Something incredible happened to Garry Plumb last summer. For the first time in his life, he made a friend and it changed everything.

  Up until the first half of last year – stretching back all twenty-eight years of his existence – Garry had failed to connect with a single other human being, something everyone else seemed to be able to achieve without effort.

  He was the kind of man who would go unnoticed in a busy café, bar or even a small meeting room; the sort of presence waves of people would course around without acknowledging.

  He wasn’t odd to any great extreme. Sure, he liked computers a bit more than the average man his age, but numbers and algorithms were his job. Besides, throughout his life he watched on as others like him, and even those further along the nerd scale, found kindred spirits, both in the platonic sense as well as romantic.

  Garry also wasn’t repulsive. Although he hunched, he stood at five-feet-ten – pretty average for an adult male in Scotland. He walked most places and while he was a little softer around the middle than he would have liked, he wasn’t overweight and he kept good personal hygiene.

  Location wasn’t the issue either. He’d grown up in the town of Falkirk, surrounded by 160,000 other individuals trying to find their way in the world. He wasn’t confined to some rural outpost hours away from civilisation. His school classes averaged thirty-six kids and with each new school year and each new group of classmates, he saw an opportunity to wipe the slate clean. Start over.

  He would spend the intervening summers subtly reinventing himself in the belief that this year would be the year he made a friend, but those hopes did not materialise.

  Later in life, he moved to Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh where he jostled for position amongst half-a-million connection-seeking humans, and worked in close quarters with twenty-five of them.

  Those who’d encountered Garry prior to last year’s summer described him with words like ‘shy’, ‘meek’, ‘timid’. The word they really meant but wouldn’t want to say because humans are generally good, was ‘uninteresting’.

  At a young age Garry became aware that others viewed him this way and, in one of his many attempts to offset his inability to impress, he adopted the name ‘Garry’. On his birth certificate, he was an average single-r – Gary Alan Plumb – but since leaving home, everything he signed declared him as the marginally less common and, in his mind, more quirky ‘Garry’.

  It didn’t change anything. Of course it didn’t.

  Nor did the night classes he’d dragged himself to in his early twenties in an effort to develop common interests with those who coasted by him in his daily life. Ballroom dancing was a poor choice – it was difficult to display a reverse fleckerl or a cross-body lead when the thought of dancing a Viennese Waltz with him didn’t even factor in the mind of a potential partner outside of the class. Inside the class, Garry was – without exception across each one of the fourteen sessions he slogged through – left to dance with the instructor, Jaime.

  Amateur dramatics was just as disappointing. Despite his hopes that the friendship demanded by the performance would translate to the real world, the reality was that the actors never became the friends that their characters were. He stuck with the acting classes long enough to see out a live show (Made in Dagenham – he was given the role of Barry, despite auditioning for Eddie) and when the curtain fell on the last night, the entire cast went for drinks at a nearby pub.

  Everyone except Garry.

  There was no malice in the cast’s failure to invite him. Rather, it was as though a collective amnesia enshrouded them; they simply forgot Garry Plumb existed.

  And on it went deep into Garry’s twenties. By this time, he’d resigned himself to a life of solitude.

  He accepted that he would never fuse a wounded palm with a blood-brother. Would never wreak havoc during a ruckus-filled sleepover. Would likely die with his only romantic encounter coming at the age of twenty-three, when an unknown drunk woman several years his senior had hauled him into an unwanted wet kiss as he shuffled home from the local corner shop with a frozen pizza and a share-size bag of Doritos he’d consume alone.

  She’d been heading the opposite way, bar-hopping for hours, and had mistaken him for an ex-boyfriend. The mystery lady would have no idea that her invasive tongue and fumbled grope of Garry’s crotch represented his entire life’s experience with the opposite sex. He had come to terms with remaining a life-long virgin, hadn’t had much interest in sex and, up to that point, had never even pleasured himself.

  What the experience taught him was that he was, in fact, not asexual. He’d felt an electric tingle as the woman’s fingers delicately cupped his balls through his joggers that sparked a new era in the life of Garry in which his favourite pastime was frantic sexual exploration. Solo, of course.

  Garry grew certain that his inability to connect with others was because some part of normal childhood development had passed him by. It could have been a nature thing, but he tended to believe that the reason for the empty part of himself was rooted in nurture.

  All the shit stuff was because of an event in your childhood, isn’t that what the psychologists said? Garry’s life was peppered with so many episodes that even Erikson and Piaget would’ve struggled to pinpoint a singular cause.

  He was bullied in school, but so were lots of kids. He didn’t belong to any of the usual target groups. He had no distinguishing features. He was clever enough to be at the smart end of the spectrum, but not so obviously clever as to be an outlier. He played sports when the curriculum demanded it and, while no athlete, he was not so inept as to warrant attention.

  White. Scottish. Religiously unassociated. Socioeconomically he was slap bang in the middle of the road for the area he lived in, which was towards the lower end nationally. He was a stock representation of the majority. In adulthood, he would come to consider that his bullying was the result of being entirely unremarkable.

  He was the only child of sometimes-barmaid/most-times-on-benefits Stacey Plumb, who raised him in a rented two-bed terraced bungalow provided by the local housing association. Garry knew nothing about his father. Once, when he was eight years old, he’d asked his mother about dear old Dad.

  Once was enough. Most of what followed he would never be able to recall – he was out cold for some of it, other parts were just gone like time had been replaced by a thick fog – but he remembered that she had said no words.

  Her right hand found the handle of the pan she had been using to fry cheap, greasy burgers and snapped it up with such pace that Garry couldn’t react. It had connected with the left side of his face and then the fog came rushing in.

  One part he would always remember was the pain he endured as his fractured eye socket healed and the sling he’d worn for six weeks after the doctors reset his dislocated shoulder.

  As he grew, both in height as well as his comprehension of the world around him, he began to doubt his mother even remembered which of the unpleasant pattern of grotesquely abusive relationships had sired him. Some of them stayed around for as long as a season. Most were flings which began when she was on nights at the bar and lasted the length of the average British family summer holiday.

  Most of the relationships he couldn’t remember, but some deep pocket inside of him housed a feeling that the ones who hung around for a season or more were always those who were always the most awful to him.

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  One thing he’d figured out far too young was that Stacey Plumb did not love her son. She didn’t even like him. This much was clear from the constant put-downs and frequent bouts of violence. But he came with financial benefits, so she kept him around.

  She collected the government Child Payment while he was at school, and when he was old enough to work part-time jobs she took any money he made.

  Into his teens, he was bringing in a decent sum from cleaning out the council’s dogshit bins for two hours every morning before school, and litter picking for three hours after. On top of her government payments and council-tax reductions, Garry was lucrative to Stacey, and there was no way she would ever let a steady stream of profit slip through her claws.

  Garry knew her plan was to trap him even after he’d outgrown the support payments because, by then, he’d be of an age to command a higher hourly rate which would help plug the income gap.

  As such, when the time came to consider further education, he approached his favoured university without her knowing.

  He’d developed an infatuation for numbers and data and code – things which possess no emotion nor capacity to pass judgement – and his preferred destination was Abertay University in Dundee. He’d hoped to gain a Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science from the same institution that birthed the Grand Theft Auto series of video games, but perhaps the most attractive aspect of studying in Dundee was that it was far enough away that he’d need to move into student accommodation.

  Mr Kinning, a good man who was Garry’s IT teacher at school – and the closest anyone had come to being his friend – had encouraged him to call Abertay admissions office to discuss his chances of acceptance, even providing his own mobile phone for Garry to use.

  The call was short, as was Garry’s elation when he was assured he’d be accepted to the course. That night, he’d told Stacey that Abertay would accept him.

  After a tirade of verbal abuse – by this time she’d mostly stopped hitting him, afraid that his greater strength might one day be used against her – Garry had unhappily relented, although he had obtained a concession.

  Stacey had agreed to his studying computing, but it would be at the community college which was walking distance from their shabby little bungalow. It wouldn’t be a degree, but it was something.

  After two years, Garry earned a diploma in computing and he was exhausted.

  The study was fine – easy, even, as he had discovered a talent for code in his early teens and had taught himself most of the college curriculum by the time he was fifteen. The problem was the need to work every evening and weekend to generate income for Stacey. Throughout those two years, she spent more time drunk and unemployed than she did at work. The one good thing about it was that Garry rarely had to listen through the paper-thin walls of the house to her getting fucked by some undiagnosed alcoholic from the bar.

  Two wonderful things happened in the same week Garry turned twenty. A hardware manufacturer with an Edinburgh-based distribution centre hired Garry as a data analyst.

  And Stacey Plumb died.

  When lunchtime arrived on that Sunday in May and Stacey hadn’t yet emerged from her room at the end of the dank corridor, Garry went to check if she’d spent the night elsewhere. He’d come home late from work the previous night, and had assumed she was already in bed. It was possible she’d gone out for the night, hooked up with a random drunk, and would drag herself back home when she’d grown tired of him.

  He tapped the door a few times, and wished he’d held the handle at the same time. As each tap eased it open a fraction further, Garry was hit with the putrid stench of vomit and faeces. He had to step back into the hallway to gag, then pulled his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose before venturing back to the doorway.

  “Mum?” he whispered. “You OK, Mum?”

  There was no response. The curtains were drawn but Garry could make out her shape on the bed. It looked like she was lying on her back, arms and legs spread wide. He couldn’t tell if she was under the sheets or lying on top of the bed.

  He clicked on the ceiling light and saw the thin duvet curled up at the food of the bed. Stacey lay spread-eagled on top of the mattress, her glassy eyes gazing at something unseen on the ceiling. Her mouth hung open and he could see the puddle of vomit which had likely ended her life. His eyes followed the trail down to where what little had been ejected from her throat had pooled between her exposed breasts, each one pointing towards opposite walls.

  Beneath her rear-end, Garry saw a pool of thick faeces and was thankful she’d been wearing shorts, otherwise the sight might have been enough to cause him a mental breakdown.

  He stood frozen and indecisive, unable to peel his gawping eyes away, and each passing second served only to etch the revolting scene deeper into his brain.

  The investigation didn’t last long. Toxicology reports highlighted an extreme quantity of alcohol had been consumed. The officers attending the scene had already identified seven empty one-litre bottles of vodka, rum and whisky lying around the room. The conclusion was that Stacey had drunk herself to death.

  The absence of any kind of note suggested it was unintentional, and Garry was certain she hadn’t tried to kill herself. After all, his wages were due the following Thursday and she’d have wanted to spend those before shuffling off the mortal coil.

  The housing association allowed Garry to remain in the bungalow for three months rent-free while he arranged his next step. Luckily, it only took a fortnight for him to find a flat on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He packed up the belongings he wanted to keep into a single Aldi bag-for-life and said goodbye to Falkirk.

  He soon settled into life in Scotland’s capital. In fair weather he would rise early and walk the couple of miles into the city centre office. On other days, he hopped on the bus that conveniently left from the nearby shopping centre and dropped him a few hundred yards from the business complex.

  Garry enjoyed his work. It was both well paid and easy, given his extensive coding skills. He performed well, never took a sick day, and attended all company events and excursions, but still, he remained on the periphery. His colleagues at least knew who he was, but no one knew him. When it came to relationships, all Garry’s move into working life had achieved was an extra twenty-five people whose description of him contained those same words: shy, meek, timid. Uninteresting.

  But all of that changed last summer.

  Ask those around Garry today and the words they’ll use will be polar opposites.

  Confident. Assertive. Bold. Just enough arrogance to convey unwavering faith in his convictions, but not so much as to appear offensive. A man who perfectly straddles the border between persuasive and manipulative to get what he wants, but makes sure others want it too.

  People trust Garry Plumb. Today, he is seen as a mentor, a leader and a protector. Those reliant on him feel absolutely secure under his charge. Outside of his professional life, those who meet Garry find him enthralling, charismatic, interesting. When he engages someone, they feel like the only person in the room.

  The people in Garry’s life feel like he knows them, and they know him.

  What they don’t know is that Garry Plumb is one of the most prolific serial killers no one has ever heard of.