In the twenty-four hours following the murder known sex offenders in the area were brought in for questioning. The flashers, the stealers of underwear from washing lines. Hollow-cheeked, solitary men. Johnston interviewed them.
‘Fucking saddle-sniffers is all. I can’t see none of them doing the youngster. They wouldn’t have it in them.’
McCrink parked at the courthouse and walked down past the Stonebridge and onto Hill Street. He walked past the mercantile buildings on Corry Square. Sugar Island. Buttercrane Quay. Places named for forgotten trades, the canal silted up, the railheads deserted. Sheets of sleet blowing up over the Marshes from the lough, McCrink trailing the dead through the January streets. Finding himself in the back lanes and shambles. Tuberculosis still rampant in the town, disease of the poor. He walked in alleyways lined with one-room cottages where the women were shawled. It was what he always did. He walked the streets, went to the victim’s workplace, trying to find a way into the story of their lives, the gritty small-town textures of the story.
At the canal basin two cranes were unloading coal from a Polish coaster into hoppers. A black dust cloud rolled across the water. The cranes bent to their task each in turn like some articulate beast from the dawn of time, as though something it craved was abroad in the dark and filthy hull of the freighter. There was coal spilled on the dock. Tinker children gathered the spilled fuel into sacks. McCrink put his foot on a piece of the brownish coal. It crumbled under his foot.
‘Pure shit, that is.’ McCrink looked up. One of the dock workers was standing over him with a spade. The man’s face was black with dust, seamed with the worked-in grains. The whites of his eyes stood out against the black.
‘You’re the boy that’s here to hang someone for Pearl Gamble,’ the man said.
‘I’m not here to hang anybody.’
‘Somebody’ll be hung though.’
‘That’s up to the courts.’
‘Courts are made up of men. There’s a mood in this town for somebody to pay with their neck.’
Across the basin McCrink could see the town gasometers. These were the textures of the town. Coal-dust. Rain-soaked meal spilled on the quayside train tracks. The dark forsworn canal waters.
McCrink walked up the town at closing time. He had left the girl’s place of work to the end. He passed the old market. Stallholders were packing their vans. There was a smell of meat from a butcher’s skip and gone-off vegetables lay in the gutter. The market gave way to stone buildings. The Northern Bank, the General Post Office. There were brass plaques for solicitors and dentists. People relied upon to be stalwart, to espouse well-worn value systems. There were small groups of workers at bus stops.
He stopped in Margaret Square and looked up at the lit frontage of Foster Newell’s. The late-evening customers just leaving. Women in hats with small veils attached, a sombre, monied gait as they walked to their cars. He could see the staff locking up inside. Through the rain-smeared windows the uniformed girls looked elegant and yielding, their movements ritualised, their eyes downcast. They moved easily in the formal interior of the shop, the gilt mirrors and empty counters, and McCrink imagined a sorrow in the air, the knowledge that one of their own had fallen, a caste awareness.
There was a phone box across the street. McCrink phoned Speers. Holding the whorled mouthpiece and waiting for the connection.
‘McCrink. Anything new?’
‘Preliminary autopsy. Seven stab wounds. None of them fatal. Death caused by crush wounds to the trachea. Bruising.’
McCrink found himself staring at the facade of Foster Newell’s. Listening to the line clutter. The information routed through the far-off exchanges, the copper and bakelite contacts, the deep subterranean connections. The death-nodes.
‘Any prints lifted from the body?’
‘None so far. She was lying out all night in the rain. Wouldn’t be many traces left.’
‘You finished at the barracks?’
‘Nothing I can do for now.
‘Meet me in Nummy’s. The Crown Bar. ‘
On his way up Hill Street McCrink saw the municipal library. He pushed through the mahogany and brass doors. The lights had been turned off in the main part of the library apart from the librarian’s desk. It was what he had expected, a shabby and bedimmed provincial interior. He could see a figure behind the desk. He thought he knew what to expect from a librarian in a place like this. A woman with mousy hair, flat-shoed, spinsterish.
‘I’m sorry, we’re closed.’ He moved closer to the desk. The woman was in her late thirties, McCrink thought. Her hair hung to her shoulders and she was wearing gold hoop earrings and a blouse with a gypsy look to it. She had a long nose and a way of tilting her head to one side when she talked to you. There was disillusion in her face, a look that had traded off wry self-forgiveness for too long and was ready to settle into resentment. The kind of woman he was drawn to.
‘Police,’ he said.
‘O God,’ she said, ‘the murder. I bought some make-up from her last weekend. She was in the chorus in the opera. You never think … I’m sorry. I’m making a story of it. You must have listened to a hundred of them.’
‘That’s what people do. Tell stories when something like this happens.’ Their stories all they had to set against the dark.
‘Is there something I can do?’ She had a way of tucking her head into her shoulder as if to suppress a smile, turning her hands palm-up in surrender, lifting an eyebrow in sardonic bemusement. Murder was abroad in the town.
‘Have you got maps of the area?’
‘You’d need more than a map to find your way around this place.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You know what people in this town are called?’
‘No.’
‘Nyuks.’
‘What does that mean? The accent?’ He’d noticed it in her speech. The mudflat drawl with a kind of disdain in it.
‘No. Most people think that, but it’s a gypsy word. Cant. It means thief.’
‘The town of thieves.’
‘It had a history as a trading town. Markets. Goods imported and exported. And it’s close to the border. Maybe that’s where it comes from.’
‘It’s not doing much trade now.’
‘Place has been starved of investment for decades. The government would rather see it fall into the canal.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Maybe they think we’re all thieves.’
She brought him into a small room at the back of the library. The maps were in drawers against the wall. He wanted to see the distance and terrain between the Orange hall, McGladdery’s house and the murder scene, but found himself staring at the lough, the shoals and high-tide lines, the charted murks. He traced the inked-in depths. The town clustered at the head of the lough, the buildings and enclosures hand-drawn. Nyuk. The spat-out word, drawing the psychic undertow of the town with it. The secret languages. Tinker’s cants. The town rising away from the centre. North Street, Abbey Yard. The gaunt precincts of the town. This was the oldest part of the municipality, the narrow streets and lanes turning into each other. Margaret put her finger on the map.
‘Gallows Hill. It always sends a shiver through me.’ The place of execution. Gibbeted footpads hanging in rows, birds pulling at their flesh.
‘Is it true that whoever did this will be executed?’ she said.
‘Capital punishment is still on the statute book.’
‘I debated repeal in school. Capital punishment has no place in a civilised society. Discuss.’ There was an earnestness in her voice which reminded him of his wife.
‘The Gamble family would probably love to discuss it with you.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean anything. I’ll get my coat.’
He watched her move away into the unlit library. When she had gone into the shadows his eye fell on the Abbey Yard on the map. The mendicant orders. Hooded monks walking in procession chanting.
He found his finger tracing the line of the coal quay where he had seen the tinkers earlier. Bivouacked in the shadows. The Orange hall. The stubble field. Weir’s Rock.
‘Did you find anything?’ The librarian had put on her coat.
‘Not much.’
‘People forget that they’re close to the border. There are unapproved roads. Smugglers pads over the mountain.’
‘Maybe that’s where the thief name came from. The smuggling.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Smugglers and excise men. Coming in over the mountain and the lough. Contraband borne by night.
‘You aren’t local.’
‘I’m from Belfast. I was in London. I came home to be Inspector of Constabulary.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I wanted a job at home and I got it. They sent me down from the city to supervise the investigation.’
‘We have to be supervised, do we?’
He waited while she locked and barred the library doors. The clank and ring of bolts and bar as though some dire mechanics were at work in the empty square. He watched as she walked to her car, a left-hand drive Renault. She looked at it and looked at him with a half-grin. If he questioned her about it there would be stories about holidays in France, bringing the car back to show herself as unconventional, her life become a thing of self-mocking gestures. If she was afraid of a murderer she didn’t mention it. She got into the car and pulled off without looking back, driving alone out into the maverick night.
There was a stillness to the town. McCrink noticed it every time he stepped off the main streets. Haunted spaces. Spaces waiting to be filled.
He walked back up to Trevor Hill and went into the bar. There was a smell of damp coats in the air, a bar-room atmosphere of low-key duplicity. McCrink recognised Nummy’s for what it was. A place where people drank to keep at bay the damage they had caused through drinking. Everything else was left outside the door. The bartop was chipped Formica. The stools were shabby. But you could stay there as long as you liked, and the small doorway seemed to be sealed against judgement.
He sat at the bar and ordered a vodka and tonic. Speers and Johnston came in and sat beside him.
‘Johnston is still keen on the local for it. Boy by the name of McGladdery we talked about,’ Speers said.
‘What do you think?’
‘There’s something about it doesn’t add up.’
‘He doesn’t act much like your regular villain. Mad into bodybuilding and the like.’
‘Doesn’t act much like anything I ever seen.’
‘The bodybuilding fits,’ McCrink said, thinking how a murderous self-regard could develop from it.
‘There’s a lot that fits. The petty crime. The difficult childhood. The man’s a danger to the world by all accounts. It’s the criminal arc.’
‘The criminal arc?’
Johnston said, ‘Inspector Speers’s got these theories about the architecture of the criminal mind, sir.’
‘What’s your theory about the criminal mind?’ McCrink said.
‘A bad bastard is a bad bastard is my theory, sir.’
‘Johnston can be crude but it works sometimes,’ Speers said. ‘I’m suggesting that he takes the lead in interviewing witnesses.’
‘What’s your qualification for the job, Johnston?’ McCrink said.
‘I learned at the feet of a master,’ Johnston said, ‘I worked the Curran case. I seen Chief Inspector Capstick interviewing Gordon for the murder. Got a confession out of him in a day.’
‘Gordon?’
‘For the murder of Patricia Curran, the judge’s daughter.’
Johnston told them how Capstick had gone about it. Capstick had told Hay Gordon that he was aware of his homosexuality. He referred to undercurrents of deviance in Gordon’s person, the weakness of the jawline, the limpness of the handshake. Capstick had referred to his own experience in dealing with the pallid deviants of the London underworld, the queers and poofters, scions of arse banditry. He had filled Gordon’s head with dark visions of night streets peopled with the children of vice.
‘At the heel of the hunt, Capstick told him his loving mother would find out he was a pervert. Scared the little bugger half to death to make him confess. The gents of the bar library had to bend over backwards to stop him getting his rightful deserts which was a rope around his neck. Cried like a baby when the ma’s name come up. Couldn’t wait to write out a statement.’
‘It’s a distasteful way to get a confession,’ McCrink said.
‘He got a conviction,’ Speers said.
‘He got a conviction but he left a fishy smell in the air.’
‘Never mind a fishy smell, sir,’ Johnston said; ‘around this town we do what works.’
‘You want to see McGladdery?’ Speers said. ‘Johnston’s men’s got him under surveillance at Hollywood’s bar.’
They drove down Merchants Quay. They parked the Humber along the canal.
‘There he is,’ Speers said.
Robert McGladdery was standing outside the bar. He was wearing a Crombie and a porkpie hat pushed back on his head. He was smoking, holding the cigarette cupped in his hand, an untipped Black Cat or No. 6. In the glow of the cigarette McCrink could see a pale face, half-smiling. There was a long scratch on one side of his face.
‘A dissolute,’ Johnston said. ‘Stood there same time every day. Sits at the bar until he hears the mill hooter then out he comes. Watches the night shift coming off the tram. Making lewd and filthy remarks in their hearing.’
‘Where’d he get the scratches on his face?’
‘That’s the question.’
‘He never got the glad rags here.’
‘Spent a year in England.’
‘That would be right.’ The clothes garish for this town. Made him look like a fairground barker. As if some lewd carnival attraction was concealed within the pub confines. A grotesque. A caged imbecile whimpering in the dark.
‘Do we lift him?’
‘Let him lie. He’ll come to us in his own good time.’
‘Likes of him wouldn’t turn himself in.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’