The Long Drop
Page 21
The trap door swings and catches on the latch.
Second and third vertebrae are separated.
From the moment the Harrys walked into the condemned cell, it takes eight seconds.
Peter Manuel is dead.
Normally during a hanging in Barlinnie the prisoners down tools until it is over. There is a moment’s reverence, a comradely silence. Not prayers exactly, but an acknowledgement that it could be any one of them up there. A knife in the wrong place, a punch and a bad fall, it’s part of the life. But when Peter Manuel is hanged the prisoners pointedly carry on eating breakfast. Some slam cups down on tables or rattle their trays against walls. Even other criminals want to distance themselves from him.
Father Smith and the medical examiner, Dr D.A.R. Anderson, leave the other witnesses in the hanging cell and go downstairs. They take their time, dawdling down the corridor, lingering on the stairs. They pause behind the door to the corridor below. A lot can happen to a body after hanging. Twitching, effluvia, noises. Best to wait. Then they walk along the silent corridor to the cell below the trap. They listen at the door. They hear the occasional creak of the swinging rope and nothing else. They open the door and go in.
Dr Anderson feels the wrist for a pulse. Manuel is dead. As he fills out the certificate–‘Cause of death: judicial hanging’–Father Smith performs the last rites.
At the moment of Manuel’s death, groups of people gather all around the city. They stand in silence and watch the sky. They gather in streets, outside his parents’ house. They stand at bus stops, on train platforms, looking up at the sky waiting for something to lift. The moment passes. It starts to rain. Trains move off. Buses arrive. Crowds disperse.
Immediately, the children begin to tell each other that Peter Manuel could see in the dark.
Three hours after his death Manuel is buried in an unmarked grave within the prison grounds. His family are not permitted to attend. Father Smith performs the ceremony.
Three weeks later a muted paragraph in the Daily Record reports that a woman has been found murdered near Burntbroom Farm, strangled and beaten, her clothing left in disarray. No mention is made of Manuel or Isabelle Cooke or the other women who were murdered and left there before her. Muncie finds and charges someone within twenty-four hours.
Three months later William Watt gives an interview to the press. For the first time he is pictured at home, smiling. He invites the city to celebrate with him on the occasion of his engagement to his young fiancée, Phamie. He expects people will be pleased for him, after all his troubles.
Three years later the value of commercial property is reassessed by Glasgow Corporation surveyors. They find it has tripled in value, and blame changing conditions and the commercial boom. Strangely, landowners do not protest the rate rises that follow from this. The land is quietly bought at these heightened valuations by the Corporation and then levelled for redevelopment.
The Gorbals is flattened.
Cowcaddens is flattened.
The city is reborn so completely that it becomes a memory of a memory of a place.
The people are bonded by loathing for Manuel. The children are bonded by fear. The women are afraid enough to stay in their homes and do their work and be glad of the menfolk who protect them.
Everything goes back to normal. Peter Manuel becomes a scary story people tell each other. Just a story. Just a creepy story about a serial killer.
Acknowledgments
More thanks are due for this book than I can possibly recall because of its unusually long gestation.
David MacLennan, Graham Eatough, Alison Hennessey, John Wood, Jemima Forrester, Peter Robinson, Ford Keirnan have all contributed. Some added significant ideas on this story, some gave me a simple shove on the back. To the National Archive of Scotland for their help accessing materials and court records. Thank you to the ladies of the Girl Guides main office in Elmbank Street for giving me access to blueprints of their office floor plan from 1957 and then pointing out that I was in the wrong street. The office moved from Gordon Street in the 1960s. To Steve, Fergus and Ownie for patiently stepping around huge maps, photos of Berettas and creepy site photos for two years.
More especially Hector and Malcolm MacLeod for their excellent book Peter Manuel, Serial Killer (Penguin, 2010), which inspired the night portions of this book, and Allan Nicol’s book Manuel: Scotland’s First Serial Killer (Abe Books, 2008) for an astute legal breakdown of the case.
At its most joyous, writing a book is living a parallel life, part-time. There were times when I could stand and feel the blackened old city growing up around me. Thank you to everyone who shared in this obsession, generously sharing glimpses of the dead and bringing the dirty old town to life.
About the Author
Denise Mina is the author of the novels Blood, Salt, Water, The Red Road, Gods and Beasts, The End of the Wasp Season, Still Midnight, Slip of the Knife, The Dead Hour, Field of Blood, Deception, and the Garnethill trilogy, the first installment of which won her the John Creasey Memorial Award for best first crime novel. Mina has twice received the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. She lives in Glasgow.
denisemina.com
@damedenisemina
DeniseMinaBooks
ALSO BY DENISE MINA
ALEX MORROW NOVELS
STILL MIDNIGHT
THE END OF THE WASP SEASON
GODS AND BEASTS
THE RED ROAD
BLOOD, SALT, WATER
PADDY MEEHAN NOVELS
FIELD OF BLOOD
THE DEAD HOUR
SLIP OF THE KNIFE
GARNETHILL TRILOGY
GARNETHILL
EXILE
RESOLUTION
OTHER NOVELS
DECEPTION
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