Three 

Corry Square, 31st January 1961

 

An incident room had been set up at Corry Square barracks. There were Ordnance Survey maps on a pinboard in the middle of the room. Space had been cleared for Mervyn Graham’s crime-scene and autopsy photographs. A bank of telephones linked to the exchange had been laid on by the Post Office. There were photographs of the dead girl cut from that evening’s Belfast Telegraph. They were waiting for the full set of crime-scene photographs to be developed, and for the results of the autopsy. Johnston’s men had started to bring in witnesses for questioning.

The locals wouldn’t look at the girl’s photograph. They kept their heads bent over their desks as though they were reciting some personal office of the dead. McCrink examined the photograph. The gap between her teeth. Her mouth turned down at the corners in a way which suggested a meanspirited sensuality.

‘Faulkner’s been on again. He wants to see whoever done this hanged.’

‘I thought they done away with the rope.’

‘Only across the water. Not here. Capital punishment is still on the books. Hangman’s not signing on yet.’

‘Faulkner’s a modern man. He’ll throw whoever did it a pardon,’ Speers said.

‘He’ll throw no pardon,’ Johnston said, ‘Faulker would no more pardon a man who left a girl in that state than he would pardon a weasel in a snare.’

‘There’s a lot of argument across the water about abolition of the rope,’ McCrink said.

‘Place is still on a war footing, Inspector. Bear it in mind.’ Speers said.

McCrink looked at him. They knew what was going on. Execution still on the cards for those attempting overthrow of the state. McCrink could see the witnesses through the meshed firedoor glass. They sat in benches along the dis tempered corridor. There was a small-town look to them. Jug-eared youths. Big-boned girls holding patent handbags on their knees. The mill girls with needle marks on their hands from the looms. He could imagine them at a Saturday-night dance. Dressed to the nines, sinking into the myth of it, the band playing Presley and Bill Haley, the Americana seeping in, Pearl in the middle of them catching McGladdery’s eye across the hall, down-home lonesomeness dragging danger into the room. Finding a home in the plank-built hall, the dust-seamed walls. The dancers hadn’t come far from the tent gospel missions and itinerant preachers, the god-struck hinterlands.

‘We should start,’ McCrink said.

‘Leave them be for a bit,’ Johnston said. Let the feel of the station seep in. Let the weight of the town bear down on them, the mass and substance of the teeming municipality. Outside it was growing dark. Rain was falling. The station doors opening and closing, the evening traffic growing until the noise of its passing was felt in the fabric of the building, the witnesses glancing at each other nervously now, feeling the town bestirring itself, the darksome thrumming.

It was eight o’clock before Speers indicated the interviews were about to start. He used a basement interview room, the table notched and scarred. He knew that they would expect this. He was hard-faced, abrupt. He gave the impression that events beyond the station walls were hastening to an inevitable conclusion.

McCrink walked past the interviewees in the corridor. The process would have to be gruelling. They would have to move through the stages. Acceptance and repentance. They would be turned out into the darkness, shriven. He opened the door of the interview room then turned in the doorway and beckoned. A young man got uncertainly to his feet. Come in, McCrink thought. Lay bare your pilgrim soul.

The interview rooms were in the basement of Corry Square. The witness was meant to feel the weight of the building pressing down on him. The rooms were bare, the pipework exposed. There was a table in the middle of the floor with a chair to each side. McCrink thought that the purpose was to intimidate the witness. To draw wrong to themselves, repent of sins they had not yet committed.

‘We’ll bring the backwoods Prod out in them,’ Johnston said. ‘We’ll rattle on the roofs of their fucking tin gospel huts. There’s nothing to distract them. The only thing they can do is talk. They start to tell you stuff they didn’t even know they knew.’

Hesitant at first. Then a story starts to take shape in their heads. They start to see the possibilities of narrative, the interwoven stuff of their lives. How things have shaped themselves around the defining moment. How they found themselves in an Orange hall, the dramatic building, in the dark and thrilling proximity of a sex crime. They try to piece the night together, how seemingly meaningless events become part of the weft. They start to ponder the interrelatedness of things. They are grateful to the interviewer for helping to find the patterns.

The telling of it alters what happened. They start to see everything as laden down with consequence. Searching their memory for detail. The dream-sequences. There are digressions. The narrative falters.

‘They start making it up,’ Speers said. ‘If they can’t remember they make it up. You got to keep a handle on them.’

They begin to see the victim’s passage through their lives, the unearthly progress. Every action fated.

‘You wait till you see the whites of their eyes,’ Johnston said.

‘They’re thinking it could have been me,’ Speers said, ‘the killer could have picked any one of them.’ He laughed and lit a Gold Bond. ‘They’re thinking what’s so special about her?’

‘That’s not it,’ McCrink said. The witnesses became panicky, words spilling out of them. They had felt the presence of death or some attendant to death in the hall, a louche cold figure who gave the impression that he had been there for some time.

‘They have to tell the whole thing because they’re terrified,’ McCrink said. Searching for the formula of words that would protect them. The telling. The incantation of story.

‘I’d hang them all,’ Johnston said, ‘hang them all and let God sort them out.’

Johnston put a telegram on the desk in front of McCrink. The lettering dark and inky, the characters unevenly spaced. Kennedy. Tonight. 8.00. HQ.

‘Looks like the Chief Constable wants you,’ Speers said.

‘We’ll be busy here, sir, don’t worry,’ Johnston said, ‘I’m always busy anyhow, isn’t that right, sir?’

Busy at what? McCrink thought.

McCrink drove to RUC Headquarters at Castlereagh on the outskirts of Belfast feeling he was leaving mischief behind him. The headquarters were low grey buildings, flat-roofed with a Soviet-era look to them. McCrink was led through distempered corridors, feeling he was out in some far-flung spy post. He imagined operatives crouched over radar screens, looking for incoming missiles, parabolic flights coming in over Siberia.

Kennedy’s office was leather and wood. The Chief Constable was wearing full dress uniform. A career policeman, McCrink thought. He shook hands with McCrink.

‘Congratulations on your appointment.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t come straight away.’

‘Of course, of course. It was an emergency. You’ll find your duties here are light. There is little inspecting to be done. However Minister Faulkner has expressed a wish that you keep a close eye on this Pearl Gamble business.’

Brian Faulkner. Minister for Home Affairs. Faulkner’s picture in the Telegraph. Pitching himself at the urbane but you looked at the mouth, the downturned corners, the big-house dissatisfactions written all over him, the epic disdain. Faulkner rode to hounds. Faulkner knew the structures of rotten boroughs, redrawn ward boundaries, electoral carve-ups, zoning scandals going unaddressed. Faulkner was a big-house Unionist. He had estates in the east and on the border. An air of feudal rancours about him. Disdain in the gene code.

‘What is the state of play?’ Kennedy said. ‘A sex crime?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘What’s the story with the girl?’

‘She left the dance on her own about 1.30. We’re interviewing witnesses.’

‘Witnesses?’

‘The man who found her. The crowd who were at the dance. No eye-witness to the crime.’

‘What sort of crowd?’

‘Local girls. Mill girls. Crew of wide boys from the town.’

‘Murder weapon?’

‘None so far.’

‘Was she interfered with?’

McCrink had worked in London, Denmark Street. Soho and the theatre district. Areas that were described as vice-ridden. He had seen women dead in alleys, beaten by lovers in shabby flats. He had seen a Maltese tom with her nostrils slit. Sex crimes with an Edwardian slant to them, gaslit, looming out of the fog, Whitechapel lurkers at work in the night.

‘She was stripped. Bare to the world.’

‘Anything else?’

‘She was stabbed and strangled. He wasn’t taking any chances.’

‘I’ll say again. Any sexual interference?’

‘He never laid a hand on her person. Bar the beating and the stabbing and the strangling. That’s the preliminary finding anyhow.’

‘I hope the locals are giving you a steer.’

‘They say they’ve got a likely candidate.’

‘The gathering of evidence is the responsibility of the investigating officer,’ Kennedy said. ‘They have failed to find the murder weapon or any eye-witnesses to the crime.’

‘Either he has them well concealed or we’re barking up the wrong tree, sir. Might not have been him after all.’

‘You do not seem to have considered the possibility that the suspect might be cleverer than you give him credit for. Perverts often are, you know.’

You wouldn’t know a pervert from a hole in the ground, McCrink thought.

‘I find that an appeal to the public is often effective in these cases,’ Kennedy said. ‘Encourages good citizenry.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘We have to apprehend the beast,’ Kennedy said. ‘An example will have to be made.’

You’re an example of something yourself, McCrink thought.

‘You’ll have full access to Special Branch files in order to familiarise yourself with the province and its people,’ Kennedy said.

McCrink stayed in the city that night. He slept badly, the names of the Nude Murder victims going through his head. Elizabeth Figg. Gwynneth Rees. The unmarked corpses, nude and profane. The killer easing them into death and dumping their bodies. Drawing them into his narrative, their stories retold. Their old lives were discarded. All the cheap flats and sex acts in the backs of parked cars. You could see it in the arrest files. Their pale demeaned faces. The autopsy reports pointed to venereal disease, evidence of alcohol abuse and malnutrition. The killer seeing the possibility in them that they could redeem themselves in death.

 

The body of Pearl Gamble was transferred to the Royal Victoria in Belfast for full autopsy. Photographs in the Newry Reporter and the Belfast Telegraph show the hearse leaving the hospital grounds. There are knots of people at the hospital gates. They have the look of a defeated populace. Sullen, huddled. There are photographers from the city papers, PA reporters in Aquascutum coats. There are no photographs of the hearse arriving at the Royal. The car directed to a rear entrance. A concrete ramp down to the mortuary. The body removed from the coffin and placed on a wheeled gurney by aproned attendants. They wheeled Pearl through the waiting area to the pathology room, the men talking quietly among themselves. The instruments of dissection are waiting for her. The scales to weigh the organs. Pearl’s substance and matter accounted for, weighed and assayed. The place tiled and sluiced. Cabinets of stainless steel and high-wattage strip lighting to keep the dark away, the cadaver shadows.

McCrink drove back to the coast that evening. He had been booked into a hotel in Rostrevor. He went as far as the Great Northern Hotel opposite the coal pier. Along the coastline there were many hotels named for train companies. The Great Northern. The Great Western. They were built in the style of grand European hotels. There were high-ceilinged foyers, uniformed porterage. The mouldering ballrooms and damp shrubberies seemed to have decays catered for, lingered over. There were still framed posters on the walls of the hotels, the mass-tourism reveries of the mid-fifties. Outings and excursions, charabancs and trains carrying families from dreamed-of industrial belts. The lines shut down. The railway companies went into receivership. The vast hotels could be seen for miles around, gaunt and ill-lit termini on the lough’s wintry shore.

McCrink checked in and telephoned Corry Square. Johnston answered the phone. McCrink asked for Speers.

‘Inspector Speers has gone home, sir,’ Johnston said.

‘How is the investigation proceeding?’

‘I’m not inclined to judgement.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Johnston, I’m not asking you to send somebody to eternal flame. I’m asking you how the day went.’

‘Since you ask, sir, the finger is pointing in the direction of McGladdery. Since you speak of eternal flame.’

‘Go on.’

‘We have witnesses saying he danced with Miss Gamble. We have witnesses to vulgar acts on his part. He disappears after the dance. It turns out that a bicycle was stole from outside the hall and the bicycle turns up at Damolly Cross.’

‘What does McGladdery say?’

‘Denies it. Laughs in the face of jeopardy and right thinking.’

‘Laughs?’

‘Thinks it a joke a woman laid out indecent and dead in a field like a beast.’