The Long Drop

by Denise Mina

  The cops who were leaving come back to watch Dandy punch Manuel’s side, his chest, his side, his throat, cursing all the time.

  Goodall is holding his hands out like a referee, watching nothing happens to the face. They can’t appear in court with an accused with a sore face, not on a case this big. SMACK to the side and Manuel’s lungs empty. SMACK in the gut. Manuel is bent double, struggling to get air back into his chest, drawing shallow, squeaky little breaths. Dandy stands tall. This is the beating he meant to give him at the Gordon Club.

  Suddenly, Dandy straightens his jacket and spits on the floor. He tips his chin at Manuel who is bent double, huffing. Dandy is scared. Manuel will do anything. He’ll finger-point and make up lies and tell stories until one sticks. Dandy shoulders his way out through the throng of open-mouthed cops at the door. Muncie follows him to take his statement about the Beretta.

  Goodall and four uniformed cops take Peter back to the cell.

  He is left alone in the cold stone.

  No one will speak to him. He can hear other prisoners, sounds echoing, but no one will answer him or speak. He tries goading the officers outside the door but gets nothing back.

  Finally at midnight he says he wants to confess. He wants to talk to McNeill. Someone goes away but he doesn’t know if they are going to get McNeill because they won’t speak to him.

  They leave him waiting, in this hellish silence, until 2.15 a.m.

  The door opens abruptly. He is taken to a bleak interview room. The walls are grey. He is shoved into a lone chair in the middle of the room. Five uniformed cops line the wall. Peter speaks to them. I know you, don’t I? Nothing. Or is it your sister I know? Not a flicker. It’s as if he isn’t there. They don’t even look at him. Two stand by the door. One sits against the wall reading the Daily Record. Two more stand guard by the window. Manuel sits there for an hour, thinking.

  DI Goodall and DI Robert McNeill come in.

  ‘Hello again, Peter,’ says McNeill. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  They give him tea. They give him cigarettes.

  ‘What did you want to see us about, then, Peter?’

  He knows before he says it that this will get a reaction: ‘I want to see my parents. I want you to let my father go.’

  ‘Hm,’ says Goodall. ‘Why would we do that?’

  ‘I’ll confess.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To certain matters.’

  They all look at each other, mapping the cracks in one another’s psyche. They appreciate that, together, this group of three very different men are going to try and navigate these rapids, come to a negotiated settlement. Goodall breaks the gorgeous, promising pause. ‘Be specific.’

  ‘Certain mysteries,’ says Manuel carefully, ‘that have been happening in Lanarkshire recently.’

  They all smirk. They all know it isn’t enough.

  ‘Namely…?’

  ‘Let my dad go.’

  ‘We can’t let your dad go. The sheriff will have to decide that in the morning. However, obviously, if you confess and take responsibility for the charges brought against him–’

  ‘Which is it?’

  ‘Smarts.’

  Manuel reels at this. ‘You’re charging my dad with the Smart murders?’

  ‘Well, Peter, he had gloves from their house in his dresser. He can’t explain how they got there.’

  In fact, Peter gave them to his father as a present. They were sheepskin and still had the label on them. Samuel can’t bring himself to tell the cops something so damning about his son and they know that.

  ‘So, it all depends on what you confess to.’

  It’s a clever manoeuvre. Manuel is a famous talker. Silence is intensely uncomfortable for him, he can’t sit in silence for another moment.

  The three men look at each other. Manuel wants something, a concession of some kind, a win. He doesn’t really care what it is.

  ‘I’ll confess to everything if you bring my parents here.’

  Everyone is slightly stunned.

  ‘“Everything”?’

  Manuel lists them quietly: Smarts. Watts. Isabelle Cooke. Anne Kneilands.

  ‘What about Moira Anderson?’

  She is an eleven-year-old girl who has gone missing.

  ‘No.’

  Even Manuel draws the line at little girls.

  ‘Not Moira?’

  ‘Not her. But I’ll need to see my mother and father.’

  ‘Are you sure not Moira?’ The girl went missing in Coatbridge, not too far from Manuel’s home. It would be good to get a proper mop-up.

  ‘Not her, not the kiddie.’

  ‘OK. The rest though?’

  ‘Yeah, but I want to see my parents now.’

  ‘Now?’ asks Goodall. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘Now,’ says Manuel, pleased with the effect of his request.

  Before they arrive Manuel gives a vague confession, referring to certain matters. He signs it. It’s not detailed enough to be of any legal use. It mentions no names or places or times. Goodall points this out so Manuel gives a second confession, addressed to McNeill, numbering the crimes he will solve:

  1. Anne Kneilands

  2. The Watt murders

  3. Isabelle Cooke

  4. The Smart murders

  He signs it and McNeill reads it. No. They need details, for God’s sake, Manuel, a general statement simply won’t do. Manuel talks to Muncie and then signs a detailed narrative confession. They bring his father from Barlinnie. They get his mother from the family home in Birkenshaw. He sees them in the company of a room full of policemen.

  Afterwards his mother cannot stop crying. She has to be helped down the stairs but resents being touched, even by her own husband.

  Left alone with the cops, in penitent mood, Manuel is taken to Barlinnie and checked in.

  Goodall, Muncie and McNeill are there with him at the reception bar. It is five thirty in the morning and they can almost smell their pillows.

  They stand in a companionable silence. Manuel is handing over the contents of his pockets. Loose change. A handkerchief. The Sirs will be pleased. There has been criticism of the force in the newspapers–angry demands for them to catch the killers. It is personal: Muncie and Goodall are named and pictured in the papers as the men who have failed to stop this.

  They’re too tired to talk and too afraid to go home.

  Goodall has been investigating this Smart case for eight solid days with little sleep. He notes his exhaustion in every limb, his shallowness of breath, his laboured heartbeat. He looks across the room and sees a prison guard sitting at a desk, reading the Daily Record.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaims.

  The front page of the paper has every murder Manuel confessed to. Every detail on the front page is mentioned in his confession. The handbag full of stones. The barbed wire. The tin of salmon.

  It would produce a reasonable doubt in anyone’s mind if the newspaper is produced in court.

  Has Manuel pulled off a stroke of genius? Have those Masonic idiots in South Lanarkshire used Manuel’s confession to mop up every single unsolved case on their books?

  He confronts Muncie–are you jeopardising this collar for your own career advancement? Certainly not, smirks Muncie. You have a very suspicious mind there, Goodall, my man.

  Goodall doesn’t give a flying fuck for these games. We need more against the man, he says and Muncie sees that he is serious. Muncie makes them give Manuel his shoes back, his jacket back.

  ‘Put them on,’ Muncie tells him. ‘There’s one thing left to do. Tell us where Isabelle Cooke is buried.’

  Manuel says, ‘I can’t. I don’t know where it is.’

  The room holds its breath as Goodall asks, ‘Why not?’

  Manuel smiles up at them. ‘I am tired and I am cold,’ he says.

  ‘Cuff the bastard,’ barks Muncie. ‘Get the cars. We’re going out to Burntbroom. He’ll walk us to her.’

  C
hill January wind rages across flat black fields. Spiteful rain stings their faces. A ring of eight officers stand around them in case Manuel tries to run.

  ‘Where now?’ shouts Muncie.

  By Muncie’s account Manuel takes them straight to a hole and says he nearly buried Isabelle here but a man came along on a bike and interrupted them.

  The group walk together for half a mile and Manuel stops. He bends down and moves a brick out of the way and one of her dancing shoes is exposed.

  They walk on. They stop. Manuel says, ‘I think I’m standing on her.’

  Goodall and Muncie take him back to Barlinnie with an escort of four officers. They leave the other four at the site and send out a team of diggers. By the time they get back to the station the diggers have sent word: Isabelle Cooke has been found. Manuel had been standing on her.

  They lock him in a cell and he falls asleep immediately.

  19

  Tuesday 27 May 1958

  WILLIAM WATT IS IN the witness hall, waiting to be called back into court. It is morning. He hasn’t been able to eat since he heard he would have to appear again and be questioned by Manuel. He smokes a couple of the courtesy cigarettes provided by the court but they’re not his brand and they make him feel sick. He drinks a lot of water to wash the taste away. Then he just sits, slumped, in the painful, muffled silence and wishes he was dead. Dowdall hasn’t even briefed him for this court appearance. There is no point. Anything could happen. Dowdall has reassured him: the jury can’t bring themselves to look straight at Manuel, Dowdall thinks that means Peter will hang. It’s a sure sign. The verdict is the least of William’s worries. Dowdall doesn’t know that.

  It has been a week and a half since the car crash and Watt’s last appearance. He is on a single crutch now. At Dowdall’s insistence, for the benefit of the drink-driving charge, he hasn’t had a drink since. Watt cannot believe how joyless his life is without drink. Everything is grey and frightening and awful. And now this.

  Manuel can ask Watt about anything. Any single thing about Watt’s entire life. Watt’s mind flips through a Wheeldex of secret, awful shames spanning his life from early childhood to the present. These are memories of falling, spilling, dropping, losing, failing, failing, foolish. It is not a good way to prepare for an interview of any kind. He draws back and balances those recollections: winning, winning, bettering others, having, winning, getting.

  The door opens and the Macer’s face appears. ‘Mr Watt?’

  William stands up and promises himself drink tonight. Whisky. Amber glinting, good and plentiful, imbibed alone, until he passes out. This gives him the luxury of distance, he is removed, just enough, from this humiliation. It is half bearable. He could walk through fire and walls to get past this to a night on the drink. He takes the steps down into the court one at a time, using his crutch expertly.

  Watt can see women looking down from the public gallery. They’re not watching Watt hobble in on his crutch, though. They are watching Peter Manuel. He is sitting at the solicitors’ table, absent-mindedly playing with a pen. Watt takes another step and glances over to the jury. They are looking at Manuel too. Dowdall said they weren’t looking at him but they are looking at him. In the lower stalls, among the journalists and lawyers, Dandy McKay and Maurice Dickov sit in the front row. They deliberately catch his eye as he passes. Careful, their faces warn.

  Nothing is going to be all right. Nothing is going to be all right. Dickov will get angry. Mrs Manuel will die and then Watt will be the only loose thread left.

  As William Watt gets sworn in again his hands and feet are cold. He feels faint, doesn’t even trust the walls of the room to do what they’re supposed to. He imagines the balcony sliding forward and guillotining everyone.

  Manuel is standing at Harald Leslie’s place, at a table in the well of the court. He has stacks of papers in front of him. He looks smart and able and plausible and the jury are looking at him.

  Lord Cameron clears his throat and speaks directly to Peter.

  ‘Now, Manuel,’ he booms in his sonorous voice, ‘you wanted to ask questions as to certain matters which, according to you, passed at the meeting which you had with Mr Watt but were not put in court by your counsel?’

  ‘Yes, My Lord.’

  This is the first time Watt has heard Manuel speak in court. His voice is clear and confident.

  ‘All right, now,’ continues Cameron sternly, ‘that is the limit of the questioning.’

  Cameron has limited the questioning to their night together. That’s the worst thing he could have done. It’s the one thing Watt doesn’t want to answer questions about.

  Watt can’t bring himself to look up at Manuel but the jury are looking straight at Manuel. They shouldn’t be. Watt thinks he will set an example by refusing to look straight at him. He stares at the jury, moving his gaze along the two rows. He can see the shape of Manuel in the corner of his eye, he’s the only person moving in the court. Everyone else is completely still, mesmerised by him.

  He sees the shape of Manuel come around the table, undo the buttons on his jacket, pull it back to rest his hand on his hip, look at papers. He’s Clarence Darrow to the very life. He seems to be smiling at the jury.

  As Watt watches, one of the women jury members presses her lips together in a non-committal reciprocative smile. The rest of the jury glance away as if they don’t trust themselves not to submit to his charm. They don’t meet Watt’s eye though.

  ‘Mr Watt,’ Manuel begins, ‘do you recall the first occasion upon which you and I met?’

  He sounds so normal. Watt is aware that he can’t keep staring at the jury, it looks very odd, almost threatening, so he shifts his eye to Lord Cameron.

  ‘I do,’ he says soberly.

  It sounds as if he is agreeing to marry Lord Cameron.

  An abrupt laugh explodes from a woman up in the public gallery. She stops herself, afraid of being thrown out, but the reverb hangs in the air long after it can be heard, a tuning-fork hum. Watt doesn’t mean to be funny but he is. Journalists are smirking. The jury are screwing their faces up. Even Lord Cameron frowns deep at his papers. People have always found Watt ridiculous, he knows that, but this is not the time.

  Manuel continues. ‘It was a meeting, I believe, which you said transpired between you and I with no one else present, other than Mr Laurence Dowdall and he departed our company after ten minutes or so. Is that your recollection?’

  Watt has never heard Peter Manuel talk like that. Even his accent sounds different.

  ‘That assertion is correct,’ Watt tells the side of Lord Cameron’s face.

  ‘Do you remember meeting me in a restaurant in Renfield Street? “Whitehall’s”, I believe, is the name of that establishment?’

  Watt says yes to the side of Lord Cameron’s face. ‘Do you remember going over Crown Street to a public house, “Jackson’s Bar” in the Gorbals. Is that your recollection?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Whitehall’s. Jackson’s. Manuel is working through the night, through the venues. Watt is suddenly back in Jackson’s, remembering the smell and the noise and the ambience. It is a whisky-smelling, happy memory of being best and winning. The room is glowing orange and they have the corner and he is warm and drunk.

  But Jackson’s is rough. Everyone knows what Jackson’s Bar is like, the sorts of people who go there. Still, it’s not the roughest bar he was ever in. Thinking that brings the Moulin Rouge to Watt’s undisciplined mind. The Moulin is the roughest bar he was ever in.

  The Moulin was a dive, a crumbling basement in the Gorbals, rats under tables, sawdust on the floor, warm cloudy beer and whisky best-drunk-not-smelt. Watt was a half-partner in the Moulin just after the war, a time when everything was up in the air and a man could make his way.

  The Moulin Rouge. Watt stands in the pristine High Court, every eye on him and the worst, the very worst, of his youthful late nights at the Moulin invade his thoughts in bright snapping images. Big Mamie doing her act
in a back room. That guy Hector doing the elephant trouser gag. Moroculous Martin being sick into his pint glass and then trying to drink it because he thinks it is still beer.

  The disembodied voice of Manuel continues, asking if Watt recalls being in Jackson’s from seven o’clock until about a quarter past nine?

  Watt feels caught out. He can still see Big Mamie’s open-mouthed grin and tiny teeth. Well, he tells Lord Cameron, the timing was not something he was keeping a record of, but his throat is closing up. His fingertips are tingling. Talking to Cameron is like talking to a wall with eyebrows.

  Manuel asks if he remembers the conversation which, at that time, took place between Mr Watt and himself?

  Watt blusters, ‘There was a very great deal of conversation during the time we were there.’

  Cameron ignores him again, but his eyes slide over to him as if he is building up to telling Watt to leave him alone.

  ‘Do you or don’t you remember our conversation?’

  ‘I do.’

  Manuel can’t take it any more and raises his voice. ‘The question has been asked by me, not by His Lordship.’

  Watt has been shocked into looking straight at Manuel. And it certainly is Manuel.

  It’s Peter Manuel and he’s looking back at him. Peter Manuel has his back to the rest of the court, trespassers on their conversation. He gives Watt a tiny encouraging smile. We’re still us, Billy, he seems to be saying. We’re still pals. The two guys in the car, in those bars, at the Gordon.

  Reflexively, Watt’s eyes smile back. Now they’re locked together, looking at each other.

  Watt attempts a smile at the rest of court, feels his lips and cheeks sliding around in smile-suggesting ways. He knows he hasn’t pulled it off. The press look back at him, blank. The women on the balcony are staring at him, mouths agape. He looks at the clerk, the stenographer, other officials. Everyone here hates him.

  But then Marion’s voice comes into his head so strongly and clearly that it makes him want to cry: don’t be silly, Bill. This isn’t about being liked, it’s business. You’re just being silly, aren’t you?