Manuel by Allan Nicol

Author:Allan Nicol [Nicol, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781845025564
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2012-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

If Manuel had allowed his legal team to finish the job, presumably the jury would have been addressed by both Leslie and Grieve, and it seems likely that Grieve would have been able to capitalise on the general unease surrounding Watt’s position.

In the aftermath of the murders, his well-publicised activities might not have appeared as those of a man seeking the truth, but as those of a desperate man trying to offload the blame; he agreed that he had told Mrs Collison that he thought he knew who had really done it.

On the basis that it was someone ‘in the family’, he said he suspected his brother-in-law had committed the murders – a theory, it has to be said, as ill-fitting as the one implicating Watt himself.

As for Watt agreeing with Sergeant Mitchell’s view that he was a man ‘with a smirk and without a tear’, Watt replied that that was ‘an absolute invention and quite like Mitchell too’.

What prompted the famous retort of ‘What a profession!’ was Grieve’s proposition that he was able to inform the brother-in-law he had suspected of being the culprit, that his wife Margaret had ‘got it first’, the suggestion being that Watt knew this as the murderer. Watt said it was a lie that he had ever said that ‘Margaret had got it first.’

It would be fair to say that, overall, he appears to have been able to offer a reasonable if not fully convincing explanation for meeting the man who had murdered his family. Amongst other things, he said that when he was in prison, he had heard what sort of madman Manuel was and that when he heard that Manuel had asked to meet him, he had done so only because he had been told he wanted to see him.

He described Manuel as the man responsible for all his troubles and that all the police – apart from one – were not listening to him when he said that Manuel was definitely the murderer.

He scoffed at suggestions that he had admitted to Manuel that he had been the murderer, or that he had tried to persuade Manuel to help him manufacture evidence to clear him of the crimes, or that he had given Manuel £150 to try to get him to ensure that someone else was arrested for the murders.

He said he was ‘not in the least surprised’ that Manuel was saying things like that.

Re-examination was brief and covered the fact that there was only a small amount of life insurance on Mrs Watt’s life, so weakening one strand of suspicion. He was also asked about Ferrier and he explained that he was someone he had sacked and who might therefore have had a grudge against him and his family.

William Watt was then free to leave the building to try to get on with his troubled existence. The backdrop of lingering suspicion and the whispering onlookers would, however, plague him to the end.

As he left that day, though, he was not to know that Manuel planned one more cruel surprise for him.

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