Glasgow Noir Box Set

by Gavin Graham

He pitched himself on a corner, high above an observant line of old steel spikes, jutting out like a covert garrison defence line.

  The Inspector watched with curious fascination, scowling, wondering if he would really do it and secretly hoping that he would.

  McGreavy himself had often had dreams where he was standing on the edge, just like that. Pitched, as he was, with his arms out to the sides, like Christ on the Cross.

  Ready to jump.

  To be received by the afterlife and granted a peaceful dwelling, with her, his constant love.

  Mad Dog looked down and raised his head once again, peering down with that glint of devilment in his eyes. Even from that distance as he stood against the wind and prepared his heart for Satan’s fork, he looked right into the Inspector’s eyes and that is when it happened.

  He smiled at Mac.

  A devious, knowing smile…

  Your time is coming soon Inspector, is the message it conveyed.

  It was the evil smile that had once been captured in a courtroom sketch. It was his last smile too because right then he winked at McGreavy and gave himself to the drop like a diver on a high-board.

  It was a weird moment, and an eerie silence enveloped all those at the scene as they watched his graceful descent. But, there was no grace in his ending as he got spiked through the chest by multiple sharp points and slumped downwards through the top third of the fence.

  The torso had been split open at a slight downward angle.

  The innards were visibly torn, brightly exposed and glistening with the viscosity of fresh blood.

  A fresh kill.

  The blood seeped in slow, definite waves.

  The limbs hung heavy, like a dead animal, left in the woods of a Norse Cult to scare and send a warning to uninvited trespassers.

  It looked sacrificial.

  Biblical, in a way.

  Mac and Siobhan shared a brief look as if each was expecting the other to offer up something witty to say.

  But, neither did.

  It was just a sombre moment of death, where a weird form of poetic justice had been done. They hadn’t solved the case, as such, and they hadn’t caught their man. But, at the end of the day, that is the cold, hard reality of policing. With plastic surgeons and gangland vendettas coming into the mix, it is not always so easy to work things out, and some cases don’t get solved the way they do in the movies. They solve themselves as nature and karma somehow come into play. There had always been cases like that and there always would. It was just how it was, but such stories must be told nonetheless.

  The Inspector took a deep breath and suddenly looked back at his young female colleague with something to offer up in the way of dark wisdom. “You know what they say, don’t you?”

  “No Boss, what’s that?”

  “If you live by the cross, you die by the cross…”

  “Aye, true enough…fancy a drink then? A wee Coke?”

  “A whisky might be on the cards, purely in the interests of public safety, of course.”

  “Of course,” Siobhan replied with a wry smile.

  “Are you buying?”

  “No, but Jimmy ‘The Swede’ is…”

  The Inspector laughed, a throaty chuckle that was somehow joyful and mournful at the same time. “Aye, let’s go and get pissed then…”

  Richard Ramirez

  ‘You don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable. I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells in all of us… I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilised society… You maggots make me sick! Hypocrites one and all… I don’t need to hear all of society’s rationalisations. I’ve heard them all before…legions of the night, night breed, repeat not the errors of the night prowler and show no mercy.’ - Richard Ramirez (The Night Stalker)

  Ted Bundy

  ‘We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere.’ - Theodore Robert Bundy (America’s worst serial killer)

  Part 3

  The Unsung Satanist [Glasgow Noir, III]

  Chapter 53

  The horseman & the woman in the graveyard

  Resurrection.

  Am I risen, from the dead?

  No, I’m falling again, to drown in my own pathetic misery.

  The flame of self-destruction teases me.

  The arrogance of wasted youth taunts me.

  The narcissism of empty achievements mocks me.

  Floating, head-down, in a bath of blood, wishing it to be a barrel of whisky, longing for the barrel of a gun to finish me once and for all.

  Death awaits me, life pains me, I might just answer the call. Life can be a mystery, but I am not, I’m an open book and it doesn’t have a happy ending; they all die. Death, no such enigma but an alluring mistress, seducing, enticing as manipulative snakes in the grass of life, such beautiful serpents in a sultry garden.

  Death is a whore that stands at my door, to promise me nights of comfort, tempting as it is, the joke of all jokes as the comedic Gods cursed me in a sin-ridden city of chaos, to give answers to those who need answers and to stalk and hunt and slay demons.

  I stalk The Devil, too, as he stalks me.

  I see a tall figure of skeletal proportions, black as black can be, charred to the bone as he rides on a horse, the most beautiful white horse I’ve ever seen. The mouth of the black skeleton is breathing smoke and he talks in the voice of a dead Priest: “You know the truth, Mac, you can’t hide from me, I took her because she wanted to be taken…”

  Aye, she did it, she took her own life, in the melancholy shadow of unseen sadness.

  “Who is this knowing horseman?” I ask myself.

  Death?

  God?

  The Unsung Satanist?

  I look around. She always comes, she does, more loyal in death than she ever was in life. I love her more too, in death, than I did in life; the mind is a terrible thing to lose.

  “Mac,” I hear her call my name. “Mac, I’m here, Mac.”

  The horseman has gone, nothing left but a wall of mist, and I see nothing around me but idle headstones. I’m at the graveyard. I look down, I’m right there, stooped over her grave. I look up and see her as clear as day, in her night dress, her eyes are black and running with blood, in her pink nightie, stained with dirt, and clutching onto a bottle of vodka. “I’m sorry Mac, I felt that pain too, when you quit the booze and I was no longer a facet of your twisted hallucinations, it was like we’d lost each other all over again.”

  “I know, it was a mistake, I’ll never quit the drink again, I promise…”

  “Who is that whore?”

  “Oh, c’mon now, am’ not a bloody Saint and you know that.”

  “Fancy a wee drop, fur’ auld’ time’s sake?” she holds up the bottle, slowly and deliberately, blood still running from her dark eyes in a defiant trickle, a snake as her tongue, a deathly thing of sensuality to behold. “C’mon, let’s do it over my gravestone, a bit of romance, how about it?” she pulled up the night dress with her right hand, her naked legs burnt and angry with puss-filled blisters, turning around to show her mottled grey, bare behind. “C’mon, I know you want this, Mac, come and fuck me,” she spoke to him as a sweet temptress, The Devil in her voice…

  He woke up in a sweat, sucking air into his lungs like a massive blade had been thrust into his stomach, by a silent killer who’d approached his bed in the night, not to kill him, but to bring him back to life.

  On the side-table was a half-empty bottle of small, yellow sleeping pills and a pistol with one bullet in the chamber.

  “Oh Jesus,” he thought to himself, clenching his eyes shut, rubbing them, like he was on the verge of weeping; he actually was, too. “What the hell are you doing to yourself? You’re on the edge, man, right on the bloody edge.”

  There were many things that the Inspector was good at, conversing with the dead was one of them, catching killers another, suici
de on the other hand was clearly not his forte.

  Chapter 54

  A meeting with a Priest

  Absorbing a good crime story, one of murder and madness, it’s like being raped by a talented philosopher…

  There was a knock at the door.

  It was a door that could be found in the black dusk of night and a door that was always open. The Irish Priest got up from his Daily Record and shuffled across the room, lightning flashed at a tall window above the sink and torrential rain continued to lash down from thick towers of cumulonimbus cloud, heavily embedded in the ominous sky above. “It’s just God shuffling around the furniture,” he’d often tell people. “Like The Devil, when he puts his show in order, you can feel it, and he has to leave some destruction in his wake, to remind us still that he is all-powerful and, indeed, a worthy adversary…”

  He opened the door to find a dishevelled figure standing there in a grey suit, soaked to the bone, a lost soul. “Well, well, well…would you look who it is? None other than the illustrious crime-solving mastermind – Inspector Mac McGreavy…” he had that rough, charming Dublin accent that made him sound more like an old Irish folk singer than a Priest, one of those old bearded types that you’d find in a cosy little country pub, telling the punters a story via the magical lyric of song.

  McGreavy stood in the doorway, wet through, hands in his pockets, almost to a shiver as he wriggled in his overcoat in search of warmth, his black hair flat and wet across one eye.

  “You’re drenched, Mac, get in now for a dram…”

  “Aye, cheers, Father,” the Inspector muttered, still hunched over as he removed his coat, rubbing his hands and darting his eyes around the room before he saw the small table where a newspaper lay.

  Many a deep, philosophical discussion had taken place at that table over the years.

  Many a confession too.

  It was a table that represented trust, companionship, and a mutually shared love-affair with the drink.

  He saw the Priest’s half-empty glass of lager and an uncapped bottle of cheap blended whisky, one of those supermarket brands.

  “A beer, Mac?”

  “That would be grand, Father.”

  “Take a seat, Boy,” Rankin gesture to the small, wooden table.

  “Yes, Father,” he replied, humbly. There weren’t many who could talk to him like that, call him ‘Boy’, but Rankin could.

  He had that power.

  That authority.

  The respect he had for the Priest wasn’t about the Church or God or anything like that either, Mac couldn’t care less, he wasn’t religious…no…it was something else…it was his capacity to see things in their entirety…a quality few men (or women) possessed in the modern era.

  Father Rankin put a lukewarm beer can on the table and an old-school pint tumbler that was stained and weathered, along with too smaller glasses for the ‘shorts’ of whisky.

  “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.

  They drank the whiskies down first and then sat in silence as the first few gulps of beer passed.

  “I’d heard a rumour that you were off the booze, but I could see, when I opened that door there behind me, that was no sober man looking at me from out there in the pouring rain.”

  “I was dry for a bit, I gave it a go because someone asked me to quit, they were concerned for my personal well-being, shall we say…”

  “Would that person be a living soul, or, a dead soul?”

  “A dead soul, Father.”

  “The spirit of your good wife…?”

  “Aye, that would be the one,” McGreavy sunk his head, with shame, or so it appeared.

  Both men paused to drink more, re-filling their short glasses and knocking them back, no chaser was needed as they allowed the sting to linger.

  “The funny thing is, Father, when I stopped drinking she was no longer there, to visit me…”

  “A funny thing it is too…”

  “So, I started to think, that it was all in my head, just a sinister by-product of my addiction to alcohol.”

  “I see…”

  “So, if none of it was real, I supposed for a while that the only way to truly find her would be to kill myself.”

  “Oh, God bless your soul, Son. Don’t be doing a stupid thing like that. The good people of Glasgow need men like you, Mac, to rid the streets of evil.”

  “I drank a bottle. I took the business-end of my pistol and very, very slowly,” Mac made a gun with his right hand, “very slowly, I put it into my mouth. Funny, it was, but I can distinctively remember how the cold steel felt as it ran across my drunken lips. I had it pushed up right against the roof of my mouth, ready to put my brain to the wall…” Mac took his demonstrative gesture of a gun, two fingers and a thumb, and stuck it up into his mouth.

  “But, you didn’t pull the trigger…”

  “No, she came to rescue me, it was the booze, see? So, what does it all mean, I ask you? What was it protecting me? Was it my wife? Or, was it actually the drink? Or, some kind of a higher power? God? Am I honestly to say that the bottle was my saviour?”

  “It was yourself, Mac, you were protecting you from you. You’re a self-destructive personality, to be sure, but you have psychological resilience, that brings stability and order to your life when it needs to be there, that there was just the resilience coming into play.”

  Mac nodded his head, thoughtfully, digesting the Priest’s analysis.

  They sipped their drams and drank more beer.

  “Some people receive their calling in life, but still, they get kissed by the sweet lips of addiction. And, with God as my witness, you know yourself, that I too am one of those tortured souls, just like you…after all, that’s why you are here…that’s why we are friends…is it not?”

  “Aye, you’re right, as always.”

  “Tell me, are you any closer to catching this evil murderer who kills in the name of Satan? He’s taken two men, already, one of them was a good member of the Church he was too…”

  “We’re doing the best we can, Father, but the perpetrator is methodical, well-organised and meticulous in his planning. He’s an expert in home-intrusions, making seamless covert entries to each home that he violates, coming and going without a trace or a witness…”

  “But, the manner in which he kills them, these good Christian people, it is truly horrific and gruesome. You were there, Mac, were the crime scenes really as bad as they say? People are saying that it must have been Lucifer himself who committed those crimes.”

  Mac bowed his head, again. “They were very bad, Father, I’ve seen some horrid things in this job, but what I saw in those houses will haunt me forever, not so much of what I saw of the dead, but what I saw of the living…”

  “You catch this bastard, Mac, you hear…?”

  “Aye, Father…”

  Mac’s phone began to vibrate from an unknown pocket of his crumpled, wet-through suit jacket. He patted around it, up and down his body, like a clumsy child pretending to play the drums. He soon uncovered it and frowned at the caller’s name, it was Siobhan, and he surely hoped to Hell that it wasn’t what he feared.

  “Hello, Siobhan, what can I do you for…?” he answered it, that silly way he did when he was nervous. He listened and nodded, as the female voice spoke to him, and he took a mental note of an address. “Aye, right, I’m on my way…”

  Rankin looked at the Inspector, his face had fallen pale and grey. “What is it, Mac?”

  “I have to go, Father, I’m really sorry…”

  “Is it him, Mac, has there been another human sacrifice?”

  “Aye, Father, it would seem so…”

  Chapter 55

  He lived by The Bible, yet he died by the sword

  The blind cannot see, for the grandeur of hypocrisy appeals to the mass as the truth does to enlightened minorities, it has long been this way…

  There’s one thing about a crime scene that people don’t talk about so much. To be fai
r though, it’s not the kind of thing you would want to think about, talk about, and certainly not a thing you would want to remember. It’s the brilliance of the blood, that’s what I’m talking about, the silky texture and the macabre sheen that it has. There is an unknown viscosity to freshly spilled blood that can only be truly appreciated when seen up-close-and-personal. The treacle-like thickness glistens like nothing you can imagine, as it pools and flows and sits upon a hard surface, or as it soaks and festers and curdles in the deep-set grain of gash carpet. A deep, deep, cherry-red, that surges and moves as an awe-inspiring river. Deeper than the reddest lips you ever kissed in your life, for man. For the woman, richer and more silken than the shiny red heels that symbolise and embody her most primitive of all urges.

  Real.

  Vital.

  Deep.

  Magnificent, to the point that you will fight with the turmoil, to stand there and gawp, to be amazed by it, or turn away and be repulsed by it. What once was a person’s life force, pumping in the veins, spilled at the hands of a Devil, the body no more than a redundant shell, a hideous husk, gross yet alluring as this magical red slick sets flow, forming in puddles, moving like a swarm across smooth wood, or spraying across the confines of distant surfaces, and soaking into furniture that will be forevermore touched by death.

  In this case, it was the television set, a mirror that hung behind it on the wall, and the living-room’s thick and luxurious carpet. Blood entertains all shades on the crimson-spectrum as it settles and dries on different surfaces, looking most angry and paint-like as it sticks to human skin.

  There was no corpse, just two living souls, who’d been made to watch the killer at work.

  By the time the Inspector had arrived at the house, preliminary statements had already been taken.