The Long Drop

by Denise Mina

  He skips the part of the story where he goes to midnight Mass with his mother on New Year’s Eve but suddenly, at half four in the morning, Peter Manuel is seeing ‘a girl home safely from a dance’. On the way home Peter remembered that he had a key to the Smarts’ house, that there was a bottle of whisky in there, so he just went in for another drink instead of going on to his own house. Jovially, he tells the jury that, although it was New Year, he was ‘not moroculous drunk’, just very drunk.

  In the still bungalow, he found three bottles of whisky on the sideboard and a bottle of sherry. He had never seen that brand of sherry before: Romano Cabana. While drinking whisky he noticed that the house was in some disarray and it occurred to him that maybe the Smarts had not gone on holiday after all.

  He went down the hall. He opened Michael Smart’s bedroom door and saw ‘someone in the bed’. He went to Mr and Mrs Smart’s bedroom and saw that they were asleep in bed. So he put on the lights. It was then that he saw blood everywhere. They were both dead and Mr Smart had the Beretta in his hand.

  Manuel went and looked at the boy. He was dead too. Mr Smart had killed his son and his wife and then turned the gun on himself. Manuel describes the scene: ‘When you got to the bed and leaned over you could see blood on the wallpaper just on the far side of him and there was blood on the pillow.’

  Realising that the gun was traceable to him, and not wanting to be implicated, Manuel got a pair of gloves and went around wiping his prints from anything he might have touched inside the house. He picked the gun up and wiped that too.

  He looked at the dead couple. ‘Normally, you would just leave them there, but they looked so bare.’

  So he tucked the covers up around their chins.

  Then he made to leave but a ‘tiger’ cat was in the house and wouldn’t leave him alone. There was no milk in the house so he found a tin of Kitekat in the cupboard. Then he spotted the tin of salmon and thought, well, no one else here is going to eat that now. So he gave the cat the salmon. Then he took the Smarts’ car and drove off and dropped the Beretta in the Clyde, by the suspension bridge, in the same place he hid the Webley for Tallis. That’s why he was able to tell the cops where the guns were.

  DI Goodall and DI McNeill are sitting in the court, waiting for the front page of the Daily Record to feature, but it never comes up. Manuel lies like a child, adding bits on, making narrative addendums when he realises that his story makes no sense–and then–and then–and then. He is spinning lies and then abandoning them. He’s halfway through a lie when he switches back, or forgets.

  He doesn’t shape the story, seed the characters earlier and bring them on to behave consistently. New people who have never been mentioned before appear, cause life-changing events and then evaporate. Some characters even have placeholder names: ‘Mr Brown’, ‘a girl in hospital’.

  In Manuel’s stories everyone is acting out of character.

  The police are dumb.

  Everyone confides in Peter.

  He gives himself all the good lines and even stops to chortle at his own quips.

  The jury hate him.

  He sees them listening, puzzled by his lumpy edits, his grandiosity, his circular arguments.

  The jury hate him, not just because he has killed lots of people, but for telling them such a stupid story. A bad story is annoying but a very bad story is insulting. Does he think they are stupid? Is he stupid? He clearly isn’t stupid. He is very something but they don’t know what it is. There’s something really wrong with him.

  Manuel feels none of this. He is Other Possible Peter and thinks the jury are as entranced by him as he is by himself. Other Peter is having a lovely time, talking, talking, talking. For the first time in his life he feels heard.

  He doesn’t feel what other people are feeling.

  Other people are feeling insulted and bored and revolted. Other people are wishing he would stop talking about those poor girls that way. Other people are wishing they hadn’t come here today. Half of the public leave during the break. They expected a dazzling monster, a Dracula, a shaman beast. This man is vulgar and commonplace and making mistakes all day. This man is ordinary. He doesn’t know anything they don’t know.

  After six hours of Other Possible Peter everyone in the court wants him dead.

  The jury have no qualms.

  The lawyers feel he has tried himself.

  This is his first capital case but Lord Cameron knows that if it comes to donning the black tricorn, it will cause him no sleepless nights.

  Peter Manuel doesn’t feel what they feel. Manuel thinks that went quite well.

  21

  Thursday 29 May 1958

  ‘WHO SPEAKS FOR YOU?’ asks the clerk of the judiciary.

  The foreman of the jury stands up. ‘Have you reached your verdict?’

  He nods, takes out his glasses, curling the wire frames around his ears. He reads out the verdict.

  Guilty.

  Guilty.

  Guilty.

  Not guilty.

  This is a shortened version. The actual verdict is very long; there are fifteen separate charges. It will be published in full in all of tomorrow’s papers, reported verbatim in special pullout sections.

  The foreman reads out the full verdict with details: this decision was unanimous, this one by majority. The murder of Anne Kneilands we found not proven, the murders of the Watts, the Smarts and Isabelle Cooke we found pursuant to theft.

  The clerk writes in a large book, jotting it down in shorthand as the verdict is read out. When it is finished the clerk sits down at his desk and rewrites the verdict in longhand, leaving the foreman on his feet, clutching the rail in front of him. Transcription takes a full four minutes. While he writes no one in the room speaks.

  The rustle and snap of the clerk’s silk gown is heard clearly.

  Up in the public gallery a woman struggles to muffle her cough. The panes of glass in the high windows buzz as a bus rumbles past in the street.

  The city outside freezes. No one is waiting for the verdict, they’re waiting for the sentence.

  The audience in court is reverent but discipline breaks down in the street.

  The mob heckle the building, chat cheerfully among themselves, laugh. Someone sings a baritone line of a song. The police are already annoyed at the crowd for blocking the road. Worried they’ll be dispersed, the mob start to police themselves. Inside the frozen court they can hear the high hiss of distant hushing.

  William Watt and Peter Manuel sit there awaiting their fate. Both stare straight ahead, aware of being watched.

  As they await the sentence of the court Watt’s beige suit darkens under the arms. Sweat drips down his back. He is trembling and cannot draw more than a shallow breath. He wants to loosen his tie but knows how guilty the cartoonish gesture would seem. He is not entirely without insight.

  Manuel is calm. His heart rate is a lazy bump at his temple. It’s easier for him: he has done this many times before.

  They wait.

  The clerk is finished transcribing the verdict. He rises to his feet, holds up the sheet he has been writing on and reads it back to the foreman of the jury. Is this record of your verdict correct?

  The foreman says it is.

  The clerk nods his permission to the foreman to sit. At the sudden release from duty the foreman’s knee buckles and he drops awkwardly onto the oak bench. The loud crack clatters around the still room.

  The clerk hands the longhand verdict up to Lord Cameron and turns back to face the public as he heads for his desk. When he is seated Lord Cameron whispers down to him. The clerk whispers back and Cameron, his patrician eyebrows unmoving, nods at Mr Gillies.

  M.G. Gillies stands up and asks the court to pass sentence on charges four, six and seven. The murder verdicts.

  Lord Cameron nods. Then he speaks to the room but his eyes are on Manuel, standing in the dock.

  ‘It is the sentence of this court that you be taken from this place to the
prison of Barlinnie, Glasgow, there to be detained until the 19th of June next and upon that day, within the said prison of Barlinnie, Glasgow, between the hours of eight and ten o’clock, you suffer death by hanging.’

  The room is ready to spring but Lord Cameron was a commando in the war. He knows that swiftness is essential in the execution of brutal tasks. He reaches down to a special shelf below his desk, smoothly lifts a black tricorn hat with two hands, holds it over his head and recites the legal formulation that makes the sentence binding:

  ‘This is pronounced for doom.’

  He lifts the hat away from his head, a coronation in reverse. As he does there is a scurry in the dock. The manoeuvre is so nimble that the public, puzzled by the donning of the strange hat and the archaic grammar, don’t look down until it is almost too late.

  As if a plug has been pulled, the dock empties down the spiral staircase that leads to the cells below. The public leap to their feet and look down. All they see is an empty dock and the last police officer vanishing underground. All they hear is feet running on stone stairs.

  It is a klaxon.

  Suddenly everyone is moving, shouting, leaning over one another. William Watt covers his face to hide his shame. He is crying. In the shadow of the public gallery, standing flat to the wall, Laurence Dowdall sees his big, bald, bowed head nodding. Dowdall rolls his eyes up, turns his face into the shadows and says a silent prayer of thanks. The press benches empty round the two men. Above, the public bray with fury at the empty dock, robbed of their chance to heckle. From the balcony the women’s voices are high and the resonance instantly unbearable.

  The Macer leaps to his feet. ‘SIT DOWN AND BE QUIET.’

  They freeze. The rankling silence is cut through with a sharp metal click that ricochets from wall to wall. It is the sound of the door closing at the back of the lower tier. Journalists have gone to call in the news for the late editions. In the sudden silence called by the Macer the court can hear a stampede in the stone hall outside, thunder echoing in a high stone cupola as fifty journalists race for the four public phones by the door.

  The story rolls out to the street.

  The thousand people who are waiting to hear have been standing in smears of blustery May rain, waiting, staring at the Doric portico and waiting.

  The cops have herded most of them across the street to Glasgow Green on the other side, but time and again they ooze over the kerb, spilling into the road, in the way of cars and carts and buses. It’s nearly five o’clock, nearly teatime. Many of them have been waiting all day, some since the jury went out two hours ago. They’ve all been waiting, watching for movement in the court windows.

  Now the doors to the court fly open and the journalists who lost the sprint to the phone boxes race down to the street, yanking their coats on. The mob surge across the Saltmarket to them, blocking the road, threatening to trap the journalists before they get their copy in. The journalists shout the verdict to fend them off: Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Not Guilty. He’ll hang in a month.

  The triumphant roar can be heard over a mile away.

  A green-and-gold double-decker bus is marooned in the flash flood of people. Excited passengers abandon their journey, spill out of the door to join the mob, amazed at their luck in washing up right here, right now.

  Alone on the bottom deck of the bus, a behatted woman stares straight ahead. Her handbag is on her knee. She is stubbornly refusing to be interested in that. It is none of her concern. She does not wish to be involved. A man on the top deck calls out of a window for the score. The lady hears it hollered up from the street guilty guilty guilty not guilty for Anne. Hanging.

  He shouts back, ‘How come “no” for Anne?’

  ‘Cameron’s told the jury not to. Circumstantial. Auch, he’ll hang anyway.’

  ‘Good! Good!’

  She looks in her handbag and finds a paper poke of peppermints, twisted at the neck. She takes one out, puts it in her mouth, sucking it sourly and staring straight ahead. She does not wish to be involved. But she is. The happy mob swirl and eddy around her bus, ribald, shameless.

  High overhead a black rain cloud races across the sky, a tri-corn hat darkening the city. It starts to spit.

  In her empty bus the reluctant witness to history sucks her peppermint and stares forward to the driver’s cabin. She is so distracted by the sharp mint oil on her tongue and the frenzy all around her that she is almost functionally blind.

  Some have forgone the festival atmosphere in front of the court and are gathered around at the back. They know a van is waiting to spirit Manuel away to Barlinnie. This mob is not nearly-all-women but exclusively women. One hundred women stand and stare, headscarfed against the May rain, fingering stones and rocks they have gathered and put in their pockets. They would wait until the end of the world for this.

  The police are ready though. The entrance to the cells is narrow and blocked off by mounted policemen in formation, holding the road open so that the prison van doesn’t get stuck. From the moment the sentence was passed the prime objective of all the organs of justice is to ensure that he doesn’t die until they kill him. Guards will sit with him, sleep with him, they’ll be in his company every moment from now until the hanging so that he can’t cheat justice.

  After a few minutes a small black prison van races out from the enclosed yard, black smoke belching from the unwarmed engine. The horses bridle, the women shout. They throw their stones and scream words women shouldn’t know. They chase the van down the street to a corner and watch it tilt on the bend. It gets away. Then they stop, open-mouthed, panting. They thought they would feel less angry but they don’t. Their venom is enflamed but now it is aimless. Still panting, they head back for the heart of the mob at the front of the court, knowing they’re not fit for any other company, not for a while anyway.

  That van was a decoy. In an hour’s time the actual van will leave and some of those who lingered will get a second chance to chase.

  Back on the pavement, journalists are asking people for their impressions. Press photographers are snapping bulbs at the triumphant crowd. A television camera the size of a ray gun is mounted on a trailer in front of the court. The director is telling a man with a mic to go back, further back, Bill, we can still only see your shoulder. It is the first criminal case ever reported on Scottish television.

  The mob disperse around the stranded Corporation bus. With a ting-ting from the bell, it jump-starts and rumbles slowly away. The peppermint sucker decides that she will not even mention being here when it happened. She smooths the hem on her coat. She is not interested in that sort of thing. Not that sort of person. She will simply not say. Although, her sister-in-law is that sort of person. She might tell her. She rehearses her impressions as the bus rumbles across the Albert Bridge: the stillness, the howling roar, the chasing of the van, how the bus emptied but she stayed on because she is simply not interested in that sort of thing.

  The edge of the mob thins and news sweeps up the smoke-choked valley of the Saltmarket, on up the High Street to the cathedral grounds and the Necropolis. It billows into shops and stations, around the looming black buildings of the begrimed city.

  Strangers stop each other to ask, join conversations without invitation. Passed from mouth to mouth, the news crosses the river. It surges down through the black glowering valleys of Gorbals tenements and on to leafy Southside suburbs.

  Swarming westward, the news reaches the shipyards and the dry docks. Crane drivers come down from their high cabs to hear. Welders stop in the middle of a line.

  Along the river and up Gilmorehill, the news arrives at the ears of the students and matron aunts and academics. Translated into Polish, Gaelic, Italian and French, it blows east along the train tracks, through the gated community and crumbling tenements of Dennistoun, an area that has been rumoured to be coming up since Buffalo Bill’s Circus performed on the waste ground there.

  The news bursts open the door of the Saracen Head public house, announces
itself to the smoke-yellow air. Two men, sitting in the very seats where Adam Smith and Dr Johnston had a drunken swearing match, chink their greasy glasses and cheer.

  The news sweeps into pubs with facades that advertise a loathing of Catholics, a horror of Protestants, sores picked at and festering since the Reformation. It floods the dark satanic Parkhead Forge, manned by Irish Catholic immigrants because no one with a choice would do that work.

  Far out on the Argyll coast the news reaches Brigit Manuel, sitting on a bed in a dark hotel room paid for by the Empire News. She cradles a small plaster statue of St Anthony that she brought with her from the house and weeps as her husband hangs up the phone.

  News travels north, fast along the tram and train lines, hitting the solid cliff of black basalt that is the Campsie Fault and rolling back, reverberating over the city.

  One hour before late-edition newspapers are dry from the presses everyone in Glasgow already knows they’ll hang him in a month and they celebrate, because then their troubles will be over.

  22

  Friday 30 May 1958

  THE DAY AFTER HE is found guilty his father and mother are allowed to visit Peter in the deputy governor’s office at Barlinnie.

  Brigit Manuel sits rigid. Samuel stands behind her, clutching the back of her chair. A scurry outside the door tells them their condemned son is approaching. The door opens and Peter is brought in by three officers. Both Brigit and Samuel expect him to be angry but he isn’t. Peter is excited. His mood is up. He wants to talk about the trial.