The story rolls out to the street.
The thousand people who are waiting to hear have been standing in smears of blustery May rain, waiting, staring at the Doric portico and waiting.
The cops have herded most of them across the street to Glasgow Green on the other side, but time and again they ooze over the kerb, spilling into the road, in the way of cars and carts and buses. It’s nearly five o’clock, nearly teatime. Many of them have been waiting all day, some since the jury went out two hours ago. They’ve all been waiting, watching for movement in the court windows.
Now the doors to the court fly open and the journalists who lost the sprint to the phone boxes race down to the street, yanking their coats on. The mob surge across the Saltmarket to them, blocking the road, threatening to trap the journalists before they get their copy in. The journalists shout the verdict to fend them off: Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Not Guilty. He’ll hang in a month.
The triumphant roar can be heard over a mile away.
A green-and-gold double-decker bus is marooned in the flash flood of people. Excited passengers abandon their journey, spill out of the door to join the mob, amazed at their luck in washing up right here, right now.
Alone on the bottom deck of the bus, a behatted woman stares straight ahead. Her handbag is on her knee. She is stubbornly refusing to be interested in that. It is none of her concern. She does not wish to be involved. A man on the top deck calls out of a window for the score. The lady hears it hollered up from the street guilty guilty guilty not guilty for Anne. Hanging.
He shouts back, ‘How come “no” for Anne?’
‘Cameron’s told the jury not to. Circumstantial. Auch, he’ll hang anyway.’
‘Good! Good!’
She looks in her handbag and finds a paper poke of peppermints, twisted at the neck. She takes one out, puts it in her mouth, sucking it sourly and staring straight ahead. She does not wish to be involved. But she is. The happy mob swirl and eddy around her bus, ribald, shameless.
High overhead a black rain cloud races across the sky, a tricorn hat darkening the city. It starts to spit.
In her empty bus the reluctant witness to history sucks her peppermint and stares forward to the driver’s cabin. She is so distracted by the sharp mint oil on her tongue and the frenzy all around her that she is almost functionally blind.
Some have forgone the festival atmosphere in front of the court and are gathered around at the back. They know a van is waiting to spirit Manuel away to Barlinnie. This mob is not nearly-all-women but exclusively women. One hundred women stand and stare, headscarfed against the May rain, fingering stones and rocks they have gathered and put in their pockets. They would wait until the end of the world for this.
The police are ready though. The entrance to the cells is narrow and blocked off by mounted policemen in formation, holding the road open so that the prison van doesn’t get stuck. From the moment the sentence was passed the prime objective of all the organs of justice is to ensure that he doesn’t die until they kill him. Guards will sit with him, sleep with him, they’ll be in his company every moment from now until the hanging so that he can’t cheat justice.
After a few minutes a small black prison van races out from the enclosed yard, black smoke belching from the unwarmed engine. The horses bridle, the women shout. They throw their stones and scream words women shouldn’t know. They chase the van down the street to a corner and watch it tilt on the bend. It gets away. Then they stop, open-mouthed, panting. They thought they would feel less angry but they don’t. Their venom is enflamed but now it is aimless. Still panting, they head back for the heart of the mob at the front of the court, knowing they’re not fit for any other company, not for a while anyway.
That van was a decoy. In an hour’s time the actual van will leave and some of those who lingered will get a second chance to chase.
Back on the pavement, journalists are asking people for their impressions. Press photographers are snapping bulbs at the triumphant crowd. A television camera the size of a ray gun is mounted on a trailer in front of the court. The director is telling a man with a mic to go back, further back, Bill, we can still only see your shoulder. It is the first criminal case ever reported on Scottish television.
The mob disperse around the stranded Corporation bus. With a ting-ting from the bell, it jump-starts and rumbles slowly away. The peppermint sucker decides that she will not even mention being here when it happened. She smooths the hem on her coat. She is not interested in that sort of thing. Not that sort of person. She will simply not say. Although, her sister-in-law is that sort of person. She might tell her. She rehearses her impressions as the bus rumbles across the Albert Bridge: the stillness, the howling roar, the chasing of the van, how the bus emptied but she stayed on because she is simply not interested in that sort of thing.
The edge of the mob thins and news sweeps up the smoke-choked valley of the Saltmarket, on up the High Street to the cathedral grounds and the Necropolis. It billows into shops and stations, around the looming black buildings of the begrimed city.
Strangers stop each other to ask, join conversations without invitation. Passed from mouth to mouth, the news crosses the river. It surges down through the black glowering valleys of Gorbals tenements and on to leafy Southside suburbs.
Swarming westward, the news reaches the shipyards and the dry docks. Crane drivers come down from their high cabs to hear. Welders stop in the middle of a line.
Along the river and up Gilmorehill, the news arrives at the ears of the students and matron aunts and academics. Translated into Polish, Gaelic, Italian and French, it blows east along the train tracks, through the gated community and crumbling tenements of Dennistoun, an area that has been rumoured to be coming up since Buffalo Bill’s Circus performed on the waste ground there.
The news bursts open the door of the Saracen Head public house, announces itself to the smoke-yellow air. Two men, sitting in the very seats where Adam Smith and Dr Johnston had a drunken swearing match, chink their greasy glasses and cheer.
The news sweeps into pubs with facades that advertise a loathing of Catholics, a horror of Protestants, sores picked at and festering since the Reformation. It floods the dark satanic Parkhead Forge, manned by Irish Catholic immigrants because no one with a choice would do that work.
Far out on the Argyll coast the news reaches Brigit Manuel, sitting on a bed in a dark hotel room paid for by the Empire News. She cradles a small plaster statue of St Anthony that she brought with her from the house and weeps as her husband hangs up the phone.