‘Mr Taylor, you were to be married.’
‘I was.’
‘And you required twelve pounds and nine shillings to pay for the wedding cars, and you required three or four pounds for the ring.’
‘Yes.’
‘And in your possession you had not more than five pounds?’
‘Yes.’
‘You lied to the police when you said that your friend Booth owed you money. You lied, did you not, Mr Taylor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you lie?’
‘I didn’t want the police to know I was borrowing money when they were seeing me.’
‘Why?’
‘Well they were around seeing me about an assault that had been committed.’
Ferguson could hear signs of the coaching that Taylor had been given, the lawyer’s cadences of the sentences,
an assault that had been committed.
Curran breaking down his story by breaking down his language.
‘I say again. Why?’
‘Well, it would look bad for me at the time.’
‘Is it because it would give you reason for assaulting Mrs McGowan?’
‘Yes.’
‘So when the police came to you it occurred to you that the fact that you had tried to borrow money that morning would be against you.’
‘Yes.’
‘It might lead the police to believe that you had assaulted Mrs McGowan?’
‘Yes.’
Taylor looked over at Hanna. Three uses of the word yes in a row. He seemed uncertain of what he had given his assent to. Hanna’s eyes were on Curran. All eyes in the courtroom were on Curran. He placed his notes on the dais to his left and moved to the front of his bench. Taylor turned his head away from Hanna, his attention drawn to Curran against his will it seemed. Curran waited until the whole courtroom was stilled. He stood in front of them, his black robes gathered about him like an orator in some cold senate.
‘We will now come to the matter of blood,’ he said.
Patricia leaned over to Ferguson. He could feel her breath on his cheek.
‘It’s a sin to tell a lie.’
‘What?’
‘The Bobby Breen song.’ Ferguson remembering Esther at Glenravel Street barracks naming the song.
Curran’s cross-examination was harsh and lyric. It was a song of blood, a blaming canticle sung out in the courtroom.
‘Why did you tell the police that the stains on your coat were caused by paint?’
‘Well it could have been paint . . . I thought it was paint.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I work with paint.’
‘Did it occur to you that having bloodstains on your coat would be against you in connection with the assault on Mrs McGowan?’
‘I didn’t think about it. The police said they were bloodstains. I didn’t know it was blood.’
Taylor’s syntax falling apart.
‘Did you remember at the time that your nose had been bleeding the day before?’
‘I never thought about it.’
‘Has your nose bled since?’
‘No. It’s only when I’m painting that it bleeds.’
‘Have you had medical attention at any time for your nose?’
‘No.’
‘Can you explain how the blood got on the shoulder of your overcoat?’
‘No.’
‘All this nose-bleeding happened the day before?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did it not occur to you to tell the truth about it?’
‘No.’
‘Did you know the blood on your coat and trousers was blood?’
‘I suppose I did.’
Taylor turning sullen now. Something of the cur about him. Lily glad that he wouldn’t be coming home to her. She knew what happened when Taylor felt that people were against him.
‘Just explain how that splash of blood could have got down to your foot from your nose bleeding.’
‘It could have dropped down when I was in the lavatory.’
‘Did you notice any splash on your right leg?’
‘I knew it was dropping down.’
‘If you knew that then why did you not tell the police that the stain on your sock and foot was caused by your nose bleeding?’
‘I didn’t think of that.’
‘I see. Now how do you account for the fact that the bloodstained hairs on your coat match those on Mrs McGowan’s head?’
Taylor couldn’t account for it. A silence fell on the courtroom. He looked to his father, then he looked to Lily. He couldn’t see her face through the black veil but her hands were clasped in her lap and he looked at them as though she held some pale, cold truth there.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘The hairs, Mr Taylor,’ the judge said. ‘Can you tell the court how Mrs McGowan’s bloodstained hairs were found on your person?’
‘I don’t know.’ Taylor hadn’t expected the judge to repeat Curran’s question. He didn’t think it was fair for Curran and the judge to gang up on him like this. He had already told Curran he didn’t know how the hairs on his coat matched the victim’s hair. If you didn’t know something nobody could make you know it.
Curran waited until the jury had absorbed the judge’s intervention, then asked his final question.
‘How do you account for the fact that one of the bloodstains on your coat was still wet?’
‘I don’t know how it was wet.’ Taylor looking sulky now. A blamed-in-the-wrong, childish air to him. Curran said nothing more. He turned away from the accused man and stood facing the rear wall of the courtroom. Patricia wanted to tell him not to do it. That he didn’t need to use this kind of shabby theatrics.
‘He’s gone a bit too far,’ Ferguson said in a whisper, ‘just a bit. It hardly matters.’
‘You may step down, Mr Taylor,’ the judge said. Taylor walked back to the dock. He looked like an old man now, a pavement shuffler in an oversized suit. As the court rose McKenzie looked in Ferguson’s direction.
‘Why is that man looking at you?’ Patricia said.
‘Which one?’
‘The man in the jury.’
‘He’s the foreman of the jury. His name’s McKenzie. From the Shankill Road.’
‘Oh my God, Harry.’
‘What?’
‘You haven’t nobbled the jury, have you?’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘To make sure that Father wins.’
‘It would be nice if I could. But I don’t think he needs me, do you? Besides, the jury all look like holy joes. Hard to corrupt that sort.’
Outside the courthouse Patricia nudged Ferguson. ‘The jury’s not the only holy joes around here. Look.’
Desmond Curran was standing at the front gate of the courthouse. He was handing out leaflets to the departing crowd. Some of them laughed but many took leaflets. It was a city of pamphleteers and zealots, and people liked to feel that they were attending to the undercurrents.
‘Does Father ever say anything to you about Desmond?’ Patricia said.
‘No,’ Ferguson said.
‘That’s a lie, Harry. I can tell when you’re lying, you know. I’m probably one of the few that can. Father isn’t happy about all of the religious stuff. But I think it bothers Mother more. Deep down. Desmond thinks that we should pursue each other with loving relentlessness.’
‘I think you’ll find the the pamphlet tells you to pursue another’s salvation with loving relentlessness.’
‘Really? I like the idea of being pursued with loving relentlessness.’
‘I’m sure it will happen, Patricia.’
‘You think so, Harry? Honestly, I thought nunhood awaited me. Looks like Desmond’s got rid of all his handouts. Here he comes.’
Desmond shook Ferguson’s hand.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Ferguson.’
‘Desmond.’
‘Are you going to say hello to me, Desmond?’
‘I was going to ask you why you aren’t at school.’
‘The trial of the century, Desmond. It’s instructive. I’m getting a rounded education.’ Desmond leaning forward, a sandy-haired, earnest figure, his hands clasped behind his back, striking a donnish pose. Esther had commented on his good looks. When Ferguson saw him he thought of the SS prisoners he had seen at Nuremberg. The fine-boned Aryan faces, death’s-head on the tunic collar. Walking alone among the captured, holding themselves apart, loyal still to some profane corps.
‘You’d better get home. You know what happens with Mother when you’re not on the bus.’
‘I didn’t ask,’ Ferguson said, ‘forgive me, Desmond. How is your mother?’
‘Mad as a bloody hatter,’ Patricia said. Desmond turned on her. For a moment Ferguson thought that he was going to strike her. Patricia lowered her eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Desmond,’ she said, ‘my big mouth. That wasn’t fair.’
‘Do you remember the Taylor trial, Mrs Curran?’
‘That would be Lady Curran to you, you whelp.’
Ferguson waited in silence. Doris walked in the storied dark. The nurses said that characters came and went. They stepped into the circle of light, they spoke their piece and then were gone back into the shadow. They were travellers and did not stay long in one place. Madness was a story, a ghast yarn spun in the firelight. They swarmed over her mind for days on end. You had to ignore them, Ferguson thought. If you ignored them long enough they would go away and allow Doris to emerge, kindly, nodding, an elderly woman in a flannelette dressing gown.
‘Taylor was the chap that murdered poor Mrs McGowan,’ Doris said.
‘Yes.’
‘A bad lot.’
‘He was. He did a lot of harm.’
‘I went down to the trial,’ Doris said. ‘I never did go to the courthouse but that day I thought to myself, why not? But when I got there they were queued all the way to the City Hall. I couldn’t get in.’
‘You should have asked someone. You were the Attorney General’s wife.’
‘I didn’t think of it then, Mr Ferguson. There were such a lot of people. What the hell do you want to know about that for?’
Normally there was time to take on the change in her voice, Doris slipping away, stepping back into the shadows. This time the change was instant. The voice was rich, mannish, sardonic. When Ferguson turned to Doris, her eyes met his and he took a step backwards.
Dark blue, very sharp.
Doris sat forward, her legs apart, her elbows resting on her thighs.
‘Judge Curran said he didn’t trust you on the Taylor case. He said he didn’t know what you were up to. Too slippery for your own good. Harry is a means to an end, the Judge said, and I’ll be done with him in the heel of the hunt.’
‘Who did he say this to?’
‘To Doris, man, who else would he say it to? He scared Doris. Don’t be scared of him, I says to Doris. She was easy feared, Doris, in them days, and Patricia had her tortured. Never mind, Patricia, I says, me and you’ll have some sport with her, by and by. Did you ever go sporting with the lasses, Harry?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sporting with the lasses under the arches in Whitechapel. And after I was took to the asylum at Broadmoor.’
‘Same as Doris.’
‘Same as Doris. Dr Meyer spoke to me there. He says the causes of madness are as follows. Intemperance. Vice. Poverty. Fright. Religious Excitement. Exposure to Hot Climates. Which of them answers befits me? If indeed you think me mad at all.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think me in my right mind?’
‘I can’t answer that.’
‘Your own married wife could answer for thee, I think she’s a lass has given many’s a man a run for his money.’ There was a half-smile on her face. The voice delinquent, mocking.
‘Did you?’ Ferguson said.
‘Did I what?’
‘Did you and Doris have sport with Patricia? Did you sport with her in her bedroom where the bloodstain was found on the floor? Did you carry her body outside into the trees?’
‘Out in the trees?’
‘That’s where the Judge found her.’
‘The Judge always finds you, no matter where you hide.’ Doris passed her hand over her face. When she took it away she was an old woman again. The hand she had passed over her face, now weak and palsied, fell to her side.
‘I’m very tired,’ she said.
‘I’ll call a nurse.’
‘Thank you. That would be kind.’
Ferguson walked over to the door and rang the bell. He lifted a rug and put it over Doris’s knees. She did not respond. When the nurse came she looked at Ferguson.
‘The poor thing’s done out. You should have let her be, mister.’
The nurse helped Doris to her feet and linked her to the door, Doris dragging her feet. As she reached the door she lifted her head and glanced at Ferguson.
A woman standing in the exercise yard. She is nude. There are scapulars about her neck.
Hilary would wait for Patricia at Oxford Street bus station to hear what had happened at the trial that day. They would go out the back of the station. Hilary always had cigarettes, Dunhills or Black Cats. They’d sit in among the maintenance vehicles and tow trucks, sharing a cigarette. Hilary had a way of finding the hidden places of the city, the derelict canal banks and building sites. She knew the rusted-through locks and bent railings, squirming into old factory spaces and waterworks. She took Patricia to a Quaker graveyard in Stranmillis, ivy and nettles growing through the vaults and tilted headstones. Hilary and other fifth years would meet Wesley boys there after evening service in the wintertime. Hilary sometimes let them ‘go too far’, telling Patricia about it afterwards, her talk smutty and detailed.
Patricia had waited for her just inside the gates. She didn’t want to go in with the boys, anonymous figures passing her in the dark, the girls waiting for them among the bent stones and scrub growth. Sometimes there’d be sounds from the graveyard interior, small cries and moans that made her start. Waiting until Hilary came out, straightening her blazer, her stockings laddered.
One night Hilary made Patricia wait longer than usual, Patricia shivering, pulling her coat around her. She was about to call out when Hilary came out with a tall boy that Patricia recognised as one of the Wesley rugby team. As he ducked past Patricia she saw Hilary watch after him, drawing the back of her hand across her mouth, something feral in the look, a base appetite sated.
Hilary couldn’t get enough of the trial. She made Patricia describe the demeanour of the witnesses, what they were wearing, the procedures and the ritual, the wigs and gowns and processional entrances. She would buy the early edition of the Telegraph and read passages of evidence aloud, getting Patricia to add details – whether the witness was sweating or fearful, if the judge looked sternly over his glasses at the defendant, did the public gallery gasp and turn to each other for comfort at some shocking passage of evidence, Hilary caught up in the sweep of the trial, the whole strange and graphic tumult of it. She wanted dramatics, the accused collapsing in the box sobbing, judges thundering from the bench.
‘The noonday sun blazed down on Newington as the killer known as Babyface Taylor swaggered towards the quiet house. Sweet little old lady Mary McGowan went about her day’s business, unaware that fate had singled her out for murder most foul. Taylor had one thing on his mind.’
‘Put a sock in it, Hilary,’ Patricia said, ‘you’ve watched too many cowboy films. It’s not like that.’
But Hilary’s fictions had an authority of their own and they stayed with Patricia. In this version Taylor a drifter in some western dreamtime. Pacing the dusty street, the sun beating down, the hallucinatory noontime glare. Other times she made him a Chicago gangster, John Dillinger, gunned down outside the Biograph, giving him an allure he didn’t have. Patricia wanted to tell Hilary that Taylor wasn’t like that, given to a killer’s terse monosyllables, the long-distance stare, seeing beyond the moment. There were no flat existential perspectives, the camera panning across deserted landscapes on the edge of town. The two girls smoking in the bus yard, tar-smelling, sticky with spilled oil. Finding their way into the back of a broken-down bus, the smell of warm leatherette, cigarette smoke hanging in the air, late-afternoon languor in the summer, Hilary’s stories taking on an air of foretelling, of a future rife with sudden death.
‘Your father’s the lawman. He rides into town, makes things safe for the townsfolk.’
‘He’s not really like that.’
‘Of course he is. The strong silent type.’
‘He gambles, Hilary.’
‘Does he? That’s fantastic. Makes him even more interesting. Sitting at the card table with the gunslinger, his face betrayed no emotion. He knew what he was dealing with. They all did.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Bet he carries a silver derringer.’
‘Hardly. There’s not much need of silver derringers at the Reform Club.’
‘I suppose so. What sort of gambling does he do?’
‘Cards mostly, I think. Though he might do horses as well. I’ve heard him on the telephone with this man Hughes who is a bookmaker.’
‘Do tell all.’ Hilary leaning forward confidentially. It was what she liked, the adolescent sphere of sharing, confidential asides. Girls telling each other everything. Patricia saw it all the time, girls walking home from school, their heads together, the telling of secrets, the sweet lore of adolescence. All the girls in school feeling the confidential undercurrent, the deep tug of it, the whispered conversation in corridors, the late-evening telephone calls. Hilary liked to use made-up words, a coded and allusive vocabulary of the heart. It was important that everything to do with feelings was kept secret, that an aura was created. A boy she liked was svelte. Girl rivals were hussies.
‘Mother and Father don’t talk very much. Mother’s a bit highly strung. Sometimes she locks herself in the bedroom and won’t come out. Father hides the key.’
‘Poor Patricia. What does Desmond do?’
‘Desmond ignores it all.’
‘He’s quite handsome, your Desmond.’
‘Hilary, don’t tell me you’re sweet on Desmond as well?’
‘What do you mean by as well?’
‘As well as the entire Wesley rugby team. As well as the hockey team and the men’s gymnastic association. Do you want me to go on?’
‘I see what you mean. I am a bit loose with my affections, aren’t I? A girl of easy virtue.’
‘A girl of not much virtue at all.’
Hilary told Patricia things that she did with boys. How she dealt with the hussies, turning one against the other, leaving a trail of hints and half-truths for them. She lay down on the back seat of the bus and put her head in Patricia’s lap.
‘We have to pick some svelte thing out for you. You’re going positively nunnish.’
‘I’m saving my womanhood, Hilary. I’m being picky.’
‘Meaning I’m not? You have an old heart, my dear. I think we’re going to have to find you a mature man.’
Patricia had gone with some of the Wesley boys but she found herself thinking beyond the moment, seeing herself walking home, submitting to their callow fumblings.
‘I want someone to make love to me. I don’t want to be groped in the shrubbery.’
‘Where do you want to be groped?’ Hilary lifted her head from Patricia’s lap. She knew that Patricia was holding back. It was all right to have deep dark secrets as long as they were brought out into the light eventually. Those were the rules of the game.
Patricia said that her mother liked to have her hair brushed. Only Patricia was allowed into her room. She would lie on the bed beside her mother to comb her hair, still long and worn in a bun. Patricia knew how to undo the pins, lay out the hanks, working her way into the lustres, listening to her mother’s talk of herself and the hair, the teaspoon of vinegar in the rinse water, knew the hair as a swirling, nuanced thing. She had a dressing table with a mirror on either side and she watched herself while Patricia brushed. She had a brush set with silver backs and tortoiseshell.
‘Patricia, you’re getting a décolletage, you really are,’ Hilary said.
‘Father always calls me Patricia in a way that makes me feel like the accused standing in the dock, ready to be transported off to some dread shore.’
Patricia told Hilary that when she was ten her father had taken her to Whiteabbey police station. While her father was talking to the sergeant a constable asked her if she would like to see the cells. He told her to go into one, which she did. The cell was whitewashed with a plain bed and the policeman closed the door and said for her to sit on the bed.
‘What did you do?’
‘Screamed. He opened the door double quick.’
Hilary’s father had men he went golfing with. The chaps, Hilary called them. They made Hilary laugh, until one of the chaps gave her a lift home from school one evening.
‘He put his rotten hand on my knee,’ Hilary said. ‘He is a perv and a creep. I couldn’t imagine Harry Ferguson doing anything like that. I saw him in his uniform when he came home from the war. He looked a whizz in it.’
Patricia had come across her father’s uniform in a closet in the spare bedroom. The tunic. The belt. The smells of starch, of oil worked into the leather. Brasso used on the buttons. She remembered finding her father’s wig in the hallway, the wig in its dented tin hatbox. Patricia danced into the dining room with the wig askew on her head, then turned to each of them in turn and said,
I judge you, I judge you, I judge you
.
Hilary knew that Patricia was holding back but she did not know that she was thinking about Harry Ferguson. Ferguson was Father’s friend but he had something brutal about him. You could see it in his eyes. People were afraid of Ferguson although she had never heard him raise his voice. She could smell his cologne from the sleeve of her cardigan where she had pressed against him in the courtroom. He wore a wrist watch with a gold metal strap and a signet ring on his right hand. There was fine, reddish hair on the back of his hands. Patricia thought they would be strong and agile. There was something knowing about Ferguson’s hands. She found herself thinking about them independent of him. What a hand does. Weighing and grasping. She imagined grips and holds, deft touches.
Hilary sat up. She lit another cigarette and handed it to Patricia. Patricia remembered the night she had stood outside the house with Ferguson, taking a pull on his cigarette. Looking back there seemed to be ritual to the encounter, gestures that seemed deliberated over, as though coming to them out of some deep faith, the sensual rites, a man and a woman standing together in the night.
‘Don’t tell me who it is now,’ Hilary said, ‘but tell me some time, agreed?’
‘Scouts’ honour,’ Patricia said.
‘Is it someone svelte?’ Hilary said.
‘Very svelte,’ Patricia said.
Hilary put her head back in Patricia’s lap. The sun was at its zenith, the girls feeling languid, unpicking their blouses where the heat made the fabric stick to their skin, passing the cigarette to and fro, the scene fading out as the sun moved behind the vaulted bus station roof, taking with it the day’s heat, the lost girlhoods.
*
‘I’m going to be convicted,’ Taylor said, ‘they’re going to put a rope around my neck and string me up like a rat and then they’re going to put me in a grave and pour quicklime over me. How long does quicklime take to dissolve a body, Mr Lunn? Not long. A week maybe.’
‘Steady yourself, Robert,’ Lunn said. But he was worried. Curran’s cross-examination of Taylor had been devastating. ‘We erected a good defence insofar as you can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but we didn’t plan on Curran tearing it to shreds.’
‘Curran knew his duty in the matter,’ Hanna said. ‘There is considerable disquiet regarding his behaviour.’
‘We opened the bloody door for him,’ Lunn said, ‘all he had to do was walk through.’
‘People are starting to wonder if Curran is the man they thought he was.’
‘Two weeks tops,’ Taylor said. ‘The bone would take longer.’ Absorbed in the mechanics of the burial, the chemical fire, what it was like to be consumed.
‘There is no question of your being hanged,’ Lunn said.
‘There was no question of Curran eating me alive until he done it,’ Taylor said. ‘That’s what you told me.’
‘I thought Ferguson would knock some sense into him.’
‘I’d wait and see. Harry usually has something up his sleeve.’
‘For Curran’s sake he’d better have.’
‘Never mind Curran’s sake,’ Taylor said. ‘What about my sake?’
Lunn had arranged to meet Hanna in the Reform Club later that night, following a visit to his client in prison. He met Curran in the lobby and Curran inclined his head. Lunn found Hanna in the smoking room with Ellis Harvey.
‘I met Curran on the way in. He threw me the nod. He’s a cool customer, I’ll give him that,’ Lunn said.
‘I think we had better prepare for a guilty verdict tomorrow,’ Hanna said. ‘A guilty verdict and an appeal.’
‘Police reserves have been called up,’ Harvey said, ‘but they won’t be able to contain it if it spills over. We’ll have to let the mob have its head for the night, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s this heat,’ Lunn said. ‘The place is primed and ready to blow.’
Lunn had walked across the city by the Crumlin Road, coming past Cambrai Street, Crimea Street, the Oldpark Road, turning down Agnes Street on to the Shankill. The streetlights had been extinguished.
‘You’re ready to sum up tomorrow?’ Harvey said.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Hanna said, ‘if you can keep a lid on the town and Ferguson can put a curb on Curran.’
‘He hasn’t much hope of putting a curb on Curran if he can’t keep a curb on that.’
They followed Lunn’s eyes. Esther Ferguson was crossing the bar. She was wearing a blue blouse in slub silk and a black pencil skirt. Her eyes were fixed on the bar, her lips moving as though she was uttering a prayer, an incantation of warding and protecting, the words that would carry her across the floor, other eyes watching her.
‘She’s no asset to Ferguson, that’s for sure,’ Lunn said. ‘I hear tell she’s there for the asking.’
‘We all have our weaknesses,’ Harvey said. ‘There’s many a man in this town would have to pack his bags if a light was shone into dark corners.’
‘Here comes another one that’s for the fairies,’ Lunn said. Doris Curran crossed the room and took Esther by the arm.
‘I think I see Harry coming, Mrs Ferguson,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we ought to freshen up before he comes in.’ She put her arm through Esther’s and led her towards the ladies.
‘The blind leading the blind,’ Lunn said.
‘How’s that?’ Hanna said.
‘I hear tell she’s high-strung. Surprised to see her out at all.’
‘Heads down. Here comes Harry.’ Ferguson crossed the room without looking at their table.
‘Off for a game of snooker with Curran,’ Lunn said. ‘I hope he’s going to have a word in his ear.’