Glasgow Noir Box Set

by Gavin Graham

The victim, who’s body had been vanished, was a Minister of the Parish Church and had arrived home approximately fifty-five minutes before his wife and daughter. The wife was a teacher and the sixteen-year-old son a student at the same school. They’d found him dead upon entering the house; the neighbours weren’t at home so nobody would have heard the struggles and screams. The killer had entered the premises via a window that had been smashed at the side of the house.

  When the wife and son found him, he’d had a long and heavy ornate sword inserted beneath his chin and raised upward through his head, splitting the brain open, all the way through, until the base of the handle jutted into the base of his chin just an inch above the jugular. The girth of the sword was so thick and the blade so sharp that his head had been torn completely open.

  The boy had been frozen with shock as the wife of the Minister screamed, unaware that the killer was still in the house, standing behind them.

  Each took a blow to the head and blacked-out.

  When they came to they were bound in a position of prayer, kneeling on the floor, their feet and their hands bound with rope and tape placed tightly across their mouths. The killer made them watch, just kneeling there, staring at the altar of the pentagram – a Devil’s star – adorned upon the sword’s handle. The body was placed in a chair with the tip of the enormous blade resting against the wall, just next to a large Mackintosh mirror. His penis had been cut off at the base, severed, and the blood ran thick and trickled to the floor where the victim’s blood was being collected in a bucket.

  The severed penis was nowhere to be seen, perhaps taken by the killer, as a souvenir.

  Both wife and son would never recover from what they saw, forced to look at the slaughtered remains of the man they’d idolised as a husband and father and a Man of God, as he sat there, eyes wide open, glazed over with blood that had poured down from his broken cranium. The casualness of his physical pose was morbid and horrific, like a drunk in a pub, arms drooping down by his sides. What made it strikingly grotesque was that open mouth and those wide-open, blood glazed eyes, looking up to God, to the heavens, as if to scream for help, to his saviour, to beg for mercy.

  As the family members awoke in a panic, they struggled in the confines of bondage-rope, their cries for help muffled by gags that had been stuffed into their mouths. All they could do was weep and whimper with confused trauma as tears welled in their eyes. When the killer appeared in the boy’s view he was dressed in black motorcycle gear, helmet and all with a blacked-out visor, standing over the bucket to check for a sufficient amount of blood. There wasn’t enough, apparently, so the killer took a cutthroat razor and dissected the man’s torso with a long, deep cut. The body now bled more heavily and eventually the bucket was adequately full. All paintings and wall decorations were removed and the killer took a brush and began to paint the walls in blood, writing what appeared to be psychotic ramblings, or some form of evil Satanic poetry.

  The killer in black then went back to the dead Minister.

  The sword was removed and the blade and corpse were taken to the kitchen. Flushing sounds were heard as the killer ran water, cleaning up blood, for exfiltration of the corpse. They heard the noise of a zipper, as the body was bagged and dragged from the house at the back door.

  The door was left open and would be found that way when the Police eventually arrived on-scene.

  The rain came down harder.

  Chapter 56

  The wisdom of darkness comes, written in human blood

  The fallacy of a broken mind’s rhetoric can be like an infestation of the soul, a cancer that is pure evil, convincing as it may be…

  It was another crime of horror, a scene that was awash with blood, a blood bath in the truest sense. It was the same killer, McGreavy noted, because the writing was on the wall; quite literally:

  I am The Unsung Satanist. Freedom, to be tasted by the tongue of those who are hungry, her flesh is a feast to be had, her blood spiced with raw filth. The Beast waits to laugh with delight. The true destiny shall soon be known, of this pathetic circus, the clowns clown and the jokers joke. The Beast of the Shadow is there to chase, His destiny is clear, as the weak are devoured and skinned alive by the Children of the Shadow, those blind maggots who are set to die by the blade and rot with the worms, yes, for bleeding victims are the salt of the realm, as The Devil pokes a finger, humiliation for the misguided fools and stupid followers. Satan’s grip, to hold thy focus, never stop and never give up. The killing must be done, blood must spill, the peasants must fall, the Kings must reign, and shadow dwellers may thrive under His reign of darkness. The void is eternal, magnificent, and consuming, but only an Unsung Satanist may fully embrace that source of power. Dead souls and victims of the shadow may know the greatness of His beauty, as I, the bringer of death stand tall over their false image of Godliness, in this age of tolerated ignorance, what a truly vile predicament we have. Take thy hand and walk upon thy path, in the echo of screams, the cries of the dead and all the glory of The Abyss. Rivers of blood will flood your abode as the sordid demon slinks within, to slit your throat, and rape and bludgeon your children. The killer’s calling is an Oath to The Devil, bonded in blood that flows red, the flame is ever eternal. Hail Satan! 666.

  “In the name of good God, Jimmy, what kind of sinister monster are we up against here?”

  “It’s just the workings of a disturbed, broken and twisted mind,” Jimmy spoke, matter-of-factly, in his dour Glasgow brogue, looking at the wall. “The verses are from no known demonic text that we’ve been able to establish, thus far. They just appear to be the psychotic ramblings of a blood-thirsty nutcase. It could be that the words don’t actually mean anything.”

  “The words mean everything, they have to mean something to him, otherwise he wouldn’t make such a dramatic show of it. Any mutilation of the victim’s genitalia?”

  “Aye, same protocol, the wife recalls seeing him bleed heavily from where the penis had been severed after the killer knocked her down to the floor.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “Just the wife and son.”

  “What about the neighbours? Somebody must have seen something? Caught sight of a vehicle? A license plate number? Have we got absolutely anything to work with here?”

  “Sorry, Boss, we’re working on it…”

  Chapter 57

  Those who would be monsters: a lecture

  It’s the understated charm of the quiet genius – the ability to take a complex conceptualisation and make it seem so damn simple…

  The Professor looked as eccentric as ever, smartly dressed in a three-piece suit, sober and grey, crisp white shirt and a red tie of silk that was adorned with a paisley pattern of gold. Every time he moved a dazzling chain sparkled around his waist, beneath the lights of the auditorium, attached to a newly-serviced pocket watch that dated back to the First World War. He’d once told a young female student that it had stopped a bullet in combat and had saved his grandfather’s life, that it was his lucky charm; nobody knew for sure if the story was true or not, including the Professor himself.

  He fiddled with his eye-frames as he peered down at the papers and notes before him, scribbled notes and photocopies of texts with highlighted paragraphs in fluorescent yellow. Occasionally, he glanced out to the crowd of students and eventually he smiled as his eyes settled upon a dishevelled-looking man in the back row who was dressed in a black suit, sipping from some kind of a hip-flask.

  The audience talked among themselves as the renowned lecturer and expert in fields of Criminology and Pathology settled himself in slowly as he always did; it was all part of his eccentric charm.

  “Your attention, if I may, silence in the room,” he cleared his throat, speaking in grandiose fashion as he found his familiar ground, as the master of the room.

  The noise halted and all eyes fell upon the one-and-only, the brilliant, Professor Alistair Sinclair.

  “I would like you all to repeat after me, in Unison,
anyone who doesn’t pitch-in can pick up their bags and get out of my lecture theatre. Understood?”

  All heads nodded, some with reluctance, some with confusion.

  “Hail Satan!” he roared the words like a mad lunatic and stepped to the centre of the stage with his hands out to the sides.

  His students looked around at each other in confusion, some smiling, but they went along with the show. “Hail Satan!” they roared back their responses in a unison-form that was creepy enough to hit McGreavy with an unsettling blow.

  The Inspector was frowning down at his friend on the stage.

  “Very good, very good, indeed,” he smirked to himself. “I hope Principal McDonald is not in the lecture hall next door, or I’m pretty sure my contract for next year will not be getting an extension.”

  The students laughed.

  “As you may have guessed, today’s lecture will be related to secular motivations that may drive a person to murder, and that little exercise was just my way of demonstrating an important facet of criminal psychology – manipulation to a cause – a cause that may be perceived by outsiders as inherently evil. A question. If you are trained to see the world in a certain way, to believe things in accordance to a certain ideology, and you consequently model your behaviour accordingly, then are you merely a victim of your own circumstances? Or, do we have a choice in the matter, of what we are destined to become based on our surroundings and influences, be they good or bad?”

  The students too frowned intently now, with concentration, contemplating the wise man’s word.

  “If you join the Army, and you are given a gun, told to raid a village and kill man, woman and child, will you go and commit those violent and murderous acts blindly? Yes, of course, without question, you shall, because as a soldier one is not at liberty to question or doubt the great leaders who issue commands from high above. They will follow orders, those commands, because that is how they have been trained. Perhaps, it will come back and haunt them, later in life, they might be cursed by nightmares and acute combat trauma. Why? Guilt, perhaps, and because it was inhumane to do what they did. Does it make a man evil if he did those things under government endorsement? Because, he was following orders? He did it, because he was told to do it, is that a valid reason? Nazi murderers tried that one but it didn’t get them very far. Justice prevails in the long run. David Berkowitz, The Son of Sam, the .44 Caliber Killer, he claimed that he was given the order to kill from a demon, who spoke to him via the medium of a dog.”

  The students laughed.

  “A dog, that is correct. He, too, did it because he was told to do it; but, what this actually was? It was his own mind engineering a means of justification. That, my cherubs, is the first step towards committing the crime – justification – and a subconscious narrative to the cause of murder is all part of the serial killer’s sociopathic personality disorder.”

  Sinclair’s students were trying their hardest to listen whilst at the same time jotting down salient points.

  “It’s clearly not for me to say what is right or wrong, but, we must always attempt to understand things from the killer’s viewpoint. We talk and talk and talk about motivation, but I put it to you now, that the key word in being able to understand is actually justification. An Army lives in motivation, trained and ready, as professionals in the field of combat. Yet, in their careers, they may never see the hardships of war. Unless, it is decided, that a conflict is indeed justified. Justification is what leads us to the act of violence, whether it be a military campaign to fight it out on the battlefield, or, it is in the mind of man who picks out a small segment of society who fit his mould – X, Y and Z… – and that man or woman decides that these people deserve to die for some morbid reason that is justifiable in his own twisted mind. Justification, for the serial killer, gives him a free ticket and a path to enjoyment in the act, sadistic pleasure to be gained in ending their lives, the thrill that will tickle his gut and make him want to do it over and over again. Are you getting my point here, cherubs?”

  The students nodded, in awe of the man, like he was an all-knowing God.

  “So, the eternal question we must ask ourselves is: Are killers born evil or are they simply moulded by society to be delusional personalities prone to self-justification for the crimes they commit? Does the establishment make them that way? Does a fanatical religious doctrine make them that way? Islam? Christianity? Satanism? You will remember, see, that just a few moments ago I had you all shouting ‘Hail Satan!’ at the tops of your voices like you were an organised cult of deranged lunatics? It took me a mere few seconds to manipulate you all into following my lead…”

  The students looked at each other, still silently mesmerised by the words of the Professor, fascinated yet somehow frightened.

  “Imagine what I could do, if I really wanted to get inside your heads and guide you to kill, like Charles Manson and the Manson Family cult, to mould your behaviour, to be a sinister master of a justifiable cause that would put you onto the killer’s path and give you that free ticket to the unknown delights of sadistic pleasure?” the Professor himself now paused, to laugh, revelling in his own intelligence. “But, of course, my little ones,” he continued, peering down at them with slanted eyes. “You always have a choice, so remember that in all that you do in life, you can go with the flow, or you can swim against the stream, because in the end I think it is quite clear which swimmer will be stronger. Thankyou.”

  The students were on their feet and applauded him as if they had just witnessed the most powerful and moving performance of their lives…

  It never ceased to amaze the Inspector that he got such a reaction, one that no other Professor in Glasgow could expect to receive from students, but Sinclair was a legend in his own time and that could not be denied.

  McGreavy sat, at the back, as he always did, with mixed feelings. Sometimes, he cursed himself, for mocking the Professor, teaching people to suck eggs, saying such simplistic things that didn’t impress him. But, in the next breath, he would see the pure genius in his approach. Because, what he did, was drive home a point that was fundamental: that we are all actually victims (to an extent) of our own perceptions and bias, our own minds, our surroundings; things that we often don’t have a choice in.

  Do we have a choice?

  Well, of course, we do…

  Nevertheless, we put labels on the killers – psychopath – sadist – serial killer – woman murderer – these troubled souls who made their choice, to live within a dimension of evil, that darkness of the sick mind, driven to those disgusting acts, justifiable in their own deviant minds, to commit crimes so shockingly horrific that no book of fiction could ever put you in the spot. Yet, how often do we try, actually try, to see things from their perspective? Or, at least, to understand them on a more human level?

  Not their motivations, but their justifications…

  Humanisation is perhaps the key then, to catching them, empathising with them, a thing that practitioners are reluctant to do, because it leaves a bad taste in the mouth and goes against the grain, and because it is much easier to use a ‘label’ – MONSTER. People often say, it is not human to kill, but McGreavy disagreed with that sentiment, because after years and years of doing nothing else but hunt down killers on the mean streets of Glasgow, he saw in fact that man is the most primitive being of all and the basic urge to kill is a founding-block of human nature that is deep-rooted within us all.

  Chapter 58

  Stale beer, bad food & revelations of The Abyss

  The only difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man already knows himself to be a fool…

  Lunch with the Professor was set for low-cost fair at a pub just off the motorway, called The Auld’ Scottish Soldier; as it was the Inspector’s choice of lunching venue, it was expected to be a bit of a shithole. It stank of overly-salted gravy and oil from a deep-fat fryer, wafts coming in waves as a large door swung open and shut, giving audibility to punters
as a cook swore periodically from the confines of the kitchen. Every so often a young blonde girl would appear with a plate of food.

  A stench rose from the carpets, too, like the faded material had been soaked in cheap ale and vinegar and then volunteered to customers as a semi-open toilet.

  It was clear to both what the topic of conversation would be centred around – Glasgow’s recent spate of Satanic murders.

  “The numbers are there, Al, more than three dead with the same M.O., it’s a serial killer who has no intention of letting up,” Mac spoke, getting his knife into a layer of pastry that was thick and soft at the bottom with a slight crumble on the top.

  “It would appear so, the pie’s disgusting by the way, and what on earth is this wine? Did they not give me the vinegar instead?” Sinclair screwed up his face like a snotty, old toff.

  “I like it this place, it’s got a good ambience, OK? Anyways, you should drink beer every now and again, it’s good for you,” Mac defended his choice of eatery, vehemently, as per usual. “But, listen, Satanism though? Do people still actually worship The Devil? Sacrificing babies and drinking the blood of goats, all that crap, I thought that all went out in medieval times, or that it was just a theme for the Hollywood films and whatnot, all vampires and ghouls, no? What a load of nonsense…”

  “A load of nonsense you should perhaps take more seriously if you’re to stand a chance at roping-in the killer, remember what I said in the lecture, Mac? We have to understand them, the doctrine that drives them, the things that make them tick and allow them grounds for justifiable reason. Remember, what I just spoke about just now, or have you lost all faculties of short-term memory?”

  “What is there to understand, though, really? It’s a part of the human condition, OK, fine. But, evil is as evil does, my friend, we both know that deep down…”