Author's Note

The Paddy Meehan portions of this novel are drawn from a real case. Patrick Meehan was a career safe cracker who was found guilty of the high profile murder of an elderly woman during a house break. The case was a notorious miscarriage of justice in Scotland. Even after the real culprits had sold their story to a Sunday news paper it took a book by Ludovick Kennedy to prompt the reopening of the case and the Royal Pardon. The story told here is based largely on Meehan's accounts in interviews and books and on those of his solicitor, Joseph Beltrami. Some facts have been conflated to make them read more clearly, for example Griffiths hijacked a number of cars during his shooting spree. Only the emotional content is substantially fictionalised.

In the late eighties I interviewed Paddy Meehan. Neither of us wanted to be there. We were both trying to please my mum, Edith.

During a summer in the late eighties Edith was working as a manicurist in the Argyle Market, a ramshackle series of booths in a first floor corridor off a main shopping thoroughfare in central Glasgow. At the same time Paddy Meehan was selling his vanity - published book 'Framed by MI5' at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the market.

Edith's nail booth was very classy: she wore a white uniform, had a desk and a sofa and even had a working telephone installed. Meehan approached her and asked if he could receive important calls there because the Secret Service had bugged the public payphone. Being a lady, she graciously agreed but asked if he would return a favour by telling his story to her daughter. She would be interested, Edith said, because she was a law student. I actually wasn't interested, I didn't know anything about him or the case and I had exams coming up, but my mum said I had to buy him a cup of tea.

The market canteen was deserted in the half hour before closing time. We were the only customers and Meehan sat facing the door, watching over my shoulder. I was young and arrogant and in a hurry and only half listened to his story. He had told it so often that at times I don't even think he was listening but he told it well and still got angry when he remembered prison and being mobbed in Ayr.

Afterwards I asked him to go over part of it again. He said he had been recruited into the communist underworld network by a shadowy figure who first appeared when he worked in the ship yards. He bumped into him unexpectedly in London outside the Embassy and now thought he was an agent provocateur from MI5. Although it appeared from his prison records that he had remained in Leicester prison for a five stretch he actually escaped and ran away to the USSR. There he gave the Soviets information about prison layouts which they used to spring George Blake. More incendiary, he claimed that he had warned them about the method Blake used to escape. Either they failed to heed his warnings or MI5 let Blake escape.

It sounded ridiculous to me. I told him I didn't believe that MI5 would try to ensure his silence by framing him for a very high profile murder. He insisted, became agitated and flushed and at one point almost tearful. I suddenly saw myself, a arrogant law student sitting in a dirty cafÈ correcting a red faced old bloke about the narrative arc of his life.

Meehan insisted that his life make sense. He wasn't prepared to accept that his life, like most eventful lives, was nothing but a series of comic mishaps and tragedies strung together in a meaningless pattern. Someone knew what was going on and had directed it all. In looking for a shadowy instigator it felt as though he was insisting that God existed.

We finished our tea and cigarettes and parted on a sour note. He blanked me for the rest of the summer. Every time I passed him at the foot of the stairs on my way up to visit my mum he'd busy himself tidying the piles of books or look to the distance with narrowed eyes, pretending to spot an imaginary friend. I always said hello just to let him snub me.

As I've grown older I've come to realise that nothing silences an awkward truth more effectively than ridicule. His story was implausible enough to be true.

Meehan kept on telling his story. He told it to anyone he met.

Paddy Meehan died of throat cancer in 1994.