Random (27 page)

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.

Maybe this Lewington guy would have known Rachel got the letter, maybe not. But either way it was her who would have got on to Tesco.

Narey was good. It wouldn’t have taken her long. One phone call to the store to determine if any of their staff had gone missing, or worse. She would have been told of course that nothing had been reported. All was well. The receipt would have been sent immediately to the lab for fingerprint tests and whatever else they could get from it. That was the clever bit, my smart arse solution. I couldn’t give her a finger so I gave her a fingerprint. I liked to think she would have appreciated that later.

Narey would have told the store manager to have a word with all his staff, urge caution, impress on them just how serious this was.

Imrie didn’t phone her or Lewington but headed to the shop to snoop around on his own. The cops could wait, he wanted to be ahead of the game yet again. Had there been a murder, was there going to be one? His source had never let him down before. Whoever that source was, of course.

He’d still have been hanging around when the liquid nicotine kicked in and Raedale kicked off. He might even have seen it. He’d certainly have heard the commotion it must have caused and been there when Strathclyde’s finest came rushing to the door with sirens blaring.

The cops wouldn’t have been best pleased to see Imrie there before them. Not pleased at all. He’d have got an angry earful. He got a quote about his Cutter right enough, his story in the
Record
on the Monday confirmed that, but I was pretty sure Narey in particular also said a few things that couldn’t be printed. She wouldn’t have missed him.

She’d have found the soaked, stinking body of Fiona Raedale. She’d have known who any fingerprint on the till receipt from the Thursday was going to match up to. She’d have made sure they wrung every piece of evidence they could from that receipt. Every print, every bit of DNA, everything that might have passed for a clue.

I knew they’d have studied the CCTV tapes from the store, maybe as much as an hour or two before and after the 14.23 that was shown on the receipt. Everyone who entered and left. Looking for whoever might have purchased a six-pack of lager and a half bottle of whisky from Fiona Raedale’s till in two separate transactions.

They wouldn’t have seen me though because I was never there. Not that day at any rate. If they could have known then they might have seen a jaikie in a dirty, worn overcoat enter the shop about 14.09. They might have seen him leave about 14.24. Maybe if they concentrated on the exit time then they’d have spotted him as the buyer of the lager and the whisky. It still wouldn’t have helped them much though.

I had found my alkie accomplice at a piece of waste-ground five minutes’ walk away from Tesco. He wasn’t hard to convince that he should help me. I gave him a tenner to buy the drink, making it quite clear that he had to buy from the till with the fat woman wearing a badge that said her name was Fiona. He had to buy the drinks separately so that he would have two receipts. When he brought the receipts back to me he could keep the drink and get another tenner for his trouble.

He was already pretty wasted on Buckfast and methadone when I went to him and he’d have been off his face within half an hour of me leaving. There was no way he could remember me even if the cops did track him down.

Anyway, I’d sworn him to secrecy under pain of reprisals and I knew he’d keep to his side of the bargain. He was full of bravado and Buckie but something about me frightened him. Maybe the jaikie could see things that others couldn’t, maybe living on the streets just meant that he scared easily. Either way, he would stay drunk and silent.

The police knew. Imrie knew. Before long all of Glasgow and Scotland and beyond knew too. The Cutter had killed again.

The news couldn’t keep. Imrie being there ensured that. There was no way that they wanted him to claim another scoop and Lewington was in front of TV cameras within an hour. No explanation of how they could be sure, no missing finger, no names, no pack drill. But confirmation all the same. Victim number six. Cue hysteria.

The news had travelled all the way to an empty house somewhere about five minutes from Possil where Alec Kirkwood held seven men in hoods and was halfway through extracting whatever he could from them. Killing Raedale by remote control, being miles away when it happened was supposed to be my alibi when Rachel inevitably came calling. But it turned out to be my alibi to Kirkwood.

I couldn’t know if he’d got a phone call, heard from a rogue cop, heard it on the radio or had been watching Sky News. Didn’t matter. All that mattered, all that saved me and a couple of others from extreme pain was that he found out.

The Cutter had struck again and it could not be any of the poor saps he had lined up tied to chairs. Whoever it was it wasn’t any of them. We were kicked onto the streets without explanation and expected to be glad to be alive.

The next day I was visited at home by Arthur Penman, the accountant that fronted Kirky’s takeover of the taxi business. I was told that it had been a mistake, an unfortunate understanding but that no more was to be said about it. Nothing said to anyone. I didn’t have a job any more though, there had been a couple of redundancies, credit crunch and all that. An envelope was shoved into my hand containing twenty grand in cash. I didn’t need to go in to pick up any of my stuff. My taxi-driving days were over.

I sat at home with the television on. Not watching, not hearing a word. She sat to my left, not talking. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

My mind was on a lock-up garage in Springburn. Keith Imrie would be arriving there now. He’d be excited, maybe a bit scared. He’d be seeing his scoop, his reporter of the year award. He’d be reaching inside the box in the corner and fumbling for the brown envelope. It would be there, just as I’d promised him.

Later I wasn’t sure how much of it I’d imagined or how much of it was the stuff I’d read in the papers or heard from the people who knew people. It was the talk of the steamie obviously.