Blue Is the Night (4 page)

Taylor had a ‘box of tricks’ he kept in the shed. It was an old ammunition box, its green paint chipped in places. Taylor had stolen it from the back of a military truck at Magilligan camp. No one else was allowed to touch it. He kept his tools in it. Besides the tools there was a yellowing collection of pornography that he’d found in a service shelter at the waterworks. Girls in marcelled curls wearing bathing suits, striking kittenish poses at the front of the pile, then working back towards what Taylor called the hard stuff. The smudged monochromes, the torn-out magazine pages. Girls who knew what was what, legs akimbo. Starlets with a small-town intentness about them. The way they looked at the camera. Where they’d come from. Knowing the shadows out there, the haunted spaces, what lay in the dark beyond the suburban lawns.

The men had slicked-back hair and small moustaches. They had a spivvish, across-the-border look to them. Taylor tried to copy the way they looked. He bought a double-breasted suit at Burton and wore it to the dogs at Celtic Park. He liked to get down among the dogs, the wet ash smell of the cinder track, the dogs muzzled, straining. The trainers muscling the dogs, working back from the shoulders, the spavined-looking ribs sticking out to give the greyhounds a slum-dog look, skulking in the noon heat. Taylor would run his hand along their backs feeling the vertebrae through the fine-haired pelt, and the heat. Taylor bet on horses and football, but most of all on the dogs. There was a cruel look to them, remorseless. He liked the moment when the traps opened and the greyhounds left the hutches, changed into something else, the pattered salvo of their paws, kicking up sand pulses, the lithe footfall. Taylor thought about bloodhounds in films given a piece of the victim’s clothing to smell, working their way through the swampland, torches swinging from side to side, a mournful baying.

Taylor was known as Robert the Painter. Paint was his medium. He was familiar with its qualities of camouflage, of deception. He was always in the shed, mixing paints, trying out colours on the walls. Carmine, turpentine and linseed oil. He painted his parents’ sitting room five or six times a year. He could never leave things alone. He met Lily when he was painting her sister’s kitchen.

Robert took Lily to the pictures. He said he was a foreman at Barrett’s painting firm. He told her about the things he took from houses he worked in. Ornaments and pieces of delft. He told her about the paint that was made from insect wings. He told her about the pigment made from ground-up poppies. When she took out her make-up he touched it, rubbing it between his fingers, tasting it. He’d touch her between her legs and put his fingers to his lips.

It was all about surfaces. Glazes and washes. He showed her how to cut in with the brush, work the paint into the plaster.

Taylor took her to the parks at night. Lady Dixon’s and Botanic. They’d climb over the fence. He’d back her up against the glass of the palm house. Taylor always looking for the textures in things. The silks, the nylon. He’d pull her stocking over his hand, smell it.

She always had to plead with him. He was always overstepping the mark. He named other girls who had let him touch their breasts, their silky thighs. Who had let him put his hand down there. He told her that it was normal. They all did it. They all sighed and turned their heads away on the damp grass.

‘Don’t, Robert, it’s not safe.’

‘You want it. You all want it.’ Robert’s manifesto. He said that he could be a great artist if he put his mind to it. Robert took her to the dances in Maxim’s. In the summertime they went to Bangor to the amusements. Robert would take her on the dodgems. He would belt her in, all little touches and smoothing her clothing down, arranging her skirt on her thighs, positioning the seatbelt over her breasts. Robert would take the wheel, blue sparks cascading from the grid. The careen and trundle of the dodgem-car bogies on the rubber matting. Robert would go the wrong way around the track. He saw her looking at the youth who attended the cars, setting them straight, stepping from car to car, crouching to turn the wheel. His hard-nosed road grace.

He played the horse track, betting on the coloured tin horses inching around the track. When he won he couldn’t wait. He’d take her down an alley, in behind a pile of beer crates. He’d back her up against a wall, working at her. His tongue hanging out for it.

He would try to win at the rifle range but he always missed. She tried to pull him away but he wouldn’t budge. He spent all of his money. He told the man behind the counter that the sights of the rifle were bent.

Taylor would be in a bad mood then. He could be spiteful. There would be pinches, an arm painfully gripped, hurtful pettings that left her sore and breathless. Taylor shifting the blame to her. I nearly had the bullseye but you jogged my elbow. You were sniffing and I couldn’t concentrate.

In March Taylor took Lily to the greyhounds. She thought the greyhounds looked like wild creatures, amoral skulking things. Hunting dogs prowling in the shadowed area under the stand. When the hare was released she put her hand to her mouth, willing it around the stadium.

‘It’s only a bit of fur and metal,’ Taylor said. ‘The dogs’ll do it no harm.’ But Lily could see in their eyes what they were. Taylor took her to the top bar above the stands. The drinks were more expensive here but Taylor liked the swank, the ladies in fur coats, the men well got in Aquascutum coats and bespoke suits. Taylor felt that he belonged here. He bought a Babycham for Lily but she didn’t drink it. She was pale and everything felt far away. Another race had started. Through the rain-streaked glass she saw the people stand to urge on the dogs but they were blurred and soundless, a ghost citizenry under the dog-track lights.

‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ Taylor was staring at her hard. ‘You’re up the fucking bubble.’

People had difficulty believing that Taylor could have committed such a brutal murder. He was a slight, boyish figure. He had unruly red hair, parted at the side, green eyes, a button nose, an irrepressible smile. People called ‘Bobby Breen’ after him in the street.

Doris met Lance Curran at a tea dance at the Savoy Hotel. She danced with him three times. She wore a dress she had made herself from a pattern in Vogue magazine. The dress pattern came with dance steps. The dance steps were a sheet of paper you laid out on the floor with each step marked out with footprints. You placed your foot in each print and that showed you the step. That was how Doris learned to dance. Doris and Lance were photographed during an interval in the dancing. Pre-war glamours cling to them. Lance is wearing an evening suit. Doris’s hair is arranged in a French bun. She is wearing gloves to her elbows. Lance is leaning back in his chair, a cigarette in his left hand, a glass on the table. He is a young man. He sees himself as without peer but she looks uncertain, as though she senses the catastrophe that her life will be. The onset of madness. Her daughter slain. Her son turned towards the light of God.

A cinema programme lies on the table between them. The film is Their Own Desire with Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery. Shearer and Montgomery dance together in an early scene. Shearer is wearing an ankle-length chiffon dress. They dance a Charleston. The dance is highly stylised. The woman places her left hand high on the man’s shoulder and he places his right hand in the small of her back, supporting her forearm so that she is forced to stand close to him, her pelvis pressed against his hip. He extends his left arm and holds it so that she must reach for it, his elbow high and crooked. She must raise her head sharply to look up at her partner. The camera pulls out to show that they are dancing among many other couples. The man fixed and stiff, forced into the mechanics of the dance, the woman forever looking up at him.

Men in uniform watch her and they ask her to dance. They know that war is coming. She finds herself circling the dance hall in the arms of provincial debonairs, Lance watching without expression. Lance takes her in his arms again and they dance against the mirrors until they seem lost among dozens of dancing couples. Each man in evening dress. Each woman wearing a long silk gown. The music drives them on. A masque of predation and desire.

On her way to the Savoy Doris saw a poster for Their Own Desire and regretted that she had not seen it. Lance insisted that they see it at the Odeon in Leicester Square. They stood in the queue, Lance wearing his overcoat and black evening suit, Doris in gown and gloves.

They sat in the balcony. You could hear the sounds that couples made in the back seats. The whispers and the shiftings. She wished that Lance would put his arm around her but he sat straight as a rod, the way he always did. Montgomery looks down at Shearer. Have you ever been kissed, he asks her, and Doris knew that he didn’t mean kissed. Montgomery and Shearer danced together to Blue Is the Night. From the back seats of the cinema a woman moaned as though she had sought to confirm all that she was in the dark but had instead found something desolate there.

When they came out of the cinema the wind funnelled down the streets, making the glass shopfronts shiver. A few people moved quickly out of the station and disappeared, driven before the storm. Lance stood at the top of the station steps, his black coat flowing out behind him. He looked as if he had summoned the storm. The night was full of wrath and he was its master.

Lance takes Doris to the jazz clubs and she wonders how he knows about them. The Black Cat. The Boom Boom Rooms. There are black marketeers there, foreign hostesses. She sits in low-ceilinged rooms listening to Negro musicians. When they walk through the West End and Soho the club callers and toms call out to him as he passes, falling silent when they see Doris. Lance knows the gaming clubs. She watches as he plays cribbage, gin and euchre. There are games of sheepshead and pinochle run by demobbed American servicemen. Seven-card stud and Texas hold ’em. There is a sense of desolate one-street towns about the players. Games of the prairie darkness.

In October Lance drove Doris to Feltwell airfield. There were mechanics in overalls working on the machines. The Bristol had RAF roundels on the wings. Lance walked Doris around the aircraft. It smelt of epoxies, clear varnishes. The wing canvas on balsa stretchers. Workshop scents. Doris was afraid to fly but Lance talked about how it felt, being aloft, buffeted. The far-from-the-ground possibilities that opened up on the edge of a weather system.

He placed a leather helmet on her head and arranged it. Thirty years later she heard how he had placed a square of black silk on his head to pronounce the death sentence on Robert McGladdery and this moment came back to her, Lance setting the helmet, working at the chin straps, arranging the goggles on her forehead. Doris’s hair was marcel-waved. The helmet would flatten it.

‘I’ll look a fright when I take it off,’ she said, ‘a perfect fright.’

She had worn jodhpurs and a short riding coat. One of the mechanics held out a leather flying jacket and she put it on. Lance zipped it, pulled it tight around her, cinched the waist belt.

‘There’s a bit of a squall coming, sir,’ one of the mechanics said. ‘I wouldn’t go up if I were you.’

As the Bristol cleared the treeline, Lance turned to her and pointed to the sky behind the hangars. Across the flat washes and drained tidal fields a black cloud ran from horizon to horizon, its dense top rift with anvil lightning. The lightning cast light across the salt bents and derelict flax pits and the black cloud bore down on the scattering of homesteads and the huts of itinerant eelfishers.

The biplane gained altitude as though it would run before the storm. Then Doris felt it bank to port. She could feel the flex of the airframe, the wind risen to a shriek in the wing struts. Lance turned back from the front cockpit to look at her. His face was streaked with oil. He turned away and steered the Bristol towards the heart of the storm.

It came to her crouched in the rear of the aircraft how men played at forfeits and that what they wagered was often not their own to dispose of. She pulled the webbed strapping tight about her and awaited the storm.

The first buffetings she thought would unpick the fabric of the aircraft. The cloud was rent with updraughts and vortices and the wind roared so that cold voices gave tongue. Hailstones dashed upon the fabric of the aeroplane. One struck her goggles and starred the glass in the left eye and ice gathered in the folds of the leather jacket. Pale fire ran along the wing edges. The canvas snapped and the wing stretchers groaned. At the height of the storm Lance turned to look at her again. His face and goggles were covered with oil. There was blood on his cheek. Doris realised then that she would never know him.

Doris and Lance were married three months later in the registry office on the Strand. Lance wore his uniform as a reserve lieutenant in the Royal Ulster Rifles. She married Lance without knowing him. He was handsome and severe with that mouth that turned down at the corners. Desmond was born in 1926. Patricia was born in March 1933 in London. In November 1940 Lance went to the war.

A still temperate day, the thermometer at seventeen degrees. Mary McGowan walked to the greengrocer’s on Atlantic Avenue and back again. Courtesies were exchanged with neighbours. Mary wearing a knee-length tweed skirt and brown silk blouse edged in white lace, buttoned to the neck with a relief brooch at the collar. Mary knowing what was required. Orders totted, goods weighed out. You watched the scales and took nothing for granted.

Mary hadn’t liked Taylor. He had worked at 18 Ponsonby Avenue the previous October as part of a painting crew from Barrett’s of Sunnyside Street. In February 1949 he had returned to the house. Mary’s daughter Kathleen came to the door. Taylor said that he had finished his apprenticeship and was setting up a painting business with his brother. Mary thanked him but said that she would keep her existing arrangement with Barrett. Taylor slammed the garden gate behind him.

It was about knowing what was important. There was a behind-the-lines feel to the day. Life going on. Hedges were being trimmed. Paintwork touched up. Mary bought bread from Kennedy’s van. She crossed Atlantic Avenue to buy vegetables. As she emerged from the vegetable shop she was surprised to meet Taylor. He chatted to her about the weather. About the fact that her husband was in hospital, her daughter away for the day. Taylor was wearing a blue raincoat and light brown shoes, a colour that was described in court as ‘light yellow’.

As Mary returned to Ponsonby Avenue Taylor walked in the opposite direction. When she was out of sight he turned right into Baltic Avenue and back on to Atlantic Avenue, entering the north end of Ponsonby Avenue.

Taylor was seen walking down Ponsonby Avenue by Mrs Shiels from number 28. The coat was belted and his collar was turned up. In the coat pocket he had a seven-foot length of strong twine, a seven-eighths spanner and a pair of gloves. Taylor stood out in the blue coat and yellow shoes. He looked as if he had wandered in out of some Middle European tale. A snatcher of children from folklore.

Mary McGowan’s neighbour, John Lillis, greeted her as she returned home. Lillis was working in his front garden. The lilies were in bloom. The hollyhocks.

No matter how often it is presented, the witnessed day comes to you in fragments, drummed out in policeman’s argot, legalities, coroner’s reports, the talk of neighbours, the day’s deep pathologies left in the details. The hollyhocks in bloom, the noontime trip to the shops. Foreboding creeping into the telling of it, sinister undertones. Mr Lillis staunched Mary McGowan’s wounds after the attack. In the following years he was seen walking the streets after dark, his eyes fixed on the ground. His garden, left untended, became a wilderness.

Taylor knocked on the door of number 18. Mary came to the door. He asked her if he could use her telephone.

Number 18. A still interior. Things that are husbanded, tended to. Care is taken with the smallest of tasks. There are devotional images on the walls. A candle flickers. The household gods are watchful. There are delft ornaments and carnival-ware plates. These are the votives we set against the shadow within. The sun shone outside but in here you could almost believe that things were ordered differently. The interior shadowed with Romish leanings. Stories he’d heard as a child, priestholes, the furtive saying of masses, the soft chanting, the doctrinal taint.

Taylor couldn’t stop himself from touching things as he followed Mary into the kitchen. She remembered that about him. Stroking the paintwork on the bannisters, fingering things, picking them up. Running his hand over the missal on the hall table, the foxed and worn leather cover, the beads handworn, venerated.

The only account of what happened in the house that morning came from dying statements from Mary McGowan and from the physical evidence at the scene. Taylor denied that he had been there at all.

It would appear that Mary turned her back on Taylor. He took the cord from his pocket and placed it around her neck, slipped the cord twice around her neck and tried to strangle her. Her breathing became laboured. She got her fingers between the cord and her flesh. She reached behind her with the other hand and scratched his face. Why would she not die?

She broke away from him. Bitch. She ran towards the kitchen. He struck her again and again with the spanner but it slipped from his grasp and Mary ran into the scullery. He struck her with a bottle of holy water. He stabbed her with a carving knife. Why would she not die? He punched her in the face. She fell to the ground but would not die. He kicked her in the back, in the face, in the kidneys. He went into the kitchen. There was a pot of soup on the stove. He carried the soup into the scullery and poured it over her and left her like that.

He went through her purse on the kitchen table. He found some coins. There were holy medals, scapulars. Faces watching him from Mary’s holy pictures on the wall, brown-skinned men with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. They made him nervous, their fierce hawklike gaze following him round the kitchen. Their minds honed by ordeal, alone in the desert reciting the names of God.

Taylor only found a few coins in Mary’s purse. He went upstairs to her bedroom and began to empty drawers on to the floor. Somewhere there would be money, a roll of banknotes as thick as a clenched fist, bound with an elastic band like the ones that the bookies at Dunmore Park kept in their leather satchels. These people were bookmakers, publicans. Their bounty was solid, earthbound. They knew the value of cash. They knew the worth of things. Ferreting through drawers, the clothes and underthings, linens that had been given as wedding presents and were now kept pristine, the deep lode of constancy that ran through her life now unfolded and thrown aside.

Taylor froze when he heard the back door latch. He went to the window. Mary had got to her feet and staggered out into the back garden. She was first seen by two small boys. The Rafferty twins had been playing in their back garden at number 17 and had looked up to see Mary, blood-drenched and unrecognisable. The boys had heard of such apparitions in the schoolyard. They were seen as important figures of summoning. They lurked at night in tree-lined avenues. They haunted the waterworks, old hospital buildings, disused well shafts. There was the Red Nurse. There was the One-Armed Man. The boys did not expect to see one of these figures in the back gardens of Ponsonby Avenue on a sunny morning. Mary’s features were obscured by blood and swelling. An arm of her spectacles had lodged in her hair. The cord that had been used to strangle her hung around her neck. She made strange noises. The twins watched her in silence. They knew the rules. When Mr Skillen came round the corner the spell was lifted. Mary’s arms made gestures of warding, of gathering. She stood alone in her own ghast lore. They ran into the house and told their mother there was a Red Lady in the garden.

No one saw Taylor leave the house. A storybook imp in a blue coat and yellow shoes skipping down Ponsonby Avenue past the lilies in bloom, the hollyhocks.