Random by Craig Robertson Read Free Book Online Page B

street in search of the motorway. I wasn’t a nobody. I was somebody that they hadn’t heard of yet.
    I’d killed. Carr and Hutchison. More would follow. I was going to be known. And yet here was some gallus bastard with the bare-faced cheek to leave me without a fare. I laughed.
    It happened. Door lock was supposed to stop it but you weren’t always ready. Money is coming out of the pocket, handle is released and before you know it they are out the suicide door and off into traffic with your money in their hand. Comes with the territory. But there is no way they’d have had the nerve to try it if they knew what I was capable of. There wouldn’t even be a bare hire if they knew that. There’d be a tip every time.

 
CHAPTER 10
    Life used to have a rhythm. Maybe it still did but while it used to be a constant, understandable, workable, bearable thing now it wasn’t. Hadn’t been for six years. If there was a new rhythm then it wasn’t one I could live with. It jarred. It messed with my head. Clanging noises fucking with my ears and my mind. Even though it was now supposed to be dancing to my tune, it still rang raw and rattling and upsetting.
    A long time six years. Where there had been order there was discord. Like Thatcher lying before television cameras, whimpering about harmony as she bastardized the words of St Francis of Assisi yet whipped up more conflict than ever before. What was the norm had quickly become something very different and much worse.
    I knew it was the same for her, my wife, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to accept the way she chose to deal with it. Each to their own is all very well but she was way off the mark. Wrong.
    It was her rhythm, her solution. But wrong just the same. She filled her days with her campaign; using it to shut out everything else, blot out the world. She would leaflet, she would petition, she would persuade and harangue. She would sit on committees and chair discussion groups. She would carry placards and stand outside Parliament. She was on first-name terms with MPs, MSPs and councillors.
    Every fucking minute of it a complete waste of time.
    She complained, she moaned, she whined. She grumbled, criticized and bleated. She had achieved absolutely nothing and would achieve absolutely nothing. After all, the one thing that she really wanted to accomplish was impossible.
    That morning was just typical of it. It was just after seven and I was slumped over the breakfast table, drowning in a mug of coffee and sinking lower after a long night shift. She had charged into the kitchen, her hair tied back, businesslike. Just a few stray strands of the fair hair that had caught my eye all those years ago managed to escape the clutches of the hairband. She had a waterproof on over a suit jacket. Ready for all weathers and all circumstances.
    She had aged maybe fifteen years in the past six. Lines where there had been none. Her green eyes deeper and darker. Her mouth set harder. I think she was smaller too. Not that she had ever been much over five foot but I think it had all beaten her down another half inch.
    Not that morning though. She was ready for the day. She was bustling around the house full of the joys of a day ahead, believing all the false promises that it held. She even sang a bit. I caught her humming a few bars of something under her breath, a rarity in our house these days. I bridled at it. Half-witted optimism was not something likely to cheer me up after a long night at the wheel. Glasgow had been enough for me without this too.
    I knew I was supposed to ask where she was going, I knew I didn’t care and I knew she would tell me anyway. I just stared into the murky depths of the coffee and stayed silent.
    ‘Going to the Scottish Parliament today,’ she breezed at me eventually. ‘Train through to Edinburgh then to Holyrood.’
    I gave her just a nod in response. Any more would have signalled interest, even encouragement. Any less might have kicked