Judge Lance Curran was at the table in the billiard room of the Reform Club on Royal Avenue. Judge Curran played with his election agent, Harry Ferguson. They played French billiards at one guinea a ball. Theirs was the only occupied table in the room. Ferguson racked the balls and broke. The billiard room was in the turreted peaks of the building. A fire burned at either end of the room and there were coats of arms and portraits on the walls. Each time he was invited to the room to play, Ferguson felt as if he had wandered into a storybook castle, a place of shifting perception and nursery cruelties. The windows were white with fog. The city was fogbound, muffled, inward-looking. He felt as if he had come upon some abstraction of weather.
Curran studied the arrangement of balls on the table, the random disposition from the break. He ran his hand along the chalk-scored nap of the baize. They played as night fell and there were only the lights above the tables. The judge in his pinstripe trousers and white shirt and tie like some master of ceremonies set to fashion and prepare the onset of night. The Belfast Telegraph with the story of Pearl Gamble’s murder lay on the table below the cue rack and score board. Curran kept score. Every time he went over to the board he had to see the photograph of Pearl Gamble but he made no mention of it. Curran had a way of letting things hang in the air.
Halfway through the evening Curran excused himself. Ferguson went out onto the landing and saw Curran enter the phone kiosk in the entrance hall. He thought he knew what the phone call would be. He envisaged Curran standing in the kiosk, the heavy bakelite receiver in his hand. An instrument to give weight to your words, a moral heft.
When Curran returned he removed his cue from the rack. He sighted along the ash shaft and brass ferrule.
‘I am going to try this case,’ he said.
‘Do you think that is wise?’
‘Wise, Ferguson?’
‘A nineteen-year-old girl has been murdered. Your own nineteen-year-old daughter was also murdered nine years ago.’
‘Are you suggesting prejudice?’
‘The appearance of prejudice.’
‘I will try the case even-handedly.’
‘I’ve no fear of that.’
‘Then what do you fear?’
Curran leaned over the table. He made a bridge of the fingers of his left hand and laid the cue across the raised knuckles. He studied the balls then put side on the cue ball to kiss the yellow ball into the middle, the cue ball coming to rest against the cushion beside the top-right pocket. Over the years Ferguson had come to understand that the judge believed in pattern. That things were mapped out, that matters were underlain with strange cartographies. Things were not random. Ferguson had gone with Curran to the planetarium. He had sat with him while the alignments of the planets were represented to him. The announcer described the movements of the planets as a dance and Curran turned to look at him as if to say is this in fact a dance, this cold gavotte, the streaming nebulae, the stars of ash?
Lance Curran’s daughter Patricia had been murdered in November 1952. She had been stabbed thirty-seven times and her body left under trees on the driveway of their house, the Glen, in Whiteabbey. The body had been found by her brother and her father. There were reports of tension between Patricia and her mother, Doris. Patricia was independent and during the summer holidays before her death she had taken a summer job driving a lorry for a builders’ supplier.
In November 1953 Iain Hay Gordon was found not guilty of her murder by reason of insanity. Gordon had known the family. Interviewed by Inspector John Capstick of Scotland Yard, he had confessed to killing Patricia with his service knife.
Gordon had been incarcerated in Holywell Mental Hospital. The superintendent of the hospital had said that he could find no reason to detain him. In 1958 Gordon was quietly released. He returned to Glasgow and changed his name. In 2000, forty-eight years after the conviction, Gordon had his conviction overturned. One key strand of his appeal was his oppressive interrogation by Inspector Capstick.
The other strand of the case which resulted in the conviction being overturned concerned the phone call which was made by Judge Curran to the family of John Steel, the young man who had accompanied Patricia to the bus which had carried her home from college that night. Steel’s father was adamant that he had answered the phone at 2.15 a.m. and had been asked by Judge Curran if ‘he had seen Patricia’. It was conclusively proven that Patricia’s body had been discovered shortly before 2 a.m., fifteen minutes before the judge called the Steel household to ask if they had seen her. The discrepancy has never been explained.
The murder of Patricia Curran and the murder of Pearl Gamble were separated by nine years. Patricia was the daughter of a judge. Her family were prominent in political and legal circles. Pearl was a shop assistant. Mystery accrues equally to them. Their tenure in the darkness is assured.