Professor Allison smiles a little and nods, letting M.G. Gillies know that he is saying ‘crutch’ deliberately, because of all the women listening. He expects the advocate-depute to be pleased at his delicacy but M.G. Gillies is of a different generation. Gillies was in the Royal Artillery. He was evacuated from France in 1940, went back with the Allied invasion of Italy and fought on for two more brutal years. He knows there are worse things in the world than directly referencing a woman’s crotch, but he enjoys Professor Allison’s conviction that there isn’t. It is sweet and naive, so much of a gentler time that he envies it. Gillies moves on to ask about Anne Kneilands.
Anne Kneilands is an older case. A bludgeoning as opposed to asphyxiation, says Professor Allison. Her head was battered and ‘human debris’ was found as far as ten feet away. Yes, Allison smiles and nods, indeed, an awful lot of force would be required to break through the human skull and spread the contents so widely over the golf course. Really, an awful lot of force. This piece of angle iron was found at the scene and is a remarkably good fit to the wounds.
To illustrate, he is given Anne Kneilands’ skull and the angle iron. The skull has an oblong hole smashed in the back. Professor Allison turns the iron lump in his hand, fits it into the matching hole in the skull and smiles triumphantly up at the court. His pragmatic face says, See? See what I did?
The angle iron is ‘devoid of human debris’ though because it was found in a burn.
Professor Allison is furnishing the court with the cold scientific facts but they have the narrative too. Manuel signed a detailed confession.
This is Manuel’s story:
Anne is in East Kilbride, waiting for the bus home, when a man walks out of the dark. She calls out to him: Tommy? No, he says, I’m not Tommy. My name is Peter. He joins her at the bus stop. Has the number 70 has been yet? She says no and they fall to talking. She tells him she’s just been stood up by a soldier she met at a dance last week. She’s fed up.
Auch, never mind, he says, that happens to everyone.
Does it?
Aye, everyone gets dizzied sometimes. People miss buses, forget or run out of dough to get where they need to be.
Well, she feels like a fool.
Never mind, he says, don’t take it so serious. What age are you?
Seventeen, she says.
You’re young, he says. Don’t take it so serious.
When her bus comes he gets on too, though it’s going a different way than the 70. They don’t sit together, he sits a few seats behind her, but four stops later he gets off when she does.
Oh, are you getting off here too?
Yes.
They’re pals by then.
Well, I’m off this way, she says, and remembers her manners–Nice to meet you.
He looks over the golf course.
It’s a bit dark for a girl alone, he says, I’ll walk you over.
There’s no need, says Anne, I go this way all the time, it’s quite safe.
He flattens a hand to his chest, stands tall and formal, mocking himself a little. I couldn’t possibly let you.
So he walks her across the fields towards her house. They climb a stile and walk onto the dark golf course. Anne screams and claws at his face, scratching three long welts in his left cheek. No, he doesn’t know why she did that, it sort of came out of nowhere. Then she runs away from him. He runs after her, across mud, across grass, following her panicking shadow. She is swallowed by the earth.
He catches up to where she disappeared. She has fallen down the dyke, the one by the burn. It’s very steep, about a seven-foot drop, and he can see the slide marks in the muddy banks where she went down. She’s lost a kitten-heel shoe. The heel is stuck in the muddy bank. He looks down the dyke and sees her running along it. She gets out the other side and runs to a wooded area. He gets down the dyke and follows, climbs out and sees a copse of woods. She is gone but not gone. She is hiding. He knows she is. He slides behind a tree and stills. He waits, breathless, listening.
Two small animals hide in the dark. They wait for five minutes. It’s a long time to stand still in the cold, alert to only one other person in the world, listening for a breath or a step or a shift of weight. It’s intimate.
A branch moves somewhere nearby. He can hear her stand up. A step, a twig snapping, she creeps out of a bush. She looks around, shoulders hunched, scanning the open ground, looking for him.
He lets her take a few steps into the open. He lets her shoulders drop, lets her look to the lights of the road. He lets her hope. Then he runs out.
She is screaming quite loud and runs through the undergrowth and doesn’t see the discarded barbed wire until she is stuck on it. She is pulling and he watches. She sees him watching and screams. He wants her to stop screaming but she doesn’t. He picks up a bit of metal from the ground and hits her head with it. Yes, it was a few times. By the tree in the undergrowth. Quite a few times. He had to hit hard to stop the screaming.
She stops screaming. She is stuck on the rusty roll of barbed wire. He looks at her for a while. The metal thing is heavy in his hand, dragging his shoulder down, making his neck ache, but he doesn’t let go. It gets too much for him and he drops it to the ground and it rolls down the bank and into the burn. He realises what he has done and where they are. He smokes some cigarettes.
He turns away and walks the mile across raw December fields to a Gas Board work shed. He knew it was there because he was working for the Gas Board then, up at East Kilbride. He changed his boots in the shed, they had blood all over them. Then he walked the eight miles home to Birkenshaw.
Manuel has made three different confessions, on the same night in Hamilton Police Station, just after Dandy McKay beat him up in front of eight officers. The confessions are typed by cops and then signed by Peter Manuel. The confessions are given to Detective Inspector Robert McNeill of Glasgow, and to Chief Inspector William Muncie, the South Lanarkshire cop who hates Manuel more than anyone else in the world. Muncie has been pursuing Manuel for twelve years, since he first arrested him for housebreaking and sexual assault. Muncie always gets his man. His career covers fifty-four murder inquiries. ‘Incredibly, every one was solved,’ it says in his own memoir. That is incredible.
Manuel’s first confession is a promise to help with certain matters.
His second confession is a promise to help them solve the murders of Anne Kneilands, Isabelle Cooke, the Watts and the Smarts.
His third is many pages long. It is a detailed narrative account of the things he has done.
Isabelle Cooke: Just over the bridge at Burntbroom I met a girl walking. I dragged her into a field. I made her watch as I put stones in her handbag and threw it into a burn. I walked her into the dark. She started to scream. I tore off her clothes and tied something round her neck and choked her. I picked her up and took her to a field. I started to dig a hole but a man cycled past on the path and he stopped to see what I was doing. I waited until he was gone and then moved her over to a darker place and I buried her.
The description of the Watt murders tells how Manuel crept along the dark street and approached the house. How he smashed the window and slid his hand in to open the door. How quiet it was and about the picture of the dog and chiffonnier and the Mascaró Dry Gin and the sandwich. And the women: pop pop. Pop. Pop.