by Denise Mina
Brigit is pleased initially, feels the relief of her husband at her shoulder. Samuel expected him to be angry as well, she realises now, though he never said so.
Peter sits down in the chair set out for him. He wants to talk about what happened, who said what and how he feels about it. He knows the Empire News has bought his mother’s story for a lot of money. He encouraged his parents to do the deal. He thinks he is talking directly to the press through his parents. He doesn’t know that Brigit has infuriated the Empire News with all of her conditions: she will not talk about the trial or the crimes or speak about any of those poor people. She will not describe the night of the confession or this meeting now. She will talk only about what sort of boy Peter was when he was growing up, how much she loved him and prays for his soul.
But Peter thinks he is holding a vicarious press conference. He grandstands about Lord Cameron’s conduct of the case. Peter wanted to give a speech at the end of the trial, after the verdict. He wanted to address the room, he’d been thinking of things to say, about his treatment in the press and Harald Leslie’s conduct, but Cameron said no.
‘Maybe he thought you’d said enough,’ says Brigit.
Peter nods towards her, not really hearing her but acknowledging that she has spoken. And then he’s off again, rambling about his lawyer and the possibility of his appeal and how the van from the court wasn’t very safe and he should have had a seat belt if they were going to drive at that sort of speed.
As he talks Brigit looks at her son’s hands. They are in front of him, hanging between his knees, palm to palm. He is chopping them for emphasis as he would have in court.
Brigit imagines enfolding her son’s hands with hers, transferring the warmth from her skin to his skin. The hands are not a big man’s hands, not raping or strangling hands, but small chubby boy hands, swallowed by her mother-hands. She imagines wilting over his hands and washing them with her tears, drying them with her hair. She should tell him that she loves him and that God loves him, that Jesus loves him and forgives him, but sitting in the governor’s chair, listening to her raping, murdering son ramble on about the injustices done to him, Brigit is too sad to speak.
Cameron should have let him talk, he says, he had things he wanted to say, to the public, to the journalists. He stops for breath. He looks at his parents, waiting for them to react. Samuel can’t think what to say.
Brigit tries to reimagine cupping his hands again but she remembers him now. She looks at his fine, square face, an echo of his father as a younger man. Peter won’t be home tonight. She asks God to forgive her for feeling so glad.
He talks about his appeal. He is hopeful.
The visit finishes. Brigit touches his sleeve and asks him to speak to Father Smith. Samuel shakes his son’s hand. They take Peter away, back to the cell.
They meet their son three more times before he dies.
The second and third visits are uneventful. Normal prison visits. Brigit saves up news from the family and the papers, impressions from her day so that she will have something to say. She waits for the right moment and asks Peter if he has been to confession? Attended the blessed sacrament? Peter has done neither. It’s a difficult subject for her to bring up but she knows that she’ll regret it for eternity if she doesn’t try. She values her redemption above her comfort.
The last time they meet is different. It becomes violent and Brigit leaves sobbing. She cries all the way home on the bus.
The last visit is two days before the execution date. They wait in the governor’s office and Peter comes shuffling in, dried white saliva crusted at the side of his mouth. Two officers lead him in, one holding each arm. They guide him to his chair. They sit him down.
Peter’s eyes are unfocused. His hands are trembling on his knees. The drool from his mouth begins to foam, small white bubbles gathering at the side of his lips. He is acting.
Brigit is instantly furious with him. She says his name. He doesn’t react. She says it again. Nothing. She reminds him that this may well be the last time they ever see each other in this life.
Peter? Peter? Peter!
Nothing. His hands tremble and he lifts them slightly as if he is showing them to her.
In her head Brigit thinks: I am your mother. I have cried for you since the day and hour of your birth. I have tried to love you. And now I am nothing but an object in your play. I am a tablecloth. I am a cup. My feelings mean nothing to you. You don’t care.
Brigit stands so suddenly that the chair topples behind her and she shouts his name. She shouts that he can’t fool her. She’s here to say goodbye.
Nothing. Not a spark of recognition, but even a madman can hear shouting.
Brigit does what she would never dare to do if they weren’t in a prison. She slaps him. His face falls to the side under her hand. His head comes back to true. Still nothing.
She grabs his hair and tugs it hard. This is something Peter cannot stand because the bald spot on his crown is a weakness to him. Messing his hair, tugging his hair, is the one thing that will always send him into a rage. Nothing. The prison officers are not stepping in either. They want her to hit him.
Peter stares forward but she can see he is angry from the hooding of his eyes.
She sits down and, weeping, speaks to him in a monotone:
‘I have never found it easy to talk to you. My knees are broken with praying for you. I fed and clothed you and you did nothing but hurt me. And still you hurt me. You asked me to choose between my God and my son. I prayed and I wept for you. I chose you. You made me choose and I chose you, always. I kept you in my heart. When I saw you go out of that door I never knew what harm you would do. And still I kept you in my heart and my home. I loved you and you never gave me a spark of love back. You did nothing but shame me and mock me. You have broken my heart you vicious, godless man.’
She waits for him to say something. She waits but he does nothing. She stands up without permission from her husband or the officers or her son. She stands and says, ‘So, goodbye.’
She doesn’t try to touch him any more.
She is glad to get out to the open air.
Samuel comes hurrying after her. Perhaps the boy, he calls him the boy all the time now so he doesn’t have to say ‘Peter’, perhaps the boy is really ill? Brigit just looks at him. She looks at Samuel through her tears and thinks he is an eejit. He’s a lying, f.ing eejit and he is kinky in the s.e.x. department. But she is married to him. So be it.
Samuel burned the boy’s clothes in the garden after Anne Kneilands’ disappearance. He lied under an oath from God. He gave the boy alibis for crucial times. He stood by him and lied to let the boy go free to kill those poor people, those poor girls, because Samuel was afraid of his son. So be it.
She stares at him. He reaches for her hand and she barks, ‘Don’t you touch me.’
The bus approaches them. They don’t put out their hands. In the gritty back draught of the bus passing she says, ‘Don’t you touch me ever again.’
23
Friday 11 July 1958
THIS CELL IN BARLINNIE is specially adapted. A hook hangs from the ceiling. A trap door opens down into the cell below. Simple engineering principles have finessed the process of hanging. The lever is pulled, the trap drops open and catches on a swing latch. In the old days, the rough days, if a gibbet trap was heavy it could bounce back and snap a man’s thigh bone. Sometimes it would shear a limb clean off. This happened on gibbets all over the world. But the swing latch has solved that problem. Swing, click, still.
Capital punishment will soon be abolished. Peter Manuel will be the third-to-last person ever hanged in Scotland. In the meantime, as a compassionate compromise, attempts are made to meet the complaints of abolitionists and the practice has changed. Chief among the changes is the hanging rehearsal. Rehearsal is essential to perfect the hangmen’s timing, to ensure the mechanism is oiled and working. Fast is best. Gibbets are always near the condemned cell to avoid long journeys, b
ut prisoners shouldn’t be tortured by having to watch or hear the incessant rehearsal of their own death. Legislation has just been passed: the hanging rehearsal must be completely silent and out of sight. Rubber stoppers have been fitted to the levers and the trap to silence them completely.
The public are no longer allowed to witness hangings. Death has moved indoors. Far from an enlightened sense of propriety or a shift in social mores, public executions became impossible to police. The mobs were strange and massively overexcited. Public indecency and drunkenness and missile attacks on the condemned were common.
Scotland uses the ‘long drop’ method. It is as clean as hanging gets and resolves the two main pitfalls: the head being pinched from the body like a grape from the stalk, or slow strangulation.
If the drop is steep and the body too heavy the head will be ripped from the body, in whole or in part. If the drop is too gentle and the weight too slight, the condemned person will choke to death. It can take up to fifteen minutes. During this time the eyes and tongue swell to grotesque proportions, the body twitches and jerks, the condemned scratch at their neck. It is distressing to witness. None of this happens with the long drop method. Still, a hood is fitted over the person’s face, in case something goes wrong.
The long drop method snaps the neck between the second and third vertebrae. Done properly, death is instantaneous. It is a careful calculation of weight, height and muscle tone.
Manuel was weighed and measured when he first came to Barlinnie. His food intake and physical size is monitored so that they don’t have to weigh him again. Thirty-one-year-old men don’t lose a lot of muscle in six weeks and it would be obvious what they were weighing him for. That would be inhumane.
Across the corridor from the hanging cell is the condemned cell where Manuel is living now. It is more of a suite, three cells knocked together. The bare brick walls are painted green and it is furnished with a table and bed, three chairs, a wireless, a set of drawers for clothes, a commode and a washstand.
It has to be three cells big because officers are in there with him at all times, working eight-hour shifts. After every shift the departing officers fill out the Deathwatch Journal, a notebook bound in navy-blue leather. In it they note Manuel’s moods, his behaviour and what he has eaten, then the date and time of the shift, when it started, when it ended.
The officers play cards with Manuel and dominoes, they listen to popular music on Radio Luxembourg with him. It is the job of the prison service to keep Manuel calm by pretending that the hanging is not happening. Dominoes is happening. Cards and dinner and books is happening. But death is not happening. In this respect it is just like normal life.
These men are the most experienced officers in the Scottish Prison Service, all ex-army. Manuel already knows some of them from his long-ago rape sentence in Peterhead Prison.
None of these officers are bleeding hearts but they know Manuel will die soon. At the beginning of the Deathwatch Journal their notes are dispassionate but tinged with tenderness.
Prisoner had a nice night’s sleep.
Ate well at breakfast.
Prisoner seemed in good spirits.
But Peter Manuel is not a man whose company fosters affection. The lingering kindness soon evaporates.
Prisoner boasted about his heroism during the war.
Prisoner smoking and talking incessantly.
Prisoner apparently listening to Radio Luxembourg but talked over all the music, seems to think he knows a lot about it.
Prisoner told us his adventures as a spy in the Soviet Union.
The cover of the Deathwatch Journal is marked ‘Do Not Destroy–Ever’. It is essential that judicial killing is provably fair, measured and decent.
The Deathwatch Journal details Manuel’s urination and bowel movements. It notes what time he fell asleep and when he woke up. It says what he eats and how much of it he had–today he left all of his bread but ate the fish and chips. It also documents what he says. Peter Manuel is all stories.
I was a spy for the Soviet Union. I was flown to Moscow and met a handler in an aircraft hangar. The Soviets had heard of my reputation as a housebreaker and wanted me to do a job for them, a specialist job, like Gentleman Johnny Ramensky. When they realised I was an American citizen they just flew me home.
Is that right, Peter?
During the war, when I lived in Coventry, a German pilot came down in the fields outside my reform school and I strangled him with my bare hands.
Did you really?
I was on a plane and the pilot fainted and I took the controls and I landed it. They couldn’t believe I’d done it. No experience, nothing. And I never even broke a sweat.
Is that so?
Manuel only ever tells the same story about himself: Manuel is doing clever things and other people are amazed by him. Manuel is always winning. He is never attacking women in the dark. He is never hiding in dusty attics, waiting for people to leave their homes so he can steal their mother’s engagement ring. He is never lying on pristine linen bedclothes with dirty boots on or dropping food on precious rugs and grinding it in with the heel of his shoe, spoiling a modest home for spite.
He is never dragging women down embankments, scattering their shopping in puddles, telling their three-year-old son to shut the fuck up or he’ll kill their mum.
Women are never screaming and running away in the stories he tells. Women are never weeping in dark fields, gathering their broken dentures or clasping ripped and bloody underwear to their chests. Women are never kneeling, heads bowed, hoping that if they are very, very quiet he will not kill them.
In his stories women are not sitting in court being stared at by the hard, accusing eyes of the jury as the foreman tells the judge that the rape charge against Peter Manuel is Not Proven by a unanimous decision.
Women are never being spat at by Samuel Manuel at the bus stop for going to the police about his son after swearing that she wouldn’t if he let her go, so she’s a liar. They’re never sitting on the bus with Samuel’s voice ringing in their ears, you dirty fucking lying cow, watching out of the window through a blur of tears and wondering: is breaking a promise not-to-tell worse than what he did to her?
Peter is never standing over dead families, eating a sandwich in the roaring silence. He is never looking at a dead girl’s tits and rubbing himself through his trousers. He is never hiding behind a tree, letting Anne Kneilands think herself saved before jumping out at her.
These are not the stories Manuel tells, but the POs know them. They have access to his records. Everyone knows everything he has ever done now, because he’s famous.
As he talks Peter sees them glancing at each other, like POs do. The thrill of all that attention dissipates and Manuel starts to realise that they’re laughing at him. This and their tepid, sceptical reception of his best stories make him angry. They don’t fucking know him. They don’t know anything about him. This is the mood in the condemned suite and why it goes so sour.
It becomes very acrimonious.
The trouble starts the day before his appeal against the death sentence. Peter begins frothing at the mouth and fitting. He is rushed to the infirmary and his stomach is pumped. They find nothing. For a week he twitches and is mute, froths and stares. He still eats though. He still smokes.
The Deathwatch Journal notes Prisoner doing his usual act.
Prisoner still away with the bees.
Despite mental condition, prisoner mysteriously managed to tune the wireless to Radio Luxembourg when I couldn’t find the station. Smoking incessantly.
Prisoner said nothing but the word ‘chips’ five times. Prisoner maintained act all through parents’ visit.
The day before his execution he stops the act.
That morning he wakes up. I feel better, he says. He has no memory of the past two weeks but remembers that the appeal was due to happen then. Did it happen? Yes, Peter, it did. You were at the court. In a side room. What happened? You lost by unanimous,
son. It’s happening tomorrow.
No, see what happened was PO Sullivan hit me on the head a week ago. I’ve had a massive head injury. We’ll need to have the appeal reheard because I wasn’t fit to plead. We need a second appeal.
Manuel shows them a chip off the side of the chest of drawers. That is where PO Sullivan attacked him. He remembers listening to the radio and the attack and then nothing for two weeks. Unspoken in this is the fact that Sullivan had a similar accusation levelled against him ten years ago. He hit a prisoner with a nightstick during a riot in Peterhead. The man was in a coma for two months. He came out of it just before Sullivan was charged with assault. Peter Manuel was in Peterhead at the time.
Manuel is examined by two prison doctors. They find a mark on his scalp, but it’s healed. It looks as if he scratched it there himself.
This is the day before the execution date. Brigit Manuel has submitted a petition to the court to delay her son’s hanging. Peter never hears about this. Abolitionist groups have petitioned for a delay too. A group of teachers have formed a committee and made a submission to the court: they have analysed Manuel’s behaviour from the court case and reports in the papers and believe they have diagnosed a ‘mental illness’. Peter Manuel should be shown compassion because he is not one bit well.
But there will be no second appeal because the two Harrys are already in the prison.
Harry Allen and his assistant, Harry Smith. Professional hangmen, long-drop-method men.
That night Manuel doesn’t sleep. He stays awake all night, listening to the radio and smoking, chatting.
At 5 a.m. he eats chips and drinks a pint of strong tea. At 7.20 a.m. Father Smith comes in and asks to take his confession. Manuel says no but lets Father Smith pray for him.
The governor and two other officials join them in the cell, checking all is well.
At three seconds to eight the two Harrys come into his cell. In complete but companionable silence, they bind his wrists behind his back and lead him across the corridor. Harry Allen fits the noose and the hood while Harry Smith ensures the witnesses are standing clear. Smith pulls the lever.