As the Bible withdraws she glances up at the public gallery, sees the faces of the watching women. Brigit recognises the expression. She is used to being pitied. She has thought and prayed about it a lot. She thinks pity isn’t really about the recipient, the only thing it is eloquent about is the giver, but it still stings.
Both of Brigit’s sons have been in prison. Her husband was expelled in disgrace from the local council when the police caught him watching women through bathroom windows. Now her son may hang for murdering women and girls and children. If God is testing her this must be her Gethsemane. But God has not called her here. Her son has called her here. She flinches from the realisation, looks up again at the pitying faces and thinks: they’re all Protestants and bound for hell anyway, so who are they to pity her?
No. Dear Lord. The sin of pride. She thinks truncated, familiar prayers asking God to grant her the grace of humility, grant forgiveness, grant acceptance. Thy will be done.
Peter is standing in the court, looking up at her. He looks well and healthy and confident. His hair is immaculately swept back covering the tiny bald spot on his crown he worries about so much. His sports jackets and shirt and tie and slacks are nicely pressed. His face is clean-shaven. Very formally, and in just the right sort of language, he asks his mother to identify herself by name and address and she does.
‘I believe,’ he says, ‘you are also my mother?’ He flashes her a wry smile. It is about nothing and for nothing and asking nothing. A fond, wry smile.
Brigit smiles back. ‘I am,’ she says softly.
Peter and Brigit look at each other, both think of St Peter denying Christ three times. Or rather Brigit thinks of that and Peter knows she is thinking of it. He always knows what she is thinking of. It’s one of the things he loves about his mother, her predictability, the signs and signifiers, her clarity.
Taking the confessions from the productions table, Peter shows her the signature on each of them and asks his mother to compare them. ‘Do these look like my signature?’
No, she says, they don’t look like his signature.
Peter tries to make her say that he couldn’t have signed them but she can’t lie. She’s under oath. She frowns at the papers. She says his writing is usually very neat and in this particular one the signature goes over the line. That’s unusual for him. He stays inside the lines.
He smiles at her. His writing is very neat, he likes his writing.
‘Does anything strike you about the variations in the form of the signature? “P.T. Manuel”, “Peter Anthony Manuel” and so on? Would you say they are the signature of the same man?’
She knows what he is trying to make her say but she can’t. She holds his eye and tilts her head softly and says she has no way of knowing that.
‘Could a policeman have signed these instead of me?’
Brigit wants to say the police are to blame but that isn’t true.
‘I don’t believe they could have,’ she says quietly, ‘I’m not sure they’d know your confirmation name is Anthony.’
Manuel flinches and changes the subject. He asks her about times of alibis and she remembers nothing. He goes into a lot of detail and she says over and over that she doesn’t remember what happened on the evening of Monday the 2nd of January two years ago.
He is deflecting. He doesn’t want to discuss his fraught relationship with the Church but knows that his mother does. He certainly doesn’t want his confirmation name discussed in court. Confirmation is a sacrament for Catholic children. No one in the Lanarkshire Police is Catholic, they’re unfamiliar with the naming convention. Catholic children choose a saint’s name for themselves, a saint they hope to emulate, or for whom they feel a special devotion. Peter Manuel was ten when he chose St Anthony, the patron saint of lost people. Two years later he was convicted of stealing a collection box from a Catholic chapel, a crime against the Church. The court sent him away to a Catholic approved school run by the De La Salle order. Manuel went in a petty thief who committed troubling offences against the Church and came out a rapist. He was so disruptive there that he was transferred to Hollesley Bay Borstal. Throughout his life Manuel’s relationship with the Church is intense and defiant. He will not talk to priests or go to confession. He commits many of his worst offences after attending mass.
On the stand Brigit does remember one particular detail though and swells with pride at the telling: Peter attended midnight Mass last New Year’s Eve with her and his father. They came back to the house and had a sing-song. Then everyone fell asleep and the Smart murders happened.
Peter doesn’t want to discuss his confirmation name in court, or his relationship with the Catholic Church.
He moves on to asking his mother about the morning he was arrested. She says that when the policemen, ‘gentlemen’ she calls them, arrived at the house with the warrant, Peter was asleep in the bed chair in the living room. They arrested him. The next time she saw him was two nights later, when she was called into Hamilton Police Station to see him. Peter asks if she could tell them about that night?
Brigit says that Detective Superintendent Brown and another policeman arrived at her house at two thirty in the morning. No, she wasn’t in bed. She was awake. She couldn’t sleep. She was drinking tea and trying to say the novena to St Anthony. Day two of the novena: O holy St Anthony, gentlest of saints, the answer to my prayer may require a miracle.
Mr Brown asked her to come with them to the police station and see her son; Peter had something to tell her. When she got into the police car her husband, Samuel, had already been picked up from Barlinnie where he was being held for the night on the charge of having the gloves from the housebreaking. He was handcuffed and surprised to see her. He looked exhausted. He asked if they had arrested her too? No, she said, no, Samuel, we’re going to see Peter, he has asked to speak to us together.
Brigit and Samuel are driven to Hamilton Police Station. Outside, a mob has formed despite the hour. Mostly the public, coats over nighties and warm boots, but also journalists, eager for scraps of information to call in for the second or third edition. The car is driven round the back and they are taken through the back door to the station lobby.
The hallway stills as they walk in. Everyone has stopped moving. They are ushered to the bottom of a big staircase and Brigit looks up. Uniformed police officers line the stairs, two or three on each step. They are all staring at Brigit and Samuel. They’ve gathered here to look at them.
Samuel shouts up at the police officers on the stairs: this is mistreatment. He will write to his MP about this, make no mistake. Brigit can hardly look at him. He’s making things worse.