‘He’s right,’ Marianne said sorrowfully. ‘Ethan had memories of his father hitting his mother, slapping her around, throwing cups of hot coffee over her, verbally abusing her and constantly running her down. But all of those acts were, in Ethan’s mind, the result of his mother bringing it on herself. She’d hector his father, always be on his case when he’d only been out working hard, trying to do his best for his family. That’s how his dad had explained it to Ethan. No action without a reaction, that’s what his father always told him. If she acted, she had to expect him to react.
‘Mike’s right. Ethan idolised his dad. Probably in the way that you can when the object of the worship disappears before his faults can be revealed.’
‘He died in a small city outside Lansing, right?’
‘Yes, when Ethan was twelve. It was all very mysterious, it seems. I don’t know what Mike knows about it but Ethan’s dad was supposedly found after being run over by a garbage truck while lying in the road.’
‘Supposedly?’ O’Neill picked up on it immediately. ‘I read the report. That’s what it said.’
Marianne sighed. ‘There were seemingly strong hints that he was already dead when the vehicle hit him.’
‘How did Ethan react to the news?’ Salgado leaned closer as he asked the question.
‘I think it devastated him. He rarely talked about it but if it ever came up, he’d go very dark and disappear inside himself for days. Even though his dad left, and he hadn’t seen him for a few years, the impression I got was that his death floored Ethan and changed him.’
‘For the worse?’
‘I’d say so, wouldn’t you?’
They went on and on, digging deeper into Ethan Garland’s life, getting dirtier and grubbier. And getting maybe half a heartbeat closer to finding the young man that was chained somewhere in the city and dying of thirst.
CHAPTER 41
The time of day had ceased to matter. There was no start or finish, no shift pattern, no clocking on or off in either Los Angeles or Glasgow. Time difference made no difference.
It was ten at night in LA and six in the morning in Scotland. One in darkness, the other in daylight, both at work.
The folder on the six released patients from Carstairs made grim reading. There was nothing hugely off the scale in terms of what the men had done – they wouldn’t have been put back on the streets if there had been – but it still held the power to shock.
Narey was huddled in an incident room along with Giannandrea and DC Kerri Wells, each of them taking a file at a time and making notes before comparing. Photographs of the six men were pinned to whiteboards and the detectives occasionally scribbled notes under them.
Derek Solomon was admitted to the State Hospital in 2012. He’d been arrested following a disturbance in a pub in Balornock. The then thirty-seven-year-old had got into an argument with two men over football, the city’s most clichéd reason for a fight, and had bitten off one of the other men’s ears. When police turned up, he hurled pint tumblers and tables at them, produced a knife and launched himself at the three coppers, stabbing two of them.
Colin McPake was referred to Carstairs by social workers and police after what was described as extreme antisocial behaviour. He had a habit of wandering around the streets near his Rutherglen home in bare feet and stripped to the waist, intimidating anyone who came across his path, including noising up the local dealers and calling them out by name. When he was taken in and referred for tests, he’d gone willingly, telling psychiatrists that he wanted to know what was happening in his head.
John Paul Kepple was a thirty-two-year-old electrician who walked into a Catholic church in Bishopbriggs north of Glasgow in 2005 and demanded to speak to the priest, threatening to burn the church to the ground if the priest didn’t come. When Father Thomas Kiernan entered the chapel, along with two police officers, they found Kepple sitting surrounded by debris – smashed pews, broken chairs, a hacked-down pulpit, torn curtains, relics torn from the walls – and the caretaker lying face down next to him. Kepple gave himself up to the officers without saying a word, just glaring at Father Kiernan as he was led away.
Fraser Anderson was an IT consultant in the summer of 2012, a man with a flourishing career, a wife and young family. His life seemed perfect until he learned his wife Erin was having an affair with his best friend. Anderson went to the home of his friend Alastair Drummond and beat him with a baseball bat until he knocked him out. He then held Drummond hostage for eighteen hours, waking him up, hitting him again, over and over. Police were finally alerted by neighbours, who heard Drummond’s moans. It transpired that his belief of Drummond’s infidelity with his wife was completely delusional.
When the social work department denied him access to his children on his release two years later, Anderson orchestrated a service attack against the city council’s computer system, forcing it to crash on several occasions and earning him another year inside as he completed his sentence.
Martin Geir killed cats. Dozens of them. After a year-long killing spree which captured the attention of the press, Geir was finally caught on CCTV in 2006, crushing the skull of a ginger tabby with a brick. He admitted the other killings, many of which he couldn’t deny after the remains of ten cats were found buried in the garden of his Bridgeton home.
He’d poisoned some, trapped and strangled others. He never tried to justify it other than by saying that a cat had been shitting on his lawn and he was getting his own back. He’d been unable to identify the culprit so killed every cat he could find. He was ordered to serve at least part of his eighteen-month sentence at the State Hospital.
Ian Bryce had been an accountant working for Glasgow City Council. His colleagues had always identified him as a loose cannon and there had been several complaints about his workplace behaviour. In March 2011, the thirty-three-year-old got into an argument with his line manager about signing off a head of department’s expenses. It started out as something routine and within minutes escalated into Bryce smashing every computer screen in the room, assaulting five people and holding two others hostage using a taser he’d bought online and hidden under his desk.
He was admitted to the State Hospital and stayed there for three months before responding well enough to treatment that he was released, initially on parole. He was last known to be working for a charity in the city centre delivering meals to the elderly.
‘So, who do you like best?’ Kerri Wells asked, a mischievous grin on her face.
Narey and Giannandrea knew it was a facetious question, but it was as good an opening gambit as any. Rico went first.
‘Kepple. the guy who tore up the church. There’s something more than sinister about what he did, and how he did it. There was a coldness, a restraint before the destruction that chimes with me for Marr.’
‘I like the accountant,’ Wells pitched in. ‘The guy knew he was going to explode and bought a fucking taser. Smart enough to prepare, crazy enough to actually do it. He gets my vote.’
Narey nodded, seeing arguments for both. ‘We’ve no grounds to pull them but let’s pay them a visit and ask some questions.’
‘What about you, boss?’
‘I’m not a big fan of guessing. But maybe Anderson, the IT consultant. Delusional but functioning. Obviously intelligent. Capable of extreme violence. The service attack on the council’s computers suggests a tendency for risk and a public display of power.’