The Law Killers by Alexander McGregor Page B

vehicle, pushed the door shut and quietly moved off into the shadows of the car park. The trembling woman in the passenger seat quickly locked all the doors, anxiously watching his departure. It was only after he vanished towards a nearby housing estate that she found sufficient courage to leave the car and re-enter the supermarket to ask staff to call the police.
    Despite press appeals and the study of the supermarket company’s CCTV recordings, the identity of the man who had appeared from nowhere to transform a woman’s routine shopping expedition into the most frightening experience of her life, remained unknown. The tapes picked up his arrival at the store some 40 minutes before the incident began and he was tracked wandering round the store without attempting to buy anything. He was also pinpointed hanging around outside, apparently watching other shoppers, and then moving towards a cash machine as though to use it. But, however helpful the images were, they were insufficiently clear to establish who the man was.
    The breakthrough the police were searching for came when an observant detective reviewed the CCTV footage. Magnification of the images showed distinctive features on the jacket, sufficient to allow the manufacturer to be traced. They in turn advised that it had been part of a batch supplied to a charity second-hand furniture organisation in Dundee.
    Within hours of that information being received, the recycling firm were able to tell police that the owner of the jacket was John Cant Smith. They knew him as a released murderer but had been ‘motivated by humanity’ to give him a chance by taking him on as a volunteer. At first he had been employed part-time, then, latterly, full-time. They were able to tell police, too, that on the day of the abduction, Smith had not turned up for work.
    Three weeks after the incident, he was arrested. At first he denied having any part in it, but later, before he was due in court, he confessed to what he had done, saying the offence hadn’t been sexually motivated but had been carried out because he had a cocaine habit and owed a dealer £350.
    Even after his arrest, Smith’s latest female victim remained unaware of his appalling history. It was only after he had faced justice – again in the High Court in Edinburgh – for the ordeal he had subjected her to, that she learned the full extent of his violent past. Perhaps it was as well she was such an innocent or she might never have found the nerve to confront him in the valiant way she did.
    As in the previous incidents, when he forced himself upon unsuspecting women, Smith again sought in court to explain away his actions as having much less sinister motives. His defence counsel said that following his release from his 19 years in Peterhead, Smith had lived alone and had obtained employment. However, just as he had admitted to police, he was a drug addict and required extra money. An examination of blood samples taken from Smith and also of his bank account, confirmed these facts. On the day of the attack, the defence QC went on to explain, Smith had little recollection of events but his intention had been to rob someone at a cash machine. When he had been unable to do so, he turned towards his victim and when that plan went wrong, his next thought was to have her drive him to a less busy machine.
    Jailing him for five years, Lord Kinclaven remarked that the term would have been seven years except for the fact that he had owned up to his crime at an early stage and also because he had been returned to prison immediately under the terms of the licence releasing him from his original life sentence.
    His words were received unemotionally by the man with the ordinary name but extraordinary history of crime. John Smith, who in his relatively short life had murdered, raped, rioted and abducted, was led away silently to return once more to the place he had said left him feeling desolate and hopeless – the place where those