The Long Drop

by Denise Mina

  The second witness swears he saw Watt parked on Loch Lomond side at a quarter past two on the morning of the murders. He was driving his wife when he saw a car hurtling towards him. The lights switched off suddenly, and the car pulled up. He passed it and saw a lone driver, smoking a cigarette. The witness admits in court that he didn’t see the driver’s face but picked Watt out of a line-up of thirty because the driver was smoking his cigarette in a particular way: his index finger was curled over the top, as one might smoke a pipe. In the identification parade he asked all thirty gentlemen to mime smoking a cigarette and picked Watt out on the basis of the gesture.

  Watt tells the court about being arrested for the murders.

  Because his photograph has been published in all of the papers witnesses have no trouble identifying him. Neither do the other prisoners in Barlinnie. As Watt is walked to his cell they gather on the landings and chant his name. Because Watt owns a string of bakery shops, one wit shouts ‘One killer, one scone’ and everyone laughs at him. The meaner men shout that he’ll hang. The place smells of shit and piss left in buckets overnight.

  Mr Watt is in Barlinnie for sixty-seven days until he changes lawyer. Dowdall gets him out. The evidence is thin, but the police never stop believing he is responsible. They follow him everywhere. They question all his business contacts. They park outside his residence and businesses. They continue to interview people about him. Watt finds out that they are not looking for anyone else.

  Watt tells the court that he felt it was up to him to ‘turn detective’ and solve the case himself. He let it be known through Mr Dowdall and his own contacts in the underworld that he was seeking information about the Burnside Affair. He would be receptive to any and all information on the matter and was willing to travel or meet anyone who might help.

  ‘Before this meeting with Mr Manuel you had accompanied Mr “Scout” O’Neil to the police station in Rutherglen?’

  ‘Yes. I had occasion to meet with Mr O’Neil. He knew I was seeking information about this affair. He informed me that just a few days before the Burnside murders he had sold a Webley revolver to Mr Peter Manuel, the very man I had been hearing so much about.’

  ‘What did you do when Mr O’Neil told you this?’

  ‘I took Mr O’Neil to Rutherglen Police Station at once so that he might make a statement to that effect.’

  ‘And what did this information lead the police to do?’

  Mr Watt looks older suddenly. ‘Nothing,’ he says quietly.

  Lord Cameron asks him to speak up.

  Mr Watt raises his face to the court. ‘The police did nothing with this information. Nor any subsequent information I brought them relating to the murders. It was after I took Mr O’Neil to the station, with this sensational information about which they did nothing at all, that I realised I had to crack the case myself.’

  ‘You found the man who sold your suspected killer the gun, you took that man to the police, and they did nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  M.G. Gillies asks kindly, ‘You must have felt terribly discouraged?’ It’s a prompt for Watt to tell the court about his painful experiences.

  ‘Certainly not!’ declares Watt bumptiously. ‘Never that!’

  M.G. Gillies sags a little, fiddling with his notes. He tries again. ‘Six months after Mr O’Neil went to the police with you, you finally met Mr Manuel face-to-face, in early December 1957, in Whitehall’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Though you were by now convinced that Manuel had killed your family, you were willing to spend an entire evening in his company?’

  ‘What other option did I have? The police were certain I was responsible. Somebody had to do something. Find something.’ Watt pauses for a breath. ‘The police did nothing but follow me around all the time. Every time I had a business meeting they would turn up the next day and question everyone from the merest janitor to my business contemporaries. It was–’ he fumbles for a word that isn’t ‘embarrassing’ because it is bigger than that–‘awful.’

  And now he breaks down. Crying at the wrong time. A full-grown man, bubbling about foiled business opportunities when he could have cried for his murdered family and made them like him.

  It’s an uncomfortable moment. The lawyers look away. The public pass bags of sweeties, blow noses and rearrange the coats on their knees. The doctor steps forward and takes Watt’s pulse.

  Watt has obviously been coached in his evidence, as have many of the witnesses. Startling to a modern reader is the frequency with which witnesses ask lawyers if they should say this bit now, or interrupt their own evidence to point out that the prosecution has forgotten to prompt them into a bit of the story that they’ve practised together.

  A good liar can be taught to spontaneously repeat statements ad nauseam. Honest witnesses often seem disingenuous after coaching.

  The doctor nods to Lord Cameron, indicating that, in his professional opinion, Mr Watt is not dead or dying. Just to be certain, Lord Cameron commands that Watt be given a glass of water.

  Mr Watt drinks it dutifully, like a child. He drinks all of it. He catches his breath and the doctor steps away.

  M.G. Gillies continues. ‘So, your investigations led you to arrange a meeting with Mr Manuel?’

  ‘No,’ Watt corrects him. ‘He arranged a meeting with me. He sought me out through Mr Dowdall. They arranged the meeting between them but I was very keen to meet him.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘From my investigations I had become convinced that Peter Manuel had killed my family.’

  ‘And you were convinced of this at the time that you met him?’

  ‘Utterly. I met him to ascertain what I could. Mr Dowdall informed me that Manuel knew where the gun was and I was trying to get that for the police. I thought if I could get him to give them the gun it would be something real, a physical thing that would prove it wasn’t me.’

  ‘And you spent the entire night with him?’

  Watt nods adamantly. ‘Until six in the morning. Until I dropped him off at his parents’ house in Birkenshaw.’

  Gillies says this very slowly: ‘Mr Watt. With the benefit of hindsight, do you think you should have met and spent all this time with him?’

  This is rehearsed and Watt picks up on the cue: he turns stiffly to the jury.

  ‘I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO,’ he says. Then turns and smiles at M.G. Gillies as if to say, See? I can take a prompt, sometimes. ‘It made perfect sense at the time. I felt I had to meet him.’

  Grieve gets up for the defence. He makes Watt go over the night with Manuel again and again. Grieve knows it is the oddest thing this very odd man has done. Chunks of the night are missing: they meet at Whitehall’s, they go to Jackson’s, they stop briefly in the Steps Bar, they meet Watt’s brother, John, at the bakery in Bridgeton and wait in the Gleniffer Bar for John to finish work. Then they go to John’s house in Dennistoun and eat bacon and eggs and drink for over an hour and a bit. Watt and Manuel leave there towards four in the morning and two hours later arrive in Birkenshaw, which is a ten-minute drive from John’s house. No, Watt doesn’t remember what happened during that time. It does seem like a long time for a short drive. Well, maybe they left later then, he doesn’t know. It was a long night.

  What did they talk about during the night? Well, Manuel said he had the gun and then told Watt that the people who committed the murders had made a mistake. They actually meant to kill and rob the Valentes next door. But Manuel knew practically every stick of furniture in the Fennsbank Avenue house, he knew where all the rooms were and what the bedspread felt like. He even knew what sort of gin they had in the house. Watt and Manuel were together for eleven hours. The reported conversation between them would have taken half an hour.

  Abruptly, Grieve asks Watt if he has bad feet?

  Yes, Watt admits that he does have rather bad feet.

  ‘You suffer from corns?’

  ‘Yes,’ Watt says warily. He admits to havi
ng three corns, though he fails to see how this is relevant.

  ‘Did you tell DS Mitchell that you had been cutting your corns in the hotel room in Cairnbaan before you came to Glasgow that day?’

  ‘Yes, I did tell him that.’

  ‘And this was to explain why you had blood on your hands, under your fingernails?’

  ‘Yes.’ Watt dabs his forehead. ‘From cutting my corns.’

  ‘But you had been fishing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you cut your corns before or after you had been fishing?’

  ‘I don’t recall.’

  ‘Fish generally swim in water, do they not? One might assume your hands would have been washed clean of blood if you cut them before?’

  ‘Well, it must have been after then.’

  ‘You were brought back to the hotel on an urgent matter, you were told that your family had been all been shot dead and you must go immediately to Glasgow to identify their bodies yet then you went off to cut your corns? That’s how you got blood all over your hands?’

  ‘I don’t recall!’

  Grieve finishes Watt’s torment with a final flick of the whip. ‘Did you kill your family, Mr Watt?’

  Watt waves a hand in the air and announces: ‘What a profession! What a profession!’

  Does he mean lawyering is an odd profession or that Grieve is wrong when he professes that Watt killed his family? No one knows but the statement is widely reported as an example of how odd Mr Watt sounded on the stand.

  The last thing he says before getting down is an unprompted announcement. ‘I would never hurt my girls,’ he says. But the jury aren’t making notes. They aren’t listening. They have too much to take in already, about the blood and the witnesses and the apparent confessions to Mitchell. The press don’t care because they already have a character for Watt and this doesn’t fit.

  As he is helped down from the witness box and climbs effortlessly onto the stretcher, Watt thinks his part in this case is over.

  It isn’t.

  Peter Manuel will sack his lawyers and represent himself in the case. Arguing that important matters were not aired at this time, Manuel will recall William Watt as a witness. He will question him about their night together himself.

  5

  Monday 2 December 1957

  WILLIAM WATT IS FAR too drunk to drive. Normally he wouldn’t have more than eight or nine drinks before getting behind the wheel but tonight he has had a good deal more than that. So he is driving very slowly, for safety purposes. There’s another reason he is going slowly: he hasn’t quite worked out what to do yet. There are a number of possibilities but he’s befuddled with the drink: he can’t think them through to the final play. One wrong move could be catastrophic.

  Watt has money. The bakery business is a cash business and Watt makes full use of that fact. He has cash stashed all over the place, in his house, in each of his five bakery shops. He has a five-pound note rolled up and tucked into his sock right now. He has money hidden in his girlfriend’s flat. He can pay Manuel but Manuel is a career criminal. If he does give Manuel money he has to be careful. Watt doesn’t want him to know where his money is.

  He’s not sure how to handle the gun. He can’t simply get it from Manuel and take it to the police. They already suspect him so if he turns up with the gun they could use it against him. He needs to get Manuel to tell him where it is, needs a witness to him saying it, and then he needs to get the police to go and get it from there themselves. Unless Manuel has it on him now, in which case he mustn’t touch it.

  It’s all too complicated for someone as drunk as he is, and he is trying to drive as well. Briefly, he considers getting money from his girlfriend, Phamie. He has two hundred pounds on top of a cupboard in her flat, but if he went there Manuel might go back later and attack her. Watt drives slowly and imagines Phamie being sex-attacked by Manuel. He knows Manuel’s history, about the girls he has forced himself on. William Watt can’t really conceive of rape. He imagines such an encounter as essentially consensual but perhaps more than gently insistent on the gentleman’s behalf. He doesn’t imagine a middle-aged woman, just off the bus, being hit in the face with a brick. He imagines Phamie, shocked and surprised as Manuel looms over her, being more than gently insistent. Watt wonders whether he finds this erotic but realises that no, he finds it very alarming. Phamie’s shock makes Watt realise how much he cares for her. He wants to protect her from such surprises. He imagines dear, young Phamie’s cheeks streaked with surprised tears and her face morphs into Vivienne’s dead and bruised face, splattered with blood. Watt feels that like a punch in the colon. He needs to shit very suddenly.

  Abruptly a horn blares and lights flash in his rear-view mirror.

  ‘What in blazes!’

  Manuel laughs at him. ‘You’ve stopped the bloody car!’

  Watt has stopped in the middle of the Albert Bridge. He hadn’t noticed because he was driving so slowly in the first place. The engine has stalled.

  ‘You’re too drunk to drive.’ Manuel waves the driver past. Watt is proud of his ability to drive drunk. ‘I’ll have you know I’m a famously good driver.’

  ‘Are ye now?’

  Watt takes his foot off the brake and lets the car roll down the other side of the bridge. ‘Better than Stirling Moss, any day of the week.’

  At the other end of the bridge he restarts the engine. The High Court glides past on the left, a long, low blackened building with a columned portico.

  Manuel’s face follows it. ‘Ever been in there?’

  Watt knows the question is a prompt. Manuel wants Watt to bat the question back so he can roll out his stories. Watt decides not to, out of spite, because he is defensive about his driving,

  ‘Why the hell would I have been in there?’

  It’s a throwaway line but neither of them says anything for a while so the spiky comment hangs uncomfortably in the car.

  They’re not getting on any more. They both start to think about what they want from each other.

  Watt takes a left and plunges into the tunnel under St Enoch’s railway lines. A train grinds slowly by overhead. The railway tunnels are dark, a piss-tang smell seeps in through the windows. The coal smog is heavy and damp here, it swirls at ankle height. This dank world is peopled with tramps and whores from Glasgow Green and clapped-out street fighters. A burning brazier lights men with fight-flattened noses slumped against a crumbling black wall.

  The car makes it out the other side and they head up town, dodging rumbling trams and staggering drunks. Watt is sobering up. He feels his rational mind wake up. He felt terribly drunk just then because of the confusion of their leaving Jackson’s Bar so suddenly, of their coming out from the warm into the cold, leaving the embrace of good regard for a cold street and a sore conversation, these things have thrown him off his stride, made him melancholy, but he’s regaining equilibrium. He makes a decision: he will take Manuel to his brother John over in Bridgeton. John will be sober. John will witness Manuel telling William where the gun is. He glances at his watch. It’s ten to ten. Too early. John will still be finishing the books. Watt needs to play for time.

  They cross a busy junction and Watt realises why he is feeling so sad: he misses the power he felt in Jackson’s. His mind rolls through ways to get that back and Ah! He realises where they are. The Chamber of Commerce is one street over, straight ahead is the Sheriff Court, the Merchants House, the City Chambers, the Trades Hall. This is the epicentre of Glaswegian prosperity and respectability.

  A good, warm feeling washes over him. He drives slowly on, passing the Trades Hall, a perfectly symmetrical Robert Adam building. It is full of rich people and rich things, friezes, oak-panelled rooms with roll calls of officer bearers since 1605 etched on them. Power and prosperity and respectability. Watt wants to sit outside and warm his face in the glow of it.

  But Peter Manuel is common and Watt cannot be seen with him and being this drunk is disgraceful. Still, even being near the
Trades Hall would rekindle that lovely cosseted sensation. He draws over to the kerb and parks.

  ‘Why d’you stop?’

  Watt smiles graciously. He opens his mouth and shuts it and thinks–I want to be near powerful, upper-class people. It thrills and comforts me. I want to be near them, not you. You make me less. You are cheap.

  He can’t say that. He nods across the road. ‘Swift one in the Steps Bar?’

  It is a clerks’ pub, full of office types, straights. Manuel smiles at the soft lights of it. He is aspirational, Watt forgot that. It’ll be a treat for him to go in there for one and on the way back out Watt can look at the Trades Hall again, at the windows and the beautiful doors, at the historic stained glass. Since 1605 the Guilds of the Fleshers and the Hammermen, the Maltmen and the Gardeners and all the other trades have had their associations here or nearby. Some of the Baking families go back fifteen generations, almost to its foundation. Over the centuries the networks tighten and the money builds until a guild of grocers, worried about cheap apples from Ayr, have spawned slave armies, funded fleets and built an empire. The Trades Hall and the Merchants House work together. They are power and money and respectability. The Industrial Revolution saps their official power but by then they’ve amassed so much money it hardly makes a dent.

  Watt sees himself as the coming man. He’s a businessman, not a tradesman, his path will be through the Merchants House, but still, as he locks his car door, his eyes linger on the warm windows of their sister association, the Trades Hall. He thinks he will soon take his place in that line of dynamic men who made the world cleave to their will. This they did by having the mettle to do things others would find distasteful. They gain mastery by enslaving weaker men, by profiteering, doing that which must be done, by meeting Peter Manuel. It is a timely reminder of what he is doing this for. The lights warm the back of his fat neck as he crosses the road away from it.