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<h2>32</h2>
<p>Blair Bryden's story had coined the phrase and it stuck.
Newspapers prefer it when the crazed and the criminal have tags to
hang their stories on.</p>
<p><em>SHRIKE!</em></p>
<p>The tabloids and the broadsheets blasted the name from every
front page.</p>
<p><em>SHRIKE</em>: Teenage Victims Impaled. Shrike Strikes in
Police Cell: Policeman Brutally Murdered.</p>
<p>NIGHT SHRIKE: The town which lives in fear!</p>
<p>And because most people hadn't the foggiest clue what a shrike
actually was, they wheeled on a famous naturalist and bird watcher,
who had already been thrown off three Scottish islands because the
farmers objected to his protection plans for the geese which were
eating them out of crop, field and homestead.</p>
<p>"The <em>Shrike</em>," he expounded on every networked news
programme, "is a little bird with a very nasty habit. It feeds on
lizards, frogs and often helpless nestlings of other birds which it
impales on the spines of a thorn-bush which it uses for its
larder."</p>
<p>A photograph of a neat little bird flicked up on the screens, a
bright-eyed, sparrow-sized and quick moving thing with an elegant
red back, a black stripe covering its eye and beak with a
delicately fearsome, almost hawk-like curve. The picture
immediately flicked to a filmed scene of a bird with a small naked
nestling still wriggling helplessly in its beak, forcing the blind
wingless creature down onto a blackthorn spike. The baby bird
squirmed as its outsized head was forced down onto the sharp thorn.
The shrike bobbed its head vigorously, hammering down on its victim
and the spine came forcing up between the bulbous closed eyes. The
nestling wriggled a little more then went still.</p>
<p>"<em>Lanius cristatus</em>," the popular ornithologist said, "is
an efficient predator and carnivore which revels in its nickname,
the <em>Butcher Bird.</em> It is such a successful hunter, that
many of its impaled victims are uneaten, and decompose where they
hang." The picture panned left, showing an array of pitiful little
bodies, feet dangling groundwards, some of them shrivelled and
dry.</p>
<p><em>Massive Hunt for the Shrike</em>, the papers shrieked, and
that was true enough. Two busloads of policemen drawn from
divisions all over the region had been drafted in to comb every
inch of the town. Every school in the Levenford closed its doors at
two thirty and squad cars followed the clusters of pupils home,
while it was still light. Some mothers kept their children at home
all day. At night, the streets cleared quickly as workers, men and
women, hurried home, casting quick glances to the side when they
passed a darkened close mouth or a narrow alley, jumping in alarm
if the wind rustled the needles of the evergreen trees lining the
edge of the park.</p>
<p>A heavy pall of fear descended on the town. It was as if the
people of Levenford were under siege.</p>
<p>A roadworker just finishing a job on Denny Road, close to where
Neil Kennedy had lived, was shovelling the loose rocks from a
surface awaiting tar infill where the electricity engineers had dug
a forty yard trench, got the fright of his life when scratchy
footsteps came up behind him. Something growled and before he had
time to think he had whirled round in an absolute panic and with
one blow of his spade, smashed the skull of a friendly black
labrador whose owner had let it out for a piss. The dog dropped
like a sack, without so much as a whimper, its brains leaking onto
the hardcore surface.</p>
<p>A mother of three, who like Shona Campbell had gone down to the
Castlegate Bar to salvage some of her husband's pay packet was
coming along Rope Vennel up to River Street when a shadow loomed
into view, a bulky silhouette which clumped jerkily towards her.
She backed against the alley wall as the faceless shadow stumbled
forward. It lurched to the side, heading straight for her and she
screamed so loudly she was heard by two patrolmen who came running
down River Street at full tilt and thundered down the alley. By the
time they had got there, however, the Castlegate Bar had emptied
and the screams of pain and fear were echoing from the narrow
walls. They found, under a press of bodies and flailing fists and
feet, the battered and semi-conscious form of a seventeen-year-old
amateur footballer who had twisted his knee at a five aside match
that very night and, far from attacking the petrified and still
screaming woman, had merely slipped on a patch of ice while limping
home. At Lochend Hospital doctors stitched a nasty gash on his
forehead and strapped up three broken ribs. They put dressings on
his multiple bruises and contusions, and then they examined the
boy's knee. It needed no treatment. A week later, his dental bill
cost him three weeks wages.</p>
<p>Out in East Mains a stranger seen talking to two teenage girls
was chased for his life.</p>
<p>In Corrieside a burglar shinned up a roan-pipe to break into the
fourth storey of a tenement building. He came silently down the
pipe half an hour later, with a haversack containing a video
recorder slung over his shoulder, only to find a waiting group of
men in ambush behind the privet hedge. They beat him half to death.
The men, hyped up with the fear and alarm that had spread through
the town, then went on the rampage in what was one of the rougher
areas of the town. In Corrieside, there were two houses which had
become regular pharmaceutical dispensaries. Neighbours had
complained to the council and to the police about the needles and
syringes picked up by their children on the verges by the side of
the street. There had been a couple of raids, but the occupants had
re-inforced the doors and by the time they were battered down, any
evidence had been flushed down the toilet. The fathers of
Corrieside took the law into their own hands and required no
evidence but what they already knew. One of the homes was on the
sixth storey of a squat block of flats. One of them used a sledge
hammer to smash the door off its hinges and they stormed in. A
sleepy, unshaven and skinny man, known until then as something of a
hard-ticket and who already had done two stretches for grievous
bodily harm, came diving out of a bedroom with a plastic bag in one
hand and a wickedly curved sheath knife in the other. The hammer
came down in a swift arc. The man's wrist shattered and the knife
whirled down to the floor where it stuck, quivering. In the bedroom
a woman started screaming as the man was forced back inside. The
group of men battered the skinny fellow all round the walls, each
of them punching, kicking and gouging until he was a bloodied
scrap. Then they threw him through the window to tumble forty feet
or more to the ground where he broke his other arm and fractured
his skull. They dragged the woman out of the house and down the
stairs where they beat her to a pulp and left her naked on the
pavement before moving in a determined posse up the road to the
third floor home of two brothers who were selling pills and worse
to schoolchildren. One of the boys escaped through the window and
suffered only a prick from a needle in the grass which later gave
him hepatitis and a nasty infection which turned gangrenous and
caused him to lose two fingers and a thumb. He never returned to
Levenford again. The other brother was kicked senseless and his
legs were broken so badly that it took fifteen hours of surgery to
make them look like legs again, though they never worked like legs
after that. The men went home to their houses with the feeling that
they had hit back against what was wrong with Levenford that
winter.</p>
<p>The town huddled in the grip of the cold and the crazy fear that
hunched at the back of everyone's mind. The people of the burgh,
battened down the hatches and waited for it to be all over.</p>
<p>Superintendent Cowie ordered the printing of a set of posters
which were stuck on every wall and lamp post, bearing a picture of
Michael O'Day culled from a passport photograph which had been
taken three years before. It showed him as a chubby-faced,
dark-haired smiling man, with light blue Irish eyes, and bore no
resemblance whatsoever to the wasted, haggard, grey-haired wretch
Jack Fallon had spoken to in the bell tower of St Rowan's
Church.</p>
<p>For two days nothing else happened. The huge and painstaking
search turned up nothing, no sign, not a hair of Michael O'Day.
Jack spent his time between his sister's home and Lorna's house. On
several occasions, Lorna tried to go into the kind of trance-like
state she'd demonstrated before, but she could see nothing. For
those two days, her hopes were beginning to rise that it had gone.
Jack even suggested the possibility that O'Day had died, because
he'd looked far from healthy the last time he'd seen him, or, like
the others, had commited suicide and remained only to be found. He
offered the suggestion that because O'Day had been the last of the
people who had been at Marta Herkik's seance, then the whole thing
might be over.</p>
<p>On Monday, the wind veered northwards and brought a freezing
blast of air straight from the Arctic. At five o'clock in the
morning, Graham Friel kicked his motorbike to a stuttering start
and came down the Arden Road from Westerhill on the far side of the
town. He had to wipe the icy crystals of snow from his visor as he
turned over the old bridge and into the centre of the deserted
town, heading for Riverside Bakery just off Barley Cobble. The
bakehouse had been producing fresh bread and well-fired rolls and
traditional mutton pies for more than two hundred years. Graham had
worked there since he left school, and within a year he'd be a
fully fledged master-baker, a title which caused not a little
hilarity among his friends.</p>
<p>He throttled back on the turn on River Street, careful of the
black ice on the morning-cold road, and made his way past the
deserted shop fronts. When the river had burst its banks and
flooded Benson's Tailors, Woolworths and the other shops along the
row, Graham Friel had been one of the two boys who had sped on
their bikes over the flooded tarmac and along the soaked pavements,
sending up bow waves and almost knocking the feet from Mickey
Haggerty as he made his way homewards on the night of the storm,
the night Marta Herkik had died in Cairn House.</p>
<p>Now he was keen to get in to the bakery and lean with his back
against the hot brick of the oven to take the cold out of his
bones. The icy air, colder in the wind-chill of his speed numbed
his lips and bit at the enamel of his teeth as it whipped under the
edge of the visor. None of the shops were open and the place had
that ghost-town emptiness of the early winter morning.</p>
<p>Graham moved slowly along the main street, slowed further as he
came up to Rock Lane which parallelled all the other alleys leading
down to the riverside, turned and dropped a gear to drive down
towards the bakery. Inside, he unstrapped his leathers and put his
helmet down on the bench. Gregor Christie had fired up the ovens
and when Graham stepped through to the bakehouse a delicious
flour-dusted breeze of heat enveloped him. His boss nodded from
under his white hat, a big-bellied jovial man who was already up to
his elbows in white dust. The slow egg-beater paddles in the
kneading churns were dancing around each other as they stirred the
dough. Graham leaned against the bricks and felt the heat banish
the cold. He stood there, spreadeagled, flattened against the
surface for a few minutes, the most enjoyable of any winter's
morning, and then got to work. The two of them manhandled the tub
to the table and with deft expertise, they heaved the dough out
onto the board, flattened it with their palms and sliced it into
strips which they balled into small ovals and laid on the trays.
Working steadily, Graham used his long paddle to slide the
bake-trays along the grooves on the oven sides, enjoying the fiery
scorch when the door was opened, until he'd loaded the first batch
of rolls. When the hatch clanged shut the heat died
immediately.</p>
<p>He made tea for both of them, while Gregor prepared the bread
for the stores along River Street, then when the timer rang, he
started unloading the first bake. The rolls were hot and light and
mouth-watering.</p>
<p>"Where's the milk?" he called over to Gregor. "I've buttered the
rolls."</p>
<p>"Good man," the baker said, squeezing the last of the dough into
the high silver pans. "There's a bottle in the bag. Where did I put
it?" Gregor scratched his head, then raised a finger.</p>
<p>"I must have left it in the car. It'll be behind the front
seat."</p>
<p>Graham pulled a face at the thought of going back outside into
the dark and chill morning. Gregor ignored it and chucked the keys
over to him then turned to start loading the second oven, whistling
merrily. The younger man went out of the bakehouse and through the
store-room, jamming his hat down on his head. As soon as he opened
the outside door, a draught of frigid air leached the heat from his
face. He shivered and bent his head as he hurried down the unlit
narrow space between the store-room and the wall of the
neighbouring building. He quickly opened the car, reached behind
the seat and found the bottle of milk in Gregor's tote bag. Graham
slammed the door, locked it and turned back up the gap. Just before
he got to the end of the passage, where the double doors of the
gate faced on to the alley, hiding the loading bay and the little
space where Gregor parked his car, he stopped, listening.</p>
<p>Above him, the noise came again, a rough scraping sound, just
audible over the moan of the wind which rattled the tall gates.
Graham half-turned. Already the cold was draining the warmth from
his bare arms. He looked up to where the roan-pipe on the wall
disappeared into the early morning dark. For a moment, he thought
he saw a movement, and he stood puzzled. Nothing happened and he
turned back towards the car. The noise came again, a rapid
scuttering of something hard rasping on the stonework. He turned
again, looked up, and the dark simply rushed down towards him.</p>
<p>In the bakehouse, Gregor Christie slammed the oven gate shut
with a resounding clang and put his paddle against the wall. He
yawned mightily, and strolled towards the table to where his
breakfast, two hot and crusty rolls dripping with butter awaited.
Graham had poured the tea, but it was still black. Gregor sat down
heavily on the seat, grabbed a roll jammed it into his mouth,
tearing off a gargantuan bite. He lifted the tea, despite its lack
of milk and took a sip just as the frantic howl shattered the dusty
peace of the bakehouse.</p>
<p>Gregor jerked back and spilled half a cup of tea right down his
front, scalding his considerable belly from breastbone to crotch.
He let out a whoop of pain and went stumbling back from the table,
dropping the rest of the cup onto the wooden surface while he
hauled the burning cotton away from his skin. Outside, in the
narrow gap between the building, Graham was bellowing
incoherently.</p>
<p>Despite the pain on his belly, Gregor stumbled to the door,
pushed his way through the storeroom and pushed the exit-bar.</p>
<p>"Oh get off," Graham screeched, though the words were hardly
intelligible. "Oh Jesus. <em>Gregor!</em> It's got me it's got me
it's oh help me for chrisake I'm..."</p>
<p>The babbling screech soared up so high it sounded like a woman's
shriek and then cut off abruptly.</p>
<p>Gregor bulled his way out into the back alley.</p>
<p>"What the hell's going on?" he bawled, peering down the gap.
There was no sign of Graham.</p>
<p>Up above, there was a scraping noise, like stone rubbing on
stone. Gregor looked up. For an instant he thought he saw something
light in the shadows, but it disappeared as soon as his eyes
focussed. He scratched his head and hurried down the passage,
squeezing his stout frame between the stacks of plastic baskets to
where his car sat in the shadow. Graham was nowhere to be seen.</p>
<p>A pale pool of milk spread out on the concrete of the bay and
shards of glass were scattered all around. Graham's hat was lying
upside down in the middle of the puddle.</p>
<p>Gregor took a step back. For some reason his legs were shaking
and his heart was pounding and he was suddenly very scared. He did
not know what happened. He stole a glance at the double gates and
saw the padlock still on the chain. Graham had locked it, as usual,
after parking his bike, a precaution against opportunists who might
sneak in while they were busy. There was nowhere out of the yard,
except back the way he had come. Graham hadn't been in the alley,
and his desperate and scary screams had come from outside.</p>
<p>Gregor backed away from the pale pool of spilt milk. Every nerve
down his back and arms was jittering and jumping as a huge and
nameless fear shivered through him. He took one quick, and very
nervous glance up at the dark space between the two buildings, and
then he skittered up the alley like a fat and frightened cat,
barged through the door and slammed it hard behind him. He got to
the bakehouse and flopped down on the seat and sat there for
several minutes until the distressing and dizzy pounding of his
heart slowed down enough for him to reach for the phone. The police
arrived within five minutes and it took another half an hour to get
any sense out of Gregor Christie. The mug of tea which Graham Friel
hadn't had a chance to drink went cold.</p>
<p>At five past six Laurie Liddell jumped off the back of his
milk-float and scurried up Yard Vennel, only four hundred yards
from Christie's bakery, with two eight-bottle crates rattling in
his hands. The scaffolders who had set up their frame for the
sandblasting operation on the Ship Institute, an old Victorian pile
from a bygone era of commercial and maritime wealth, started early
and they started on gallons of tea. Laurie was fourteen, and
despite the warnings on every poster, he had not thought for a
moment of quitting his job. It paid too much, despite the
hours.</p>
<p>He ran on, head down, past the metal bars on the side of the
building when he heard a noise a few feet above his head. He
glanced up and something snatched him clean off the ground so
quickly he didn't have a chance to utter a word. The crates of milk
went flying forward, tumbling as it went. The bottles flew out and
shattered on the cobbles in a series of glassy explosions.</p>
<p>The milk-float driver moved on another forty yards while the two
other boys darted up the alleys, hurrying to keep warm.</p>
<p>"Hey, where's Laurie?" one of them asked when he got back into
the warmer cab.</p>
<p>"Is he not with you?" the driver asked.</p>
<p>"No. He did the delivery for the workies. He's not down
yet."</p>
<p>"Och, away and tell him to get a move on," the driver growled.
"We can't hang about here all morning."</p>
<p>"He's probably taking a piss,!" the boy protested.</p>
<p>"I don't care if he's having a shite and a haircut. We've a run
to finish. Now get back and haul him out of there." The driver
jerked his thumb over his shoulder and bent to his tally book.</p>
<p>Colin Jamieson, who was Laurie's cousin and older by ten months,
jammed his hands in the pocket of his heavy jacket and huddled
against the cold as he scampered back towards the institute. He
rounded the vennel at a trot and ran to the far end where the
workers had their storage hut.</p>
<p>"Hey Laurie, come on. He's spitting bullets."</p>
<p>There was no reply.</p>
<p>He stuck his hear round the side of the hut, expecting to see
Laurie hunched against the slatted wall, a cloud of steam rising
from a spreading puddle. There was nothing there.</p>
<p>"Hurry up, will you?" he called again into the dark, but there
was no reply.</p>
<p>Puzzled, the youngster went right round the back of the hut,
next to where the scaffolding rig clambered up the black side of
the old building. His foot kicked a piece of glass and it tinkled
against a brick. He looked down and saw the pool of milk, just as
Gregor Christie had done on the other side of River Street.</p>
<p>"Aw Laurie, he'll murder..." he started, but did not finish.
Something struck him on the back of the neck with such colossal
force he went flopping to the ground. One second he was standing
there, gawping and the next he was face down on the cobbles. Dazed,
but still conscious, he managed to raise himself to his elbow when
a grip clamped on his head and lifted him straight off the ground.
The shadows of the scaffolding swung and somersaulted in his vision
as he was flipped upwards. A terrible pain cracked in his neck and
everything started to go dark. The last thing he saw was a single
yellow glow, like a poisonous moon, right in front of his face as
the thing that had hit him, then picked him up like a rag doll
watched as the life drained out of his eyes.</p>
<p>At six forty it was still dark and bitter cold. On Swan Street,
just round the corner from Cenotaph Stand, in one of the oldest
parts of town, Lisa Corbett went upstairs to check on her
grandmother, who lived in the little flat above in the old and
crumbly tenement. The old woman had applied for a sheltered house
because the worn stairs up to the fourth floor were getting too
much for her, though she knew she'd miss being so close to her
daughter's family. Lisa was nineteen and worked an early shift on
the lines at Castlebank Distillery. In the mornings, she always
went upstairs to make her gran a cup of tea and find out if there
was anything she wanted from the shops.</p>
<p>She closed the door behind her. The light on the stairwell was
off, which wasn't unusual because most of the tenants would rather
wait for the council to fit a bulb than spend the money themselves.
It mattered little. The teenager had been up and down the steps
almost every day since she could walk. She took the first flight,
and was turning to the second, past the sash window which looked
down onto the back courts when a gust of freezing wind came
blasting in from outside. She turned automatically, reaching to
slide the frame down, when everything went dark. A sickly smell of
rot filled her throat and she screwed her face up in disgust. Then
with such speed that the girl had no time to blink, she was dragged
right out over the window sill. The skin of her leg peeled down
from knee to instep as she was whipped over the edge against the
sandstone. She never made a sound.</p>
<p>Half an hour after that, the old woman, who had been expecting
her grand-daughter because Lisa was as regular as clockwork, went
to her front door and peered down the stairs. Something lay on the
flat landing in front of the window. She toddled down the flight
and picked it up. It was Lisa's handbag.</p>
<p>At eight, still wintry dark, the wind had picked up. It tugged
at George Wilkie's heavy coat when he opened the front door of the
old college, which was now used as the town planner's office. The
milk, he noticed, hadn't been delivered, and the janitor knew there
would be complaints from the pen-pushers when they arrived at nine.
He shivered in the cold and closed the door behind him before going
downstairs to switch on the old boiler to get the heat running
through the ancient pipes. He could have done with a hot cup of tea
himself, and muttered grumpily. He lit his pipe and blew out a
plume of smoke on his way to the back door where the black plastic
bags were leaning against the wall. The rubbish would be collected
by the cleansing department later in the morning. He shoved the
door open and started hauling the bags out into the little
quadrangle at the back of the building where the planners, now that
the building was a no-smoking area, would huddle for their morning
cigarettes. He'd hefted the last of the bags outside and dumped
them against the wall, and was just turning back towards the
building when the wind whooped fiercely into the confined space,
picking up pieces of paper and cigarette packets and whirling them
together in a dust-devil circle. Something rasped on the wall above
his head and he looked up. Something black fluttered against the
wall. For a moment he assumed it was an empty bin-liner back caught
by the wind.</p>
<p>Then it dropped down on him so blurring fast he didn't have a
chance to even open his mouth. A tremendous blow hit him on the top
of his head and the force snapped his teeth together so hard the
stem of his pipe was bitten cleanly in two, and the upper plate of
his dentures broke into three pieces. Sparks of burning tobacco
fountained out and were whipped upwards by the blustering wind. Old
George, who was due to retire in February was slammed to the ground
and then without warning, lifted up again. The force of the blow
had detatched the retina of his left eye. The other, still blurred,
was vaguely aware of the old, dusty windows passing by, although he
did not know why they were moving. When he reached the level of the
guttering, George was hauled onto the slates beside the
corbie-stepped gable. Something black opened an eye and stared into
his. Still dazed, it took him some time to realise that an
inexorable grip was squeezing at his neck. He gasped once as the
pressure built up inside his head, then the vision of his good eye
just faded out. The yellow orb glared until the life-light drained
away, then the thing turned and began to climb, dragging the old
man like a bundle of rags.</p>
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