FLASH.
He’s blinded. He reels and looks drunk in the photos. He blinks but white splashes of light are still going off in his eyes and he can’t see properly. Mitchell pulls him by the elbow, up the driveway to his own front door.
FLASH.
In the doorway Watt blinks hard, his vision resolves for a moment and he sees that his house is full of angry strangers. Men. They have overcoats on, or uniforms on, and they all stare at him as he comes through his own front door.
Grabbed by the elbow, Watt is swung around to face into his own bedroom. Men in there and the beds all messy and scarlet blood spattered on the wall. Red. Marion’s familiar ankle, blue thread-veined, is hanging over the side of her bed. A stranger’s hands pull back the wet blood-sodden sheet.
LOOK AT HER.
He looks at his dead Marion.
IS THIS YOUR WIFE?
He looks at her.
Marion. Bloody. Her nightgown is pulled up. Undergarments, thighs, breasts on show. Angry scar all the way down her chest from her heart operation. Marion is modest. William has never seen her scar before now. Men in overcoats are looking at the scar. Men in uniforms in his house and his wife’s bare thighs. He can’t look but he must.
They are all staring at him. All the men in his house with overcoats and uniforms. The sheet on his own bed is yanked off.
IS THIS YOUR SISTER-IN-LAW?
One of Margaret’s eyes is open. The other one is swollen shut.
IS THIS YOUR WIFE’S SISTER?
She has a hole in her temple. It’s where the red has come from.
IS THIS MARGARET BROWN?
He looks at his dead sister-in-law. Her face is blue and swollen at the side.
Watt thinks he is in hell. He isn’t. He’s on the threshold.
Hands yank him down the corridor. His eyes still aren’t working. White flashes are still blinding him but he is aware of DS Mitchell, sneering at his shoulder. They spin him around to face into the bedroom.
HER?
He recoils from his dead daughter. He clamps his eyes shut but his mind assembles a brutal picture from scraps.
Her breast.
A nipple.
Moon-white skin.
Hugely swollen jaw.
Slumped.
Dear, soft neck, stained with splashes of burgundy blood. Up the wall behind her, all up the wall.
Hot acid vomit jets from William Watt’s mouth onto the wall in the hall. It shoots from his nose. It squeezes out of his tear ducts and blinds him further. It drips down the flock wallpaper Marion has only just put up. He blinks the digestive acid out of his eyes but the flash spots continue. He’s glad of them now.
As he tells the court about identifying the bodies Watt relives it. He lifts the glass of water to sip but the memory of being sick is so vivid that he can’t bring himself to put anything in his mouth. He remembers hot vomit burning his chin, dripping. He remembers the filthy, pungent smell. He’s shaking as he puts the glass back down carefully.
If Watt was being devious he would fake a collapse here. It’s the logical point to fall to pieces, have the attending doctor come up and take his pulse. But that happens later.
M.G. Gillies asks him if it is possible, as the defence have suggested, for Watt to drink for six hours in the residents’ lounge and then drive ninety miles to Glasgow, kill his family, drive the ninety miles back in the same night without detection. Watt declares, ‘Oh! You couldn’t drive! Never could you drive!’
Everyone drives drunk. It’s a self-deprecating joke to claim you were following the white lines in the middle of the road because you were so drunk. No one believes him.
The photos of Watt in his driveway, as he came into the house and then left afterwards, are printed in all of the papers. Watt looks stunned and frightened and half mad in them.
An anonymous tipster sees them and calls the police and says Mr Watt has a girlfriend.
In court, Watt is asked about extramarital dalliances and, shamefaced, admits to ‘several lapses’. To take the bad look off him, Gillies asks about Marion’s heart operation, as though a sick wife is, by necessity, a cuckolded wife. Men have needs. Marion’s operation was very dangerous, Watt tells him. Experimental. He didn’t want her to have it but she went ahead anyway.
Days after the pictures of Watt are published a mechanic comes forward. He works in Lochgilphead, near the Cairnbaan Hotel. He thinks the police should know that Mr Watt had his car serviced that Sunday, in the morning. He had his petrol tank filled up. The Vauxhall’s lights kept cutting out and the mechanic offered to fix them if Watt left the car overnight with him. Watt said he couldn’t leave the car because he needed it for a journey.
But the police find the Vauxhall petrol tank is full, minus what it took to drive back to Glasgow with DS Mitchell in the morning. It should be missing three times that much petrol if he drove home, murdered everyone and got back to the Cairnbaan before breakfast. They visit everywhere en route but can’t find anywhere Watt could have refilled.
The round trip is done and timed at five hours. But the test was done during the day. Watt would have done it in the dark, on unlit, potholed roads. The only route runs over a dangerous pass on a hill so steep that the summit is called ‘The Rest and Be Thankful’. This is a time when cars overheat on any incline. A wise driver will always have one eye on the temperature gauge after taking a hill and will pull over to let the engine cool. It can take half an hour or so for the heat to lift. Watt would also have had to cross the River Clyde. The test drive was done when ferries are frequent but the Renfrew Ferry is erratic at night. Realistically, the drive would have taken much longer than five hours.
The police start to doubt that Watt could be responsible.
But then more witnesses come forward.
A week after the discovery of the bodies in Fennsbank Avenue, nine men stand in a line-up in Rutherglen Police Station. William Watt is one of them. The Renfrew ferryman walks along the line-up, peering into faces, looking men up and down. To pick a person out of the line-up the witness must touch them and say, ‘This is the man.’ This rule was introduced to stop the cops choosing the identified party themselves. The Renfrew ferryman reaches forward and touches William Watt’s soft businessman’s hand, scratching it with his ragged calloused fingers. This is the man, he hisses, This is the man.