She is glad to get out to the open air.
Samuel comes hurrying after her. Perhaps the boy, he calls him the boy all the time now so he doesn’t have to say ‘Peter’, perhaps the boy is really ill? Brigit just looks at him. She looks at Samuel through her tears and thinks he is an eejit. He’s a lying, f.ing eejit and he is kinky in the s.e.x. department. But she is married to him. So be it.
Samuel burned the boy’s clothes in the garden after Anne Kneilands’ disappearance. He lied under an oath from God. He gave the boy alibis for crucial times. He stood by him and lied to let the boy go free to kill those poor people, those poor girls, because Samuel was afraid of his son. So be it.
She stares at him. He reaches for her hand and she barks, ‘Don’t you touch me.’
The bus approaches them. They don’t put out their hands. In the gritty back draught of the bus passing she says, ‘Don’t you touch me ever again.’
23
Friday 11 July 1958
THIS CELL IN BARLINNIE is specially adapted. A hook hangs from the ceiling. A trap door opens down into the cell below. Simple engineering principles have finessed the process of hanging. The lever is pulled, the trap drops open and catches on a swing latch. In the old days, the rough days, if a gibbet trap was heavy it could bounce back and snap a man’s thigh bone. Sometimes it would shear a limb clean off. This happened on gibbets all over the world. But the swing latch has solved that problem. Swing, click, still.
Capital punishment will soon be abolished. Peter Manuel will be the third-to-last person ever hanged in Scotland. In the meantime, as a compassionate compromise, attempts are made to meet the complaints of abolitionists and the practice has changed. Chief among the changes is the hanging rehearsal. Rehearsal is essential to perfect the hangmen’s timing, to ensure the mechanism is oiled and working. Fast is best. Gibbets are always near the condemned cell to avoid long journeys, but prisoners shouldn’t be tortured by having to watch or hear the incessant rehearsal of their own death. Legislation has just been passed: the hanging rehearsal must be completely silent and out of sight. Rubber stoppers have been fitted to the levers and the trap to silence them completely.
The public are no longer allowed to witness hangings. Death has moved indoors. Far from an enlightened sense of propriety or a shift in social mores, public executions became impossible to police. The mobs were strange and massively overexcited. Public indecency and drunkenness and missile attacks on the condemned were common.
Scotland uses the ‘long drop’ method. It is as clean as hanging gets and resolves the two main pitfalls: the head being pinched from the body like a grape from the stalk, or slow strangulation.
If the drop is steep and the body too heavy the head will be ripped from the body, in whole or in part. If the drop is too gentle and the weight too slight, the condemned person will choke to death. It can take up to fifteen minutes. During this time the eyes and tongue swell to grotesque proportions, the body twitches and jerks, the condemned scratch at their neck. It is distressing to witness. None of this happens with the long drop method. Still, a hood is fitted over the person’s face, in case something goes wrong.
The long drop method snaps the neck between the second and third vertebrae. Done properly, death is instantaneous. It is a careful calculation of weight, height and muscle tone.
Manuel was weighed and measured when he first came to Barlinnie. His food intake and physical size is monitored so that they don’t have to weigh him again. Thirty-one-year-old men don’t lose a lot of muscle in six weeks and it would be obvious what they were weighing him for. That would be inhumane.
Across the corridor from the hanging cell is the condemned cell where Manuel is living now. It is more of a suite, three cells knocked together. The bare brick walls are painted green and it is furnished with a table and bed, three chairs, a wireless, a set of drawers for clothes, a commode and a washstand.
It has to be three cells big because officers are in there with him at all times, working eight-hour shifts. After every shift the departing officers fill out the Deathwatch Journal, a notebook bound in navy-blue leather. In it they note Manuel’s moods, his behaviour and what he has eaten, then the date and time of the shift, when it started, when it ended.
The officers play cards with Manuel and dominoes, they listen to popular music on Radio Luxembourg with him. It is the job of the prison service to keep Manuel calm by pretending that the hanging is not happening. Dominoes is happening. Cards and dinner and books is happening. But death is not happening. In this respect it is just like normal life.
These men are the most experienced officers in the Scottish Prison Service, all ex-army. Manuel already knows some of them from his long-ago rape sentence in Peterhead Prison.
None of these officers are bleeding hearts but they know Manuel will die soon. At the beginning of the Deathwatch Journal their notes are dispassionate but tinged with tenderness.
Prisoner had a nice night’s sleep.
Ate well at breakfast.
Prisoner seemed in good spirits.
But Peter Manuel is not a man whose company fosters affection. The lingering kindness soon evaporates.
Prisoner boasted about his heroism during the war.
Prisoner smoking and talking incessantly.
Prisoner apparently listening to Radio Luxembourg but talked over all the music, seems to think he knows a lot about it.
Prisoner told us his adventures as a spy in the Soviet Union.
The cover of the Deathwatch Journal is marked ‘Do Not Destroy–Ever’. It is essential that judicial killing is provably fair, measured and decent.
The Deathwatch Journal details Manuel’s urination and bowel movements. It notes what time he fell asleep and when he woke up. It says what he eats and how much of it he had–today he left all of his bread but ate the fish and chips. It also documents what he says. Peter Manuel is all stories.
I was a spy for the Soviet Union. I was flown to Moscow and met a handler in an aircraft hangar. The Soviets had heard of my reputation as a housebreaker and wanted me to do a job for them, a specialist job, like Gentleman Johnny Ramensky. When they realised I was an American citizen they just flew me home.
Is that right, Peter?
During the war, when I lived in Coventry, a German pilot came down in the fields outside my reform school and I strangled him with my bare hands.
Did you really?
I was on a plane and the pilot fainted and I took the controls and I landed it. They couldn’t believe I’d done it. No experience, nothing. And I never even broke a sweat.