The Long Drop

by Denise Mina

  ‘We should go,’ he says when he reaches them.

  ‘What did she mean?’ Manuel is asking Watt, as if John hasn’t spoken.

  William has been told many things by Moira. He comes in here often to wait for John to finish the books. She says vague things, good luck, bad luck, debts, sorrows. Never anything concrete, never anything that couldn’t be sort of true.

  ‘Moira, dear, might we have two bottles of Scotch to take away please?’

  Moira smiles at Watt, delighted he is paying bar prices for a takeaway. She didn’t see that coming.

  Outside, John takes the truck and William and Manuel take the Vauxhall, and they all drive to John’s house in Garthland Street in Dennistoun. They park behind each other, and go up the close to John’s flat on the second floor. It is a nice close. All of the doors are painted to look like oak. The neighbours take their turn cleaning the stairs and doormats can be left outside without being stolen.

  Nettie, John’s wife, is in the warm kitchen. The table is set for two.

  Nettie isn’t at all pleased to see William with a drunk stranger in tow. She pinches her lips and says she only has enough stew for the two of them. John is making it clear that she is to welcome them though. Egg and bacon, he orders and she scuttles away and puts the frying pan on.

  They sit around the kitchen table in the recess. She sits on the step stool at the table and gives the men the chairs.

  Nettie and John are drinking tea with their dinner. Watt opens one of the two bottles of whisky he bought from the Gleniffer and pours himself and Peter generous mouthfuls. Peter Manuel eats his eggs by cramming them whole into his mouth.

  When they have finished Nettie takes the dirty plates away and washes up. Then she leaves the kitchen.

  The men stay at the table and Peter Manuel lights a cigarette. He looks at both of them. It feels like the start of a negotiation. John begins:

  ‘What are you offering? I know you’re an author but we need more than a good story at this point.’

  Manuel blows a thick string of white smoke over John’s head.

  ‘I’m offering the gun. A named killer, the story and the gun.’

  Watt waits for him to name a price, but Manuel doesn’t. The money doesn’t seem that important to him all of a sudden. John catches William’s eye. John has spotted Manuel’s mistake too. He’s forgotten to charge them before giving them the information. John thinks it is a drunken mistake. William is seeing a pattern of chaotic behaviour, an inability to control impulses, a lack of long-term planning.

  John leans in. ‘How would we know it’s not just any old gun?’

  Manuel smokes and smirks. ‘His name is Charles Tallis and he was after the Valentes.’

  John and Watt look at each other. They speculated about the Valentes. The story sounds as if it might be plausible.

  Manuel draws on his cigarette. He sits back and rests a knee on the side of the table. John and William sit forward, the better to hear.

  ‘The whole thing was a mistake.’

  Unseen in the hallway, Nettie leans against a wall and listens.

  8

  Thursday 15 May 1958

  ISABELLE COOKE’S FATHER IS telling the court about the last night he ever saw his daughter. Mr Cooke knows he is a footnote in this story. His loss, his daughter, his life, is an aside. He is only here because Peter Manuel pled not guilty so the Crown needs his evidence. He would rather be anywhere else than here but he is dutiful.

  Mr Cooke is a solid, decent man with an unblemished work record and a handsome wife. He describes his daughter in terms that are bland. Isabelle was a sweet girl. A good daughter. She always helped her mother around the house. She worked at the telephone exchange. She loved the dancing. He describes her like this because he doesn’t want to talk about her openly, in front of other people, not the real Isabelle. They have looked at her underpants and fingered her underskirt. They dug her naked carcass up from the frozen January earth and saw her body, examined her private parts for signs of rape. Mr Cooke can’t allow them any more of his real daughter, a giggler, unsure of the world and her place, feeling her way. The deep sleeper, funny, nasty sometimes too, loose in her prayers, with a fondness for fritters, tending to fat.

  ‘For the benefit of the court, can you tell us about the last night you saw Isabelle?’

  Mr Cooke clears his throat. He pauses.

  ‘Isabelle was going to meet her boyfriend at a dance. It was a cold night. After tea she packed her dancing shoes into her handbag and put on her coat and her muffler. She was getting new dancing shoes for her birthday in January. She was excited about that. She said she was going to dance the soles off her old ones that night.’

  Mr Cooke drops his chin to his chest. He feels unexpectedly emotional, overwhelmed by an image of her in the living-room doorway, pulling her coat on and smiling at him. He didn’t pay attention to her because he was busy trying to starve the fire. The chimney needed cleaning, they’d been using damp coal, and the fire wasn’t hot. He was holding a sheet of newspaper over the hearth, heating it up to burn the flue clean. Isabelle looked in on him but he only glanced back. His attention was on the fire, didn’t want the middle of the newspaper to catch and burn.

  ‘Don’t be late.’

  ‘Bye, Daddy.’

  And then the door slammed behind her and she was gone and it was forever.

  ‘But she didn’t come home that night?’

  ‘No, she didn’t come home.’

  ‘When did you realise she was missing?’

  He draws a deep breath but the court is stuffy and it doesn’t help. He tries again and this one works.

  ‘We began to worry at eleven o’clock. She knows when she should be in and it was very unlike her to be late. I went out to look for her. I went to the bus stop and a bus came but Isabelle wasn’t on it. Then I went home. By then it was a quarter to twelve. She still wasn’t home. My wife telephoned the home of Isabelle’s boyfriend and his mother put him on the phone. Isabelle had never arrived at the dance.’

  Mr Cooke stops to take a drink of water. He cannot look at Peter Manuel in the dock. He is aware of him as a shadow in the corner of his eye, but he can’t look at him. Mr Cooke keeps his eyes down and promises himself that soon it will be over and then he will feel better.

  ‘She never got to the dance so we knew she was really missing. My wife telephoned the police and I went out to look for her on the road at first, in the train station, then in the fields.’

  ‘The fields behind your house?’

  ‘In the fields,’ echoes Mr Cooke, ‘the fields of Sandyhills and Burntbroom.’

  His eyes drop to the wooden railing his hands are resting on, the fine oak grain lost to his fingertips. They are numb in the biting December cold. He feels it on his cheek, the tightness of his face closed against the robber wind. He feels wet ground squelch beneath his boots, sucking him into the earth. He looks for his Isabelle in the dark. He walks for four hours, up to Barrachnie, over to Foxley and up to Newlands Glen, returning to the house for tea he cannot taste, for another scarf, to talk to the police. He takes them and shows them where he has already looked. The fields are pitted with old mine shafts. It is dangerous in the dark if you don’t know the area.

  At first Mr Cooke is angry with Isabelle. He wants her to know what she is putting her mother through. When the anger lifts he wishes it back because then he is just terrified. He is so frightened he wants to hold his daughter tight and never let go. Then he just wants to hold her hand, then just to see her. Just to see her. The yearning is worse than the fear. The yearning is a sorrowing ache that burrows deep down into the core of him.

  As the night wears on he gets less and less tired. Mr Cooke knows how men talk about girls. He knows what might have happened to his own Isabelle. Over the long hours in the dark, as all the hope he will ever feel is sucked out through his soles into the wet, treacherous earth, it comes to feel absolutely vital that he find the dancing shoes that she has worn
thin with all her dancing.

  In the hazy morning, when the careless sun bothers to come up, Mr Cooke sits in the living room by a fire that won’t warm anyone, his outdoor clothes still on. He sits, listening to the reassurances of policemen who are just doing a shift at their work.

  She will be found. She has stayed the night with a friend who doesn’t have a telephone. We are searching the hospitals, perhaps she has been run over.

  But Mr Cooke knows what has happened to his daughter. It has happened before out there, in those fields. Girls and women attacked and no one caught. He thought, his wife thought, that women should not be out at that time. He thought and his wife said, they must be peculiar kinds of women to be out there at that time, in a field with a man. They didn’t think these things because they were nasty people, or spiteful or uncaring. They thought these things so that they were not terrified all the time. Otherwise they would never have allowed their Isabelle out of the door.

  As the hazy morning breaks Mr Cooke compromises his ambitions just once more: if he could just hold one of her shoes, her dancing shoes. Just one of them. He wants it so much he can feel the brush of soft worn leather, the curve of her heel against the pad of his work-hardened hand.

  ‘We waited and she never came home,’ he tells the court.

  ‘And in the morning, what happened?’

  ‘Her handbag was found in a burn about a mile and a half from the house. Her dancing shoes were missing.’

  ‘Was the handbag found in the direction of the bus stop?’

  ‘No. It was in the other direction. They found footprints. They think she had been chased over half a mile of fields. But they still couldn’t find her.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Acres of nothing for year-long weeks. They found no more of her possessions. Mines were searched. They dredged the River Calder but found nothing. Until the 11th of January. Then they found her grave.

  ‘How did you hear about that?’

  Mr Cooke drinks again from the glass. He goes to put it down but he realises that he isn’t ready to speak yet so he drains the glass and reminds himself that he is near the end of this and he is just a footnote and no one really cares but him.

  ‘The police came to see us. They told us that a man had confessed, to that and other things. They said he took them to her grave in the middle of the night. “I’m standing on her.” I remember them saying he said that. He showed them where her dancing shoes were. They were nearby. Under a pile of bricks.’

  The shoes had been in the rain and the frost for almost a fortnight, under the dirt. Mr Cooke has yet to get them back but he knows they are not soft or shaped by her feet any more. They are ruined by exposure. They’re just bits of ruined skin now.

  The defence have no questions for Mr Cooke. He is allowed to stand down.

  As he walks across the court Mr Cooke feels no better. He wonders where the sense of finality is. He is as bereft as he was before but now he feels his sorrow exposed for the entertainment of the public. His loss will be written about in the papers tomorrow, read about on buses by people who don’t much care about Isabelle. People who don’t really care are watching him now from the balcony seats. He wonders bitterly if they found his loss entertaining.

  Angry, he looks up and catches the eye of a woman. She is ages with his wife. She is weeping openly, tears coursing down her cheeks, her hands clutched together as if she is holding his dead daughter’s cold feet to warm them. A sob bursts from his mouth and Mr Cooke slaps a hand to his lips, ashamed, shocked at this sudden connection with a stranger. He jumps the stairs to the witness hall and clatters through the door.

  In the privacy of the silent room his wife is waiting for him. She puts her arms around him and he sobs into her hair.

  Mr Cooke thinks of the weeping woman in the gallery. His unique desolation was all he had left of his Isabelle. Now the crying woman has taken that as well. He has been robbed again.

  9

  Tuesday 3 December 1957

  NETTIE WATT DOESN’T SAY anything, about any of it, ever. She is not called as a witness in the trial, she gives no interviews to the press. She is there though, throughout the night when Peter Manuel tells the story. She hears it sober, with the critical facility of a woman who has spent thirty-five years at the movies. She knows the difference between a good story and a bad one.

  Nettie goes to the movies four or five times a week. She is ashamed of it. As regularly as Samuel Pepys swore off the theatre, Nettie swears off the movies. Just like Pepys, Nettie always back-slides. It’s hard to go anywhere in Dennistoun without passing a cinema. There are two picture houses within a block of her house. Movies and newsreels run all day, every day. She moves between the Parade and the Picture House so that the staff don’t notice how often she goes. If an usher comments–hello! you here again?–Nettie won’t go back for a while. Sometimes, when she is in the town she will go to a bigger cinema where no one will see her. People don’t go to the movies as much any more, since television came in, but Nettie is thirty-eight and she grew up at the movies, with movie stories.

  She is listening to the men in the kitchen but they can’t see her. She is leaning her back on the outside wall of the recess, her head to the side, the better to hear. The recess in the kitchen would have been used by the maid as a sleeping nook but people in two-bedroom flats don’t have maids any more. Nettie and John use it as a dining area. It’s a nice, draught-free part of the house. The men are talking quietly but the surrounding stone walls amplify their voices. She can hear everything, intakes of breath, glasses chinking against teeth, the ‘pup’ as a sucked cigarette is released from lips. It’s like listening to a play on the wireless.

  Manuel tells them that the whole thing was a mistake. The Watts were never the intended target. Tallis was after the Valentes, an Italian family who lived next door to William and Marion’s house.

  ‘Tallis went with an address for the Valentes but then the girl, Deanna, was at the window in your house so he thought they’d got it wrong.’

  The story is compelling because Deanna was in the Watt house that night. She told the police that she went home at midnight, before the Pop Parade was finished, after Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera, Sera’ was played at number 5. William points out to his brother: See? I told you he would clear this up. John grunts and Nettie can tell he’s listening intently.

  Charles Tallis thought the Valentes had money in the house. They have a successful confectioners business, a cash business, and they’re Italian.

  Italians are known for keeping cash and jewellery to hand in case they have to run. The war is not long past. As enemy aliens, Italians were rounded up and interned. Their houses and businesses were attacked. Now they’re always ready to run. It’s a safe guess that the Valentes would keep money in the house.

  Charles Tallis, a man with a long history of housebreaking, went to Burnside with a widow-woman, Mary Bowes. Bowes is his girlfriend. They brought Martin Hart with them, he’s a pair of thug hands Tallis takes housebreaking sometimes. Tallis really wanted Manuel, not Hart, what with all his experience and skills, but Manuel demurred because the plan was to break in and kill them all, except the girl, Deanna. They were going to make her tell them where the money was hidden and then kill her too. Manuel wouldn’t go on the job because he doesn’t want to hurt a young girl, that’s not his way. So they took Hart as a substitute.

  Then Tallis came to see Manuel the day before he went on the job. He asked to borrow Manuel’s Webley revolver to kill the family with. Then he was going to give him the gun back. Sure, said Manuel, no problem.

  Nettie straightens up. That’s wrong. That is a narrative misstep. If Manuel’s story was in a movie the audience would be jeering now. They would be shouting at the screen and throwing orange peel. Rubbish! They would shout. Go on wi’ ye! You don’t lend a murderer your gun. It can be traced back to you. No one would do that. And you certainly don’t ask for it back
afterwards unless you’re pulling the old double cross. It occurs to her that maybe Manuel is pulling some sort of double cross. Nettie keeps one eyebrow raised though, as she settles back against the wall and waits to see if that’s his game.

  Manuel’s tone is conspiratorial: so he loans Tallis the Webley. Next night Tallis goes to Burnside with Mary Bowes and Martin Hart.

  In Fennsbank Avenue, they look for a place to watch the Valentes’ house from. Lucky for them they find an empty house facing what they think is the Valentes’ bungalow. Nettie nods. She knows this is true. The police found number 18 broken into that night as well. It’s right across from the Valentes’. They break in and as they watch they see Deanna Valente at the window of number 5: William Watt’s house. They think they had the address wrong.

  In the vigil house Tallis, Hart and Bowes sit and smoke and wait and watch out of the window for the lights to go off. Tallis and the widow Bowes go to the bedroom for–you know–the men in the kitchen ‘ho-ho’. Nettie’s mouth tightens with disgust. The house belongs to two spinster women. It’s not nice.

  ‘WIFE.’ John shouts for her. ‘WIFE! ASHTRAY.’

  Nettie startles. She doesn’t want them to know she is just around the corner listening. She waits for a moment and then tiptoes silently into the kitchen. They pause while she gets a clean ashtray from the cupboard and puts it on the table, taking the dirty one away to empty into the grate. They stay silent until she is out in the hall so she knows they don’t want her listening. She takes the ashtray into the living room and empties the ash and stubs in the unlit fire. Then she scurries back to her listening wall.

  The murmur continues: Tallis, Bowes and Hart go over to the Watt bungalow.

  Tallis breaks the glass on the side window, opens the front door and they all creep into the quiet house. They shut the door behind them. In the house, everyone is asleep.

  Nettie sees them in William’s hallway. Backlit through the glass on the door, their faces in black shadow, feathers in their hair, tomahawks silhouetted at their sides.