Random by Craig Robertson Read Free Book Online

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