camera. She was looking straight at me.
‘There is someone out there who knows what happened to Mr Hutchison and I am asking that person to go to his local police station. It is very important that you speak to officers now before things get worse.’
She must have been screaming inside. Desperate to tell everything. Two murders, one killer. Two severed fingers, one maniac.
‘You have information which may ease the suffering felt by Mr Hutchison’s widow, Agnes, and their family. I am asking you now to come forward with that information.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming along this evening. We will provide you with any further information when it becomes appropriate to do so. Thanks for your help on this matter.’
Immediately there was a clamour among the reporters who were standing off camera. One shout came through the hubbub. ‘DS Narey, is this a murder investigation?’
She levelled the questioner with a stare that put the brakes on every other reporter’s attempt to talk to her.
She held his gaze long enough that he must have been squirming. The contempt was dripping from her.
‘I said I wouldn’t take any questions.’
She clearly wouldn’t take any shit either.
A big, black dog appeared on our street. An overweight Labrador cross, with red eyes. Didn’t seem to belong to anyone. But it looked at me.
It didn’t bark or growl. Didn’t run towards me or turn away. Just looked. Looked at me as if it knew something.
I asked if anyone knew whose dog it was but no one did. No one even seemed to have seen it around.
Must have, I told them. Big, black thing. Red eyes. Heavy with a belly on it. Must have seen it.
No.
Sat on the corner outside the McKechnies’. Or opposite ours.
No.
Big, black dug. Surely?
No.
I remembered my granddad had a dog like it. Not as heavy maybe. Name of Mick. Looked just like this dog on our street, except not so heavy.
This dog that nobody knew who it belonged to. This dog that nobody else had seen. Four days in a row I saw this dog. This big, black Labrador cross.
Four days I saw it and then it disappeared. Strangest thing.
CHAPTER 9
Nobody talked much about Billy Hutchison from the back of my cab. Glasgow went on being Glasgow. City centre. West end. South side. Rat runs. Drunks. Businessmen. Drunk businessmen. Airport dashes. Rain shine and rain. East end. North side. Big tips, no tips.
Pollokshields. Carntyne. Barmulloch. Ibrox. Parkhead. Carling Academy. Queen Street Station. More drunks. Traffic jams.
So much city. Maybe it was no surprise that no one seemed to notice a single soul slipping from it. Single because no one connected Billy the bookie to Jonathan Carr. No one talked about the double killing that nobody knew about. No one talked about the double killer that walked unknown among them.
To the people in the back of my taxi I was just mate or driver. I was just a pair of eyes in the rear-view mirror.
To me, they were just yawning, jabbering, disconnected mouths. I listened for mention of Billy but there was none. But for a single day when Radio Clyde news carried a fifteen-second report as part of their twice-hourly news bulletin, there was nothing. Even that day it disappeared when some ned got himself stabbed in Possil and the sports news was extended because a Rangers defender had a knee injury.
Billy had come and gone in a flash and people either didn’t notice or didn’t give a fuck. That wasn’t what was bothering me though. I didn’t give a fuck about Billy either. I didn’t care that they weren’t talking about him but I did want them to talk about me. Or rather, about the man that dispatched Carr and Hutchison. The man that cut off the little fingers of their right hand and posted them to the police. I wanted them to talk about that man.
But Glasgow just went on being Glasgow.
Gallus. That was the word that summed up the city best. A Glasgow word. It meant bold and cool, it meant great, it meant cheeky and brash, it meant fearless and cocky. It meant self-confident and stylish. It meant all that and more. Hard to explain if you hadn’t used it since you were old enough to talk. Glasgow was certainly gallus though.
Time was I revelled in that gallusness. I was part of it. As gallus as the next guy. But that was before, before it was all taken away. Now I was on the outside looking in through a rear-view mirror as Glasgow spilled in and out of my taxi on their way to or from a drink or an airport.
Busy the night, driver?
Sometimes I just looked at them through that mirror. Held their gaze and let them try to guess. Do you know who I am, what happened to me, what I have done? Do you know what I am going to do? They never did. They never even came close.
Instead they bleated about the weather. Moaned about rain as if it was important. A little rain never killed anybody.
Football, money, traffic, football, rain and football. What I had done hadn’t dented the consciousness of this place, hadn’t touched the sides. That would change, I knew that. I needed to be patient.
Sometimes though, when they moaned on and on about such trivial nonsense, about nothing at all, I wanted to slap them, to tell them what real troubles were. To let them know what real suffering was. Mostly though I just wanted them to shut the fuck up. I needed to let them drift in and out through the taxi, blissful in their stupidity and their ignorance. The eyes were supposed to be the window to the soul but they saw nothing in mine. They looked but they did not see. All the time I was thinking, planning, waiting, wondering. Inside it was all there but they just couldn’t see it.
The SECC. Central Station. Wee wifies with bags of messages. Hyndland. Pick-ups at the ranks. Flagged down in the street. Mount Florida. Early starts. Late finishes.
Garthamlock. Celtic Park. Kids to school. No smoking. No drinking. No eating. No throwing up. Cathcart. Johnstone.
I drove them. Drove by them. Drove through them. Picked them up and laid them down. I took their money. Gave them their change. I was right there and they did not see me. They did not know that I existed.
Suited me fine. For now.
I’d drop the flag and set the meter going, ferrying the sleepers and the talkers, the happy and the sad to wherever it was they wanted to go. Sometimes of course I’d get duffed for the hire and some chancer would do a runner into the night leaving me out of pocket.
I’d been sixth on the rank at Central on a slow Wednesday evening, one of those long waits that can happen when you time it wrong in between trains. Sitting watching the to and fro, flicking the wipers on and off to keep the windscreen clear, moving forward every few minutes till all at once a train has come in and there is a queue desperate to get moving.
When I got to the front, a hard-looking sort in a black leather jacket and a bag slung over his shoulder was the next in line. Wouldn’t have been my choice but it wasn’t mine to make. He got in the back, gave me an address in Barrhead then got on his mobile to tell someone that his train was in and that he was in a taxi, would be there in twenty.
You get a feeling for people. Even when you couldn’t care less about 99 per cent of them, even when they
