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 pretense that a quarter gill of whisky at half ten in the morning was a casual enjoyment. The other old man stared straight ahead, dead-eyed, 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’s 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.”
Griffiths stood up on the foot rail and grabbed a chubby bottle of brandy from behind the bar, uncorking it and drinking from the neck. It tasted peppery and exciting. Griffiths 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’s greedy little mouth, dropping it so it bounced and rolled to the wall, glug-glugging its contents to the floor. “Look at him.” He pointed at the old man facedown 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 anymore, 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 took hold of Griffiths’s shirt and pulled him towards the door. Griffiths scrambled for purchase, holding his rifle and shotgun tight to his body. Connelly let go and Griffiths backed out hurriedly through the door, 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, but 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 center of a Springburn cul-de-sac. He stopped the engine and pulled on the hand brake. A packet of Woodbine cigarettes was sitting under a yellowed newspaper on the dashboard. He sat back in the seat and lit one with a match, watching the entrance to the cul-de-sac in the nearside mirror. He couldn’t back out; he was convinced that the police were right behind him. He waited, smoking his cigarette and watching. They didn’t come.
Sure 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. Nothing happened. 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 streetlight, 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 derelict; the tenements were damp and rat infested. James Griffiths’s 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 farthest tenement, running through the close mouth and up the stairs. It was a rotten building: 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 gray 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 and 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.