Blue Is the Night (9 page)

‘At that point I concluded the interview,’ Thornton said.

‘Had the defendant anything to add?’

‘Not at that point. However I returned to his cell later that evening and told him he was to be charged with the murder of Mrs McGowan. I cautioned him that anything he might say at that point could be used in evidence.

‘Did he make any reply?’

‘He said, “Just say I’m innocent. That’s all.”’

Hanna and Lunn came to Taylor’s cell directly from court. They took him through his testimony. Hanna said they’d had a stroke of luck. Taylor had the same blood group as Mary McGowan.

‘Now we have to account for each bloodstain,’ Lunn said, ‘for Curran will crucify us if we don’t get it right.’

The two men enacted various scenarios in which the blood from a nosebleed might have fallen on the areas of clothing discovered by the prosecution. They made Taylor lie on his back, sit with his elbows on his knees. Hanna intent on making a piece of theatre out of the testimony, Lunn more calculating, working out the angles, anticipating Curran’s objections and challenges. Late in the evening the warder, McCullough, slid open the spyhole and watched them for several minutes. Hanna blustering like some Elizabethan travelling player, master of animals and fools. Lunn brooding over his stagecraft, refining the stances which would allow blood to flow on to Taylor’s overcoat, his socks and underpants, the instep of his shoe.

McCullough went back to his fellow warders where they sat in the central guardhouse.

‘It’s a regular bedlam in there, I can tell you that,’ he said. He related what he had seen in the cell, the two impresarios and Taylor between them, shining with malice. McCullough was a religious man and he was uncomfortable with what he had seen, the staging of testimony by actors in some backstreet playhouse of the damned.

As he left the courthouse Ferguson’s arm was held. One of the men he had seen sitting at McKenzie’s bar, in a pinstripe jacket and docker’s overalls.

‘Mr McKenzie needs a word in the ear,’ the man said.

‘He’s sequestered with the jury. He can’t talk to me.’

‘He’s in the International Hotel. You’ll find him at the tradesman’s entrance, Amelia Street, at half eleven.’

‘You tell McKenzie that if he’s seen talking to me, the whole trial is blown out of the water.’

‘Mr McKenzie knows that. Who’s going to see you? And if anybody does they know to stay blind.’

Ferguson waited in the foyer of the Reform Club until eleven thirty. It was raining outside. A few vehicles passed outside. Last buses, a police tender. People hurrying past under umbrellas as though the city was subject to curfew. He looked for an umbrella from the porter but there was none so he turned up his collar and pulled the brim of his hat down over his face.

He met no one as he walked down Donegall Place and under the City Hall. He turned on to Howard Street and then on to Great Victoria Street. As he turned on to Amelia Street he saw Esther. She was standing under an umbrella outside the porter’s lodge of the Europa. He crossed the street to her.

‘What business do you have at this time of night in an alleyway like that?’ she said.
The same business as you were conducting in that hotel perhaps
, he thought, but he did not say it.

‘How are you getting home?’ he said.

‘I’m waiting for a taxi,’ she said. She was wearing a dark dress and the umbrella was black so that she looked like a mourner, and he wondered how she would look at his own grave and whether she would become it.

‘You could wait with me,’ she said, ‘we could go home together.’

‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘I have business with a man. But I’ll be home later.’ She inclined her head so that he could no longer see her face. He heard a taxi approaching.

‘Perhaps you would hold the door for me?’ she said as the car pulled alongside. Ferguson took the umbrella from her and held it over her head as she got into the car. This was the matter of their marriage, he thought. Gestures of hollow courtliness. Minor kindnesses, costing little.

Amelia Street had been known in the war as a place where women traded their bodies to servicemen and to naval workers. The prostitution had been tolerated until Wiley Harris stabbed Harry Coogan to death in a row over payment. Harris was hanged at Shepton Mallet and the police had halted the trade in the street. But it seemed to Ferguson that the women had not left the street, that there were lewd whisperings in the shadows.

He saw the glow of a cigarette under a shop awning, McKenzie’s face lit from below as he cupped the cigarette and pulled on it. Ferguson nodded to him and stepped under the canvas awning.

‘That’s a great evening, Ferguson.’

‘What do you want, McKenzie?’

‘Mr Curran’s doing well.’

‘He’ll do better tomorrow with Taylor in the box.’

‘That’s my problem. Can you not slow him down a bit?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m having trouble talking the rest of the jury round to my point of view.’

‘They think Taylor did it?’

‘Of course he done it. But there’s a squad of holy joes in the jury room. Eye-for-an-eye bunch and they’re mad to hang somebody.’

‘I told you. I want a not guilty verdict.’

‘All it takes is for one juror to hold out. There’s no majority verdict. It’s unanimous or nothing. You’ll get a retrial. Different jury.’

‘Yes, but you won’t be on that jury, McKenzie, will you? I put you on this one to get a not guilty verdict.’

‘You put me on the jury? You never told me that before.’

‘You think I can’t put my hand on a jury list? And I tell you what else I can put my hand on. The licence for that pub of yours. Or the cargo manifest for the bootleg gin you bring in from Liverpool. You think you’ll stay in business long if I decide that another man could make a better job of your public house and that bonehouse you have out the back?’

‘I get the point, Mr Ferguson.’

‘Then go back to your hotel and get that jury out of bed and explain to them how the world works. Tell them to leave justice to God. He’s got plenty to go around. It’s in short supply in this town.’

McKenzie threw his cigarette into the gutter where it quenched in the incessant rain. He walked off into the light cast by a streetlight and into the darkness beyond. Water drummed on the stretched canvas above Ferguson’s head. The headlights of a police tender swept the end of the street, then moved on, but he felt himself shrink back into the doorway behind him.

Ferguson had known the dead pimp, Harry Coogan. He had defended him in the crown court against charges of procurement in the year before he was murdered. Coogan a black marketeer, sharp-dressed, good-looking, leering from the back seat of a taxi after the charges had been dropped.
Anything you want, Mr Ferguson. Just give me a bell. Anything.
Ferguson felt once again the presence of Coogan and his female charges gathered on the pavement opposite, their whispering and beckoning, his fellows in that shadowed mews.

The rain had cleared the following morning. The basalt mountains were fogged and the air was warm and still. Ferguson walked to the court buildings through the Botanic Gardens, past the giant leaf ferns and trees of the palm house, still and primal in the moist glasshouse air. Patricia waited for him at the northern entrance to the gardens.

‘Does your father know that you’re not going to school?’

‘Do you think he misses anything that happens in that courtroom? I think he regards this as part of my education.’

‘He wants you to understand something of the law.’

‘Is that what it is?’

Ferguson didn’t answer. He didn’t know why Curran wanted his daughter in the public gallery. He didn’t know why Patricia felt it necessary to be there. He saw her looking out over the crowd gathering in the court precinct and he studied her face. The deep-set eyes, her father’s mouth, downturned at the corners. There’s not much of the mother’s blood in her, he thought. She is her father’s child.

It would be a long day. Taylor was to be in the witness box. They would see him cornered. They were down to the bare bones of the case. A man was to stand in front of others and attest to the truth or otherwise of his doings in the world. Ferguson wondered if this was the reason that Curran wanted his daughter in the courtroom. To see her father’s work among the fallen. Esther had spoken to him about it as he left that morning, calling to him from a darkened bedroom. He stood in the door and heard her stir.

‘Will Patricia be there?’ she asked.

‘I think so,’ he said.

‘It’s not something I would wish a child of mine to see,’ she said.

‘What part of it?’ Ferguson asked.

‘Any of it,’ she said, ‘any of it.’

The three final prosecution witnesses preceded Taylor into the box. Dr J. B. Firth told the court that the bloodstains on Taylor’s clothing belonged to blood group O. The victim was blood group O, as was Taylor. Curran asked him about the human hairs which were found on the shoulders of Taylor’s overcoat. Firth said that fifteen hairs had been found, all belonging to Mary McGowan. The hairs were bloodstained. Curran raised the matter of wax polish found on the soles of the victim’s shoes, Lyon’s wax polish, which was used by the Taylors but not by the McGowans.

Newsagent George Clarke was called to say that Taylor had not collected his newspaper on the morning of the murder, despite Taylor’s assertion that he had, providing himself with an alibi. The next witness was a friend of Taylor’s, Billie Booth. Taylor had told the police interrogators that he had borrowed money from Booth and so had no need of money on the day of the murder. Booth denied that he had ever lent money to Taylor. The final witness was the owner of Morrison’s pub, where Taylor drank. Alexander Morrison stated that Taylor had asked him for a loan, although he omitted to say that the request had come on the morning of the murder. Ferguson thought that Curran did not look pleased.

Hanna and his junior, Fox, did not prolong their cross-examination. They pressed Clarke, but he was adamant that Taylor had not picked up his newspaper. Ferguson nudged Patricia when the prison doctor, Girvan, came into the box. Curran had him describe the deep scratches on Taylor’s face when he examined him, but Fox ignored the scratches. He asked a single question.

‘Is Taylor a perfectly normal man?’

‘He appeared perfectly normal.’

Patricia starting to understand. Hanna trying to set up Taylor as a normal man. The act of murdering Mary McGowan was not normal, therefore Taylor could not have carried it out.

The court clerk called Taylor’s name. He stood up. Lily made a gesture towards him, her veil stirring. Taylor turned to her. His smile warm. He looked as if he might lay a hand on her arm.
Be strong.
But the usher guided him towards the box. Looking confident as he took the Bible in his hand.
Babyface killer.
The newspapers afterwards describing him as ‘confident’, ‘assured’.

Patricia later told Hilary Douglas that Taylor was like an actor in the box. He was playing a role and that role was innocence.

‘Did he play it well?’ Hilary asked.

‘He did. He played it very well,’ Patricia said. ‘Mr Hanna gave him his lines.’

Hilary was to remember the conversation three years later when Iain Hay Gordon was put in the witness box during his trial for the murder of Patricia. Hilary wondering what Patricia would have said about Gordon repudiating the confession he had given to Chief Inspector Capstick. Gordon nervy, hard to read. Hilary imagined dropping her voice to tell Patricia that he was a homo, laughing at the expression on Patricia’s face when she heard the word.

‘What is your name?’

‘Robert Taylor.’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘And your employer until recently?’

‘Mr Barrett of Sunnyside Street.’

‘You have recently become engaged to a young lady named Elizabeth Jones.’

‘Yes.’ Taylor’s eyes going to Lily in the front of the public gallery. Lily lifting a tremulous hand.

‘Pure bloody ham,’ Patricia whispered.

Hanna set about constructing the case for Taylor. Taylor leaving home at 9.45 a.m. Buying his newspaper. Going to see Billie Booth about money. This account placing him elsewhere when Mary McGowan was murdered.

‘He’s getting to the blood now,’ Ferguson said. Hanna rearranging his papers on the bench in front of him, looking absent-minded, avuncular. He looked at Taylor over the top of his glasses.

‘On your coat and other garments traces of blood were found. Would you tell the judge and the jury how that blood got on them?’

‘It got on them through my nose bleeding on Good Friday and the Monday before.’

‘Where were you when your nose began to bleed?’

Patricia felt a kind of wonderment. That they should construct such a dance around the dead woman’s blood. She had entered her father’s study the previous evening. He had been studying texts and papers on blood. The groups and platelets. There were monochrome photographs of blood-spatter at crime scenes, patterned across ceilings and household furnishings. There were dark poolings under dead bodies. She read the papers until night fell around her. Lost in the dread science, her father’s daughter. Passive and transfer stains. Arterial spurting. Cast-off stains. Impact spatter. Unaware that in time her own blood would be the subject of similar attention.

Taylor at Hanna’s prompting went on to describe the angle of blood drips from his nose, the downward trajectory that might explain the stains to various parts of his clothing. Taylor breezy and articulate. How the blood got on his overcoat. How the blood got on his socks. The nature and frequency of his nosebleeds. Ferguson could see McKenzie nudging the other jurors, urging them towards Hanna’s arguments. Ferguson thinking
Don’t bloody overdo it, McKenzie.
He could see Hanna working the rhythms into his speech, the street preacher’s flourishes. Question and answer. Statement and retort.

‘Did you know Mrs McGowan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Had you worked for her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see her on the sixteenth of April?’

‘No.’

‘Did you make any attack on her?’

‘No.’

‘That day or any other day?’

‘No.’

‘Did you attempt to throttle her?’

‘No.’

‘Did you kick her?’

‘No.’

‘Did you go into her house on that day?’

‘No.’

Watching the prisoner in the dock, Patricia was reminded of Sunday school and the scuffed and foxed texts that were passed around. Tales of children who misbehaved and accepted their chastisement and were returned to God. There were stories of children that told the truth against overwhelming odds, their voices ringing out in the presence of soldiers and tyrants, and Taylor reminded her of such a child. She thought of him illustrated in pastel colours, his voice clear and piping. Undaunted. Hanna returned to his bench and she saw her father stand up, black-suited and wigged, proxy to some old malice, his mouth downturned, waiting until the court fell silent before he spoke, his voice dry and uninflected, looking down at his notes as though a tally and account of Taylor’s wrongdoing was written there and had fallen due to be paid.