The Long Drop

by Denise Mina

  Other deceptions are just as obvious but incomprehensible. Three of the independent witnesses to Manuel buying the guns work together at the Gordon Club. Shifty Thomson, Scout O’Neil and Dandy McKay. Another deception is this happenstance: Peter Manuel obtained both of these revolvers from completely unrelated apartments in the same street in the Gorbals, Florence Street. Florence Street is where Dandy McKay lives. It is where Mr Smart’s car was found abandoned and where Mr Watt will have his car accident the night before he gives evidence. The street is famously unpoliceable because of the clear sight lines and the belligerence of its inhabitants.

  Some underworld witnesses saw only damning evidence against Manuel. Some saw nothing significant, though they were looking directly at significant things as they occurred and were the only other person present at the time.

  In among the smog of lies and cheap theatre, ever-present on the table, sit the two black handguns. The Webley is a cowboy revolver with a barrel for the bullets and a long round shaft. It has a wooden handle. The Beretta is an Italian pistol. It is sleek and ergonomic. It has a square barrel and is an automatic, the bullets are held in the handle. The Webley is older but more reliable. The Beretta jams all the time.

  Each of these guns has been on a journey to get here.

  This is the Webley’s story.

  A fat, pockmarked guy called Henry Campbell tells the court that he was doing his national service in the RAF. He stole the Webley from an officers’ barracks and went AWOL in Glasgow where he gave it to a man he’d just met in a pub. That man was called Dick Hamilton. He made this gift to Hamilton because they stood next to each other and Hamilton mentioned that he was in a bit of trouble. Yes, Hamilton did give Campbell money afterwards. He wasn’t selling the gun to him though. He just gave it to him. He doesn’t know why, he just did.

  Campbell is shown the Webley that was used to murder three women in the Watt house. It is the same gun, Campbell says, apart from the fact that the lanyard ring at the bottom is now missing and it wasn’t when he gave it to Dick Hamilton, as a gift, like, because he seemed kinda worried.

  Dick Hamilton gets up. He has a shock of black hair so thick his pomade can barely tame it. He takes the oath solemnly, then he smiles and waves up to the public gallery as if he has been pulled out of the audience at a variety show. Hamilton does this every single time he is in court, to make it look as if he has never been in a court before. None of the lawyers are fooled, they know he always does this, but the public and the jury are in the palm of his hand.

  The bones of Hamilton’s story are these: he got the gun from Henry Campbell and took it home. He left it on a shelf in his house. Then, eight days before the Watt murders, on a Saturday, 8 September 1956, at around 5 p.m., he popped into Meldrum’s Bar for a quick one. There he found Peter Manuel and Scout O’Neil drinking together. Oh, they were very, very drunk. He says this as if he has never witnessed public drunkenness before and was saddened by the sight. Anyone fooled by the waving to the crowd might now be slightly sceptical. If Hamilton is upset by the sight of drunkenness then he’s living in the wrong city. Between lunch-time closing and the pubs reopening for the evening Glasgow is carpeted with drunk men. They loll on pavements, piss themselves at bus stops, fight invisible foes in the streets. Hamilton doesn’t notice that he has lost his audience and carries on: Oh! They were so drunk he didn’t want anything to do with them, but he stayed drinking with them for two hours. At some point Manuel mentioned he needed a gun for a hold-up job in Liverpool. Hamilton said he had a Webley and Manuel could have that.

  So, by arrangement the next day, a Sunday, Hamilton met Manuel and Scout O’Neil outside the Gordon Club. O’Neil had a loan of a car and drove them to Florence Street in the Gorbals, where Hamilton happened to be living. The street is only ten minutes’ walk from the Gordon Club so Scout O’Neil has no reason to be in this story at all. But he is and he’s an important corroborating witness. Anyway, they got out of the car and Hamilton took Manuel up the close to his flat. There, on a high shelf in the lobby, was the gun in a paper bag with seven or eight bullets in a matchbox. He gave the gun to Manuel for no consideration and then Mr Manuel spontaneously gave him a fiver. They left the close together but Hamilton went off to get a shave and Scout O’Neil drove Manuel off in the car.

  Hamilton is shown the gun from the productions table but he isn’t sure if it is the same gun. That one looks bigger than the one he had. M.G. Gillies points out that Webley revolvers really only come in the one size. Well, Hamilton really doesn’t know, he can’t say for sure.

  He can’t even identify Manuel. Hamilton touches his heart and says that he couldn’t, in all good conscience, say which person in this court is Manuel. Now no one believes him. M.G. Gillies feels honour-bound to point out that they all know he is lying:

  ‘You drank with him for two hours, met him again the next day and gave him a gun but you can’t recognise him in court?’

  ‘Well, he was sitting in the back seat of the car, Your Worship, and I’ve an awful bad memory for faces.’

  By contrast with Hamilton, Scout O’Neil is a beautiful liar. His balletic style is a privilege to witness. Sometimes he engages the court in astonishing feats of slippery logic, at other times he is simply charm incarnate.

  M.G. Gillies wants the jury to know that O’Neil keeps changing his version of events and can’t be trusted. He can’t introduce all the conflicting versions into evidence without creating a distracting trial-within-a-trial, so instead he asks, ‘Mr O’Neil, this story you are telling the court, is this the story you have always told about this incident?’

  Scout shrugs innocently. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s certainly the story I am telling here today.’

  Scout looks clean and tidy on the stand. He doesn’t have any blood on his face or sleeve, but still, you wouldn’t let your sister leave a dance with him. He has an air of cheeky mischief, speaks in the colloquial and has a way of talking and smiling that hide his teeth, which are very bad.

  Asked by Harald Leslie if he is in the habit of getting guns for people like Mr Manuel, Scout says, ‘I don’t think so,’ as if he has just met himself and isn’t quite sure.

  The public snicker at that, showing Scout that they are in on the joke. This annoys Harald Leslie and he snaps, ‘Mr O’Neil! Will you please just answer with “yes” or “no”.’

  Scout thinks about it for a moment then says ‘No’, compliant and defiant all at once. The public and jury laugh again and Scout smiles, showing off a set of teeth as craggy as an eight-year-old’s.

  Scout O’Neil is a likeable man. As a child he realised that being charming made hitting stop. He made his mother laugh like none of the other children. He made his daddy smile, drunk or sober, angry or angry. Scout was never leathered like the others. Mrs O’Neil’s other children are good-living and God-fearing. Scout O’Neil is not now, nor has he ever been, either.

  People like to think Scout says something about Glasgow, that Glasgow is like him or he is like Glasgow. Gallus and roguish. Lovable but rough. But they’re flattering the city because Scout is like Scout and that’s all.

  O’Neil tells a vivid story about the Webley, so damning and detailed that everyone knows it can only be half true, but it’s a great story, well told and told by Scout O’Neil.

  Scout met Manuel and Hamilton outside the Gordon Club on the Sunday and drove them to Florence Street. Scout stayed in the car. When Manuel and Hamilton came back out of the close they stood in the street for a minute, Hamilton saying he was going for a shave, kind of rubbing his chin and that, and Manuel holding a paper bag. Then Manuel looks back at O’Neil sitting in the car, and he grins and he makes a kind of a gun shape with his hand, like a kid, know?

  To illustrate this Scout makes a gun with his hand. And he sort of puffs his lips out, like as if he was firing a gun, like this: p-tyaw! O’Neil shoots Lord Cameron with his fingers. When the public galleries laugh, Scout grins and shoots M.G. Gillies as well, p-tyaw! Then he b
lows the smoke from the end of the finger-barrel and slips the gun into an imaginary holster.

  M.G. Gillies says wryly, yes, he thinks they know what Mr O’Neil means.

  Scout continues with his story.

  As if all of this weren’t damning enough, Manuel then got back into the car and shut the door. He opened the paper bag and showed the contents to O’Neil for no reason at all: there was a Webley revolver in the bag. Plus a matchbox with six or seven bullets in it. Yes, it was that gun, yes. Manuel had it. Seven days before the Watt murders, yes. He had that gun. Yes, I can see him in court today. That is Peter Manuel over there.

  Scout points over at Manuel. Then he smiles and Manuel smiles back. As a reflex, O’Neil gives Manuel a cheery wee wave with his accusing hand. It’s all Manuel can do not to wave back.

  William Grieve asks how Scout came to tell the police about Manuel getting the gun?

  ‘William Watt’s asked us to go and tell the police about what happened.’

  Grieve addresses the jury but finds they are all looking at Scout. ‘Mr Watt approached you and took you to the police to tell this story?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Grieve raises an arm to the side, trying hard to draw the jury’s eye to him, to get them to stop listening to these blatant lies. ‘But why did you do what he asked, Mr O’Neil?’

  Still none of the jury are looking at him. They’re watching Scout and they are all grinning.

  ‘Well,’ Scout says solemnly, ‘it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?’

  Everyone in this room knows that Scout O’Neil is not a man invariably compelled to do the right thing. As if he can hear their doubts, Scout grins and holds beseeching hands up out to the public galleries,

  ‘Isn’t it, though? The right thing?’ Then he gives a deep rumbling belly laugh and everyone in the courtroom laughs too.

  Grieve recognises that O’Neil has the room, and he has no control of him. There is a distinct danger of Scout bursting into song so he says, ‘Mr O’Neil, you may get down.’

  The court watches Scout walk down the stairs, sorry to see him leave.

  When he was arrested Manuel gave the police a detailed account of how he bought the Webley: he got it from a stranger in the Mercat Bar at Glasgow Cross, paid a fiver, left immediately.

  It is lunchtime and they haven’t started tracing the provenance of the Beretta.

  Manuel is taken down to the cells where his lunch is waiting. Bread and cheese are provided for all the prisoners on trial. Manuel has chosen to pay extra and get the salmon salad provided by the court for the QCs.

  12

  Tuesday 3 December 1957

  SITE OF BIRTHS, DEATHS and marriages, Townhead is the highest point in the old city. The Royal Infirmary looms across the road, black as the devil and ten storeys high. Squatting behind it is the medieval cathedral and then the sharp high hills of the Necropolis.

  The Cot Bar is on a sharp corner at Townhead. It is a filthy place. By an unhappy accident of aerodynamics, litter and dust and ash are swept downhill, around corners, over streets, and deposited against the side wall. Gang slogans are scratched into the dirt. This is Cody gang territory so the tags are mostly theirs (CODY = Come On, Die Young).

  The early-morning streets are dusted with a thin frost that melts underfoot, leaving black smears on the pavement. The re-sidual heat of the city, held in the ground, defies the season.

  Watt and Manuel park and get out of the car. They walk round the back, exchanging excited glances. Their eyes are wide, they nod to each other over and over, exaggerating their sexual engagement to the brink of pantomime. Peter Manuel is impotent. He can ejaculate when a woman is frightened enough but he can’t have normal relations. When the police examine his clothes they will find all of his trousers have ejaculatory stains inside. It has been like this since he was in Hollesley Bay Borstal. Brendan Behan was in Hollesley Bay around the same time. He said of it that inmates engaged in sexual practices ‘the lowest ruffian in Ireland could be born, live and die and never even guess at’. Manuel was sent there when he was twelve. William Watt doesn’t like sexy shows or stripping, he wouldn’t go on his own. But they are prisoners of this macho convention and there is no room for either of them to express anything but increasingly intense interest. Still, both quite like the idea of being in a room where their satisfaction is the main focus. They suspect, as do many people, that there is some sexual practice that they don’t yet know about, something new that will pique their interest.

  The cellar is round the back, by the bins and behind a high wall. It was once a coal cellar so the stairs down are narrow and plain, sliced out of the yard floor. When a man is standing on the bottom step he looks as if he has sunk into the ground up to his waist.

  Manuel and Watt step carefully down into the well. There is hardly enough room for both sets of feet. Watt knocks on the steel door.

  The eye slot slides opens and a puffy-eyed man looks at them critically. They try to see past him but his face blocks the view.

  ‘Wait,’ he says, and shuts it.

  They wait, their annoyance tempered by sexual interest.

  The slot opens again and the bouncer examines them as if he is looking for something. Watt holds up a five-pound note and smiles pleasantly.

  ‘We’re no buzzies!’ Manuel says, but the slit scrapes shut.

  There is nothing to do but wait.

  ‘Did you give me a pound?’ asks Manuel, a smirk on his face.

  ‘You’ve sung that song already, Chief,’ says Watt, but he’s smiling too.

  A huge engine rumbles in the street beyond the wall, wheels crunch on the cobbles. The engine cuts. Doors slam. The stairwell is too narrow for them to turn around. They hear feet tramp towards them.

  ‘Right, boys?’

  Twisting awkwardly around they find Scout and Shifty Thomson looking down at them.

  Scout has a plaster on the bridge of his burst nose and has changed his jacket. His eyes are purple-puffed. He half smiles. ‘Mon, fellas. Time to go.’

  They are trapped. They both know the jig is up.

  Shifty and Scout escort them to the car, an Alvis Grey Lady, two-tone, in burgundy and black. The bonnet is longer than the cabin. The wheel hoods are fat and round and the chrome trim perfectly polished.

  Watt is too drunk to put his case eloquently but he doesn’t think he should really be here. They want Manuel. They don’t want him. He’s not the problem.

  They are put in the back of the car with Scout sitting in the middle.

  Before they set off Scout warns them with a grin, ‘Anybody tries anything funny and they’ll be getting their fucking lights put out. Clear?’

  Manuel and Watt agree that Scout has made himself clear. Shifty pulls out onto the road and Watt thinks ‘I need a drink’. He doesn’t. He has drunk so much tonight that he is having mini blackouts. He suddenly comes to in odd situations: listening in John’s kitchen, walking down the close, ordering drinks in the Gleniffer, changing up to fifth gear. The one thing he doesn’t need is more drink.

  Shifty is driving. The Grey Lady is a thing of beauty. The seats are soft grey leather. The dashboard is a solid slab of high-varnished walnut with a matching steering wheel. Both front seats are pushed back as far as they can go, which is not so much of a problem for Manuel at five foot six, but Watt is concertinaed, his knees against his chin.

  Wheels purr against cobbles as Shifty turns down the sweep of Cathedral Street. It is still dark but the workers’ dawn is breaking. Grey civilians walk purposefully, sandwiches and flasks in their hands, faces raw from sleep, making their way to their own small part of the great machine of Empire.

  Manuel grabs the back of the front seat, yanking himself forward. This seems to count as ‘anything funny’ and Scout takes hold of Manuel’s middle finger, levering it the way fingers don’t want to go. Manuel raises a pissed-off eyebrow at Scout.

  Shifty tells the windscreen, ‘Yees wur telt.’

  Watt and Manuel
know that they have no defence. They wur telt.

  They turn down Buchanan Street. Shifty swings gently around piles of horseshit. There are a lot of pubs down here and brewers still deliver with drays and carts. Halfway down Buchanan Street he takes the turn for Gordon Street and parks right outside number 25.

  The door to the Gordon Club has a Georgian formality. It is glossy, black and ten foot tall, set into the building, four steps up from the mucky street. The Gordon Club is on the second floor, above the Girl Guides’ headquarters.

  Everyone is wary as they get out of the car. This is not going to be nice.

  The Gordon Club is in the middle of everything. At the end of the block Glasgow Herald vans are lined up along the street, waiting to pick up the second edition. Within a half-mile radius of this place are the courts, the Corporation, the Trades Hall and the Merchants’ Guild, three national newspapers and the police headquarters.

  Both Watt and Manuel have been to the club before. That’s not surprising. Every man of interest in Glasgow has been in the Gordon Club at one time or another. This is a time of clubs. Men with common interests meet in closed rooms and make deals, lend money, decide outcomes before formal negotiations are even timetabled. Still, though, the Gordon is special. It is a social portal through which the bottom and the top can meet and drink and talk, in the absence of women and church and moralising judgement.

  The Gordon Club is a thrumming valve in Glasgow’s mercantile heart. But mostly it isn’t about deals. Mostly it is about bonhomie and men acknowledging their common interests across the chasm of class distinction. But it’s no place for the faint-hearted, it takes audacity to be part of this. It hazards disgrace.

  Scout and Shifty flank the two men who wur telt to the door, up the steps to get out of a sudden bluster of sleet. Shifty has a key to the front door and uses it. This is quite impressive. Most people have to ring, wait and give the boy who comes to the door their membership number. Shifty opens the door and waves them up the stairwell.