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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