Blue Is the Night (19 page)

Robert Taylor’s appeal against his sentence for murder was heard on 18th December 1949 before Lord Justice Porter and Lord Justice Black. Taylor was represented by Robert Hanna QC. The new Attorney General, A. J. Reid, who had replaced Judge Lance Curran, represented the crown.

The appellants stated that jury sequestration had not been maintained during the trial. That on an outing to Bangor the members of the jury had been allowed to separate and go their separate ways and that this was forbidden by statute and in common law. Porter spoke upon the rights of the accused. He said that no blame fell upon the sergeant and constables of Leopold Street who had accompanied the members of the jury. Porter spoke about the injustice that would be done to Taylor and to his fiancée Lily if due weight was not given to the improper jury sequestration. Robert Taylor’s conviction for the murder of Mary McGowan was struck out. Because he had already been tried twice for the same offence a retrial was not possible. Taylor was released.

Robert Taylor left no images of himself. When he was charged with murder he instructed his family to destroy what photographs they might have had in the house. Held on remand, he was taken from his cell in Crumlin Road to the courthouse on the other side of the road through an underground passage. On his few public appearances a coat or a solicitor’s file concealed his features. Taylor knew the odds.

Esther met Capstick from the Heathrow flight at Aldergrove. There were snow flurries as the plane touched down on the runway. The light snow formed vortices in the rotor wash. Esther waited for him on the apron, the Viscount taxiing to a halt, the passengers disembarking into the frozen night. They did not speak until they were driving back into the city.

‘What’s your game, Mrs Ferguson?’

‘I want to know the truth about Patricia.’

‘There’s more to it.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because there always is.’

‘Curran’s about to try a capital murder case. A man called McGladdery, for the murder of a nineteen-year-old shop girl.’

‘The same age as Patricia.’

‘McGladdery doesn’t have a hope with Curran on the bench.’

‘You think it’s not just.’

‘Curran will hang him.’

‘Is this McGladdery something to you?’

‘No.’

‘Then why all this? You trying to get back at Harry? He’s still Curran’s man, isn’t he?’

Capstick turned his head to smile at Esther, his face lit by oncoming headlights, fleshy, corrupted. Examining her in the unforgiving light. The corners of her mouth lined. Her eyes in darkness.

‘He’s still Curran’s man.’

‘For Patricia then?’

‘I don’t have to explain myself to you, do I?’

‘You done all the explaining you needed to do a long time ago.’ Esther seeing the hotel bedroom. Captstick lying on the bed. Esther sitting at the dressing table in her slip. Her face in the mirror. The ineradicable shadow.

‘I called you for Harry. I want the harm to stop. I don’t want Lance Curran hanging a man and my husband going along with it.’

‘You can drop me at the hotel,’ Capstick said. ‘I’ll find my own way out to Holywell.’

‘Will she tell you?’

‘They generally do. Does Ferguson know you called me?’

‘No.’

‘Are you going to keep it that way?’ She didn’t answer. She left him at the International Hotel. Ferguson was waiting for her in the living room. Her medical file from Holywell lay on the card table. She opened it and read in silence.

‘Where is Capstick?’ He said.

‘At his hotel. How did you know?’ Ferguson shrugged. The furtive ways of the city his stock in trade.

‘What else do you know? Do you know who killed Patricia?’

‘No.’

Esther said that she had had an abortion when she was eighteen. Backstreet stuff. He knew about it from Germany. The hunched-over agonies. The scraping and scouring, the risk of things pierced, things rupturing, the haemorrhagic flow. A midwife, a matronly figure carrying a leather bag, leaving the house after dark, closing the door carefully.

It wasn’t that, she said, it was a clinic. In a good street in London. Everyone was very discreet. But they messed it up anyway.

‘When I got back home they said I was a nymphomaniac. They sent me to the asylum. To the actual loony bin.’

She was released a month before she met Ferguson. She had slept with him in seaside hotels, travelling up the coast where they would not be recognised, taking the illicit into their relationship. She would drink whiskey and soda. In bed she would speak obscenities into his ear, describe sex acts he had never heard of. During the day she was silent and withdrawn. She took his hand in restaurants and put it between her legs.

‘Holywell.’

‘Yes.’

Ferguson held her hand until she fell asleep. Their marriage had been an accord on her hurt. They would tend it together. He put a blanket over her and left her and went outside to his car. He looked towards the dark of the mountains beyond the city. There was a line of stars along the sharp cut edge of the Black Mountain as though darkness struck fire in the deep basalt.

Doris was surprised to learn that she had a visitor on Wednesday evening. There were seldom visitors during the week and there were never visitors after five. The night was hers alone. The duty nurse took her from her room to the day room. She was unaccustomed to being there at nighttime and found it cold and ill-lit. She did not recognise the man at first and he smiled at her in a most unpleasant way. Mr Brown came in with him but the man told him to go.

‘Capstick of the Yard is known for solo results, Mr Brown,’ he said. ‘Your presence is not required.’

Chief Inspector Capstick.

Doris recalled it had been Capstick who took the confession from Iain Hay Gordon when he was accused of murdering Patricia. Not that a frail man such as Gordon could have done murder against Patricia with her waspish temperament. She had never met Capstick but had always thought of him as a vulgar man acquainted with many of the lowest types.

‘Good to see you looking so well, Doris. I heard you were a bit shook, but the rest has done you good.’

‘My needs have been well attended to, Chief Inspector.’

‘You’d be well used to a place like this, Doris, wouldn’t you? I’d say you seen plenty when you lived in Broadmoor. Plenty of lunatic behaviour.’

‘I had a sheltered upbringing, Mr Capstick.’

‘What I’m trying to get at is this. It wouldn’t be too hard for you to put on. It wouldn’t be out of the picture for you to act like you’d lost your marbles when you were as sane as the next man or woman.’

‘I don’t understand you, Chief Inspector.’

‘Don’t give me that, Doris. You understand me plain as day. Many’s the place like this I sat in listening to some miscreant trying to get his neck out of a noose. You know damn well what happened to Patricia.’

‘I am not one of your creatures, Chief Inspector, one of your criminals from the slums and suburbs. I am Doris Curran and I will be Lady Curran.’

‘Hark at her, brought up in the loony bin.’

‘I must object.’

‘You can object all you like, Doris, there’s nobody listening. I know all about you and your daughter. She was a saucy little article and no mistake, isn’t that right?’

‘You have no right to speak to me like that.’

‘I’ll speak to you any way I choose. I met many a little madam like your Patricia when I was working the West End. A posh little minx on the skinny for some rough trade. Thought they was different from the rest of us but they all look more or less the same when they’re on their back, if you get my drift.’

‘You are a horrid man.’

‘Horrid I may well be, but I don’t see you breaking down. There’s no waterworks for our Patricia. That’s missing from this here scene. Any mother would be in bits at this stage but not our Doris.’

‘Stop it.’

‘I didn’t leave my daughter lying dead on the leafy forest floor. I didn’t pretend she was still alive when she was as stiff as a plank. So what’s the story here, Doris? Which one of you done her in? Or maybe all of you done it.’

‘I did not harm my daughter. I did not. I did not.’

‘So you say, but old Judge Curran, he must of reckoned you done her in, the way he acted.’

‘Nurse, nurse, nurse.’

‘Don’t get me wrong, Doris. Far as I can see Patricia was a goner, no matter what. Some girls just have that. You know they’re going to end up in an alley with their skirt over their head. It’s in their nature to be tarts. They smell danger and danger smells them and there’s nothing no one can do about it. What gets me is that you rotten lot would have let the hangman have Gordon before you’d rat each other out.’

Capstick stood up and took a black notebook from his open pocket. ‘These is from your police files, Thomas Cutbush. Also known as Jack the Ripper. Also known as Saucy Jack.
When officers from Scotland Yard entered Cutbush’s lodgings at the Minories they conducted a thorough search. In the chimney piece they apprehended pieces of woman’s attire stained with blood. Three cami skirts. Two overskirts. Other ladies’ sundries equally stained with blood.
’

‘Vile, Chief Inspector. Utterly vile.’

‘
Officers also seized an amount of anatomy books with the pages being soiled at illustrations of the intimate female parts. Among the items taken from the chimney breast were two anatomical drawings of women, one of them displaying mutilations.
’

‘You will stop this, Chief Inspector. My husband is an important man. He will hear of this.’

‘You’re the tricky one and no mistake, Doris. There was more than one minx in the Curran family if you want my opinion.’

In the suspect’s possession at the time of his arrest was a ‘Polish knife’, very sharp with a bone handle.

‘I’ll do you, Cutbush.’

When suspect was removed to Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane he informed staff and inmates that he would ‘rip them all’
.

She was locked up
like Cutbush.
She was a watcher from windows
like Cutbush.
She knew what Saucy Jack would do to the Chief Inspector. Jack would have the knives out. Chop chop. What odds would be given for your life then, Chief Inspector? You’d be rent from your ball sack to your gizzard. Chop chop. When Thomas Cutbush asks for silence he gets silence.

Doris looked up. There was someone else in the room. Another watcher. How long had he been there? Ferguson. Lance’s man. He of the slut wife. The man she had seen from her window as he left Patricia home late at night. The man she had seen searching the forest on the night Patricia died.

‘I think that’s enough, Chief Inspector.’ Capstick turned.

‘That’s a crying shame, Ferguson. I had her on the ropes there. Another few minutes I would have had her telling me every last thing. They want to, you know. Her ladyship might hide all she likes but she’s as bent as a nine-bob note.’

‘Your flight’s booked for eight o’clock in the morning.’

‘Fair enough, Ferguson. It’s your funeral. Mind you, if old Doris ever gets out I’d keep that wife of yours locked up. Not to be trusted, our Doris.’

‘Lucy took the flowers back.’

‘What did you say, Mrs Curran?’ Doris had fallen asleep in a wingback chair. Ferguson sitting in the window seat beside her.

‘She was afraid that Father would ask where they came from and she would get into trouble for not looking after me.’

‘Lucy?’

‘The housemaid. She looked after me when Mother wasn’t well.’

‘What flowers were they?’

‘Pink roses. In the middle of winter.’

‘Where did you get pink roses in winter?’

‘I asked him for them. He brought me into the shed.’

‘Who did you ask for them?’

‘Jack.’

‘Who was he? One of the gardeners?’

‘Lucy took the flowers back to Jack. I think he was waiting for her.’

‘Who was Jack, Mrs Curran?’

‘Lucy never came back to me, Mr Ferguson.’

‘You never saw her again?’

‘There was a different maid the next day. She wasn’t like Lucy. She never chatted to me or let me put on lipstick when Father wasn’t there.’

‘Did anyone tell you what happened to her?’

‘No.’ Although Doris could guess what happened to Lucy in the shed. Among the rakes and spades and packets of seed spilled, the bulbs and corms. In the darkness.

Doris had closed her eyes again. Her breathing was even. Her chest rose and fell. Even so, Ferguson did not think that she was asleep.

That’s a cheeky lie, Doris Curran
, Lucy said.
You did see me again.

Doris didn’t know what Lucy had done to end up in Broadmoor, what sad tale she was part of, an infanticide perhaps, a baby unwanted plunged in water or left to die in bitter cold. Lucy moved without noise around the house and told her tales of murder dark and desperate but always Cutbush, she always came back to him.

Lucy said Thomas Cutbush killed six women and cut them all to shreds, he took their innards out their womanly parts and took them home for to play with. What did they call him? Doris had asked. Saucy Jack, Lucy replied, and he were right saucy too.

At full moon all the patients were put on lockdown, Lucy said, but Doris knew that. Father said that there was a draw on the fluids of the brain at the apex of the lunar cycle. You could stand outside on a full moon night and hear them moan and cry out. Father said that some paced their cell all night. Or sat on their bunks rocking. But not Cutbush. Nothing stirred in his cell.

Doris knows what they think in Holywell, that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. They all forget where she was brought up. Broadmoor prison for the criminally insane. That’s no picnic, Lucy says.

Father showed her everything. The table with the leather straps where you were tied down for ECT. The copper skullcap and the piece of black rubber to put in your mouth so that you wouldn’t bite your tongue when they gave you the full twenty-five thousand volts. No messing around there, Lucy said.

‘Lance would have made a good Jack the Ripper, wouldn’t he, Mr Ferguson?’

‘What do you mean?’ But Ferguson knew what she meant. He could see Lance at large in the Whitechapel night, a shadow in himself, bound to harm. Women beckoning from doorways. What stakes would they play for? Jack dicing with them in the darkness. The soul-wagers. Lance would stake what the darkness demanded and he would pay his forfeit.

‘Tell me about Cutbush, Mrs Curran,’ Ferguson said.

‘I told you to be quiet. You don’t want to meet him. You don’t want to meet Saucy Jack.’

‘Saucy Jack?’

‘That’s what he called himself when it happened to Doris.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Doris went into the shed and didn’t come out.’

‘She got the roses.’

‘Yes.’

‘But Lucy took them back.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you never saw Lucy again.’

Now, now, Doris Curran. Tell the truth and shame the devil.

‘There was a woman. Against the wire. She had no clothes on.’

‘It was Lucy?’

‘After she came back from the shed.’ It was freezing that night. The ground was frosted. Lucy stood barefoot and naked in the exercise yard. Two warders approached her. One of them took off his overcoat and put it over her shoulders.

‘What did Jack do to Lucy in the shed, Mrs Curran?’

‘He sported with her. The way he sported with the lasses under the arches at Whitechapel.’

‘What did he do to Doris?’

Not answered.

‘Did Patricia ring you from the bus stop on the night she died?’

Not answered.

‘Did you take the car down to pick her up?’

Not answered.

Doris played families every day when she was small. That was what Patricia did not understand. There was a father. Sometimes there was a son. But there was always a mother and a daughter. Standing a little apart from the others, looking at each other, speaking a secret mother and daughter language. When she was seventeen she bought a clutch purse in the Army and Navy stores and could see a daughter carrying it. It was about making store against the future. She bought stockings still in their wrappers. Other girls had their trousseaus, their glory boxes where they kept household items, linens, tableware. But Doris wanted more than that. She had a picture in her head of a daughter, a companion. They would shop together. They would take tea, be disdainful of the other ladies, have a secret language of nods and gestures that only they understood. Doris would produce the items she had bought and they would be unwrapped with noises of delight.

‘Who killed Patricia, Mrs Curran?’ Ferguson leaned close to her.

‘I know,’ Doris said, ‘I know who did it.’

‘Tell me. I won’t repeat it.’

‘I know you won’t repeat it. To tell you is to tell the darkness.’

‘Who did it, Doris?’ Ferguson was aware of the night around them. That they sat alone in the empty recreation room. Around them the table-tennis tables, the stacked board games. That the shadows made sport there.

‘Cutbush.’ Doris whispered the name. ‘Cutbush did it.’

Esther woke when Ferguson came home. She sat up and gathered the blanket around her, brushed her hair back from her forehead. Every time he came home late was the same as the night he came in to tell her that Patricia had been murdered. The same pain in his face.

‘Did she kill Patricia?’

‘By her own words. She says Cutbush, but she is Cutbush in her own head.’

‘Poor Doris.’

‘Poor Patricia.’

‘What happened to Taylor?’

‘They say he went to Canada with Lily but I don’t believe it.’

Taylor and his box of tricks.
If harm had a human face.
Out there somewhere with his pinchings and rubbings. Staying clear of the dog tracks. Now he knew what such dogs were for. Now he knew what it was like to be hunted, the yelps and snuffles, the unrelenting padding on your trail, on your scent. Taylor knew better than to let his face be seen in public. Men like Lunn and McKenzie wouldn’t have it. Men like Hanna.

Ferguson had heard that Taylor had moved to the eastern periphery of the city, into one of the new housing estates built for the growing population of the city. The privet gardens and new shopfronts in need of their own hauntings. Taylor a figure of storybook malice. Lily the veiled lady.

‘I wish they’d hanged him.’

‘Do you?’

‘If they had Lance Curran wouldn’t have been a judge.’

‘And Patricia might still be alive.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if she ever existed. If I dreamed her.’

‘She existed. There’s a stone in the graveyard to say it.’

‘Can we stop Curran trying McGladdery?’

‘No. Doris told me that Cutbush did it. She didn’t tell Capstick. Doris might be sick but she’s not stupid.’

‘Loyal to Curran.’

‘More loyal than me, you mean.’

‘She is his wife, Harry.’