Craig Robertson - Random

Kirky’s boys leaned on him although there really wasn’t much need. Fyfe knew which side his bread was buttered on. He provided them with a list of Carr’s clients and a rundown on who might be worth talking to.

He also gave them details of Carr’s extra-curricular activities. The lap-dancing clubs, the massage parlour and the redhead in Milngavie named Amanda. Jack Fyfe was the type who made sure he knew everything about his employees, particularly the potentially embarrassing ones like Carr. He survived by knowing about problems before they happened.

Davie Stewart and Charlie Grant took a trip out to Woodlands Street in Milngavie and knocked on Amanda Kernaghan’s door. She wasn’t best pleased to see them.

The way Ally McFarland heard it, she was much less pleased by the time they left.

I had no idea if Rachel Narey, DC Dawson or any of their uniformed friends had been out to see Amanda but if they had I was pretty sure their approach would have been different. It’s doubtful they would have taken a crystal vase from a table and emptied flowers and water over an expensive carpet. Or smashed the vase against a wall. They almost certainly wouldn’t have rummaged through drawers to find address books and letters. They wouldn’t have stood over her and let her believe that they were about to rape her.

They wouldn’t have forced her legs apart and dragged her skirt to her waist. Wouldn’t have leered and stared and scowled and drooled the way Davie Stewart did. Silently pawing at her, aroused and angry, while Grant demanded to know who else knew about her and Carr. Pushing at her to tell who would have been jealous enough to kill him.

Amanda cried, tried to scream but Stewart’s hand stopped her from doing that. She told them that the killer had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with Jonathan. It was a random murder, the papers said so, the police said so.

Stewart and Grant told her it wasn’t, that she was a stupid cow, that she had to tell them what she knew. She cried again. Stewart stroked her thighs and licked his lips. Grant asked for a name and in the end she gave one. Some guy that had been interested before Carr was on the scene and who she had been out for dinner with a couple of times. He didn’t take it too well when she said she didn’t want to see him again. The guy, a computer programmer from Bearsden, demanded to know if there was anyone else and she’d said yes.

They didn’t leave a mark on her. No damage to the house except a broken vase, a clumsy accident. They eased her skirt back down and encouraged her not to speak to anyone. Grant suggested that Davie Stewart might be keen to come back and pay her another visit if there was even a whisper out of her. She wouldn’t say anything.

The computer geek took a doing. He told them nothing because he had nothing to say.

The cops were called but he could tell them little. Two guys in ski masks asked about the lawyer that had been murdered. Left him in a heap of badly bruised ribs when they realized all he knew was what was in the papers.

Frankie Grant and a couple of thugs were tasked with having a quiet word with some of Billy Hutchison’s customers at the bookies in Maryhill. It was in the nature of things that there were punters there that owed Billy money and would have been quids in when he got a short, sharp shock and was found pan breid behind his own front door. Independent bookies like Billy strung regulars out on credit and were much more likely to let them run up a tab than the likes of Ladbrokes or Corals. Some of them could be into him for a bundle.

Debts like that could end up in the hands of loan sharks and it took no more than a single phone call for Kirky to find out what he needed. Frankie and his boys had leverage. Not that they particularly needed it because they were quite happy to break fingers or burn cars. But the threat of those gambling debts being transferred to Alec Kirkwood turned out to be a very effective laxative. It loosened tongues as well as bowels. A name that was offered to them three times was Charlie Coyle, known as Glasvegas because of his heavy gambling.

At the time Billy had popped his clogs, Coyle was into him for nine and a half grand. Glasvegas was a big up, big down punter, the kind who would sting Billy for a thousand here or there with a shrewd bet then give him fifteen hundred back with a crazy hunch. Billy would always take his dough because he was confident he’d finish up ahead. Glasvegas sold second-hand cars so made decent money without exactly rolling in it. He needed Billy’s credit line and got it. But this time he’d got more of it than he could handle. Billy hadn’t handed the debt over to a shark but they were circling and smelling blood. The pressure was on but Glasvegas couldn’t buy a winner to get himself out of it.

There were those who reckoned Glasvegas was mad and bad enough to have done Billy in. No one made him for a serial killer though. Didn’t figure him for that. Frankie Grant and his bully boys weren’t thinking that far ahead though. Don’t ignore the obvious was what Kirkwood had told them.

Glasvegas was walking home half-canned from a session in Munns Vaults on Maryhill Road when he was pulled into a white van and knocked unconscious. He woke in a flat somewhere, blindfolded and his bare feet in a basin of water.

Glasvegas was a gambler, a bluff merchant, a guy used to putting on a bold front. Confidence can only get you so far though. As the first tiny jolt of electricity shot through his body, Coyle would have torn up a betting slip with ‘Certainty’ written on it. He was a gambler not a fighter. And he fucking hated pain.

The clamps on his fingers stayed put despite his shouts to take them off and his offers to tell them anything they wanted to know.

So talk, they told him. The first words Frankie or the thugs had spoken.

Glasvegas was the kind of guy with fingers in many pies, skeletons in many cupboards and debts in many places. He didn’t know where to start.

‘Is it about the Skodas I got from down south? I can sort that, no probs. If it’s Billy Hutchison’s dosh then you’re maybe family. Will pay that obviously. It’s only right. Terrible shame what happened to Billy. Great guy. Salt of the earth. Wait. Is it my maw’s hoose? Is it? Fuck, can’t tell you how bad I feel about that. Loved that wee hoose, she did too. The Cosworth that I sold to Malky Blackstock’s cousin? That it? I knew I should have got the boy to check those gears over.’

Frankie raised a hand signalling his boys to keep quiet.

‘It’s about your maw’s hoose. Talk.’

Glasvegas spilled his guts. He’d remortgaged his mother’s ex-council house and blew the thirty-five grand he got for it. Then he couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments and the bank had repossessed. His mother had gone to live with her sister in Bishopbriggs. The sister with three cats and a bad back. The smell and the inconvenience wasn’t the worst thing though. It was the shame. Lost that smashing wee two-bedroomed hoose. The one that she had loved showing off to her sister. The sister that was now lording it over her. Frankie Grant threw a big blast of electricity that had Glasvegas’s hair standing on end. Didn’t kill him, didn’t even knock him out but had him grinding his teeth together as if trying to bite his own molars off. Scorch marks on his skin where the clamps had fired into his hands.

Eventually Coyle found a shaky voice.

‘Bastards. Said you wouldn’t do that if I told you what you wanted to know. Bastards.’

‘Aye, but that wasn’t what we wanted to know. That was for your maw, you fucker. And so’s this.’

The charge of electricity wasn’t as much as the one before but it still had Glasvegas screaming and whimpering.

‘Billy Hutchison, you wee scrote. Tell us everything.’