Random by Craig Robertson Page A

nothing.
    I let her think it. To do otherwise would have meant opening up a deep can of worms we were both desperately trying to keep a lid on.
    So she had done her duty, another day of active inaction and now she was home signalling the start of the collapse, the sinking into oblivion.
    The first pill was taken within ten minutes of her being through the door. She halted her deluded monologue just long enough to sip water and bite tablet. Lockdown had begun for the night.
    She was still talking as I sat a plate and cutlery in front of her. She was still telling her self-serving lies when I dropped a breast of chicken, new potatoes and green beans onto the plate. The food was no more than a minor barrier to her. The one-sided conversation was her justifying her existence and it would have been cruel to interrupt.
    Finally the food was gone and the talk began to fade. She was dropping deeper.
    The television propped her up for a few hours. Staring at the box in the corner, the spirit going and the flesh weakening. Images playing back across her increasingly glassy eyes, soap operas and situation comedies sending her deeper and deeper.
    I sat too, in a growing conspiracy of silence. Not watching, not caring, my own plans playing out in the theatre of my mind.
    By nine all the pills were rattling around inside her as she made her way upstairs to bed. I knew that in minutes she would be fast asleep.
    By day a misdirected human dynamo. By night a spent force. By day the accidental campaigner. By night a lockeddown impenetrable cell. The day was the fuel and the night the hunger.
    Day and night shutting out demons that were hurling themselves at her door, battering to be let in. Better to let them inside. Welcome them with open arms and use them to your ends. Better by far.
    With her gone I still sat and gazed at the television. No more or less lonely now that I was alone. The night was mine and there was work to be done. I’d drive the streets and see what the morning was to bring.

 
CHAPTER 11
    Sauchiehall Street is now a straight, mile-long broadway but it used to be completely different. It was once a winding, narrow lane with villas each standing in an acre of garden. I liked that. The idea of random, winding roads turned into a direct route. The name came from two old Scots words that have since been bastardized into English, much like the entire country. Saugh is the Scots word for a willow tree and haugh means meadow. That’s why I started counting at Miss Cranston’s old place near the corner of Blythswood Street, the Willow Tea Rooms. Good a reason as any.
    I’d begun walking at the Donald Dewar statue in front of the Royal Concert Hall but didn’t begin a countdown until I got to the tea rooms and the windows full of the Mockintosh stuff that would have had Charles Rennie spinning in his art nouveau grave. The tea rooms were Glasgow history though, a tourist’s favourite.
    The Room De Luxe had silver furniture and leaded glass work, a genuine thing of beauty produced in a city of sweat and ugly temper. Mackintosh’s genius was to harness Glasgow’s contrasts, mixing right angles and curves, traditional and modernist, poverty and prosperous, beauty and beaten brow.
    A good place to start.
    The place you begin is always important. Not as vital as where you finish but important all the same. There is logic and logic. Some would have considered me crazy but I had my own reasoning.
    I counted as best I could.
    One. A youngish guy in a Rangers away top. Cap pushed back on his head, tracksuit trousers and trainers. Classic ned look. Crappy chain round his neck. Lovebites and at least one tattoo.
    Two. His mate. Same uniform except with the addition of a scar from ear to mouth. His hands thrust in his pockets, his mouth going at a hundred miles an hour, man.
    Three. A girl. Just a bit older than Sarah would have been. Perhaps nineteen or twenty. Knee-length boots and a short skirt. Way too much make-up. She looked at