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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.

Around five o’clock, I bought the final edition of the
Evening Times
. It was slightly more promising.

I’d decided to make DS Rachel Narey my new best friend. Whether she liked it or not.

That was why Billy Hutchison’s finger did not go in an envelope addressed to the CID at Stewart Street as the first one had been. It was sent directly to her.

Same kind of plain brown padded envelope, same printed label amended to suit, same process, same level of caution and self-protection. Different postbox. Different recipient. I just wished I could have seen her face as she opened the envelope and Hutchison’s pinkie slid onto her desk. A picture I’m sure.

She would have worn gloves of course. Assiduously careful not to contaminate the evidence. She would have known what was inside, they would all have known. There would have been a crowd of them around her desk. Waiting, wondering. As soon as they saw the envelope, the place would have been buzzing. They’d have come running, shouting people in from fag breaks, excusing them from interview rooms, all bursting to know for sure.

As soon as they saw the finger it would confirm what they had all thought from the minute they heard about Hutchison’s missing digit. Two words. Serial killer.

One word. Nutter.

Another word. Overtime.

The cops would have been loving it and hating it all at once. A psycho killer on their patch. Good and bad all in the one package.

A stubby, nicotine-stained finger lying there on an evidence bag on a standard-issue desk. Hard and white. Rigid edges of skin where the blades of the secateurs had ripped it away from the hand.

Sharp intakes of breath. Shouts. Swearing. Jokes. More swearing. Every pair of eyes in the place on that finger but the prize was Rachel’s.

She’d have been thinking the same as them. Why her? I hoped a little bit of her would have run scared at the knowledge that she had been picked out by a double murderer. I was certain that a bigger bit of her would have been pleased.

The other cops would have hated her for getting the finger. Some – the lazy, the old and the unambitious – would have been pleased it wasn’t them but hated her all the same. That’s the way people are.

The young ones, those with a hungry eye on quick promotion through the ranks, would have fucking despised her for getting it. They’d have killed to be the name on that label on that envelope with that finger. Why that fucking bitch? Her boss, Robertson, was probably more pissed off than most.

Too bad, it was hers. And it was hers because it was in my power to make it hers.

Billy was dispatched on the Thursday night, the finger posted the next day. Rachel Narey got it on the Saturday, no weekends off for her or me.

Early on Saturday evening, perfectly timed to catch the Sunday papers and the evening news, Rachel did another news conference. This time DCI Robertson stood at her shoulder rather than the other way about, probably trying to appear supportive but only managing to look vexed. It was her show now and everyone knew it.

She wore a dark suit with a white blouse underneath. She looked a bit nervous at first but soon hit her stride. She said she would be making a short statement but would not be taking any questions.

‘Yesterday morning, the body of William Hutchison was found in the premises of his bookmakers on Maryhill Road. We have good reason to believe that there were suspicious circumstances relating to Mr Hutchison’s death but are not prepared to go into the details of those at present.

‘We would ask anyone who was in the vicinity of 670 Maryhill Road on the evening of March the 8th to contact us. All information will be treated in confidence.’ She was looking directly at the camera now. Into the camera. She was looking straight at me.

‘There is someone out there who knows what happened to Mr Hutchison and I am asking that person to go to his local police station. It is very important that you speak to officers now before things get worse.’

She must have been screaming inside. Desperate to tell everything. Two murders, one killer. Two severed fingers, one maniac.