Craig Robertson - Random

They were the usual mixed betting-shop crowd. Old guys shuffling a quid a day around Lucky 15s and Yankees at a few pence a line. Loud younger guys in football tops banging in single bets and claiming it is all fixed when they lose. Quiet types who slide their slips over the counter and never let on whether they’ve won or not.

I stood with them and faced the two TV screens just like they did. Difference was I was the only guy in there hoping that his horse wouldn’t win. And I wasn’t looking at the television but looking for cameras. I saw none. Thank fuck for that.

Diamond Mick, the favourite that I’d put my fiver on, came in fourth. Thank fuck for that too. I wouldn’t have to go back to the counter and give Billy or the assistant another look at me or another reason to remember me.

I scrunched up my betting slip and made as if to let it fall at my feet with all the others. Instead I slipped it into my pocket. No one was paying any attention. If they looked at anything other than the form for the next race it was at a skinny ginger guy in a Celtic shirt who was telling anyone that would listen that the entire sport was fixed.

I had my back to the counter and was walking out when I heard Billy laughing, telling everyone that their luck would change in the next race. A beaten favourite was a good result for him. Or it should have been. Billy’s luck wasn’t as good as he thought.

‘Come on, boys,’ he was telling them. ‘Can’t win them all, but things can only get better, as Tony Blair used to say.

‘Tell you what. I’ll give you a quarter point on the next favourite above whatever the SP is. Can’t say fairer than that, now can I? This is going to cost me money, I can feel it in my bones.’

Billy’s bones. The bones of Billy the bookie. A single shiver passed through me.

It was three full weeks before I went anywhere near Billy’s shop again. Three weeks of thinking, planning, waiting.

Patience, patience.

Means and opportunity. Method. Detail and more detail. Devil in the detail. Pitfalls, escape routes, eventualities. Everything had to be considered.

A part of me hankered to go back there and to get on with it but the majority of me – the cold, dead part of me – knew better.

The hot, living part, the last traces of the old me, was getting ahead of himself. Thinking of Billy’s bones, his last sound, his death rattle. Dead me reined it back in.

There was no rush, things had to be done properly or not done at all. Billy could wait. Billy the bookie wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet.

Three weeks of reading, researching, deliberating, rejecting, debating. Do it this way, do it that. But never a moment to think not to do it. Never that.

Even when I went back to the bookies, even then I was there for an hour, no more. Then not there again for another two weeks. No rush.

In between, I went past his house in the middle of the night. I got out of the car and walked. I timed myself.

I practised. I worked through things in my head. My cold head. My dead head. Billy Hutchison. Billy the burping bookie. I thought about him a lot.

The rear of his shop backed onto the Forth and Clyde Canal. The bookies was Billy’s castle and his moat gave shelter to shopping trolleys, beer cans and condoms. The canal steals through Glasgow unseen and unheralded. At Maryhill it almost separates the city from the country as if it were the present from the past. One bank holds back the bams of Maryhill Road and the other protects rabbits, mink and roe deer. Never the twain shall meet unless a wild child of the Wyndford is particularly hungry.

I sometimes used to play around the canal when I was wee and knew the basin well enough. I hadn’t been down there since the days it ran dirty and a lungful of canal water would have had you dicing with death. It has been cleaned up in recent years though and fish have a better chance of survival in the water than the locals do on the land. No chance of the fish ending up as junkies.

It had been a while since I’d been on the canal but you don’t forget your way. It was an easy job to climb down the bank a hundred yards along and then hit the back of the building without being seen by anyone other than a passing fish. Billy’s moat was also his back door and he’d have been as well leaving it open. A two-tick fiddle with a thin rasp and a latch was lifted and I was in.

The bookie wasn’t too hot on security, emptied the safe every night so nothing to steal. But I didn’t want to steal, I had another commandment to break.

I knew Billy was in the Imperial and I knew he’d be at least an hour, much more likely two. It was Thursday night and that meant Billy would come back to the bookies alone after the pub. He always did. I reckoned he crashed out for a few hours before sobering up a bit and driving home to the wife with nicotine skin.

I knew I had time to work.

My brother was an electrician and I’d helped him out a few times when he took on big jobs and needed a hand. We’d rewired a few houses together and although my expertise was heavy lifting, fetching and carrying, I knew one end of a screwdriver from the other. He’d shown me a few dos and don’ts. I was about to put some of the don’ts into practice. I rewired, closed the back door behind me, taking care to leave it off the latch and got out. I hid in the shadows of the canal bank, waiting and thinking.

The human body is a great conductor of electricity because it is so full of water. Throw in dissolved salts in the form of blood and other various bodily fluids and you have a ready-made superconductor. Electricity can go from top to toe in the blink of an eye or at the flick of a switch.

The amount of damage done by electrocution depends on the size of the current and the length of the time it is in contact with the body. Ohm’s law says that the voltage of the source is equal to the current passing through the circuit – in this case the body – and the resistance to the flow of current it offers…

Whatever way you look at it, a fat old man with a dodgy ticker makes for a lovely conductor. But only once.

You don’t get taught that kind of stuff when you help your brother out on rewiring jobs but you can pick up a hell of a lot from Google. Said it before, the Internet is a great thing.

Two hours and ten minutes I waited on that canal bank. Two hours and ten minutes until I saw a light go on in the bookies. It went on very briefly.

I wasn’t there when they found him of course but I could picture the scene. The staff would turn up in the morning and be surprised the place was still locked up. One of the wee wummin would produce her spare key. The door would be opened and they’d see there was no one in the shop. They’d go through the back where the stairs led to the small flat above. At the foot of the stairs they would find Billy, dead as the deadest doornail, at the foot of the light switch he’d tried to put on.

It would be obvious enough that he’d been electrocuted. Grey hair frazzled and on end, burns black on his hands, lips charred, eyes wide. Hardly a surprise either given the state of the place. One of the wee wummin would probably mutter that they’d warned him often enough that someone would get fried. Chances are it would have killed anyone but with the condition of Billy’s heart he’d not have stood a chance in hell.

They’d call an ambulance although they knew it would do no good. They’d call the police too. They’d all look at Billy and at the dodgy wiring in the bookies and it would be obvious to every one of them what had happened.

Obvious that is until they saw his right hand. Until they saw that he was missing a finger. A pinkie. Neatly chopped off. Severed.

I bought every Scottish daily newspaper but found mention of it in only three of them. It didn’t please me. The Herald. Saturday, 9 May 2009. Page 6. No byline.