It turned out Billy was a bookie. An accountant of the turf variety with his own shop on Maryhill Road, one of the handful of independents left in the city. Places like his relied on regulars. Offering slightly better prices than the big high street guys to keep the punters coming back. He’d know them all by name, know whose wife not to talk to, know whose secrets to keep, know who’d be good for credit and who wouldn’t.
He’d be a bit shady, bound to be, but legit enough. There would be a good few bets never chalked up for the taxman. He’d maybe be paying a bit of insurance to keep his shop from going up in flames, protection money to ensure a safe trip to the bank with a bag of takings.
Billy the bookie was in his late fifties, a cheery, grey-haired man of about five foot six with steel glasses, a belly and a purple face. His stomach, face and nose told me he liked his beer and whisky. So did his lunchtime visits to the Imperial Bar.
He lived an easy fifteen-minute drive from his shop, a big semi in Whiteinch with garden front and back. His wife was a faded woman with hard-worked hair, nicotine skin and 1980s clothes. I twice saw two guys who were probably grown-up kids that had flown the coop.
I watched him get into his car to drive to the shop.
I watched him walk from his shop to the bank and saw him stop fully five times to chat with this person or that.
Billy Hutchison knew everyone in the street and they all knew him. He had a joke for most, a quiet word for others. For every one of them he had a breezy smile. He tousled kids’ hair, he patted dogs and he waved at passing cars. Chances are he would have helped old ladies across the road if any of them needed it. He was Santa, offering 2-1 the field.
It didn’t make any difference. His was the name at the end of my finger and that was all that mattered. Carr had made it easy for me by being a total fanny but that wasn’t the point. Random is random.
I slipped into the pub and watched Billy. I was much more comfortable in the Imperial than I had been in the Corinthian. The beer, bunnets and bandits hid me better than champagne and chandeliers. No one looked twice.
Billy held court at a table in the corner. He sat with cronies and there was a lot of laughing and waving of hands. They all enjoyed the craic but Billy was king. No doubt about it.
The bunnets – whether they wore them or not – knew their place. They could have a pop at Billy, make a joke at his expense, didn’t matter. When Billy spoke they listened and laughed. He was the money man and that bought him stature.
I watched him knock back a pint of special and a large whisky. He wolfed down a plate of lasagne and chips. Chips with lasagne? Christ, the ‘chef’ deserved killing.
He had another pint and two more double whiskies. He chased the lasagne and chips salad down with apple pie and cream.
He had lasagne on his shirt, spots of cream on his collar and a mix of the whole mess on his face. To celebrate, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and burped. It was more than a rift. It was an open-mouth belch that he exaggerated by making it roar from his belly.
Billy the bookie sat back to let everyone marvel at his talent and his mates duly paid homage by all laughing with him.
I guess you can find a reason to kill anyone if you look hard enough. Billy Hutchison – nice old guy, burping slob – had just signed his warrant. I finished my drink, left the pub and went home.
It was fully two weeks until I went back to Maryhill and went into Billy’s shop. I’d seen him go into the Imperial just after twelve and the first race was the 2.00 at Sandown. Billy would be back in the bookies by 1.30 so that gave him nearly an hour and a half to fill his belly and display his manners.
I walked and waited – I didn’t need to watch him eat again. Walking when you have nowhere to go and no wish to be noticed is a strange thing. You can’t just look aimless, there has to be a direction about you. Pick a spot in front of you and walk quick enough, not too quick. No eye contact, keep in the shadows, be casual. Walk as if you are whistling without actually doing so.
I got far enough, checked my watch, looked around as if I was a bit lost and making my mind up. No idea if anyone was actually watching me. Checked my watch again, puffed out my cheeks and turned around.
Back to Billy’s.
It was ten past two, the first race was over and the place should have filled up a bit. More customers, more cover.
I had one worry though and there was no way I could think of to test it except by going in. Suck it and see, no other way to go. CCTV. The bane of my frigging life. Well, my new life.
I had spent a lot of time thinking about it. Pros. Cons. There were no pros. I would say that I lost sleep over it but I didn’t sleep much anyway. However the thought of them definitely made me anxious. If there were cameras in there then it could only be bad news. The only question was the degree of trouble.
My only protection was the baseball cap on my head and while that would help, it was hardly a disguise. One shot of me in the shop meant a link could be proven. No getting away from that. It would be a while yet before anything happened to Billy and it would mean someone checking through a lot of film but it could be done.
Maybe Billy didn’t keep the film more than a day or two. Maybe Billy had cameras with no film in them. Maybe Billy had no camera. I didn’t like maybes. I needed certainties. Random only gets you so far.
What was my take on Billy boy? He had money but not that much. The house was reasonably expensive but not that much. Semi. Semi-detached, semi-expensive. I’d looked at his shoes – a hundred quid a time with worn heels. He ate lasagne and chips but wore a watch that was either worth five hundred pounds or a tenner depending on whether it was legit or a snidey. He had a two quid haircut and two twenty-grand cars in his drive. He walked to the bank. Mrs nicotine skin and hard-worked hair carried Louis Vuitton handbags and went to bingo twice a week.
My money was on Billy not having a camera. It was a big bet. Bigger than anything placed in Hutchison’s Independent Bookmakers. I figured that he wouldn’t want to spend the money. Figured he’d not want everything that happened in his shop to be recorded either. Figured he’d have a dummy camera at best.
For figured, read hoped. For hoped, read prayed. Except I didn’t pray to God any more.
I had finished my return walk and was outside the bookies. I didn’t hesitate even though I wanted to. I breathed deep and approached the door. Let there be no cameras. No cameras. No cameras. Keep saying it, make it so.
I pushed through the frosted-glass door and went in, knowing that the last thing I should do was look for the last thing I wanted to see. Scanning the little shop for cameras would be like holding my hands up.
There were newspapers pinned up on the far wall and I headed over to hide myself against them until I got my bearings. I made as if I was poring over the Sandown form. Made as if I knew what I was doing. Checked out the floor. Worn carpet. Rolled-up betting slips. Rogue ash showed someone was ignoring the smoking ban.
The walls behind the pinned-up racing pages could have done with a lick of paint. There were chips out of the Formica tabletops and a loose wire sticking out below a light switch. Thoughts of electrocution strayed across my mind.
I found a betting slip and wrote out a line. Fiver on the favourite in the second.
Billy took the bet himself. There was just him and a slightly chubby twenty-something girl with dark hair behind the counter. He gave the slip the once-over before giving me some cheesy ‘last of the big spenders’ grin and clocked in my bet. He’d barely seen me although it didn’t matter if he did. Only mattered who else saw me. Billy wouldn’t be talking.
He gave me my copy of the slip and turned to the next punter.
I looked at him just a moment longer than I should have done. Imagining all kinds of things and thinking it odd that I was standing so close to him. I was stalling and it was stupid and yet I didn’t, couldn’t, pull away. The chubby girl was looking at me, her eyebrows knitted, about to ask if there was anything wrong. Sure, I thought, I am going to kill your boss and I’m having a good gawk at him first. You got a problem with that? Instead I made a show of checking my betting slip and nodding my head before sliding back into the cover of the punters.
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.