UNDER CROSS-examination from Liam McCollum QC, prosecuting, Karen Walsh agreed that she was “really worried” about her neighbour because of her breathing difficulties so she had gone downstairs to look for an asthma inhaler for her.
However, she could not explain why she initially told police she had looked in the kitchen but then said in evidence that she only looked in the living room and dining room. Mr McCollum suggested that the kitchen “was the most obvious place to look”.
He put to her that she was so worried about Mrs Rankin that, having had a look around for an inhaler she then sat down to eat a mince pie in the living room before she “simply upped and left”, without either going upstairs to check on Mrs Rankin or to say goodbye.
“That would be the neighbourly thing to do,” he suggested. Ms Walsh replied that she had already “hugged her and kissed her and wished her a happy Christmas” when she had first gone in and that Mrs Rankin had told her she was okay.
Mr McCollum took Ms Walsh through the transcripts of the interviews she gave to the police when she was considered a “significant witness” rather than a suspect. He highlighted the fact that despite having numerous opportunities to do so, she never told the police about the women hugging and kissing when she first went in.
“You never thought that that would be of interest to them [the police],” Mr McCollum said. “As an intelligent woman. That’s your evidence.”
Ms Walsh replied: “It’s really difficult because I could not have been nicer to the woman.”
Mr McCollum asked her if it was normal for her to call to an elderly neighbour’s house at that time. He suggested to her that she had brought the bottle of vodka with her because “the truth is that the vodka was for you and you knew it was for you and you wanted to drink it but wanted to take it away from your husband because he maybe didn’t approve of you drinking vodka neat, from the bottle.”
“No it’s not,” she replied.
The jury has already heard that Ms Walsh repeatedly asked police at the scene cordon if Mrs Rankin “had been beaten” and if the door had been left open.
She told Mr McCollum the reason she asked that was because her husband told her the police were treating the death as suspicious and because she had seen it on the teletext, accepting that was the first time she had mentioned teletext.
“Why did you presuppose she had been beaten?” Mr McCollum asked. He said a suspicious death could have meant knifed, suffocated or strangled: “You could only think ‘beaten’ if you knew she had been beaten and you thought beaten because you had beaten her, that’s the truth?”
Ms Walsh rejected the allegation, telling the court: “That’s not the truth. I could not have been nicer to her.”
The trial continues.