Random

by Craig Robertson

  Fiona Raedale was one podgy step out of the seat and towards the bar area when I staggered into her, knocking the bag from her hand and sending her spinning back onto the lap of the startled female student. I apologized, slurring it as best I could, hearing muffled giggles from the supermarket girls as Raedale fumed.

  I knelt to the floor, apologizing over and over, and picked up the items that had spilled out of fat Fiona’s handbag, stuffing them back in as quickly as I could. She grabbed the bag from me, embarrassment fuelling her naturally crabbit nature even further. Idiot, she rasped, checking that her purse was still where it should be. Righteous indignation masqueraded as steam coming out of her ears as she pushed past me and stormed towards the toilets.

  I stood with my back to the Tesco crowd and shrugged apologetically to her retreating form before slouching out of the pub and back onto Sauchiehall Street.

  That was it. Job done. All that was left to do was walk away.

  And wait. And wonder.

  I knew it would happen – except in the unlikely event that she noticed I had swapped her asthma inhaler for a seemingly identical one. It was just the where and the when that I couldn’t be sure of.

  I walked to the first corner and took a left up Dalhousie Street, turned right onto Hill Street and made for the side of the road that was in shadow. I kept going until I came to the corner of Rose Street and there, in the twenty yards of relative safety that afforded me, I changed.

  I turned my jacket inside out, switching it from black to green. I took off the baseball cap that had been low on my head since I entered Budda. I tore off the dark wig that lurked beneath it. I straightened up to my natural height, a few inches taller than the way I’d been carrying myself.

  It wasn’t much maybe but I was confident it would be enough. The simple fact was that I was smarter than the people who may have seen me. The risk of knocking over that bag was one that had to be taken but I had known I needed extra insurance. If anyone had seen the guy that banged into Fiona Raedale and picked that bag back up, if anyone remembered him and connected him to what happened later then they would have remembered a shorter, dark-haired guy with several days of growth on his chin. Not me.

  The wait and the wonder. The where and the when.

  I was hoping it didn’t happen in the pub although there was no doubt that there was a danger of that. The hassle and humiliation of being knocked over might have been enough to make her use the inhaler. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if it happened there. Well, not mine anyway – it would definitely be the end of hers. The mass audience it would undoubtedly create would be a bonus, a spectacle like that would guarantee front-page news, but it would make it far too close to my being there. No, later would be better.

  I walked on in the shadows, my mind full of the possibilities, when I heard the car racing towards me. It was the slamming of the brakes that alerted me more than the speed but it didn’t matter either way. I had no time to react, no chance to run. Three men were out of the car in a flash, doors left open, engine still running.

  They were on me before I could move. A dark shape came at me hard from the left and I was falling to the pavement. There was a moment of sweet calm, a vague feeling of feet against me then a long nothingness. Sleep came fast.

  CHAPTER 42

  When I came round I was unable to move or see. Sneaking consciousness without light is a strange experience.

  I slowly became aware that my hands and legs were both tied. The little movement that I could make with my fingers confirmed I was lashed to a chair. My head was covered, not just my eyes. A hood, maybe a pillowcase.

  I listened.

  Nothing. No voices, no breathing, no movement. Then, from further away, maybe through a wall, I heard raised voices but could make nothing out.

  Long, long periods of silence broken only by the occasional distant shout of complaint.

  I was calm. Cold. Waiting for what had to come.

  This wasn’t part of the plan. Far from it. I’d deal with it though. So be it. Bring it on.

  I slept on and off.

  Much as I fought it, tiredness and even boredom washed over the adrenalin and I slipped away for a while. I woke now and again to hear offstage cries, reality and dreams mashing away time, snoozing through a nightmare that was almost certainly of my own making.

  When a door slammed and people walked into the room, snapping me awake, I had no way of knowing how long I had sat tied to that chair but the aches in my bones and the lack of feeling in my fingers and limbs told me that it was long enough. I could see no light through whatever was tied over my head so it could have been night or day.

  I stayed silent as I was grabbed then hauled, me and my chair pulled across the floor for some distance, one door then another closing behind us. I rocked to a halt, rough hands on my shoulders settling me. I breathed and waited again.

  There were other people in that room. Not the ones who’d brought me there. Others almost certainly tied up like me. There was a raucous hubbub of voices, piping up angry, pleading and insistent. Something hard smacked against something else hard and the room fell silent.

  ‘Nobody speaks. Not one word.’

  Immediately a voice jumped up somewhere to my left.

  ‘Fuck you!’

  There was a swish of air, a crack and a roar of pain. After that no one spoke. Not one word.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. It probably wasn’t as long as it seemed but someone was letting us stew, letting the anticipation grow.

  Then out of the hush came the sound of feet across the wooden floor, echoing round what appeared to be a big, empty space. Three short steps and the person stopped. A few seconds later there was a gasp. The gasp was followed by the sound of a blow then more silence.

  The feet moved again, three steps and stop. No gasp this time, a lesson learned. It happened another twice. Three steps and a wait.

  The steps were getting closer, very close. He was on the move again, three steps and stop. Echo echo echo. He stopped right in front of me.

  I had counted four seconds when the hood around my head was loosened and pulled off. I blinked at the light and saw Alec Kirkwood standing in front me, his eyes boring into mine. I made sure my face registered confusion more than shock, trying to give off the fear of an innocent man.

  Of course it was Kirkwood. It could only have been one of two people and although Strathclyde polis could be capable of the odd bit of unlicensed heavy-handedness, this didn’t really seem Narey’s style. It had to be Kirkwood. No brainer. Had to be.

  I looked left and right, seeing seven other bodies tied to chairs as I was, each with a hood over their head, each hood with a rope looped round them. Whoever we were, we weren’t going to get to know the others. I was number five of seven ducks in a row. One of the ducks had a pool of piss at his feet. I caught a glance of a high window. Daylight.

  Kirkwood put the hood back over my head, his eyes never leaving mine as the darkness closed over me again. He walked on, three short steps to the guy next to me. A wait then on to number six.

  I wasn’t scared. Maybe I would have been if it was only me that had been hauled in there but the other hoods meant Kirkwood was on a fishing trip. A voice in my head told me that you can’t go fishing for ducks, it was fishing or it was ducks, it couldn’t be both. I told the voice to shut the fuck up.

  If it was just me that was in there then I’d have been thinking that Ally McFarland had named me. I’d have been sure I was a dead man. Maybe I still wouldn’t have been scared. Kirky couldn’t kill a dead man, just torture him a bit. I could take that. Maybe I even deserved it.

  Not scared, not for fear of what he could do to me anyway. Fear of being stopped, fear of not being able to finish what I’d started. Started so I’ll finish. No passes.

  Lots of footsteps now, three maybe four people on the move. They were heading away from me, back down the line, back to duck number one. There was a scrape of a chair, a muffled protest
and a cry of pain then the footsteps were heading off in another direction, dragging a chair and an extra pair of feet with them.

  A door shut and there was silence in the room. The noises came from further off, softened by wood and brick but unmistakably the sounds of accusing voices and strangled screams. No noise in our room though, the good little ducks were quiet as mice. We listened and we waited our turn. We heard a man scream really loudly.

  Kirkwood was fishing. He’d rounded up seven suspects from his shortlist of Spud killers. Maybe we weren’t even the first seven, maybe half of Glasgow had sat hooded in this room. I knew I’d asked too many questions, knew I’d pushed Ally to ask too much, knew that Kirky had looked deep into my eyes that day in the taxi office, knew my luck was on the run, knew he was coming for me, knew I was on his list. Knew I was not alone and that might just be my saving grace.

  The feet came back into the room and hauled off another suspect on another chair and those of us that were left listened in distant silence, our ears straining to hear the fate of the departed. Judging by the noise that eventually came, his fate was not pleasant.

  Fifteen minutes later and it was duck number three that was screaming loud and hard. I imagined Davie Stewart’s twisted smile as he happily carried out Kirkwood’s bidding. Eye? Ankle? Arse or knee? Take your pick, take a pick to it. Doing his worst, doing what he was best at. Suddenly the screaming stopped, the distant door opened and closed and I knew duck number four was shitting himself. He would have had absolutely no idea why he had been dragged here but he’d have had no doubt that he was next.

  It seemed to take much, much longer until the near door opened for him though. Maybe it just seemed that way. Maybe the pain getting closer made time slow and stop like a watched kettle, like that boiling kettle that was poured over Hutton’s balls. Einstein called it relativity. The sitting ducks called it torture.

  Then the door was open and the feet rushed in, hauling number four away, ignoring his pleas and dragging him out of the room. He had been the only thing standing between me and what was to come and now he was gone. I missed him.

  I listened for the shouts and the screams but instead the feet came back. Long before I expected it. Arms were on me, pulling at me, cutting at the straps that held me and pinning my arms tight to my side. I was being dragged away quickly, rushing towards that near door, leaving the chair behind. But I wasn’t pulled into that room, wasn’t propped up in front of Kirkwood. It was taking too long, they were dragging me too far.

  Then I heard a crash of wood against a wall and felt wind on my face. I was outside. Then just for a moment or two I was being shoved. I flew through the air a few feet and landed with a shot of sudden pain as the side of my head hit metal. I was back in the van, bodies moving beside me, quiet moans and fear reverberating. I could smell blood.

  Within minutes the transit door had opened and closed twice, two more bodies being thrown inside. The second of them landed on my right leg jarring my knee violently against the floor. The van was thrown into gear and with a screech it took off, chucking its cargo around in the back.

  We drove no more than a few minutes then we screamed to a halt, the engine still running. The doors were opened and a body next to me was grabbed and thrown out. I heard it land on concrete. The doors slammed shut and the van moved off at speed. I reckoned maybe five minutes passed and it stopped once more, the engine again churning below us. The doors opened and my ankles were grabbed, my body was hauled along the floor, causing my head to crack off what was maybe someone’s knee before I felt nothingness below me and dropped onto the ground.

  I could feel grit and dirt against my arms as the feet moved around and away from me. A stamp on an accelerator and the van was gone. I lay still, not certain I was alone, not sure they had left me or were about to reverse the transit back over me.

  I was still lying there when more feet raced towards me, making me brace myself for a kick or the crack of a baseball bat. Instead it was young voices, kids’ voices, pure Glesga kids, scheme kids.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, man. Izzi deid? Dunno. Kick him. Naw don’t. Ye mental? Get yer big brother. Talking aboot? Fuck’s sake, man. Whose wis the van. Dunno. Fuck’s sake, man.’

  I pulled the hood from my face, scaring the shit out of the kids in doing so. It only took two seconds though before the bravado was back.

  ‘Awrite, big man? Whit happened? Wizzit gangsters, man? Who done ye?’

  I went mental at them. I needed them away from me as quick as possible so I could work out where I was, what had and hadn’t happened to me and what was going to happen to me. I told them to fuck off, wore all my hate on my face and screamed at them. They backed off, knowing a headcase when they saw one, and retreated to the other side of the road where they felt safe to abuse me.

  ‘Who you shouting at, ya prick? Gaun fuck off, ya muppet. Possil Fleeto, ya bass. Faw’in oot a van like a big wean. Fuck you, ya cunt. Gaun, get tae fuck.’

  Possil. Cheers guys. I started walking down the road in search of the nearest bus stop, the jeers of the Fleeto ringing in my ear and a million questions battering the inside of my head.

  I now knew where I was but I didn’t know why I didn’t get a beating, a cutting or worse. I didn’t know why Kirky abandoned his line-up. Did someone confess? Surely not, not in a way he’d believe anyway. Some guy might have confessed to anything just to stop the pain but Kirkwood would have wanted details the poor mug couldn’t provide. Couldn’t have been that.

  It was only after I’d got on board a 54 into Hope Street and went into the Pot Still where I sat myself in front of a large whisky and a television that I discovered I had saved myself. The word was serendipity.

  CHAPTER 43

  Fiona Raedale’s mortal coil had been ripped from her as she sat at her till in Tesco. The where and the when. It hadn’t been pretty. Losing control of your bodily functions and dying from an agonizing convulsive seizure while drenched in your own visceral lava rarely is. It could have happened in Bar Budda, in another pub, on a bus or in a taxi. In the lift of the multi if it was working or locked away in the safety of her own home. But as luck would have it, it was in front of three frozen meals, two pints of milk, a multi-pack of crisps and a bottle of Bell’s.

  The previous night I had swapped her inhaler for one I had prepared earlier. One with a little added something. Pure liquid nicotine is lethal stuff. One drop in the bloodstream will kill an average-sized adult in five minutes flat. It will take only slightly longer to kill a rhinoceros. It is virtually tasteless and virtually colourless and it is absolutely fucking deadly. The American National Poison Centre estimates that the lethal dose of liquid nicotine is 40–60 mg. A cigarette contains about 1 mg, so short of stuffing two or three packets of twenty into your mouth and swallowing the lot, it’s not going to do the trick.

  They use liquid nicotine as an anti-smoking measure, one that had worked particularly well in Fiona’s case. A vial of liquid death, 100 mg in each, sits in those nifty little inhalators, released puff by harmless minuscule puff to fulfil the smoker’s craving. I had carefully, very carefully, removed the vials of nicotine from two of them and placed their contents carefully, very carefully, inside a bog-standard inhaler, the same as the one I had seen her use.

  She would have known right away that something was wrong, or at least different. But by then it would have been too late. Damage done.

  Of course, it was just possible that she had some mecamylamine in her purse just for such an eventuality. A shot of that was the only thing that could save her but it wasn’t likely to be found among her cigarettes and lipstick nor behind the Tesco pharmacy counter. Unless she had a hotline to a lab at Philip Morris or Imperial Tobacco then she had had it. The end, whenever and wherever it was to be, was always certain to be as messy as it would be quick.

  Fiona Raedale lost control of her limbs, flopping to the floor in a big, fat, startled collapse. She suffered confusion and nausea but that was only the start. She soon
lost management of her bowels and bladder, both discharging whatever they held in an abandoned flood of shit and piss. She vomited violently, emptying her guts till she wrenched up nothing but air. Then there was the terrible seizures, a final gasping convulsion before she slipped into a coma and sudden respiratory arrest.

  It was a grotesque, undignified death – as any performed in front of a waiting queue of shoppers had to be. I felt some small measure of sympathy for the buyer of the frozen meals and sundry essentials, all the poor sods who endured the sight and stomach-churning stench, the cleaner dispatched from the juice aisle to deal with the mess. Still, eggs and omelettes, collateral damage and all that.

  The real beauty of all this human ugliness is that liquid nicotine doesn’t show up in a serum toxicology screening. If the cops or the coroner decided to go for a urine toxicology screen then they’d see it OK but maybe not suspect too much. A smoker like Fiona, stands to reason she’d have nicotine in her pee.

  No, chances were that the awful demise of fat Fiona would have gone down as a tragedy, a mystery, a medical conundrum. Unless I told them otherwise.

  And of course that’s precisely what I did. The day before I had sent two first-class letters and on that Saturday morning they landed on two desks in Glasgow city centre. One letter to Rachel Narey, one to Keith Imrie. They might have removed her from being in charge of the investigation but they couldn’t dictate who I made contact with. Two letters, no fingers in either. Instead both contained a till receipt from Tesco on Maryhill Road.

  Imrie couldn’t have known quite what he had but he certainly would have known immediately who it had come from and what it was likely to have meant. He was also armed with a slip of paper with a name and a phrase printed on it. ‘Fiona Raedale. Pure liquid nicotine.’

  Narey too would have recognized the envelope as soon as she saw it. It would have set off alarm bells the moment it dropped through the Stewart Street letterbox. Chances are that whoever brought it to her desk would already have patted it down and confirmed what their eyes had already told them, that there was no finger-shaped bulge. It would have been handed over with a confused, anticipatory shrug.