The Long Drop

by Denise Mina

  They slow and stop. They’re both unbelievably tired all of a sudden. Manuel sees them both as if from far away. Two drunk men sagging in Crown Street. Quiet street, because it’s not yet closing time. Sagging. Small drunk, big drunk. Wants money, has money. Knows something, wants to know.

  ‘Give me money,’ he blurts at Watt.

  Watt considers his petition. He raises his hands and sighs, ‘Haven’t gotneny.’

  Manuel points to the river, over the river, to away. ‘Got somewhere?’

  Watt shakes his big head and says nononono. But he has. They both know he has. ‘Got the gun?’

  ‘I’ve got. I’ll get.’

  Manuel shakes two cigarettes out of his packet and gives one to Watt. He lights a match and they take their time, no rush, trying to make contact with the flame. It takes a while.

  They smoke in a considered manner.

  It is frosty. Cold creeps through the bar-warmed soles of their shoes, up their shins. They pull their jackets tight around them.

  Watt is looking at Hutchesons’, a centuries-old public school. He smiles warmly at it and Manuel asks, ‘Wha’? D’you go there?’

  Watt says no but smiles and straightens his back, flattered. He looks at the wall next to him. It’s a black tenement and the stone is crumbling. Sand and lumps of soft stone lie scattered on the pavement. It looks as if someone has been kicking bits out of it. Gang slogans and graffiti are scratched into the soft surface.

  ‘This?’ Watt turns and sweeps a panoramic hand over the street. ‘Gone. All gone. Big money.’

  Manuel nods. ‘Knocking it down.’

  ‘Really big money.’ Watt makes a raspberry with his fat yellow tongue. ‘Ptttthhhhhhh. Ten years. All gone.’ He sees that Manuel isn’t interested in land-development scams. Manuel should be. They’ll cost him his life. When the city is flattened and being rebuilt with bathrooms and plumbing and kitchens, money will be scammed on the materials and the labour. But Watt is in on the meta-scam. This pleases him enormously. ‘Big money.’ He spins on his heel. ‘Mon to the car.’

  They stagger down to Watt’s maroon Vauxhall, parked outside Jackson’s.

  Watt can’t find the key. He finds the key. He can’t fit it in the lock. He fits it in the lock. This though is seamless: door open, twist, fall into the driver’s seat, breathe. Turn, lean deep back and lift his big legs in. Shut the door. Breathe. Reach over. Unlock the passenger door. Breathe.

  Now they are both in the car. Now the doors are shut.

  They take a short break. They are both looking out of the windscreen at Jackson’s. Yellow light spills into black night.

  The door to Jackson’s opens and a man staggers out. He crab-walks away from them, along the pavement until he hits a lamp post. He clings to it, waiting until his legs agree to listen to orders. Confident he has reached an entente cordiale with his knees, he straightens up, watching his rebel legs to see if the truce holds. It does, but only for standing. The moment he attempts a step he is swept around the corner like a trawlerman thrown from a deck in a storm. Watt watches, glad he’s not as drunk as him.

  ‘I know who killed your wife and daughter.’

  ‘I know you do. Will you tell me?’

  Manuel sighs. It isn’t a drunken sigh. It a different kind of a sigh. ‘You know who did it.’

  Watt nods and slumps, his forehead resting on the backs of his hands on the steering wheel.

  Manuel mutters in the background, ‘You need a joe. I’ve got one, a right good fit.’

  Watt is confused for a moment. He doesn’t need a joe. ‘I just want the gun,’ he says.

  Manuel nods, as if that’s what they were discussing anyway. ‘And I’m the boy who knows where it is.’

  Watt can finally see an end to this nightmare. It won’t be easy but he is sure he was right to meet this terrible man. Fortune favours the brave.

  ‘I know where it is,’ slurs Manuel, ‘but I’m gonnae need money.’

  In the dark car Watt says, ‘I have money. I can get money.’

  Manuel nods. ‘All right then. Let’s go.’

  4

  Thursday 15 May 1958

  GLASGOW HIGH COURT WAS finished the year Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. The floor, the bench and the jury stall are oak, the walls bare lath and plaster. The acoustics in the room are acute.

  William Watt’s laboured breathing, and the grunts of the four policemen carrying him, fill the high, rapt room.

  Watt is being carried into court on a stretcher. He arrived in an ambulance and his doctor is in attendance, standing at the side of the court, watching him carefully.

  Watt crashed his car in the Gorbals last night. He drove straight into a wall. His knee is swollen and his neck hurts, but what really ails Mr Watt is self-pity. Mr Watt could cry even thinking about himself. He thinks that if only people knew how awful this is, they might be a bit nicer to him.

  After the crash last night, when the doctor asked him how he felt, Watt tried to communicate this, but it is 1958 and men don’t really have words for feelings. The doctor misunderstood. He thought Watt was in tremendous physical pain and now Watt is too embarrassed to admit the truth. He has to play along with the fiction that he is horribly injured but he’s not a good actor.

  The police have charged him with drunk-driving. This is not the first time. When the case comes to court he’ll lose his licence. Dowdall told Watt to plead not guilty so that news of the incident will be sub judice until the Manuel trial is over and no one will hear about it. Dowdall strives to make Mr Watt sympathetic because what has happened to William Watt is horrific. He deserves a charitable hearing.

  Watt and his phalanx of officers make it across to the witness stand. Watt is let down and hauls himself up the steps. A seat has been placed there for him. Lord Cameron asks him if he would like a rubber cushion for his knee? Watt accepts tearfully.

  Flinching, he raises his hand to be sworn in and repeats the oath with ludicrous solemnity.

  M.G. Gillies asks and this is the story Watt tells:

  It was a Sunday night, the start of the second week of his annual fly-fishing holiday. His wife and daughter didn’t want to come with him. Neither of them like to fish. His wife Marion is recovering from a heart operation. So he is alone, staying at the Cairnbaan Hotel, a ninety-mile drive from Glasgow.

  He spends the Sunday night in the residents’ lounge. Mr Watt, Mr and Mrs Leitch, who own the hotel, and a fishing chum, Mr Bruce, have ‘quite a party’. Watt is serving behind the bar. There is some singing. It all sounds very jolly. They drink for five or six hours until 1 a.m. when Watt and Mr Leitch stand by the back door, smoking cigars and watching as Watt’s black Labrador, Queenie, goes out. When she comes back in they both roll up to their beds.

  Watt is next seen at 8 a.m. in the dining room for breakfast. The hotel’s maid arrives for work at the same time and sees his car outside. The windscreen is covered in frost.

  After breakfast Watt goes fishing. A while later a taxi arrives at the riverbank. The driver gets out and beckons him over. Puzzled, Watt wades to the bank. Whatever is going on? He is wanted at the hotel. Mrs Leitch, proprietress of the hotel, needs to see him urgently. Watt can’t imagine why, but he knows it is very bad news.

  A sobbing Mrs Leitch meets him at the door. She is incoherent, saying something confusing. At first Watt thinks Mrs Leitch’s daughter has had a terrible accident. Finally she sits down and catches her breath and tells him: your brother John telephoned from Glasgow. Journalists came into the baker’s shop asking strange questions about your wife, about you. John phoned the police to find out what was going on. They said:

  Your wife is dead.

  Your daughter is dead.

  Your sister-in-law is dead.

  Killed in your house.

  Shot with a gun.

  In their beds.

  William keeps shaking his head. No, this is a mistake. My wife Marion? It is wrong. There weren’t three people at my house last night. My s
ister-in-law wasn’t at my house last night. I called home yesterday evening and Vivienne told me specifically that she would stay the night with Deanna Valente next door. This is all wrong.

  Mrs Leitch telephones John Watt and puts William on the phone. John tells William that Marion is dead.

  Vivienne is dead.

  Margaret is dead.

  Killed in your house.

  Shot with a gun. Come home at once.

  Mr Bruce arrives at the hotel and finds William very angry about this wicked mistake. He needs to go to Glasgow and sort this nonsense out.

  Furious now, William gets into his car. Mr Bruce insists on coming with him because he thinks William is too upset to drive safely–Oh! What a silly fuss about a load of nonsense!

  One harum-scarum mile down the road William pulls over and admits that he is not in a fit state to drive. They limp the Vauxhall to the police station at Lochgilphead. A kindly police officer takes over, driving Watt and Mr Bruce in Watt’s car to Alexandria, a town on the outskirts of Glasgow. And here Watt’s troubles begin because here he meets DS Mitchell.

  Watt is an odd man. He has always been odd, says the wrong thing, gets the mood wrong, but this has never been legally relevant before. Suddenly it is.

  DS Mitchell finds him very strange. Watt smiles abruptly, keeps announcing that he is fine, wants to drive his own car and is angry at the Glasgow police for making a ‘huge mistake’. Mitchell becomes suspicious of Watt and makes notes of some of the things he says in the car. He jots down these remarks:

  ‘You won’t see me shed a single tear.’

  ‘You don’t think I did it, do you?’

  ‘I know this road like the back of my hand.’

  For the defence, William Grieve asks Watt if he made these statements in the car because he had a guilty conscience?

  Watt announces to the court: ‘My conscience has never been guilty all of my life. I never did a wrong thing in all my life. Never once did I do a wrong thing in my life.’

  The court pauses. The public shift in their seats and smirk to each other.

  Even the lawyers find this level of bombast entertaining. They smile, raise eyebrows, make a note of it for their chest of war stories.

  I never did a wrong thing in all my life.

  Watt seems to sense that he has got something very wrong but isn’t sure what: he tries blaming someone else.

  ‘And anyway all of that is a lie. Quite like Mitchell to say that too. He’s a liar.’

  Standing up in court and calling a policeman a liar is utterly shocking in the 1950s. A police officer could stand in a witness dock and claim to be a tram, and the room would wonder if he was, in some sense, in many ways, actually telling the truth. Watt has good reason to be suspicious of policemen but, by speaking so boldly, he has lost the room.

  M.G. Gillies tries several times to make him likeable again. He asks Watt if DS Mitchell gave him any warning of what he was about to be shown when they arrived at his house. Watt blinks back tears. No, he says in a choking voice. None.

  They arrive in Fennsbank Avenue. DS Mitchell parks and pulls Watt out of the back of his own car in his own driveway. Journalists are crowding around the door. They take photographs of Watt being pulled out of the back of his own car in his own driveway.

  FLASH. FLASH.

  White lights. He wasn’t ready. He was looking straight at them.

  FLASH.

  He’s blinded. He reels and looks drunk in the photos. He blinks but white splashes of light are still going off in his eyes and he can’t see properly. Mitchell pulls him by the elbow, up the driveway to his own front door.

  FLASH.

  In the doorway Watt blinks hard, his vision resolves for a moment and he sees that his house is full of angry strangers. Men. They have overcoats on, or uniforms on, and they all stare at him as he comes through his own front door.

  Grabbed by the elbow, Watt is swung around to face into his own bedroom. Men in there and the beds all messy and scarlet blood spattered on the wall. Red. Marion’s familiar ankle, blue thread-veined, is hanging over the side of her bed. A stranger’s hands pull back the wet blood-sodden sheet.

  LOOK AT HER.

  He looks at his dead Marion.

  IS THIS YOUR WIFE?

  He looks at her.

  Marion. Bloody. Her nightgown is pulled up. Undergarments, thighs, breasts on show. Angry scar all the way down her chest from her heart operation. Marion is modest. William has never seen her scar before now. Men in overcoats are looking at the scar. Men in uniforms in his house and his wife’s bare thighs. He can’t look but he must.

  They are all staring at him. All the men in his house with overcoats and uniforms. The sheet on his own bed is yanked off.

  IS THIS YOUR SISTER-IN-LAW?

  One of Margaret’s eyes is open. The other one is swollen shut.

  IS THIS YOUR WIFE’S SISTER?

  She has a hole in her temple. It’s where the red has come from.

  IS THIS MARGARET BROWN?

  He looks at his dead sister-in-law. Her face is blue and swollen at the side.

  Watt thinks he is in hell. He isn’t. He’s on the threshold.

  Hands yank him down the corridor. His eyes still aren’t working. White flashes are still blinding him but he is aware of DS Mitchell, sneering at his shoulder. They spin him around to face into the bedroom.

  HER?

  He recoils from his dead daughter. He clamps his eyes shut but his mind assembles a brutal picture from scraps.

  Her breast.

  A nipple.

  Moon-white skin.

  Hugely swollen jaw.

  Slumped.

  Dear, soft neck, stained with splashes of burgundy blood. Up the wall behind her, all up the wall.

  Hot acid vomit jets from William Watt’s mouth onto the wall in the hall. It shoots from his nose. It squeezes out of his tear ducts and blinds him further. It drips down the flock wallpaper Marion has only just put up. He blinks the digestive acid out of his eyes but the flash spots continue. He’s glad of them now.

  As he tells the court about identifying the bodies Watt relives it. He lifts the glass of water to sip but the memory of being sick is so vivid that he can’t bring himself to put anything in his mouth. He remembers hot vomit burning his chin, dripping. He remembers the filthy, pungent smell. He’s shaking as he puts the glass back down carefully.

  If Watt was being devious he would fake a collapse here. It’s the logical point to fall to pieces, have the attending doctor come up and take his pulse. But that happens later.

  M.G. Gillies asks him if it is possible, as the defence have suggested, for Watt to drink for six hours in the residents’ lounge and then drive ninety miles to Glasgow, kill his family, drive the ninety miles back in the same night without detection. Watt declares, ‘Oh! You couldn’t drive! Never could you drive!’

  Everyone drives drunk. It’s a self-deprecating joke to claim you were following the white lines in the middle of the road because you were so drunk. No one believes him.

  The photos of Watt in his driveway, as he came into the house and then left afterwards, are printed in all of the papers. Watt looks stunned and frightened and half mad in them.

  An anonymous tipster sees them and calls the police and says Mr Watt has a girlfriend.

  In court, Watt is asked about extramarital dalliances and, shamefaced, admits to ‘several lapses’. To take the bad look off him, Gillies asks about Marion’s heart operation, as though a sick wife is, by necessity, a cuckolded wife. Men have needs. Marion’s operation was very dangerous, Watt tells him. Experimental. He didn’t want her to have it but she went ahead anyway.

  Days after the pictures of Watt are published a mechanic comes forward. He works in Lochgilphead, near the Cairnbaan Hotel. He thinks the police should know that Mr Watt had his car serviced that Sunday, in the morning. He had his petrol tank filled up. The Vauxhall’s lights kept cutting out and the mechanic offered to fix them if Watt le
ft the car overnight with him. Watt said he couldn’t leave the car because he needed it for a journey.

  But the police find the Vauxhall petrol tank is full, minus what it took to drive back to Glasgow with DS Mitchell in the morning. It should be missing three times that much petrol if he drove home, murdered everyone and got back to the Cairnbaan before breakfast. They visit everywhere en route but can’t find anywhere Watt could have refilled.

  The round trip is done and timed at five hours. But the test was done during the day. Watt would have done it in the dark, on unlit, potholed roads. The only route runs over a dangerous pass on a hill so steep that the summit is called ‘The Rest and Be Thankful’. This is a time when cars overheat on any incline. A wise driver will always have one eye on the temperature gauge after taking a hill and will pull over to let the engine cool. It can take half an hour or so for the heat to lift. Watt would also have had to cross the River Clyde. The test drive was done when ferries are frequent but the Renfrew Ferry is erratic at night. Realistically, the drive would have taken much longer than five hours.

  The police start to doubt that Watt could be responsible.

  But then more witnesses come forward.

  A week after the discovery of the bodies in Fennsbank Avenue, nine men stand in a line-up in Rutherglen Police Station. William Watt is one of them. The Renfrew ferryman walks along the line-up, peering into faces, looking men up and down. To pick a person out of the line-up the witness must touch them and say, ‘This is the man.’ This rule was introduced to stop the cops choosing the identified party themselves. The Renfrew ferryman reaches forward and touches William Watt’s soft businessman’s hand, scratching it with his ragged calloused fingers. This is the man, he hisses, This is the man.

  In court Watt admits that he was picked out by the ferry-man as having been on the 3 a.m. Renfrew Ferry on the night in question. He says he doesn’t understand how the man could have picked him out when he wasn’t even there.

  The ferryman also picked out the Vauxhall Velox in the Rutherglen Police Station car park. He identified Queenie from a pack of eight dogs. But he is a bad witness in court. He keeps calling the car ‘the Wolseley’, which is a very different-looking car from a Vauxhall. He comes over as an attention-seeker who obsessively contacts the police. He’s never off the phone to the police about ‘suspicious passengers’. He has a history of noting down the registration numbers of all the cars on the ferry but didn’t do it that night because, he says, it wasn’t his shift, he was covering for a friend.