Hamilton is shown the gun from the productions table but he isn’t sure if it is the same gun. That one looks bigger than the one he had. M.G. Gillies points out that Webley revolvers really only come in the one size. Well, Hamilton really doesn’t know, he can’t say for sure.
He can’t even identify Manuel. Hamilton touches his heart and says that he couldn’t, in all good conscience, say which person in this court is Manuel. Now no one believes him. M.G. Gillies feels honour-bound to point out that they all know he is lying:
‘You drank with him for two hours, met him again the next day and gave him a gun but you can’t recognise him in court?’
‘Well, he was sitting in the back seat of the car, Your Worship, and I’ve an awful bad memory for faces.’
By contrast with Hamilton, Scout O’Neil is a beautiful liar. His balletic style is a privilege to witness. Sometimes he engages the court in astonishing feats of slippery logic, at other times he is simply charm incarnate.
M.G. Gillies wants the jury to know that O’Neil keeps changing his version of events and can’t be trusted. He can’t introduce all the conflicting versions into evidence without creating a distracting trial-within-a-trial, so instead he asks, ‘Mr O’Neil, this story you are telling the court, is this the story you have always told about this incident?’
Scout shrugs innocently. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s certainly the story I am telling here today.’
Scout looks clean and tidy on the stand. He doesn’t have any blood on his face or sleeve, but still, you wouldn’t let your sister leave a dance with him. He has an air of cheeky mischief, speaks in the colloquial and has a way of talking and smiling that hide his teeth, which are very bad.
Asked by Harald Leslie if he is in the habit of getting guns for people like Mr Manuel, Scout says, ‘I don’t think so,’ as if he has just met himself and isn’t quite sure.
The public snicker at that, showing Scout that they are in on the joke. This annoys Harald Leslie and he snaps, ‘Mr O’Neil! Will you please just answer with “yes” or “no”.’
Scout thinks about it for a moment then says ‘No’, compliant and defiant all at once. The public and jury laugh again and Scout smiles, showing off a set of teeth as craggy as an eight-year-old’s.
Scout O’Neil is a likeable man. As a child he realised that being charming made hitting stop. He made his mother laugh like none of the other children. He made his daddy smile, drunk or sober, angry or angry. Scout was never leathered like the others. Mrs O’Neil’s other children are good-living and God-fearing. Scout O’Neil is not now, nor has he ever been, either.
People like to think Scout says something about Glasgow, that Glasgow is like him or he is like Glasgow. Gallus and roguish. Lovable but rough. But they’re flattering the city because Scout is like Scout and that’s all.
O’Neil tells a vivid story about the Webley, so damning and detailed that everyone knows it can only be half true, but it’s a great story, well told and told by Scout O’Neil.
Scout met Manuel and Hamilton outside the Gordon Club on the Sunday and drove them to Florence Street. Scout stayed in the car. When Manuel and Hamilton came back out of the close they stood in the street for a minute, Hamilton saying he was going for a shave, kind of rubbing his chin and that, and Manuel holding a paper bag. Then Manuel looks back at O’Neil sitting in the car, and he grins and he makes a kind of a gun shape with his hand, like a kid, know?
To illustrate this Scout makes a gun with his hand. And he sort of puffs his lips out, like as if he was firing a gun, like this: p-tyaw! O’Neil shoots Lord Cameron with his fingers. When the public galleries laugh, Scout grins and shoots M.G. Gillies as well, p-tyaw! Then he blows the smoke from the end of the finger-barrel and slips the gun into an imaginary holster.
M.G. Gillies says wryly, yes, he thinks they know what Mr O’Neil means.
Scout continues with his story.
As if all of this weren’t damning enough, Manuel then got back into the car and shut the door. He opened the paper bag and showed the contents to O’Neil for no reason at all: there was a Webley revolver in the bag. Plus a matchbox with six or seven bullets in it. Yes, it was that gun, yes. Manuel had it. Seven days before the Watt murders, yes. He had that gun. Yes, I can see him in court today. That is Peter Manuel over there.
Scout points over at Manuel. Then he smiles and Manuel smiles back. As a reflex, O’Neil gives Manuel a cheery wee wave with his accusing hand. It’s all Manuel can do not to wave back.
William Grieve asks how Scout came to tell the police about Manuel getting the gun?
‘William Watt’s asked us to go and tell the police about what happened.’
Grieve addresses the jury but finds they are all looking at Scout. ‘Mr Watt approached you and took you to the police to tell this story?’
‘Yup.’
Grieve raises an arm to the side, trying hard to draw the jury’s eye to him, to get them to stop listening to these blatant lies. ‘But why did you do what he asked, Mr O’Neil?’
Still none of the jury are looking at him. They’re watching Scout and they are all grinning.
‘Well,’ Scout says solemnly, ‘it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?’
Everyone in this room knows that Scout O’Neil is not a man invariably compelled to do the right thing. As if he can hear their doubts, Scout grins and holds beseeching hands up out to the public galleries,
‘Isn’t it, though? The right thing?’ Then he gives a deep rumbling belly laugh and everyone in the courtroom laughs too.
Grieve recognises that O’Neil has the room, and he has no control of him. There is a distinct danger of Scout bursting into song so he says, ‘Mr O’Neil, you may get down.’
The court watches Scout walk down the stairs, sorry to see him leave.
When he was arrested Manuel gave the police a detailed account of how he bought the Webley: he got it from a stranger in the Mercat Bar at Glasgow Cross, paid a fiver, left immediately.
It is lunchtime and they haven’t started tracing the provenance of the Beretta.
Manuel is taken down to the cells where his lunch is waiting. Bread and cheese are provided for all the prisoners on trial. Manuel has chosen to pay extra and get the salmon salad provided by the court for the QCs.
12
Tuesday 3 December 1957
SITE OF BIRTHS, DEATHS and marriages, Townhead is the highest point in the old city. The Royal Infirmary looms across the road, black as the devil and ten storeys high. Squatting behind it is the medieval cathedral and then the sharp high hills of the Necropolis.
The Cot Bar is on a sharp corner at Townhead. It is a filthy place. By an unhappy accident of aerodynamics, litter and dust and ash are swept downhill, around corners, over streets, and deposited against the side wall. Gang slogans are scratched into the dirt. This is Cody gang territory so the tags are mostly theirs (CODY = Come On, Die Young).