If you take a step back and look at everything from Nine, Leonora, Mrswah and now Baz, and then try and build a model that fits all, there appears to only be one solution.
Working backwards, the police “officers” standing outside the court are utterly despondent, the statements read out were delivered in such a manner as to indicate that something is seriously wrong, nothing is delivered with the normal cocky gusto.
Leonora perceives that the confessions were false and, more to the point, staged and completely out of place.
Nine’s epic research points out that at every turn a kind, thoughtful, extremely intelligent man has suddenly become a cold, thoroughly dismissive killer that could strangle a pretty young woman, dump her body and go shopping for crisps, a situation that is as about as likely as winning the lottery without buying a ticket.
Baz’s observations are unintentionally astute in respect of the model, but highlight the where the cement needs to be put between the blocks.
Put yourself into Tabak’s place, imagine you are so intelligent you are probably six questions ahead and going round the same pointless loop of argument day after day after day, wondering when these morons are going to take a hint and go and do something useful instead of high fiving each other after each pointless day.
Sitting in front of you are the comparative academic equivalent of a pair of Troglodytes, trying to be the story twisting experts the police hold up as an example of genius coppers. Their reputations are on the line with this one and they are not going to give an inch, Yeates uncle was a copper so there is an additional pressure to get Tabak to “crack” under their amazing powers of persuasion. And so they keep going, round and round, round and round, until the victim, who’s been exposed to the same stuff over and over again, starts to remember things as they come up in conversation again, and again, and again.
But the Troglodytes are up against a brain that can see them coming and can see the weakness in this petty system developed to persuade your average simpleton to confess to all, and Tabak walks them into the void. All he’s done is shove the system straight up their own arses by simply confessing to manslaughter. As he will have pointed out the Trogs have got a killer out there and he struck fast, hard and with the ability to avoid detection, and he’s probably going to do it again. But now the Trogs can’t touch him, because the inquiry ends here, it stops, and they are the ones who will have to answer in the long term to the queue of bereft parents wanting to know why they let this continue.
And the Trogs became the victims of their own system.
This might account for the behaviour of Clegg, he’s part of the system too and realised that Tabak had damaged them beyond repair, he needed to be made an example of, hence the Judges complicity by handing out an unusually long sentence. The apology to Yeates parents wasn’t for killing Joanna, it was for preventing the Trogs going after her killer.
They don’t like it up ‘em.
AH
