Interlude:
"The trail had gone cold by the time we really started looking," Angus McNicol explained. "By God, it was difficult then and the whole town was in a panic. People were sending their kids away, rather than have them around here, and nobody could blame them.
"What threw us was the fact that the Rankine boy had fallen off the quarry and at first it looked just like an accident. There were always boys coming off the Castle ramparts or the Langmuir Crags, risking life and limb for the sake of birds eggs. You'll have done the same eh?"
His face broke into a knowing smile before he cocked an eye at the spinning reel in the Dictaphone and started talking again.
"We didn't start the search for young Whalen until night and we got the floodlights set up. It was well after midnight by the time the frogmen came. The dogs had scoured the whole of the quarry and there was no sign of the boy, but that didn't mean he wasn't there. Then there was the business with that boot and the severed foot which gave that frogman a right old scare.
"Anyhow, it was back down to the station in the early hours of the morning. We were coming round to the notion that the other boy hadn't fallen and maybe he'd had such a scare when his friend tumbled that he'd taken off in a panic. So, at that moment, we had a missing boy who had probably made himself missing. He'd be out at some friend's place, or hiding in a gang hut and he'd come home when he got hungry and even more scared..
"Then Hector Kelso came in now that the boy had been gone for well over twelve hours.
"Hector got a brief from the inspector. I remember he listened with a straight face. He asked where the boy's bag was, and said that if young Rankine had been dodging off school, then he'd likely have his bag with him unless he'd stashed it someplace. We did another search of the place and that took us the rest of the day. I could see Hector Kelso was getting worried, for Whalen never turned up on the second night and I spent a bit of time with the boy's mother. That's not a pleasant job, I can tell you. As every minute ticked away, you could see her nerves getting wound up tighter and tighter. There was something in her eyes that I'll never forget, and I swear to you that it was beginning to dawn on her, long before it dawned on anybody else with the exception maybe of Kelso, that she would never see the boy again. Not alive, that is.
"Then Crawford Rankine came round in the hospital. "The boy had a fractured skull and for a while they thought his brains would be like porridge in there, but he was pretty clear about what had happened. He told us about the railway wagon and how he'd been chased and had gone running. He remembered the man all right.
"I recall thinking the boy had a stammer. He was saying twi-twi-twi like a sparrow with a stutter. Took me a second to work out he was trying to say Twitchy Eyes.. He'd known who was chasing him.
"We got back to the hill behind the school and down that track between the pigeon shacks, Kelso, myself, big John Fallon and a couple of others. I remember a big beast of a terrier trying to get at us through the fence and later Fallon had it put down, for there was a big septic ulcer on its nose where it had been pushing through the wire. We went down to the hut and inside we saw the blood handprint and all of us knew then that the killer had taken young Whalen away. The boy was gone and the next week was murder I can tell you, in more ways than one. By the next morning there was a team of pressmen camped outside the station and you couldn't move for flashguns popping in front of your eyes.
"That was in June, fairly close to the beginning of the month. Three dead, including young Whalen, all of them in the space of a couple of months or so. We had a pretty good so we had a fair idea of what the bastard looked like. The fingerprints matched the other sites and again there were pages of the bible crumpled about and not to clean either. Hector Kelso never liked the notion of anybody wiping his arse on the good book."
Angus raised his eyebrows. "Some folk seemed to think that made it even worse, but as far as I was concerned it was only paper, and it was a clue. Anything was a clue, but despite that, the trail went cold very soon and Bryce, the criminal psychologist started talking about burn-out, saying that the killer could be so filled with remorse that he'd killed himself. Hector Kelso didn't put much stock in that, and neither did I, as I've said before. He said Bryce was talking through a hole in his backside. But the killings did stop. For the next month or so there was nothing, at least as far as we knew, and even Kelso could have been forgiven for relaxing a little at the end of July.
"Then, sometime in August, just before the schools went back, Johnson McKay went up Blackwood Farm to find out why Ian McColl hadn't been picking up his mail from the box and the solids really hit the punkah, as the Commander used to say. What a mess."
Angus stopped talking and rubbed his chin. He dunked a biscuit in his coffee, took a bite, washed it down with a mouthful and started talking again.
"By this time, of course, we knew what happened to Whalen and we knew about the girl, and that took us by surprise. It must have been ten days later, less than a fortnight after the boy went missing. Once I've looked out my old papers from up in the loft I'll be able to tell you exactly.
"We knew nothing about the girl until we found her, for she'd never been posted missing. "Sandra Walters, her name was. She was nineteen and came from Lochend, as you'll probably remember. By the time we found her, she'd been dead about two weeks, which means she was killed sometime in May, near the end of the month, and that figured with the story we got from the family. Some big argument with her father and she walked out. Now I was in on it when we questioned them, in a tenement flat about a hundred yards down from the railway station, I recall. Donald Walters, I remember thinking there was something funny about him. It was only after the body was found that the mother came to us to say she was missing and it was the dental records that finally confirmed who it was, for the face was pretty much eaten away by the flies and the rats.
"Walters said she'd stormed out, but there was more to it than that. I got to know the look the more I worked on the force. There were three girls, two of them still in the house, about fifteen and thirteen, and the wife, she had the look of a mouse caught in a corner. The girls never looked at anybody, just sat there, heads down, scared to move, it seemed. Waters was cocky enough, a fast talking, skinny little runt of a fellow, and he was adamant the girl was a whore who'd been putting it about and he for one wasn't having any of that.
"Now when the post mortem was done, there was plenty of evidence to show that the girl was no virgin. Dr Bell found old scarring on the walls of the uterus which he said was classic evidence of unlubricated sex, or forced entry as he described it unofficially. We couldn't put anything down to Donald Walters at the time and it was pretty clear he hadn't killed his daughter, but Hector Kelso was pretty suspicious. The other girls said nothing and the wife, well she would have backed up everything he said. He hung himself from the rafters nine months afterwards, and I had a notion Kelso had been leaning on the little bastard and I can't blame him for that. There was something queer about Walters. After that the family moved away.
"Young Sandra, she'd been hirt bad. Awful. It didn't affect me as much as little Lucy Sunders broken and torn under the bridge, but this was bad. You'll get the details in the archives, and the pictures too, if you've the stomach for them. She's been terribly damage, and she had lasted a long time. Dr Bell showed us the marks around her ankles and wrists and the scarring on her throat where she'd pulled against a ligature. She broke the fuckin' rope. Pardon me for that, but after all this time I still don't like rememebring that."
Angus paused again, his eyes inflamed with the recollection of the dreadful damage. He absently took another swallow of coffee and swirled it around in his mouth as if it would take away the taste.
"Now there was another thing we knew about Twitchy Eyes. He was crazy and he was evil and he liked to cause pain. But he also waited around with the bodies, sitting vigil with them, for at least three days, probably more. By then, they'd be pretty well blown and that didn't seem to bother him.
"He waited until the maggots had hatched. He stayed until they were covered in flies."
June:
A match flared in the dark, blinding bright, cut a flaming arc in the blackness and stopped. Don Whalen watched it waver through a film of tears as his eyes watered. They trickled hot down his cheeks and ran cold onto his neck. The light floated and a candle-flame swelled slowly to life, hardly flickering at all. He blinked away the tears, trying to stay still, wishing his heart would stop thudding against his chest. His shoulder shrieked with every movement he made and his throat was on fire.
He had listened to the sirens, huddled against the wall of the boxcar. The man had been there, a silent presence in the gloom, his breathing low and slow and unhurried. The sound of it carried infinite menace. Don tried to call out, tried to say something, but the pain in his throat burned in a caustic rasp and all he could manage was a hoarse whisper. It felt as if something was broken in there where the hand had squeezed him. The longer the silence went on, the more frightened Don Whalen became. He couldn't understand any of this. But the deadly silence was somehow even more frightening than the pain.
The sirens had wailed in the distance, howling urgency and emergency. They'd stopped for a while and then they'd started up again, rising to a crescendo as they passed along Lochend Road, before fading as they got to the old bridge. The silence had descended then, broken only by the fluttering of pigeon flocks as they took off from the nearby huts, and by the savage rumbling growl of the pit bull terrier, like a leopard in a bush. Much later, the bell had rung and there had been shouts and calls and the sounds of school spilling out. A crowd of boys came down the track, made the terrier snarl and pound the fence, and then they went on their way. The man had gone out, opening the door quickly and rolling it closed. When he came back, some time later, the said nothing at all. He roughly grabbed Don about the waist, dumped him on the flat of the wagon and quickly wrapped him up tight in a roll of something that might have been an old carpet. He felt himself being picked up and slung over a broad back and carried away. The material covered his eyes and he couldn't tell whether it was day or night. Don could hear the twigs crackle underfoot and he knew he was in trees. There was some traffic noise close by and he figured he was being taken along Lochend Road, but through the belt of trees that bordered the winding route to the west side of the town. Out of the trees, he sensed the clamber over rough ground and then the descent down a flight of stairs. A door squealed open and Don Whalen was lowered to the flat surface.
He was still wrapped tight in a rough bundle of thick material, slanted across a flat surface against a wall. Strong hands unrolled it. He felt his clothes ripped away from him until the cool air told him he was naked. The hands pushed him down onto a chair and then very quickly bound his hands behind him and tied his feet to upright posts that felt like chair legs. The smell in the air was dreadful, sickening and thick. The pain in his throat stopped him from retching.
The match flared and a dark shape moved out of the light, and a faint humming sound rose stronger. Black stars floated in front of his eyes and for a moment he thought he was going to pass out before he realised they were not stars, but flies hundreds of them wheeling in the air, disturbed by the light. He turned his head, just a little, trying to see the man, scared to let his eyes light upon him, deadly afraid of him taking him unawares again. His eyes swept round.
The thing on the table screamed silently at him.
For a second his mind refused to accept what it had seen. His eyes continued their sweep and then jerked back at the shape on the table. A catastrophic fright exploded inside him and his heart kicked violently behind his ribs, one solid thump that was so powerful his body spasmed sideways.
The head was twisted at the end of a scrawny neck and the mouth was open so wide it looked inhuman. An arm, grey in the dim light and bruise-mottled was stuck out straight, the fingers clawed.
Absolute terror rocketed through him. He was trembling violently, shuddering as uncontrollable fear rampaged through him, making his head tap against the wall in a rapid staccato. The eyes were crawling with flies. The skin shimmered and rippled with a life of its own.
The dead body's silent scream went on and on and on and the flies crawled over the skin. Don bucked against the string binding his wrists as the realisation hit him. He had been brought here by the man who had done that. His muscles convulsed in a violent contortion powerful enough to drive the thick twine into the skin of his wrists and open up two abraded lacerations.
He heard himself gibbering uncontrollably, incomprehensibly, though hardly a sound escaped his throat. In his mind he called out for his mother and his father and he prayed to God to get him out of this and all of the time he knew there was no way out.
The horror on the table screamed on and on and on and Don Whalen echoed that scream in his own mind. After a while the overload of terror and dread was too much and he passed out in a dead faint, banging his head against the wall, to leave yet another clue for Superintendent Hector Kelso.
When he came round he was lying on the table and the man was leaning down towards him. The eyes were blinking rapidly and Don Whalen dimly realised this was something he should remember.
He felt rough hands on him and tried fruitlessly to squirm away, His legs were spread-eagled and he knew his ankles were tied to the legs of the table and he felt a huge scream building up inside him. He twisted his head and saw the other scream, frozen and fly-blown, only a yard away, slanted against the back of the chair. The flies hummed busily and Don Whalen's pain began.