A time will come when a person will be declared insane when they believe that ‘I am he who is X, Y and Z, and X, Y and Z only.’
It’s a line from a book called The Dice Man by a guy calling himself Luke Rhinehart. It was a cult novel written at the height of the hippy revolution and featured free sex, rape and murder. The dust cover said it was subversive, controversial, and dangerous. Banned in several countries, it promised to change the reader’s life whether he liked it or not. It was about a bored psychiatrist who spiced things up by letting his entire life be ruled by the roll of the dice. No going back, no changing the rules, just follow the dice and let chance sweep away what he said were the illnesses of reason and seriousness created by modern society. It championed freedom over free will, chance over choice. It took away the moral or ethical responsibility that came with choice and replaced it with risk, variety and impermanence. You couldn’t be held accountable for something that happened at random and there was no point in worrying about the consequences of any action when the next throw of the dice took you in an unrelated direction.
It was of course a massive piss-take.
All that mattered though was the premise and the premise was simple. The dice decide. Or the die decides. Die is the singular of dice. Die, die, die. For my purposes, it was all rather neat. The die decides who dies. Homicidal tongue-twisters r us.
The line about he who is X, Y and Z means that it’s crazy to believe a person is just what he is and nothing more or less. We are all more than we seem, even to ourselves. We are all capable of much more than we or others might think.
None of us can be sure of who we are or what we are, far less of what we might do. One event, one roll of the dice, one chance happening, one flutter of a butterfly’s wing and all that we think is set and sure is suddenly very different. Your world is arse over tit just like that. Chaos rules. Your X, Y and Z is gone and you find that you are X, B and W. You are more and you are less.
My instruments of chance were a pair of dice liberated from an old Monopoly set. Rhinehart’s nonsense is no way to live a life but it seemed a perfect way to orchestrate a random death.
The dice man cometh.
I split Glasgow into two areas, north and south of the river. An odd number meant north, even was south. A four and a six. South.
Wikipedia lists sixty-two districts south of the Clyde in alphabetical order from Arden to Tradeston. I split them into five groups of twelve with two left over. I threw a single die and threw a one.
That left me with Arden, Auldhouse, Battlefield, Bellahouston, Cardonald, Carmunnock, Carnwadric, Castlemilk, Cathcart, Corkerhill, Cowglen and Craigton.
Leafy suburbs, skyscraper hellholes, Victorian villas, tenement graveyards and conservation villages. Rat runs, estates, schemes and bombsites. Someone in one of them would fall into in the crosshairs of the dice.
I’d need to throw a pair of dice so that left only Arden as being safe. Perhaps a first for anyone living there.
I threw some practice dice in my head. Think of a number.
Eight. Castlemilk. Chateau Au Lait or Castlemanky depending on your point of view. It had one pub and seven hundred hungry weans testifying that you couldnae fling pieces oot a twenty-storey flat. If it was butter, cheese or jeely, if the bread was plain or pan, the odds of it reaching earth were ninety-nine to wan. Numbers everywhere.
Ten. Corkerhill. Home of the Paka, a canal or train stop for Paisley, refurbished commuter land and not half as bad as it was painted or as it used to be.
Seven. Carnwadric. Another tweeny war housing scheme on the fringes of civilization, east of safe Arden and north of Thornliebank. I’d say it was a shithole but that would hardly distinguish it from so many of the badly thought out schemes thrown up to take the spillover from the old slums.
I threw the dice for real.
A two. A three.
Five. Cardonald.
I knew there was the college, a cat and dog home, the Bute and Cumbrae multis and not much else of note except the bus into town. Cardonald it was.
Random step number two.
I opened an email account in the name of Wayne Wayne. Wayne. wayne@live. co. uk. I then opened a Facebook account in the name of Wayne Wayne. As good a name as any, better than most.
Wayne is the most common middle name of America’s most prolific murderers. It’s all big John’s fault. Over 150 of the USA’s most vicious serial killers had the middle name Wayne. John Wayne Gacy, 36 victims. Elmer Wayne Henley, 27 victims. Conan Wayne Hale, Jimmy Wayne Jeffers, Robert Wayne Sawyer.
Blame the parents. Give a kid a name like that and don’t be surprised if he grows up just a little more aggressive and macho than you expected. Wayne Wayne it was.
Facebook search engine. Type in the word Cardonald and hit enter.
Top of the list of over 500 names was Lara Samoltowski, the unwitting victim of the social networking revolution. It was all Google’s fault for opening Facebook up to their search engine and so opening her up to me. She really ought to have listened to those warnings on privacy settings.
A look at her profile told me a lot. Where she studied. What bands she liked and so what concerts she might go to. Where she liked to eat. Where she liked to drink. Where she liked to shop. The lack of a boyfriend. Her vulnerability.
So much networking. So much information.
I was the most patient of impatient killers. It took three meals at Gambrino on Great Western Road. It took three times of wandering carefully through Zara, H amp;M and Oasis. It took four fairly uncomfortable visits to Oran Mor and the pubs of Ashton Lane before I saw the face from Facebook.
It was in Jinty McGinty’s on Friday 3 April that I eventually saw her. She was sitting at a table in the corner with three other girls. I knew them immediately. Maz, Christine and Ash. Her Facebook friends, her best pals. Fellow students who didn’t know how lucky they were. But they would.
Maz was a hotshot netball player, had a thing for guys with glasses and the only thing she loved more than vodka and cranberry was Ugly Betty. They all thought Christine was the best-looking girl in college. Chrissie had loved Take That since she was seven but now she was big time into the Chemical Brothers and missed her dog Robbie who was at home in Elgin. Ash was a party girl, hated studying but loved Greggs steak bakes, Pinot Grigio and tablet.
Then there was Lara. She wasn’t one of the new Poles who had flooded into Scotland since EU expansion. She was fourth generation. Her dad couldn’t even speak Polish. Lara wanted to save the planet, the environment, the whale, the proboscis monkey, the Penan forest people of Malaysia and the old Atheneum theatre. She’d have been better off trying to save herself.
She loved hillwalking and clubbing, lusted for Ashton Kutcher and admitted a guilty fancy for Al Gore. She barely looked her twenty years. Slim and pale. Long, dark curly hair. A near constant, guileless smile on a pretty face.
One of the other girls, one of the lucky ones, sat with her back to me. Whatever she was saying, Lara smiled, laughed and nodded. Quick impressions were that she was smart and lively, an intelligent face, not too loud, interested. Nice. Beautiful. All to live for.
I saw a couple of other guys in the pub looking at her too, checking her out and nudging their mates. That helped. It wouldn’t seem so odd if someone caught me staring at her. And I did.
In fact, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Lovely, laughing, lively Lara.
But I wasn’t looking for the same reason the other guys in the bar were. It wasn’t the slim waist, the long hair or the beautiful smile. I was staring because I was going to kill her.
I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t gawping at her slim neck because I wanted to kiss it. I wasn’t like them at all.
I wasn’t like anyone. Not in that pub or anywhere else. I hadn’t been like anyone else for a very long time.
Not since my wee girl died under the wheels of Wallace Ogilvie’s car. Not since I had taken the lives of Carr, Hutchison, Tierney, Ogilvie and Sinclair. And I would be a lot less like anyone else after I disposed of the young girl sitting a few yards away from me.
I had no choice. There was no choice. The dice said so. Facebook said so. The others, Ogilvie apart, were the unlucky losers in my Cutter’s lottery. She was part of the afterthought, the camouflage, the extra padding, the rest of the plan. Not the way a young life should be described. Not the way things should turn out.
There was something about her neck though. My eyes kept being drawn to it. A pretty neck but slender. Fragile.
I’d watch what she was doing – taking in her friends, her movements, trying to pick up more clues about her – but again and again my eyes went back to that delicate neck. Brass neck. Won by a neck. Red neck. Up to your neck in it. Dead from the neck up. Pain in the neck. Stick your neck out. Millstone around your neck. Hung from the neck until dead. Broken neck.
She would be just a couple of years older than Sarah would be now. Maybe Sarah would have been at college or university now too. A young woman. Out on the town with her friends. Her life ahead of her.
I shook my head. Shook the interfering thoughts out. No time for that. A distraction I didn’t need. I mentally apologized to her for doing so but it had to be done. Out damn thoughts.
They kept coming back though. Maybe Sarah and Lara would be friends. Maybe Sarah would have been on her Facebook list, swapping messages with Maz, Ash and Christine. Maybe she’d have been in that happy group in Jinty’s with white wine, vodka and cranberry and bottles of beer.
I’d been mugged by my memories again. Sarah came flooding back, pushing at me, arguing with me. She was saying no, I was saying it had to be. The plan, the dice, Facebook. They all demanded it.
I shook the thoughts out of my head again and screwed my convictions to the sticking place. It had to be done. That neck. I was still looking at it when I became aware of someone standing at my shoulder. I hadn’t paid any attention to the door opening or the two sets of feet that had walked near me.
I looked up and saw the inquisitive face of Detective Sergeant Rachel Narey looking back down at me.