Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

‘And why should I sacrifice everything to have kids?’

‘I like cheese scones.’ Door number two opened on a double bedroom. Nothing fancy. Blue-and-yellow duvet cover with matching pillows. An array of bottles, jars, make-up, brushes, and associated things on a little vanity unit. Scottie Dog cuddly toy thing. A few framed prints of famous Scottish landscapes.

‘You can bet if it was men who had to squeeze three and a half kilos of human being out the end of their penis, they wouldn’t be so damned keen on a big family.’

‘They’re nicer if you toast them. Oh, and lots of butter.’

She stared at him. ‘ Children? ’

‘Cheese scones, you muppet.’

Door number three: a single bedroom that looked as if a drunken baboon had been locked in there and told to go wild with the clothes and underwear. It was everywhere. On the floor, on the bed, poking out from under the bed, on the chest of drawers, hanging from the top of the wardrobe. Shirts, T-shirts, jumpers, tops, jeans, leggings, jeggings, socks, stockings, tights, shoes, and flip-flops. Add about two dozen bras and pants and mix liberally.

Callum sniffed. The harsh chemical taint of deodorant and air freshener. ‘Someone’s trashed the place.’

Franklin rolled her eyes. ‘You’ve never been in a teenage girl’s bedroom before, have you?’

A collection of posters were stuck to the ceiling above the bed. Popstars and boy bands, a couple of rap artists. Lots of bare chests, tattoos, and flowing hair.

One particularly oily-looking git was posing on a motorbike, surrounded by unfeasibly breasty women in bikinis. They were all pouting at him, as if he were God’s greatest creation, instead of a wee nyaff with a shaved chest, stupid facial hair, and a tattoo of a fox poking out from the waistband of his Calvin Kleins.

Franklin followed his gaze. ‘Look at them. How are little girls supposed to develop a healthy body image when they’re confronted with the Size-Zero Silicone-Mammary Brigade at every turn?’

Callum settled onto the edge of the bed, between a pink fluffy jumper and a pair of leather shorts. Frowned out at the devastation. ‘Long as I live, I’ll never understand you lot.’

‘Try harder.’

He picked up a green sock with orange penguins on it. ‘Monaghan raped a guy in Blackwall Hill, but the victim dropped the charges.’

‘So?’

‘Not sure.’ The sock got tossed onto the floor so Callum could pull out his mobile phone and scroll through the contacts list till he got to ‘MCDONALD, DR A’.

She picked up on the first ring. ‘Hello? Ash?’

‘Alice, it’s DC MacGregor. From the Divisional Investigative Support Team?’

‘Oh... I see.’ Not doing a very good job of hiding her disappointment. ‘Anyway, thanks for sending over the file on Tod Monaghan, I’ve been through it and compared it to the behavioural evidence analysis we did on the initial victim set, well, I say “initial victim set”, but it isn’t, is it? I mean we don’t know who the first victims were, we just know about Glen, Brett, and Ben, but then we can’t factor in the first two without an ID to do a victimology work-up from, does that make sense?’

Sort of.

‘Monaghan might have grabbed someone else. We’ve got a crime scene in Shortstaine, mother and daughter abducted, blood everywhere.’

Franklin leaned back against the chest of drawers, arms folded. Watching him.

‘To be honest, that doesn’t sound likely, I mean we’ve got all these other victims and they’re all men and it’s very unusual for a killer like this to cross a gender gap once established and—’

‘The daughter’s anorexic and she was on the phone to a friend when it happened. Her friend recorded the whole thing. And right at the end, he tells them, “They’ll worship you. You’ll be a god and they’ll worship you.” So I thought...?’

‘Ooooh, now that is interesting. It’s conceivable that there’s someone else going around Oldcastle abducting people and turning them into gods, but it’d be a huge coincidence, wouldn’t it, I mean absolutely massive, so if we work on the assumption that it was actually Tod Monaghan, then we’d need a compelling reason to justify his sudden change in victim-gender selection, because it tends to be pretty consistent with serial offenders, oh, it’s different if they don’t differentiate to start with, but when they make a definite choice they tend to stick with it.’

‘But we’re not likely to have two god-making nutbags on the go, are we?’

‘There would have to be a reason for him to suddenly stop selecting male victims and you shouldn’t call people “nutbags”, these are human beings just like you and me only wired a bit differently due to their brain chemistry and upbringing. Dehumanising them by calling them “nutbags” doesn’t help anyone; it doesn’t matter how horrible the things they do are, they’re still human beings. We should try to remember that.’

Which was pretty much the same speech he’d given Willow last night. ‘Sorry.’

‘According to the notes: eight years ago, Ted Monaghan goes to a picnic area in Moncuir Wood that’s a well-known pickup spot for gay men, only there’s an argument, the young man he wants rejects him and Monaghan becomes violent. Leaves. Comes back half an hour later with a hammer and tries to beat the young man to death. At the trial Monaghan insists he wasn’t looking for sex, because he isn’t gay, and that the young man attacked him . The jury doesn’t agree and he serves six years for attempted murder.’

Franklin waved a hand at Callum. ‘At least put it on speakerphone.’

‘Sorry.’

He pressed the button and a tiny Dr McDonald voice sounded in the pigsty room. ‘Five months after Monaghan gets out of prison he’s back in Moncuir Wood, only this time he doesn’t go looking for a willing partner, he attacks and rapes a different young man. When questioned, Monaghan claims he isn’t gay and that he’s the real victim. Again. The young man later drops the charges when his car gets set on fire.’

‘So we know Monaghan’s violent.’

‘Well, yes, but when he starts turning people into gods, they’re always young men, probably because it’s young men that he likes, only he can’t admit that, because it contradicts his self-image as a manly man, even though he’s been having sexual fantasies about them for as long as he can remember, which is why he hangs out in this bit of the woods where it’s easy to find someone to explore his sexuality with, only he can’t reconcile his sexual needs with his strict upbringing and ends up venting this cognitive dissonance destructively, until one day he rationalises it into something more positive.’

How did she manage to keep talking for so long without taking a single breath? How was that physically possible?

‘He decides to take the objects of his sexual confusion and turn them into gods, he’s venerating what he can’t allow himself to physically realise, so their gender is very important to him and the only way he’d change that pattern is if something serious happened, and I mean something revelatory , because he’s been planning and fantasising about this for so long, but now it’s all different, and it would send him right out of his comfort zone, so I’d expect to see a lot more violence when things don’t go exactly as he’s planned and he has to improvise his way out of trouble.’

Callum frowned. ‘He didn’t improvise anything. We heard him on the recording: he cons his way into their home — pretending he’s looking for his missing son — and then attacks them. Blood all over the kitchen. Drag marks in the hall.’