Blue Is the Night (18 page)

‘What’s he doing?’ Patricia said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘In the first trial he sounded coached. Like every word that came out of his mouth had been given to him by Lunn. He doesn’t sound like that now. It sounds like they’ve given him his head.’

‘You’re right,’ Ferguson said. Taylor sticking to the script first time round, striking out on his own this time. He couldn’t resist it, adding to the narrative, creating new events, stories loaded with harm.

Lily knew what he was doing. He had to find out how it worked, picking at the fabric of his own lies, the densely structured untruths devised in the dark of his cell by Lunn and Hanna. He was cleverer than them. He wanted to take their stories apart and replace them with something ornate, crafted from his box of tricks. She could see how angry Curran was making him and she found herself wondering how he would be if he was acquitted and if he would hurt her or her baby. She placed her hand on her swollen belly and saw the Curran girl watching her, the snobby bitch.

When the jury returned after lunch the foreman asked that they be permittted a break during legal argument. Lunn suggested that they go to Bangor as the previous jury had done. The judge assented and ordered that the jurors be accompanied by officers from Leopold Street barracks.

‘You fancy it?’ Ferguson said.

‘What?’

‘The trip to Bangor for the afternoon. Though it’s not exactly the weather for it.’

‘I like this kind of weather. I’ll get the train out. I’ll meet you there.’

Ferguson drove out to Bangor. He parked outside the railway station and walked out to the promenade, the wind from the north-east, shingle from the beach driven across the storm walls and on to the concrete. Weed and debris scattered underfoot. Solitary walkers on the sea wall, the sea buoys straining on their cables against the undertows, the tidal flux.

He saw Patricia standing on the sea wall. She was wearing a macintosh, her hands in the pockets. The sea spray had flattened her hair to her forehead. He called up to her, making himself heard above the wind, autumnal, buffeting, not to be denied.

‘Come down, Patricia.’

‘I like storms.’

‘It’s not safe. You could be washed off.’

‘I feel noble up here. Thinking heroine thoughts.’ The swell gathered against the far end of the sea wall and drove along it almost to her feet. The sea spray rose above the wall and fell in grey around her, almost obscured from view, stood on the sea wall, the raincoat to her feet, like a grey-veiled woman from some ghostly telling. Ferguson got on to the wall and took her by the wrist. He pulled her down the stone steps and into the lee of the wall.

‘Don’t be so rough, Harry,’ she said.

‘Then don’t be foolish.’

‘I am a bit damp,’ she said.

‘You’re soaked through,’ Ferguson said. ‘What train did you come out on?’

‘The two thirty.’

‘Was the jury on the train?’

‘They were. Kind of a mixture. Some of them were having drinks. The rest looked like church elders. Very sombre and disapproving.’

‘Let’s go.’

‘I need to change. I’ve got my badminton gear in my bag.’

‘You can change in one of the shelters.’

Ferguson led her to one of the concrete-roofed shelters, the damp and chilled interior circled by a wooden bench, names carved in the timber of the seating, hearts pierced with arrows, crude sexual figurings etched into the varnish, the bench an almanac of illicit couplings, the night’s doings, the heart abandoned on the margins.

‘Turn your back, Harry,’ Patricia said. Ferguson could hear her wet clothing fall on the concrete floor, a briskness to her movements, a locker room’s utilitarian gestures. Then her bare feet on the floor behind him, her hands over his eyes, the chilled flesh of her forearms against his face.

‘Guess who?’ She turned him towards her. He kept his eyes on hers, the shadowed gaze, her cold palms on his face, her fingers tracing his jawline, a grave attention brought to bear as though his face were something lain undisturbed for years, a half-sunk artefact dredged from the depths.

‘You’re starting to get wrinkles, Harry. Here and here. Maybe they’re life lines. Do faces have life lines? Does mine?’

‘Get dressed, Patricia.’ He turned away from her and went to the shelter entrance. He looked down. He could see where her skin had touched the material of his suit, the damp outlined body, the saltwater traces.

They walked up Quay Street into the town. Patricia wore her wet raincoat over her badminton clothes. The wind funnelled through the buildings. There were no day trippers on the streets, one or two locals walking with their heads down.

‘What are we looking for?’ Patricia said.

‘The jury.’

‘Where do we look?’

‘You said it. Some of them will be in a bar. The rest of them are good-living. They wouldn’t go into a public house if their lives depended on it and the weather’s not good enough for them to walk.’

‘Don’t worry, Harry. We’ll sleuth them out.’

The amusements and funfair lights were on in the storm dark. The streets were windswept, eerie. They found the jury members clustered like survivors. One group in Shell’s tearoom on the front, the rest in the British Legion on Queen’s Parade. Ferguson counted how many jurors were in each group. He wrote the figure, the address and time in a notebook.

‘What are you up to, Harry?’ Patricia said.

‘Just making sure that justice is served,’ Ferguson said. He walked with her to the train station.

‘Do I look tired?’ she said.

‘No.’ But her eyes looked deep-sunk, her cheeks hollow, her hair still damp and flattened to her skull.

‘I feel tired. You know Mother is not well?’

‘I know that your mother is sometimes quite nervous.’

‘Cat on a hot tin roof nervous. I think this trial is making her worse. Sometimes she looks at me like I’m the devil or something. She never does that with Desmond.’

‘The trial will soon be over.’

‘When I was small I heated the poker in the fire and touched Desmond’s leg with it.’

‘Did you? Why?’

‘I wanted to see what would happen. Desmond forgave me. He’s good like that. But I think Mother never forgave me.’

‘I’m sure she has.’

‘I’d prefer if you didn’t answer me at all than answer me like that. She called me Lucy the other night. Do you know who Lucy is?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘Mother was brought up in Broadmoor. I wonder if that kind of thing can be catching?’

The train whistle sounded from the platform. She put her lips to his cheek and ran without looking back, disappearing into the crowd.

Ferguson hadn’t answered her question about Doris.
If that kind of thing can be catching.

The trial resumed the following morning. In his final cross-examination of Taylor Curran forced him to admit that he had lost all his money at the dog track several days before the murder. Then Curran sought to prove that Taylor had gone to Morrison, the publican, to borrow money before Mary McGowan’s death rather than afterwards as Taylor claimed, trying to break the link between Morrison’s refusal to lend him money and the subsequent robbery and murder.

Curran was relentless. Taylor’s sister Madeleine said that she had accompanied him to see Morrison. Curran destroyed her credibility by proving that she had lied regarding the hiring of the wedding car. Morrison also lied. He said he had met Taylor that afternoon. He said that a girl was waiting for him. Curran asked him to identify the girl. He pointed to Madeleine.

‘What was she wearing?’

‘I don’t know. I took no notice of her.’

‘Then how can you be so sure that it was the defendant’s sister, six months on?’

Ferguson could feel the silence among the jurors and the public. Witnesses leaving the box, tearstained, harried. They barely listened to Hanna’s defence, his description of Taylor as ‘almost a boy’, his assertion that no normal person would kill for such a pittance. They had eyes only for Curran. Ferguson wondered if he had ever really known Curran or if he could be known. His final witnesses had let their lies be exposed. A long reckoning falling due. When Judge Andrews laid out ten points for the jury to decide, each point was deduced from Curran’s reasoning.

Andrews referred to Taylor’s attempt to deceive the police by saying that Booth owed him £5. His false statement that he had been to the Daisy. The evidence of the blood. The evidence of Mrs Shiels. The overcoat in the warm kitchen. The blood again, the spilling of it, the damning flow and spatter. The five scratches on Taylor’s face, his statement that ‘it could have been done by the child’.

Finally the most important question of all. Did Mrs McGowan, that poor lady, tell the truth when she declared on four different occasions, ‘Robert did it,’ and gave, moreover, the details of how he did it, which precisely corresponded, as I suggest to you, with the nature of the injuries which she received? Was she mistaken? Counsel said it was a question of mistaken identity. The assailant grasped her by the throat. She had no opportunity of seeing who it was. But according to her, she opened the door and the accused entered and spoke to her and asked for the liberty of using her telephone. It was only then that, according to her, the attack was made upon her. I suggest to you that at that early stage at any rate, she was not distraught and had the opportunity of seeing full well who he was who entered her house. And you will not forget too that, according to her story, if it is true, she had seen him outside only ten minutes before.

The voice that spoke to us in those dying declarations was the voice of Mary McGowan, sitting as she then was, on the edge of eternity. And today, gentlemen, it is for you to say, is not her voice still crying to us from the grave, for justice?

No McKenzie on this jury would stand against the others. The jurors stood up as the judge left the courtroom, white-faced, reserved, as though they had attended a bloody assize from the past. The jurors left for their deliberations. Hanna stood still as his desk. He did not turn to face his adversary. Curran had won.

In the court precincts leaves blew on the limestone paviours and on the granite kerbing. Patricia had set her back to a stone buttress out of the wind. She was smoking a cigarette. Her father came out of the courtroom with Ellis Harvey. Harvey listened to Curran, then turned and walked slowly away. Curran stood for a moment. The wind tugged at the fabric of his coat. A seagull driven inland rode the courtyard updraft and Curran’s eyes followed it upwards as though it rose at his command in its tilt and yaw and he was stormmaster and isolate.

Ferguson walked past Curran without speaking to him. He stepped off the courthouse plinth and began approaching groups in the yard, talking to them, low and earnest, some of the men looking angry, and she thought that one of them might hit him but he kept talking into their faces, his shoulders hunched as he went from group to group, gathering a shabby backstreet authority about him. Something of the bosses’ hired hand about him, the strikebreaker, underhand and subtle. She saw him take one man aside and palm banknotes into his hand and after that the other man also started to approach figures in the crowd, gathering a few others to him, men starting to drift in from the afternoon shift at the shipyard in boots and caps, riveters and platemen with streaked faces and the furnace reek still about them. Patricia saw Ferguson put his hand into one man’s pocket and scatter a fistful of steel rivets and bolts on the ground.

Ferguson saw Patricia.

‘His nibs was on his high horse.’

‘The judge?’

‘The victim sitting on the edge of eternity.’

‘What were you doing, talking to those men?’

‘Making sure they behave themselves when the verdict comes in.’

‘How do you do that?’

‘I persuade them.’

‘Persuade them with what? I saw you give that man money.’

‘Did you? It takes more than money to keep them off the street.’

‘What does it take?’

‘Rain, Patricia. Rain and wind.’ He looked at his watch.

‘They can’t find him not guilty this time, can they, Harry?’

There was movement by the courtroom doors. Reporters and spectators pushing through. A platoon of constabulary moved into position at the gates to the courthouse.

‘The verdict’s in,’ Ferguson said. He brought Patricia around the back and they entered the courthouse through the bailiffs’ postdoor. He brought her down the jury-room corridor, where a uniformed turnkey put out his hand to stop them. The whites of the man’s eyes showed and his nostrils were flared.

‘Pull yourself together, McMichael,’ Ferguson said, ‘we’re only going through to the public gallery.’

‘I am in dread of this day,’ the man said, standing back against the wall, ‘I am in mortal dread of what will be delivered from behind that door.’

Ferguson and Patricia entered the courtroom by the jury door as the public entered the gallery beside them. Curran stood at his bench in the centre of the courtroom and he saw Ferguson and his daughter enter and cross the body of the court in front of him without expression. Ferguson saw Patricia flush and he kept his own face turned away until he reached the public benches.

The courtroom filled and the tipstaff closed the doors and when he had done so the judge entered and the court rose. Once again the black silk was placed close to hand on the judge’s bench and once more Taylor was led forth into the dock.

‘Something’s wrong. He’s gone loopy,’ Patricia said. Taylor nodded and smiled at his parents in the public gallery and winked at Lily’s sister. The wind moaned through the tunnel from gaol to courthouse and rattled the windows and stirred dust on the scaffold planking placed so carefully against the execution-room whitewash. The jury came in with their hands down and dry leaves blew about the courtroom floor as if in parody of their dismal footfall. The foreman of the jury handed the verdict paper to the tipstaff, who brought it to the judge. The judge opened it and read it and handed it back. The foreman of the jury stood.

‘In the case of Regina versus Taylor on the charge of murder, has the jury reached a verdict?’

‘There is a verdict.’

‘Please inform the court.’

‘On the charge of murder we find the accused, Robert Taylor, guilty.’

No one in the courtroom moved. Dead leaves blew around the bench legs and the feet of the court officers. Taylor looked boyish and unconcerned. When the judge reached down for the square of black sillk Taylor rose slightly in his seat so that he could see. The judge put the silk on his head.

‘Robert Taylor, I do not wish to add to the pain and anguish of the moment for you, which indeed must be great.
Dead leaves.
I shall therefore content myself with pronouncing the dread judgement and sentence of the court as prescribed by law.
It was Robert. Robert the Painter.
The sentence and judgement of the court is and it is hereby ordered and adjudged that you, Robert Taylor, be taken from the bar of the court where you now stand to his majesty’s prison and that on Wednesday the sixteenth day of November in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and forty-nine
babyface killer
you be taken to the common place of execution in the prison and there hanged by the neck
it’s a sin to tell a lie
until you are dead and that your body be buried within the walls of the prison in which the said judgement of death shall be executed on you. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

Ferguson had seen the executed at Nuremberg and had sat with the death-cell guards and their talk of hanging, the hooding, the lore of knots and drops, the crack of the trap door. He knew what he had seen. Eyeless corpses asway on crossroads gibbets at dusk. Ferguson knew that a man hearing that sentence pronounced felt the abyss open under his feet. The jury stared at Taylor with a kind of horror. Taylor looked as if he expected to be clapped from the courtroom when the jurors thought that his ears would fill with carrion acclaim, the whisper of grave tilth. Curran stood gaunt and unmoving, his eyes on Taylor. He had played his hand. He had rendered a man’s soul forfeit.

No one moved. The judge wet his lips. He did not seem to know whether to remove the cap of silk or retain it.

‘Bring the prisoner below,’ he said. A woman screamed.

‘Lily,’ Patricia said. For Lily had seen what seemed to evade Taylor, the welcome of the damned, the grave’s acclaim. Lily bent forward in her mourning cloth and touched her forehead to her clenched fists.

‘He didn’t tell her,’ Ferguson said, ‘Taylor didn’t tell her.’ He turned to Patricia.

Taylor was led out. The judge rose. Ferguson saw Curran leave the courtroom, then saw Patricia pushing her way through the public gallery.

There was a Special Constabulary cordon around the courthouse. A silent crowd stood outside it. Beyond the crowd bonfires had been lit, dull orange flame within, the smoke rolling in dark banks seaward driven by squalls inland, the smoke black as though the substance of the night were being gathered.

Patricia stopped Ferguson in the courtyard.

‘You said Taylor didn’t tell her. Didn’t tell her what?’

‘He knows he’s not going to hang.’

‘You did it, Harry. It’s something to do with the jury. That day in Bangor. You and me. We sleuthed the jury. You took notes. Father’s case. This was Father’s case.’

‘I was working on his behalf.’

‘Were you?’

‘Yes, Patricia.’

‘Is it working on his behalf to cut the ground from under him?’

‘Yes.’

‘On whose behalf did you make me part of it? Yours or his?’ He reached out to her but she moved away from him, slipping between the armed constables and into the throng. At the edge of the crowd she turned and looked back. Ferguson could see her face white against the gathering darkness, semaphore of heart’s pain to come.

Ferguson found Curran at ten o’clock that evening. Curran’s Lancia was parked close to the perimeter fencing at Aldergrove aerodrome. Friday night take-offs and arrivals, the smell of aviation fuel hanging in the air. Far-off lights on the apron, the red and green wingtip lights drifting off the edge of the south runway, carried into the nighttime sky, borne by the winds that blew aloft. Curran stood at the wire. A Dakota came in over his head, the undercarriage down, the turboprop exhaust blast washing over him, the fuselage alloy dented and scored, the undercarriage members chipped and oil-streaked, thundering, resolved out of the night.

Ferguson stood beside him at the wire. Curran had been in the Flying Corps at seventeen. Ferguson could see him goggled, crouched in an open cockpit. Pre-dawn briefings. Shot down over enemy lines.

‘I was too young to go to France,’ Curran said.

‘Did you want to?’

‘I lied about my age to join the Corps and they found out. My classmates all went and they all died.’

On the far side of the airfield the Dakota cut its engines and the blades whined as they slowed. A hooter sounded from the hangar area. The autumnal crosswind blew dust across the runway. Curran stood still, as if he attended to windblown anthems for the doomed of his youth.

‘I won, Harry.’

‘I know you won, Mr Curran. Wiped the floor with Hanna and the rest of them.’

‘That’s not what I mean. Every wager I made in the last three days was good. Every horse won. Every card was an ace.’

‘You kept going. Making up your losses.’

‘That’s not it. You wait for the luck to stop. The faller at the last with the field beaten. Wagering all on a full house to turn up a two instead of an ace. That is the gamble, Ferguson. That is the full extent and material of it.’

‘Hanna has filed an appeal against the guilty verdict.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s to be heard straight away. I don’t know what the grounds are.’

‘Do you not know what the grounds will be, Harry? Hanna will argue that the jury were permitted an afternoon of relaxation. During that afternoon in Bangor the jury were separated one from the other. That separation is not permitted by the law. They must be kept together at all times. The lack of sequestration means that their verdict must be set aside. There is no conviction.’

‘Double jeopardy means that the case cannot be tried again.’

‘So Taylor is a free man.’

‘Yes. Your appointment to the High Court will be announced later this week. It means that you will have no part in Taylor’s appeal.’

‘Attention to detail, Harry. I’m impressed. You played a bad hand well.’

‘Taylor will come to some harm of his own making. His kind always do.’

‘And what of our kind, Harry?’

Ferguson drove back into the city. At twelve he drove up the Malone Road. The Attorney General’s car was in the driveway. All the lights were off in the house except one high up in the gable wall. Patricia’s room. Ferguson drove off. Thinking about what Curran had said. Knowing that a card had been played to him and he dare not turn it over.