Blue Is the Night (12 page)

The victim immediately before the canonical five was Martha Tabram, killed on 7th August 1888, twenty-four days before the first of the canonical five, Mary Ann Nichols. She was a prostitute and a drunkard. She’d last been seen by another prostitute, Mary Ann Connolly, also known as Pearly Poll, with an unidentified client. They parted company at 11.45 p.m. close to George Yard Buildings, an alley between Wentworth Street and Whitechapel High Street, the myth of the Ripper story beginning to close around her, the narrative murk. Pearly Poll brought her client to Angel alley. At some time before two o’clock in the morning cries of ‘Murder’ were heard in the area, but no attention was paid. At two Joseph and Elizabeth Mahoney returned home, climbing the stairs of George’s Yard Buildings, and saw nothing. At three o’clock Albert Crow, a cab driver, saw someone lying on one of the landings but passed on. Labourer John Reeves saw the body of Martha Tabram at five in the morning and realised she was dead.

Ferguson took the autopsy report from the file. The autopsy had been carried out by the assistant pathologist for South East Middlesex, George Collier, at the Working Lads’ Institute in Whitechapel. Martha Tabram had been wearing a long black jacket, a dark green skirt, a brown petticoat and stockings. She was five feet three inches tall and had dark hair.

She had been stabbed thirty-nine times.

Ferguson put the file down on the desk. He noticed that his hand was shaking a little. He wondered if death would be like this. Presences crowding the room, whispering.

Patricia Curran stabbed thirty-seven times. Martha Tabram stabbed thirty-nine times. The occult numbers. You felt there was meaning there, just out of reach. Lately Esther had begun to go to crank healers and fortune tellers. Ferguson told her that she was wasting her money and she shrugged. Now he felt he’d wandered into their territory, the numerologists and astrologers bent over their instruments in cold sitting rooms.

‘You look like you seen a ghost.’ Capstick was standing in the doorway. He had a bottle of Johnnie Walker and two glasses.

‘Come in.’

Capstick closed the door behind him and put the bottle on the table.

‘Once I get here it’s hard to go home. Once a copper, always a copper. I saw your light. Did you find anything useful?’

Ferguson pushed his notebook across the desk. He had ringed the number of stab wounds in the Martha Tabram case and the Patricia Curran case. Capstick scanned it and put it back on the desk.

‘What are you playing at with this Ripper stuff?’

‘Doris.’

‘Her own daughter?’

‘If Doris thought that was who she was. If Doris was suffering from delusions.’

‘Let’s assume for the moment that Gordon didn’t kill Patricia. What do you have? Patricia didn’t get on with her mother. I heard that.’

‘They talk about Patricia taking a job driving a builder’s lorry. Doris hated that.’

‘Thirty-seven stab wounds. Not enough.’

‘It’s what it shows about the Currans.’ Capstick nodded. People were laid waste in the badlands of family. The nameless tracts.

‘What else do we know about Patricia and the mother?’

‘Only the scuttlebutt. That they didn’t get on. That a large bloodstain was found in Patricia’s room after the trial. Patricia’s room was redecorated a week after the murder and everything in it burned.’

‘And the mother was sent to the floating hotel straight after.’

‘Where she remains to this day.’

‘Any other physical evidence?’

‘Her books and hat.’

‘The Curran girl was found in the trees beside the driveway to the house.’

‘There were people tramping through it all night. Police searches.’

‘Very scientific, I’m sure.’

‘If they’d set out to destroy the crime scene they couldn’t have done more.’

‘But the books and hat weren’t spotted.’

‘They were found the next morning. The books and hat were bone dry even though it had rained all night.’

‘So someone put them there that morning.’ Capstick got up and walked to the window. ‘A yellow Juliet cap,’ he said, his back to Ferguson, ‘and five books tied together with a cord.’

Ferguson looked at the man’s back. During the original investigation Capstick had discounted the presence of the Juliet cap and books. The outcome of the investigation had been predetermined, Capstick’s brief to redirect suspicion away from the Curran family. This was a different man. This was the archetypal detective, lone and hampered. Capstick turned away from the window. The wind whipped the tree branches outside and light passed and repassed across the fleshy and shadowed contour of his face, the eyes dark as though they weighed the moral substance of the man he beheld.

‘The blood,’ Capstick said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There was no blood at the scene. The girl was stabbed thirty-seven times. She would have bled like a stuck pig. Even with the rain the place would have been saturated. Once I’d seen your crime scene and not a drop there, I knew that somebody was lying through their teeth.’

Capstick walked to a wall cabinet and unlocked it with a key from his fob. He took out a legal pad and put it on the desk.

‘Let’s do the timing. Chummy always falls down on the timing.’ He took a fountain pen from his pocket. His handwriting was small and meticulous. Patricia’s last hours graven on the page.

‘Patricia played squash with John Steel. She went to the bus station to take the bus to Whiteabbey.’

‘The five o’clock bus.’

‘We’ll come back to that. She got off the bus at the Glen.’

‘According to the Currans they missed her when she didn’t turn up at the house. Desmond and Judge Curran started to search. Desmond found the body at 1.50 a.m.’

‘He thought she was still alive. He said that she made a noise when he lifted her.’

‘The lifting expels air from the lungs. It can happen. And here’s the detail. Fifteen minutes later Curran calls the Steels and asks if they’ve seen Patricia.’

‘I’m impressed, Chief Inspector.’

‘Why?’

‘You remember the sequence of events. The times.’

‘I never forget the detail. But I’ve been turning this one over in my head since the day and hour.’

‘Pity you didn’t turn it over more at the time.’

‘Hark at you, Ferguson. You and your kind ran a dirty shop from the minute you got your hands on it. You think there would have been any need for me if any of you had been straight? I cleaned up your mess for you and you’d do well to remember that.’

Ferguson stared at Capstick’s writing.

‘I’ve seen all this before. There’s nothing new here, Chief Inspector.’

‘That’s what you think. In a proper investigation the house would have been searched and the family questioned, including Doris.’

‘Judge Curran forbade it.’

‘And you sat back and let him. Then you give me grief for coming in when the trail was cold. Look at this, Ferguson.’ Capstick stabbed the map with his forefinger. ‘The start of the journey from the bus station and the end. Nobody fucking looked hard enough at them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I sent my sergeant into the bus station. He pumped the stationmaster. The clock at the station was broken. Stuck at five o’clock. It was the ten past five bus that Patricia took home.’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘I’ll tell you the difference it makes. Judge Curran told Steel that Patricia had taken the five o’clock bus home. Only one person could have told Curran what bus she took home and mistaken the time.’

‘Patricia.’

‘Now you’re getting it.’

‘The other thing you found out. What is it?’

‘It ties in. I want you to tell me what the gates to the Glen looked like.’

Ferguson leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. There were two limestone pillars to either side of the entrance, the barrel of the pillar fluted with a domed capstone. To the right of the entrance stood the single-storey gatehouse. There was a bus stop to the left of the entrance and a low sea wall on the other side of the road. The driveway was enclosed on one side by iron railings and on the other by trees. It rose away from the road, curving to the right, then sharply angled to the left. It was at the apex of the angle that Patricia’s body was found, dragged into the trees.

Esther had never liked driving to the Glen at night. She said afterwards that the driveway felt like one of the places that might draw crime to itself. The moorland settings and lonely riverbanks, all the death-haunted locales. She read true crime magazines. She was an aficionado of sprawled corpses, crime-scene vernaculars, eyes open and staring, lipstick awry.

‘Did you notice the phone box?’ Capstick said.

‘Was there one?’

‘At the bus stop. See, I was thinking, it’s a lonely walk for a young girl in the dark, so I do a bit of asking and Mrs McCrink, the housekeeper, she tells me that Patricia never walks up the drive. She always telephones the house and someone comes down for her in a car.’

‘You think Patricia didn’t walk up the drive?’

‘It wasn’t her habit.’

‘She could have called and found there was no one there, then decided to walk.’

‘Doris was in the house until seven thirty. I don’t know about any of the rest of them.’

‘Doris couldn’t have done it, Chief Inspector, not to her own daughter.’

‘Anyone is capable of anything, Mr Ferguson. Flesh and blood’s no bar to murder. People kill for greed or a grope.’

‘Patricia was stabbed twenty-one times in the chest. Thirty-seven in all.’ The knife rising and falling. The killer gore-drenched.

‘It doesn’t signify. People save their worst for them that’s closest.’

‘The physical strength required. It doesn’t seem likely from a woman.’

‘When it comes to the shedding of blood, a woman can do anything a man can. A woman’s hand wrote the book on harm, Mr Ferguson.’

‘Cutbush.’

‘What brings you to him?’

‘Doris said his name. She was at Broadmoor at the same time.’

‘So there was a dead lunatic lurking in the shrubbery?’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘What do you mean then?’ But Ferguson did not answer. Cutbush’s eyes on him, summoned from out of the night.

Ferguson took his seat in the public gallery. He could see Taylor shifting in his seat, rubbing his thumbnail along the edge of the dock, testing the varnish, warmed and softened by the sun although it was only ten thirty.

Lily sat to one side, still wearing her widow’s garb, her hands folded in her lap. Lunn had told her to sit like that, the fabric smoothed taut over her belly so that the jury and public could see that she was pregnant.

Patricia sat down beside Ferguson. She was wearing a long gaberdine coat.

‘It’s warm in here,’ Ferguson said, ‘you won’t last the morning.’

‘Can’t take it off,’ Patricia said, ‘I’ve got my hockey skirt on underneath. I’m playing at lunchtime. His honour would have kittens. Besides, if Father can make it through wearing a gown and wig, I can make it in a raincoat.’

‘You look like one of those men in the bushes at the park,’ Hilary had said.

‘Maybe I should flash Harry,’ Patricia said.

‘Don’t be awful, Patricia. Besides, I think Mrs Ferguson might have a thing or two to say about it.’

‘I heard Mother’s bridge ladies talking about her,’ Patricia said. ‘They seem to think she’s a bit fast, Harry or no Harry. Why are you looking at me like that?

‘Because I talk about doing things but never do them, Patricia. I’m all talk. But you just go ahead and do things.’

‘What? Like flash Harry Ferguson?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Don’t turn all grim on me, Hilary. You’ll give yourself lines. A crone before your time.’

The judge instructed defence counsel to address the jury. Hanna began his summation at ten thirty-five. Mary McGowan was confused. The blood on Taylor’s trousers was in fact paint. Mary McGowan’s senses were disordered by the blows to her head. She had named Taylor but she was mistaken. The motive did not exist, for no one would kill for such a small sum of money.

‘I’m almost starting to feel sorry for Taylor,’ Patricia said. ‘He’s not much older than I am.’

‘Don’t,’ Ferguson said. He could see that Taylor wasn’t looking at his counsel. He had noticed Patricia in the body of the court and his eyes were drawn to her. Later that morning Patricia became aware of his eyes. It made her nervous, she told Hilary afterwards. It was as if Taylor knew why she was wearing the trenchcoat and what she was wearing underneath it.

‘He has these button eyes and freckles. The way he was looking at me gave me the creeps, Hilary. It was like hands on you.’

Patricia found herself moving closer to Ferguson. Taylor seemed to notice the movement. She thought she saw him smiling at her.

Hanna’s summing up took an hour and forty-five minutes. The court adjourned for lunch. Patricia followed Ferguson out into the hallway. He saw Esther coming towards him.

‘Go and get yourself something to eat,’ Ferguson said. ‘I’ve got something to do.’

‘I thought we’d talk about the case,’ Patricia said.

‘Go,’ Ferguson said. He crossed the foyer to meet Esther. ‘I’ve got to get to McKenzie before Curran sums up.’

‘Who’s McKenzie?’

‘The foreman of the jury.’

‘I thought you’d got to the jury.’

‘The courtroom’s a place where things are bought and sold, same as anything else, and I’m the broker. There’s still work to be done.’

‘That poor woman’s life has a price.’

‘I made a bargain with McKenzie and I need to make sure he keeps it.’

‘How do you know he won’t?’

‘Because Hanna has no case. And your father is about to tear Taylor to shreds in there and send him out of this courthouse with a noose around his neck.’

Ferguson walked down the corridor to the doorway which led to the rear of the jury room. He looked over his shoulder. Patricia was standing where he had left her, holding the gaberdine closed at her throat with one hand as though she was chilled.

The policeman at the door stood aside. Ferguson nodded to him. The corridor beyond the door was quiet and still. The jury room was at the end of the corridor. There was a gents’ toilet halfway along with an alcove opposite. Ferguson stood in the alcove. One of the jurors left the jury room and went into the toilet without seeing him, a small bald man with the look of a small-town shopkeeper, used to weighing out of dry goods, totting sums on the back of brown paper bags. Ferguson waited for him to leave the toilet. No air moved in the enclosed corridor and he felt sweat on his back. The jury room door opened. McKenzie. Ferguson waited for him to pass the alcove, then put a hand in his back and pushed him through the toilet door. He turned McKenzie and backed him up against the sinks.

‘What do you want from me, Ferguson? The man’s as guilty as sin. A child could see it.’

‘I don’t care what a child can see. How many?’

‘How many what?’

‘How many calls for a guilty verdict?’

‘Unanimous.’

Ferguson moved closer to McKenzie. He could see his face reflected in the flyspecked mirror over the man’s shoulder. He looked detached. A scholar in the sciences of harm. He could hear water flushing behind him.

‘Do you know what this place reminds me of?’

‘What?’

‘The morgue. The autopsy room. Where they slice the bodies.’ He could see the fear in McKenzie’s face. ‘The last time I was in there was after the riots in ’42. There were seven bodies on trolleys ready for the knife. I don’t want to see that tomorrow morning, McKenzie. You go back in there and tell them you’re voting not guilty.’

‘I already told them yes.’

‘You changed your mind. You had a conversion in here. The angel of the Lord came unto you.’

‘They won’t swallow that.’

‘I don’t care what they swallow. Your customers find out that you sent Taylor to the hangman, you’re done, McKenzie. You can shut up shop tomorrow.’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘You better.’

Ferguson released McKenzie. He could still see his own face in the mirror. Judgement hanging in the glass. He walked away from McKenzie, his heels clicking on the tiled floor. In the corridor he stopped and leaned against the wall. The jury room was to his left. Dust motes in the air. A monkish calm.

Ferguson knocked on the inside of the door from the jury quarters. The policeman opened it and stood back to let Ferguson out. Curran was passing on the other side of the hallway. He looked up from the affidavit in his hand and saw Ferguson come out. Curran stopped. He knew there was only one reason for Ferguson to be in the jury quarters.

‘Do you think I will not adequately convince them, Ferguson?’

‘I was just using the bathroom, Mr Curran.’ Curran looked down at the paper in his hand as though it might address a query as to his own substance, what character of man he was, what defect?

‘I was using the bathroom, Mr Curran.’ Curran shook his head and walked on. Ferguson felt Patricia’s hand on his arm.

‘I ducked into the foyer when I saw Father,’ she said. ‘He’d go spare if he saw me in this old coat.’

‘I thought you had hockey?’

‘I didn’t want to miss the exciting denouement. The miscreant sent to the hangman’s embrace.’

‘It’s not funny,’ Ferguson said, ‘even for someone like Taylor.’

‘I’m sorry. It isn’t funny. There’s a bloodthirsty part of me wants someone to pay for that poor little lady.’

‘He told you off,’ Hilary said afterwards. ‘How very stern and manly. Was it very thrilling, Patricia?’

‘That part of it was. The rest of it wasn’t any fun though.’

‘Was your father not utterly devastating?’

‘He was. He was cold like ice. ‘

The court resumed at two o’clock. Curran’s address to the jury lasted for one hour. He pointed out that the victim, Mary McGowan, had identified Taylor on four separate occasions to different witnesses. Hanna had argued that Mrs McGowan had been confused and mistaken following blows to the head. But Curran said that on the morning of the murder the victim had in fact opened the door to Taylor when he asked to use the telephone precisely because she knew him and this was before the blows to the head had been struck.

Taylor looked at Hanna but the counsel did not return the look.

‘Old Hanna didn’t see that one coming, did he?’ Patricia said. Her eyes were bright.

‘You’re not at the pictures,’ Ferguson said.

As to the imputation that there was some motive of revenge in Mrs McGowan’s identification of Taylor, there was no reason for vengeance as Taylor had never previously wronged Mrs McGowan.

Curran turned to the direct evidence against Taylor. He had lied to the police about his proximity to the crime. There were fibres from the victim’s clothing on his clothes. There were hairs which matched the victim’s. There was cereal which matched the cereal in the soup which had been poured over the victim. There was blood on his shoes. There was blood on his coat, on his shirt, jacket, trousers and socks. He had claimed the blood was paint, knowing it was not so. He had then told the police that the blood had come from massive nosebleeds which he had neglected to mention during interrogation.

Curran left the question of motive until last. He spoke of ‘poor Miss Jones’ and Taylor’s need for money in order to proceed with the marriage which had been planned for two days after the murder of Mary McGowan.

‘I need not make the case against the accused,’ Curran said. ‘The examinations have made the case themselves. The jury must look at the facts laid in front of them. They must not let the consequences of their verdict sway them. Their duty is clear.’

When he had finished Lily turned her head to look at Curran, her face invisible beneath the black veil. She moved her head as though a figure of death acknowledged its familiar. Taylor smoothed his hair back nervously. Judge Shiel announced a brief recess and the court rose.

‘Your father was inch-perfect,’ Ferguson said. ‘He let the facts speak for themselves. No more and no less. No fancy stuff.’

‘A little bit of fancy stuff,’ Patricia said. ‘The way he said that Mrs McGowan opened the door to Taylor before the blows to the head so that she must have known him.’

‘Fair enough. What else?’

‘The end of his speech. Saying that the defence brought about their own downfall by introducing evidence in cross-examination.’

‘You think that was clever?’

‘I think it was true. We all bring about our own downfall, whether we mean to or not, don’t we, Harry?’

She brushed against him and began to walk towards the court exit.

‘Where are you going?’ Ferguson said.

‘Hockey,’ she said, ‘remember?’ She turned back towards him and with a quick glance around, opened her coat to the blouse and hockey skirt underneath.

The court returned at three thirty. The judge’s address to the jury lasted for three hours. Breaking down the case for them, explaining the law, surrounding the events of the day of the murder with moment and gravity. A handbag open on a kitchen table, an earring lying in a clot of blood on the floor. It was important to bring understanding to these things. A girl in black in the body of the court. If the law was for nothing else it was to give shape and weight to the everyday when things were thrown off course. The judge looked over his glasses at the twelve members of the jury. They must act in earnest. They were ratepayers, holders of premises and of offices, and must use the gravity of their position to anchor the world for all. It was a fair summing up, Ferguson thought. Shiel knew what he was up against and had held the line. He stared at McKenzie throughout but McKenzie wouldn’t meet his eye. Hanna and Lunn conferred together. Taylor looked around the courtroom but none met his gaze. He rubbed his arms and pinched the flesh on the inside of his wrists. Ferguson saw him rub his neck.
Well may you touch that young neck,
Ferguson thought,
for if McKenzie fails me, it’ll feel the bite of the hemp, the pinch of it.

As Judge Shiel drew to a close Ferguson looked up and saw the curator Harvey enter the court and take a seat opposite. Curran glanced upwards towards Harvey. All was in place now. All was in play. Curran folded his hands in his lap and waited for the judge to rise. When he was gone and the jury had filed back into their room, Hanna and Lunn hurried from the courtroom. The public gallery emptied. Lily did not move, nor did Curran. Harvey got to his feet but did not leave.

Outside the court precincts had filled with the news that the jury had retired, the people close-packed. Harvey crossed the courtroom to join Ferguson, leaving the body of the room empty save for Lily and Curran, the silent, veiled girl and the Attorney General in wig and frock coat. They faced each other across the courtroom like silent duellists. In the court yards the crowd grew in number, spilling out in the streets, massing against the walls of the building.

‘The Special Constabulary have been called up,’ Harvey said.

‘They’re as likely to lead the mob,’ Ferguson said. There were sunspots on the backs of Harvey’s hands. He brought an air of dusty colonial squares to the courtroom, the muezzin’s call, the sound of distant pogrom. An hour passed. There were murmurs from the crowd outside. The murmurs subsided, but Ferguson heard scurrying feet through the open courtroom window.

‘Will the court rise for the night?’ Harvey asked.

‘No. This will have to be finished,’ Ferguson said.

‘What’s wrong with Curran?’

‘He expected the jury to come straight back in. He didn’t think there would be any debate about the verdict.’

‘And you?’

‘I have faith in our system of justice.’

Eight thirty. The scurrying outside the window had turned to shuffling. Ferguson could hear the engines of police tenders on Chichester Street. He looked at the door of the jury room. He thought about McKenzie backed into a corner.
Stand your ground, man.

At nine thirty a police sergeant conveyed a note from the jury to the court clerk. They were ready to return. Curran did not lift his head as the public re-entered. Taylor entered with a gaoler to each side. One of the wardens guided Taylor towards the box when it looked as though he might keep on going into the body of the courtroom, break into a stumbling run.