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.
Everyone is asleep.
They can hear the breathing in the house, the in-out of breathing, as they stand in the silent hallway, on the red hall carpet, next to the chiffonier with the picture of the yellow dog above it and the empty key rack on the other wall.
‘Empty?’ asks John, puzzled.
‘There’s no keys on the key rack,’ says Manuel ‘All the wee hooks is empty.’
‘Hooks?’
‘Five wee hooks. For keys. Nothing on it.’
John says, ‘Wha’?’ He sounds confused.
From the kitchen, Nettie hears either John or William sit back, a faint creak of a wooden chair. She feels their puzzlement at him knowing that about a house he’s never been in.
Manuel tells them: Tallis opens the door to the first bedroom, the one on the right-hand side. There are twin beds and a table in between, two women sleeping in those beds. Tallis goes in and stands between the two beds and he looks down at the soft-sleeping women. He draws the gun and shoots the woman nearest the door, shoots her in the temple, then he shoots the woman furthest away. One bullet in each.
‘Pop,’ he says. ‘Pop.’
Out in the hall Hart and Bowes get a fright and scramble for the front door, run out into the street and go back to hide in number 18. They leave Tallis alone in number 5.
William’s voice: ‘Why did they run? Tallis had told them his intentions, hadn’t he?’
Manuel snorts. ‘Ever heard a revolver go off in a small bedroom? Pretty goddamned loud…’
No one in the kitchen says anything for a moment but Nettie stands tall: Manuel did it. He’s describing what he did. Nettie knows that for sure now.