William Watt’s laboured breathing, and the grunts of the four policemen carrying him, fill the high, rapt room.
Watt is being carried into court on a stretcher. He arrived in an ambulance and his doctor is in attendance, standing at the side of the court, watching him carefully.
Watt crashed his car in the Gorbals last night. He drove straight into a wall. His knee is swollen and his neck hurts, but what really ails Mr Watt is self-pity. Mr Watt could cry even thinking about himself. He thinks that if only people knew how awful this is, they might be a bit nicer to him.
After the crash last night, when the doctor asked him how he felt, Watt tried to communicate this, but it is 1958 and men don’t really have words for feelings. The doctor misunderstood. He thought Watt was in tremendous physical pain and now Watt is too embarrassed to admit the truth. He has to play along with the fiction that he is horribly injured but he’s not a good actor.
The police have charged him with drunk-driving. This is not the first time. When the case comes to court he’ll lose his licence. Dowdall told Watt to plead not guilty so that news of the incident will be sub judice until the Manuel trial is over and no one will hear about it. Dowdall strives to make Mr Watt sympathetic because what has happened to William Watt is horrific. He deserves a charitable hearing.
Watt and his phalanx of officers make it across to the witness stand. Watt is let down and hauls himself up the steps. A seat has been placed there for him. Lord Cameron asks him if he would like a rubber cushion for his knee? Watt accepts tearfully.
Flinching, he raises his hand to be sworn in and repeats the oath with ludicrous solemnity.
M.G. Gillies asks and this is the story Watt tells:
It was a Sunday night, the start of the second week of his annual fly-fishing holiday. His wife and daughter didn’t want to come with him. Neither of them like to fish. His wife Marion is recovering from a heart operation. So he is alone, staying at the Cairnbaan Hotel, a ninety-mile drive from Glasgow.
He spends the Sunday night in the residents’ lounge. Mr Watt, Mr and Mrs Leitch, who own the hotel, and a fishing chum, Mr Bruce, have ‘quite a party’. Watt is serving behind the bar. There is some singing. It all sounds very jolly. They drink for five or six hours until 1 a.m. when Watt and Mr Leitch stand by the back door, smoking cigars and watching as Watt’s black Labrador, Queenie, goes out. When she comes back in they both roll up to their beds.
Watt is next seen at 8 a.m. in the dining room for breakfast. The hotel’s maid arrives for work at the same time and sees his car outside. The windscreen is covered in frost.
After breakfast Watt goes fishing. A while later a taxi arrives at the riverbank. The driver gets out and beckons him over. Puzzled, Watt wades to the bank. Whatever is going on? He is wanted at the hotel. Mrs Leitch, proprietress of the hotel, needs to see him urgently. Watt can’t imagine why, but he knows it is very bad news.
A sobbing Mrs Leitch meets him at the door. She is incoherent, saying something confusing. At first Watt thinks Mrs Leitch’s daughter has had a terrible accident. Finally she sits down and catches her breath and tells him: your brother John telephoned from Glasgow. Journalists came into the baker’s shop asking strange questions about your wife, about you. John phoned the police to find out what was going on. They said:
Your wife is dead.
Your daughter is dead.
Your sister-in-law is dead.
Killed in your house.
Shot with a gun.
In their beds.
William keeps shaking his head. No, this is a mistake. My wife Marion? It is wrong. There weren’t three people at my house last night. My sister-in-law wasn’t at my house last night. I called home yesterday evening and Vivienne told me specifically that she would stay the night with Deanna Valente next door. This is all wrong.
Mrs Leitch telephones John Watt and puts William on the phone. John tells William that Marion is dead.
Vivienne is dead.
Margaret is dead.
Killed in your house.
Shot with a gun. Come home at once.
Mr Bruce arrives at the hotel and finds William very angry about this wicked mistake. He needs to go to Glasgow and sort this nonsense out.
Furious now, William gets into his car. Mr Bruce insists on coming with him because he thinks William is too upset to drive safely–Oh! What a silly fuss about a load of nonsense!
One harum-scarum mile down the road William pulls over and admits that he is not in a fit state to drive. They limp the Vauxhall to the police station at Lochgilphead. A kindly police officer takes over, driving Watt and Mr Bruce in Watt’s car to Alexandria, a town on the outskirts of Glasgow. And here Watt’s troubles begin because here he meets DS Mitchell.
Watt is an odd man. He has always been odd, says the wrong thing, gets the mood wrong, but this has never been legally relevant before. Suddenly it is.
DS Mitchell finds him very strange. Watt smiles abruptly, keeps announcing that he is fine, wants to drive his own car and is angry at the Glasgow police for making a ‘huge mistake’. Mitchell becomes suspicious of Watt and makes notes of some of the things he says in the car. He jots down these remarks:
‘You won’t see me shed a single tear.’
‘You don’t think I did it, do you?’
‘I know this road like the back of my hand.’
For the defence, William Grieve asks Watt if he made these statements in the car because he had a guilty conscience?
Watt announces to the court: ‘My conscience has never been guilty all of my life. I never did a wrong thing in all my life. Never once did I do a wrong thing in my life.’
The court pauses. The public shift in their seats and smirk to each other.
Even the lawyers find this level of bombast entertaining. They smile, raise eyebrows, make a note of it for their chest of war stories.
I never did a wrong thing in all my life.
Watt seems to sense that he has got something very wrong but isn’t sure what: he tries blaming someone else.
‘And anyway all of that is a lie. Quite like Mitchell to say that too. He’s a liar.’
Standing up in court and calling a policeman a liar is utterly shocking in the 1950s. A police officer could stand in a witness dock and claim to be a tram, and the room would wonder if he was, in some sense, in many ways, actually telling the truth. Watt has good reason to be suspicious of policemen but, by speaking so boldly, he has lost the room.
M.G. Gillies tries several times to make him likeable again. He asks Watt if DS Mitchell gave him any warning of what he was about to be shown when they arrived at his house. Watt blinks back tears. No, he says in a choking voice. None.
They arrive in Fennsbank Avenue. DS Mitchell parks and pulls Watt out of the back of his own car in his own driveway. Journalists are crowding around the door. They take photographs of Watt being pulled out of the back of his own car in his own driveway.
FLASH. FLASH.
White lights. He wasn’t ready. He was looking straight at them.