by Denise Mina
II
At the same time that Paddy Meehan’s van set out for Ayr High Court, five Glasgow CID officers were pulling up in a Ford Anglia outside the address Meehan had given them for his alibi, James Griffiths.
Holyrood Crescent was a graceful curve of town houses facing on to private central gardens. Griffiths had a couple of outstanding warrants for car theft but the officers weren’t interested in them. They wanted to know if he would corroborate Meehan’s story about the night of Rachel Ross’s death.
It was mid-morning on a warm summer’s day and the generous trees in the central gardens of Holyrood Crescent were lush and full, rippling in the warm wind. The house had been built as a single dwelling but chopped up into single apartments for let to commercial travellers and decent families who were down on their luck but wanted to keep a good address. Detectives had done a reconnaissance of the property earlier that morning. They questioned the caretaker about Griffiths’ habits. He would just be getting up now, the man said, and he promised to leave the front door to the house unlocked.
Now the officers were led by their superior up the three flights, following the red stair carpet worn threadbare in the middle. Griffiths’ room was on the attic floor, in the old servants’ quarters, where the stairs were narrow and listing. It was a small landing with a single four-panelled door. The first officer to reach the top of the stairs banged on it sharply, shouting,‘James Griffiths, open up. It’s the CID.’
A chair scratched against the floor inside. They glanced at one another.
‘Come on, Griffiths, open up or we’ll open up for you.’ A floorboard squeaked. Griffiths was messing about in there, taunting five officers. The DI pointed to a DC and then at the door, motioning for the other officers to back down the steps and give him room. When everyone had finished noisily rearranging themselves around the tiny hall the DC shouted at the door,‘Step back, Griffiths, we’re coming in.’
He ran at the door, shoulder first, aiming for the jamb but hitting and breaking one of the panels, pushing it in so that it flapped open into the bright room, then snapped shut. They saw him for less than a second and not one of them believed it. Griffiths was sitting on a wooden chair facing the door, a blank expression in his hooded eyes. He wore bandoliers of bullets across his chest, held a rifle over his shoulder, and resting in his lap was a single-barrelled shotgun. The DC had bowed his head against possible splinters from the wood and seen nothing. He backed up and ran at it again. This time the door panel cracked and snapped off, dropping inside the door.
Framed in the splintered window, James Griffiths rose from the chair, lifting the nose of his shotgun. The first blast hit the DC in the shoulder, spinning him round, the meat and blood of his arm splattering over the landing walls. The second shot hit the ceiling, a plaster-and-horsehair cloud exploding in the air. Policemen tumbled over one another to get down the first narrow flight. They reassembled on the floor below and carried the DC down the rickety stairs in an ungainly blood-smeared scramble as Griffiths fired random shots out of windows and at walls. Downstairs, they ran out into the street and found a passer-by lying in the road, shocked and speechless, bleeding from the leg. The DI shouted into the radio that Griffiths had at least one gun, someone thought they saw a rifle as well, send someone with a gun right now, get the army, anyone, because the bugger was firing into the street. They could still hear shooting in the house.
Griffiths fired a last shot into the hallway before running out of the back door. In the walled garden wooden bedsteads were propped up with veneer peeling off them; broken chairs and a settee were piled up on rotting linoleum. The door to the lane was blocked by a tallboy. Climbing on top of it, Griffiths dropped the shotgun and the rifle over the crumbling brick wall and hoisted himself over, dropping down the far side. He picked up his guns and ran down the back lane.
He felt higher than he ever had in his life, like stealing cars times ten. He was a lifelong criminal and knew the score. The police wouldn’t let him live after this. He wouldn’t have to face the consequences. It would be like before when he robbed or got chased but he wouldn’t ever go to jail again.
Ecstatic that this was his final day he ran faster, stumbling on the uneven ground, acutely sensitive to the wind pushing his hair off his face, the warm, damp breeze on his skin.
His shirt flapped loose around his body, feet landed on damp turf and his own, lonely heart thumped hard in his chest. The high walls dropped away and he was in a bright residential street. The sudden sun frightened him so he raised his rifle and fired three times. He could see figures running, melting into the brightness, and then, as if the fact of other people had been a mistake, he was alone again.
He breathed, felt the sun prickle at the sweat on his brow, heard his breath suck in, push out. His hand was sweating on the steel of the gun barrel. Streets away a car stopped too quickly. He wanted to be alone but when he was alone he got confused. He needed an audience to be brave in front of. He was too excited to drive, too heated up. He needed a drink.
It was a small pub with an unassuming exterior, painted black with red trim on the high windows. Inside two old men sat at separate tables. One was reading a paper, keeping up the pretence that a quarter gill of whisky at half ten in the morning was a casual enjoyment. The other old man stared straight ahead, dreading the last of his glass.
The day gleamed through the windows but the sunlight didn’t temper the gloom. The pub was peaceful, a contemplative pocket of calm reflection. Behind the bar was the charge hand, a well-built ex-boxer named Connelly, who was looking down his flattened nose at the glass he was drying when Griffiths kicked the swing door open into the stale and dusty room. Connelly looked up, smiling at Griffiths’ bandoliers, thinking he was in fancy dress.
‘I’ll kill the first man that moves,’ shouted Griffiths. The two old men froze, the newspaper reader holding his glass still to his mouth. ‘I’ve shot four policemen this morning.’ Stepping up on the foot rail, Griffiths grabbed a chubby bottle of brandy from behind the bar, uncorking it and drinking from the neck. It tasted peppery and exciting. He saw himself standing there, taking what he wanted, and felt like giggling. Instead he swung his shotgun vertical, fired into the ceiling, and a burst of plaster hit the floor. The man with the newspaper twitched forward to put his glass down and Griffiths spun around and fired the rifle. The dead man slumped forward, a ribbon of red fluttering from his neck to the black floor.
‘You bastard,’ whispered Connelly, dropping the dishtowel to the floor. ‘You complete bloody bastard.’ He reached for the brandy bottle and yanked it away from Griffiths’ greedy little mouth, throwing it to the floor where it bounced and rolled to the wall, glug-glugging its contents to the floor. ‘Look at him.’ He pointed at the old man face down on the table, the flow from the hole in his neck pulsing in time to the noise from the brandy bottle. ‘Look at Wullie. Look what you’ve done to that wee man, you bastard.’
Unable to contain his anger any more, Connelly ran out from behind the bar and Griffiths could see that he didn’t care how many guns he had.
‘Out! Get out of my fucking pub!’ Connelly grabbed hold of Griffiths’ shirt and pulled him towards the door, while Griffiths scrambled for purchase, holding his rifle and shotgun tight to his chest. When Connelly let go Griffiths staggered out backwards through the door, and was instantly swallowed by the white summer light. Connelly shouted after him,‘And fucking stay out, an’ all!’
He just had time to take a deep breath and convince himself not to chase the guy into the street when three shots ripped through the open door, one of them tearing the sleeve off his shirt. Connelly contracted, bending his knees and stiffening his thick neck, and sprang through the wall of light, screaming to the full capacity of both his lungs, ‘Arsehole!’
But Griffiths had run off, lifting the two unwieldy guns up high to shoulder height as he legged it around the corner. He was out of sight bu
t Connelly knew exactly where he had gone: everyone in the street was frozen still, staring at the first right corner. Cars had stopped in the middle of the street so that drivers could stare.
Around the corner, a long-distance lorry driver who had parked to consult a map of Glasgow heard a series of bangs.
He looked up to see what appeared to be a small, hatless Mexican bandit running towards him, followed by an angry muscleman a hundred yards behind. The cab door opened next to him and a shotgun barrel was pointed at his face.
The man fell out of the lorry and Griffiths swung himself up into the cab, started the engine and sped off, leaving Connelly standing by the side of the road, so angry that he kicked a wall and broke three small bones in his toes.
Griffiths managed two miles. His last ever turn was into the centre of a Springburn cul-de-sac. Panting, he stopped the engine and pulled on the handbrake. A packet of Woodbine cigarettes was sitting under a yellowed newspaper on the dashboard. He watched his fingers tremble as he reached for them and sat back in the seat, watching the entrance to the cul-de-sac in the nearside mirror. Convinced that the police were right behind him, he waited, smoking his cigarette and watching. They didn’t come.
Certain that they were waiting around the corner, he slowly opened the driver’s side door and dropped the yellow newspaper onto the ground, expecting a police bullet to hit it. The paper fell into the road with a soft thud. The summer wind flicked through the crispy pages. Griffiths reasoned that he must be in a blind spot. He stepped out tentatively, holding his guns across his chest. His footing slipped as he stepped down from the high cab and he landed heavily on his heel, feeling slightly foolish for the very last time.
Resting his guns on his hips, he stepped away from the cab. He pointed the guns at a street light, at an already broken tenement window, at the entrance to the road. He was scaring the locals, the coppers, making the law wait for him for once, standing like the cowboys did in the movies.
There was no-one there. The unarmed police had kept too much of a distance and had lost him. The street Griffiths was in was a derelict strip of damp, rat-infested tenements. James Griffiths’ last living moments in the soft summer air were pissed away, like his life, posing for an audience that wasn’t watching.
Over and beyond the surrounding tenements he could hear children laughing and screaming, enjoying the summer holidays. A magpie flew over his head, a beautiful flash of turquoise on its broad, black wing, and Griffiths suddenly felt profoundly sad to be leaving. It had been a poor excuse for a life. A surge of self-pity prompted him to run and he bolted for the furthest tenement, running through the close mouth and up the stairs. The building was rotten: patches of plaster the size of a child were missing from the burgundy walls, the windows on the landings were all smashed. He ran all the way up to the top floor and kicked open a door.
It was an abandoned room and kitchen; dirty grey net curtains flapped at the broken window. The walls were lumpy and stained brown by galloping damp. Through the window he could see a swing park, sliced in half by the shadow cast by the building. This is where it was going to end, in a dirty flat with a bad smell and a broken window. He stood and caught his breath, tears itching at his eyes. They might not shoot him. They might talk to him and convince him to give himself up and send him back to pokey for ever. Or else he might escape and be forced to go somewhere else and start all over again. Waiting, always waiting for it to go wrong again.
Griffiths pulled up a stool next to the window and, raising his telescopic rifle, started to shoot at the children in the light.
The last thing James Griffiths saw was a gun barrel sliding through the letter box towards him, a tiny puff of smoke and flame. As the bullet flew towards him, his brain sent out a signal to smile. The impulse didn’t have time to reach the muscles of his face before the bullet pierced his heart.
III
Meehan was in the van, being driven back to his remand cell in Barlinnie Prison. His shin had stopped bleeding but it still throbbed, drawing his mind back to the mob outside the court. He thought of James Griffiths fondly, hoping he wouldn’t be too annoyed that he had given the police his home address, that he would understand how desperate he had felt. Griffiths hated the police; he wouldn’t like them knowing where he stayed, but it was just a rented gaff. He could move. Meehan would offer him the deposit for a new place.
The DCI waited until the van was on the main road to Glasgow and an officer was on either side of Meehan, ready to grab him if he went nuts. He told him that Griffiths was dead after a long shoot-out with many casualties. When they searched Griffiths’ dead body they found paper in his car coat pocket that matched a sample taken from Abraham Ross’s safe.
The officers on either side of Meehan watched for a reaction, ready to jump up and give him a doing if he lashed out. Meehan had to be told three times that his friend was dead. Completely. Not sick, not winged. Dead. He sat back, pressing his head against the wall of the van. The plant of the paper from the safe would convict him, Meehan knew it. It was the Secret Service. They were setting him up because he had betrayed his country in Russia.
He waited until they got back to Barlinnie and he was put in a holding cell, one of a row of cupboard rooms at the drop-off yard with their names chalked onto the door. Naked and ready for the search, Meehan turned his back to the Judas window and sobbed with panic.
IV
That same sunny morning lingered in Rutherglen while small girls and boys gathered excitedly in the courtyard of St Columbkill’s RC Chapel. The class had been given lessons on confession for weeks beforehand. Despite having the theological basis explained to them over and over, in detail and by analogy, only the already very damaged children could properly grasp the concept of sin. All the confession meant to young Paddy Meehan was washing her soul so that she could make her first communion and wear a big white dress with flowers embroidered on the hem and a blue velvet cape. Paddy got her photo taken in Mary Ann’s cape when it had been her turn. Even the three Protestant Beattie girls next door got their photo taken in the cape and veil, though they asked the Meehans not to show their mum because she was in the Orange Lodge and marched against Popery in the summer when the weather was nice. The boys from her class knelt in front of her in the warm, dusky chapel. They giggled and nudged one another in the pew, growing increasingly bold until spindly Miss Stenhouse walked silently out of the dark side chapel and glared at them, picking one out for a silent finger-point. The boys slid apart in the pew, only seven and still biddable with a look.
The confessional was dark and fusty, like the inside of a cupboard. Behind the trellis window she could see the brand-new parish priest, an old man with hair up his nose who no-one was allowed to laugh at because he was a priest. He was staring at his knees. He waited for a moment before prompting her to begin. Paddy said her lines, repeating them sing-song style, hearing the rest of the class chant along with her in her head.
‘Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession and I have committed the sin of being disrespectful to my mother and father. I stole sweets from my sister and I lied about it and my brother Martin got the blame—’
‘And did you own up then?’ Paddy looked up.
‘When your brother was blamed for your theft, did you own up then?’
Paddy hadn’t been told about the priest speaking. It was throwing her off. ‘No.’
He exhaled a whistle through his hairy nose and shook his head. ‘Well, that’s very bad. You must try to be honest.’ Paddy thought she was honest, but a priest was saying she wasn’t and priests knew everything. She was afraid to tell him more.
‘Are you sorry for what you did?’
‘Yes, Father.’ Martin always blamed her when he did things. He always did.
‘And what other sins have you committed?’ Paddy took a deep breath. She’d peed up a close once and hit a dog on the nose for snarling. Sh
e couldn’t tell him those things, they were even worse than blaming Martin. She took a breath and abandoned herself to the terrible sin of not making a good confession. ‘I can’t think of any others.’
He nodded heavily. ‘Very well.’ He muttered absolution, gave her a penance of five Hail Marys and two Our Fathers, and dismissed her.
Kneeling in the front row of the chapel Paddy looked at the child next to her. The girl was counting off three fingers as her lips moved through the prayers. Paddy owed God seven fingers. It seemed to her infinitely, grotesquely unjust. Ostentatiously holding up three fingers, Paddy looked around at the moving lips and closed eyes of the other children and smiled sweetly to herself as she began to mutter quickly: one potato, two potato, three potato, four. After the confession, just before tea, Paddy stood in the front room of their house, swaying to a song on the wireless. Her two brothers were fighting on the settee while Rory, their ginger dog, tried to join in, his hard pinkie sticking out under his tummy.
The news came on the wireless and the very first story made them all listen: the north of Glasgow had come to a standstill when a man went around shooting at people. The boys stopped wrestling and listened. Rory’s pinkie retracted. The man had killed two policemen and injured four passersby. The police had shot him dead and Paddy Meehan had been charged with murder.
The boys sat up and looked at their little sister, mouths dropping open, eyes wide with wonder.
Outside St Columbkill’s girls were showing off their white dresses, the boys just pleased to be together and outside. Paddy knew she would die. Her mother had dressed her carefully in Mary Ann’s white dress. She had white gloves, made of a material so fine that the seams on the fingers were visible from the outside. On her feet she wore lace trimmed ankle socks and white sandals that she would grow into. Her soul was too dirty for communion: some splinter of her was a murderer.
She once saw her father Con pick up a frying pan of smoking oil and run a tap into it. The water exploded, carrying particles of scalding oil through the air. Con still had red speckles on his neck. This is how it would be when she took communion in her mouth, Paddy knew it: cold water into hot oil.
