that only the killer could know. He was a small, dark, unprepossessing man in his thirties. And I’d never seen him before in my life. He was about as guilty of Ellis’s murder as I was.
One of Hopkins’s innocents to the slaughter.
Except he didn’t go to the slaughter. His plea was accepted and he was declared unfit for trial and committed to the secure mental hospital in Carstairs. Case closed. No one asked me even to identify him, which I wouldn’t have. My guess was that he wouldn’t spend long weaving baskets and finger-painting: he would probably soon be repatriated to a Hungarian hospital ‘on compassionate grounds’.
No one mentioned Ferenc Lang, Matyas, Magda, Tanglewood or any putative emigre group. Deals, no doubt, were being done, intelligence traded, lives bought and sold. Or maybe he had been sold back to the Soviets.
I asked a friend of mine who knew about such things what NTS could have stood for. The best he could come up with was Narodny Trudovoi Soyuz. He explained it was a Russian anti-communist organization that had worked with Hungarian insurgents, encouraging them to revolt. But the rumour was that the NTS was actually a double- blind Kremlin outfit, placing communist agents in the West in the guise of right-wing refugees.
There was a rumour, my friend told me, that the NTS had encouraged Hungarian dissident groups to act sooner, rather than later, so that the Soviets could crush the Uprising while the West squabbled over who owned a canal.
Maybe I was still being paranoid.
I had to put my return to Canada on hold, until after the trials. In the meantime, the Iron Curtain had once more been drawn around Hungary, saving the West the embarrassment of having to look at the consequences of its inaction and deafness to the desperate, final broadcast pleas for help while Hungary’s brief flame of freedom was snuffed out under tank tracks.
In the meantime, Suez emasculated Britain. Eisenhower flexed the US’s economic power and, faced with bankruptcy without American support, Britain caved in over Suez and Anthony Eden’s head rolled. Overnight, the great imperial power became just a little grey island off the coast of Europe.
What Hopkins didn’t know — or probably did — was that I helped Matyas’s network over the next couple of months. Pamela Ellis met with me after the trial: she said she was sorry and I said it was okay and how I understood that Lang had put the frighteners on her. We talked about the Matyas network and I put her in touch with it. She had, it appeared, some money she wanted to put to work helping Hungarian refugees.
Over the months after the Uprising, the Matyas network succeeded in getting a great many Hungarians into Britain, France, Canada and the US. Some were geniuses, just as Hopkins had described in his Hungarian Brain Drain theory, but there were a lot of plumbers and sailors, mechanics and goulash cooks in there too. Oppression, contrary to the beliefs of some, is something the ordinary want to escape from every bit as much as the extraordinary do.
At least I made one person happy: I went back to the car lot on Great Western Road and made Kenny the salesman’s month by trading the Atlantic in for the Talbot — after all, I didn’t have anyone else to spend my money on. Well, I had one person, and Kenny came close to ecstasy when I told him I also wanted to buy the six-month old, low-mileage Vauxhall Cresta he had on the forecourt.
‘For a friend,’ I had explained.
Kenny probably blew the commission on hair oil and breath mints.
Jonny Cohen was never charged with the Argyle Arcade robbery. No one was. But one of his ‘known associates’, as the coppers were wont to say, met with a tragic accident. Drowning. They fished him out of the Clyde not far from the Queen’s Dock, where I’d met with Jonny that day.
There was another, unexpected twist to my tale of dead men and broken hearts. I thought I’d heard the last of Sheriff Pete, the pale-faced loudmouth with the phoney American accent, the strange dark eyes and the mop of black hair.
I’d done exactly what Jock Ferguson had asked and kept out of whatever it was that was going on with him. After all, I had had a lot on my plate and Sheriff Pete had been the least of my concerns. I hadn’t seen the little creep since I’d given him the slapping for harassing the girl from the dance hall. But I had thought about him. I had thought about him a lot. About the earnest look on Jock Ferguson’s face. About Sheriff Pete’s boast that no one would forget his face or his name.
He had been right.
I looked again into those coal-black eyes; every time his face appeared on the TV news; every time I passed a news vendor’s stand.
They hanged him too.
The small, insignificant loser and Walter Mitty fantasist who’d been the butt of so many jokes in the Horsehead Bar had lived up to his promise of becoming a big name. Just like he said: a name no one would ever forget, in Scotland at least.
He’d managed that all right.
What I hadn’t known, but Jock Ferguson had suspected, was that that night I’d met him, Pete had already murdered four women. And he had gone on to become the most notorious multiple rapist and murderer in Scottish legal history. They hanged him in Fifty-eight for the eight murders they tried him for. Eight out of maybe as many as eighteen or nineteen killings.
The small man got the big name he had craved.
Peter Manuel.
The Beast of Birkenshaw.
Over the next six months, I ’phoned Fiona White three times. The first two calls had been made drunk and she hung up on me. I was sober the third time and we spoke for three or four politely dry minutes. Her voice had been small and quiet and fragile on the ’phone, as if her fading out of my life was literal. I had had a list of things I wanted to say to her, promises I wanted to make, meetings I wanted to arrange, but somehow they too, faded to nothing.
It was in the summer of Fifty-seven that he came to the door of my new flat in Kelvin Court. James White. The last person I expected ever to see again. He asked quietly and politely if he could come in and talk to me. I decided to be very civilized and Canadian about it all and was polite back. He declined my offer of a drink and set down to business.
As soon as I had seen him on the doorstep, I’d guessed the reason for his visit. I could almost have saved him the effort of explaining that he and Fiona would be getting married and how that would be best for the girls and how he knew all about my past with her and they just wanted to put that behind them, they didn’t want any trouble and she didn’t want anything more to do with me…
Thing is, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all.
He handed me a letter and I could see my name in Fiona’s handwriting on the envelope. White told me not to open it until he explained a few things, which he did, and something deep, deep inside me froze, then snapped.
Turned out I’d got it all wrong; turned out I wasn’t so expert on looking in on the lives of others as I had thought I was.
That night — the night after James White had been to see me; the night after I had sat alone in my flat when he had gone and read and reread the letter Fiona had written — that night I went out to get as drunk as it was possible to get, but somehow I couldn’t. It was as if I’d been inoculated against alcohol, against all other feeling except the searing pain in my gut and chest. But I guess I was drunk after all without feeling it.
I picked up a girl. Or she picked me up. She was about ten years younger than me and pretty in a bottle- blonde, hard-faced sort of way. She told me all about her stupid life, her stupid job and her stupid friends and told me stupid things about me looking like the movie star Jack Palance and asked me what I did and was I married or did I have a girlfriend.
‘There was someone,’ I said, turning to her.
‘Did you break up with her,’ she asked.
‘Yes…’ Then I shook my head irritatedly. ‘No…’
I thought of the letter; of what Fiona had told me about how she had felt about me; how I’d changed while I’d known her and how I wasn’t to let this ruin that; how she wanted me to go back to Canada and find someone new, someone nice and start all over.
‘No,’ I repeated to the girl next to me. ‘We didn’t break up. She got sick. She died.’
