Blue Is the Night (8 page)

Patricia knocked on the door and rattled the brass doorknob. Outside the wind howled and the bare trees rattled. Doris lifted the top tray out of the knitting basket and took the dressmaking scissors from underneath.

‘Please, Mother.’

There was an opening in the dressing table between the top surface and the drawers where Doris kept cotton wool. She slipped the shears into the opening and arranged cotton wool around them. Then she went to the door and opened it.

‘Honestly, Mother,’ Patricia said, ‘you shouldn’t lock the door. What if there was an emergency or something?’

Patricia had taken off her school uniform and was wearing her Chinese silk robe. She had tied her hair back from her face, walking barefoot around the room. She straightened the bedspread. She took shoes from the floor and placed them on the shoe rack. A dress was laid over the back of a chair. Patricia lifted it and put it on a hanger in the wardrobe. Deft and homely gestures. Folding and arranging. The world put to rights in small ways. Patricia talking about her mother’s day, ornamenting it with small talk and generalities.

Doris wasn’t falling for any of it. Doris had her hand on the handle of the shears under the dressing table. She could hear bare feet padding about the room behind her. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Stealing up behind you. The stealthy barefoot tread.
All the girls liked a lark with Thomas Cutbush. All the girls liked Tom.

‘Would you like me to do your hair now, Mother?’ Patricia said.
Don’t touch the locks now, girls. You know Thomas doesn’t like the locks touched.
Doris withdrawing the shears from the opening. Knowing there would only be one chance. She could hear the rustle of the silk gown. Headlights swept across the room from the window in front of the dressing table. Doris looked out of the window and saw the Lancia pull into the driveway. The rear door opened and Lance got out. Lance looked up at the bedroom window. Doris shrank back.

Thomas stepped back into the shadow. Tom knows the law when he sees it. There would be another chance to put manners on the saucy bitch.

The dressmaker’s shears fell from Doris’s hand. Patricia heard them strike the floor. She picked them up.

‘Silly. You could have stabbed yourself in the foot. Was that Father’s car?’

‘Yes. Go to bed, Patricia.’

‘Not on your nelly, Doris Curran, I’ve your hair to do.’

‘Do as you are bid, Patricia. Your father will be coming to bed. He has court tomorrow and will be tired. And he may notice the smell of cigarette smoke from you, do you want to take that chance? You may fool him by removing your uniform before coming to my room, but you will not fool me.’

Patricia tucked the hairbrush under her arm. She gathered her mother’s hair with both hands and twisted it away from her neck.

‘You have such silky hair. Mine’s like a wire brush.’

Patricia reached under her arm for the brush, still holding her mother’s hair with her left hand. The things that pass between women. Tasks set. Identifying small needs in each other and attending to them. Tending and flattering. That was what Doris had tried to teach Patricia over the years. There was only a certain amount of love in the world. You had to be frugal with it. It had to be eked out over a lifetime. Not squandered. Not wasted in longing glances at men old enough to be your father.

As Patricia raised the brush Doris took it from her and threw it into the corner of the room. Patricia flushed.

‘That’s a silly thing to do, Mother.’

‘You have no right to speak to your mother like that.’

The raised voices heard downstairs. Lance Curran standing at the front window, his hands clasped behind his back, staring into the dark. He heard Patricia’s bedroom door slam. He would wait downstairs until Doris had gone to bed.

The public gallery was full for the second day of Taylor’s trial. The crowd outside the courthouse had grown. Ferguson found himself looking around for Patricia but he could not see her. People were jostling each other at the front of the queue. Ferguson walked past the uniformed policeman at the front door and found a seat. Lily sat at the front of the gallery, still wearing her widow’s clothing. Patricia sat down beside him. He felt her weight against his, smelt her perfume. She was sixteen, his master’s daughter. She turned her dark eyes on him.

‘God it’s hot in here,’ she said. He could see fine beads of perspiration on her upper lip. He wondered if she felt it, the stirrings, the deep, transgressive undertow.

The morning was given over to medical evidence. The pathologist, Dr J. A. Johnston, detailed the victim’s injuries. Multiple incised wounds. Bleeding from mouth and both ears.
Die, bitch.
Swollen, fractured, burned. An air of ordeal about what had happened to Mary McGowan. She had been subject to medieval practices, torments of the flesh. Ferguson found himself thinking about pincers, implements of burning and rending, demands for repentance. Curran drawing out the evidence, letting it hang in the air. Hanna trying to suggest that McGowan was driven to hysteria by pain. That in her extremity and confusion she lashed out, naming an innocent man.

Taylor listened intently. His expression did not change, his Bobby Breen look. He had nothing to do with these terrible events although Ferguson knew that Taylor was intrigued by what the pathologist was saying. He could see Taylor’s right hand. He had grasped the material of his trousers between his finger and thumb and he was working it, balling and rubbing it. Testing the quality of the material. Ferguson thought of him bent over Mary McGowan, at work with knife and hammer, learning what the flesh would bear, apprentice to the arts of pain. The pincers. The rack.

Lily knew in her heart what Taylor had been up to with Mary McGowan. It was the way he was. The way he pinched her and fondled her. The way he wanted her to do things all the time. Things you couldn’t tell anyone about. Asking her questions. Does that hurt? If I do it there does it feel the same? Lily going along with it. All his rubbings and smellings.

Lily liked being behind the veil. She felt like a lady with a mystery and secrets that none could know save she. The veiled lady. The spectators parted for her when she walked into the courtroom. Mr Hanna and Mr Lunn would open doors for her, pull out chairs for her to sit down. There were little gestures of gallantry. Not like the crown QC, Mr Curran. He’d sit very quiet at his desk until it was his turn, then he was all scorn and cutting words. Her sister-in-law Martha said that he was handsome and that he had been an officer in the army but Lily didn’t think there was anything handsome about him. She didn’t like the way his mouth turned down at the corners. It made her think of one of those cruel men in uniform you saw on the newsreels from the war.

During a prison visit Taylor had told Lily he’d seen Curran at Dunmore Park at the dog racing one night. He said he’d seen him with the collar of his coat turned up, placing bets at the Tote hatch, but Lily didn’t think that was true. Mark my words, Taylor said, I can spot a gambling man a mile off.

Taylor recognised another gambler in Lance Curran. All put to chance and all made forfeit. He recognised the demeanour. The hangdog mien. He saw what was unwholesome in the man. The betting slip in the hand, the face pinched with vice.

Kempton Park. Haydock. The names coming in off the wireless. Races that you would never see, the horses labouring towards the line, the fog of their breath.

‘The type of man he is,’ Taylor said, ‘he couldn’t see two flies running up a windowpane without making a bet in his head as to which one would breast the tape.’

Lily got a start when she looked along the front row of the public gallery and saw a girl who was the dead spit of Curran, with the same mouth turned down at the corners. She told Taylor on a visit that evening what she had seen, and Taylor had replied that he had seen her too and that it was Curran’s daughter. He said she looked like a saucy one. She’d eat the face clean off you if you gave her half a chance. The girl was wearing a Methody school uniform, where all the nobby bitches went. The Methody girls had a reputation. Them girls spend as much time on their back as they do on their hind legs, Taylor said.

Taylor tried to say that one of the Methody girls had gone with him to Lady Dixon’s park after dark and how she was dying for it. Lily said she didn’t believe him, then wished she’d kept her big mouth shut. The rest of the visit was all spiteful remarks and comments about her appearance.

But Lily couldn’t get the Curran girl out of her head. She saw the way she watched her father. Like she was heart-scared of him but also that she would do his bidding to the last. She remembered wishing Curran ill-will. She remembered wishing that his daughter be taken away from him the way that Curran was trying to take Taylor away from her and see how he would feel about it then. If she thought about it hard enough she could make it happen. She was the veiled lady. She was the keeper of mystery.

Patricia told Ferguson that she had bunked off school for a second day. She looked as if she hadn’t slept. There were dark shadows under her eyes. Ferguson hadn’t slept either. He’d lain awake waiting for Esther to come in. Waited until he heard a car in the street, the key in the door and Esther coming up the stairs, carrying her shoes in her hand, entering the spare bedroom. When he was sure she was asleep he went downstairs. He picked up her wrap from the bannisters and smelt it, the perfume, the bar-room smells, loneliness. Her other life.

DI Thornton and DC Davis, who had been first to the murder scene, were called to the witness box. Davis said that he had been summoned to Ponsonby Avenue when John Caughey, a journalist and neighbour of the McGowans, entered the Antrim Road barracks. Caughey informed him that a lady had been attacked in Newington. Davis followed Caughey to the scene.

Davis said that they went to 18 Ponsonby Avenue, where he found the front door open. He entered the house. There was a bent and bloodstained knife on the table. There was a set of dentures and a large spanner on the floor. A bloodied earring lay beside the spanner. There was blood on the floor, on the walls and on the ceiling. Davis proceeded to number 19, the Rafferty house, where he found Mrs McGowan being held by Mrs Rafferty, Mrs McGowan a bloodstained marionette in her neighbour’s arms.

Curran asked Davis if Mrs McGowan had spoken. He said that she had.

‘What did she say?’

‘Thank God the police have come. Please don’t leave me. I am going to die.’

‘Did you later try to ascertain her state of mind?’

‘I asked her some time later if she thought she would recover.’

‘What did the victim say in reply?’

‘She said, “No, dear. I’m going to die. I know it.”’

‘What happened then?’

‘I asked Mrs McGowan what had taken place. She said it was Robert, Robert the Painter. He works for Barrett. She said he asked to use the telephone, then he got her by the neck and started to choke her.’

The policeman said he went to the back of the garden of number 19 to write up his notebook. Davis then travelled to hospital with the victim and stayed by her bedside. At 7 p.m. she recovered consciousness. Davis asked her again what had happened. She said, ‘It was Robert the Painter who worked for Barrett. I’m sure it was Robert. I knew him all right. It’s all true.’

Ferguson shaking his head as Curran sat down.

‘What is it?’ Patricia said.

‘You tell me.’

‘That bit at the end.
I knew him all right. It’s all true
.’

‘Got it in one. Police-words added on.’

‘Yes. It’s not the kind of thing she would have said.’

‘The bloody police. They can’t help themselves. Anything else?’

Patricia frowned. ‘Why would you ask somebody who was hurt if they thought they were going to recover? What sort of question is that?’

‘Good. What else? Look for the unnecessary detail.’

‘The notebook. Why did he mention writing up his notes?’

‘Yes. He wouldn’t have mentioned it if he had been writing up his notes the way he was supposed to. He’s trying to cover himself. His nibs has noticed it too.’ Ferguson nodded towards the defence QC, Hanna, who was getting to his feet.

‘Is that bad?’

‘No. Davis is an old hand. He won’t admit anything to Hanna.’

Hanna suggested to Davis that he ‘made his notes correspond with Mrs Rafferty’s statements’. He asked Davis when had he in fact written up the notes. Davis replied that he had told the story ‘as fairly and as straight and honestly as I could’. Hanna asked that Davis’s notebook should be admitted as evidence.

DI Thornton followed Davis into the box. Thornton described his preliminary interview with Taylor. The police Humber arriving at his home, the long black car coming to rest in the empty street, the sun beating down on it, two policemen alighting carefully from it, grave in their belted tunics, entering the story carefully, knowing that they must uphold their place in the narrative.

Ferguson leaned across to Patricia.

‘Let’s see what Taylor was up to, the little weasel.’

From the start Taylor denied that he had anything to do with the assault, according to Thornton. Taylor had opened the door to the policemen and Thornton had noted five long scratches on Taylor’s left cheek. The scratches were fresh and stood out against Taylor’s fair complexion. Thornton noticed that his colleague Davis’s eyes kept returning to Taylor’s marked cheek. Thinking of the struggle that had taken place, the extremity which had driven a respectable lady like Mrs McGowan to such an act, the primal clawing.

The young man told Thornton he had walked into the city at 9.45 a.m. He had stopped at his newsagent’s, the Daisy, and bought a paper. He went to visit his friend Billie Booth, who worked at the City Hall and who, he said, owed him £5. He wanted to use the £5 to pay for a taxi for his wedding. He did not see Booth. He then went to see Lily at her home in Lilliput Street at 12.30.

Thornton said they had then left the Taylor house and gone to Lilliput Street. Lily and her sister, Mary Erskine, confirmed that Taylor had been there. But the rest of it didn’t stand up. The newsagent told Thornton that Taylor hadn’t been there. He was adamant about it. Billie Booth said that he had never borrowed money off Taylor.

Lance Curran’s tone was soft. He removed himself from the testimony. Thornton was a big man, burly, authoritative. When he removed his cap his hair was carefully combed. He had what was described as a Clark Gable moustache. A big man’s vanities. A touch of burlesque about him, the carnival barker, pomaded and vain. Drawing in the audience, asking that the jury trust his account, to help them find a way through these shifting and allusive tales of the city.

Thornton, accompanied by a Sergeant Hughes, had returned to Taylor’s house at 3 p.m. Taylor and Mary Erskine, Lily’s sister, had continued with preparations for the wedding, persuading the wedding car firm to give them credit. As they were leaving the Williamson car office after signing sureties, they found Thornton and Hughes waiting for them. Taylor was taken to Glenravel Street barracks for further questioning.

Taylor was taken to an interrogation room. Curran asked Thornton to describe the room. There were no windows. There was a portrait of the king on the wall, which bore no other device. Taylor was seated at a plain table under a bare light. His interrogator faced him on the other side. The public recognised what was happening. It was how these things were meant to be conducted, the threads of the story being pulled together again, structure reasserting itself.

The jury followed Thornton’s testimony closely. Despite the pathologist’s careful scientific language, the medical evidence had shaken them. Not just the description of the victim’s injuries but the sense it gave them of the attack, the unhinged moments. They needed Thornton to take control, big-boned, handsome. They imagined the portrait of the king, the melancholy regal features.

During Thornton’s questioning Taylor once more denied he had been to Ponsonby Avenue that morning. Thornton said he had asked Taylor to remove his overcoat and jacket. The DI had examined both garments then removed them from the room. He had scraped dried blood from Taylor’s instep into a sheet of white paper. ‘Did you search the accused’s garments?’ Curran said.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you find a bill for twelve pounds nine shillings payable on that very day?’

‘I did.’

‘But you didn’t find any money on the accused’s person with which he might settle that bill.’

‘No.’

‘Did he admit he knew Mrs McGowan?’

‘Cool as a cucumber. Said she always called him Robert as well.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I brought in his coat and his jacket and questioned him as to the presence of blood on them.’

‘What did he reply?’

‘He said it must be paint.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I touched my finger to the stain and pressed my finger against the table so that he could see that it did not look like paint. That the substance on his coat was in fact blood.’

The bloodied fingermark was to remain on the scrubbed deal surface of the table during each of the subsequent interrogations. Taylor glanced at it every time he was brought into the room, as he was intended to, Thornton thinking that the admonitory finger would work on his mind, but the young man seemed immune to it.

‘There were scratches on his face?’ Curran said.

‘Five big scrabs. He said his sister’s youngster must have done it.’

Curran paused. Letting the image sink in. The young man sitting in the interrogation room, pale-faced, marked. Something primitive about the nail-marked face, the world of biting and tearing, wanting the jury to appreciate what Mary McGowan had become.

At that point the duty officer had entered the interrogation room and informed Thornton that Mrs Shiels from number 28 Ponsonby Avenue had made a statement saying that she had seen and recognised Taylor on the adjacent Atlantic Avenue a few minutes before Mary McGowan had been attacked.