Eight

Corry Square, 2nd February 1961

 

Johnston came into the room. He had removed his tunic and his shirt sleeves were rolled up.

‘We got McGladdery’s pal in. Took us a brave while to find the bold Mr Copeland. He’s usually in Hollywood’s or the British Legion. We run him to ground in the heel of the hunt. We might get a turn out of him.’

‘You want to sit in?’ Speers said.

Copeland was in a holding cell on the ground floor. McCrink opened the door a crack and looked in at him. Copeland gave no sign of being aware of McCrink’s scrutiny. His blond hair was swept back into a duck’s arse. He was smoking, the cigarette held between his knees. Straw-haired, insolent.

‘I left him in there for a while,’ Johnston said, ‘give him a feel for the place.’

‘He’s not under arrest,’ McCrink said.

‘He doesn’t know that.’

McCrink followed Speers in. McCrink sat on a wooden chair at the back of the interview room. Johnston stood by the door. Copeland was thin, wary, hostile.

‘You’re a shifty-looking piece of work,’ Johnston said.

‘I never done nothing.’

‘Where were you on the night of 28th January?’

‘At the dance same as all the rest.’

‘Were you with McGladdery?’

‘I was.’

‘You were with Robert McGladdery all day?’

‘We done some drinking. Then we went back to his place.’

‘What did you do there?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘That’s not good enough. Did he show you anything?’

‘I don’t recall.’

‘Did he give you a go on any bodybuilding gear?’ Speers was the senior officer but Johnston was leading the questioning, leaning against the wall in the shadow.

‘He had this contraption with springs and stuff.’

‘A bullworker.’

‘That’s it. Did anything happen with it?’

‘I can’t remember. It might have. I’d a lock of drink in me. He was going on about bodybuilding.’

‘How come you went back to his place?’ Speers said.

‘We wanted to get changed for the dance.’

‘Changed for the dance. Did you swap clothes or something?’

‘A right pair of ladies,’ Johnston said. ‘What clothes was he wearing?’ Johnston always coming back to what Robert was wearing. There was a shape to Johnston’s questions, a steel-trap architecture. He would circle back to an original question which had seemed unimportant and you would find it suddenly hedged about with meaning.

‘I don’t remember. He always had these clothes he got in London. Fancy stuff.’

‘So he thinks he’s the big cheese in the glad rags from the big city? Puts the moves on Miss Gamble. She shoots him down. Is that it?’ Speers said.

‘What was he wearing? A light-coloured suit?’ Johnston said.

‘Where were you for the past two days?’ McCrink said. Speers turned in his chair to look at him. He could hear Johnston shift his weight at the back of the room.

‘What?’ Copeland said.

‘Sergeant Johnston said you couldn’t be found in your usual places. He mentioned the British Legion.’

‘So what?’

‘Less lip.’ Johnston spoke softly. ‘We can’t have the like of you giving lip to visiting officers.’

‘It’s a simple question. Where were you?’

‘Here and there. The ma’s. Out walking the dogs. Up at the morgue for to see Pearl brung home.’

Copeland lifted his head for the first time and looked into McCrink’s eyes. The eyes were pale and colourless. The eyes of a traveller in some infernal region. I know what journey you took this past few days, McCrink thought, I know what barren itinerary unfolded.

‘We’ll break for the day now,’ Speers said. They left the cell. McCrink looked back as they reached the end of the corridor. He saw Johnston re-enter the interrogation room.

When McCrink came into Corry Square the next morning there were men everywhere. He found Speers in his office.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Kennedy’s orders. We’re to impose total twenty-four-hour surveillance on McGladdery.’

‘What class of police work is that?’ McCrink said.

‘Kennedy reckons it’ll soften him up. He’ll crack in the end. Lead us to the murder weapon.’

‘Kennedy’s a retard,’ Johnston said. ‘He’d be brave and thick to go anywhere near the murder weapon with a bunch of clodhoppers on his tail. Still, I can use some of these extra men.’

The week-long surveillance of Robert attracted national media attention. Reporters from the London papers interviewed Robert. He was described as a ‘bodybuilding fanatic’, and complained of what he referred to as police harassment. He was photographed for the Daily Mail stripped to the waist and holding home-made dumb-bells made from lumps of concrete moulded onto a metal bar.

The photograph of Robert shows a good-looking young man, flexing his muscles. He looks like an old illustration of a bare-knuckle boxer, a daguerreotyped figure from another era in a stilted pose.

‘He’s working on his defence,’ Speers said.

‘How do you work that out?’ McCrink said.

‘He told us he got the scratches on his face from the bullworker. If he makes himself out to be a heavy-duty bodybuilder, it puts bones on his statement.’

‘I’m not sure if he’s that smart.’

‘You might be right. A smarter client wouldn’t let the world see how much he’s enjoying the attention he’s getting. If somebody was looking at me for what was done to that girl, I’d hang the head and keep the mouth well shut.’

‘The little bastard loves himself, no doubt about that.’

‘I can’t work him out.’

‘If we had a polygraph.’ Speers had studied the application of technology and forensics to criminal investigation. The polygraph had a home-made look to it, the delicate arm and revolving cylinder had a spidery authority. He’d studied polygraph patterns in criminology books. The heart rate and secretions scientifically measured. The scribed guilt.

It remained a puzzle to McCrink, the way Robert had started to behave once he knew he was a suspect, the bravado. It was McCrink’s experience that those who showed the most defiance and demonstrated no signs of breaking down were the ones who admitted their guilt in the end. But not Robert. Show-off. Fancy Dan.

Speers organised the local men into four squads of two men each. McGladdery was to be followed twenty-four hours a day. From the beginning Robert seemed to welcome them in a sly, knowing way. The whole town seemed to be in open intrigue. People came out of shops to watch the detectives trail Robert. They followed behind, slouching, resentful. Robert making them look stupid. They saw themselves in a world of shadowy pursuit, suspects trying to give them the slip, officers of the court on the trail of justice. Instead they were standing outside the labour exchange while Robert signed on, the queue of unemployed men giving them smartarse looks. Robert faking surprise when he came out of the building, playing it up for the spectators. There were photographers from the national press on the streets. Local people were photographed and interviewed.

‘He’s a cheeky little fucker,’ Speers said.

‘I suppose.’ McCrink watched him in silence. He wanted to shake McGladdery. To tell him that the death of Pearl Gamble was not a backdrop against which Robert could act out his life. It was a maw into which his existence would empty.

There was an outpost of the tinker camp by the disused coal bunkers on the south side of the basin. They lived under tarpaulins stretched over railway sleepers and in tents fabricated from creosoted rags. There were sundry ragpickers and scrap-metal dealers. Half-starved mastiffs roamed the camp and there were spavined piebalds tethered to night lines. The men drank ether on waste ground beside the market and stepped in and out of the campfire smoke as though ragged ceremonials were being enacted. The women wheeled old carpet and furniture through the town on broken-down pram bodies and begged in doorways. They did not look as if they belonged to the town or country. They looked like Eastern European émigrés, wandering bands, the headscarved women, their lips moving as though they recounted Talmudic mysteries

The traveller children took to following McGladdery and his escort through the town. They shuffled when they walked, talked to each other in street argot, backhand language. Cant.

‘This is a fucking shambles,’ Speers said, ‘him running through the town like the Pied Piper.’

‘He’s not behaving like any guilty man I ever seen. I seen them ate up with guilt and I seen them cocky, but I never came across the like of this.’

McCrink had seen them too. The remorseful and the publicity-seekers. The bewildered and the calculating. A night cadre of the guilty abroad in the court precincts and prison vans.

‘Forensics will sort out if he’s guilty or not,’ Speers said.

‘What forensics? He doesn’t have the odour of it.’

‘He has the odour of something not right, sir.’

‘I wonder.’ McCrink wondered who would pass appraisal in the scrutiny now being brought to bear on McGladdery. He thought that McGladdery did see himself as a figure from a story, a capering fool brought out from the pages of some plague-time medieval lore. During this period the town seemed to rise above itself, finding haunted milieux not apparent before. Gallows Hill. Chancellors Road. The cold was like a weight. The town seemed to have acquired the dark spaces of a larger place. The small churchyard on Kilmorey Street seemed like a haunted cathedral cloister. Solitary men walking home along the esplanade cast the shadows of sinister boulevardiers. Foreign boats docked every two or three days at the coal quay.

 

‘You keep hearing snatches of strange languages,’ Margaret said. ‘You never know who you’re going to see next. I keep waiting for pedlars and the like. You know, groups of wandering Jews emerging from the forest.’

‘People see their surroundings differently when there’s been a murder,’ McCrink said; ‘they stop trusting what’s around them.’

‘People round here never trusted anything around them,’ she said. McCrink had been standing at the window of his hotel room when he saw the Renault pull up outside, Margaret glancing around her as she got out, then walking quickly across the car park with her head down, at ease with illicit transactions of the heart. She knocked quickly on his bedroom door. When he let her in she went straight to the bed where he had spread out the photographs of Pearl’s possessions. Each photograph was numbered and had the place where it was found written across the bottom. McCrink was looking at a photo of a brown shoe with a low heel. Charles Ashe had found a brown shoe at Damolly Cross.

‘The friend Ronnie Whitcroft says she had black slingbacks on for the dance,’ McCrink said.

‘She would have brought the brown shoes for walking home when the dance was over,’ Margaret said.

In the stubble field between the crossroads and Weir’s Rock they had found Pearl’s bloodstained handkerchief. McCrink read from Johnston’s notes. ‘The handkerchief looked as if it had been soaked in a basin of blood. Her blouse and brassiere were in the stubble field along with the slingbacks she was wearing at the dance. Her skirt and underthings were at the top of the field.’ The rustle. The silky underthings.

‘What’s that?’ The last photograph was marked ‘Stubble field’. It was of a plain tin bucket. Margaret’s fingers traced the dire utilitarian outlines of the bucket.

‘Johnston’s idea. He dug up a bucketful of bloodstained earth from the stubble field. I’m not sure what was going through his head.’

The clank of the bucket handle being carried from the stubble field at nightfall. The dank, stained pail. Brimful.

‘The laboratory haven’t found any physical evidence so far. No prints. No skin under the fingernails. They’re looking for hair on her clothing. If he didn’t leave any evidence on her he must of left some on himself. She bled out, the pathologist said. The whole thing worries me.’

‘Why?’

‘The fact that he left no prints, no physical evidence.’

‘Why does that worry you?’

‘McGladdery lay in wait for her because she resisted him in the hall. He beat her, stripped her, then stabbed and strangled her. He carried her for almost half a mile. And he left no physical traces of himself on her or on the crime scene. It doesn’t ring true.’

‘Maybe he was just very careful.’

McCrink didn’t answer. He remembered the Nude Murderer. The care that was taken with each victim. The way the murderer erased himself from the scene. He did not want to be caught but there was more to it than that. It was important that he did not intrude on the narrative he had created for them, stripped of the chaos of their lives and eased into the storied dark.

 

‘You’ll need to raid McGladdery’s house,’ McCrink said, ‘get a hold of the clothes he was wearing that night.’

‘Already done, sir,’ Johnston said. ‘We obtained a search warrant at a special sitting of Newry Magistrates’ Court the day you were in the city.’

‘I would expect to be told.’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘What did you get?’

‘A black suit. McGladdery says he was wearing it at the dance. We know different. No murder weapon.’

‘We found this in the house as well,’ Speers said. He held up a small pile of books and magazines. The magazines were badly printed on cheap paper. Pornographic stories were interspersed with underexposed black-and-white photographs of glum nudes with 1950s hairstyles. The covers of the novels were line drawings of young women cowering in mock terror. Another had a woman facing outward. She was wearing a basque and thigh boots. Her look was downcast, unchaste.

‘Get an eyeful, sir,’ Johnston said, ‘it’s free. There’s lots more where that came from. All part of the service. Never let it be said that the Newry police were behind the door when it come to nudity and perversion.’

‘It’s all pointing McGladdery’s way. There’s no doubt about that,’ Speers said. ‘If he didn’t get what he was looking for that night by asking for it, he was going to take it one way or the other.’

‘We talked to the lead singer of the band. He asked for a song called “It’s Now or Never” before he danced with the girl. A girl he knew all his life. She wasn’t keen on dancing with him. He was pawing her, hands all over the shop according to witnesses, and she wanted him to stop.’

‘What about motive?’

‘A sexual motive. As Sergeant Johnston says, he couldn’t get what he wanted one way. He allowed his appetites to get the better of him. He waylaid the girl on her way home and attacked her.’

‘There was no sexual assault.’

‘She was stripped to the skin,’ Johnston said. ‘She was sent out of the world the way she come into it. If he went no further it was because he was disturbed or maybe he just wanted to see the goods without handling them. There’s them is fond of that kind of thing too.’

 

Agnes McGladdery had opened the door to the policemen and was served with the warrant.

‘I thought you were the lot with the prize bonds,’ she said. McCrink had met others in her position before. A good line delivered under pressure was the closest you’d get to rueful good grace. He gave her a grim nod and a tight smile in the spirit of hardscrabble etiquette then pushed past her into the house.

‘Robert’s out,’ she said, ‘but you boys already know that. He can’t go to the toilet forby there’s a peeler there ready to hold it for him.’

The house was unkempt. They searched Robert’s room first. Robert had cut out illustrations from Bodybuilder International and sellotaped them to the wall above his bed. Glistening veined torsos that McCrink found it hard to look at. There was a full-length mirror on the back of the door. McCrink thought of Robert standing in front of it turning this way and that, trying to throw the muscle into relief, trying to make the mass jump, the tiny narcissistic twitches. A bullworker and homemade bar-bells were on the floor beside the door.

 

One night Robert went out to Mervyn’s garage. He lit an old carbide lamp. There was a suitcase on top of the tool rack. The leatherbound case was old and its fittings corroded. He opened it and took out a stack of yellowed magazines, Penthouse and Carousel. The pages were yellowed with age, the prints badly developed. Pages of mute, lightstruck nudes. Girls that seemed dazed, caught in a seedy undertow.