Pat Black (2025) To Pay the Ferryman.

I remember Pat Black from years ago from a defunct online magazine. One of us wrote ‘Nanny Gudgeon’s Teeth,’ and it wasn’t him, even though there was gold in that story. Good to see him becoming an international, bestselling celebrity. I thought I’d pop in and give the Ferryman a visit.

‘To Pay the Ferryman,’ is a play on words. You probably recognise the allusion to Charon. He’s the ferryman who transports souls across the river Styx to the underworld. The customary fare for our final journey is a coin. An obol, or sometimes referred to as a danake, placed in the mouth of the dead. It’s all Greek to me.

The River Clyde made Glasgow an international hub and shipbuilding superpower with its population in the late eighteenth century growing faster than London. Its waterways crisscrossed with ferries. The last ferry to remain Yoker-Renfrew is to be replaced this year by a bridge.

Several serial killers were associated with these shores in the late twentieth century.  Peter Tobin: Known as the ‘Beast of Birkenshaw’. Angus Sinclair  who was found guilty of the World’s End Murders and suspected of many more. Dennis Nilsen: Known as the ‘Muswell Hill Murderer,’ Nilsen was a Scottish serial killer, originally from Aberdeen, who murdered (Killing for Comfort) at least 15 young men in London during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bible John, who was never caught. He murdered three young women between 1968 and 1969. The victims were Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald, and Helen Puttock, all last seen at the Barrowland Ballroom before their murders.

Mr Flick. He’s also a serial killer that’s never been caught—until now. That’s D.I. Lomond’s next case. Pat Black is just writing him up.

For now, a twenty-year-old lassie, Aylie Colquhoun’s body has been found in the Clyde. She’s originally from Castlemilk. Her throat has been cut. One murder does not make a serial killer. But it was hardly accidental.

It reminds D.I. Lomond of a cold case. Someone similarly mutilated Daisy Lallor’s body at Rafferty Landing. One suspect was the Earl of Strathblane’s son, Torquod (Torin) MacAllister, who is currently running for a seat in Parliament as Tory MP in a working-class district that used to be labelled part of Red Clydeside.

If, as a starting point, ‘Tories are scum’, (see jibes from Aneurin Bevan or more recently Angela Rayner, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. During the Labour Party conference in 2021) the question becomes is Torrin and his coterie of scum friends also serial killers targeting very beautiful, working-class girls working in art and adult streaming? Then there’s Sir Erskine Copper, a Scottish art grandee that seems to act as a bridge between the past and present, the beautiful and the tawdry.

We know from reading Laidlaw and watching Mick McManus’s Taggart there will be abrupt absences, disappearances in the night without explanation, mistrust and common deceptions. That’s the polis.

D.I. Lomie Lomond will have his smart-ass subordinate, Slater (the name of a popular tailor in Glasgow) that can mouth things he wouldn’t say. And the pretty but tough female cop, and the public-school cop, who went to Glasgow Academy but might not even vote Tory.  All’s good when it’s bad.

They need to catch the Ferryman. The clock is ticking, because the gaps between murders are shortening, and if there is a link to the past and that murder in Rafferty Landing, Lomond will uncover it.  Lomond will find the killer. Justice delayed cannot be justice denied. Read on.

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