Blue Is the Night (6 page)

Mrs Curran was admitted on 20th November 1952 on the advice of the family general practitioner, Dr Kenneth Wilson. She was in a withdrawn state, uncommunicative, and refusing food. It was assumed that her condition was a reaction to the sudden death of her nineteen-year-old daughter eight days previous, her delicate state of mind being adversely affected by the tragic events. She was kept under close observation for the first weeks of her hospitalisation although not thought a suicide risk. Visits from family were accompanied by extreme agitation such that she had to be sedated following the visit of her husband on 20th March.

Mrs Curran had been seen as a day patient on occasions in 1950 and 1951 after concerns had been raised by her husband and by the family doctor. She seems to have become fixated on her daughter Patricia’s behaviour, which she regarded as errant in the extreme. She spoke often of Patricia’s ‘defiance’ and suggested that there might be an element of sexual impropriety associated with Patricia’s behaviour.

Patricia Curran, then aged seventeen, was seen in this office on 14th January 1951. She presented as a spirited, intelligent female. Some aspects of her demeanour were inappropriate to her age and station. She was given to some vulgarity in language. She admitted to smoking and to truancy from school on occasions. Her relations with males of her own age were of particular interest. She described them as ‘callow’ and ‘only after one thing’. When her response was queried she said that she ‘preferred a more mature man’. There was a degree of levity associated with her remarks, nonetheless they showed a precocious sexuality.

Patricia had attended a ‘life class’ at the College of Art. Her mother had found drawings made during the class under her bed and had brought them to the clinic without her daughter’s knowledge. Mrs Curran thought that the drawings of the naked female form exhibited delinquency on the part of her daughter, if not deviancy, and asked if Patricia might be medicated. Medication was not considered appropriate.

When confronted with the drawings Patricia stated that her mother had ‘no right’ to remove them from her room. She refused to answer questions as to the appropriateness of the images. Aggressive tendencies were displayed during this interview.

On the whole Mrs Curran’s concerns were considered valid. The Attorney General attended the clinic to hear the conclusions drawn following interviews with his daughter. As is to be expected, he had many questions on the subject of his daughter’s mental health and queried the terms hyperesthesia and erotomania which were contained in the report. He expressed his reluctance to pursue the proposed course of medication for his daughter, instead suggesting that she be monitored by the family doctor, although he did express concern about Patricia’s sometimes ‘erratic’ behaviour.

Subsequent to Patricia’s murder, her medical files were requested by Chief Inspector Capstick of Scotland Yard, who had been assigned to the case at a late stage. Capstick’s approach to the medical records was irregular. He did not seek a court order. He came to Holywell on 20th November and was shown to my office. In my absence he demanded to see the files there and then. He was told that the files were not to be released unless by court order, and certainly not without the permission of the Curran family. However Chief Inspector Capstick prevailed upon a junior staff nurse to fetch the files and when I arrived he had apparently read them. He seemed to think that the files confirmed public apprehensions that Patricia was a ‘nympho’ and wished me to confirm that she had ‘got in a scrape’ with ‘one of her chaps on the way home’. I replied that the files were confidential medical records of a limited series of interviews and could not be regarded as clinically complete in any sense. Chief Inspector Capstick replied that he had got what he had wanted at any rate and left.

There was no further application for the files to be produced in court. It was suggested to me on several occasions that the legal parties were sensitive to the feelings of the Curran family and that the material contained in the files would be damaging to Patricia’s character. I was made aware that the defence solicitor for Iain Hay Gordon, the man subsequently convicted for Patricia’s murder, might approach me to testify as to her character but no such approaches were received.

Mrs Curran remained in a delicate condition. There were several episodes of psychosis and catatonia which were treated with tranquillisers although these sometimes had no discernible effect. Mrs Curran was given to excessive and purposeless motor activity. On occasions she walked from one end of her room to the other for periods of six hours. She gave no indication however that she was aware of the search for her daughter’s killer or of the trial of Iain Hay Gordon for Patricia’s murder. She did not mention her daughter’s name during this period, although she sometimes mentioned her son Desmond with pride. Her husband came to see her once a week. She appeared withdrawn following these visits.

Mrs Curran was placed under continuous observation during the trial of Iain Hay Gordon. She mixed freely in the day room between the hours of nine and six and it was thought that some of the other patients might relate details of her daughter’s death to her.

While observing Mrs Curran alone in her room after she had retired, the ward sister reported that the patient appeared to be hearing voices. I observed Mrs Curran and confirmed the sister’s report. Mrs Curran appeared to be experiencing classic auditory hallucination. Judging by the tone of her responses the voices were by turn derogatory, commanding or preoccupying. Following several periods of observation I concluded that there were at least two principal voices. The primary voice preoccupied Mrs Curran to a large degree and she seemed to be able to converse easily, in a ‘chatty’ fashion, although she did seem to be struck silent on occasion.

The second voice provoked a more extreme reaction. Mrs Curran’s responses were brief and it was evident that the voice spoke with some authority. She exhibited signs of stress and fear and remained unnaturally still when listening. Following exposure to this voice she resumed compulsive activities, handwashing, pacing, etc.

An important outcome of Mrs Curran’s treatment will be the elimination of these voices. The patient must be made aware of the fact that these voices are imaginary, a function of the unbalanced mind, and should not be indulged or negotiated with.

I remained unconvinced that the death of her daughter was the root cause of her psychosis since she had shown signs of difficulty before that date. Over the course of several interviews her upbringing and early childhood was investigated. It is a commonplace of analysis that the root cause of much psychosis lies in early childhood, but it may be thought that an upbringing in an institution such as Broadmoor might provide fertile ground for enquiry.

The trial of Robert Taylor for the murder of Mary McGowan opened at the law courts on Chichester Street on the 25th of July 1949. Mr Justice Shiel presided. It was a hot day and the courthouse and its environs assumed the aspect of some southern assize. The men dressed in black stood in rows to either side of the courthouse and their shadows were elongated on the pavement as though a noontime of consequence were on them. The women fell silent as Taylor’s father and sister Madeleine alighted from a taxi. They stood to either side of the car door and waited for the last of their party to emerge. Some of the throng were neighbours and would have known Robert Taylor’s fiancée of several weeks, Lily Jones, but they did not at first recognise her as she stepped from the car. Lily wore a long black dress, a black hat and a black mourning veil which concealed her face.

Lunn had suggested the widow’s clothing‚ his strategy to draw the jury’s sympathy from Mary McGowan’s daughter, Kathleen, who would be in court to give evidence against her mother’s killer. There were gasps from the crowd when Lily emerged from the car. They were reminded that this was a matter of blood and legacy. A young solicitor’s apprentice, Paschal O’Hare, was in the crowd. A woman spoke to him as Lily mounted the courthouse steps: ‘Good Fenian crop planted in the soil.’ O’Hare took this as a reference to Mary McGowan.

People could see the shape of Lily’s pregnancy through the black fabric. The trial would bring down judgement and retribution on the woman and her unborn child. She seemed a sorrowing figure, and the people jostled about her and more women and children joined the throng as though the town’s barrios had emptied and marched upon the courthouse. Two dozen armed constabulary came around the corner of the building and stood in rank across the front of the courthouse. Lunn emerged from a black town car and took Lily’s arm, escorting her to the top of the staircase. In the limestone portico he turned her towards the crowd and showed her to them as though she would enact for them a drama of family and vengeance. The crowd surged silently forward and the constables pushed them back with their rifle butts. Lunn led Lily into the courthouse.

Ferguson drove Curran to the courthouse in the Lancia. A police car led them through the crowd. Faces bent to stare through the window at Curran but he sat without moving and the populace stepped back from the car as though it was a cortège which made its way into the court precincts. Curran looked up once as Lunn made display of Lily at the top of the steps.

Curran wore a carnation in the buttonhole of his frock coat, a white winged collar and barrister’s starched neckpiece. The crowd pressed after them and the porters pushed them back and closed and locked the iron gates.

All through the trial the sun beat down and it seemed that people did not know themselves or their city. The centre felt dusty, provincial, heatstruck. Aspects of the city that had remained unseen became apparent. Colonial architectures, cupolas, the city heat-hazed, lost in an oriental dream of itself. The harsh and atonal cries of newsvendors sound like calls to prayer, the sung-out stanzas of prophecy. Trains are put on, weekend specials, to carry trippers to the resort towns of Portrush and Bangor. They walk the promenades and tiled lidos, sundazed, lost. Illumination from strings of coloured lights falls across the esplanades at night and in the dimlit wind shelters and bandstands couples lie on the wooden benches or are driven by the night heat to stand against walls and trees like lewd statuary.

Patricia took the bus to Central station and walked to Crumlin Road. The porters and RUC men at the court buildings knew her. They’d let her in through back doors, lead her down corridors, passing the rooms where prison warders and guards drank tea, their boots unlaced, caps pushed back on their heads. Places where you heard the gaolhouse sounds, clankings and men cursing in the distance.

A warder called McConkey said he would bring her to the public gallery. He said that there was plenty of time and that he would show her the gallows. He led her through the damp limestone tunnel between the gaol and the courthouse. The dismantled scaffold was kept in the room below the execution chamber. McConkey kept trying to edge her up against the wall, the stacked members. He showed her where the main beam of the gallows fitted into the platform. He allowed her to work the trapdoor lever. A utilitarian clang in the shadowed spaces.

‘You need to stand witness to an execution,’ McConkey said, ‘you never seen anything like it. A man dangling from the end of a rope. I was there on the solemn occasion they done Williams. Quick and clean, a textbook example, Mr Pierrepoint says to me afterwards. The condemned man was pronounced devoid of life forty minutes after for he has to dangle that long before the doctor is allowed near him.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Not a bit. The knot snaps the vertebrae. The spinal cord is severed. He hangs there. You can see the evidence of his excitement.’

Patricia didn’t really know what he was talking about. She told Hilary what he had said afterwards.

‘Did he really say that, Patricia?’

‘Yes. He was red in the face when he said it.’

‘I’m not surprised he was puffing and panting. A hanged man gets a stiffy when he dies. It’s something to do with the blood pressure.’

‘A stiffy?’

‘A great big bloody horn from what they say.’

McConkey brought her to the condemned man’s cell, the door to the gallows hidden behind a bookcase. McConkey said that Williams was the last man to occupy the cell. Nineteen years old. McConkey told Patricia about the moment when they pulled the bookcase back to reveal the doorway behind. Williams shook his head and smiled at the way he’d been fooled, a weary end-of-days smile, his hands tied together behind his back.

‘Can they hang Taylor if he’s found guilty?’ Patricia said.

‘He should be,’ McConkey said, ‘and in law there’s no reason why he shouldn’t.’

The space in the small burial yard at Crumlin Road that had been reserved for Taylor was in fact filled by Robert McGladdery after Lance Curran had convicted him and sentenced him to death for the murder of Pearl Gamble.

‘The corpse of the deceased is left to hang for forty minutes,’ McConkey said, ‘then the doctor steps forward and pronounces life extinct. The corpse is cut down and brought for post-mortem.’

The warder opened the small ironbound door to the post-mortem room. There was a plain wooden table in the centre of the room with sluices leading to an open drain in the floor. A small trolley held scalpels and bone saws on its top deck and glass Kilner jars on the second tier. There was another door in the far wall.

‘What’s that for?’

‘For interment of the deceased,’ McConkey said. He took an iron key from the cluster at his belt and opened the brassbound lock. The door opened into a small high-walled yard. A gravelled sunless place with seven narrow graves without markers against the far wall.

‘If Taylor is found guilty and hanged then he’ll be buried right here.’ McConkey stood beside the last grave. ‘Beside our old pal Mr Williams.’

‘I wouldn’t like to be buried here.’ Patricia shivering as she spoke.

‘I wouldn’t take a pension to be planted here either, miss, but it’s not likely to happen to either of us. But we’ll keep an eye on Mr Taylor for I believe a spot in this yard will be pegged out for him.’

‘Those poor men,’ Patricia said, ‘not even a flower laid for them.’

‘Murderers, the whole lot of them,’ McConkey said. ‘They got their just deserts and good riddance.’

Patricia stared at the graves. It was the picture that would come into McConkey’s mind when he heard about her murder. The girl with the downturned mouth standing alone in that unhallowed place.

McConkey showed her into a seat beside Harry Ferguson. The foreman of the jury kept looking towards Ferguson. Patricia remembered the feel of his overcoat against her cheek. The way he smelt of cologne and cigarette smoke. She noticed the way people nodded at him. Court clerks, policemen. The way they leaned over and whispered to him, bringing him stories, scandal, the information flow of the city, its spoken bounty.

More papers were brought to the judge by the clerk. Then the judge spoke to her father.

The courtroom was not as Patricia had imagined it might be. She had expected dread, a monstrous tribunal. Men gesturing and eloquent. But this room was quiet. One of the jury members looked as if he was asleep. Documents were being passed up to the judge. Her father sat at a wooden table, his head bent over an affidavit. There were dust motes in the air. It reminded her of schooldays, a classroom at Methody, late afternoon, a teacher’s voice droning on.

As the day went on she started to see it differently. There were other things going on here, low-key and elaborate. The fabric of the courtroom gathered meaning to itself, the chipped benches and scuffed planks. Law reports stacked on the desk in front of the court clerk, books of lore and covenant. She saw George Hanna, the defence counsel. He was a sleek, plausible-looking man. Hanna paused behind her father and spoke but Lance did not look up from the brief on the table in front of him.

Patricia thought that Taylor did not look old enough to die by hanging. She told Hilary that his attention wasn’t on proceedings most of the time. He smiled at the public gallery or waved. And sometimes he would find something, a loose thread or a button on his jacket, and would examine it for hours, turning it this way and that as though he would learn the properties of it.

‘Does he look wicked and depraved,’ Hilary said, ‘an evil monster?’

‘He looks like somebody’s little brother,’ Patricia said.

‘A babyface killer,’ Hilary said. ‘No one suspects him.’

‘You could see him delivering things. Newspapers,’ Patricia said.

‘He finds his way into his victims’ confidence. Before they know it they are ensnared in his web of intrigue. They plead for mercy but though his eyes are smiling his heart is made of stone.’

‘He’s a fidget. Jumps about the place.’

‘Probably the remorse. Gnawing at him. What’s the gen on the courtroom? I’d say you could cut the tension with a knife. A man on trial for his very life. What was your father like?’ Hilary said. ‘Was he heroic? Standing up for truth? Stern but just?’

Lance seemed to be addressing himself to an office superior to others in the court. They left space around his desk. Solicitors entered it respectfully with documents, withdrew without speaking. A higher purpose was being explored. Patricia kept her head down so that he would not see her, but Lance did not look at the public gallery.

Every few minutes it seemed that Taylor remembered where he was and he would look around. His eyes kept going to the second row of the gallery. His father and mother sat there. His father looked like a shipyard worker. He was wearing a serge suit and he held a cloth cap between his hands. His eyes travelled over the members of the jury, looking each of them up and down, returning always to the foreman. A girl sat beside Taylor’s father. She was wearing a black dress and veil as though she was in mourning. She moved uncomfortably in her seat, standing once as if she had cramp, and Patricia saw that she was pregnant. The girl had an engagement ring on her hand. She kept looking up at Taylor but he did not look back.

‘Up the duff,’ Hilary said later that evening. ‘Mr Babyface isn’t so innocent after all. At least he intends to make a decent woman of her. Was she pretty?’

‘From what you could see,’ Patricia said. The girl kept her head down when she wasn’t looking up at Taylor. Her veil covered her face but Patricia could see her eyes behind the fringe, moving ceaselessly about the courtroom.

‘I think she hates all of us,’ Patricia said. She did not understand why Lily had chosen to wear a veil. She stayed that way through the whole trial although it was warm in the courtroom and the girl must have felt the heat.

‘Bloody cheek,’ Hilary said, ‘a shopgirl or the like. Who does she think she is, Mata bloody Hari?’

‘Mr Curran, are you ready to call your first witness?’ Curran got to his feet. He waited until the courtroom fell silent before he spoke. He carried a mute authority and Patricia could see how the jury and the public gallery turned to him as though he was in fact the judge.

Kathleen McGowan wore a black linen suit and a white cotton blouse with a plain collar. Her hair was pinned close to her head. She did not look at Robert or Lily as she walked to the dock. She wore no make-up. She looked plain-spoken, Quakerish. She passed in front of Harry Ferguson in the front row of the public gallery and he smelt coal-tar soap. Ferguson knew what Curran was about to do, Kathleen looking like some Protestant martyr closing in on God.

The solicitor Lunn leaned back in his chair so that he was close to Ferguson and spoke softly.

‘Curran’s going to strip his own witness to the bone. If I were you I’d find another line of work, Harry. Or another boss.’

Kathleen McGowan took the oath and stood in the witness box facing the bench. Robert Taylor sat in the dock behind her.

‘Do you recognise the accused?’ Curran said. Kathleen looked back over her shoulder.

‘Yes, that is Robert the Painter.’

‘Did he work for your mother?’

‘He came round with Mr Barrett of Sunnyside Street. They painted the house.’

‘The house in Newington?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many times?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘How many times did you see Taylor working at your mother’s house?’

‘I remember four times.’

Curran motioned to a uniformed policeman who stepped forward with a heavy spanner. He placed the labelled spanner on the bench in front of the judge.

‘An American-gauge seven-eighths spanner,’ Curran said. ‘Is there such a spanner in your house?’

‘I have never seen one.’

The policeman stepped forward again and placed a carving knife on the bench. The blade of the knife was bent, the steel grotesquely kinked halfway between the handle and the tip.

‘Do you recognise this knife?’