twenty minutes.
I waited until the bus had stopped before getting up from my seat and making for the exit. By that time a couple of people were trying to get on and I earned a bit of a glare from the driver. It was worth it though, the roly-poly was off and waddling down the street without ever catching sight of me.
As soon as she got off the bus, she’d reached into her handbag and took something out. Whatever it was, she moved it from hand to hand and then seemed to put it back in the bag. She went just a few yards then repeated the exercise.
Maybe ten yards further, just as she’d passed the Viking itself and crossed the road, she was back into the bag again. She took out whatever it was and this time huddled over it for a few moments before walking on. She’d lit a cigarette.
I was still on the other side of the road, watching her turn right and head back in the direction we’d come. Watched her charge purposefully ahead, fat but fast, rolling like a battlecruiser in stormy seas.
Then suddenly she took a sharp pavement left and turned into the Tesco on Maryhill Road. I followed, grabbing a basket for cover. Cameras saw me enter the store but it wouldn’t matter. I was one among hundreds. Hundreds today and thousands this week.
I walked up and down the aisles but couldn’t see her anywhere. Fruit and veg, toiletries, dog food, tinned foods, all the way to the butchers and bakers without sight of the roly-poly. I started to walk quicker, doubling back, scanning the heads of all the shoppers.
Nothing.
Fully five minutes, up and down, back and forth, getting desperate, had to find her. Surely she couldn’t have gone in and out so quickly. Had to still be there. Panicking a bit.
Then I saw her. Not in any of the aisles but sitting behind a till. Ten items or less. The roly-poly had been on her way to work at Tesco.
I picked up enough things to make it look like I had actually been shopping then joined a queue already three deep at her till. There were shorter queues but not so many that it would have looked odd that I chose this one. Just like a once a month shopper who didn’t know any better. Women were probably shaking their heads at me and smiling patronizingly.
She looked up and saw me standing there, another impediment to an easy day. She exhaled noisily and shook her head at my stupidity. Keep shaking it, I thought. She was maybe fifty-five although I had the feeling she wasn’t as old as she looked. She’d made herself old. She’d smoked her face old and scrunched it up into a meaner, harsher version than her God had intended. If she looked fifty-five then she was forty-five tops. Her podgy face was framed by that bowl of red hair and set off by a pair of practical specs and a permanent scowl.
You wouldn’t want to take a burst pay packet home to this one.
Her name badge said she was called Fiona. Then the young girl on the next till called her Mrs Raedale. Fiona Raedale. Welcome to my world.
She was unpleasantly plump and dressed older than she looked. Which meant she dressed at least ten years older than she was. Fiona Raedale was someone in an eternal bad mood. She didn’t like people. Maybe she thought people didn’t like her.
The woman being served had a wee girl with her, maybe three or four years old. She was hanging near the till and obviously wanted to help. She was reaching for the food as it came off the conveyor belt and a couple of times she made a grab for it before Mrs Frosty Drawers had the chance to pass it across the machine that reads the bar code.
If looks could kill. Raedale snatched a packet of HobNobs out of the wee girl’s hand and treated her mother to a glare that could fry eggs. The woman looked back at the queue with raised eyebrows and I shrugged in some sort of sympathy.
They moved on and it was soon my turn. Raedale didn’t look up but surveyed the contents of my basket with a cold glower. She didn’t take anything out but just looked at it, her small eyes flitting across the milk, bread, and processed foods that I had picked up. She was counting them. She was actually fucking counting them, the bitch.
Raedale must have recounted the stuff in my basket because I saw her eyes go over them again. By this time I had counted them myself and knew there were ten items. She seemed disappointed to find I wasn’t attempting an illegal till transaction.
She raised her eyes slowly and they settled on mine. Lucky, she was saying, lucky for you. Her fat, painted lip turned down at one corner in a barely-hidden sneer.
She didn’t look at me again. Picked up the ten items, one at a time, scanned them and dropped them onto the belt.
Roly-poly Fiona Raedale. Fat fucking bitch.
A voice raged inside my head. I am the scariest man in all of fucking Glasgow. Everyone in this city is living in fear of me and you sit there and fucking sneer at me. You fat fucking bitch. Bitch. Count my fucking shopping? You fat fucking bitch.
I could tear your fucking head off right now. I could strangle you with my bare hands. I could take those scissors that are at the side of your till and rip a hole in your throat.
I didn’t do that of course. I smiled quietly, put the items in a carrier bag, paid in cash and left.
CHAPTER 41
Raedale was a forty-a-day woman trying not to be.
I watched her. To Tesco, from Tesco, in Tesco. To the multi where she lived in Gilshochill in Summerston. To her mother’s house in Shiskine Drive. To regular Friday nights out with girls from work. To the one night a week with her mother to County Bingo across the road from her work.
Time and again I saw her take out cigarettes and thrust them back into the packet without smoking them. She needed to touch them, be reassured that they were there. The roly-poly bitch would play with the packet, turning it over and over in her hands, moving it from one to the other, slipping it back into her pocket then out again. She was desperate to smoke and desperate not to.
She had more reason than most to quit the cancer sticks. She was asthmatic. The first couple of times I saw her pull the inhaler from her bag and draw deep on it I thought it was one of those nicotine inhalators that people use when they are trying to give up. Then I saw her heaving air back into her heavy lungs and knew what it was. Smoking and asthma. Smart combination, fatty.
Fiona Raedale was trying to give up. It struck me that I could help her give up for good.
I watched her. Carrying staff-discounted bags of shopping to her mother’s. Scowling at people from her till to the bus stop to the bingo. Her life was limited and so were my opportunities.
There were times I wished I hadn’t painted myself into a corner with the whole finger thing. It made life – and death – so much more difficult.
Killing Fiona Raedale, even with the method I had in mind, was not difficult. Strange to say maybe but killing her was easy.
Killing her and cutting off her little finger was a bit more difficult. Killing her, cutting off her little finger and getting away without anyone knowing anything about it was much, much more difficult.
My own fault of course.
The plan had required it. Demanded it. But Jesus Christ it made things complicated. I knew how to murder her. I knew a way that could make the front page of newspapers and yet I could be on the other side of Glasgow when it happened. She would die a horrible, shocking death and I could have any alibi I wanted in the unlikely event anyone asked me for it.
Oh I was clever as fuck. I could kill this woman almost by remote control.
I couldn’t deny that the cleverness of that made me feel a right smart arse. And yet I was way too clever and therefore nowhere near clever enough.
Because I had to be there. I had to be with her so that I could cut off that finger and dispatch it safely to Rachel Narey. Shit, shit, shit.
