Who’d have thought it? Hotshot reporter Keith Imrie a cold-blooded serial killer. They didn’t see that one coming down at the old
Daily Record
. Must have fair put the editors and executives at Central Quay on their padded arses. Shame.
Well, maybe they should have thought a bit more carefully about the kind of person they hired. Perhaps they shouldn’t have taken on the kind of evil cunt that would do a thing like that.
Most people think all journalists are low-life shit and fuck knows there’s a lot of truth in that. Pushing out their lies and half-truths, selling their souls to sell stories. Writing shit that might not be entirely untrue but untrue enough so that by the time it appears in print it is a mile away from what is really going on. They know it and they simply don’t give a fuck.
Not all of them. Only the ones that make it big. Wave a ticket for what used to be Fleet Street in front of their faces and some just can’t say no. Greed, ambition and low moral fibre make a bad combination.
But I knew it wasn’t like that for all of them. There were laws for a start. Ninety-nine per cent of what you read is completely true. Get them in court if it’s not. Most of it is just what happens. If the news is bad you can’t blame the messenger. I’d learned that.
The first time I saw Sarah’s name in print, I screamed. Not in anger, not in rage, just in shock. The noise just came out of me. Couldn’t stop it. I thought maybe it might be in the paper. Had prepared myself for that. But it was on page three. Didn’t expect that.
Took the breath out of me. It just escaped. A wheezing gulp exploded out of me. It turned into a strangled scream after half a thought. I felt her mother’s arms round me and that quelled the surprise a bit but it still hurt. Her name shouldn’t have been in the paper, not unless it was for winning a prize or getting to university or being married or in some kind of celebration. Fuck’s sake. That wasn’t the fucking way it should have been. Not right. Wrong. On page three. So fucking wrong.
Felt weak. Should have seen it coming. Didn’t.
Not all reporters though. A lot of them were genuinely decent. Or so they appeared anyway. Sure, some tried to pass themselves off as being on our side and then turned round and shat on us, but most were true to their kind words. There were people, reporters, who turned up at our place and talked to me and to her. They actually cared. Some cried. Genuinely cried and genuinely cared.
These people, the good guys, had kids of their own and were actually fucking angry, really enraged and infuriated, about what Ogilvie had done. I saw their eyes. They could have done what I was about to do. One guy, maybe mid-thirties, looked away as he talked to me. He looked out of our window and saw nothing, shook his head and said ‘If it was me . . ., if it was my sons . . .’ He shook his head again but he could have done it. I saw it in his eyes. One step, one fine line, one outrageous fucking horrible life-changing, mind-wrecking, drive-you-fucking-crazy happening and he was where I was. Didn’t wish anyone to be where I was. God forbid. Not God. Too late for that but forbid it anyway. Couldn’t wish it on anyone.
The good journalists, they were sort of reassuring. Nearly gave me some kind of comfort, nearly gave me belief in the decency of man. But not enough.
Because all it took to defeat the few good men was one arsehole.
Well fuck the arseholes. Well fuck Keith Imrie.
The
Record
’s hotshot was a prince among arseholes. A king amongst cunts. He had been the worst of the worst. He had asked and he had received.
What sort of father wouldn’t do anything for his daughter?
Before I drove out to Milngavie to kill Jonathan Carr, I thought of Keith Imrie. I saw his face in my rear-view mirror and I smiled at him. I smirked at him.
Because I knew what he didn’t. Shit, I knew lots of things he didn’t. I knew that I hadn’t only changed the tyres on my car. I’d changed my shoes too. The car’s shoes, my shoes. If you are going to do something, then do it right.
When I walked up to Jonathan Carr, when I swung that car jack, when I cracked his head against the side of the Audi TT, when I taped his mouth and superglued his nostrils and when I snuffed out his life, I walked in Imrie’s footsteps. Walk a mile in another’s man’s moccasins before you criticize him says an old Native American saying. Fair enough. I certainly wanted to criticize Imrie and so much more. Wearing his shoes was the least that I could do.
So the prints that I left on the soft ground near the Audi were Keith Imrie’s size seven trainers, borrowed from his flat, rather than my own size eights. Tough tittie, Keith. I wore the same pair when I went into the woods at Inchinnan after Brian Sinclair. Trampled all over the ground there. Left plenty of prints. Left no doubt that the same guy that killed Carr killed Sinclair.
For the record, no pun intended, I didn’t like killing Sinclair. That was wrong. Had to be done but it was wrong. Wrong. Seemed a nice guy. Not a bad guy. Had to be done.
Imrie. Imrie’s feet ran all over Inchinnan woods.
His hairs were found on Brian Sinclair’s clothing too. Proper bastard. Proper puzzle. It had taken ages to pick the hairs off the collar of one of Imrie’s jackets. Took a bit less time to place them carefully on Sinclair. You don’t realize just how small hairs are. Imrie’s were fairish blonde as well so they were finer, thinner, harder to pick off. Bastard to get them all off that poncey cord jacket. Worth it though.
Every single strand of hair was worth it. They say there are about a hundred thousand hairs on a human head. It would have been worth picking off every one of them, one by one, to nail that bastard. One by fucking one.
The secateurs. Oh, aye, the secateurs.
I’d taped them under his bed after I was done with them. No longer any use to me. Not for cutting anyway.
I was almost tempted to kiss them, which would have been of no use whatsoever but I felt the urge to do it. The thought of kissing all the crap that had accumulated on the secateurs could have made me boak but I was stronger than that. Fuck, I’d killed six people. I was hardly squeamish. Still. Not exactly nice and, more to the point, certainly wouldn’t have been smart to transfer DNA on to them after all that care.
Of course there was a chance that Imrie would have found the secateurs there but it wasn’t very likely. He didn’t seem the type to go dusting under the bed.
Same reason he wouldn’t have found the photographs I left or the camera I took them with. They were well enough hidden to escape the attentions of a lazy reporter but would easily be found by cops looking for evidence of a serial killer. They were printouts of photographs but they did the job. Getting them printed from a chemist or on a digital machine would have been stupid.
Carr’s Audi, Billy Hutchison’s bookies and his flat, Ogilvie’s offices and his Mondeo, the Tesco where Raedale worked and Sinclair’s dental practice and his house. Each and every photograph taken carefully and surreptitiously. Each and every one of them dated before the killings.
I’d carried out a factory wipe of my computer after printing them. I’d wiped everything at regular intervals in the sure knowledge that the cops would come calling.
The secateurs, the photos, the trainers, the DNA, the odds and ends liberated from the dead. No one needed to worry about opportunity and motive when so much evidence was handed to them on a plate. Not every competent cop would accept the bleeding obvious but that didn’t matter now. It was done. It was true. The newspapers said so.
Imrie was easy. Too greedy, too ambitious, too eager for the next headline. He couldn’t wait to see his name on the front page again under another exclusive. When I contacted him to tell him the brown envelope was waiting for him in the lock-up he nearly wet himself with excitement. He tried to be super cool but he was desperate to get his hands on it.
He didn’t stop to think what it meant, that someone else had been murdered, that another innocent life had been snatched away. Nor did he pause to worry about the moral quicksand he was swimming in. Imrie knew who I was. No one could have been capable of giving him that information other than the killer. The real killer.
He made it far too easy for me.
Alec Kirkwood was different. He had all sorts of questions that I wouldn’t answer. He demanded to know who I was and how I knew what I was telling him. He swore and he threatened. He wanted to know why the timing was so important. Said he’d be there when it suited him not me. I made it clear though. If he wanted the man who had killed Spud Tierney and the others then he had to be at the address I gave him at the time I gave him. No argument. It had to be then or he wouldn’t get him. Did he want him? He did.
The people who answered the hotline in Lewington’s incident room wanted him too. Wanted him enough not to ask too many questions other than the pertinent ones. The where and the when. They didn’t ask the why. I was told my call would be treated in the strictest confidence and that I may be eligible for a reward. My voice was muffled and disguised when I called all three of them. They all got what they wanted.
Of course I thought about calling Narey, giving the prize to her rather than Lewington. But Rachel was too smart. She would have given a gift horse a dental examination and an X-ray. If she was to have been there when Lewington got Kirkwood got Imrie then it had to have been at Lewington’s invitation.
The party was arranged. The invitations had been sent. Jelly and ice cream for all.
Irony. I’d been an uninvited guest in Imrie’s flat in Observatory Road for nearly three years. I knew his shifts, knew his patterns, his movements. I knew the layout of that flat like I knew my own house. I could find my way round his flat in total darkness, taking no more than a few minutes to get used to the lack of light and being able to navigate by the streetlight alone.
I had followed him and watched him just as I had tracked the others. I knew Keith Imrie better than he knew himself. It had taken two months before I got my chance. So many pubs, so many restaurants and cafes, cinemas and theatres. I followed that shallow, morally bankrupt bastard from east to west, north to south. Finally one Saturday afternoon in Tennent’s Bar on Byres Road, the opportunity was there.
The pub was packed, loud and jumping with football fans, crazy with simmering hatred. Imrie was off his face drunk and so were the people he was with. I was near enough to stone cold sober to make no difference. It was the easiest thing in the world to take his key from his jacket pocket. Goal to Rangers and an open goal for me.
I was out of the pub, in and out of the key-cutting bar and back into Tennent’s before he knew it had gone. I slipped the key back into his jacket and finished my pint. I watched Imrie for a while, burning my eyes into him, resisting the urge to punch his head in. It would wait. It would be better.
After that I could get into his flat when it suited me. I waited another month before I first went there, until I was sure he hadn’t realized his key had been taken, sure that he’d be working and not coming home any time soon. His work made it all too easy. Imrie could be relied upon to be out of his flat when everyone else was asleep or otherwise occupied. That was handy.
He wasn’t too bright either. You’d think if you were going to have a flat in the west end you would get an alarm fitted. You really couldn’t be too careful. Some very dodgy people about.
I didn’t go there often. Just when I needed or when it suited. Maybe just five times in all. To take stuff and to leave stuff. He was too stupid to even notice I had been. But then I’d always known he was stupid. Stupid and arrogant and cold and heartless and mercenary and deceitful and dishonest.
When he wrote those words about my Sarah I wanted to kill him. There and then I wanted to strangle him to death with my bare hands. I wanted to cut off his fingers and rip out his throat. Wanted to destroy the liar and the tools of his lying.
How could he do that?
I wanted him to suffer like I had. Wanted him to know what it was like. He couldn’t have written what he did if he had known my pain. He couldn’t have written those words if he was a decent human being.
‘
Erratic behaviour
’.
‘
Mucking around
’.
‘
Unfortunate accident
’.
Maybe another person wouldn’t have reacted the way I did. But they are not me and I am not them. When Keith Imrie wrote that article he may as well have signed his own death warrant.
Of course I couldn’t have been sure what would happen to Imrie when I set out to frame him but there was no regret. Kirkwood’s unwelcome appearance in my plans gave me opportunity. I already had all the motive I needed.
How could he do that?
Her fault. He as good as said so. That hideous interview with Wallace Ogilvie’s wife. Defending the indefensible.
It was much later that I learned of Imrie’s motives, the grubby motives of a grubby little man. He didn’t know Ogilvie but knew someone that knew him very well. A contact of Imrie’s inside the council was a friend and close business associate of Ogilvie’s. This contact fed Imrie tip-offs, told him about contracts up for grabs and who was doing what to get them. Told him about the movers and shakers and what they were up to. Who was shagging who, who was bribing who, who owed who and why. Supplied him with enough information to allow a struggling hack to get out of the court and council circuit and onto the front page.