Cold Hands (16 page)

‘Gie him it!’ Tommy said, shoving Docherty, who was turning away, trying to shield the rod with his body. Banny grabbed it with both hands and slammed his hips into Docherty, body-checking him hard, sending him flying across the poured concrete, his glasses flying off, the rod in Banny’s hands now.

Docherty lay there, looking up at us, breathing hard, his face strange and blank without his glasses. There were tears in his eyes but his jaw was set and his fists were balled. ‘Give it back,’ he said.

‘Nae bother,’ Banny said. He snapped the rod cleanly in half over his knee and threw the pieces in Docherty’s face. ‘There ye go.’ Tommy laughed. Then something happened no one was expecting.

Docherty went for Banny.

Instantly, you could tell he’d never been in a fight in his life: head down, fists flailing wildly. Banny, an eight-year veteran of playground battles and street fights, just stepped back and let Docherty reach him, taking a couple of weak, useless punches on the arms before he grabbed Docherty’s hair and started slowly pulling his head towards the ground.

‘Iya! Iya!’ Docherty squealed.

Banny kicked Docherty hard in the face, one, two, three times, then let him go. Docherty staggered back and fell
down, blood pouring from his nose and mouth, but trying to get back up, trying to stand on trembling legs.

‘C’MON THEN!’ Banny screamed.

It became like a dream, like a nightmare, like a video, like one of the horror videos watched on those endless afternoons off school, the curtains closed in the living room of the small council house, the only light coming from the fizzing television. Things happened quickly, fast-forward, and yet seemed to take all the time in the world. Freeze-frame. Slow motion. Banny whipping Docherty with the rod, shouting things I couldn’t hear. Tommy, his jaw set terribly as his foot lashed back and forth, real blood on the ox-blood Doc Martens. Above us the sky was cloudless, smiling on the crime, the riverbank empty for miles in both directions. The bushes and the poured-concrete weir house bearing silent witness. Docherty’s trousers were pulled off, then his pants, his trembling, bloodied hand as he tried to stop this, tried to hold onto this last shred of dignity (‘no, no, no, please, no . . .’), and then the bronze rod was arcing against the blue again, the sun kissing the length of the graphite as it whistled through the air, a filament of silver line trailing behind it. The red welts appearing on his thighs, his buttocks, the blood. More blood. His face – the face I still see every night as I reach for sleep – caked in dirt and tears, a pebble stuck to his cheek, looking at me, begging. Tommy sitting on his back, Banny on his legs, moving the broken end of the rod towards . . .

His scream.

This had all gone far enough, too far, much, much too far. But there was further to go, distance yet to run, as Tommy jumped on his head now, laughing, stumbling, falling over.
Then Banny was leaping off the low wall above Docherty. Banny was caught against the sun – his black silhouette framed, arms extended, feet coming down, like at the pool (‘No Dive-Bombing’), like an awful bird of prey, falling, falling, his feet the talons, coming straight down at Docherty’s skull, Docherty sobbing, trying to crawl, the glittering rod quivering in time with his sobs. Banny’s face, lit with terrible glee. The impact . . .

Banny getting up and walking away, straightening his Harrington, brushing chalky dust off, flicking his hair out of his face.

Back into real time and the silence, broken by a gull, crying as it streaked low over the river, white on grey, moving fast in the corner of my eye. Tommy was the first to speak.

‘Docherty? Get up, ya cunt.’

They’d told us something, in Physics, about the velocity of falling objects, something to do with mass times gravity or something, about unstoppable forces and immovable objects, but the only person here who would have been listening, who could have told you what the equation was, wasn’t listening any more. He wouldn’t be listening to anything ever again.

A single rivulet from his ear – black and thick as treacle. His mouth and eyes – both open, the mouth caught as though it was forming the end of the word ‘no’, the eyes just staring up, staring dumbstruck at the bland, vacant sky.

It was Banny who took charge.

Nobody saw anything.

It was our word against any cunt’s.

He told us to get stones and boulders and put them in Docherty’s pockets.

We rolled him to the edge of the weir and pushed him into the water. I tried not to look at him. He floated away, face down, just below the surface, the green parka ballooning up out of the water slightly.

The rest of the weekend was fear and keeping quiet and staying out of the way. I remember feeling sick all that weekend, avoiding my parents, spending most of it in my room, my mum having to call me out for meals. The nauseating fear as we ate, as always, on our laps with the telly on, me pushing the mince and tatties and beans around my plate, unable to look as my dad mashed his into a pink/grey pulp. He changed channels for
Game for a Laugh
after the football results and we watched a couple of minutes of the news, me wondering if this would be it. But no – just a news item about the Pope’s visit, about proposed redundancies at a steelworks near Motherwell. The weather. The crack and hiss as my dad opened another can of lager. My mum asking if I was feeling OK? ‘Bit sick.’ I told her I’d drunk too much ginger.

First thing Monday it was on the news, on the telly, about the missing boy, Craig Docherty aged thirteen from Ardgirvan, Ayrshire. Last seen fishing Saturday morning on the River Irvine near the railway bridge. Docherty’s mum and dad, appealing for anyone with information. It was the talk of the school. Rumours about paedos and stuff.

It was in the papers on Tuesday, his face on the cover of the
Daily Record
, his school photo: Docherty smiling in white shirt, school tie and blazer.

The next day the old dog-walker guy came forward with
a description of ‘three youths’ seen at the weir that Saturday morning. They were ‘loud and abusive’.

They found the body on Thursday morning. The current had carried it nearly a mile, to within sight of the estuary where the river emptied into the Irish Sea. It had drifted into a bank and become wedged beneath the roots of a tree. A golfer at Bankside, looking for his ball down behind the sixth green had spotted what he thought was just ‘a green coat’ floating in the water. Given what police described as the ‘horrific’ nature of his injuries it was now a murder hunt. Police appealed for the three boys seen near the weir to come forward. That night, we later found out, Tommy asked his big sister, ‘See if ye didnae mean to kill somebody but they died could ye still go to the jail?’ She told her mum and dad. Tommy didn’t come into school on Friday morning.

They came for me and Banny during second period. Chemistry. I remember we were all gathered round a Bunsen burner, wearing the daft glasses, the knock at the door, Mr Staples looking up from whatever he was demonstrating as Mr McMahon, the headmaster entered, looking shocked. The black, looming figures of the two policemen behind him and everything seeming to go into slow motion as they came towards us. Banny acting indignant, saying ‘Whit?’ and ‘No me’. and Mr McMahon taking me gently by the elbow and leading me towards the police. The stunned silence in the class.

I can’t really remember the hours and days after that very clearly, but I know it didn’t take long to break us down. They interviewed Banny and me separately and we were contradicting each other within minutes, the whole thing
coming apart, falling down around us. The cell. How hard and cold the tiled bench was. The toilet in the corner. The disbelief on my parents’ faces. Detectives and psychologists from Glasgow. Edinburgh even. Being asked about my home life, about sex, about fighting. About the incident in Miss Gilchrist’s English class weeks ago. (They’d interviewed everyone in the class.) The woman who just sat in the corner and watched me and wrote things down. Glimpsing Tommy, crying, through the open door of another interview room. The policemen mainly polite to us, except one older, harder man, with a thick black moustache, who I later learned had seen the body, whispering, hissing, to me as he took me back to the cell after more questioning. ‘Yese are cruel, vicious wee bastards. Ah hope they throw away the fucking key.’

By the following week I was ‘Boy C’.

THE TRIAL IN
Glasgow, where I last saw her, during the winter of 1982.

It took months for the case to come to court, for profiles to be prepared by psychologists and social workers, for the Procurator Fiscal’s office to prepare the prosecution. We were all held in different young offenders institutes: Banny near Edinburgh, Tommy further north, outside Aberdeen, and me closest to home, in Glasgow.

And all the while the Scottish press bayed for our blood. ‘Hang them.’ ‘Pure evil.’ The papers dwelt at length on Craig Docherty’s stable, loving home. His exceptional academic promise. Our lives were described as ‘chaotic’ and ‘broken’. My parents came to visit two or three times that summer. My mother would sit crying and saying ‘Why? Why?’ My father – silent, eyeing me coldly until, the last time he came, he stood up after five minutes and said, ‘You’re no son of mine.’ They had to be rehoused twice. The windows kept getting put in, things painted on the walls. (‘MURDERER’. ‘BASTERDS’.) People spat at them in the street, until, finally, my mum wrote that letter. They didn’t come to the trial and I never heard from them again.

I came off best in the reports. I was a ‘timid, easily led boy’, who had ‘the capacity for remorse’ and who showed ‘some academic promise’ and ‘potential for rehabilitation’.

Tommy had a ‘limited capacity’ to understand the consequences of his actions and there was ‘very little to suggest’ this would ever be improved upon. His IQ was determined at 72, ‘borderline feeble minded’.

They went to town on Banny. ‘A vicious, malevolent personality’ with ‘an enormous capacity for cruelty’. They found evidence of sexual abuse. He had great difficulty expressing any ‘empathy or remorse’ over what had happened. Banny tried longer than any of us to deny killing Craig. He blamed me. Tommy, who my lawyer said was ‘intimidated’ by Banny, blamed me too. When Banny finally confessed to ‘some part’ in the murder it was in what the prosecutor characterised as ‘a blatant attempt to mitigate sentencing’. In court Tommy and I looked at our feet. Banny stared straight ahead, sullen and defiant. The judge characterised his attitude as ‘irritation. As though it were inconvenient that a minor misdeed should keep troubling him.’

I remembered her from the trial. Blonde, full lips. She seemed very old to me then of course, although she couldn’t have been more than thirty-four or thirty-five. She watched everything intently, taking notes on an A4 pad, looking from us to the judge, to whichever lawyer was talking. She didn’t cry, but her hand would sometimes cover her face when certain details were read out. (‘Rectal tearing, dozens of gashes, massive cranial trauma, decomposition of the body after five days in the water.’)

We were over twelve, the age of criminal responsibility in Scotland at that time, so we were effectively tried as
adults. Banny was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life, defined as being a minimum of fifteen years. Tommy and I were found guilty of second-degree murder and given seven years each, prompting an outcry in the press about soft sentencing. At the Home Secretary’s insistence we were mandated to serve the full terms of our sentences with no possibility of parole, meaning we would remain in young offenders institutions until we were eighteen before being transferred to adult prisons to serve the remainder of our time. Then we were to be released into probationary care with new identities.

We were all moved around a lot in our first few years, for our own safety. I stayed in three different institutions across central Scotland in the first two years. Every time I was transferred there would be screaming mobs outside the van, Mr Cardew, holding my hand sometimes, a blanket over my head, the flashbulbs of the press going off.

Tommy never made it. He was stabbed and killed in a borstal fight when he was seventeen.

Banny’s sentence was extended by three years due to repeated incidents of violence. He was finally released on parole in 2000, when he was thirty-two. He almost immediately reoffended, raping a fourteen-year-old girl. He is still in prison today.

I was luckier: Mr Cardew,
Of Mice and Men
,
The Long and the Short and the Tall
(the way the dying boy said ‘mother’, always strangely affecting to me). Ted Hughes. ‘The Jaguar’. (‘Over the cage floor, the horizons come.’ Mr Cardew explaining its resonance to my situation.) Then Shakespeare and me crying and shaking in his arms, smelling the nicotine on his jacket. We had to stop. Orwell and
Larkin. I learned to play chess, Mr Cardew gradually becoming Paul over hours at the board while I became Donald Miller. By the time I was eighteen the thirteen-year-old William Anderson already felt remote and half remembered, like a distant relative, a second cousin who shared a vague trace element in the blood, an echo in the bone structure, but who I didn’t really know, whose history I did not share and was not responsible for. (Perhaps true to a degree for all teenagers.) I was given a backstory: my parents died when I was very young and I was brought up by an elderly uncle who died when I was eighteen, the uncle finally fusing in my mind with Mr Cardew.

I took what we had done, what I had done, sealed it up in a box, and dropped into the depths of my being.

I was released in 1989 and matriculated at Lampeter University in Wales that October as Donald Angus Miller. A mature student at one of the smallest, most remote universities in the UK.

Biology helped me. A twenty-year-old is almost unrecognisable from his thirteen-year-old self, the age at which all available photographs of me were last taken. As an undergraduate I sported a thick, unfashionable growth of beard. The government paid me a living allowance and kept watch at a distance. The gentrification of the soul that had begun in prison with books was intensified at university with life. I met English people for the first time, people we would have called ‘posh’ or ‘up themselves’, and I marvelled at their ease in the world, at the way they laughed as they casually held up a hand to bring a waiter to the table. I didn’t drink wine, didn’t see a bottle of wine, until I was twenty years old, at an arts faculty ‘cheese and wine’ at
Lampeter. Some kind of thick, rusty Bulgarian red, served in plastic cups. The token plates of Jarlsberg and Brie curling untouched on the side, under the strip lighting of the lecture theatre.