The Undertones Stole My Title

…a brown-complected volume called Teenage Rage, How A Golden Boy Became A Child Killer, written by one Bruce P Mackenzie. I guess he would have called it Teenage Kicks, but the Undertones got there first.

It wasn’t a bulky volume, 160 pages of fonts on steroids with generous line-spacing, but who needed Dostoyevsky for the tragedy of Nicole Clancy? Not that she was the major player in the tale, rather she was a by-the-way in the tabloid breathlessness – and Bruce P Mackenzie was red-top to the bone, no less than the chief crime reporter for the Daily Banner, according to the author’s bio. Christ, the Daily Banner…

Nicole Clancy was just the same as any other six-year-old girl that sunny December morning, skipping on her way to school, chatting with her chums about all the presents that Santa would be bringing her in a couple of weeks. She loved Christmas and her mum Linda was planning to make it an occasion to remember for the whole family. Linda and Nicole had moved a few months before to a flat in Barlanark, along with Nicole’s big sister Gemma…

Hold on there, Bruce – Barlanark? That scheme was the best part of ten miles from Levenhall. What was thirteen-year-old Lachlan doing over there? Or six-year-old Nicole doing in Levenhall? What happened to you, Gemma? You’d be around thirty now, at a guess.

…although Nicole was still getting to know her new school friends, she was already a popular pupil at St Aidan’s Primary and her teacher remembers her as a cheerful and bright girl. “Nicole always had a wee smile for me in the morning” said tall brunette Mrs Wendy O’Hara…

Well, call me and all my descendants shallow, but I for one was starkly gripped by the apparent hair colour of Nicole Clancy’s former teacher, twenty-odd years ago. What if “Mrs” O’Hara had been ginger? Oh, the drama…

The background narrative waltzed on, in regulation brazen blandness.

Times were tough for single parent Linda and her two girls, but the single mum was getting used to life without her children’s dad since he had been sent to Barlinnie prison six months before. That was a blessing in disguise, since hard-man Anthony Clancy had never been slow to leave bruises on the tall blonde.

Christ, more hair colour – did no editor notice you used “single” twice in the same sentence, Bruce? And, reluctant as I was to treat Linda’s many-years-later vague recollections as “true”, I think the man’s name was Charlie, not Anthony, and I doubt he was Gemma’s father, since Linda said he gave her the child. Then again, she also said his name wasn’t Clancy, either.

Now, talking to Linda, there are lines of sadness etched in her face as she wonders if there was anything she could have done differently that would have prevented what happened to Nicole. But, back in that cold December, no-one could have imagined the horror that was to befall the chatty six-year-old.

I touched my ear to check if any brain was dribbling out, melted by Mackenzie’s weapons-grade prose; everything seemed in order, so I skimmed through irrelevant detail and verbal upholstery to the start of the next chapter, a sketch of Lachlan Doune. Or, if you prefer, The Child Who Became A Monster.

Nobody knows when Lachlan Doune turned into the murderous killer who took the life of six-year-old Nicole Clancy. Nobody knows what went through his head that fateful night. We can only guess and shake our heads at the horror that came out of nowhere.

Lachlan was the youngest of a wealthy family, the Dounes of Airdlaggan – family motto Stand Up And Fight What The World Throws – and always seemed to be the favourite of his elderly father, Abercrombie Doune, a fierce businessman with dark moods and (to his older children) a distant and unloving father. Did this attention spoil the growing boy as he wandered on his own around the former mining country that had been turned into grouse and pheasant shooting land for the Dounes’ rich friends?

Well, Bruce P Mackenzie, you are as bad a psychologist as you are a journalist, so you are at least consistent. Nice, though, to paraphrase that verbose family motto for your readers, even if you made such a bad job of it. But…‘dark moods’?

…Abercrombie had several business interests in his life, but it was the sale of his mines at the time of nationalisation that made his biggest fortune. Later, when the mining industry declined and the mines were closed, he bought the land back for next to nothing and used the rolling acres for farming, shooting and Glenbarrie Safari Park…

And on he babbled. This was old-school tabloid boilerplate, simplistic and mock-serious, bloating pages until Mackenzie could deliver the money shot. Conversations and interviews with “friends” and “local people” added no information that any random passer-by could not have provided, or invented; either would suffice. I flicked through observations that Lachlan was “a bit of an outsider” and “kind of funny, not that anybody was laughing” and made few notes. Lachlan’s siblings were dismissed as a “playboy” and a “mysterious recluse”, which seemed to be a highly impressionistic (but lawyer-approved) way to say “unmarried alcoholic woman”. There was nothing more about the Doune parents, nor anybody else. Well, what was I expecting, research?

I meandered through more empty recollections of Nicole as a “happy wee soul” who “always had a smile for everybody”. None, though, were directly attributed to mother Linda who, Mackenzie recorded had had “her life torn apart by the tragedy” and was “shattered” by the experience. Okay, Bruce P, take me to what would surely be described, again, as ‘that fateful day’…

…which he did - although it turned out, specifically, to be “that fateful Wednesday”, for which I gave myself a silver medal.

Nobody knows how Lachlan Doune came to meet Nicole that fateful Wednesday…

Whoa, hold it right there! How can nobody know? Explain that remark, Bruce…but he didn’t. There followed – slowly and awkwardly – a wander through the various paths that Nicole might have taken towards Levenhall or Airdlaggan, or the reasons that the thirteen-year-old Lachlan (“perhaps playing truant from his expensive private school, although records show that he was present that day”) might have had to find himself in Barlanark, but nothing was clear and no questions were answered.

Whatever the mystery, one thing remains horribly, undeniably clear – after darkness fell on that cold December day, residents of the Levenhall scheme heard a commotion in the street. When concerned neighbours went to see what was causing the noise, they found Lachlan Doune dancing around a fire on a piece of waste ground, strewn with empty bottles and garbage. While they remonstrated with the agitated youth, barmaid Patricia McLean noticed there was what seemed to be a small human body in the fire. She was right – it was the remains of Nicole Clancy. When scaffolder Archie Bannerman asked Doune what was going on, the youth – seemingly in a trance, or a deranged state – mysteriously said “I can’t explain me to myself”.

At last, Bruce, you managed an accurate quote.  Idly, I checked Amazon on my phone – this book was out of print and unavailable, not even as a “used” version, however much this particular copy had interested somebody. I flicked to the book’s frontispiece – no old-fashioned sheet there with dates of issue, just a barcode. I went to the issue desk and waved the book at the neckbeard tickling his keyboard there, as if I’d discovered it...