did his best to introduce as many girls to Eddie as possible, and to take as many pictures as he could. Without so many of them being consumed by his own appetites the volume of women that he presented to the pornographer began to climb once more, as did the variety of ‘special projects’ he was able to complete for his partner in crime. Eddie was pleased, but he also wanted to teach the younger man a lesson about respect, so he began to pay less for each girl than he had before the slump and gave Angus a smaller cut from the payments that they were receiving in exchange for their more exotic pictures. Angus noticed immediately, but he didn’t confront Eddie, as he still hoped to draw the secret of colour photo development out of him, presumably so that he could cut the old man out of the deal altogether. Angus was trying to keep him sweet, while Eddie was trying to antagonise the young man into saying something so that he could slap him down for abandoning him during the long dry spell.
This went on for months until eve
ntually, Angus’ temper got the better of him. The argument started with yet another excuse from Eddie about why he didn’t have the time to teach someone as simple as Angus about the complex chemical procedures required to develop colour pictures, but soon it escalated into a screaming match about the reduced payments and every other slight that Angus thought that the old man had sent his way. Eddie still did not know who he was dealing with. So, he snapped back at Angus without a second thought, tearing into him about the low quality and quantity of ‘raw materials’ he was providing and excusing his reduced payments as a result of those shortcomings. He finally got to pour out all of his anger about the long months when Angus had abandoned him, leaving him with no models and no hope of fulfilling his special orders. Angus had no answer for this torrent of abuse, so he resorted to his fists. Eddie was nearly as old as Angus’ frail old mother and he suffered from numerous health complaints of his own. It was no surprise that he couldn’t stop Angus as the man beat him to the ground, seized Eddie’s camera and began clubbing him to death with it.
Even when Eddie was dead and twitching on the floor, it still wasn’t enough for Angus. He tore through the house, gathering up all of the old man’s filthy pictures and scattering them all around his corpse for the whole world to find. It was the greatest punishment that Angus could think of. To make the whole world see what Eddie had been doing. To shame him, the way that Angus had been shamed in the courtroom. It only took a few minutes for Angus to calm down and realise how stupid he was being. He couldn’t leave the corpse just lying in the middle of the living room, waiting to be found and to whisper all its secrets to the forensics team that would investigate the murder. He had to cover it up. Luckily, in the black room that occupied most of the ground floor, there were a multitude of hazardous—and highly flammable—chemicals that he could use.