The Long Drop

by Denise Mina

  Tucked behind the house is a small garage, just big enough for a diminutive Austin A35. The officer walks up to it and finds it unlocked but empty. He feels sure he has the right house.

  Though it is daytime both sets of curtains are drawn in the front windows. The policeman knocks. No answer. He tries the door and finds it locked. He walks around to the back of the house.

  The kitchen door has a net-curtained window. He peers in.The kitchen is very tidy except for an empty tin discarded on the table. He squints and reads the label. Canadian Salmon in Oil. The lid has been dropped carelessly, odd in such an ordered room. The lid sits over the edge of the table, placed the wrong way down. If he moves his head, he can see light catch where the fish oil has soaked into the wood. They’ll never get that smell out.

  He sees a movement. A ginger tail curls lazily through the slightly open door into the back hall. It’s a cat, which makes sense of the tin. The tail flicks and disappears.

  He bends his knees and now he can see underneath the salmon tin lid on the edge of the table. A drip of oil has gathered, it catches the light. It is hanging there, threatening to fall onto the floor. Just hanging and waiting for a breeze or a knock, or two more molecules of oil to travel along the underside and join the build-up. Then the fishy oil will drop onto the floor and need cleaning up.

  He goes back to the station. He hears that Mr Smart may have gone to visit his parents in Jedburgh on the 31st of December. It is now the 6th of January. The parents do not have a telephone. Mr Smart may have stayed on in Jedburgh, his parents are frail, but this does not assuage the officer’s concern. Mr Smart would have taken his car, surely? The officer is uneasy. Mostly, it’s the ginger tail and the tin on the table that bother him. He’s very troubled by that and he doesn’t know why.

  He’s eating his lunch pieces when he realises: if the Smarts had gone away visiting they would have put the cat out. If they forgot to do that then the cat would be trapped with no field mice or kind neighbours to feed it. It should be frantically hungry by now. The tin lid with the oil drip is still on the edge of the table. A hungry cat would have jumped up, knocked off the lid coated in delicious-smelling oil and licked it clean. But the cat hasn’t. Someone is in the house.

  With a sudden sense of alarm the policeman abandons his sandwich and hurries back to Sheepburn Road.

  A neighbour rushes out to meet him, pulling her coat on over her pinny.

  Officer! She runs across the road to him and explains that there is something odd going on in that house. She’s already worried because of that Isabelle Cooke girl disappearing nearby. The lady telephoned the police herself about the Smarts’ house, yesterday. Their car is gone but the curtains keep changing, closing and opening. She becomes more incoherent as she goes on: Doris Smart sets the curtains nicely, do you see? But the curtains are pulled roughly: they cross at the bottom but are open at the top. Doris is very house-proud–

  The housewife stops. She touches her rollers and remembers that she is in the street. That is low class for this area. Suddenly aware that she is being seen, or very likely to be seen, she pulls the rollers out without removing her Kirby grips first, yanking at her hair angrily, making her eyes water. The officer feels for her. He thinks there is someone in there too but doesn’t say.

  He says he’s going to force an entry to the house. Will she come and witness for him? She’s glad to, even if she doesn’t know what that means, not technically, she just wants someone to do something.

  Together they go around the back of the house, walking up the twin tracks where the car has balded the grass.

  She gibbers: Mr Smart built this house himself and she worries about gas and electricity and so on. How could he know about all of those things? And there’s that business with the poor little Cooke girl. Well, it isn’t a gas leak, he says, there’s a cat in there.

  There are twelve glass panels in the kitchen door. The officer uses his wooden truncheon on the lowest pane. It shatters easily, a tinkling shower of glass falls inside the still house.

  The officer smiles reassuringly to the housewife. She tries to return the favour, but her smile is a cringe and her chin crumples. He reaches in through the empty frame, feeling for the snib. He twists it, turning the door handle on the outside and the door swings open.

  The ginger cat is sitting very upright on the draining board next to the sink. It looks at him, shifts its front paws and waits to see what he will do.

  He opens the door wide and calls soft hellos into the house. He steps in, his foot crunching on the glass, smelling for gas, listening.

  It doesn’t smell of gas. It smells of damp with a high tang of cat pee. Cold. So cold it dampens a strange smell which may be the earth foundations or something else. Or something else. He walks carefully across the kitchen to the back hall, listening. He can’t hear anyone. In the hallway he skirts a sticky yellow puddle of cat’s piss on the lino.

  The door to the living room is open. Homemade paper chains are hung around the picture rail, newspaper text visible through watery red and green paint. It’s the 6th of January and Christmas cards still line the mantelpiece. Doris Smart is very house-proud.

  The officer doubles-back down the hall and finds a door slightly ajar. He pushes it with his elbow.

  The soft creak of the door hinge gets louder and louder and louder until it is a scream, a shrill, eyeball-trembling scream, loud as Panzer tank fire, loud as a building collapsing on Belgian civilians, loud as the screams of a young soldier from Dundee with a pelvis mangled by a speeding truck carrying cabbages to Namur.

  Don’t come in! he screams at the housewife. She wasn’t going to come in. His shouting only brings her to the door of the kitchen. She bends down and gives a Sunday smile through the pane of broken glass. Beg pardon?

  Don’t come in here. He speaks calmly, his panic harnessed. He didn’t really mean ‘don’t come in’. What he really meant was he wished he had not come in.

  He steps across the corridor to the opposite door. Pushes that one with his other elbow. Worse. Even worse in there.

  The housewife smiles through the broken windowpane. Did you want me to come in?

  In a loud sergeant major’s voice he orders her to return to her home and telephone Hamilton Police Station. She will give this address and inform the senior officer that there have been murders here. His voice trills high because he is trying not to breathe in the smell.

  The woman’s eyebrows spring to her hairline, her face snaps away from the hole. He hears her walk, then run, around the side of the house, slippers flapping on the mud.

  And he is alone in the damp cold.

  Even without turning his head he can see, in the room on his right, a small boy’s spectacles sitting on the night table. The boy is lying in the bed and the bed is red. The sheets are red, the blankets are red and the pillow is so profoundly red it has turned black. He can make out the curvature of the boy’s small head on the pillow.

  On his left, in the second room, a double bed. Worse in there. Daylight flickers through the curtains of the couple’s bedroom, licking their covers. The bedclothes are red and dry and tucked up under their bloody chins. And there’s a cat shit next to the bed. A small brown tube of cat shit.

  The officer cannot move. His throat throbs. He cannot swallow. This officer fought through the Low Countries with the Scots Greys. He saw bits of people, bits of children, leftover bits, burnt bits. Back then he prayed to a God he still feared but no longer loved. He prayed never, ever to feel this again. But now he has.

  7

  Monday 2 December 1957

  THE FACADE OF THE bakery in Bridgeton is pale yellow. ‘Watt’s Bakery and Dairy’ is painted in blue above the window display. The paper blind behind the glass glows with a faint light. Watt opens the front door with his own fat set of keys and Manuel staggers in behind him. The shop is dark but for the light coming from the back office where John is counting up the takings.

  ‘John! It’s me! I have a–�
�� he doesn’t know what to call Manuel–‘pal with me!’

  There is a pause before John answers, though he must have heard them coming in.

  ‘WAIT.’ John’s voice is flat and annoyed.

  William knows he should not have brought anyone here at this time, when the money is being counted.

  :‘John?’

  ‘WAIT.’

  So they wait.

  Watt and Manuel stand in the dark shop looking at the empty glass shelves, swaying like a pair of lost idiot shoppers. Orange light from the street throbs in through the blind. Manuel takes his packet of cigarettes out. Watt says he can’t smoke in here. Manuel turns to him, angry, but just then John comes out of the back office.

  He is a slim version of William, the youngest of the three Watt brothers. He stands in the doorway and looks out at them.

  In the company of someone sober, they both realise how very drunk they are.

  Self-conscious, Watt raises a straight arm at his side. ‘John! This is Peter Manuel who you have been hearing so much about. He is going to help me. He has a whole new slant on the Burnside Affair.’

  Peter’s chin is down. He looks up at John like a boxer on a poster. John is not the businessman William is, he can’t see three moves ahead, but he makes up for it by doing the hard work. This is the end of his usual fifteen-hour shift and he’s tired. He can’t disguise his reaction to William arriving with a drunk chancer who claims to have stumbled on a conscience.

  William attempts the sale again. ‘This young man? Splendid fellow. An author, no less!’

  Manuel sways with pleasure at the description, sneering and blinking slowly. John still doesn’t seem to like the look of him.

  Watt whispers in a hiss, spraying his sober, hygiene-conscious brother with spittle: ‘He knows who did the murders! He’s going to tell us what happened and how we can get the gun.’

  John sounds exhausted. ‘Why are you here, Bill?’

  ‘We need a witness. Peter has a story to tell about the Burnside Affair–’

  ‘It’s the TRUTH!’ Manuel declares.

  Watt hesitates. The statement undermines itself. He is suddenly not sure how well this is going to go or if he was wise to defy Dandy McKay by waylaying Manuel.

  ‘And to get money,’ adds Manuel.

  ‘Yes,’ says Watt, ‘And to get money for Peter, here. For his trouble. He can tell us where the gun is, John.’

  John watches Peter fumble a cigarette out of his packet and put it behind his ear for in-a-minute. Then John looks at William.

  ‘You seem quite drunk, Bill.’

  Watt is embarrassed by that and laughs. He can’t think of anything to say. John says he has to finish up and why don’t they go over to the Gleniffer Bar and he’ll be over in half an hour.

  William cringes. ‘We’re slightly hiding,’ he says.

  ‘Who from?’

  William doesn’t want to say Dandy McKay. That would make it seem very serious. John would make a big deal out of that.

  ‘Disreputable fellows, a rough crowd.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be all right in the Gleniffer. It’s just locals in there.’

  ‘They found us in the Steps but we got away.’

  John thinks he has misheard. ‘They met you in the Steps?’

  ‘No, they found us there.’

  ‘They were looking for you and found you there?’

  William nods. No one important ever goes into the Steps. It already sounds serious, ‘We just need to hear his story.’

  John doesn’t know what William wants him to do. He glances to the back office, reminding William that the day’s takings from all five of their shops are sitting on a table in there, being counted. He needs them to leave. John shrugs.

  ‘You’ll be all right for twenty minutes.’

  There is nothing else to do. William nods at Manuel and they turn to the door. Watt opens it and holds it and Manuel bowls under his arm, out to the street.

  William looks back at his sensible brother. John waves him out, rolling his eyes, but William nods, insisting: Go along with me, John, he is saying, this is a good plan. William is all plans. Most of them are good.

  The door shuts behind them and the frosty night air envelops them. William can tell John is sceptical about the plan. William is too but less so. Manuel can get them the gun and he’s an author. He’ll tell them a good story, a credible story.

  He looks down at his salvation. He sees Manuel through John’s eyes for a moment: cheap shoes, threadbare jacket, baring his bad teeth. Manuel looks small and desperate and dishonest as he takes the cigarette from behind his ear and lights it. He glances down the road for the Gleniffer Bar.

  Watt points across the road and they go over. He glances back at his shop. The window glows warm, the paintwork and glass are clean. It pleases him.

  Watt has five shops now. The shops are very successful because their cakes are bigger than everyone else’s. Rationing ended three years ago but women shoppers are trained to count every ounce. They know they are getting a good deal here, their eyes tell them that. They queue out of the door to buy in Watt’s shops.

  The shops are clean but the bakery house itself is in a vermin-infested shed in the backcourt. They have to put buckets out when it rains, which is nearly always. The war is over and new laws have just been passed to stop factories being run in unsanitary lean-tos. It is under this premise that William is buying land. Ostensibly to build factories on, he tells John and their company accountant. He has been helped to buy land. He buys bits of land other people don’t even know are for sale, bits of Townhead and Cowcaddens that the council will be forced to buy to complete their Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan. Those strips of land will be priceless soon. It’s all set: soon he will have a lot of money, but not respectability. He looks at Peter walking next to him. That depends on him.

  They walk through the door and into the Gleniffer.

  The floor is coated in swirled sawdust, put there to soak up spills. Ashtrays get emptied onto the floor because they’ll sweep up at the end of the night anyway. There’s a spittoon in the corner with a big sign warning patrons not to spit on the floor and spread diseases. The lights are bright and harsh. There’s no toilet but the place still smells of piss. It is not a nice pub.

  The woman serving has two scarves wrapped around her head like a gypsy. She’s wearing several bangles and too much make-up for a woman in her thirties. Both Watt and Manuel avoid her eye.

  They buy warm bottled beers and whisky that tastes a bit watery. Neither of them likes who they are in this pub. There are a few locals drinking together in moderation but mostly it’s bitter lone drinkers swaying on their feet.

  ‘So,’ says Watt, trying to get them back to the point of the night when they were winners, ‘will you write more?’

  Peter smiles and looks around the bar. He stands taller in the compromising pub. He can comfortably be here now because Watt has asked that.

  Peter Manuel is telling the truth about writing. He has written long-form fiction, ideas, short stories, precis of stories. He sends them off to well-known magazines. He has no success but he has fallen in love with the waiting. The waiting makes all of the indignities of his life tolerable because after that envelope slips his fingers into the postbox he feels reborn. In these glorious waiting times he imagines himself anew.

  During these times Peter is going about, drinking in pubs, being barked at by dogs, sitting in the pictures, breaking into houses for meagre prizes, but simultaneously he is also being Peter Manuel Before-He-Was-A-Writer. The future crackles with possibility. Detached from the humdrum everyday, he begins to think of himself in the third person, to see himself through the prism of history.

  There is the dog that barked at Peter Manuel.

  Peter Manuel sat in this very seat at the pictures.

  Peter Manuel drank just here, in this chair.

  He loves this other Peter Manuel. This astonishing man, who moved among us, just as if he was no
thing special.

  He wants these pockets of wonder to go on forever. But they don’t. Time ticks by and there is a gradual realisation that the magazine is not going to respond. The luminescent pride fades, as it dawns on him that weeks have passed and the Rolls-Royce hasn’t arrived to whisk him off to magazine headquarters (he doesn’t understand the economics of magazines).

  The first time he posts a story it takes two months for the glow to dull. The second time it lasts for a month. The third time the hope dissipates after less than a fortnight, because he really tried that time, rewrote the story over and over, used his best handwriting.

  Finally, one day, he holds an envelope on the lip of the post-box. He stares at the blackness inside. He can’t drop the story in. He keeps it in his hand and walks to a field and sits on a hill and smokes a cigarette. Then he burns his story in the envelope. He tries to forget that feeling, the yearning for the man he might have been. But he can’t forget it. It felt too good, this Other Possible Peter.

  ‘You will help each other.’

  The woman with the scarves and make-up is staring at them, her bangled hand dangling over the bar.

  ‘Ah,’ says Watt. ‘Really?’

  ‘He–’ she points a lazy finger at Manuel then at Watt–‘Will help you. Your paths will cross again. He will pay the debt that hangs over him.’

  Watt nods as Manuel seems to shrink by his side. Watt knows Moira is an idiot, he has met her before and she always does this. She thinks she’s psychic, that’s why she wears all the bangles and the headscarves. He turns to explain to Manuel. ‘Moira, here, is a spiritualist. A seer.’

  But Manuel is grey and frozen. He’s staring at the floor, lost in the swirls of sawdust on the floor. He looks as if he might be sick.

  The door opens. John is there. He nods to William but they still have drinks so William waves him over, trying to finish his while John makes his way across the room. John is not happy about any of this.