by Denise Mina
‘You remember our conversation, I take it?’
‘Yes,’ Watt tells his dead wife, Marion.
‘Do you recall, in particular, part of the conversation in which you professed yourself agreeably surprised?’
It’s such a wordy sentence that it throws Watt. He’s angry that Manuel is using words like ‘profess’ and ‘agreeably’.
But he must answer. He begs pardon and asks what he was supposed to be ‘agreeably surprised’ by?
Manuel purrs, ‘Why, by meeting me.’
Watt tuts, ‘I do not remember saying anything of the kind.’
‘Do you remember telling me that you could “drive a car better than Stirling Moss any day of the week”?’
‘That is a lie. You are lying.’
As Manuel fiddles with his notes Watt realises he’s alluding to the driving back overnight from Cairnbaan allegation. Manuel isn’t bringing up Dickov or the Gordon Club. He catches sight of Dandy in the public benches, sitting back, happy.
‘In the course of that evening,’ says disembodied Manuel, ‘do you recall raising the matter wherein you alleged you had been selected, or nominated, as President of the Merchants’ Guild of Glasgow?’
In among the lawyers in the well of the court, one or two faces rise slowly to look at William Watt. Lips tighten, glances are exchanged among the professionals. President? Of the Merchants’ Guild? Did they hear right? How has Peter Manuel come to be discussing the Merchants’ Guild?
Watt is embarrassed and assures Lord Cameron, ‘Most certainly not.’
‘You do not recall discussion of the Merchants’ Guild?’
‘No.’
‘Really?’
‘I have no recollection of that aspect of our conversement at all. No.’
Manuel takes a gentle breath and asks, ‘Six and a half months before we met in Whitehall’s did you take Scout O’Neil to the police?’
Right over Manuel’s shoulder Watt can see Dandy sitting forward, lips tight. Manuel half smiles innocently. Watt clutches the rail. There is no point in denying it. It has already been raised in court. Scout talked about this. Watt has already been asked about it on the stand.
‘I did.’
‘And–’ Manuel flicks through his notes–‘that would be on or around the 26th of May 1957?’
‘Would it?’ This isn’t about their night together. Lord Cameron should be stopping this line of questioning. ‘Hmm, I don’t know… dates and so on.’
Manuel nods slowly, smiles quickly. ‘I believe you met Mr O’Neil at the Gordon Club that night, did you not?’
Dickov sits forward too now.
‘And I took him to the police,’ says Watt, getting them out of the Gordon Club as fast as possible, ‘to tell them that he had sold you the gun used in the Burnside Affair.’
‘You met him in the Gordon Club, though?’
Lord Cameron interjects, ‘These questions are not within the parameters laid out in my original direction, Mr Manuel.’
But they are. Four people in the court know they are. Manuel looks at William Watt and raises his eyebrows. He huffs a little laugh–hah–and looks down at his papers again.
Watt saw a picture of Mrs Manuel in the newspaper this morning. She is just a little woman. Ordinary.
‘When you met Scout O’Neil that time, did you give him money to tell the police this story?’
‘Certainly not.’ Manuel is trying to discredit Scout, which is fine by Watt, he is happier with this line.
‘Did you give him money?’
‘No. That is a lie.’
‘Yes, you did,’ says Manuel confidently. ‘You gave him money. When you dropped him home after, you gave him money.’
This doesn’t matter really, this isn’t the big lie, so Watt explains to Cameron: ‘The man was in rags. His clothes were in tatters. I only gave him a pound to get a drink.’
Manuel lets that sink in and says, as an aside, ‘After you met him at the Gordon Club… what did the police do with Mr O’Neil’s information?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing. They did nothing at all. They wouldn’t listen to me.’
‘Why?’
Watt drops his chin to his chest. He doesn’t need to answer. Everyone knows. The press benches know. Everyone in the city knows. Watt isn’t credible.
Manuel says suddenly, ‘Do you recall describing to me the manner in which you killed your wife?’
Watt is winded. He struggles to draw breath and when he does his voice is faint. ‘I never did anything of the kind.’
Manuel looks disappointed at the answer.
‘Do you remember telling me that it was never your intention to kill your daughter?’
‘I did not say that.’
‘Do you remember telling me that after you had shot your little girl, Vivienne, it would have taken very little effort to turn the gun on yourself?’
‘No, I don’t, because I never said it.’
Manuel nods, as if this is just as he suspected. He turns a page in the notes, denoting a change of pace. ‘Mr Watt, in the course of the night, after we left your brother’s house, do you remember offering to give me the biggest boost I had ever had if I pulled up my socks and played the game your way?’
‘That, also, is a lie.’
‘You don’t remember saying that?’
‘I didn’t say it.’
‘You must have been very keen to clear your name?’
‘Yes.’
‘I expect you would have been desperate, Mr Watt?’
‘I was very keen to clear my name.’
‘Do you remember a conversation whereby you put to me this scheme: I was to find someone to take the blame for these crimes, a “joe” I think you called it, with the intention of clearing your name?’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Did you not tell me that your only mistake was taking the Renfrew Ferry to get to your house that night and being seen?’
‘I did not cross on the Renfrew Ferry. I can prove that now.’
Watt means that the ferryman did badly in court but it isn’t clear and he sees Manuel’s neck twitch. Peter thinks something new has come up. Something that discredits the whole story of Watt killing his family.
‘You have already appeared here before the court, Mr Watt, and you alleged that I described certain articles of furniture in the interior of your house to you?’
‘You knew every stick of furniture in the place. It was uncanny.’
Manuel smirks at his hand. ‘When you last gave evidence you made a statement on oath that I told you there was no safe in your house. Yet is it feasible that if I killed your wife, and was indeed in your house, that I would make detailed notes about the furniture and furnishings, but fail to note that there was a safe in the kitchen?’
Watt shrugs. It wasn’t a question.
Manuel thinks he is being clever. ‘Does it not in fact prove that I was never in your house, Mr Watt?’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ Watt is right. ‘Not noticing a safe doesn’t mean you haven’t been in someone’s house.’
Manuel looks thrown by that. He doesn’t really understand the art of adversarial legal questioning. He’s watched it often enough and knows it looks like a fight without shouting or hitting, but it is infinitely more complex. It isn’t just point scoring. Manuel is getting it wrong. He’s angry about that and his voice changes. ‘Mr Watt, you killed your family, didn’t you?’
‘No–’ Watt is comfortable–‘I did not. I did not kill my family.’
‘Well,’ says Manuel, a nasty edge to his voice, ‘did you ask someone else to kill your family?’
Dickov and Dandy sit forward in tandem and William Watt thinks of Mrs Manuel’s picture in the papers. He’s not surprised at Manuel doing this to his mother but he’s sad, for her.
‘No–’ Watt’s voice falters–‘I did not.’
‘Did you pay someone to kill your family for you?’
Watt looks at Pe
ter, trying to read him. ‘No,’ he says heavily, ‘I did not.’
‘That’s what you’re saying, is it?’
Watt nods softly at him. ‘That’s what I’m saying.’
Manuel holds his eye and takes a deep breath. Watt thinks he is going to shout. He’s going to betray his mother. He’s going to get her raped and killed. Watt braces himself. ‘That will be all, Mr Watt. You can get down.’
Manuel and Watt look at each other. He hasn’t. He won’t. This is the last time they will ever meet. For a moment they’re back in the car outside Manuel’s house in Birkenshaw, giggling on a dark winter morning. Watt feels the warmth of a cup of tea against his cold fingertips. Manuel feels his gorge rise as if he’s going to be sick. Watt sees Brigit Manuel fleetingly rise from the deep shadow of the Manuels’ living room and drop back again, swallowed by the dark.
Dickov and McKay sit back in their chairs.
Manuel has saved his mother’s life.
Peter and William both feel sad that it had to be him. It was always going to end here.
20
Tuesday 27 May 1958
IT’S THE FINALE. Peter Manuel is going to give evidence on his own behalf. He gets up, unbuttons his jacket and almost runs up to the witness box. He turns to face the court. The balcony, the lawyers, the journalists are mesmerised. Unlike most of the witnesses, he doesn’t avert his eyes but has a good look at everyone. He’s excited. He has been waiting to do this for a long time.
Now they will get to know the real him.
John Wayne Gacy wanted to write his own story. Ted Bundy wanted to be a writer and represented himself in court. Carl Panzram wrote his autobiography and represented himself at trial. Panzram had sailed the world raping and killing men and boys, he sailed full crew up the Congo from Lobito Bay and returned alone, yet satiated. When Panzram didn’t like a witness’s evidence in court he stared hard at them and drew a finger along his throat. Peter Manuel wrote fiction. All his life people commented on how much he liked to tell stories. Even early borstal assessments noted how much he liked to tell stories.
This is it. He’ll never have a bigger audience, and they’re discerning. They’re actual writers: journalists, newsmen, novelists. Compton Mackenzie is here. He’s been reading Lombroso. He notes the likelihood of Manuel having a ‘Spain or Sicilian strain in his blood’. These people will see what the magazines couldn’t. They will see Other Possible Peter.
Manuel speaks so fast at the beginning that Lord Cameron asks him to have mercy on the stenographer. Manuel smiles kindly down at the expressionless man who is tip-tapping out his every word for the record. He slows down.
Then he talks for six hours, largely without notes.
He tells all the stories of each of the murders individually. As he does this he recalls witness statements, word for word, stages small vignettes, recounts dialogue. Sometimes, to establish a new chapter, he reads the details of a particular charge before addressing the case against him.
In the defence’s favour is his confident delivery, the fact that he is charged with horrific crimes but is just standing there, with legs and hair and a jacket on, speaking, doing normal human things. He couldn’t have done those awful things, could he? But then, who could? Well, somebody did.
Against his defence is just about everything Manuel says, how he behaves and what he means. Ten minutes into the six-hour monologue everyone in the courtroom knows that Manuel has made a catastrophic mistake. He should not be speaking.
Peter Manuel does not know how other people feel. He has never known that. He can guess. He can read a face and see signs that tell him if someone is frightened or laughing. But there is no reciprocation. He feels no small echo of what his listener is feeling.
Anne Kneilands: it wasn’t him. Sure, he was working nearby at the time, for the Gas Board. The only reason the cops liked him for it was the foreman on that job phoned them and telt them Peter appeared for work the day after the murder with scratches on his cheek and blood on his boots.
Now, Peter is a straightforward kind of person. He will not be spoken about behind his back. So he went to see the foreman and had a few words with him. Everyone knows what he means by ‘a few words’. The guy, he says, walked off the job and went away to work somewhere else. Somewhere quieter. He snickers.
To Manuel this is how real men resolve disputes. He thinks he is telling them that Peter Manuel is a man in charge of situations, that other men respect him. Other men don’t respect him. They are afraid of him because he is nuts.
Sure, he says, a witness claims to have seen him in East Kilbride that night, but they couldn’t have seen him because he wasn’t there.
The police were all over him at the time, searching his house, confiscating his clothes, bothering him, bothering his mother. His voice breaks when he says ‘mother’. Jury members look up, hopeful. They want to find humanity in the man. But Manuel has moved on. He wasn’t going to be harassed by the police. He decided to take action. He told a journalist to take his picture and to publish a story about the murder on the front page of the local paper with the picture. He holds up the page for them to see. Under the headline, local man questioned, is a photo of Peter standing in front of a car in his workman’s clothing. He is smiling for the camera. This was published but did anyone come forward and identify him after that? No. Why? Because he wasn’t there.
He moves on to the Isabelle Cooke murder and reads out the charge. He reads this out in a low, slow voice, hoping perhaps to sound sombre. He doesn’t sound sombre, he sounds mocking.
‘“On 28 December 1957, on the footpath between Mount Vernon Avenue and Kenmuir Avenue, Mount Vernon, you did assault Isabelle Wallace Cooke (17), 5 Carrick Drive, Mount Vernon, and did seize her, struggle with her, drag her into a field, tear off her clothing, tie a brassiere around her neck and a head square around her face and mouth, rob her of a pair of shoes, a brush, a fan, a stole, a pouchette of cosmetics and a handbag, and you did murder her, and such is a capital murder within the meaning of the Homicide Act 1957, Section 5 (1) (a).”’
The jury have already heard poor Mr Cooke talking about his daughter’s disappearance and the discovery of her body. They’ve been moved by his quiet dignity. Now Manuel is doing silly voices.
Well, Manuel didn’t do that murder. He wasn’t there. He didn’t know where the body was. Goodall and Muncie knew where it was buried all along and they just took him there in the middle of the night and said he’d told them where it was. ‘I am standing on her.’ Who actually says that? One might say ‘I am standing on it’, or ‘I am standing on the grave’, but ‘I am standing on her’? No one would say that.
He doesn’t say anything compassionate about Isabelle or Anne, two dead seventeen-year-old girls. To him they are no more than skin-covered stage flats in a play about him.
One of the jury men at the back yawns but sees Peter’s eye on him and falters. He shuts his mouth and looks embarrassed. Peter wonders why he’s embarrassed about yawning.
Next, he talks about the Watt murders. He tells the court he met Watt in Whitehall’s and Watt was so impressed by Peter that he invited him drinking. Watt admitted everything to him. He told Peter that he drove back from Cairnbaan overnight and killed his own family. He didn’t know his wife’s sister would be there, but she was, so he shot her too. He meant to tie up his daughter, not kill her. Watt just meant to tie her up and then she would get free the next morning by which time Watt would be back at the Cairnbaan Hotel and have an alibi. It doesn’t occur to Manuel that Vivienne Watt would recognise her own father while he tied her up. He says Watt told him that ‘things got out of hand’ and he killed her too. It took all of his strength not to turn the gun on himself after that. He does Watt that courtesy.
Later in their evening together, in the Gleniffer, Watt admitted that before he killed his family he had paid Charles Tallis five thousand pounds as part of an elaborate plan. Tallis was to break into the Watt house after the murders and ransack it, to
make it look like a burglary, make it look as if the killer was in there for a long time to give Watt an alibi. Tallis was also supposed to take the gun Watt had left in the house and hide it. It doesn’t occur to Manuel that Watt could save five thousand pounds by messing his own house up and hiding his own gun. Manuel doesn’t address the fact that Charles Tallis had a cast-iron alibi, attested to by many witnesses. He just ignores that.
Jury members look at each other and shrug. They wonder why Lord Cameron is letting him say this stuff but Lord Cameron’s job is to ensure that Peter Manuel is heard fairly and thoroughly, not that he is dissuaded from talking utter shite.
Manuel continues: why did he know where the gun was? Well, the day after the murders Tallis came to Manuel’s house. He confided in Manuel and told him many details about the house, described the events and then, when Manuel was out of the room, planted the Webley in a dresser drawer. Manuel found the Webley later, while he was looking for string to wrap a parcel ‘for a girl who was in hospital’. He immediately knew Tallis had planted it and knew what the gun had been used for. So Manuel wrapped it in one of his sister’s gloves and threw it into the Clyde.
Laurence Dowdall approached Manuel and said he needed Manuel’s help to clear his guilty client, William Watt, and frame Charles Tallis for the murders. Even Manuel knows this needs explanation because Dowdall is a famously smart lawyer and unlikely to go about sharing incendiary information relating to a client with someone like Manuel. Dowdall was desperate though because, with Watt as his client, Dowdall would be in for a share of Watt’s wrongful imprisonment compensation payment, but they won’t get anything unless someone else is convicted of the Burnside murders. When Manuel refused to be involved Dowdall threatened him: if you don’t help us frame Tallis, then we will frame you.
Moving on to the Smart murders: Manuel tells everyone that he had been a friend of Mr Smart’s for a long time. Mr Smart had both respect and deference for Peter Manuel, because Peter helped him when he was building his house. Peter knows about gas piping.
Just before New Year Mr Smart asked Peter to help him buy an illegal gun. Prowlers had been seen in the area and he wanted to protect his family. The two men met in the Royal Oak on New Year’s Eve. When Manuel handed over the Beretta Mr Smart was so pleased that he gave Manuel fifteen pounds in brand-new, sequentially numbered notes. Then–oh!–Mr Smart remembered that a business associate, ‘Mr Brown’, was coming to call while the Smarts were away for New Year. Could Peter take this key to the family home and meet Mr Brown there and explain: Mr Smart isn’t here. Mr Smart will leave out a bottle of whisky for Peter to give to Mr Brown.