Fiona Raedale’s mortal coil had been ripped from her as she sat at her till in Tesco. The where and the when. It hadn’t been pretty. Losing control of your bodily functions and dying from an agonizing convulsive seizure while drenched in your own visceral lava rarely is. It could have happened in Bar Budda, in another pub, on a bus or in a taxi. In the lift of the multi if it was working or locked away in the safety of her own home. But as luck would have it, it was in front of three frozen meals, two pints of milk, a multi-pack of crisps and a bottle of Bell’s.
The previous night I had swapped her inhaler for one I had prepared earlier. One with a little added something. Pure liquid nicotine is lethal stuff. One drop in the bloodstream will kill an average-sized adult in five minutes flat. It will take only slightly longer to kill a rhinoceros. It is virtually tasteless and virtually colourless and it is absolutely fucking deadly. The American National Poison Centre estimates that the lethal dose of liquid nicotine is 40-60 mg. A cigarette contains about 1 mg, so short of stuffing two or three packets of twenty into your mouth and swallowing the lot, it’s not going to do the trick.
They use liquid nicotine as an anti-smoking measure, one that had worked particularly well in Fiona’s case. A vial of liquid death, 100 mg in each, sits in those nifty little inhalators, released puff by harmless minuscule puff to fulfil the smoker’s craving. I had carefully, very carefully, removed the vials of nicotine from two of them and placed their contents carefully, very carefully, inside a bog-standard inhaler, the same as the one I had seen her use.
She would have known right away that something was wrong, or at least different. But by then it would have been too late. Damage done.
Of course, it was just possible that she had some mecamylamine in her purse just for such an eventuality. A shot of that was the only thing that could save her but it wasn’t likely to be found among her cigarettes and lipstick nor behind the Tesco pharmacy counter. Unless she had a hotline to a lab at Philip Morris or Imperial Tobacco then she had had it. The end, whenever and wherever it was to be, was always certain to be as messy as it would be quick.
Fiona Raedale lost control of her limbs, flopping to the floor in a big, fat, startled collapse. She suffered confusion and nausea but that was only the start. She soon lost management of her bowels and bladder, both discharging whatever they held in an abandoned flood of shit and piss. She vomited violently, emptying her guts till she wrenched up nothing but air. Then there was the terrible seizures, a final gasping convulsion before she slipped into a coma and sudden respiratory arrest.
It was a grotesque, undignified death – as any performed in front of a waiting queue of shoppers had to be. I felt some small measure of sympathy for the buyer of the frozen meals and sundry essentials, all the poor sods who endured the sight and stomach-churning stench, the cleaner dispatched from the juice aisle to deal with the mess. Still, eggs and omelettes, collateral damage and all that.
The real beauty of all this human ugliness is that liquid nicotine doesn’t show up in a serum toxicology screening. If the cops or the coroner decided to go for a urine toxicology screen then they’d see it OK but maybe not suspect too much. A smoker like Fiona, stands to reason she’d have nicotine in her pee.
No, chances were that the awful demise of fat Fiona would have gone down as a tragedy, a mystery, a medical conundrum. Unless I told them otherwise.
And of course that’s precisely what I did. The day before I had sent two first-class letters and on that Saturday morning they landed on two desks in Glasgow city centre. One letter to Rachel Narey, one to Keith Imrie. They might have removed her from being in charge of the investigation but they couldn’t dictate who I made contact with. Two letters, no fingers in either. Instead both contained a till receipt from Tesco on Maryhill Road.
Imrie couldn’t have known quite what he had but he certainly would have known immediately who it had come from and what it was likely to have meant. He was also armed with a slip of paper with a name and a phrase printed on it. ‘Fiona Raedale. Pure liquid nicotine.’
Narey too would have recognized the envelope as soon as she saw it. It would have set off alarm bells the moment it dropped through the Stewart Street letterbox. Chances are that whoever brought it to her desk would already have patted it down and confirmed what their eyes had already told them, that there was no finger-shaped bulge. It would have been handed over with a confused, anticipatory shrug.
Maybe this Lewington guy would have known Rachel got the letter, maybe not. But either way it was her who would have got on to Tesco.
Narey was good. It wouldn’t have taken her long. One phone call to the store to determine if any of their staff had gone missing, or worse. She would have been told of course that nothing had been reported. All was well. The receipt would have been sent immediately to the lab for fingerprint tests and whatever else they could get from it. That was the clever bit, my smart arse solution. I couldn’t give her a finger so I gave her a fingerprint. I liked to think she would have appreciated that later.
Narey would have told the store manager to have a word with all his staff, urge caution, impress on them just how serious this was.
Imrie didn’t phone her or Lewington but headed to the shop to snoop around on his own. The cops could wait, he wanted to be ahead of the game yet again. Had there been a murder, was there going to be one? His source had never let him down before. Whoever that source was, of course.
He’d still have been hanging around when the liquid nicotine kicked in and Raedale kicked off. He might even have seen it. He’d certainly have heard the commotion it must have caused and been there when Strathclyde’s finest came rushing to the door with sirens blaring.
The cops wouldn’t have been best pleased to see Imrie there before them. Not pleased at all. He’d have got an angry earful. He got a quote about his Cutter right enough, his story in the Record on the Monday confirmed that, but I was pretty sure Narey in particular also said a few things that couldn’t be printed. She wouldn’t have missed him.
She’d have found the soaked, stinking body of Fiona Raedale. She’d have known who any fingerprint on the till receipt from the Thursday was going to match up to. She’d have made sure they wrung every piece of evidence they could from that receipt. Every print, every bit of DNA, everything that might have passed for a clue.
I knew they’d have studied the CCTV tapes from the store, maybe as much as an hour or two before and after the 14.23 that was shown on the receipt. Everyone who entered and left. Looking for whoever might have purchased a six-pack of lager and a half bottle of whisky from Fiona Raedale’s till in two separate transactions.
They wouldn’t have seen me though because I was never there. Not that day at any rate. If they could have known then they might have seen a jaikie in a dirty, worn overcoat enter the shop about 14.09. They might have seen him leave about 14.24. Maybe if they concentrated on the exit time then they’d have spotted him as the buyer of the lager and the whisky. It still wouldn’t have helped them much though.
I had found my alkie accomplice at a piece of waste-ground five minutes’ walk away from Tesco. He wasn’t hard to convince that he should help me. I gave him a tenner to buy the drink, making it quite clear that he had to buy from the till with the fat woman wearing a badge that said her name was Fiona. He had to buy the drinks separately so that he would have two receipts. When he brought the receipts back to me he could keep the drink and get another tenner for his trouble.
He was already pretty wasted on Buckfast and methadone when I went to him and he’d have been off his face within half an hour of me leaving. There was no way he could remember me even if the cops did track him down.
Anyway, I’d sworn him to secrecy under pain of reprisals and I knew he’d keep to his side of the bargain. He was full of bravado and Buckie but something about me frightened him. Maybe the jaikie could see things that others couldn’t, maybe living on the streets just meant that he scared easily. Either way, he would stay drunk and silent.
The police knew. Imrie knew. Before long all of Glasgow and Scotland and beyond knew too. The Cutter had killed again.
The news couldn’t keep. Imrie being there ensured that. There was no way that they wanted him to claim another scoop and Lewington was in front of TV cameras within an hour. No explanation of how they could be sure, no missing finger, no names, no pack drill. But confirmation all the same. Victim number six. Cue hysteria.
The news had travelled all the way to an empty house somewhere about five minutes from Possil where Alec Kirkwood held seven men in hoods and was halfway through extracting whatever he could from them. Killing Raedale by remote control, being miles away when it happened was supposed to be my alibi when Rachel inevitably came calling. But it turned out to be my alibi to Kirkwood.
I couldn’t know if he’d got a phone call, heard from a rogue cop, heard it on the radio or had been watching Sky News. Didn’t matter. All that mattered, all that saved me and a couple of others from extreme pain was that he found out.
The Cutter had struck again and it could not be any of the poor saps he had lined up tied to chairs. Whoever it was it wasn’t any of them. We were kicked onto the streets without explanation and expected to be glad to be alive.
The next day I was visited at home by Arthur Penman, the accountant that fronted Kirky’s takeover of the taxi business. I was told that it had been a mistake, an unfortunate understanding but that no more was to be said about it. Nothing said to anyone. I didn’t have a job any more though, there had been a couple of redundancies, credit crunch and all that. An envelope was shoved into my hand containing twenty grand in cash. I didn’t need to go in to pick up any of my stuff. My taxi-driving days were over.