‘But then he’s heard the girl. She’s in another room. So he’s left the two women bleeding and gone down the hall to the girl’s bedroom door. She’s opened the door and his face is just there and–“Oh!” She’s jumped back into the room. Must have been asleep. Her eyes are all puffy, like. Now–now, he is not a cruel man, this man I’m talking about. This man. He is not a cruel man. He doesn’t want to hurt a young girl.’
As Dowdall listens to this he rubs the ripped inside of his cheek against his teeth again and again, feeling the dull throb of raw skin. Dowdall knows about Manuel’s rape charges. The rapes stretch back to the age of fourteen. He broke out of Catholic approved school and attacked a staff member’s wife in her home. Manuel has a thing about the women’s heads. He goes for the head. Always for their head. He bludgeons, punches the head, threatens the head. I will cut your fucking head off and bury it out here, he told one victim, ten years into his career as a rapist, Your kids will be walking out here, walking across your head on their way to school and they’ll not even know. She promised not to report him if he let her go but she went straight to the police. Manuel wasn’t convicted of that rape. He defended himself in court and the jury found the case Not Proven. Manuel thinks he did a good job in court but, really, Dowdall knows it was just a jury of women. Glasgow juries, especially women jurors, don’t believe that rape really happens. They think slutty girls get raped, claim rape, cry rape to cover their own sins. The lady he threatened to decapitate had taken the bus home from work and crossed a dark lane. He grabbed her hair and dragged her down a railway embankment, broke her dentures with a punch. The jury found the case Not Proven. They weren’t told about Manuel’s other conviction, a rape on the same embankment seven years before, a three-year-old boy left screaming on the path, watching his mother dragged away down the same slope into dark fields. Manuel got six years in Peterhead for that one. Dowdall is thinking about these women as Manuel continues the story of the man who is not him.
‘He didn’t want to hurt a young girl so he gives her a knockout punch on the jaw. She fell on the floor. KO. Now he didn’t know what to do, but he’s hungry so he’s went into the kitchen, a wee galley kitchen, yellow Formica worktops and cupboards along the wall and he fixed hisself a wee something to eat, just a wee sandwich with gammon. Good gammon too, off the bone, not in jelly from a tin. He’s in a fix, see? Because the kid, she’s seen his face. So, he’s in the front room, eating his wee sandwich, when he hears a noise from the first bedroom, the one with the two women in it.’
Manuel’s story speeds from a trot to a gallop. Faster and faster he tells it. ‘The woman in the first bed wasn’t dead. She was kinda gurgling, like a wet cough sort of a thing, so he shot her again. He’d no sooner done that and went back and nearly finished eating the sandwich when he heard the girl again. She’s woke up. She’s cried out. He went back in there and he shot her too and she fell in a corner. Then he stood there and smoked a couple of fags. He went into the front room and he took a swig of gin from the bottle on the dresser. Mascaró Dry Gin.’
Dowdall is damp with sweat and his cheek is swelling on the inside.
‘One might wonder though,’ says Dowdall quietly, ‘if it was this other man, and not you, how it is that you know so many details?’
Manuel reaches across to him and it is all Dowdall can do not to slap his hand away.
‘Oh, see, this man?’ breezes Manuel. ‘He’s came to me, just after, the morning after and–’
Manuel stops. He stops for too long, staring at the tabletop. Neither happy nor sad. He just stares at the tabletop. And then he’s back.
‘–He’s destroyed by what he’s done. He’s like this–’ Manuel trembles his hands at Dowdall.
‘–In the horrors. “Hide this gun for me,” he says. So I took it. And I hid it. And I can get it again.’
The gun has never been found. Manuel is offering a piece of concrete, physical evidence that could prove Mr Watt is innocent. Dowdall stands in the mouth of a trap. Manuel sees it.
Manuel sits back in his chair and slowly trails his hands along the tabletop, damp palms making a scumbled shriek that fills the room.
‘Can you describe this gun?’
Manuel smirks. ‘I’ll go one better, I’ll draw it.’
Dowdall gives him paper and a pencil and he does draw it. The trap springs tight around Dowdall. The teeth are so sharp he doesn’t even feel them sinking in.
It is quite a good drawing of a Webley revolver. Manuel is proud of his drawing. Dowdall senses this and compliments him. ‘You’re a very able artist.’
Manuel shrugs. He already knows that.
‘May I take this drawing?’
Manuel seems flattered. ‘Sure, why not.’
Dowdall slips the drawing in among his papers. He can’t legally take away any communications by a prisoner unless he is their lawyer.
‘Thank you, Mr Manuel.’
Dowdall stands up to leave.
‘Did you put in my bail application, then?’ Manuel’s eyes slide from the papers to Dowdall and a sly smile creeps across his face.
Dowdall freezes. He is not here about the hopeless bail application Manuel raised at their previous meeting. They both know Manuel isn’t getting bail. The breakins he is convicted of had his signature all over them: food half eaten and dropped, ground into rugs with his heel, liquor drunk from bottles. The bail application was pointless and Manuel is familiar enough with the law to know that. But if Dowdall answers Manuel’s question this becomes a client/lawyer interview. Legally, Dowdall will not be able to repeat what Manuel has just told him. However, he will be able to take the drawing of the gun out of the prison perfectly legally.
Dowdall senses that Manuel fully understands the position he has put him in. The point of the bail application was never the bail itself but putting Dowdall in this quandary. Manuel has done this deliberately.
Thrown, for possibly the first time in his life, Dowdall picks up his papers. He means to say ‘I am not here about that’. He thinks to say ‘We will discuss this another time’. But his mouth disobeys him.
‘Yes.’
Shocked at himself, he turns and walks out.
Dowdall doesn’t tell this part in court. This part makes all of his testimony invalid. This part makes him a bad lawyer who betrays his clients and should not be allowed to practise. Instead, he tells the court that he left the meeting and immediately endeavoured to confirm the veracity of the information imparted by Mr Manuel at that second meeting.
‘And is this the drawing of the gun Mr Manuel gave you at that interview?’
M.G. Gillies hands a sheet of paper labelled ‘Crown Production 41’ up to the witness dock.
Dowdall looks at it. ‘Yes. That is the drawing of the Webley that Peter Manuel gave to me.’
‘And is this the type of gun that was used to kill Mrs Watt, Vivienne Watt and Mrs Brown?’
They all know it is. The actual Webley is sitting right there, in front of them, on the evidence table.
‘So I understand,’ says Dowdall, adding, ‘And it has a particularity. You will notice that the lanyard ring is missing in the sketch and on the actual gun.’
‘The lanyard ring at the bottom of the handle?’