by Ryan Green
He quit school, withdrawing from everyone in his peer group entirely and cutting himself off from anyone his own age. For his mother, it was a mixed blessing: on the one hand, he was cutting himself off from any chance of advancing in life, but on the other, he was now able to start contributing to the household. He got a job as a van boy and began earning a paltry wage at the age of fifteen. More importantly, the job got him out of the house and away from the closes where he lived. Even before turning to crime Angus had been intensely unpopular, but now he was at risk of being attacked just for walking down the street, and he had neither the intelligence to diffuse the situation nor the physical strength to defend himself. He rode around in the back of a van, loading and unloading for the owner, and gradually he learned the lay of the land outside of the tiny corner of Glasgow where he had spent his entire life.
Cowcaddens was near to the centre of Glasgow, another council housing estate like the one that Angus called home. It was far enough away from his usual haunts that he was not immediately recognisable but not so far that it felt like unfamiliar territory. He passed through it frequently when he was working, and one day when he was finished for the day he walked back through those smog-shrouded streets and spotted a little girl of about eight years old playing alone, completely unattended and completely unaware.
It isn’t clear what lie he told her to make her go into the nearest close. He had not had years of experience to help him develop his usual performance revolving around a lost dog, or an errand needing run that he would happily pay for. Regardless, he tricked the girl into the close, followed her inside, pinned her against the wall and molested her for his own twisted pleasure while she screamed and cried. Once he had satisfied himself, he left her lying in the stairwell and headed for home. This time when the police came knocking at his door, it was not to administer a slap on the wrist. His mother thought that he was being taken away for another small-scale larceny like he had committed so frequently through his teenage years, and he did nothing to destroy that illusion. She remained one of the few people who he believed were on his side and he did not want his ravenous sadistic and sexual appetites to be revealed to his mother.
Because of his age, Angus could not be tried as an adult or sent to prison. The judge administered the harshest sentence that he could for a first offence, recognising the callous disregard that Angus had for the damage that he had done to a child. The boy was sentenced to three years on parole, with any further offences resulting in jail time. The case was kept quiet to prevent an outbreak of violence from the family and community of the victim. Angus returned home, returned to his job and returned to the strange equilibrium of his solitary life. His family did not turn on him, although his oldest brother was already living elsewhere and may not have been informed of the gruesome details. Instead, they maintained the lie that Angus was a perfectly normal boy, that his youthful exuberance had gotten him into trouble with the law. The old lie that ‘boys will be boys’ came back, again and again, to protect him from the consequences of his disgusting actions. He remembered every detail of his crime, and he used those memories not only as fuel for his sexual explorations but also to refine his process. He recognised early on in the case that the only evidence the state truly had against him was the eyewitness testimony of the little girl whom he had made his victim. He realised that if he could silence the victim then his terrible actions might go entirely unreported. He did not have the presence, intelligence, charisma or finesse to intimidate his targets into silence, so he instead opted for the simplest way to silence a victim. A method that coincidentally fit in perfectly with his increasingly violent urges.
Catherine Reehill had lived in the impoverished closes of Glasgow for all seven years of her life, but that was soon coming to an end. Her parents had left her and her siblings in the care of their numerous aunts and uncles while they travelled to London to seek out accommodation and work. They had big plans for a brave new future at the other end of the country, an escape from the slums that had defined their lives until now. Catherine was too young to have had anything to do with the children of the Sinclair family, her neighbours, but she was old enough to recognise them as local fixtures.
The temperature had been climbing all week and now it was so hot that spontaneous fires had lit up several of the closes around the city, rendering dozens homeless. The newspapers called this time the ‘Glasgow sizzles.’ Trapped within the shadowy flat he called home, Angus was pacing restlessly. His sister and mother were out. He had just turned 16 a few weeks ago. Since he had been placed on probation, he had not dared to act on any of his darker impulses. Even the small relief of breaking and entering would have condemned him to years in prison. The heat was oppressive, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe, trapped in the stuffy little flat while the world outside burned. Even if the weather had been reasonable he would have been pinned in place by the constant whispering of his neighbours. They didn’t know what had happened to that little girl in Cowcaddens and they had no right to judge him. It wasn’t his fault that girls his own age weren’t interested in him. If one of the wee bitches at school had given him the time of day, it wouldn’t have come to this. He could have gotten what he wanted without all these unwanted consequences. It wasn’t fair that he got the blame for everything all the time. They were just mean to him. They were bullies. He stalked over to the window, wiping sweat out of his eyes. Wee Catherine from the next close over was skipping along the pavement like you couldn’t fry an egg on the concrete. Her skirt flipped up every time she hopped, and he caught a glimpse of the pale skin that the sun hadn’t tanned. Angus tried to wet his lips, but the heat had dried out his tongue until it felt like a lump of leather in his mouth. He gulped some cold water straight from the tap, then ran back to the window. Cathy wasn’t wandering far, just skipping back and forth along the road. Whoever was meant to be looking after her while her parents were away had obviously told her not to wander too far. They were trying to keep her safe. To say that he made an impulsive decision when he saw that little girl skipping up and down the road would have been a lie. He moved around the flat rapidly, gathering together the things that he needed and laying them out. Last, he scooped a penny out of the jam jar of savings that he had been putting aside from his job and headed down the stairs.
‘Cathy,’ he mumbled. The little girl didn’t hear him over the sound of her own rhyme and the slapping of her feet. Angus looked up and down the street. There was nobody else around, so he took a perilous step out of the shadow of the building.
‘Cathy, come here a second.’
The girl stopped and stared at him. He was still short, and the bulk that years of manual labour would pile onto him hadn’t even begun to emerge yet. Angus looked closer to her age than his real sixteen years. Young enough that any vague warnings about talking to strangers faded from Catherine’s memory. She was too young to recognise his nervousness as anything except funny. The sweat dripping from his face could be attributed to the heat without much stretching of the imagination. When he gave her the penny and asked her to bring him a bar of chocolate from the shop down the road, it didn’t even occur to the child that there was anything out of the ordinary. She bought him his chocolate, and a bar for herself as that had been the price he had agreed for her running this errand, then she hiked back along the street. She took one last look up at the clear blue sky and the blazing sun before she stepped into the refreshing shade of the close. She walked into the darkness without looking back, anxious to get up the stairs before her chocolate could melt.
At the door to his flat, she handed over the chocolate and his change, then he invited her in and she politely declined. He tried once more to persuade her. ‘Come on, it’s roasting out there, your chocolate will melt.’
His predatory nature must have shone through because the girl tried to run. He caught her by the arm. When she tried to tug free he smacked her with the back of his hand. Blood started to pour from her nose, staining streaks do
wn the front of her sundress and leaving a polka dot pattern in the dust of the close floor. The blow stunned her just long enough for him to drag her inside and slam the door shut.
Inside the flat with nobody around, all the pretence of humanity fell away. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her screaming into his room, then he tossed her down onto the bed. She cried out ‘Daddy! Help me!’ as Angus dragged her skirt up and climbed on top of her. Her screams turned from fear to agony as he molested her, and her supplications for help echoed through the flat, so loud that Angus was sure they would be heard. He could not afford to be caught. Not again. It would be jail for sure this time, and jail wasn’t kind to sick little boys who liked to hurt little girls. He would be lucky to get out alive. This girl knew him. There was no possibility that she wouldn’t go running to the police at the first opportunity. If he wanted to stay free, he would have to take that opportunity away from her. He fumbled one of his bloodied hands up over her mouth to keep her quiet and fumbled down the side of the bed with the other, eventually pulling his final piece of preparation out: a makeshift ligature made out of the inner tube of a tyre. He wrapped it around her throat and pulled it tight. The skin around the pinching point turned an angry red, but it wasn’t enough. He twisted the tube in his hands, dragging it in tighter and tighter until the rubber was biting into the little girl’s neck all around. Like it would only take one more twist to tear the whole thing off. He knew that he wasn’t meant to enjoy this part. He knew that this was just meant to be for his protection so that she couldn’t go crying to her mummy and daddy and all the police in Glasgow about the bad boy from next door. But as she bucked and flailed around beneath him he realised that this was as good as sex. This was better. He pressed himself down on top of her and continued to pull on the tyre. She shuddered as he squeezed the last drops of breath and life out of her and he had never been happier.
Afterwards, he stared at the dead little girl on his bed for a solid minute before he became aware of the passage of time. He went to the bathroom and cleaned himself up with a washcloth. He tugged her clothes back into place as best he could and then he carried her out into the hall. He was suddenly intensely aware of how many people were just behind those doors, hidden out of sight and ready to pop out at any moment. The people in this building didn’t hate him any less than the people in the street, or the kids at the school across the road. They would love to catch him out like this. He dragged the girl down two flights of stairs as quickly as he could. He nearly had her out the front door of the close when thought better of it. The basement stairs were right there, as good an excuse for her death as any. He pulled her over to the steps and weighed it in his mind. She had fallen down the stairs. She fell down the stairs, officer. Tragic accident. He nodded and then threw her limp corpse down the flight of stairs with a smirk. It wasn’t perfect, but who was going to look at it twice. Little girls had stupid accidents, that was life, especially here in the housing schemes.
He scrambled back up to the flat, ready to start scrubbing away any evidence that had been left behind. It was bad enough having to deal with all the scum out there, but if his mother turned on him it would all be over. There wasn’t much, except the inner tube that had been stretched completely out of shape, the perforated rubber looking wet where it had cut into her. He shoved it down to the bottom of the bin then returned to his room and made his bed before tossing his clothes back on top of it. Everything as it should be. He heard footsteps in the hall and panic welled up. What if they found her? What if the shouting started now? He wasn’t ready yet. He hadn’t prepared a story in case the police came. What if someone had seen him giving the girl money? He would need to admit that he had seen her. He would have to act like he was annoyed that she had run off with his penny. That would work. He could beat this. All that he had to do was stay calm and collected. All that he had to do was not freeze the way that he did when he was trying to talk to girls. What could be easier than lying to the police? It was almost second nature to him. But he needed time. He needed time to think.
Without that time, he made rash decisions, he burst out of his flat and ran down the stairs, trying to catch up to the mystery footsteps. All that he had to do was make sure they didn’t see her. He could distract them if he needed to. He could… There was a scream from the foot of the stairs. He skidded down the last few steps, trying not to trip himself. There were two old women standing with their hands over their mouths, looking down into the basement. He panicked and blurted out, ‘I’ll call the ambulance.’ The women mumbled something, but he was already out in the street, running for the bright red phone box at the end of the road. He dialled the operator and got through to the ambulance service in moments. He fumbled over his lie, eventually blurting out: ‘Catherine fell down the stairs. There is a little girl. She fell down the stairs in a close. She isn’t breathing.’
He ran back to the close before the ambulance could arrive. Only one of the old women was still there. He told her the ambulance was coming then ran back up the stairs again. In the flat, he locked the door and slumped to the floor. That was stupid. He had drawn attention to himself. There was no way the old biddies downstairs weren’t going to recognise him. The police knew his name, they knew his face. They were going to pin this on him no matter what he did. He stuffed a change of clothes into his sports bag and left.
The police catching up to Angus was the best thing that could have happened to him. Catherine was declared dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital and it did not take the medical staff long to realise that most of her injuries had occurred after her death and the ones before it were not consistent with a fall. The police in London scoured the boarding houses of their city looking for her parents to report the terrible news. Her uncles had taken to the streets to hunt for Angus before the sun had even set. His molestation of another young girl had been the gossip of the street for months and he had been spotted at the scene of the crime. It didn’t take much to put two and two together. If the Reehill family found Angus, they planned to kill him. The police were not able to force a confession out of Angus. He stuck resolutely to his version of events despite all the circumstantial evidence arrayed against him. In the early hours of the morning, he was picked up by the police several miles away in the centre of Glasgow, wandering around on foot. It is entirely possible that he would have walked away from the grisly crime if it wasn’t for the intervention of his older brother John, who convinced him that a confession was the best course of action. Inside jail, he would be protected from the fury of the Reehill family, and if he confessed then his sentence was likely to be much lighter than if he fought the case all the way. Knowing the truth of the situation and suspecting how much of his story could be proven false very easily, Angus followed his brother’s advice. It would be the last time that the boys spoke to each other. After convincing Angus to throw himself on the court’s mercy, John wanted nothing to do with his brother ever again. He was charged with his crimes in the old Patrick Marine police station as soon as it opened for business on Monday morning. Catherine’s parents arrived in Glasgow to identify the body at about the same time.
This time he was old enough to be tried as an adult and, given the horrific nature of his crime, the courts were more than willing to throw the book at him. His mother came to visit him while he was still on remand and all of the empathy that he denied others came flooding out now that he had been caught out. He wept to his mother. ‘Why did I do it? Why did I do it, mother? Why did I do that to her? I’ve caused that little girl’s parents so much grief, I’ve hurt them so bad. I don’t understand. Why did I do it?’
At the time, the cold and calculating manner in which he had planned and committed his crime was not known to the court. It was only decades later when his true nature had been revealed to everyone, when it was no longer to his advantage to lie, that all of the details came out. Psychiatrists were brought in to evaluate Angus. One of them described his behaviour after committing what
should have been a disturbing action as so mundane as to be considered abnormal. He had treated the act of disposing of a corpse, inventing a false narrative and constructing a fake crime scene as no more unusual than taking out the rubbish. It indicated that something was fundamentally wrong with Angus. Further testing determined that he had an IQ of no more than 80. It was not low enough for him to be considered developmentally disabled, but it was taken into account by the court that he may not have understood the significance of his actions. In response, another psychiatrist brought in by the court stated, very clearly, that Angus had a psycho-sexual disorder and that for as long as he was alive, he would continue to commit sexually motivated attacks. The psychologist recommended that Angus should be permanently separated from society for the protection of the general population. The court took the combination reports to mean that Angus was mentally impaired, and therefore not as culpable for his actions. In light of it being his first offence as an adult and the overblown remorse that he acted out while pleading guilty, he was sentenced to only 10 years in prison.
On his first day inside, Angus was expecting violence. The population of Saughton Prison in Edinburgh wasn’t just made up of the local thugs and hooligans. People from all over Scotland were imprisoned there, and that meant that at least some of the dozen people from his patch of Glasgow who had been jailed over the last few years would be in there with him. If he could get away with a beating, then he would consider himself lucky. For the first time, he was afraid. He had to cough every time he tried to ask a question during his induction to the facilities to cover up the fact his voice was cracking. Every person that he passed was staring at him, and he just knew that the story about the boy who had murdered a wee girl was already doing the rounds. They would come for him in the night when the guards weren’t looking, or in the showers. Maybe they would stab him in the cafeteria while he was waiting for his dinner, bodies pressed in on either side of him, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. They would get caught if they killed him in public, but some of these lads were in here for the rest of their lives anyway—it would make their lives easier if they got a reputation for killing scum like him.
