The ordinands kneel in a semicircle before the altar. The bishop is seated on his faldstool before them, the folds of his surplice spread on the ground.
Receive the yoke of the Lord for His yoke is sweet and His burden light.
Lancelot Curran is seated to the left of the altar. His son Desmond is among the kneeling supplicants. Befrocked priests move in the annexed chapels. Lance Curran sits without moving. The rite must be endured. The litany moves on. The candidates prostrate themselves, their faces pressed to the marble floor. The dominion of centuries presses down on them. Idolatrous chants in the septs of Rome.
There is instruction here. On the decline of empires. His son receives benedictions. The priests move in procession. They stretch out their hands to take the oils. They say they have shriven themselves of sin and are dressed in white. Curran knows that sin is never erased.
Curran has made his play and now he gathers his winnings to him. His son a Romish priest. His wife a madwoman. His daughter murdered.
On 16th October 1961 Judge Lance Curran had sentenced Robert McGladdery to death for the murder of Pearl Gamble. Curran’s summing up left no doubt in the jury’s mind that McGladdery had murdered Pearl Gamble. They returned with a guilty verdict after forty minutes’ deliberation. Robert McGladdery was hanged in Crumlin Road prison on 20th December 1961.
The novices kneel on the floor then fall forward on to their faces, their arms outspread. Curran watches his son’s submission. In hours to come his son will bless him, his hands made fragrant with oils of chrism, with oils of myrrh. Desmond’s soutane is spread out. In a side chapel the garments of authority are made ready for him.
The phone rang. Calls in the night. Time after time the summons comes at night. Ferguson thinks that the last call to judgement will be such a summons. That Patricia might hearken to it and be raised. Even the eyeless succubus in her painted chest would pay heed. He had heard the voice at the other end of the line twenty-four years hence and it had not changed and he felt the malice in it. Why now? He remembered the photograph in the Telegraph that day. The Judge and his priest son.
Ferguson expected and was given a time and a place. He went to his car. The dread rendezvous. He drove along the lough shore in the dark. The masthead lights of ships showed beyond the bar. He could see night waves on the shoal rocks, their surge and billow. He stopped at the gates of the Glen. He crossed the road to the telephone box, its frail light votive in the gathered dark. As the caller had said there was a manilla envelope on the directory shelf. He opened the envelope and slid from it a charcoal drawing of a nude woman. A life drawing. The woman sat with her legs under her, head turned away, haunch and breast exposed. The phone rang. The same voice as before. Taylor.
The button man.
‘You found the envelope, Mr Ferguson?’
‘Where did you get this drawing, Taylor?’
‘I seen her sitting beside you at the trial. Reckon she was more than just the boss’s daughter.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘The night she got killed she was carrying a folder. Books. A yellow cap.’
‘A Juliet cap.’
‘That’s it. They weren’t there, were they, when the body was found?’
‘The drawing, Taylor.’
‘Curran made a cod out of me in the witness box. I told him what I knew but he wouldn’t stop.’
‘You never went to Canada. You waited for Patricia on the driveway.’
‘I seen Curran at the bookies and the dog track. Acting like he was better than all of us when he was the same or worse.’
‘You pulled her into the trees.’
‘Curran hanged that boy McGladdery. She would have sat there and watched her da put on the black cap the way he had the judge put it on for me.’
‘Patricia.’
‘Stuck up. Who did she think she was? I seen the way she looked at me. Like I was dirt. There’s only one answer to that.’
‘Did you take the drawing from her folder?’
‘They’re all the same when they’re on their back and they’re all the same when they’re lying in heart’s blood. I kept that drawing in the box of tricks special for you, Mr Ferguson. I knew you’d like a souvenir of the dear departed. Mightn’t be the first souvenir you got off her.’
Taylor was still talking when Ferguson put the phone down. He had never considered Taylor as a suspect in Patricia’s murder. He had never thought that Taylor or another man unknown to him, some enemy of Curran, had hidden in the trees to wait for Patricia. Now it seemed as likely as any other conclusion. Taylor. Doris. Cutbush. Lancelot Curran. They had gathered about Patricia. They had made a fellowship of themselves. He thought that if one of them had not taken her life, then another would have stepped forward. He opened the telephone-box door on to the pavement. To his left the driveway led through the woods where Patricia had been found to the house now shuttered and unseen. The Glen. The Judge’s house.
The phone would ring again. His life had been made of such appointments. Men who bade him come to them that they might show how they had mastered the world when the truth was that they always had attended on his will. The rich and the beggared. The guilty and innocent. Those who had been bought. Those who had been sold.
He looked down at the drawing. The nude woman crouched, alert. Ready for flight.
Some days after Taylor had been released Ferguson had seen Patricia on University Road with a group of schoolfriends. In their uniforms of pleated skirts and seamed stockings they seemed aloof and knowing. In the evenings when they had gone home to Malone and Holywood, the silken boroughs, they left a little of themselves behind to the night settling in on the university streets, the ghosts of longing abroad in the dark. Years after Patricia’s death Ferguson would walk these streets and think that she was there somewhere, close by in the dusk. Patricia had not waited at the courthouse on the day of Taylor’s conviction. Nor had he ever been alone in her company again. After her murder stories had reached him of Patricia’s men. Of her reputed promiscuity. These men had never shown themselves and he had never found them. But they would be forever her companions in the dark. In this faithless city the story was all.
The author would like to acknowledge his debt to Tom McAlindon’s
Bloodstains in Ulster
, the authoritative account of the Robert Taylor affair.
Eoin McNamee was born in Kilkeel, County Down, in 1961. He was educated in various schools in the North of Ireland and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book, the novella
The Last of Deeds
, was shortlisted for the
Irish Times
Literature Prize and his novels include
Resurrection Man
, which was later made into a film,
The Blue Tango
which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and, most recently,
Orchid Blue
. He lives in Sligo.
by the same author
The Last of Deeds
Love in History
Resurrection Man
The Blue Tango
The Ultras
12:23
Orchid Blue
First published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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This ebook edition first published in 2014
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© Eoin McNamee, 2014
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ISBN
978–0–571–27862–6