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.