Left alone with the cops, in penitent mood, Manuel is taken to Barlinnie and checked in.
Goodall, Muncie and McNeill are there with him at the reception bar. It is five thirty in the morning and they can almost smell their pillows.
They stand in a companionable silence. Manuel is handing over the contents of his pockets. Loose change. A handkerchief. The Sirs will be pleased. There has been criticism of the force in the newspapers–angry demands for them to catch the killers. It is personal: Muncie and Goodall are named and pictured in the papers as the men who have failed to stop this.
They’re too tired to talk and too afraid to go home.
Goodall has been investigating this Smart case for eight solid days with little sleep. He notes his exhaustion in every limb, his shallowness of breath, his laboured heartbeat. He looks across the room and sees a prison guard sitting at a desk, reading the Daily Record.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaims.
The front page of the paper has every murder Manuel confessed to. Every detail on the front page is mentioned in his confession. The handbag full of stones. The barbed wire. The tin of salmon.
It would produce a reasonable doubt in anyone’s mind if the newspaper is produced in court.
Has Manuel pulled off a stroke of genius? Have those Masonic idiots in South Lanarkshire used Manuel’s confession to mop up every single unsolved case on their books?
He confronts Muncie–are you jeopardising this collar for your own career advancement? Certainly not, smirks Muncie. You have a very suspicious mind there, Goodall, my man.
Goodall doesn’t give a flying fuck for these games. We need more against the man, he says and Muncie sees that he is serious. Muncie makes them give Manuel his shoes back, his jacket back.
‘Put them on,’ Muncie tells him. ‘There’s one thing left to do. Tell us where Isabelle Cooke is buried.’
Manuel says, ‘I can’t. I don’t know where it is.’
The room holds its breath as Goodall asks, ‘Why not?’
Manuel smiles up at them. ‘I am tired and I am cold,’ he says.
‘Cuff the bastard,’ barks Muncie. ‘Get the cars. We’re going out to Burntbroom. He’ll walk us to her.’
Chill January wind rages across flat black fields. Spiteful rain stings their faces. A ring of eight officers stand around them in case Manuel tries to run.
‘Where now?’ shouts Muncie.
By Muncie’s account Manuel takes them straight to a hole and says he nearly buried Isabelle here but a man came along on a bike and interrupted them.
The group walk together for half a mile and Manuel stops. He bends down and moves a brick out of the way and one of her dancing shoes is exposed.
They walk on. They stop. Manuel says, ‘I think I’m standing on her.’
Goodall and Muncie take him back to Barlinnie with an escort of four officers. They leave the other four at the site and send out a team of diggers. By the time they get back to the station the diggers have sent word: Isabelle Cooke has been found. Manuel had been standing on her.
They lock him in a cell and he falls asleep immediately.
19
Tuesday 27 May 1958
WILLIAM WATT IS IN the witness hall, waiting to be called back into court. It is morning. He hasn’t been able to eat since he heard he would have to appear again and be questioned by Manuel. He smokes a couple of the courtesy cigarettes provided by the court but they’re not his brand and they make him feel sick. He drinks a lot of water to wash the taste away. Then he just sits, slumped, in the painful, muffled silence and wishes he was dead. Dowdall hasn’t even briefed him for this court appearance. There is no point. Anything could happen. Dowdall has reassured him: the jury can’t bring themselves to look straight at Manuel, Dowdall thinks that means Peter will hang. It’s a sure sign. The verdict is the least of William’s worries. Dowdall doesn’t know that.
It has been a week and a half since the car crash and Watt’s last appearance. He is on a single crutch now. At Dowdall’s insistence, for the benefit of the drink-driving charge, he hasn’t had a drink since. Watt cannot believe how joyless his life is without drink. Everything is grey and frightening and awful. And now this.
Manuel can ask Watt about anything. Any single thing about Watt’s entire life. Watt’s mind flips through a Wheeldex of secret, awful shames spanning his life from early childhood to the present. These are memories of falling, spilling, dropping, losing, failing, failing, foolish. It is not a good way to prepare for an interview of any kind. He draws back and balances those recollections: winning, winning, bettering others, having, winning, getting.
The door opens and the Macer’s face appears. ‘Mr Watt?’
William stands up and promises himself drink tonight. Whisky. Amber glinting, good and plentiful, imbibed alone, until he passes out. This gives him the luxury of distance, he is removed, just enough, from this humiliation. It is half bearable. He could walk through fire and walls to get past this to a night on the drink. He takes the steps down into the court one at a time, using his crutch expertly.
Watt can see women looking down from the public gallery. They’re not watching Watt hobble in on his crutch, though. They are watching Peter Manuel. He is sitting at the solicitors’ table, absent-mindedly playing with a pen. Watt takes another step and glances over to the jury. They are looking at Manuel too. Dowdall said they weren’t looking at him but they are looking at him. In the lower stalls, among the journalists and lawyers, Dandy McKay and Maurice Dickov sit in the front row. They deliberately catch his eye as he passes. Careful, their faces warn.
Nothing is going to be all right. Nothing is going to be all right. Dickov will get angry. Mrs Manuel will die and then Watt will be the only loose thread left.
As William Watt gets sworn in again his hands and feet are cold. He feels faint, doesn’t even trust the walls of the room to do what they’re supposed to. He imagines the balcony sliding forward and guillotining everyone.
Manuel is standing at Harald Leslie’s place, at a table in the well of the court. He has stacks of papers in front of him. He looks smart and able and plausible and the jury are looking at him.
Lord Cameron clears his throat and speaks directly to Peter.
‘Now, Manuel,’ he booms in his sonorous voice, ‘you wanted to ask questions as to certain matters which, according to you, passed at the meeting which you had with Mr Watt but were not put in court by your counsel?’
‘Yes, My Lord.’
This is the first time Watt has heard Manuel speak in court. His voice is clear and confident.
‘All right, now,’ continues Cameron sternly, ‘that is the limit of the questioning.’