Blue Is the Night (15 page)

Ferguson rang the doorbell again. Desmond was gone and Curran’s car was not in the driveway but he had seen the two women’s figures at the window though they were now gone. He heard laughter from the roadway. He raised his fist to beat on the door before Patricia opened it. There was a scratch on her cheek. Her eyes were dark and unreadable.

‘I need your telephone,’ he said. She did not move and he pushed past her.

‘Who are you calling?’ she said.

‘Sir Richard Pim. Inspector of Constabulary. Who is in the house?’

‘Mother is upstairs. She isn’t feeling well.’

Ferguson spoke into the receiver.

‘Pim?’

‘Harry Ferguson. I thought I might hear from you tonight.’ Pim lived in Hillsborough, outside the city. Ferguson pictured the oak-lined hallway. The tree-lined avenue.

‘There’s mischief afoot on the Malone Road tonight.’

‘You interrupted an interesting hand of bridge, Ferguson. I’ll presume you don’t play.’

‘I don’t think the boys I saw coming up the road were looking for a game of bridge either.’ Ferguson reminding himself to tone it down. Pim was a friend of Winston Churchill.

‘Sometimes it’s best to let the mob have its head.’

‘There’s more than Judge Curran living on the Malone Road. Many’s the man won’t be best pleased that you let these boys out of their box. Just bear in mind, Pim, it’s harder to get them back in than let them out.’

‘As long as Lancelot Curran understands his position.’

‘You’ve made your point, Mr Pim. I’m standing in the Attorney General’s hallway. There’s only his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter here.’

Pim sighed. Ferguson had heard rumours that he was in poor health. He had seen him in the Reform Club. A slight man with sandy hair, dandyish, malevolent.

‘I’ll send the cavalry, Ferguson, but be a good fellow and try to persuade the judge.’

‘I have a few ideas as to how to deal with this.’

‘I’m sure you do, Harry. I’m sure you do.’

Pim hung up. Ferguson replaced the receiver.

‘You’re shaking,’ Patricia said.

‘Am I? People like Pim have that effect on me. Are all the doors locked?’

‘Yes. Desmond insists when the ladies are alone in the house. Are we in diffs?’

‘Not now. The police are on their way. Still would be a good idea to stay away from the windows for ten minutes. I’m going to move my car around the back.’

Ferguson stepped out into the night. Patricia stood behind him. The wind moved the trees. Leaves gathered in the angle of the porch. Ferguson remembered the leaves on the floor of the museum. The dry scuttling. A man moved from the shadow of the gate pillars. A flung granite sett struck the windscreen of his car and span obliquely from the starring glass, hitting Ferguson above the eye. Dazed, he went to his knees. He felt Patricia beside him.

‘Go back inside,’ he said.

‘Bugger that for a game of soldiers,’ she said, trying to lift him. From the south a siren sounded.

‘Tell the Attorney,’ a man shouted, ‘hang Taylor and we’ll fucking hang him.’

Another siren sounded from the bottom of the road. They heard running feet. A third siren began and the noise of the approaching tenders sounded together like some iron klaxon announcing a new coming. Patricia helped Ferguson up and into the house. In the hallway she looked at his eye.

‘You need something on that. It’s split open. Clean though. You need the doctor.’

‘No doctor.’

‘Let me look after it then.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘She’ll be all right. She had one of her turns. She always sleeps like the dead afterwards.’

Ferguson held his handkerchief to his cut eye. Patricia led him towards the back of the house through the sculleries and outhouses. She left him in a scullery lined with tennis rackets, hockey sticks with worn grips, tennis shoes. He had not thought of her as sporting. He imagined her moving in the scuffed tennis shoes, up on her toes, at full stretch.

She came back with mercurochrome and lint. She washed the cut and swabbed it with the mercurochrome.

‘Does it sting?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Death, where is thy sting. Grave, where is thy victory.’

‘You make it sound like a song.’

‘Bloody Sunday school. I shouldn’t say bloody. Especially about Sunday school. My language is appalling. Everyone says so.’

She cut gauze from a roll and pressed it over the cut.

‘You look like a boxer. Jack Dempsey or somebody.’ She took the Black Cats out from under the sink, lit two and handed one to him.

‘I’m not helpless.’

‘I like men’s company. I like doing things for them. Will those idiots come back?’

‘No. Not with the police here.’

Rain blew against the scullery windows. Patricia shivered.

‘That’s all the better. Rain keeps them off the streets.’

‘It’s cold out here.’

‘Your cut is bleeding again.’ She made him sit and put the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, narrowing her eyes against the smoke as she took a fresh piece of gauze and pressed it against the wound. He was aware of her throat, the inner part of her wrist, the shadow of her underarm where the fabric of her blouse parted. She put her knee against his thigh to steady herself so that her skirt fell away from her knee, her body all underside and vulnerable points. He could feel the weight of her leg against his thigh, the womanly substance of it. She took the gauze from the cut and looked at him. An older man. The rumpled suit. Scented with tobacco and cologne. Worldly. The allure of the corrupted. Knowing what he’d bargained away. The soul’s carnage. She held his eyes with her own dark stare. He could not turn away from her look. The mesmeric void.

Across the city watchfires burned on street corners. In the Corn Market street preachers spoke of that which was set aside and could not be taken up again.

Lily stayed with her sister until the appeal was heard. Her mother said that the case was a judgement on her and that the child inside her would ballast her life in regret. She said the walk up the hill to the Crumlin Road prison would be as the hill of Golgotha. She did not know how things had changed for Lily. The city felt strange to her now. She had become someone different in the courtroom. The woman in mourning black. Nodded at, deferred to. She was a carrier of some storied force she barely understood. People stood aside for her. They stopped talking when she went into shops, carried her bags. There was a weight of expectation around her, a grave attention.

In the visiting area she sat across a table from Taylor. He looked strained, hollow-eyed. The seams of his jacket were coming apart where he had unpicked the stitches. He wanted to know if the police had come to his house again, whether they had looked in his box of tricks? He told her that he had asked to see the gallows.

‘What did you do that for?’

‘I wanted to see how it works. But the warder says it’s all just a pile of timber against the wall. They build it up when they need it. The hangman brings the rope and pinnings with him in a black case.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together as though he could feel the rope between his fingers, the hemp and sisal twist, the hurting coarseness of it.

‘Curran’s prosecuting again. I’d put a rope around his neck and hoist him high. I’d see his lordship’s legs kicking, so I would.’

‘He brings his daughter into the courtroom with him,’ Lily said. She knew to go along with him. She knew that if she didn’t agree with him he would remember it.

‘I seen her sitting and talking with some boy in a suit. Her like a tramp.’

‘She thinks she is somebody,’ Lily said.

‘There’s him twisting every word I’m saying and throwing it back at me.’

‘You should get Mr Hanna to talk more for you,’ Lily said. ‘Everybody knows you been done down.’

‘They’ll know it well enough when I make the acquaintance of Harry Allen.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘The hangman. You’d think you would know that.’

‘I don’t want to think about things like that, Robert.’

‘It would be the best part of you to think it, for if Mr Hanna doesn’t pull his socks up I’ll be shaking hands with Mr Allen on the way up them wooden stairs.’

Lily wanted to tell him about how things had changed. How she walked abroad now bathed in some shadowy grace. That she had fallen into the city’s favour. On Saturdays her sister’s husband drove them to Bangor. They’d link arms and walk along the front. People would notice her. The girl Robert Taylor’s engaged to. The sisters would sit in the flat-roofed shelters on the front, people passing and looking. They’d heard about the black-veiled girl in court.

Taylor sensed this from her. He felt she’d taken something that belonged to him. The prison was a place of iron and basalt. Brass locks and plain cut stonework. He could try to work into the substance of it until his fingers bled but it yielded nothing of itself to him. He walked through the prison surly and badgered. When Lily came he wanted to pinch and probe. When the warders weren’t looking he kicked her under the table. The kicks were hard and spiteful. Her calves and shins were covered in bruises when she got home. You’d be better off if they hung that creature, her mother said, if he was a dog they’d shoot him.

Lily took out the waist of the black dress to fit her so that she could wear it at the retrial. The baby was due in November. Each night before she went to bed Lily sat in front of the mirror without make-up. Her face was pale and bloodless. She placed the black veil on her head and let it fall. She saw herself standing outside Crumlin Road in the frozen dawn. Her sister said they hoisted a black flag over the prison when the deed was done. She thought of the warden posting Taylor’s execution notice on the wooden doors, the gasp of the crowd, the widow of the hanged man standing before the gaol, elevated beyond them, a figure of blood and vengeance, a soothsayer, to raise a trembling finger, bring down curses, old malfeasances.

A policeman waved Ferguson through the gates of Lunn’s house. There were formal gardens beyond the gate pillars, topiaries, a walled garden, crafted beds. Lunn met him at the bayed front of the house and they took the yew walk, the graveyard tree, dense and heavy, small poisonous berries in branch crooks.

‘I thought Curran would have thrown in the towel. I thought he’d shown what he is made of. Made a fool out of Hanna. Made a fool out of all of us. I thought that would have done him.’

‘Curran’s never done.’

‘If he keeps on he’ll bring the whole house of cards down around all of us.’

‘That wouldn’t be a bad thing.’

‘I take it you don’t want to go back to riveting ship hulls at the yard, Ferguson, because that’s where this will take you.’

‘I have his measure.’

‘You’ve a reputation as a man that can deliver. I haven’t seen evidence.’

‘I will end this.’

‘How?’

‘My business. There’s a trade.’

‘What?’

‘A seat on the bench for Curran.’

‘Not in my gift.’

‘I know that.’

‘What else?’

‘The solicitor’s post.’

‘For you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you spoken to your wife of your ambition?’

‘Why?

‘The dinners you have to attend, Ferguson. The agricultural shows. The gala balls. I hear tell Mrs Ferguson is took bad with the nerves.’

‘That’s my concern.’ But Ferguson could see himself in the future. A hunched figure in a raincoat. A carrier of secrets. People’s secret lives. Their inner corruptions. If there was a realm of bad faith he would be its king and potentate.

‘It’s a deal, Ferguson, if that’s really what you want.’

‘Tell Pim to keep a watch on the Curran house.’

‘I heard there was something the other night all right.’

‘The two women were in the house on their own.’

‘The Currans are never on their own when you’re around.’ Ferguson wondering what Lunn was driving at.

‘By the way, I hear Lance Curran was seen in a betting shop in Warrenpoint yesterday. You need to keep a closer eye on your man, not just his wife and daughter. If he has to go to a betting shop then he’s out of credit with his bookmaker. Between ourselves, it’s no commendation for a man who desires to sit on a judge’s bench.’

Ferguson stopped at a telephone box and rang the Curran house. Desmond answered. Ferguson hoping it would be Patricia.

‘Is your father there?’

‘He didn’t come home last night, Mr Ferguson. Mother is in a frightful state. He’s due in court tomorrow, isn’t he?’

Ferguson hung up. He rang the Reform Club. They hadn’t seen Curran for several days. He rang shopfront bookmakers in towns within a twenty-mile radius. He bought a Telegraph, checked the races and rang around the courses, dog and horse. Ferguson knew the track touts and bookies’ runners. They’d pick a man like Curran out of the race crowd. They’d pick him out of any crowd. Curran had been seen in Downpatrick late on Saturday afternoon.

‘He was laying down the cash,’ the source said, ‘playing like a twelve o’clock man in a nine o’clock town.’

Ferguson hung up. He dialled a number in Whiteabbey. Curran’s bookmaker, Hughes.

‘My name’s Harry Ferguson. I am a business acquaintance of Lancelot Curran’s.’

‘I know who you are, Mr Ferguson.’

‘I need to know Mr Curran’s position with you.’

‘Mr Curran’s position is different to the way it was six months ago.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘He was the coming man then.’

‘He’s still the coming man.’

‘Not since the Taylor case. Curran’s starting to look like a beaten docket.’

‘Taylor won’t hang.’

‘If you say so, Mr Ferguson. In the meantime Mr Curran’s at full stretch. Don’t get me wrong. If I was in the dock I’d want Curran on my side, and I hope he hangs Taylor and I’ll join him in dancing on the grave. But in the meantime he’s gone as far as he can with me.’

That night the telephone rang in the hallway. Ferguson got out of bed. It was after midnight, the hallway parquet cold on his bare feet. It was Patricia.

‘Father’s home.’

‘Did he tell you where he was?’

‘No.’

‘I’m frightened, Harry.’

‘There’s no need.’

Patricia didn’t answer. The phone went dead. Ferguson with the receiver to his ear. Seeing Patricia replacing the device into its cradle, the smooth, handled instrument. Ferguson left alone with the line hum, the night depths sounded.