A canal, its banks swollen to bursting, was to their right. In the convoy near Basra city were two men called Paul McGee and Stephen Ferguson, both members of the Scots Guards and close friends. They tried to control their fear, letting their training take over and praying for a safe return to base. Just another routine evening on duty in Iraq.
Then Ferguson, who was driving in front, swerved, possibly to avoid what he thought was an IED, lost control and plunged into the canal. McGee, driving behind, didn't hesitate. He leapt from his vehicle and dived into the water. For over 20 minutes he desperately tried to free his friend. He struggled to open the hatch against the weight of water, eventually managing to drag Ferguson out of the vehicle and up onto the bank. As they waited for medics to arrive McGee gave the kiss of life, begging him to hold on and reassuring him that help was on its way.
Ferguson was picked up by helicopter and eventually flown back to a military hospital in the UK, but having spent so long under water, his brain was damaged and he never regained full consciousness. A week later his life support machine was turned off. McGee came home for the funeral and wept in Ferguson's father's arms as he apologised for failing to save his son.
McGee on tour with the Scots Guard. He was a victim of a different type of war being waged on Britain's streets. Knife crime
Six months after Ferguson's death, McGee received the Queen's Commendation For Bravery. His mother recalls how he was told to stand by and await a call from his commanding offi cer; he then turned around calmly to tell her the news. She screamed out loud and rushed off to the local shop to buy a bottle of wine.
'What mother wouldn't be proud?' she says. 'I wanted to celebrate. But Paul said to me, "Mum, I lost a good friend that night. It's no cause for celebration."'
October 25, 2009, was a similarly foul night with driving rain and a fierce gale. This time in Scotland. McGee had finished his tour of duty in Iraq and had taken a new job as the face of Scots Guards recruitment in Glasgow. His role involved visiting schools and youth centres espousing the merits of Army life, and it was one he relished. He had also met the woman he wanted to marry.
McGee had been to a local charity dinner with his girlfriend Helen Laycock and both their mothers. They'd all had a drink so they took a taxi back to Lochwinnoch, the sleepy lochside town just 30 minutes outside Glasgow where Paul lived with his mother Anne and his sister Kelly.
The four of them chatted in the taxi: Anne McGee sitting in front; Helen and her mother, Ann, with Paul in the back seat. As the taxi turned o ff a country lane, they almost hit a car ahead of them that was crawling along with only fog lights on. The taxi driver swerved to avoid it and flashed the driver to warn him to turn his headlights on.
Ian Wallace (left) who was jailed for assaulting McGee's mother; and McGee's killer, 18st Barry McGrory (right)
'Watch it, that could be a psycho,' joked Helen. They all giggled but no one noticed the car follow them.
The driver of the other car, Barry McGrory, didn't turn his headlights on. Instead he and his friend Ian Wallace followed the taxi in silence and in darkness, the rain making them unseen and the wind making them unheard. For 20 minutes they drove behind the taxi as it wound through the quiet Scottish countryside, past the edge of the loch, along past the pub and the post o ffice and right up to the front door of Anne McGee's home in McConnell Road.
As the taxi came to a halt, Wallace pounced. He appeared at the driver's door and as the taxi driver wound his window down Wallace began screaming obscenities at him.
'I'm Ian Wallace, who do you think you are flashing me? Don't you know who I am?'
He started to throw punches through the window, then opened the door trying to drag the driver out. Helen reached for the door handle but felt Paul's hand over hers trying to open it first. Helen's mother tried to pull the driver away but Wallace turned upon her, biting her on the finger right to the bone.
Paul was incensed. Now outside the car he started to throw punches back at Wallace. A fitter man and a better fighter, he was getting the better of their assailant. But Wallace, who was drunk (he later admitted to a police doctor he'd drunk two litres of strong cider every day of his adult life) hit back hard. The two men grappled and punched. Anne screamed at the taxi driver to go, thinking it would be safer for him. No one had any doubt Paul could knock out the man. The taxi drove away.
But what they had all failed to notice was Barry McGrory sitting quietly in the other car. Watching and waiting. Calmly and quietly.
McGee and Wallace were by now on the ground, both exhausted.
'At that stage the fight was over,' recalls Helen.
McGrory opened his vehicle door, pushed past her and crouched down - her first instinct was that he'd come to drag his friend Wallace away. Then as he stood up she saw something glinting in his hand.
She screamed: 'What have you just done? What have you done to my Paul?'
McGrory looked her calmly in the face as Wallace got up, then the two got back in their car and drove away. Helen and Anne leant over Paul. He was staring into the distance trying to focus.
He managed to whisper: 'Can you move away a bit? I can't breathe properly.'
Helen and her mother, both trained sta ff nurses, frantically tried to search Paul's body for wounds, but couldn't find any due to the thick jacket he was wearing. Helen lifted his head out of a puddle and held his hand as his mother cradled him in her arms. In the same way that less than two years earlier Paul had begged his fallen Army comrade to hold on and reassured him help was coming, Paul's loved ones begged him not to die and told him that an ambulance was on its way. Having survived bombs and mortar attacks he died helplessly on his mother's doorstep, a victim of a diff erent type of war being waged on Britain's streets. Knife crime.
McGrory had stabbed McGee six times, the fatal blow had pierced his heart.
In many ways McGee is just another statistic, but one that also represents another son, brother and lover lost. Guardsman McGee also, as his commanding o cer said, 'died standing up for right. Paul died as he had lived, a quiet hero.'
The e ffect on Paul's family has been devastating. His mother is too scared to leave her house alone; his sister shakes constantly and her friends say she's lost more than three stone in weight. And his girlfriend is unable to move on - her Facebook page still says she's in a relationship with Paul, and she spent Christmas and Valentine's Day at his grave.
'My friends get to go out with their boyfriends on a Saturday night; mine lives in the ground,' she shrugs.
McGrory and Wallace are both 28 years old, just a year younger than McGee who was a few weeks short of his 29th birthday when he died. All three were from similar working-class backgrounds, from the same area, and in their early years all three men had attended the same school, Johnstone High.
Yet one had gone on to be a soldier decorated for bravery, while Wallace was an unemployed alcoholic with ten previous convictions for assault, and McGrory was a man capable of stabbing another in cold blood, who nicknamed the hunting knife he always carried with him 'my baby'.
There were 252 knife homicides across England and Wales in 2008/09. Last year there were 57 knife-related killings in Scotland, where the murder rate with a knife is two and half times higher than in England and Wales. A 48 per cent increase in stab-related hospital admissions between 1997 and 2007 in England is a clear indication knives are being used to inflict more serious wounds and are causing more fatalities than ever before.
Police outside the McGees' house in Lochwinnoch, where Paul was stabbed to death
In 2008, 5,239 people were admitted to NHS hospitals in England with a stab wound. These figures do not include people who are pronounced dead before hospital admission took place, which is thought to be 80 per cent of all fatal stabbings.
That McGee's murder happened in the Scottish countryside reveals another worrying trend: that knife crime is leaving the more traditional deprived urban locations for villages and suburbs. The Home A ffairs select committee on knife crime in 2009 found a small but consistently steady increase in knife assaults in non-urban areas.
The majority of knife crime off enders are young men aged 18-24 from deprived urban areas. Teenage gang-related knife stories, such as the murder of Sofyen Ghailan at Victoria Station in London in March, an incident in which 35 schoolchildren were involved and which happened in front of horrified commuters, make routine headline news. In cases like that victims are mostly other gang members. But those statistics are also changing - perpetrators now fit wider age and race profiles and the number of girls carrying knives has also risen sharply, as has the number of victims killed in random stranger attacks with no prior connections to their assailants.
Rob Kennedy was Stephen Ferguson's best friend. McGee met Kennedy when he received his bravery award and they became close friends. Kennedy shakes his head with bewilderment.
'Some boys just took a di fferent path,' he says. 'I don't know why but I think it got decided as teenagers. Of my closest friends at school, three of them are now heroin addicts. One lad I knew has had two brothers die of addictions and he's still a dealer. Can you believe that? I went to one of the lads' funeral and another of the lads I knew at school came up to me and had a go at me. He said, "I know you think you're better than us because you have a job." I replied, "Yeah, actually I do. I'm nothing special, I'm a truck driver and I've never signed on in my life. So yes, I do think I'm better than you lot."'
McGee's mother Anne and sister Kelly at his funeral
Just opposite Johnstone High is a notorious council estate called Sandyflats. Rows of Sixties houses off er a glimpse of Glasgow's underclass. Burnt-out cars litter the roads and many houses are boarded up. It's here that the extended Wallace family live. Outside
Wallace's cousin's house, where he was supposed to be babysitting on the night of the murder, several children run up and down the street. I recognise one of them as Wallace's niece. I'd seen her in court two days before giving evidence via a video link. Tearfully she'd described being woken up by the sound of Wallace washing his clothes (which the prosecution alleged was an attempt to destroy DNA evidence) in the middle of the night. Her mother didn't return from her night out until 2pm the following day.
But occasionally, among the wrecks and rubbish, there's a glimpse of a neatly tended lawn, a family having a BBQ and a water fight in the sunshine.
'We all had tough times as kids,' says Kennedy, 'but the story doesn't always have to be about crime. It's about who you are as a person.'
Ironically, both McGee's parents and McGrory's parents had moved house looking for a better future for their children, the McGrorys to Erskine, the McGees to the quiet village of Lochwinnoch. It was, says Anne McGee, the type of place where kids could play freely for hours on end.
'You'd nae have to worry about them and knew they'd come home when they got hungry and tired.'
Few people in either Johnstone or Erskine said they remembered McGrory. One neighbour described him as 'a kind of zombie boy. He never said hello to anyone. He'd just walk past you like he never saw you.' Apart from his girlfriend, who told the court in his defence she'd never known him to be confrontational, Wallace appears to have been his only real companion.
Last month, McGrory was found guilty of McGee's murder and Wallace of assaulting Anne McGee and Helen's mother, Ann. Both men had initially been charged with murder but the murder charge against Wallace was later dropped. McGrory then mounted a special defence blaming Wallace for the stabbing. The advocate who defended McGrory, Thomas Ross, had two years earlier successfully defended him on a di fferent attempted-murder charge. McGrory had chased a man and stabbed him in the head and face, seriously injuring him and disfiguring him for life. The jury learned this only after bringing their guilty verdict.
McGrory was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 20 years for what the judge called an 'utterly senseless crime'. Wallace got 15 months. The judge said his profile suggested he is extremely likely to o ffend again.
Ben Kinsella was murdered in 2007
Eighteen-stone McGrory barely registered emotion in court, hand-cuff ed to two prison o fficers and separated from the public gallery by a sheet of reinforced glass. The glass was a throwback from when the same court room was used in the trial of the Lockerbie bomber. Over the ten-day trial at Glasgow High Court he wore the same brown shirt every day, occasionally darting glances at Wallace, his co-accused. Wallace was the more confident and cockier of the two, sporting a mullet and a Pu a jacket.
The public gallery was packed with both people and tension. Every day McGee's relatives and friends had to walk the intimidating gauntlet of a crowd of McGrorys. Without speaking, both families naturally gravitated to opposite sides of the gallery but were still too close for either side's comfort. During breaks, both families were forced to share the same outside space for smoking. When McGrory was pronounced guilty his family shouted abuse and called the McGees - the victim's family - 'scum'.
As witnesses for Wallace and McGrory took the stand, one thing was crystal clear: employment was not a factor in their lives. A stream of cousins and girlfriends gave evidence on their behalf, and when asked to state their occupation all had the same reply. None.
On the night of the killing McGrory and Wallace, together with his girlfriend Kerry Gribben, were babysitting his cousin's two small children. The two men left Gribben with the children and went out to buy alcohol and drugs. What they were doing on the country lane when the taxi fatefully flashed them is still not known. Gribben told how she woke up at around 2am to hear Wallace and McGrory come back to the house shouting at each other.
Jimmy Mizen was murdered in May 2008
She said: 'Ian was shouting, "What did you do that for?" Barry replied, "Your face was turning blue, I had to do something, so I plugged him."' When asked what she understood by the term 'plugged' she replied, 'There's only one thing it can mean. Stabbed.'
Twenty-two-year-old Gribben, a pathetic figure who admitted she can barely read or write, is heavily pregnant with Wallace's baby. She already has a two-year-old son and knows the term 'plugged' all too well. Her first child's father was stabbed to death in front of her by a man she'd met and brought home for sex. Despite sobbing pitifully when this was referred to in court, on the night of McGee's murder she described with a chilling lack of empathy how after McGrory left the house, Wallace calmly put his clothes in the washing machine, had a bath and went to bed. Both fell straight to sleep. Her justification for not calling the police as soon as she'd heard about the stabbing was to say: 'Well I didn't know the boy was dead at that point did I?'
Like the parents of Jimmy Mizen and former EastEnders actress Brooke Kinsella, whose brother Ben was murdered in 2007, the McGee family have launched a campaign to introduce mandatory minimum custodial sentencing for those caught carrying knives. The petition, which has so far attracted nearly 11,000 signatures, was presented to the Scottish parliament in March.
The problem is clear: less than a quarter of people convicted of possessing an o ffensive weapon were jailed last year. Of those who are jailed, more than half re-o ffend within a year of release. In the same year knives were estimated to have been used in 138,000 robberies, woundings or assaults in England and Wales. The organisation Kids Count estimates that knife crime costs the state in the region of £1.25 billion per year - a figure which, as the profile of both off enders and victims widens, is only set to grow.
McGee's younger sister Kelly says, 'Paul was our hero and a real hero who risked his life for his country. To die like he did... his death can't be in vain, it just can't be.'
As she looks at the framed photo of Paul resplendent in his Guardsman's uniform, which dominates the family living room, she says: 'This happened in Lochwinnoch, a place where nothing ever happens. If it can happen here to someone like my brother, then believe me when I say it's happening everywhere.'
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