One of the jury men at the back yawns but sees Peter’s eye on him and falters. He shuts his mouth and looks embarrassed. Peter wonders why he’s embarrassed about yawning.
Next, he talks about the Watt murders. He tells the court he met Watt in Whitehall’s and Watt was so impressed by Peter that he invited him drinking. Watt admitted everything to him. He told Peter that he drove back from Cairnbaan overnight and killed his own family. He didn’t know his wife’s sister would be there, but she was, so he shot her too. He meant to tie up his daughter, not kill her. Watt just meant to tie her up and then she would get free the next morning by which time Watt would be back at the Cairnbaan Hotel and have an alibi. It doesn’t occur to Manuel that Vivienne Watt would recognise her own father while he tied her up. He says Watt told him that ‘things got out of hand’ and he killed her too. It took all of his strength not to turn the gun on himself after that. He does Watt that courtesy.
Later in their evening together, in the Gleniffer, Watt admitted that before he killed his family he had paid Charles Tallis five thousand pounds as part of an elaborate plan. Tallis was to break into the Watt house after the murders and ransack it, to make it look like a burglary, make it look as if the killer was in there for a long time to give Watt an alibi. Tallis was also supposed to take the gun Watt had left in the house and hide it. It doesn’t occur to Manuel that Watt could save five thousand pounds by messing his own house up and hiding his own gun. Manuel doesn’t address the fact that Charles Tallis had a cast-iron alibi, attested to by many witnesses. He just ignores that.
Jury members look at each other and shrug. They wonder why Lord Cameron is letting him say this stuff but Lord Cameron’s job is to ensure that Peter Manuel is heard fairly and thoroughly, not that he is dissuaded from talking utter shite.
Manuel continues: why did he know where the gun was? Well, the day after the murders Tallis came to Manuel’s house. He confided in Manuel and told him many details about the house, described the events and then, when Manuel was out of the room, planted the Webley in a dresser drawer. Manuel found the Webley later, while he was looking for string to wrap a parcel ‘for a girl who was in hospital’. He immediately knew Tallis had planted it and knew what the gun had been used for. So Manuel wrapped it in one of his sister’s gloves and threw it into the Clyde.
Laurence Dowdall approached Manuel and said he needed Manuel’s help to clear his guilty client, William Watt, and frame Charles Tallis for the murders. Even Manuel knows this needs explanation because Dowdall is a famously smart lawyer and unlikely to go about sharing incendiary information relating to a client with someone like Manuel. Dowdall was desperate though because, with Watt as his client, Dowdall would be in for a share of Watt’s wrongful imprisonment compensation payment, but they won’t get anything unless someone else is convicted of the Burnside murders. When Manuel refused to be involved Dowdall threatened him: if you don’t help us frame Tallis, then we will frame you.
Moving on to the Smart murders: Manuel tells everyone that he had been a friend of Mr Smart’s for a long time. Mr Smart had both respect and deference for Peter Manuel, because Peter helped him when he was building his house. Peter knows about gas piping.
Just before New Year Mr Smart asked Peter to help him buy an illegal gun. Prowlers had been seen in the area and he wanted to protect his family. The two men met in the Royal Oak on New Year’s Eve. When Manuel handed over the Beretta Mr Smart was so pleased that he gave Manuel fifteen pounds in brand-new, sequentially numbered notes. Then–oh!–Mr Smart remembered that a business associate, ‘Mr Brown’, was coming to call while the Smarts were away for New Year. Could Peter take this key to the family home and meet Mr Brown there and explain: Mr Smart isn’t here. Mr Smart will leave out a bottle of whisky for Peter to give to Mr Brown.
He skips the part of the story where he goes to midnight Mass with his mother on New Year’s Eve but suddenly, at half four in the morning, Peter Manuel is seeing ‘a girl home safely from a dance’. On the way home Peter remembered that he had a key to the Smarts’ house, that there was a bottle of whisky in there, so he just went in for another drink instead of going on to his own house. Jovially, he tells the jury that, although it was New Year, he was ‘not moroculous drunk’, just very drunk.
In the still bungalow, he found three bottles of whisky on the sideboard and a bottle of sherry. He had never seen that brand of sherry before: Romano Cabana. While drinking whisky he noticed that the house was in some disarray and it occurred to him that maybe the Smarts had not gone on holiday after all.
He went down the hall. He opened Michael Smart’s bedroom door and saw ‘someone in the bed’. He went to Mr and Mrs Smart’s bedroom and saw that they were asleep in bed. So he put on the lights. It was then that he saw blood everywhere. They were both dead and Mr Smart had the Beretta in his hand.
Manuel went and looked at the boy. He was dead too. Mr Smart had killed his son and his wife and then turned the gun on himself. Manuel describes the scene: ‘When you got to the bed and leaned over you could see blood on the wallpaper just on the far side of him and there was blood on the pillow.’
Realising that the gun was traceable to him, and not wanting to be implicated, Manuel got a pair of gloves and went around wiping his prints from anything he might have touched inside the house. He picked the gun up and wiped that too.
He looked at the dead couple. ‘Normally, you would just leave them there, but they looked so bare.’
So he tucked the covers up around their chins.
Then he made to leave but a ‘tiger’ cat was in the house and wouldn’t leave him alone. There was no milk in the house so he found a tin of Kitekat in the cupboard. Then he spotted the tin of salmon and thought, well, no one else here is going to eat that now. So he gave the cat the salmon. Then he took the Smarts’ car and drove off and dropped the Beretta in the Clyde, by the suspension bridge, in the same place he hid the Webley for Tallis. That’s why he was able to tell the cops where the guns were.
DI Goodall and DI McNeill are sitting in the court, waiting for the front page of the Daily Record to feature, but it never comes up. Manuel lies like a child, adding bits on, making narrative addendums when he realises that his story makes no sense–and then–and then–and then. He is spinning lies and then abandoning them. He’s halfway through a lie when he switches back, or forgets.
He doesn’t shape the story, seed the characters earlier and bring them on to behave consistently. New people who have never been mentioned before appear, cause life-changing events and then evaporate. Some characters even have placeholder names: ‘Mr Brown’, ‘a girl in hospital’.
In Manuel’s stories everyone is acting out of character.
The police are dumb.
Everyone confides in Peter.