Blue Is the Night (11 page)

‘If it wasn’t for Ferguson and his kind, this place would have collapsed long ago,’ Harvey said.

‘He’s only useful as long as he does his job,’ Hanna said.

Ferguson saw Hanna and Lunn in conversation with Ellis Harvey. He walked on through the bar and dining room, taking stock of the gathered groups and cliques, powerful men and their supplicants. There were bridge and canasta games being played in adjunct rooms. He climbed the stairs to the billiard room but Curran wasn’t there. He went into the long room where a band was playing muted songs of the pre-war era, couples dancing, lost in complex nostalgias for a time that never was. Ferguson listened to the music, leaning against the wall. He thought that Esther might have been on the dancefloor, held in a man’s arms, and knew that he shouldn’t be there. There was a codex of the unsaid. Heartbreak came with its own rules. She was not to be shamed. She had kissed his cheek when he left the house that morning and she had not been there when he returned. The fledgling intimacies of courtship were all that were left to them. He raised his hand to his face where her lips had brushed his skin.

He left the ballroom and went down the stairs, people starting to drift home early as though a curfew had been set. He asked the porter if he had seen Esther. The porter told him that his wife had left.

As he went down the front steps Ferguson saw Harvey in front of him, walking slowly on a cane. Harvey had contracted polio in the Middle East and had been left with a deformed leg. Ferguson caught up with him.

‘It’s not a night for walking home.’

‘There aren’t any taxis. I’ll manage.’

‘I don’t have the car with me.’

‘I’m fine, Ferguson.’

‘No you’re not. Not on a night like this. I’ll walk with you.’ Harvey shrugged. Ferguson took off his jacket and loosened his tie. Feeling the heat from the pavements and the walls, his shirt sticking to his back. He thought of Esther’s kiss that morning, the light sour touch of a wife’s kiss like sweat drying between the shoulderblades. Down a side street he saw the remnants of a bonfire, men standing in the darkness behind it.

‘It doesn’t feel like the town I grew up in,’ Ferguson said, the heat of the night changing the fabric of the place, something foetid hanging in the air.

‘I was in Egypt during the war,’ Harvey said. ‘Cairo. Sometimes the place would go quiet like this. You never knew why.’ The seething city hushed at nightfall, eyes watching from the alleyways, the narrow passages, the faithful called to prayer. Harvey seeing his city like some eastern metropolis, assassins at large in the souk, robed figures.

‘Curran has placed himself in some jeopardy,’ Harvey said.

‘And me along with him.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘What is your thinking on the verdict tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ferguson could see McKenzie’s face. Jowled, corruptible. He tried to picture a jury room with McKenzie as advocate, directing the others towards a not guilty verdict. Reminding them of their responsibilities, urging them towards the bigger picture.

‘It’s tough when the defendant is guilty as sin,’ he said.

‘And his prosecutor is determined to see him with a rope around his neck.’

‘I am Mr Curran’s adviser, not his master.’

At the museum building Harvey asked Ferguson to come in.

‘We’re in the process of installing a new exhibit. A mummy. You might be intrigued.’

‘I’ve never seen one.’

‘It’s a female. Somewhere between twenty and thirty years of age.’

Harvey unlocked the museum side door and they went in. He led Ferguson through dimlit passages with the sense that they were working their way inwards, towards some sanctum, a chambered grave with pottery shards, traces of sacrifice. The mummy was in a side room strewn with wood shavings and they had to walk between packing cases to reach it. She was enclosed in a casket of wood painted with the likeness of an upper-caste Egyptian woman with a straight fringe and eyes highlighted in kohl. Harvey took one end of the wooden lid, Ferguson took the other and they lifted it off.

The mummy’s name was Takabuti and she had been disinterred in Egypt and brought by ship to the city and they had unwrapped her and now she was in a white linen shroud. Her skin was black with age and leathern. Her nose had drawn inwards and her lips were shrunken to a tight ragged line stretched over her teeth. Her tow-coloured hair clung to her skull.

Ferguson had expected a royal figure, an arch Nile princess, not this tiny crouched form under a linen wrap. He imagined her in her tomb. Stored about her would have been jars containing her preserved viscera. Wrapped foodstuffs and unguents prepared for a journey.

Her eyes were in shadow until Harvey moved the lamp. The eyelid skin had shrunk and discoloured to give the impression that her eyes were open and staring and Ferguson moved out of the sightless glare.

‘It gave me a shock when I saw her first,’ Harvey said. ‘You think about all the old superstitions.’

Ferguson did not want to look the mummy in the face again. The head lay to one side, the two men fixed in its unholy glare. He had seen dead bodies before, the roads and ditches of northern France littered with them. But this was a different kind of death, the eyes that of some unholy coquette.

‘You’d have been better off leaving that thing in the ground where it belongs,’ he said.

‘It’s only an artefact,’ Harvey said.

‘It’s a bit more than that,’ Ferguson said. One blackened hand lay outside the linen covering, crooked as though it beckoned, and as he moved away Ferguson brushed it with his own hand and swore. There was sweat on his forehead and his shirt stuck to his body.

‘You look like you need a drink,’ Harvey said.

Ferguson sat down on a leather chair in Harvey’s office. Harvey went to the window and opened it but the air that came in was still and warm. They listened for the sounds of riot from the north and west of the city but nothing stirred. The city waiting. Harvey poured gin.

‘Curran is a gambler,’ he said.

‘So you tell me.’

‘And I’m telling you again. A man can gamble when what he puts on the table belongs to him. Not otherwise.’

‘So what is Curran gambling with?’

‘This.’ Harvey was looking out over the city. ‘The place is smouldering, Ferguson, and it will burn some day. But not on my watch. I want to make that clear. It will not happen on my watch.’

‘Nobody wants to see the city burn.’

‘Then get Curran to ease back on his summing up tomorrow. Give the jury something to hang an innocent verdict on.’

‘It’s too late for that. Besides, Curran doesn’t do what I tell him to do. You’ve got that one the wrong way round, Mr Harvey. I’ve done what I can.’

Harvey remained standing, looking out over the city, his face pinched and vehement, his knuckles white around the glass, as though he expected cohorts of the dead to rise out of the darksome streets and ride down innocent and guilty alike.

Ferguson flew into Heathrow ahead of a storm blown down from the North Channel, the last plane out before the first snow, the plane’s landing lights flashing off the underside of the laden clouds, snowfall in the distance, fathom-deep sheets of white swept overland from the sea. The aircraft bucked in the turbulence, the airframe flexed and groaned. Ferguson looking out the window without seeing.

At Heathrow the gritters were out on the runways. Ice particles from the aircraft wings swirled in the apron lights. By the time Ferguson left the airport in a taxi there was sleet blowing under the motorway lights, few cars, traffic coming out of the south looking migrant, gone north into a long wintering.

Ferguson hadn’t seen Chief Inspector John Capstick since Iain Hay Gordon had been convicted for the murder of Patricia Curran, but he had followed his high-profile cases in the newspapers. The murders of John and Phoebe Harries, the murder of Edwina Taylor. Capstick’s autobiography, Given in Evidence, had been published in 1960, giving accounts of his famous cases. The tone of the book is folksy and upbeat, the hard-pressed copper hampered by red tape in his pursuit of ‘chummy’, nevertheless managing to catch the miscreant. Ferguson picking up the undertones of planted evidence, false confessions, suspects beaten in cold station cell blocks, blood on the floor. He remembered Gordon’s supposed confession to the murder of Patricia, the coached feel to it, the use of copper’s argot.

Each chapter of Given in Evidence introduces a new case and the chapter headings are stylised and lurid. ‘Blood on the Moon’. ‘Little Girl Lost’. Tales of provincial child abductors, cheating wives and jilted lovers, the faithless and the renegade. Ferguson knew that Capstick had a reputation for bringing a suspect into an interrogation room alone and emerging with a guilty plea. He had forced the confession from Gordon for Patricia’s murder by threatening to reveal to Gordon’s mother that he was a homosexual.

Capstick had retired but he arranged to meet Ferguson at Scotland Yard. Ferguson was brought to an upstairs office with carpet on the floor and panelled walls. Capstick stood up from a leather-bound armchair when Ferguson came in. He was a big man, dressed in a worsted suit and floral tie. A black homburg sat on the desk. Ferguson could smell hair lotion, a strong scent with a rank undertone. Capstick was sixty-five but looked vigorous and cunning. He told Ferguson to sit.

‘You don’t mind if I smoke?’

‘Fire ahead, Chief Inspector.’ Ferguson waited while Capstick filled his pipe and lit it, drawing out each movement, deliberating over it.

‘You use that in interrogations, Chief Inspector?’

‘It was always said you had a quick mind, Mr Ferguson. Yes, I do use it. It unnerves them. They can’t help watching. But it doesn’t unnerve you, Mr Ferguson.’

‘Not much does these days.’

‘Really. Judge Curran’s wife unnerved you well enough. All this talk about Thomas Cutbush.’

‘Who do you think killed Patricia, Chief Inspector?’

‘I think Iain Hay Gordon killed her. That’s why I secured his conviction.’

‘He was released, you know that? Told to take up a false identity and given a job. They knew he was stitched up.’

‘Gordon repeated his confession to his first legal team. That’s why they came off the record and refused to represent him. Once he confessed they couldn’t represent him any more.’

‘That’s bar library gossip, Chief Inspector. The lawyers muddying the waters to make up for their own shortcomings.’

‘Is it? Who do you think killed Patricia? I hear you had more of an interest in her than most.’

‘I don’t like your tone, Chief Inspector.’

‘And I don’t like some judge’s fixer coming into my office and telling me I fitted up that little fairy for a crime he didn’t commit.’

‘You have to admit, if you hadn’t had a confession you wouldn’t have had a conviction.’

‘No?’

‘Patricia’s body was left beside the drive. Her art folder and hat weren’t there when she was found. The following morning they were there. And they were bone dry even though it had been raining all night. She’d been stabbed thirty-seven times but there was no blood on the ground around her.’

‘And Judge Curran and Desmond put her body into the car and took it to the doctor’s when they should have known full well she was dead, stiff as a board and cold as the grave.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the telephone calls, Ferguson. Are you not going to tell me about the calls? Judge Curran telephoned Patricia’s friend John Steel to ask if he had seen her, fifteen minutes after the body had been found. Why would his nibs do something like that?’

‘The timing of the calls was disputed.’

‘The Steels were adamant at trial that they were correct. Swore blind.’

‘There’s no way of proving it.’

‘That’s the thing that troubles you, Ferguson, isn’t it? Not the fact that your boss might have been involved, but that he didn’t bring you into his confidence, that he kept you out in the cold?’

‘Judge Curran kept everyone out in the cold, Chief Inspector, that’s the kind of man he is.’

‘You said there’s no way of proving that Curran made that call to Steel.’

‘That’s right, the phone records disappeared.’

‘What if someone had seen them before they disappeared? What if they showed the records to some showboating London copper who was called in to solve the case and asked him what they should do with them?’

‘You saw them?’ Ferguson felt cold.

‘They had the records in North Queen Street barracks. They brought me in to view them. That’s what I was for, after all. To clear up the mess you people had made.’

‘What did they say?’

‘So tell me this, Ferguson, who do you think did it? Did the judge get fed up with his slut daughter? Did mad old Doris up and at her with a knife? Who killed the girl, Ferguson, if Gordon didn’t do it?’

‘What did the phone records say?’

‘They confirmed the Steels’ account of what happened that night. Judge Curran called the Steel house to ask where Patricia was, fifteen minutes after he knew Patricia was dead.’

‘So I’m right. Gordon was innocent.’

‘Gordon had no alibi for that evening. He asked another of the airmen to cover up for him. Where’s the innocence in that?’

‘Where are they now, the records?’

‘To my knowledge Judge Curran took them.’

‘There’s no reason why I should believe any of this.’

‘You could ask Curran. He’s in London, isn’t he? Lit out for pastures new. The privy council. Left you to stew in the provinces. You could go to see him at his club. The Connaught, I believe it is. If they let you in.’

‘If you recall, I came here to ask you for access to a file.’

‘Thomas Cutbush? Jack the Ripper? What the hell do you think you’re going to find there?’

‘Do you have it?’

‘It’s ready for you, down in the archive. Tell me something, Harry. Are times so hard you have to ask me of all people?’

‘I want to know what happened.’ Capstick. Of all people.

‘You’re like a dog returning to its vomit. You think you can make up for what you done over the years by digging into what’s past and gone?’

Ferguson stood up.

‘Where is the archive?’

‘In the basement. The porter will show you.’ Capstick got up and walked in front of him. He opened the office door.

‘You’ll be seeing Doris again?’

‘I’ll be sure to pass on your regards.’

‘Do that.’ Ferguson waited. He knew what was coming next.

‘How’s your wife?’ Ferguson could see the challenge in Capstick’s eyes, the sexual insolence. Ferguson looking back to November 1952. He’d tracked Esther and Capstick to a temperance hotel in Newry. Sitting outside in the car, looking up at the bedroom windows. Had Capstick known he was there? In the middle of the night Ferguson had thought he saw someone at the window. Capstick, perhaps, the policeman recognising the car outside for what it was, hearts under surveillance in the night. Holding the curtain back to look out.
Come back to bed darling.

From the beginning Capstick had been accompanied by reporters from the London press. An air of white mischief spreading through the case. Patricia’s murder finding its way into the yellow press and true crime magazines, a backdrop of suburban goings-on, hanky-panky in the post-war boom housing and new-sprung golf clubs. Capstick moving in, brutal and predatory, identifying Esther’s place in the narrative. The unfaithful wife, a gin in one hand and a Dunhill cigarette in the other, eyes aglitter.

Ferguson turned at the bottom of the staircase. Capstick stood at the top, one hand on the balustrade, unmoving, a backstreet Caesar holding sway over some empire of the dead.

The files were waiting for Ferguson in a caged area in the basement. An orderly showed him in, then locked the cage from the outside.

There were three separate files, the manila card folders faded and tied together with hemp twine.

The first file also contained a letter from Cutbush’s solicitor protesting that ‘owing to the action of the Crown in raising the issue of insanity first the case was not gone into . . .’

The second file gave the dates of his incarceration and bare details of his life.

Date when he first became a criminal lunatic
14th April 1891

Removed from Holloway to Broadmoor
15th April 1891

Male

Former occupation
Clerk

Single

Religious persuasion
Church of England

Degree of education
Well

Temperate habits
Yes

Give brief account of the crime by which he became a criminal lunatic.
He was charged with maliciously wounding two persons by stabbing.

Supposed cause of insanity
. Hereditary and Over Study

How long insane.
Since 1889 at least
.

Is he known to have any previous attacks and if so when.
No record of previous attack.

It is recorded that on 5th July 1903 his bodily health was bad. Suffered from kidney disease.

Medical condition
Demented

Demented
. Ferguson opened the second and third files and spread the foolscap pages on the desk. The pages brittle in places, rustmarks showing where they had been held together with wire paperclips. You wondered whose hand had transcribed the words, the whorled script, blotted, cursive. He lifted a sheaf of pages which appeared to be an attending physician’s report, although there was no name on the pages.

Notes after Admission

A man of average height and slight build, expression vacant, eyeballs protruding. Is restless, and incoherent in conversation. Stated this morning that he had often been drunk though not a ‘drinker’, afterwards that he had never been drunk through drink as he had been a total abstainer for years. That the charges brought against him were absolutely false and that he had no recollection of doing anything to cause such charges to be brought against him.

That he suffered from palpitation of the heart some time ago but not lately. States he was at Peckham House Asylum ‘on a visit’ for a few days after he was charged with his crime. He states that there is no insanity in his family although he thinks both his mother and aunt are “bad enough” to want care in the way of being eccentric. Says he has often suffered from fits of uncontrollable temper.

20th May 1891 Struck another patient (Gilbert Cooper) suddenly and without cause whilst in the gallery.

24th August 1891 . . . well conducted lately but requires careful supervision. No improvement mentally.

16th March 1892 Violent and very destructive at times.

15th April 1893 . . . scarcely ever speaks to anyone with the exception of the principal attendant. Refuses to see any of his relations when visited by them.

22nd April 1894 Stubborn, unoccupied and silent. Makes grimaces and attitudinises when addressed.

There were no notes for the following nine years. Cutbush descending into silence.
Dark blue. Very sharp.
A final report from 20th April 1903:

Mrs Cutbush and her sister visited T. Cutbush from 2.35 to 2.55 p.m. Mrs Cutbush tried to kiss her son and he tried to bite her face then commenced to swear at them.

Died 5th January 1906.

The orderly opened the cage. Ferguson looked at his watch. Eight o’clock.

‘Got to lock up now, sir. Inspector Capstick says you can take the files up to his office.

Capstick was gone, his hat and coat missing from the stand. Ferguson turned on the desk light and read on into the dark. Rain spattered against the window. The lore of the Ripper. Seeping into the age. A London of gaslights, swirling fog. You couldn’t help being drawn into it. Eleven possible Ripper victims with the five middle dead being assumed to be connected, these known as the canonical five. The other six loosely connected, the killer’s method different. Dark fancies stirring in his own mind. Witnesses saw two witnesses with a ‘fair-haired man’. He was later described as being ‘shabby, genteel’. Capstick had included witness statements, coroners’ reports. Ferguson scanning the detail of each murder, the dread methodology. The canonical five were distinguished by the fact that their throats had been cut, internal organs removed, progressive facial mutilation. He read the coroners’ reports on the four later victims. It was impossible to say if they were linked. He went back to the first two. Emma Smith attacked and sexually assaulted on 3rd April 1888 and died the following day. The contemporary file reported it as a gang crime and Ferguson thought that was correct. He’d seen enough street fights in his time, the havoc of collectives.