That night Speers took McCrink out to the Gamble house. The house was to the north of the railway embankment. McCrink and Speers parked under the embankment and looked up to see the 18.10 Enterprise go past, the iron-flanked diesel locomotive, McCrink feeling the heavy bogeys trundling in the ground beneath his feet, northbound, working the gradient. He could see the passengers, carried through the dark. Speers stood watching as it passed into the night.
There were neighbours standing in the darkness and they stepped aside as the two detectives walked towards the house. No one spoke. McCrink could see the whites of Speers’s eyes. He looked like a man come to some place of judgement. In the distance the train’s hooter sounded as it slowed for Newry Station and McCrink felt Speers start beside him as the dismal klaxon sounded in the night, reaching them like some carrion shriek.
The onlookers closed ranks behind them. They were called upon. To gather wordlessly in the dark. They had taken it upon themselves to fulfil this dire office. Men stood to either side of the door to the council house, framing the plain wooden door with their bulk and authority. McCrink understood that death had transformed the semi-detached house. People speaking in whispers. The neat fence and gravel path.
The policemen entered the house. Doors lay open. There were people sitting on the stairs. McCrink saw the mother first. She sat on the edge of a sofa in the living room. She had her daughter’s slant eyes and small, pursed mouth. She kept her gaze averted as if she kept some private agony under scrutiny, as if she was afraid that if she stopped looking at it for an instant she wouldn’t be able to find it again.
There were ornaments on the fireplace. China dogs and figurines. They looked like tomb gifts. Pearl’s father sat opposite the mother, sitting back on the leatherette settee. A small man with slicked-back hair. McCrink could see oil under his finger nails. He was wearing blue mechanic’s overalls. McCrink imagined him in a backstreet garage. A man good with his hands with a well-kept tow-truck backed up alongside. The racked tools. The epitome of roadside providence. He would be an adept of the world of crafted machine parts, fine tolerances. He looked at his hands as if they could shape the grief which consumed him, as if there were fine adjustments that could be made to loss itself. They were helpless in the face of dank calamity that pervaded the house.
McCrink was aware of movement in the hall, a stirring among the mourners. A figure in clerical black came into the room, a man with black hair combed back, a high-cheek-boned face. He invited them to kneel and took a leather-bound Bible from his pocket. He read from Deuteronomy. He read from Isaiah. The books of the unforgiving God. He sought to bring the deity into the room, to place them in his lyric, vengeful presence. In the hallway someone moaned.
When he had concluded his breviary he walked from the room without speaking. Pearl’s mother rose to her feet, her hand to her mouth, and left the room, moving with a diagonal gait as though she was trying to get out of the way of a falling object.
They followed the minister outside. Sleet was blowing across the railway tracks. The minister walked towards a dark-coloured Ford Zephyr parked on the verge. His vestments were blown about him. He stood at the car without opening the door and seemed to find some source of reverie in the skeins of sleet being blown over the embankment over his head.
‘Hope he doesn’t start quoting the Bible at us,’ Speers said under his breath.
‘Excuse me, Reverend,’ McCrink said. The man turned towards him. His shoulders and hair were coated in sleet. For a moment it looked like ermine worn in token of cold office.
‘Gentlemen,’ the cleric said. He looked from one man to another, as though he had already made a reckoning for this encounter, gaunt provision set aside in his chilly soul.
‘It’s a bad do, Reverend,’ McCrink said, dropping into the colloquial. ‘The loss of the comfort of a daughter is a frightening thing.’
‘She is gone to the place prepared for her,’ the priest said, getting into the car. ‘I will take the funeral service when the body is released to the family. In that manner I fulfil the duties of my office towards her. I trust you will discharge your duties in equal manner.’
‘We’ll do our best,’ Speers said. They watched the car drive off.
‘He said she was going to the place prepared for her,’ Speers said, ‘but he never said which place.’
Ronnie Whitcroft had been under sedation since the night of the murder. It was Wednesday before she was considered fit to be interviewed. A uniformed constable brought her to the interview room and left her at the door. Johnston motioned to the empty chair. She sat down. She looked as if she hadn’t slept. Her hair had been arranged in a beehive which was starting to come undone. Her slip was visible under the hem of her dress. Her eyes were red. Behind her back Johnston held his nose and turned up his eyes. Ronnie knew what was going through their minds. Thinking they knew where she was coming from. Thinking cheap scent and bad choices.
‘Ronnie Whitcroft. DOB 15th April 1942,’ McCrink read, ‘friend to the deceased. You accompanied Miss Gamble to the dance at the Henry Thompson Memorial Orange Hall.’ Ronnie was looking past the moment. Seeing herself photographed at the crime scene in years to come. Giving tearful interviews on the anniversary of her friend’s death, older and wiser.
Speers held up a photograph of Ronnie and Pearl.
‘It was found in her handbag,’ he said.
Ronnie remembered it being taken at the photobooth machine at the fairground in Warrenpoint. In the single shot Ronnie is looking at the camera with a sombre, flat-eyed gaze. ‘Fuck’s sakes,’ she had said at the time, ‘we look like the deceased.’
‘Don’t say things like that,’ Pearl had said, feeling the strip of photographs with her finger, the shellacked surface. There were four frames of the girls, heads together, laughing, Ronnie making faces. Ronnie slipping her sweater off her shoulder, Pearl looking at her in mock horror, knowing sidekicks in a seaside photo booth.
‘When you went into the hall, did you see McGladdery?’
‘No. He come in after. Everybody wanted to dance with him,’ Ronnie told McCrink. ‘He could dance like somebody from the films. Even the snobby lot, the tennis-club crew. But that was all they done with him. Dance.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He wasn’t good enough for them. You could see the way them girls stepped out on the floor with him. They wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole forby the dancing.’
‘Did McGladdery dance with Pearl that night?’
‘Two or three times,’ Ronnie said. She straightened her back. ‘I was with my beau.’
‘McKnight?’
‘Yes. And Pearl come along.’
‘Cramped your style?’
‘Two’s company.’
‘So you left Pearl to the tender mercies?’
‘She wasn’t complaining. Not at the start.’
‘Something happened?’
‘Nothing happened. McGladdery was dancing with her, then the other lot moved in. The tennis crowd. McGladdery was well took in by that crowd. They had a bit of a reputation.’
‘Did they do much talking? Pearl and McGladdery?’
‘They didn’t know each other except to see. Pearl said she might have met him once or twice when she was small. I seen her laughing. He said something to her and she laughed.’
‘Is that a fact,’ Johnston said. ‘So he knew Miss Gamble?’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘Sounds like it to me. What sort of a girl was she?’
‘What class of a question is that?’
‘I mean did she spend much time on her back?’
‘You talk about her like a beast of the field. Pearl was a good girl.’
‘Did she lead him on?’
‘She wasn’t the type to lead anybody on.’ Ronnie didn’t look at them. She had had a fight with Pearl a few months previously after a dance in Warrenpoint Town Hall. Pearl hadn’t been feeling well and McKnight had offered to bring her home.
A mile from Warrenpoint McKnight started trying it on, driving alongside the tidal mudflats in the neck of the lough. Rain falling on the windscreen. The car filling with McKnight’s aftershave, dusky man-scents. Telling Pearl how beautiful she looked, how the white linen dress nipped in at the waist with a leather belt became her. Pulling into a layby and putting his arm around her shoulder. There were other cars parked in the layby. Shapes moving in the windows in the faint illumination from the port lights, ghostly shiftings behind the laminate glass. This part of the lough had a reputation for hauntings, stirrings in the pine woods. There was talk of a white lady, a dead minstrel, occult personas adrift in the psychic spume.
‘Stop it,’ Pearl said. McKnight touching her knee, leaning into her. Telling her she wasn’t like Ronnie. That she had class. That she was a lady. Pearl found herself looking beyond the moment, McKnight’s breath against her ear, his hands working at her. She had that ability. To step back from the moment. She had read about people who left their bodies during operations. You floated to the ceiling and looked down on the team of surgeons and nurses labouring over your body like anatomists from an old book. She could see the red and green channel markers, ships in passage riding out the night beyond the sandbars.
McKnight stopped touching her. He sat back in his seat and lit a cigarette.
‘Ronnie was right about you,’ he said, ‘you’re like a fucking iceberg.’
Pearl hadn’t said anything to Ronnie about the incident, but the following Saturday McKnight had told Ronnie that Pearl had wanted to kiss him that night, but that he ‘hadn’t been up for it’.
Ronnie met Pearl that night in the toilets of the Town Hall. The toilets full of girls putting Silvikrin in their hair, fixing the big eye make-up in fly-specked mirrors. Girls you went to school with. All the bitch talk, the girl-spite, the jostling cattiness. The girl hierarchies coming across in scathing top-to-toe looks, leaving remarks trailing in their wakes. There was always someone being sick. There was always someone weeping in a cubicle, mascara running down her face, memory-fixed in her clownishness, woebegone, a boy’s name repeated.
‘What do you think you’re doing trying to get your mitts on my man?’ Ronnie said.
‘I never,’ Pearl said, ‘it was him pulled into the layby. I wouldn’t, Ronnie, I swear.’
‘I suppose you’re too good for him now?’
‘Don’t, Ronnie. Please.’
‘He’s fit for the likes of me, is that it?’
‘Is that what you think?’ Pearl said. ‘Maybe next time I’ll let him, then you won’t be able to say stuff like that to me.’
Pearl started to walk away but Ronnie called her back and they made up. Ronnie was sometimes jealous of Pearl. There was this look she had in unguarded moments. ‘If you could bottle it, you could have sold it,’ Ronnie said. Pearl looked foreign, as if from some far-flung republic. She looked like one of those Japanese women you saw on the newsreels, scurrying, kimonoed, eyes downcast.
Johnston questioned Ronnie about leaving the hall. She told him that Pearl had gone up Church Avenue with a man called Joseph Clydesdale for about ten minutes. Ronnie had spent the time with McKnight.
‘Had a good time to yourself then, Ronnie?’ Johnston said, winking, complicit.
A different look in Ronnie’s eyes this time, a shifty, in-heat look, Ronnie caught up in something blatant and interior, a sensual introspection. McCrink had seen the look on a suspect’s face before when it meant a husband betrayed, a lover jilted. It was a heavy-lidded look that betokened illicit couplings, underhand pleasures, lingered over and unregretted.
‘We know you drove home with Pearl, Rae Boyd, Derek Chambers and Evelyn Gamble in Billy Morton’s car,’ McCrink said. ‘Did you see anyone on the way up to Damolly Cross?’
‘No,’ Ronnie said, ‘but there was a car going up when we were coming down after we dropped Pearl off.’
There were no more witnesses to be questioned that day. Pearl was to be buried after a service at the Presbyterian church. McCrink sat at the back of the church, the service barely audible. He kept his head down as the coffin was carried past then looked up to see Speers following the cortège, his head bent. McCrink stood up as the last person passed and followed the cortège out into the shadows under the yew trees. The cortège went ahead of him through the mausoleums and tilted headstones under yew trees, a hemmed-in processional.
McCrink left the graveyard and returned to Corry Square. At five he left the station and crossed the canal by the metal bridge. The girder bridge had been designed to swivel but it had not been used for years, its mechanisms seized. He crossed Soho car park onto the Mall. He went into Mervyn Graham’s shoe-repair shop. The shop smelt of leather and rubber, dense organic odours. He could hear a lathe in the back room. The cubicles behind the counter contained dozens of matched shoes and underneath that hundreds of old, uncollected shoes, laceless, cracked and welted. He remembered that Speers had sent all Robert’s shoes to the forensics lab to have the matter adhering to the soles analysed. They were doing blood ESDA tests, looking for muds and sediments.
The lathe stopped turning and Mervyn came out of the back.
‘There’s a rumour going about the town. You’re looking for Robert’s suit.’
‘We’re looking for evidence leading to a conviction,’ McCrink said. Mervyn picked a woman’s shoe from the countertop and ran his fingers along the instep.
‘Woman’s the devil for broke heels, torn stitching,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing they won’t wear out.’
‘You’re not fond of the women then.’
‘I’m fond enough of them except when it comes to bad treatment of footwear.’
‘Does Robert like women?’
‘His early life wouldn’t point in that direction, but there’s many the mother lifted a hand to her son for no cause. Women are blew this way and that by their own discontents and woe betide the man who gets in their road.’
‘You mean he’s afraid of women? That he might lash out?’
‘You’re putting words in my mouth, Mr McCrink. You wouldn’t be the first policeman to put words in a man’s mouth.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘The man who got convicted for the killing of Judge Curran’s daughter. They say the detective in charge told him what to say and held his hand to put his signature to it.’
‘And how would he have got him to do that?’
‘The detective, Capstick, said he’d tell his mother that he was a homo. He was that scared of the mother he confessed to murder instead.’
‘If you’re that big an expert on murder, maybe you’d tell me who killed Pearl?’
‘You needn’t come to me looking to put a rope around McGladdery’s neck. No one seen him do anything. You made up your mind who done it and you never looked at anyone else.’
‘Did he have any girlfriends?’
‘Not that I know of. The women’s fond of him though. He’s a good dancer, has a way about him. Maybe when he was in London.’