Blue Is the Night (13 page)

A tipstaff came from the judge’s quarters. He was carrying a square of black silk and he placed it to the right of the judge’s seat that it might be to hand. The junior counsel and clerks took their places in the body of the court. The jury filed into their box. McKenzie would not meet Ferguson’s eyes. His face was red and he kept his gaze fixed on the floor in front of him. Taylor’s eyes kept going to the square of silk on the bench, his fingers moving. If he could handle the black material he would know its properties. The tipstaff stood to announce the judge’s entry. As he did so the court door opened and Lily entered, still attired in black and veiled. As the court rose for the judge she crossed the perimeter to her place in the gallery. Judge Shiel crossed the dais between his quarters and the bench and it seemed he changed places with Lily in some strange gavotte.

As the court took their seats Ferguson felt Patricia push into the seat beside him.

‘He doesn’t look so cocky now, does he?’ she said. Taylor was holding the stanchions of the dock tightly. His cheek twitched. Ferguson thought that he might start to weep like a child, great racking sobs, his shoulders heaving.

‘He’ll cry like a baby if it goes against him,’ Patricia said, ‘snot everywhere.’

‘Has the jury reached a verdict?’ Shiel asked. McKenzie got to his feet, his eyes downcast. He said something. The court craned forward to hear his words.

‘Speak up please, Mr Foreman,’ the judge said. As he leaned forward his sleeve brushed the silk square and he looked down at it.

‘We are unable to reach a verdict, your honour,’ McKenzie said.

‘I see,’ Shiel said. ‘As I have told you, I must have a unanimous verdict in this case. If the jury is returned to its deliberations, given more time, are they likely to overcome their differences?’

‘No, your honour,’ McKenzie said, ‘their minds are dead set, one way or the other. There’s no shifting them.’

‘Are you sure, Mr Foreman?’

‘Nothing more certain on God’s earth.’

‘In that case it is my duty to declare a mistrial and to thank the gentlemen of the jury for their service. The defendant is free to go.’

Doris would say to her children that the days of her childhood in Broadmoor were the happiest of her life. Desmond looked at her sideways when she said it but Patricia was always at her for details. Tell me about the skull on Grandpa’s desk. Tell me about the madwomen and their bare feet and their frizzy hair and about the pale-faced murderers alone in their cells. Tell me about the howling at night.

When she was small Patricia would tell adults that Mother always liked being behind bars and then she’d give Doris what she called her secret smile. She’d tell them Mummy was brought up in the mental which put Doris’s teeth on edge. The Malone Road ladies and the Whiteabbey ladies all thought they were superior but Harry Ferguson said, ‘Don’t mind them, Mrs Curran, that’s what happens when you live in the provinces, you become a snob.’ She told Desmond that Ferguson was nice and spoke well to her, but Desmond said, ‘For God’s sake, Mother, Ferguson is Father’s fixer. You don’t think Father gets elected because the people love him, do you?’

Still Ferguson had a sadness about him that no one could see but she, and it could not be gainsaid. She had her own secret sorrow which many had tried to find but none could know.

The psychiatrist, Mr Brown, spoke to her three times a week at the start but now she hardly ever saw him. He wore a tweed jacket and tie and had a line of pens in his top pocket. You were supposed to think that he had walked in the lonely halls of the mind but he did not fool Doris for one minute. Those who had been in the halls of the mind were not kindly. They did not nod in understanding. They did not carry a line of pens in their pocket. They were ice. He wanted her to name them but she would not. They were the unnamed.

When she said that she did not know what Mr Brown was talking about she could feel Lucy smile. And sometimes she felt Cutbush smile from the shadows.

Mr Brown prescribed Largactil for her. The nurses would give her the tablets with a glass of water and wait for her to swallow them. Lucy had shown her all the tricks the patients used in Broadmoor. To hide the tablets under your tongue or to drop them into your lap and sweep the folds of your skirt over them. Lucy had showed her how to search a skirt and how to hold a patient’s nose to make them swallow. They don’t like their dose, Lucy said, but they have to take it otherwise they’ll be raving and there’ll be no peace in this place.

Mr Brown kept trying to bring her back to the night of 12th November 1952. That was the way he spoke.
The night of 12th November 1952.
As if he was a policeman like Mr Capstick, so that Doris had to tell him that Lady Curran would not be subject to questioning like a common criminal.

‘Of course, Lady Curran,’ he answered her.
Lady Curran Lady Muck
was what Lucy would have said to that.
My sweet arse
she would have said.

‘What happened that night, do you remember?’ Mr Brown asked again and again.

‘I want to talk about the night of the twenty-eighth of July 1949,’ Doris told him.

‘Why that night, Mrs Curran?’

‘That was the end of the first Taylor trial.’

‘The Taylor trial?’

‘Robert Taylor was charged with the murder of a Roman Catholic woman. My husband, the Attorney General, prosecuted.’

‘Of course. Why does that night stand out in your mind?’

‘It was the night the case finished. My husband had a disagreement with Harry Ferguson.’

‘Mr Ferguson. His election agent.’

‘Harry wanted him to stop.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The jury in the Taylor case did not reach a verdict. The decision fell to my husband as Attorney General.’

Doris had awakened to the sound of voices in the drawing room. She put on her dressing gown and went down the stairs to the drawing-room door. She thought to knock but did not. Ferguson sounded like a man who was angry but wished not to show it. Her husband sounded like the winter.

‘You played the hand that was given you as best you could. You cut Taylor to pieces in the witness box. Everybody seen what you done with the case. Now let sleeping dogs lie, Mr Curran. There’s no winning this case.’

‘I intend to press for a retrial.’

‘You’ll only get the same result or worse.’

‘Look.’ Doris could hear the floorboards creak as Ferguson crossed them and she feared that he would catch her at the door. But she heard the curtains being opened. ‘It’s quiet out there tonight. There’s no sirens. There’s no houses burned. There won’t be a queue out the door of the coroner’s court in the morning. We won. Everybody knows what Taylor done. He’ll get his comeuppance somewhere along the line. People get what they deserve.’

‘Will you get what you deserve out of this affair, Harry? Will I?’

‘You’ll get a seat on the bench, if it wasn’t yours already.’

‘And you?’

‘A rising tide lifts many a boat.’

‘And yet you hazarded more than I did in the case.’

‘Did I?’

‘You forget I saw you emerge from the jury room. McKenzie?’

‘The jury reached its own verdict.’

‘Perhaps a verdict it might have reached anyway, however unjust. But you made certain.’

‘What’s done is done. The woman’s dead and there’s no bringing her back.’

‘Retribution will be exacted.’

‘If you go back to the well on this and win then you might as well kiss that ermine collar goodbye.’

‘Then let us set out a forfeit in the open this time, Harry. I will undertake to win the case. You may undertake to prevent my winning.’

‘You’re making a game out of it.’

‘Everything we undertake is a game.’

‘If I win?’

‘Then I will follow your advice in all things. I will act according to self-interest.’

‘And if I lose?’

‘That seems clear enough, Harry. If I carry the day, then you lose your job, and I lose mine.’

‘It seems as fair as anything in this life. You can convince the cabinet and the DPP to go after Taylor again?’

‘They will do my bidding on pain of my resignation. Have Taylor rearrested, Harry.’

‘It’s already done.’

‘He is in custody?’

‘I had him lifted this evening. He’s now residing in a cell in Crumlin Road. You’re not the only person round here can read a man’s heart, Mr Curran.’

‘Your office is very untidy, Mr Brown.’

‘Is it important to you that things are tidy, Mrs Curran?’

‘No more than anyone else,’ Doris said. Lucy used to say that the bigshot doctors came into Broadmoor with grave looks but that when they went home it was the likes of her that had to deal with the patients when they went off the deep end, not Mr Learned Title.

Lucy could not remember people’s proper names so she gave them nicknames, a habit that Doris found herself adopting in the hospital.

It was all Broadmoor then with Mr Brown. Did you have access to the hospital building? Did you have any communication with any of the patients? Were your parents always there and did you get on with them? Did you ever find yourself alone with any of the patients? Every time he asked a question he gave that laugh again. It was a laugh such as someone makes when they want you to think they are apologising but they are not sorry.

She didn’t like the way he acted, like he was her friend, and saying that he’d soon have her back on her feet. My feet are not the problem, she wanted to say, this is not a hospital for feet.

He asked if she considered her childhood to be a happy one and she said it was as happy as anyone else’s but she did not say that you did not talk about happiness or even think about it in Broadmoor. He wanted to know if she had many friends when she was small. She said that she had lots of friends but that was a lie. Two could play at that game. At school they called her mad Doris because she lived at the asylum. The smell of it was about her person.

Did you ever bring friends home, he asked her. Their parents would not allow it, she said. They imagined child abductors roaming the grounds of Broadmoor, slack-mouthed men with pale skins padding in the corridors. Go home with mad Doris? they said, not bloody likely.

What did you feel about that? Brown said. She shrugged. When she was small Lucy had asked her the same question and when she told her, Lucy said never you mind them nasty little misses. If Lucy got a hold of them she would give them what for.

So you were very lonely growing up was what he came out with next. I was friends with some of the staff, Doris replied. Who was that? he asked quick as a flash, no apologetic laugh this time, but Doris was ready for him. Oh, just one of the kitchen girls, Doris said, I can’t even remember her name now. Good girl, Lucy whispered, that put a stop to Mr Brown’s gallop and no mistake.

After that they talked about whether she was depressed or sad when her children were born and Doris said she wasn’t, she didn’t have time to be depressed in London where Patricia was born. Curran had insisted that she go to a public hospital. Brown was interested in that, so Doris told him about the ward with plaster falling from the walls and the East End girls groaning and swearing in the most appalling way.

Mr Brown put the top on his pen and said that will be all for today, Mrs Curran. He got up and opened the office door for her. Oh by the way, he said as she was walking through, with a big innocent face like she wouldn’t notice what he was at, what did you say the name of the kitchen girl at Broadmoor was? I told you I don’t remember, Doris said, pert as you like, and she kept walking.

That’s my girl
, Lucy said.
That’s my lass.

Ferguson woke early. He went down to the kitchen in the dark. He made no noise in passing Esther’s room. As he poured hot water from the kettle he looked up and saw her framed in the doorway.

‘Nine years ago you were standing in the same place. It was dark then as well.’

‘Was it?’

‘You were still wearing your overcoat. There was mud on your shoes. You told me that you had just come from Judge Curran’s house. That something dreadful had happened. Patricia had been found murdered.’

‘Yes. I remember.’

‘Your hand was shaking so much you could barely hold the kettle. It was dark and I couldn’t see your eyes.’

‘Nine years. It feels like longer.’

‘You need to talk to Gordon. To that policeman, Capstick.’

‘Gordon was convicted of the murder.’

‘But you don’t think he did it. You know he didn’t do it.’

‘So what’s the point of talking to him?’

‘You need to find out who killed her, Harry. Do it for yourself or do it for her. It makes no difference.’

‘I’ll talk to Gordon again.’

‘He didn’t kill Patricia. They put him in the asylum for nothing.’

‘I want to hear what he has to say.’

‘Him in the same place as Doris Curran. I wonder does he know?’

‘I wonder does she know?’

It was still dark when Ferguson got to his car. It had rained without cease until morning on the night that Patricia had died. This morning there was frost on the windscreen. He scraped it off with his hand and got into the car. Sleet struck the bodywork. It grew light. He drove along the lough. At Whiteabbey he pulled the car on to the pavement opposite the entrance to the Glen. There were lines of sleet coming in across the channel and out beyond the channel markers the tidal race drove spume across the sandbars and foul ground at the Mew Island light.

He crossed the road to the phone box at the gates and rang Holywell Mental Hospital. He made an appointment with the superintendent. As he replaced the receiver a Lancia drove out of the entrance to the Glen. He saw Lance Curran in profile, the thin mouth downturned, the gloved hands on the wheel. Ferguson remembered the night of Patricia’s death. Her body had been placed in the back seat of the car. Rigor mortis had set in, although Desmond Curran had claimed that he had heard Patricia breathing. The stiff body would not fit into the car and her legs protruded from the open window. They had driven down the avenue in convoy. Ferguson wondered if Curran thought of it as he left for court in the morning. His daughter’s body in the back seat of a car like some doleful mannikin.

Where was the blood? he thought. Stabbed thirty-seven times. There must have been blood in the car and on their clothing but Ferguson had seen none when he came to the scene in the early morning.

Curran glanced at the phone box but the windows were fogged and he could not have seen Ferguson. He pulled into the sparse early morning traffic. A wave broke on the sea wall and spray covered the car. The wind blew the spray down the road against the windows of the phone box. When it was gone the car was no longer visible. There was always a sleight of hand at work with the Currans. Objects and people appearing and disappearing. Patricia’s hat and books appeared at the edge of the trees. The telephone records from the night disappeared. Patricia dead. Gordon and Doris incarcerated. A music-hall conjuring act of drapes and levers with Curran as top-hatted master of ceremonies.

Holywell was a Victorian asylum, the main building surrounded by an ancillary complex over several acres. He drove through it for ten minutes before he reached the entrance to the secure unit, finding himself in annexes, dead ends, buildings with windows bricked up behind high walls. He kept ending up back in the same place. You thought of a still room, someone sitting on a steel-framed bed making rocking movements.

A nurse led him to the superintendent’s office. The superintendent was waiting for him. He was a balding man wearing a blazer with a rowing club crest on the pocket. He stood to shake Ferguson’s hand.

‘You want to interview Iain Hay Gordon, Mr Ferguson?’

‘That’s what I came up here for.’

‘I see. May I ask you the purpose of the interview?’

‘I don’t think that’s appropriate. How has he been?’

‘I have already stated my opinion that Mr Hay Gordon is as sane as you or I and should never have been committed to the care of this institution. While he was in my care he was anxious, neurotic, but not insane.’

‘You say was. Past tense.’

‘Iain Hay Gordon is no longer an inmate of Holywell.’

‘Is that a fact? Well if he isn’t an inmate of Holywell, where is he an inmate of?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What happened? Did he escape? Over the wall and leg it?’

‘He was released by order of the Minister for Home Affairs.’

‘When?’

‘Two months ago.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘We were given no forwarding details.’

‘A patient leaves a secure mental hospital with no forwarding details.’

‘My information is that he was given a new identity and employment on the basis that he conceal his identity.’

‘Who organised this?’

‘I received a telephone call from the minister’s representative.’

‘So all this was done on a phone call. No paperwork.’

‘I was assured it wasn’t necessary.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘You didn’t ask.’

Ferguson bowed his head. He detected the hand of Curran again.

‘Did you ever see a magician on the stage, Mr Brown?’

‘Years ago. When I was young.’ You were never young, Ferguson thought.

‘I saw an act once. In the town hall in Warrenpoint. The magician got a girl to come up from the audience and step into a cabinet. She looked nervy, shook, trying to smile, looking back at her friends. The magician closed the door and when he opened it again she was gone. He closed it again, opened it, and hey presto, there she was.’

When the cabinet door opened on an empty space the theatre was silent and the magician eyed them without speaking, one black-cloaked arm extended. He offered them access to the old worlds, to whispered tales of those that were carried off never to return. The vanished and the stolen. All they had to do was follow the girl. All they had to do was step inside.

‘It’s not the fact that the magician makes you disappear that scares the audience,’ Ferguson said, getting up. ‘It’s the fear that you might never come back at all.’

He walked down the corridor. Inmates stood alone in gowns and did not raise their eyes at his passing. A woman was embarked on some point of debate with herself. Ferguson scanned their faces, thinking that he might see Doris Curran and hoping that he would not. He remembered when he had last seen the Belfast Rowing Club logo. It had been on the tie worn by the museum curator Ellis Harvey the night he had walked to the museum with him from the Reform Club.

Esther was home before him. She sat on the edge of the lounge settee. She was still wearing her hat and coat, her back straight, looking poised, unnatural.

‘What is it?’

‘A girl was killed in Newry last night. They found her in a field this morning.’

‘I didn’t hear the news.’

‘She was nineteen. Same age as Patricia. The scuttlebutt is that she was found naked. There were bruises all over her. He tried to strangle her.’

‘Strangled.’

‘He beat her and tried to strangle her, then he stabbed her to death, Harry.’

‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘I was in the RUC club in Knockbreda this evening. It was all the talk. The Newry police know who did it.’

‘That’ll make a change around here.’

‘They’re not arresting him yet. They say they need hard evidence.’

‘It’s always a help. I went to Holywell today.’

‘Gordon?’

‘He’s not there. They gave him a false name and told him to keep his mouth shut. He’s in hiding somewhere. Scotland’s my guess.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Gives them a hold over him. Letting him know that his freedom is in their gift. They couldn’t keep him in Holywell forever with the superintendent saying that he’s sane, so this is the next best thing.’

‘The next best thing?’

‘They would have preferred him dead but that would bring its own set of problems.’

‘That poor little man locked up in the asylum for something he didn’t do. Day after day. What would a person do in the asylum, Harry, when all they want to do is get out but people won’t let them?’

There were days when Esther would sit at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes. She did not dress. Her hair was untended. He knew the undercurrents, the small brittle gestures, the theatre of sexual harm.

He had brought the Whiteabbey GP, Wilson, to see her. Afterwards she had berated him softly. She told him of assignations, casual encounters, her account detailed and cutting. She named men he knew. She told him how she brought out a rank carnality in them. She fell asleep afterwards. In the morning she remembered nothing. He found the empty prescription jar that Wilson had left in the bin, the capsules ground underfoot on the back step.

Wilson called him a few days later and asked him to come to the surgery. Wilson said he had obtained Esther’s medical records, which indicated that she had spent some time as an inpatient of the Downshire hospital in her teens. The Downshire was a mental institution on the periphery of the city.

‘How long?’

‘Several months each time. They record fugue states interspersed with hysteria.’

‘Hysteria?’

‘That’s what it says. Following unspecified trauma. She was committed by the family doctor.’

‘How long did this go on for?’

‘November 1947 was the last incarceration.’

Ferguson had met Esther in January 1947. He had worked in Nuremberg that year. He remembered black trees outside and snow. She had written to him to say that it was snowing there as well. She said that she had walked in the snow at dusk. Pathos her stock in trade.

‘Did she tell you about it?’

‘No.’ Ferguson trying to work out dates. Wondering if she had come to their encounters straight from Holywell. She would send him notes telling him where to meet her, signed and imprinted with the shape of her mouth in lipstick beside her name. She would meet him outside York Street bus station or the King’s Hall and they’d drive to the hotel she had booked. She liked to sign the register as Mr and Mrs Harry Ferguson. Needing to lie about it. She liked to see herself as damaged. She would arrange the room in the manner of a married couple, hanging his shirts in the wardrobe, adopting a brittle and suburban manner. She referred to him as her husband in provincial dining rooms, insisting that he hold her chair at the table. She would talk to other couples of a future of suburban bridge games, boarding schools for children.

Looking back he could see that they engaged in a phantasm of marriage. She would come to him at night then and lay herself bare to him, hollow-eyed, ravening.

The death of the Newry girl was reported in the papers the following day. There were photographs of the crime scene, a place known as Weir’s Rock. Policemen standing guard over rough terrain. The victim was a shop girl called Pearl Gamble. She had last been seen at a dance in a local Orange hall. A blurred photograph showed a girl with slant oriental eyes and a gap in her front teeth. The newpaper report said that her effects had been found scattered over the quarter-mile distance between the place where she had been dropped off by friends and Weir’s Rock. A shoe, her brassiere, her blouse stained with blood. Esther went out every night to police haunts and returned with information, wide-eyed, lost in the girl’s murder, the detail of it, the forensics of the heart. She told Ferguson about the massive blood loss, the ripped nylons. The ligature marks on the girl’s neck and the torn fingernails indicating she had struggled. The multiple stab wounds on neck and torso. She said that a sergeant had taken a spade and filled a bucket with earth saturated in blood. Ferguson did not ask her where she had got her information, or what bargains she had made in return for it.

‘They’re putting pressure on a suspect,’ she said. ‘They hope he’ll make a slip-up.’ Ferguson saw the reports in the papers the next day. A man named McGladdery, a provincial wide boy. The London newspapers in town filing copy from public phones, calling him the Pied Piper, following him around, hungry for sex crime innuendo, McGladdery revelling in the attention. Detectives outside his home, watching him from parked cars. Ten days after the murder he was arrested following the discovery of stained clothing hidden in a septic tank near his home at Damolly.

‘They all say he’s guilty as sin,’ Esther said.

‘That’s no guarantee.’

‘Guarantee that he’ll be convicted or that he’ll get off?’

‘Either.’

‘Do you know who the judge is? Harry? I asked you a question.’ Esther was pale, her eyes fixed on Ferguson.

‘I do.’

‘He can’t, Harry.’

‘He put himself on the list for it.’

‘If Curran is the judge that man will be convicted, innocent or guilty.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’

‘The jury will take one look at him on the bench and they’ll think about Patricia. McGladdery will be made to pay for Patricia’s death.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Curran will let them do it.’

‘Probably. He might even encourage them, Esther.’

‘You put him on that bench, Harry. You need to fix it so that Curran doesn’t try McGladdery.’

‘By finding who killed Patricia. You think it’s as simple as that.’

‘Nothing’s that simple, but you owe it to Patricia and to Doris and to that poor woman McGowan who died in 1949.’