I
Paddy Meehan heard the mob from half a mile away, chanting in a low, slow bray, getting faster and faster, until he began to sweat with panic, adding to the stench of piss and worry inside the police van. It was nine thirty on a weekday morning, but three hundred people had found the time to gather outside the court to see the bastard charged with old Rachel Ross’s murder.
He kept thinking that the van was in the middle of them, that the noise was as loud as it could get, but then another second would pass, the van would move another few feet, and the crowd outside would get louder. When they finally rolled to a stop the sound was deafening. The two uniformed policemen glanced at each other nervously, one holding the door handle, the other holding Meehan’s arm. They turned to the plainclothes CID men sitting near the back of the van, looking to them for the signal to go.
“Right, boys,” one of them shouted at the uniforms. “You two stay in front, we’ll follow up and watch his back. On three. One, two…” The blanket went over Meehan’s head, and in the darkness his face convulsed with terror. “Three.”
The rear doors to the van flew open and the two officers on either side pulled Meehan into the road. He could see the pavement below him, the glint from the coppers’ shiny shoes, and the first step up to the court. Stumbling in darkness, he heard men’s voices and women screaming, children shouting that he should hang, that he was a bastard, a murderer. The CID men grabbed the back of his jacket, reckless of skin, shoving and pushing, hurrying him up the stairs. The policemen were frightened. Tightening their lock on his elbows, they lifted him off his feet. In the sudden darkness beneath the gray blanket, he heard the fast slap of feet running on road and encouraging cries from far away. The policemen jerked sideways as a brown shoe scraped his shin. The assailant was pulled off, and the policemen dragged Meehan up the final steps and bundled him through the doors.
Every time Meehan had ever been in court before, he had waited patiently in the holding cells, but not this time. When they pulled the blanket off him he found himself in a witness room annexed to the court. He couldn’t let them see how shaken he was, so Meehan grabbed the nearest CID man by the lapels and screamed out all the terror and panic. “Do your fucking job! Do your fucking job!” They pulled him off, wrestling the grasp of his fingers from the fabric. He was wild-eyed and panting. “Find Griffiths. Check my fucking alibi. I gave you his address. What’s wrong with you?”
Meehan fell back into a chair and looked down. His trouser leg was soaked with blood from the brown shoe.
This was all wrong. He was a safecracker, a professional for Godsake, a peterman. He learned his trade with Gentle Johnny Ramensky; he had references. He wouldn’t get involved in a tie-up. And anyway, he had a solid alibi. He was in Stranraer with James Griffiths on the night of Rachel Ross’s murder, and they’d been seen. They had picked up two Kilmarnock girls and driven them home. All they had to do was talk to Griffiths or the girls and he would be free.
II
At the same time that Paddy Meehan’s van set out for Ayr High Court, five officers of the Glasgow Criminal Investigation Department 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 onto 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 midmorning on a gorgeous 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, chopped up into apartments for let to commercial travelers 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’s 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’s 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-paneled 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 detective inspector pointed to a detective constable 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 lock 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, and resting in his lap was a single-barreled shotgun. The DC had had his head bowed against possible splinters from the wood and had 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 opening, James Griffith 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 passerby 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 from his rifle into the hallway before running out 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.