In court Watt admits that he was picked out by the ferryman as having been on the 3 a.m. Renfrew Ferry on the night in question. He says he doesn’t understand how the man could have picked him out when he wasn’t even there.
The ferryman also picked out the Vauxhall Velox in the Rutherglen Police Station car park. He identified Queenie from a pack of eight dogs. But he is a bad witness in court. He keeps calling the car ‘the Wolseley’, which is a very different-looking car from a Vauxhall. He comes over as an attention-seeker who obsessively contacts the police. He’s never off the phone to the police about ‘suspicious passengers’. He has a history of noting down the registration numbers of all the cars on the ferry but didn’t do it that night because, he says, it wasn’t his shift, he was covering for a friend.
The second witness swears he saw Watt parked on Loch Lomond side at a quarter past two on the morning of the murders. He was driving his wife when he saw a car hurtling towards him. The lights switched off suddenly, and the car pulled up. He passed it and saw a lone driver, smoking a cigarette. The witness admits in court that he didn’t see the driver’s face but picked Watt out of a line-up of thirty because the driver was smoking his cigarette in a particular way: his index finger was curled over the top, as one might smoke a pipe. In the identification parade he asked all thirty gentlemen to mime smoking a cigarette and picked Watt out on the basis of the gesture.
Watt tells the court about being arrested for the murders.
Because his photograph has been published in all of the papers witnesses have no trouble identifying him. Neither do the other prisoners in Barlinnie. As Watt is walked to his cell they gather on the landings and chant his name. Because Watt owns a string of bakery shops, one wit shouts ‘One killer, one scone’ and everyone laughs at him. The meaner men shout that he’ll hang. The place smells of shit and piss left in buckets overnight.
Mr Watt is in Barlinnie for sixty-seven days until he changes lawyer. Dowdall gets him out. The evidence is thin, but the police never stop believing he is responsible. They follow him everywhere. They question all his business contacts. They park outside his residence and businesses. They continue to interview people about him. Watt finds out that they are not looking for anyone else.
Watt tells the court that he felt it was up to him to ‘turn detective’ and solve the case himself. He let it be known through Mr Dowdall and his own contacts in the underworld that he was seeking information about the Burnside Affair. He would be receptive to any and all information on the matter and was willing to travel or meet anyone who might help.
‘Before this meeting with Mr Manuel you had accompanied Mr “Scout” O’Neil to the police station in Rutherglen?’
‘Yes. I had occasion to meet with Mr O’Neil. He knew I was seeking information about this affair. He informed me that just a few days before the Burnside murders he had sold a Webley revolver to Mr Peter Manuel, the very man I had been hearing so much about.’
‘What did you do when Mr O’Neil told you this?’
‘I took Mr O’Neil to Rutherglen Police Station at once so that he might make a statement to that effect.’
‘And what did this information lead the police to do?’
Mr Watt looks older suddenly. ‘Nothing,’ he says quietly.
Lord Cameron asks him to speak up.
Mr Watt raises his face to the court. ‘The police did nothing with this information. Nor any subsequent information I brought them relating to the murders. It was after I took Mr O’Neil to the station, with this sensational information about which they did nothing at all, that I realised I had to crack the case myself.’
‘You found the man who sold your suspected killer the gun, you took that man to the police, and they did nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
M.G. Gillies asks kindly, ‘You must have felt terribly discouraged?’ It’s a prompt for Watt to tell the court about his painful experiences.
‘Certainly not!’ declares Watt bumptiously. ‘Never that!’
M.G. Gillies sags a little, fiddling with his notes. He tries again. ‘Six months after Mr O’Neil went to the police with you, you finally met Mr Manuel face-to-face, in early December 1957, in Whitehall’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘Though you were by now convinced that Manuel had killed your family, you were willing to spend an entire evening in his company?’
‘What other option did I have? The police were certain I was responsible. Somebody had to do something. Find something.’ Watt pauses for a breath. ‘The police did nothing but follow me around all the time. Every time I had a business meeting they would turn up the next day and question everyone from the merest janitor to my business contemporaries. It was–’ he fumbles for a word that isn’t ‘embarrassing’ because it is bigger than that–‘awful.’
And now he breaks down. Crying at the wrong time. A full-grown man, bubbling about foiled business opportunities when he could have cried for his murdered family and made them like him.
It’s an uncomfortable moment. The lawyers look away. The public pass bags of sweeties, blow noses and rearrange the coats on their knees. The doctor steps forward and takes Watt’s pulse.
Watt has obviously been coached in his evidence, as have many of the witnesses. Startling to a modern reader is the frequency with which witnesses ask lawyers if they should say this bit now, or interrupt their own evidence to point out that the prosecution has forgotten to prompt them into a bit of the story that they’ve practised together.
A good liar can be taught to spontaneously repeat statements ad nauseam. Honest witnesses often seem disingenuous after coaching.
The doctor nods to Lord Cameron, indicating that, in his professional opinion, Mr Watt is not dead or dying. Just to be certain, Lord Cameron commands that Watt be given a glass of water.
Mr Watt drinks it dutifully, like a child. He drinks all of it. He catches his breath and the doctor steps away.
M.G. Gillies continues. ‘So, your investigations led you to arrange a meeting with Mr Manuel?’
‘No,’ Watt corrects him. ‘He arranged a meeting with me. He sought me out through Mr Dowdall. They arranged the meeting between them but I was very keen to meet him.’
‘Why so?’
‘From my investigations I had become convinced that Peter Manuel had killed my family.’
‘And you were convinced of this at the time that you met him?’
‘Utterly. I met him to ascertain what I could. Mr Dowdall informed me that Manuel knew where the gun was and I was trying to get that for the police. I thought if I could get him to give them the gun it would be something real, a physical thing that would prove it wasn’t me.’
‘And you spent the entire night with him?’
Watt nods adamantly. ‘Until six in the morning. Until I dropped him off at his parents’ house in Birkenshaw.’
Gillies says this very slowly: ‘Mr Watt. With the benefit of hindsight, do you think you should have met and spent all this time with him?’