The Long Drop

by Denise Mina

  Manuel rubs the salt in gently. ‘I hardly can, Bill. It’s my family.’

  Watt is drunk. His moods slide across the surface of his face, water on oilcloth. ‘I know, I know… It’s your family.’

  Manuel opens the car door.

  ‘Wait here.’

  As he slams the car door, he savours the pleasure of manipulating Watt into doing something else, of being in control of another person. He slams it loud, hoping the neighbours will look out and see him getting out of a car. He walks along the fence to the gate and jumps it with one hand on the post. Around the back his mother has already hung out a smalls wash.

  The front door is unlocked. He steps into the hall and finds her in the kitchen. She is standing facing the door, waiting for him. Stern, hands clasped in front of her, the thin gold crucifix around her neck catching the light from the door. She looks as if she knows where he has been.

  ‘Mum.’ He sees her soften. She loves him. She is glad he is back. He goes into the kitchen. ‘Say, where’s the cups?’

  She glides across the kitchen to the cupboard and takes out two cups, puts them on the table and pours well-brewed tea from the pot. As she is adding a sugar to each she asks who the man in the car is.

  ‘Just a guy, Mum.’

  He has said Mum twice, which means he has done something. He sees her face twitch.

  ‘Does the “guy” have a name?’

  She adds the milk. Manuel is tempted to tell her the name, to shock her. His mother is horrified by William Watt, a man who would kill his own family. She’s talked about it a lot.

  ‘John Patterson.’

  A Protestant name. She doesn’t approve but understands now why the man was not invited in.

  ‘What happened to your face, son?’

  Manuel steps over to the small mirror hanging over the sink. It’s not as bad as he thought. He was worried his eye might swell up but it is just a cut on his lip and bruises on his jaw and forehead. He looks at his mother.

  ‘Scrapping,’ he explains, as if he was a naughty boy.

  Brigit’s mouth tightens but her eyes twinkle. She so wants to love him, for him not to be lost. Peter can feel the heat of her longing. But it isn’t a choice. He hasn’t chosen to be lost.

  ‘There’s your tea, son.’

  Manuel takes the cups. He wants to thank her but thinks it will make her more suspicious. He goes back out to the car.

  Watt takes the small brown cup from Manuel and slams the door as if he longs to be alone with the tea. As Manuel walks around to the passenger door he can see Watt drinking as if it is whisky, glug-glugging it.

  By the time he gets in the car Watt has finished. He looks at Manuel’s cup avariciously. Manuel laughs. He doesn’t even want the tea that much but he drinks it, holding Watt’s eye over the rim of the cup. As he drinks they both start smiling, Manuel with his eyes, Watt wide-mouthed, hoping still that he will get more tea. But Manuel drinks it all down.

  He pulls the empty cup from his face and Ha! laughs.

  Watt pretends he doesn’t care. He opens the glovebox in the middle of the dashboard and takes out a hip flask, keeping it out of grabbing distance. Ha! he retorts and unscrews the lid, keeping his eyes on Peter.

  This is a leather hip flask, not an overpriced bottle bought from behind a bar. This is good stuff. The smell of peat fills the car.

  Watt drinks from the flask, smiling, then not smiling, remembering what Manuel has done for him, taken for him, what happened at the Gordon. He stops drinking. He swallows. He looks away as he hands the flask to Manuel. It is a peace pipe.

  Manuel sucks a tut between his teeth and snatches the flask, drinking it all for spite.

  It wasn’t piss-whisky in the hip flask, it was an old blend, unexpectedly strong. The vapours are rolling around the back of his nose. Now Manuel feels sick but he can’t complain of nausea because hard men don’t feel a wee bit sick. He lights another cigarette and hopes he won’t spew.

  ‘Peter?’

  Manuel looks at Watt’s saying-sorry-eyes. He tuts and looks away.

  ‘It wasn’t my decision,’ pleads Watt, ‘I didn’t even know you then.’

  Manuel cannot talk about this any more.

  He gets out of the car, chucking his burning cigarette away and swaggering around the back of the car. He’s sure he’s going to be sick. As he passes he slaps the flat of his hand down on the roof and the loud bang makes Watt jump in his seat. Manuel can’t bring himself to smile. It would make him sick. He can’t jump the fence either, it would come flying out of him if he did that. He opens the gate like a housewife and shuffles through. It takes so many tippy-tappy wee steps to get through, he hates that. Hates to be seen to do that. He doesn’t look up for a last sighting of Watt but steps in through the front door with one stride, knowing Watt is watching him.

  He stands in the dark hallway of his house, his back to the cool plaster wall. He hears his mother at work in the kitchen. He hears creaks from upstairs as his brother swings his feet over the edge of the bed, as his sister steps across the room upstairs and he’s glad he didn’t let Watt come in here, to his family.

  17

  Monday 26 May 1958

  PETER MANUEL HAS CALLED his mother as a witness. Brigit Manuel is a small woman with salt-and-pepper hair pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck. She wears a two-piece suit and a plain blouse. She has tucked her crucifix inside her blouse because she knows most of the people here are Protestants. She doesn’t want to offend anyone.

  She looks tired. She is. She has been awake all night praying for the strength to do the right thing. She stands now in the cavernous courtroom and says a final thy will be done as the Bible comes towards her hand. When she swears by Almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, she means every word. She means it unconditionally.

  Laurence Dowdall is in among the lawyers watching on the lower gallery. She can’t see him but she knows he is there. He said he would be. It gives her strength. Mr Dowdall is a good Catholic gentleman. He represented her husband: when the police came for Peter they also arrested her husband, Samuel, for having a pair of gloves in his dresser that had been stolen from one of the houses. Peter gave them to his father as a Christmas present. Samuel said he didn’t know where they came from, maybe a cousin in America? They arrested him. Mr Dowdall said they were just trying to put pressure on Peter. They know how attached he is to his family. Brigit cherishes that statement.

  Mr Dowdall refused to take Peter on as a client but he did take Samuel on. He explained that he couldn’t take Peter and his reasons were legal. Brigit doesn’t understand why. She would have liked a Catholic lawyer for her son.

  By and by, she and Mr Dowdall have become friends. They have been saying a novena to St Anthony together. St Anthony, patron saint of lost people.

  As the Bible withdraws she glances up at the public gallery, sees the faces of the watching women. Brigit recognises the expression. She is used to being pitied. She has thought and prayed about it a lot. She thinks pity isn’t really about the recipient, the only thing it is eloquent about is the giver, but it still stings.

  Both of Brigit’s sons have been in prison. Her husband was expelled in disgrace from the local council when the police caught him watching women through bathroom windows. Now her son may hang for murdering women and girls and children. If God is testing her this must be her Gethsemane. But God has not called her here. Her son has called her here. She flinches from the realisation, looks up again at the pitying faces and thinks: they’re all Protestants and bound for hell anyway, so who are they to pity her?

  No. Dear Lord. The sin of pride. She thinks truncated, familiar prayers asking God to grant her the grace of humility, grant forgiveness, grant acceptance. Thy will be done.

  Peter is standing in the court, looking up at her. He looks well and healthy and confident. His hair is immaculately swept back covering the tiny bald spot on his crown he worries about so much. His sports jack
ets and shirt and tie and slacks are nicely pressed. His face is clean-shaven. Very formally, and in just the right sort of language, he asks his mother to identify herself by name and address and she does.

  ‘I believe,’ he says, ‘you are also my mother?’ He flashes her a wry smile. It is about nothing and for nothing and asking nothing. A fond, wry smile.

  Brigit smiles back. ‘I am,’ she says softly.

  Peter and Brigit look at each other, both think of St Peter denying Christ three times. Or rather Brigit thinks of that and Peter knows she is thinking of it. He always knows what she is thinking of. It’s one of the things he loves about his mother, her predictability, the signs and signifiers, her clarity.

  Taking the confessions from the productions table, Peter shows her the signature on each of them and asks his mother to compare them. ‘Do these look like my signature?’

  No, she says, they don’t look like his signature.

  Peter tries to make her say that he couldn’t have signed them but she can’t lie. She’s under oath. She frowns at the papers. She says his writing is usually very neat and in this particular one the signature goes over the line. That’s unusual for him. He stays inside the lines.

  He smiles at her. His writing is very neat, he likes his writing.

  ‘Does anything strike you about the variations in the form of the signature? “P.T. Manuel”, “Peter Anthony Manuel” and so on? Would you say they are the signature of the same man?’

  She knows what he is trying to make her say but she can’t. She holds his eye and tilts her head softly and says she has no way of knowing that.

  ‘Could a policeman have signed these instead of me?’

  Brigit wants to say the police are to blame but that isn’t true.

  ‘I don’t believe they could have,’ she says quietly, ‘I’m not sure they’d know your confirmation name is Anthony.’

  Manuel flinches and changes the subject. He asks her about times of alibis and she remembers nothing. He goes into a lot of detail and she says over and over that she doesn’t remember what happened on the evening of Monday the 2nd of January two years ago.

  He is deflecting. He doesn’t want to discuss his fraught relationship with the Church but knows that his mother does. He certainly doesn’t want his confirmation name discussed in court. Confirmation is a sacrament for Catholic children. No one in the Lanarkshire Police is Catholic, they’re unfamiliar with the naming convention. Catholic children choose a saint’s name for themselves, a saint they hope to emulate, or for whom they feel a special devotion. Peter Manuel was ten when he chose St Anthony, the patron saint of lost people. Two years later he was convicted of stealing a collection box from a Catholic chapel, a crime against the Church. The court sent him away to a Catholic approved school run by the De La Salle order. Manuel went in a petty thief who committed troubling offences against the Church and came out a rapist. He was so disruptive there that he was transferred to Hollesley Bay Borstal. Throughout his life Manuel’s relationship with the Church is intense and defiant. He will not talk to priests or go to confession. He commits many of his worst offences after attending mass.

  On the stand Brigit does remember one particular detail though and swells with pride at the telling: Peter attended midnight Mass last New Year’s Eve with her and his father. They came back to the house and had a sing-song. Then everyone fell asleep and the Smart murders happened.

  Peter doesn’t want to discuss his confirmation name in court, or his relationship with the Catholic Church.

  He moves on to asking his mother about the morning he was arrested. She says that when the policemen, ‘gentlemen’ she calls them, arrived at the house with the warrant, Peter was asleep in the bed chair in the living room. They arrested him. The next time she saw him was two nights later, when she was called into Hamilton Police Station to see him. Peter asks if she could tell them about that night?

  Brigit says that Detective Superintendent Brown and another policeman arrived at her house at two thirty in the morning. No, she wasn’t in bed. She was awake. She couldn’t sleep. She was drinking tea and trying to say the novena to St Anthony. Day two of the novena: O holy St Anthony, gentlest of saints, the answer to my prayer may require a miracle.

  Mr Brown asked her to come with them to the police station and see her son; Peter had something to tell her. When she got into the police car her husband, Samuel, had already been picked up from Barlinnie where he was being held for the night on the charge of having the gloves from the housebreaking. He was handcuffed and surprised to see her. He looked exhausted. He asked if they had arrested her too? No, she said, no, Samuel, we’re going to see Peter, he has asked to speak to us together.

  Brigit and Samuel are driven to Hamilton Police Station. Outside, a mob has formed despite the hour. Mostly the public, coats over nighties and warm boots, but also journalists, eager for scraps of information to call in for the second or third edition. The car is driven round the back and they are taken through the back door to the station lobby.

  The hallway stills as they walk in. Everyone has stopped moving. They are ushered to the bottom of a big staircase and Brigit looks up. Uniformed police officers line the stairs, two or three on each step. They are all staring at Brigit and Samuel. They’ve gathered here to look at them.

  Samuel shouts up at the police officers on the stairs: this is mistreatment. He will write to his MP about this, make no mistake. Brigit can hardly look at him. He’s making things worse.

  But she stands by her husband at the bottom of the stairs lined with angry policemen. She puts her foot on the first step and thinks of the Via Crucis. She takes a second step and berates herself for the arrogance of supposing this an emulation. She takes a third and tries to offer up whatever is about to happen. She tries to pray but feels herself beset by enemies, forgotten by God, in the valley of death.

  The policemen on the stairs shrink away from Brigit and Samuel as they pass. She sees their eyes widen, drinking in the sight but somehow vacant, as if they are already remembering this, telling someone else the story of seeing this: that couple, with a son like that. She has been laughed at and insulted and shunned. Once, down in Coventry, spat at by a policeman because of her son. But it has never been as hostile as this. Brigit knows, then. The answer to my prayers may require a miracle.

  They are led down a passageway to a grey metal door. DS Brown says that they are about to meet Peter, that he has something important to tell them.

  Brown knocks carefully and identifies himself. The door opens and they walk into a green-tiled room with a sharp overhanging light.

  There are ten or fifteen policemen inside, standing around the walls, staring solemnly at Brigit and Samuel as they shuffle in. William Muncie is there. He has searched Brigit’s house many times over the past twelve years. He takes milk and three sugars. He drops his eyes at the sight of her. She always feels that Mr Muncie wants to cry when she catches his eye.

  The door is shut behind them.

  Peter is sitting in the middle of the room on a low chair. His feet are planted firmly on the floor, as if to resist more shoves. His hands are behind the chair, cuffed, she thinks. Usually immaculate, Peter’s hair is messy and he has no jacket or tie on. His neck is bruised, the shirt undone at the neck. It looks as if someone has yanked him by the shoulder. It looks as if they have been hitting him. Not on the face but on the body. He is the only person in the room who is sweating.

  He looks up, sees her and sighs. His head flops on his chest. She can see a bruise creeping up from under his collar.

  DI Robert McNeill steps out of the mob of cops. She nods a hello.

  ‘Come on now, Peter,’ says McNeill, ‘you asked to see your parents. Don’t you have something to tell them?’

  Peter keeps his eyes down and shakes his head like a drunk.

  McNeill is exasperated. ‘You said you wanted to talk to your parents. We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to bring them here.’

  Brigit steps
forward like St Veronica. ‘Son? Are you all right, son?’

  Peter flinches from her. His jaw is tight.

  NcNeill is annoyed. ‘For goodness’ sake–look, it’s the middle of the night. We’ve got them both up out of their beds because you asked to see them.’

  Peter lifts a hand and runs his fingers through his hair. She sees now that he isn’t handcuffed to the chair. He was assuming a pose, like in a film. Brigit steps back into the crowd. She isn’t St Veronica. She is a fool who falls for his lies every time.

  ‘Let my father go,’ says Peter, full of grand biblical touches.

  McNeill is livid. He has realised it was all a trick too. He says, ‘Peter, we’ve been through this already. I’ve told you it’s the Fiscal who decides that. Your daddy will have to appear before the court in the morning.’

  But Peter doesn’t even listen to the explanation. He blinks and nods, wiping the setback from his mind. Brigit has seen him do that before, many times. Then Peter looks at his father and nods beneficently, as if they have agreed to let him go on Peter’s say-so. But they haven’t agreed to let him go.

  She says, ‘Look, Peter, what is it you want to talk to us about?’

  But Brigit knows what it is. He looks at her and sees that she knows. Silently, Brigit starts to cry.

  He slumps, puts his elbows on his knees and mutters at the floor, ‘I’ve never found it easy to talk to you…’

  Brigit falls to her knees in front of him. She holds his hand to her forehead. ‘I know. I know there are things you find hard to say to us.’

  Her tears drop onto the back of his hand.

  Peter whispers, ‘I don’t know why I do these terrible things.’

  ‘Oh, Peter.’

  She holds his hands and kisses them. She kisses them so that she doesn’t have to look up at him. Then she does. He is looking at her and then at his father. His eyes are dry but his face is the mask of a man who is crying. But his eyes are dry.