Monday 30th January 1961
Eddie McCrink’s Heathrow flight landed at 8.15. When he was in the air he liked to close his eyes and picture the air traffic control radar screen. All this speed and velocity monitored in dim-lit rooms by people in headphones, the terse clipped phrases of passage being exchanged between the tower and aircrew. Bearing headings. Westbound. Northbound. McCrink wondered if the travel itself was the point. Being airborne. Ranging between the aviation hubs, tracked across the vectors. There was a mystic element to aircraft crossing the radar screen, the ghost traces they left.
McCrink had worked in London for fifteen years, rising to the Murder Squad before being appointed to fill the vacant post of inspector of constabulary in Belfast. When he had applied for the job he had expected a formal interview process but instead had been called to the Cavendish Club by Harry West, a prominent member of the Stormont government. The talk about West was of buying up land ahead of zoning change for new motorway development. Re-drawing council boundaries. McCrink met him in the foyer. West had the look of a countryman about him, bluff and shrewd, the skin wind-reddened. He was wearing a tweed suit. He shook McCrink’s hand. He showed him that evening’s Belfast Telegraph. There was a photograph of Pearl Gamble on the front page.
‘Dreadful event,’ he said, ‘the poor girl.’ McCrink could read the look that West gave him, the steady corruptible stare. ‘Was she of the minority faith?’ McCrink knew what he was getting at. Lynch-mob politics. Hoping the killer was a Catholic. The miscreant underclass sunk in the perversion of their faith.
‘The dance was in an Orange hall,’ McCrink said, ‘so it’s not likely.’
‘Someone laid in wait for her on the way home?’
‘That’d be the way of it all right.’
‘You think the man will be caught.’
‘It’s up to the local police. Under the supervision of the Inspector of Constabulary.’
‘You’d better get supervising then. The job’s yours. Make this a priority. And bear in mind we don’t want another Curran case.’
‘It won’t take that long.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant, Mr McCrink. I want Allen to have him. Send out a signal.’
‘Allen?’
‘Harry Allen. The hangman. What goes on the mainland goes in the province. Shows we’re upholding the rule of law without fear or favour.’
The terminal was empty except for passengers waiting for a Palma-bound charter delayed in Spain, grounded on some far-off sultry apron. Outside McCrink could see the lights of Belfast reflecting off low cloud to the east. The land fell away towards the conurbations to the west. Aldergrove had been a wartime aerodrome and it retained some of the improvised feel of those times, a windswept plateau and a feeling that, if you listened for them, lost callsigns could be heard in the radio buzz and clutter, whispery ghost wordings in the radar operators’ headsets. Oscar, Whiskey, Zulu.
He took a taxi from the rank at the front of the airport, crossing the drizzly flatlands of Nutts Corner and Dromara, parts of the old aerodrome being used as a motorcycle racetrack, blue lines of two-stroke exhaust hanging in the evening air. Wistful post-war landscapes, driving through the slobs and flax dams, dropping down towards sea level and into the late-evening traffic heading into the city. He had been booked into the International Hotel in the University area. The taxi driver left him there at ten o’clock, the thoroughfare empty at that hour except for couples walking home. There was a television lounge in the hotel. A boxed set that stood in the middle of the floor. The picture was poor, but McCrink sat up when he heard the newsreader menton Pearl Gamble. The screen showed the murder scene at Weir’s Rock. The flickering rudiments of television. There was a different texture to the crime-scene photographs he was used to. The utilitarian six-by-tens, the darkly functional allure they brought to their subject matter. The hunched dead. The lingered-over poses. They were sombre and darkly themed.
McCrink left the hotel and walked down past the Botanic Gardens. He passed the end of a small cross street. A woman beckoned to him from the darkness. She was in her forties and there was a smell of gin on her breath, but in the late evening’s balm she could be recast as a melancholic altruist, an archivist of arousal and desire, the city’s carnal memory embodied.
He went into the York Hotel. He ordered a pint of ale and sat in an alcove to the side of the bar. The clientele was middle-aged. Men in blazers with the names of rugby and tennis clubs on the breast. There were club ties and crests. McCrink was familiar with this society, the emblems and allegiances, the coded and shifting structures. There was hearty laughter from the group at the bar. It depended on types. There would be hearty types, aloof men who defined themselves through sporting feats. There would be seducers of other men’s wives, sly flatterers of pale dissatisfied women.
In the morning he drove down through the woebegone roundabouts and artificial lakes of Craigavon, its stained concrete overpasses and shuttered estates, its hinterland of failed civics.
John Speers was waiting for him outside Corry Square Station. He hadn’t seen Speers since he had left Belfast for London twenty years before. Speers’s skin had a grey hue. He looked ashen, exhausted, an apostle of bad faith. He shook McCrink’s hand.
‘Good to see they’re keeping an eye on us, sending the big city boys down,’ Speers said. Letting McCrink know there was no way round the resentment, that there would be a subtle and lasting rancour.
‘It’s your case, John,’ McCrink said.
‘You must have put the crusader’s sword away then,’ Speers said.
‘A long time ago. Maybe we should proceed.’
Pearl’s body had been concealed at Weir’s Rock. Her clothing had been discarded between Damolly Cross and the murder scene. Speers had made inventory of the clothing. McCrink noted the labels. The word Ladybird on her slip. Playtex on her brassiere. The nubbed fabric. Lejaby. There were things he didn’t understand about women. How they measured themselves and what rule they used. McCrink wondered if that was why her clothing had been removed. If the man who had killed her had found himself in study of these garments. If he had strained for understanding of them like a medieval theologian, head bent over an unfolded codex.
‘This is Sergeant Johnston,’ Speers said. Johnston was a stocky man in his fifties. The kind of provincial policeman that McCrink had expected. Jowly, resentful, shrewd. ‘Where was she that night?’
‘At a class of a hop in a hall. We have the boy. We have him nailed for you. Just haven’t took him in yet.’
‘Who are you looking at?’
‘Local hood by the name of McGladdery. He’s got some form. Convictions for breach of the peace and the like.’
‘Any sexual previous?’ McCrink asked.
‘Not recorded anyhow. I’d say he was just working his way up to it.’
‘Any witnesses place him there?’
‘The whole town knows McGladdery was at the dance. Him and Will Copeland. The two of them full of drink. He got up to dance with the victim. Pawing her by all accounts. Hands all over her.’
‘Common enough at a dance, I would’ve thought,’ McCrink said.
‘There’s common and there’s common. McGladdery takes off after the dance and nobody sees him till the next day. There’s a bicycle missing from outside the hall. We reckon he took it,’ Johnston said.
‘He spent time in London. He’s into bodybuilding and the like,’ Speers said.
‘We should pick him up,’ Johnston said.
‘No,’ McCrink said, ‘leave him out there. Give him the chance to slip up. But we need to start interviewing the witnesses. Bring them up here.’
‘We can do it in Corry Square.’
‘I’d suggest doing it in Queen Street. Off the home patch. Who found her?’
‘Some boy out walking greyhounds. He seen clothing by the side of the road. There’s bloodstains between the field and the road. By the look of the face he bust her nose and she took to the fields.’
‘I got out of London to get away from this,’ McCrink said.
‘There’s no getting away from any of it any more,’ Johnston said. ‘As thou sowest, so shall thee reap.’
‘Spare us the tent mission, Sergeant,’ Speers said.
‘I seen it written on a gable on the way up to Weir’s Rock.’
‘Don’t tell us we’re in that territory,’ said McCrink.
‘Clean-living to a man. You worked this kind of case before?’ Speer said.
‘I did.’ McCrink thought about the girl sprawled in the reeking grass. ‘In London. Toms killed and dumped.’
‘Toms?’
‘Prostitutes.’
In 1959 McCrink had worked on the first cases in what became known as the Nude Murders, the killing of eight prostitutes in London. The body of twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Figg, also known as Ann Phillips, was found in Dukes Meadows in Chiswick. McCrink had accompanied her to the morgue. A lab technician had propped her eyes open with matchsticks so that she could be photographed for the late-edition Star. She was identified from the photograph.
The photograph was published in the morning editions the following day, given prominence in the Daily Mail, the Mirror and the Express. Elizabeth Figg doesn’t look dead in the photograph. Her look is thoughtful. She seems to have spotted something just out of frame that has given her pause. She looks wryly amused.
The Krays and the Nude Murders. Gangland killings and backstreet procuresses. A Reggie or a Ronnie in a lounge suit. The societal weather for the next decade seemed set at steady rain.
Pearl’s nude, butchered remains on a fell hillside seemed to funnel these dire times into people’s lives, reaching out from the distant metropolitan sprawl and clutter. Weir’s Rock and the stubble field taking its place in the dead landscapes of the corpse dumping grounds, the dingy parklands and ashpits and canal banks.
‘Same kind of thing then,’ Speers said.
‘Yes and no.’ The Nude Murderer had used only the required amount of force, just squeezing the girls’ windpipes, drawing them gently downward, removing them from the squalor of their lives, the thievery and poncing and edgy living. McCrink looking for connections. Pearl’s body partly concealed behind bushes on the stony uplands above the town at the head of the lough. The distant scene hidden by coal smoke as if by a miasma of ill-intent.
‘A crew by the name of the RayTones. From the city.’
The RayTones. McCrink wondered what they had been doing in an Orange hall more used to stark upcountry gospellers, men with a wintry eye fixed on eternity. He had seen a picture of the RayTones in the Reporter. The band wore winklepickers and narrow trousers. He pictured them standing in the doorway of the Orange hall, peering out warily as though the night was full of hayseed murderers, populated by the interbred and the homicidal.
‘There’ll be reporters from the city down for this one,’ Johnston said.
‘There’ll be reporters from all over the shop getting a look in,’ Speers said, ‘they’ll go capital. It’ll be the rope for whoever done this.’
‘There was very little blood where she was found,’ McCrink said.
‘None here,’ Johnston said, ‘but I’ve got blood in plenty for you if you want it.’
‘What do we know about her?’
‘Girl by the name of Pearl Gamble. Works in Foster Newell’s department store in the town. Never come home last night.’
The two men knew what was required of them now. That they be hard-eyed, open to revelation. There were new sciences of detection. There were laboratories where microscopic traces of flesh and matter were examined.
The body had been found in the morning but it had been evening before it was taken away, drawn into the night by motor hearse as the carted bodies from the close-by Workhouse had been drawn. She was driven through Newry and the people of the town came out in the dark to view the hearse, and record to themselves the macabre night scenes as the black car with the dented steel coffin made its way through the rainy streets.
A single constable was left to guard the murder scene. The shadows of cloud moving across the moorlands. A place for the nocturnal transport of the forsaken. For their abandonment, left naked unto the night.
‘We’ll go to the morgue and give you a look at her,’ Speers said.
The nose appeared to be broken and the tongue lolled from her mouth as though the manner of her death had forced her to some final abandon. There was blood and matter around the septum. The neck was marked and bruised. There were seven stab wounds on the torso and neck. McCrink noted that the punctures were small and of a regular shape.
‘Made good and sure of her anyhow,’ Speers said. Beaten, strangled, stabbed. The girl’s eyes were open. She lay on her side with her hands cupped between her knees, a nude and butchered pieta.
The police photographer was Mervyn Graham, a local shoemaker. Graham was the kind of man who could turn his hand to anything. He wore a brown knee-length coat. He had the look of a bystander caught up in insurrection, a crumpled figure on the ground in the aftermath of street fighting. He did wedding photography for the Newry Reporter as well. Formal interior shots that made the bride and groom look like members of some lost peasant class, sombre with the burdens of forgotten worlds.
Graham looked down at the body and lit a No. 6. He knelt down, opened the back of a black Hasselblad and began to spool film in.
Graham started to shoot. McCrink could hear the sound of the shutter, the hair’s-breadth clearances. He started to see the photographs as they would appear. Stark compositions lined up in the viewfinder. The nude unadorned body transfixed in the developing fluid, silvered and flickering. The shutter blades like something shuffled, as if a game of chance took place off-camera. A glamour brought to the scene as though staged for some deathly burlesque.
As they left the morgue an attendant approached them.
‘Minister West on the line for Inspector Speers,’ he said, ‘wants an update on the investigation.’
‘Fear and favour’s what them lot is all about,’ Johnston said. ‘Rule by fear, reward by favour, isn’t that it, sir?’
‘You may keep that socialist stuff to yourself, Johnston. They’ll have you for a commie. If there’s anything they hate more than a taig, it’s a commie,’ Speers said.