by Gavin Graham
She giggled. “Yes, ta’.”
Murdoch got off the bed and removed his shirt. He went to stand with his back to the camera and a give a full-on view of his crucifix tattoo. Yes, he wanted to send somebody a message. After all, he liked to send messages, and he was good at getting them across. He walked back to the bed and took the belt from his jeans, the way his dad used to do it after a night at the pub. Once fully naked, he got back on the bed and mounted her weird-looking rear-end, taking a minute to look again right into the lens of the camera - communicating his message. He smiled, the way he had smiled at the McConnell brothers in court, his ‘evil smile’. He pulled at the belt, outwards, as if testing its tension and suitability for strangulation. “Ready for the Rainbow Show, my sweet little slave?”
She giggled again. “Yes, please, I like rainbows.”
He smiled again at how dense she really was and with the pin of the buckle he forced the pointy part down into the flesh of her behind. It made her head rise up as she squealed in pain, like a fat little piglet, all young and ugly. That was his time, to strike, as he had enough space to reach under and fixate the belt around her neck and fold it into a noose. He tucked it under and pulled backwards, slightly twisting to the right, so her face was directly facing the camera. He began to pull tightly, squeezing like Hell. He called it The Rainbow Show because of the way the face changes colour during the act of strangulation.
First the cheeks go a nice shade of hot-pink, as the blood shoots up and the skin strains, against the tight-choking of the jugular - the initial phase. The blood then boils, as the pressure rises, and the veins get over-loaded. The hot-pink soon turns a hot-red as the vessels surge on the verge of explosion. That magnificent hue of crimson-cherry spreads around the eye sockets as if the ocular marbles are getting ready to pop out, like in the cartoons; they never did though. The eyes just turn gluey and swollen, quickly taking on a morbid and deathly translucence.
He tightened his cross-over pull at the back-end trapping of her neck.
Oxygen starvation then gives way to the blue-moon phase, like now, and a morbid colour that makes you understand, instantly, where the phrase a ‘deathly-blue’ comes from.
If the killer stays with his victim for just a little while longer he will also get to see the emergence of a beautiful pale-lavender - the death phase. It reminded Murdoch of a soap that his sister had used, called Angelic Lavender, not just because of the colour but because this was the stage where the soul would be given to the Angel of Death.
He just loved to watch it, the evolution of changing shades and facial expressions, as the victim transitioned from conventional three-dimensional space to the dimension of darkness. It was true knowledge, in that moment, of the full spectrum. The very bitter end, that so few get to witness in life, up close.
He relaxed his grip and her dead-lavender face dropped to the mattress. He peeled out the length of his belt from under her neck and let it fall loosely down upon the soft, still-warm spine.
He was happy, in a way, that her suffering was over…
Chapter 39
The Oracle
The spectre of the dead can be a determined breed, sometimes.
Here she was, again, watching him from behind the restaurant window. It was sprayed with an artificial snow that fell short of being particularly warm or festive. She stood out on the slushy Glasgow pavement, invisible to those who passed her.
She wore her favourite bathrobe, the pink one. He had given it to her as a Christmas gift, many years ago. It was the one they had found her in, that day, when she killed herself.
She held a hand up, an open palm, like she wanted to wave but didn’t have the energy.
Her lips were poised for speech, frozen, like she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.
Her shadowy face was white with murky accentuations of blistered blue. A faint, morbid and mottled face; a bleak expression of broken-heartedness in the next dimension. Her dead, taunting eyes were black and swollen, like those of a snake…
“Are you OK, Mac? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Professor Sinclair asked his haunted, sober friend. He saw that he had come over pale, suddenly, and had that all-to-familiar look in his eyes.
One of confusion, desperation and fear.
Grief.
“Sorry, that was a bad choice of words.”
“No, no, you’re alright,” he shook it off, eternally grateful to the pompous Professor for his friendship and understanding. After all, most people would think he was a raving lunatic if they knew that he was regularly visited by the spectre of a dead woman. The one he had just seen out there, standing on the street.
His wife, Mary.
It had all gone downhill after the tragic passing of their son, Robbie, who died after a night out at The Tunnel nightclub in the city centre. A regular night of drinking and dancing with his Uni pals had ended up with some bright spark suggesting they pop a few ecstasy pills and go back to the student digs for an ‘all-nighter’. Robbie had taken a bad turn and they rushed him off to the infirmary.
He died in the ambulance.
Mary hadn’t coped very well and tried to block out the reality of their predicament with a constant intake of gin and sleeping pills. Within a month, his wife had killed herself in a massive overdose, leaving Mac alone to do what he did best - drinking and hunting murderers.
She was gone, but her spirit was surely stuck in no-man’s land, caught up somewhere between the living and the dead.
“How’s your daughter Mac, the beautiful young Marie?” it was a subtle attempt to change his course of thought, onto the living and away from the dead.
“Alistair, what are you doing?” Mac avoided the question and chuckled away in bemusement.
“What?”
“With that bread, that little mixture of oil and vinegar you’ve got there, do they not have any butter in this place?”
“It’s a Mediterranean alternative Mac, much healthier. Give it a try, you might like it. And, more importantly, you might live longer,” explained the Professor, sipping an overly-priced glass of Sauvignon Blanc.
“Well that’s rich coming from you, but I happen to like butter, quite a lot…” McGreavy exploded into a wonderful eruption of laughter. Proper, loud and boisterous laughter. It was the simple things that amused him.
They had been doing this old routine for years now. Mac would get invited to attend one of the Professor’s University lectures and afterwards they would go out for lunch, taking turns at suggesting the place and picking up the bill. For Mac, it was usually a grotty old pub somewhere with sticky floors and flat, piss-warm beer. For the Professor, on the other hand, it was usually more upmarket and fancy, like the trendy wine bar they were in now, where a beer would cost you a tenner and people liked to coat their pretentious focaccia breads with oil and vinegar and a block of butter was nowhere to be seen.
By social class, they were at opposite ends of the spectrum.
An odd pairing, for sure.
Intellectually, however, they were right on par and that was what made for such a solid and rewarding friendship.
Solid, because of a mutual trust that had developed over the course of several years.
Rewarding, because Professor Alistair Sinclair was acutely familiar with the workings of the criminal mind and Police procedure. More so than most Police Investigators, particularly when it came to serial killers. Their lunches, liquid or otherwise, had been instrumental in the solving of several cases over the years and, in this sense, he had become the DCI’s secret weapon. So much so that Mac had nicknamed him ‘The Oracle’.
So, perhaps McGreavy wasn’t really the genius of policing and masterful investigations that people had him figured as; but, he was quite happy to let them think that he was every penny of it. “Oh, you asked about Marie…” he politely recalled the Professor’s question. “She’s a daughter in a million Alistair, a rock. In fact, she’s more like a mother than a daughter,” th
is was true. “I’m honestly not sure how I would have coped without her,” he said, drinking his strong black coffee.
“And, you? Not drinking?” The Professor gestured to the cup. “What on earth has happened? Shall Hell freeze over next?”
“Bloody gout, that’s what happened, it’s been making my life miserable for years. Doc says the only hope I have is to cut back on the sauce, or quit completely.”
“So, you’re actually done with it?”
“Uch, I don’t know. Mary wants me off it too, she told me one night when she appeared outside my living room window. I’ll probably just be off it till I decide that it’s in the best interest of public safety for me to start boozing again,” he smiled with mischief and intent.
“I see they found a body, in the Clyde,” said the Professor, eyes down, carefully picking the bones from a tiny piece of fish.
“None other than Frankie Murdoch. Scotland’s Most Evil Man, as the papers enjoyed calling him. He was released from Barlinnie a few months ago apparently, the sister dropped him at the airport and he was never seen again till his body tuned up in the river.”
“And, it was his body, was it?” the Professor enquired, clearly sceptical.
“They identified him by a distinctive tattoo on his back, a one-of-a-kind tribal design of a Crucifix. Let’s face it, too, there would be no shortage of people wanting to do him in as soon as he got out. Charlene Ferguson was a popular girl and what he did was a vile thing, gutting her genitalia like that and smashing her brains in. Poor girl was left a vegetable.”
Alistair raised a curious eyebrow. “Better then, to let the family believe that it was him, justice done and all that,” he added, chomping on a piece of bread that he’d used to mop up residues of creamy white wine sauce from his plate.
“You’re not buying it, are you?”
“Oh, come one Mac, bodies are not dumped in the Clyde with the intention of being fished out and identified. But that one was. Bodies get thrown in with concrete shoes and the corpse normally rots on the river bed for weeks…or months…it can be years before a body gets fished out. And believe me, if someone was ruthless and professional enough to decapitate Frankie and dismember him, they would surely be careful enough to do it properly and buy him a pair of heavy duty winter shoes, as an early Christmas present, you get my meaning?”
“So, what? Mad Dog fakes his own death and rides off into the sunset to live happily ever after?”
“Whatever went on there, I think somebody planned it, somebody with time on his hands, you get my meaning?”
McGreavy nodded, digesting the possibility that Frankie Murdoch might still be out there, somewhere.
In Glasgow.
Or, some other city.
Far away, perhaps, presumed dead.
Living under a new persona.
With a new name.
A new face, courtesy of a ‘Black Market’ plastic surgeon.
Was it plausible?
It was a little far-fetched, true, but certainly couldn’t be ruled out as a possibility…
Chapter 40
Only the good die young
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the devious say…
The befuddled Inspector stood outside the school gates; 7 am on a biting cold morning.
The body had been dumped at the front gates, on the road, blocking access to and from the school premises.
It was an official crime scene.
The McConnell girl that had gone missing, it was her, unquestionably. Bobby ‘Fat Boy’ McConnell’s Down Syndrome daughter. She’d been dead for a while, killed somewhere else, then dumped here to send Fat Boy a message.
Her neck was black and blue, like it had been squelched with a belt. The initials B.M. were carved on the chest of her naked torso and the genitalia had been cut out with a knife, leaving a blackish-red triangle of exposed innards where she’d been gutted.
“What do you reckon Boss?” asked Jimmy ‘The Swede’ stood to his right side.
He said nothing, but his mind was clearly a barrage of impartial emotions.
“Poor girl, born into the wrong family, and she ends up like this. Just so some plastic gangster can prove a point,” Siobhan interjected, stood on the Inspector’s left.
“Why do you say that?” McGreavy spoke, knowing full well she was right but playing Devil’s advocate for the sake of it.
“B.M. Bobby McConnell? He’s a nasty piece of work and puts himself all over the city with his hookers and drugs, like some kind of Teflon Don. He’d be the easiest one to kill in the McConnell Syndicate, everybody knows it, and plenty of people would happily take him out free of charge.”
“Aye,” said Jimmy. “Siobhan’s right, I reckon Fat Boy is set to take a bullet imminently. This is just a bit of pre-hit emotional torture, to get him right where it hurts.”
“Arthur despises the lad, deep down, I know it. All the brash talk and trying to rule the land with unnecessary violence. Arthur’s not afraid of making enemies, sure, but he always said ‘…you choose your enemies like you choose your friends - carefully’. Fat Boy is hated in this city, he’s killed women and kids just to make people fear him; no other reason.”
“Karma, Boss. It’s a bitch…” Siobhan said, matter-of-factly.
“Isn’t it just,” the Boss concluded, with a painful smirk.
It’s amazing what you can buy in a city like Bangkok.
A new life.
A new career.
He’d had ID cards made up, for example, at the MBK shopping mall. One proving him to be a Detective in the Glasgow CID and another showing him to be a journalist working for the Scotsman newspaper.
He arrogantly swaggered upstairs in the Oasis Sauna, rolling his shoulders from side-to-side as his arms swayed.
It smelled of baby oil.
Sex noises, some faint and some not-so-faint, were easily detectable through the thin walls; it reminded him of his old digs on the Khao San Road in Bangkok. He reached the landing and approached the woman who was a Matron of Whores.
Sat at her desk.
Her job was to collect money from individual punters and fix them up with the girl of their fantasy, enjoying the attention as they peered down into her bosom and the dark depths of her fleshy canyon.
She smiled as he approached, that way that whores do, as a gallus gent swaggers up.
“Alright, darlin’?”
“Aye.”
“Listen, is this where that serial killer’s mum worked?” he asked, brazenly. “You know, Moffat? The Casanova Killer?”
“Who, the fuck, are you? Papers, is it?”
“I’m a true-crime journalist with the Scotsman newspaper, perfectly legit,” he showed his ID. “I’m just doing a wee piece on the Glasgow Tinder murders and I’m offering you a grand in cash to give me the scoop on the killer’s mum, all the dirty little details of who she shagged and in what position, get what I’m saying? I won’t mention your name. Tell me, was she a missionary sort of girl or did she just like to get on top and ride it?”
Her eyes lit up and she pouted her cleavage; her tits deeper than the murderous longing in Lucifer’s gut. They weren’t just large breasts…
No, they were heavy.
Deep and fearsome, waiting to be explored and discovered, for the bold few that were brave enough to launch themselves upon her. The timid need not apply, that much was sure, a testament to the laws of the land.
Big Man’s money for Big Man’s play.
Finally, after gawking at him and flaunting her breasts with a naughty smirk, she spoke. “She did all sorts, kinky stuff too, with young men and older men. She didn’t care, she loved sex and she loved money, although she acted as though she had no other choice. A grand, in cash, is it?”
“Aye, a grand,” he confirmed. “So, tell me, are you up for it?” he asked, with a suggestive hint in his newly-educated brogue, still the hunter he’d always been.
She smiled again, her grin even deeper now, almost
as deep as her heavy-duty bust. “Yeah, I’m always up for it.”
He took Matron back to the cottage, where he’d blown a few faces off, and strangled the wee sizzler.
“Red wine, or sparkling?” he asked, pulling a couple of glasses from an overhead cabinet in the kitchen.
“Aye, a glass of sparkling please, why not? Nowt’ doin’ wae’ the old man and an Uber is always at the ready, eh? Don’t mind getting a wee bit pissed then we can go and have a good shag, eh? A’ like being out here in this little cottage, feels a bit kinky, know what a’ mean?”
He laughed in agreeance before glancing back at her body with an indulgent and lusty stare. “You know what?”
“What?”
“I can’t wait to lay you down in my bed, slide a finger deep inside you and get my tongue all over your tits.”
“God, I can’t wait either…I can’t wait to feel your cock inside me too.”
He entertained her and revelled in the sheer callousness of her sexuality. It was true, he lusted for her body, but he also lusted for the breakage of her skull.
As Murdoch poured the wine, taking care to tilt the glass and temper the ferocious bubbles, she pulled off her top and unlatched a rose-patterned bra at the back. Her skin was pale and she had no tattoos, just a plump tummy and a diamond piercing in her belly button.
She did have a fine body; big and lush.
She stood before him and sensually massaged her own fleshy folds and she smiled, looking down, as she noticed something move inside his trousers; a large, twitching erection. “This will be our wee secret, yeah?” she met him eye-to-eye, once again. “My husband is a gangster, a very violent and jealous man, does that bother you?”
“Not in the slightest, I’m a very discrete man.”
“Well, since you’re paying a grand I’ll let you do anything you want to me, and when I say anything, I mean anything. Just give it to me nice and hard, yeah?”
“Sure thing,” he stepped closer to hand her the wine glass before tilting his head back and taking in a full-on view of her fulsome bust. “You’ll get it nice and hard, don’t worry…”
