Blue Is the Night (5 page)

‘What are these, Harry?’ Esther languid on the settee, wearing a dressing gown.

‘Jury lists.’

‘What are they for?’

‘The trial. Taylor.’

‘You’re going to try to get at the jury.’

‘If they don’t want people to see them, they shouldn’t make the lists available.’

‘What does Lance Curran think about this?’

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘You’re trying to make him lose his case. I thought you were his friend.’

‘There’s no friends in all of this. I’m on his side.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘If he loses the case he’ll be seen as young, idealistic and wrong. He can survive that. If he wins it’ll be seen as turning against his own side. Then he’s finished.’

‘I hate this life, Harry.’

‘It’s the only one I have.’

‘I know. I’m going out later. I won’t be in when you get back.’

‘You never are.’

Ferguson walked down the path to his car. It was a still night. There was fog coming up from the river, an estuary murk carrying furnace smells from the shipyard, tar, hot rivets. There was a car parked further up the street, lights off, a man’s shape in the front seat. Waiting for Esther perhaps. It was a night for assignations. There were wreathing vapours, couples looming out of the mist as though they took their substance and mystery from it.

Ferguson drove down Stranmillis Road to University Road. There were lights on in the law library. Desmond Curran was in his final year at the law faculty. ‘It would appear’, Curran said, ‘that Desmond is more inclined to the law of Moses than the law of man.’ Desmond Curran had taken to preaching and street leafleting in support of a Christian organisation called Moral Rearmament. Ferguson had received a call earlier that month to say that Desmond was leafleting outside the Dockers Club. Ferguson had sent two men to keep an eye on him. Ferguson had also reported back to Curran on Desmond’s associates. Young men from the armed forces, loners, shy bespectacled students. Strays and hangers-on, Ferguson said.

On the road Ferguson stopped outside McKenzie’s. Wine and Spirit Merchants in gilt lettering over the door. Polished brass on the window bars. Clientele from the shipyard and Mackie’s foundry. McKenzie ran an undertaker’s from the back of the premises. Ferguson had met him at political functions. McKenzie wore pinstripes, black patent shoes. He knew how the mob worked.

The drinkers at the bar watched Ferguson cross the floor. Foundry men taking in the creased raincoat, the scuff-marked brogues. Knew him for a fixer, one with the ward bosses and vote riggers and boundary men. Subalterns of corruption. The barman nodded him through the door behind the counter and down the stairs.

He found McKenzie in his workshop, stood in the middle of it in shirtsleeves, his jacket over the back of a chair. The air smelt of formaldehyde, wood shavings. The lights were low. Casket lids set against the wall in shadow. A half-finished coffin stood on trestles beside McKenzie. Ferguson tapped the side of it thoughtfully.

‘Best red deal,’ McKenzie said. ‘I’ll do you a price on one, Ferguson.’

‘I’m not looking to use one for a while.’

‘Neither was he.’ McKenzie nodded to the adjunct room. A black tin coffin rested on the concrete floor. ‘He was up on the ship gantry and a steel cradle collapsed above his head. Split the braincase wide open. You never know the day or the hour.’

McKenzie had been a street preacher but now he contented himself with his pub and his workshop with its congregation of shadows.

‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ Ferguson said, ‘and in this case the Lord giveth you the chair of the jury in the Taylor case.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘You’re on the jury. I want a not guilty verdict.’

‘You want a lot. A child could see that Taylor killed the woman.’

‘I still want a not guilty.’

‘A hung jury’s the best I can promise. If there was more I could give you I would. Taylor done us all a favour. One less to reckon with.’

‘Does guilt or innocence come into it?’

‘The woman paid down her tithe and went to what was prepared for her. The book speaks not of guilt or of innocence. The Lord will have what is his, day is day and night is night.’ McKenzie reached into a drawer and pulled out a handful of frilled material.

‘They will have this for to line their coffins, Mr Ferguson, to adorn them as they go before the light. But the Lord has no recourse to fripperies.’

‘It’s not fripperies I’m after, McKenzie. It’s a good old-fashioned not guilty verdict.’

‘This is a dead town, Ferguson. The citizens will go out of their mind over this.’

‘That’s why I want the verdict.’

‘Is it? Who’s representing the prosecution?’

‘The Attorney General.’

‘Lance Curran’s prosecuting? What’s your game, Ferguson? Lance Curran is your man. How come you’re going against him?’

‘None of your business, McKenzie. Will you do as you’re bid?’

‘I’ll do what I can. That’s all I can say. Now, I have a traveller to send on his way.’

Ferguson walked out into the night air. The fog was dense now. He pulled up the collar of his coat against the damp. The shadows gathered round. They were multitude.

The nurses told Ferguson that Doris looked forward to his visits. That she asked for the hairdresser each Wednesday, knowing that he would come on the Thursday morning, and did her make-up.

‘I do believe she’s a little bit soft on you,’ the ward sister told Ferguson. ‘She gets right and sharp if she’s not looking the part on Thursdays.’ The psychiatrist, Mr Brown, said that he believed Ferguson’s visits were therapeutic and that it enabled her to anchor herself in the real world.

‘That’s a bit of a gag, Harry,’ Esther had said, ‘you being her anchor to the real world.’

‘Not much of an anchor, is it?’

‘Not much of a world.’

‘Do you play bridge, Mr Ferguson?’ Doris said.

‘I never learned, Mrs Curran.’

‘We used to play with the Buntings, and with the Donalds.’

‘I believe it’s a game of bluff,’ Ferguson said.

‘Yes,’ Doris said, ‘I was rather good at it.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Did your wife play?’

‘She isn’t much good at bluffing,’ Ferguson said. He got up and went to the window.

‘What is her name?’

‘Esther.’

‘I remember her now. She was a person of a nervous disposition. Not good for bridge. One needs to be fully in charge of one’s emotions.’

Ferguson stayed at the window. The nurses said that Doris drifted in and out of personalities, inhabited and discarded them. The world in her head. The clamour of it. Minor royalty, street vendors, voices from her past, strangers wandering the psychic thoroughfares.

‘Where is she now? Your wife?’ Ferguson could see Doris reflected in the window, her head tilted back, a duchess, grace and favour dispensed.

‘At home. She doesn’t go out much.’

‘Perhaps I should send Lucy to her.’

‘Lucy?’

‘The maid. A harmless-looking sort of a girl. She bears no resemblance to a murderer. None at all. I enquired of her how she found herself in Broadmoor here but she wouldn’t tell me. Drowned her baby probably. That’s what most of them are in for. Infanticide. The fruit of one’s womb. Lucy’s a cheery sort. Father says she keeps me out of mischief.’

The nurses said that Doris hid her medication. Hid it in her cheek and spat it out later. She was cunning. You had to keep your wits about you.

‘Where are you now, Mrs Curran?’

‘In Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Daddy is the superintendent. It’s a very important job. Some of the best minds of a generation end up in here. The best sort of loony, Lucy says. The very best sort of chaps.’

There was a small garden outside the window, enclosed by the hospital buildings. It was dark and muddy, the lawn trampled. Dusk was coming in from the lough and he remembered the night Patricia had been found on the driveway of the Glen. It had been such an evening, a drizzle that fell through nightfall and on into the dark of night as though it would never stop.

‘Do you remember the night Patricia died, Mr Ferguson?’

‘I do remember it, Mrs Curran.’

They had lifted Patricia from the wet ground. She was entitled to tenderness but received none. Her body was stiff and had to be forced into the back seat of the car. She was taken to the Whiteabbey surgery. She was laid out on the examining couch. Ferguson remembered the bloodless face. Thirty-seven stab wounds.

The place had been named Whiteabbey because the monks had worn white garments. The abbey was gone. The stones of it carted seaward to build the harbour. Esther had fancies of the monks abroad in the grounds of the Glen, tending still to some dark friary, their hooded faces, mendicant, unforgiving, adrift among the trees.

He had returned to the Glen and walked the murder site before the police arrived from the city. There was no blood. There were no drag marks. He had not seen Patricia’s art folder, books and Juliet cap, although these items were later found at the scene, dry although it had rained all night. The rain pattered on dead leaves. He had felt himself in a story, lost, harried in a storybook forest. It had not occurred to him until then that Patricia’s killer might still be in the trees. A face in the darkness, a watcher, pale and feral. He looked up towards the house. Through the bare, black branches of the trees he could see a light burning on the top storey of the house. A woman stood at the window, backlit, shadowed. He did not know if he was being watched or if the watcher had taken possession of the scene before her, a prioress of the dark and mistress of the night.

There was always the masque with the Currans. There was always the sense of dusty provincial theatrics, backstage intrigue, whisperings and gropings in the stalls. The frocktailed judge orchestrating proceedings.

Ferguson stood in the dark looking upward until he heard police sirens along the cold lough shore. The woman in the window lifted her arms above her head and brought the curtains together, the distant sirens her cold accolade.

‘William Chester Minor.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘William Chester Minor. The surgeon of Crowthorne. He is incarcerated at her majesty’s pleasure in Broadmoor.’

‘I didn’t realise.’

‘He is a very intelligent man. My father spoke with him once or twice a week. He was batty though. He cut off his penis with a kitchen knife, Lucy told me. He put it in his pocket and walked around with it before he fainted from loss of blood.’

Ferguson took his hat from the chair in the corner of the room. He put on his overcoat and gloves.

‘He left you too, didn’t he?’ Doris said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Lance left you too. He took off to court and left us all here. You and I alone with the ghosts.’

Ferguson stood in the superintendent’s office. The room was too warm. There was a smell of medicines in the air, an antiseptic reek. There was a notepad on the desk, leather-bound psychiatry books on the shelves. The superintendent was a balding man in his fifties. He wore corduroys and round glasses. He wished to be seen as eccentric. He had been to the higher reaches of consciousness and had not returned unchanged.

‘How can I help you, Mr Ferguson?’

‘Mrs Curran.’

‘I can’t discuss a patient’s condition without consent, Mr Ferguson.’

‘I have Judge Curran’s consent.’ Ferguson lifted the telephone from the front of the desk and placed it in front of Brown. Brown looked at it. That’s how you got people to do things. You rearranged their world a little. It kept them off balance. You eased your way into their thoughts so that your face drifted unbidden into their mind at off moments.

‘I knew Mrs Curran before her daughter’s murder. She was always highly strung.’

‘Her grasp on reality is tenuous.’

‘Would you say she’s capable of harm?’

‘Are you? Which one of us isn’t?’

‘You know what I’m talking about?’

‘You’re asking me if Doris Curran could have killed her own daughter. Is that what you’re asking me?’

Ferguson did not speak. The superintendent got to his feet. He walked over to the bookcase and ran his index finger along the book spines.

‘There are case histories of everything you can imagine in here. Parents killing children. Children killing parents. Paranoid schizophrenics who imagine that they are killing the devil.’

‘So she could have done it?’

‘It strikes me that you are in a better position to answer that than I am. You were there that night. You knew each member of the family. You are Judge Curran’s man, are you not?’

‘Everybody is somebody’s man in this town, superintendent. There was a report. When she was admitted.’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to see it.’

‘If you wish. Judge Curran has already read it.’

Doris was glad to see Ferguson coming but she is glad to see him go as well. His wife’s name is Esther, like the Bible although Ferguson’s Esther is not like Esther from the Bible, more like a harlot. He wants to know what happened. He wants to know what happened to Patricia. Everyone wants to know what became of her.

A friend of Desmond’s, Iain Hay Gordon, was convicted and found insane though Doris found it hard to believe that skinny little man could murder anybody. She read the papers at the time. The prosecution said that Gordon kissed Patricia at the bottom of the driveway and then things got out of hand. He said that Gordon tried to touch her but she said, ‘Don’t, you beast,’ and things got out of hand and that he lost control of his manly appetites.

Doris knew that Patricia would not put her lips to a man such as Gordon. She would be as like to kiss a stick as kiss a bag of bones such as Gordon was. She knew the kind of men that her daughter liked, men smelling of cologne with a smile always on their lips and a lewd word.

When Patricia was small she would sit at the dressing table watching Doris put on her make-up and well she learned. Her father would watch her with a look as though he conjured something pleasant from long ago if only he could remember what it was.

One day Patricia removed his judge’s wig from its tin box. It was a horrid, tatty thing. Patricia walked into the dining room and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, his honour Mr Justice Curran, I condemn you to death.’ We all laughed. But her father did not laugh but brought her to the outhouse and whipped her.

Doris had always wanted Patricia to know how dangerous the world was. Patricia had never seen the faces at the Broadmoor windows. The procuresses. The hollow-cheeked magdalens. Doris could feel Patricia’s eyes following her around the house. She wanted to tell her not to let her eyes follow people that way.

The first time Doris heard of Thomas Cutbush was when she read his file from his admission to Broadmoor. The file lay open on her father’s desk and she read it.

     Born: 29th June 1866

Age: 24 years

Height: 5 ft 9 1/2 inches

Weight: 9 stone 6 1/2 pounds

Hair: black

Whiskers: black (very short)

Eyes: dark blue (very sharp)

Complexion: dark

Build: slight

Features: thin

Marks: slight bruise on left knee. 1 tooth out in front of upper jaw

When later that evening she saw a man looking at her from a window in D wing she knew it was Cutbush. He didn’t push his face up against the bars like the others did. He stayed back in the shadows. You had to imagine the short black whiskers. The eyes. They say he lived in the Minories, beside Whitechapel. That he followed women home. Doris had to walk under his window every day. He was always there, watching her. She could tell. How still he was at his window. Saucy Jack.

They told her that Cutbush had died in 1903 but she knew that people like Cutbush never died. They were always in the shadows, just out of reach. You could feel the eyes on you. Dark blue. Very sharp.

Some nights she lay awake and knew that Cutbush was also awake in his cell with his whiskers black and his eyes so blue, so sharp.

The female lunatics who were trusted worked in the vegetable gardens outside her father’s office. Sometimes she walked through the gardens with him, and they would glance up at her, mute and incurious. Their eyes dark with knowledge of atrocity. When she was older she would accompany her father on his rounds.

‘Life is not all frocks,’ he said. He kept a model of the human brain on his desk and showed her the grey ridged thing, pointing out the lobes and hemispheres. His father had been a butcher and he kept a slaughterhouse in the prison grounds.

Father read the newspapers everyday. Doris heard him say to the medical officer that the Jack the Ripper killings had stopped when Cutbush had been arrested. Doris sat beneath Father’s desk and heard every word. About women dead in London alleys. The female parts mutilated. Terror abroad in the Whitechapel fog, the wreathing vapours.

Doris was not squeamish about medical matters. Broadmoor was as much a hospital as a prison. Lucy had sought to shield her from the patients but her father thought it was good for her to visit patients in the infirmary. She was familiar with a range of symptoms, the palsies, the compulsive behaviours, the self-harming. Patients slashed at themselves, burned their bodies, attempted to sever their own genitalia. When she saw a patient whose arms were tied to the metal bed frame with bandages, the prison doctor described him as an onanist. It was not uncommon for patients to throw off their clothes.

Lucy told her about Cutbush outside the gin houses. In the alleys around the Minories women dropped their inside clothes to fornicate with men, Lucy says. Doris did not know the meaning of the word fornication.

When Doris looked out of the window on a December evening to see a naked woman in the exercise yard she was not surprised. Frost had lain on the ground in the sunless yard since morning. The woman stood very still. She wore scapulars on string around her neck. Before she was taken by the arm and led away, Doris saw that her lips were moving, praying, reciting the names of God. Nude, enraptured.