Eleven

Newry, 3rd February 1961

 

McCrink had left his car at the courthouse. He walked back towards it. As he got close he could see that the front door of the Robert Thompson Memorial Hall was open. He looked at the faded board frontage of the Orange hall with Bible texts inscribed on placards. He stepped inside. The walls were hung with silk banners and tattered Orange collarettes. There were Masonic devices fixed to the wall above the stage, flute band insignia on the rear wall of the stage. Rising Sons of the Valley. True Blues.

He had arranged to meet Margaret at the bandstand in Warrenpoint Park. She was late and he stood at the tennis courts watching a mixed doubles match. When Margaret came she linked her arm through his.

‘What is it about tennis matches?’ she said. ‘They always seem to be taking place in the past.’

‘There’s always an Edwardian look to them,’ he said. ‘Makes you think about a lost generation. Young men in tennis flannels sent to face the German guns. I used to spend hours watching the hockey players when I worked in the central library. The Malone hockey club. You’d go down and watch them through the fence. Playing hockey in short skirts, the daughters of the big houses.’

It was the epitome of nostalgia. Grammar-school girls playing hockey on summer evenings, willowy and fleet. Malone girls and svelte Wesleyans. Well-bred voices ringing out over the hockey fields, playing on as the light fell, learning qualities of earnestness, how to set tight margins on a life and stay between them, their long, expressive faces bent to the game, the evening wind brushing the top of the cropped grass. Sometimes you would see one of the girls standing on their own, looking downcast, unnamed longings assailing her, leaving her marooned in the temperate parklands.

‘There’s an innocence about these things when you look back on them.’

Margaret said that the hockey girls knew more of the world than they let on. ‘That’s your problem,’ she said. ‘You idealise those people.’

It was true. He had trouble seeing misfortune’s dark hand at work in the merchant quarters of the city, ill intent abroad in the laurel shrubberies on the outskirts of town.

‘Patricia Curran was one of your hockey girls. Look what happened to her.’

Stabbed thirty-seven times on her own driveway. So many stab wounds the first doctor to see her thought that she had been struck with a shotgun blast.

‘You know about that?’

‘Everyone here knows about that.’

‘It’s not the same thing as what happened to the girls in London.’

‘What girls?’

‘The last case I worked on. The Nude Murders. Prostitutes.’

‘You think any of those girls feels it’s different when they’re walking home on their own at night and they hear footsteps in the dark behind them? Doesn’t matter what size of a house they go home to, when a man wants something and he doesn’t get it, it all ends the same way.’

‘Maybe. What happens when a woman doesn’t get what she wants?’

‘You sound like you’re talking from experience.’

‘My ex-wife.’

McCrink remembered the night that his ex-wife had told him about her infidelity. She called it an affair, letting the word hang in the air between them in all its tawdry meaning.

‘If you’d paid more attention to me you would have noticed what was going on.’

‘So now it’s my own fault.’ She didn’t reply. She stood in the doorway, inferences of bags packed in hallways.

It had started when he was at police college and had carried on through their marriage. She told him how she had met Ronnie Speers at a police function in Belfast.

‘You were trying to lick up to the Chief Constable,’ she said.

She told him how she had gone with Speers to a borrowed flat in a tower block in Larne, seventeen miles east of Belfast. She described the rooms, the wallpaper, curtains blowing across open windows, rainspatter. The textures of deceit. Working their way towards the melancholia that they both knew was the lasting thing they would have as lovers. Looking down on the ferryport. Hearing the ships loading at night. The clang of gantries. Containers being stacked. Anne always had to work around the details. The delved-into particulars of love. She named the cafes they had eaten in. She said that she had walked the promenade with Speers every evening. She was scrupulous in her account. It was important to them both that the extent of her treachery be brought into the open. Every aspect of their life together had to be undermined, ambiguities and hidden meanings unearthed. The trips back to Belfast, the late-night phone calls. They spent weeks uncovering new layers of deceit. The betrayed husband. He employed a cunning he didn’t know he possessed to find out more. She recounted narrow escapes, sex in borrowed bedrooms, coupling in a stairwell outside McCrink’s apartment in Belfast. They both understood that they had to tend to McCrink’s hurt, that it was a dense textured thing with its own internal structure, plots and digressions.

‘Ronnie Speers,’ Margaret said, taking his arm. ‘You’re working with him now.’

‘I know.’

 

For a while the knowledge of her cheating had excited them. They had uncovered an erotics of loathing. They pushed each other into acting out vile cravings. She sent him to buy cheap porn from a newsagent in the town. Glum nudes, badly photographed. She liked to get on top of him while he told her stories, obscenity-laced narratives of encounters with sailors, Negros copulating. He moved out into a cheap flat in Kilburn. There was an odour of urine in the lifts, cisterns flushing in other flats, the smell of drains. It all became part of their encounters. In the end she left one morning. The last he had heard of her she was living in Blackpool, drinking heavily, transients passing through her flat on a weekly basis.

‘What will you do?’

‘I don’t know. I put money in our account every month. It comes out.’

She took his arm. They stood with their backs to the court looking out onto the dark lough waters.

On the fourth day of the total surveillance of McGladdery Special Constable John Morris was posted to Damolly village. He saw Robert leave his house by the front door and cross several fields until he reached the Clanrye river. Constable Morris described how McGladdery looked around him before plunging into the swollen river. With the water reaching to his chest McGladdery crossed the river. He then crossed several more fields until he reached the footbridge across the canal. Crossing the canal, he went into a semi-derelict house and remained there for several minutes.

When he came out he was lost to view behind Damolly Factory but was seen several minutes later walking along the Belfast road by Sergeant Johnston who was driving towards the town. Observing that McGladdery was soaked Johnston stated that he invited McGladdery to come down to the Corry Square barracks to ‘get dry clothes’. According to Johnston he ‘stayed there until he was dry’.

The evidence of the two policemen was never properly explained. Was Robert already under surveillance on the morning following the murder? An obvious inference may be drawn that Robert intended to destroy evidence or to interfere with it in some way. Following the murder the town was in an uproar. Volunteers were combing the countryside looking for evidence. No evidence was given as to whether the semi-derelict house was searched following Robert’s reported visit to it. There are other difficulties associated with the policemen’s statements. What did Johnston mean by saying that Robert stayed at the barracks until ‘he was dry’?

The police statements implied that Robert had been be having furtively in the days following the murder. That he had paused on the bank of the river before fording it, ‘looking up and down for a minute or two’.

As in much of the evidence there are other subtle undertones in the policemen’s statement which the prosecution would have been aware of. The fact that Robert had gone to a ‘semi-derelict house’. The semi-derelict house on the edge of town was something that had worked its way into the popular imagination. The dimlit interiors, the rubbish-strewn rooms and faded wallpaper. People felt that some old magic was at work in them, a watchfulness. Places that were home to half-remembered happenings, folkloric terrors. Children populated the locations with an array of dark agencies and people. The red woman. The one-armed man. The abandoned rooms and windblown curtains. Robert made himself part of an eerie throng by going to the deserted house.

Robert McGladdery was arrested at his home at Damolly Villas at 7.45 on the morning of 22nd February 1961 on the orders of Chief Constable Kennedy.

They had prepared the warrant for McGladdery’s arrest in Corry Square. McCrink and Johnston drove to Damolly in Speers’s car with two uniformed officers coming behind in a marked squad car. They had given no notice of their intention. There was no one on the street as they stopped in front of the house in Damolly. McCrink and Speers went to the door and rang the bell. Agnes McGladdery opened the door. They could hear a transistor radio in the living room. Agnes was wearing a housecoat. Her hair hung around her face. Her look was slovenly, defiant. Speers held up the warrant. Agnes turned back into the house and spoke into the darkness.

‘Them policemen is here. By the look of them I’d pack a bag. You won’t set eyes on this house for manys a day.’

Robert came out of the living room. He was wearing an open shirt with the sleeves rolled up and he was carrying an open copy of the Daily Mirror. It was the picture of Robert that McCrink would carry with him. Like a man just come from work, tolerant, at home with his limits, his face changing when he saw the policemen, frowning at the untoward thing they’d brought to his door. He seemed to straighten his shoulders then, ready to put his mind to the damning perplexities that were looming up in front of him.

‘Will you pack a bag for me, Ma?’

‘I’d pack ten if I thought it’d put you on the high road out of here for good.’

‘You’re a pal, Ma. Trouble is, there’s nothing to pack. The peelers already took most of my clothes.’

‘Watch out, Sergeant. He’ll have the shirt off your back.’

‘You hear my ma, Mr McCrink? She’s all heart. You know what the maternal instinct is? You won’t find too much of it round this house.’

‘No,’ Agnes said, ‘but you’ll find plenty of out all night drinking and not giving any of your dole to your upkeep. That’s what you’ll find.’

McCrink felt the deep-seated familial rage at work. There were unhealthy undercurrents in the sphere of mothers and sons, a degenerate badinage between the two which left him with a bad taste in his mouth. He could see Speers looking from one to the other. He knew that Speers had worked on several murder cases involving extended families living in remote coastal communities. He understood the blood mechanics of families sunk in generational rancours, the red-eyed feud territories.

‘Robert John McGladdery, I arrest you for the murder of Pearl Gamble on the 29th January of this year.’

‘Do I get the cuffs,’ Robert said.

‘Get into the fucking car, McGladdery,’ Johnston said.

At 8.45 that morning he was brought to Corry Square RUC Station where he was charged with the murder of Pearl Gamble at Damolly between the hours of 1 a.m. and 9 a.m. on 29th January 1961. When charged he replied, ‘Definitely not guilty. I am an innocent man.’

There had been a single photographer from the Newry Reporter present when McGladdery was arrested. Neighbours stood at their doors as Robert was led out. He had an in-the-know look on his face, as if he had some sardonic aside prepared for this moment, a shirt-sleeved malefactor stepping out under a desperado moon.

At Corry Square Station there were reporters and photographers from the city and national press. They knew Robert by name and called out to him. The charges were read to Robert. He was asked if he wanted a solicitor. He replied that he did and Luke Curran, a solicitor with an office in Trevor Hill, was summoned. Johnston asked him why he had chosen Curran.

‘Because he has the same name as the judge whose daughter was murdered.’

‘I’d say you wouldn’t want to get Judge Curran for your trial.’

‘I wouldn’t mind. I’d say he’d have to be seen to be fair.’

‘Now you’ve picked the judge would you like to pick the jury and all?’

‘You’re a comic sergeant.’

‘I’m not the comedian around here, McGladdery.’

‘If I got to pick my own jury who would I put on it? You think my ma would go on the jury?’

‘She wouldn’t be let.’

‘No, she’d be too keen to put me in the ground.’

The solicitor, Curran, who was in fact no relation to Judge Curran, arrived at around 10.15 p.m. He spent half an hour alone with his client. He emerged to say that McGladdery would be pleading not guilty to all counts and that he vehemently denied any involvement in the murder of Pearl Gamble.

 

On 22nd February 1961 Robert McGladdery was charged with the murder of Pearl Gamble at Weir’s Rock, Upper Damolly, at a time unknown on 29th January that year. He was brought before a special sitting of Newry Magistrates’ Court and was remanded in custody to appear at Downpatrick Crown Court on 4th April following. Detective Inspector Speers told the court he believed he could connect the accused to the murder. He further believed that McGladdery posed a flight risk.

The court adjourned. The windowless prison van carrying McGladdery left from the back of the courthouse, its tail lights fading, dark come early in the bitter February cold. There had been other cases in the court that day concerning smuggling and border fraud. The sundry defendants left the precincts of the court to return to their homes, dark figures hunched against the cold, and it didn’t take much, McCrink thought, to have them armed and departed upon some frontier brigandage.

‘They’d smuggle corpses if there was a pound in it, them lot,’ Speers said. ‘They’d smuggle bags of cats.’

 

It was raining when McCrink and Speers left the courthouse. There were press men from the national papers on the courthouse steps. McCrink and Speers kept their heads down, pushing through the reporters. They knew what the photographs in the next day’s paper would be. Provincial detectives – dour, trenchcoated men. A sullen and resentful local populace. McCrink had heard Brian Faulkner on the radio that morning telling the presenter that they didn’t need Scotland Yard. Faulkner telling the man they didn’t need any help. They could hang their own.

McCrink, Johnston and Speers crossed the road and went into the Copper Grill. The restaurant was full. McCrink recognised policemen, solicitors, barristers. McGladdery’s case brooding on top of the felonious list.

Several national papers would describe the accused man’s demeanour in court. He smiled. He acknowledged friends in the public gallery.

‘Does thon buck understand what’s going on here?’ Johnston said.

‘Doesn’t look much like it,’ McCrink said.

‘If he keeps on going like that, he’ll be ate alive,’ Johnston said. ‘The yellow press is baying for blood as it is.’

‘Let them bay.’

‘Let them bay?’ Johnston looked at McCrink. ‘It’s well seeing it’s not your blood, sir.’

‘He’ll be tried according to the rule of law.’

‘Rule of law my hole. The time he gets to Crown Court every man jack in the room’ll know what the job is.’

‘We haven’t got enough to convict.’

‘We’ll find enough,’ Speers said.

‘Connect him to the charge my arse,’ Johnston said. ‘All we got is circumstantial, pretty weak circumstantial at that.’

‘We got the fact that he was at the dance and got up with Pearl, and that no one seen him after he left. We’ve got the scratches on his face,’ Speers said.

‘He’s got no alibi.’

‘We need something more to convict him. We need the clothing, that suit he was supposed to be wearing.’

‘Do you know something about the suit, Sergeant?’ McCrink said. ‘You keep asking about it.’

‘I don’t know any more than you, sir.’

They went over the witnesses who claimed to have noticed McGladdery at the dance. Of those witnesses the majority had said he had been wearing a light-coloured suit, although they disagreed as to the colour.

‘What if McGladdery was telling the truth? What if he wasn’t wearing the light suit that night?’ McCrink said.

‘That means the witnesses are all lying,’ Speers said.

‘Or mistaken. They can’t agree what colour it was. The dance floor was dark enough. A mistake is possible,’ McCrink said.

‘Could be. They’re all born-again merchants up that way. Blinded by the light. Tell them the canal was the River Jordan they’d believe you. Mind you, they done tests on witnesses in the states. The FBI. People don’t see the things they think they see. The mind plays tricks. McGladdery’s the main suspect. He’s enjoying the attention, pretending to be the big murderer. Next minute he has everybody else convinced he done it.’

‘We need to have a chat with our friend McGladdery, a proper interview,’ McCrink said.

‘You won’t get anything out of him, sir,’ Johnston said.

‘Why do you say that, Sergeant? Have you talked to him already?’

‘Only when we took him in to dry him out.’

‘That’s the first I heard of McGladdery darkening the door of this station.’

‘He was acting suspicious. He walked across the river. Two policemen took him back here to dry out his clothes. That’s all.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Cross my heart.’

‘I want to be told about these things.’

‘Yes sir.’

 

McCrink left the restaurant and walked across town. It was a frosty night, arctic air crossing the country. ‘From Siberia,’ Margaret said the evening before Robert’s arrest. Low pressure systems moving silently down from the steppe, the permafrost regions. The whole town was chilled. Water froze in taps. The canal was iced over. The water in the basin turned milky. At the dockside workers spread sand and salt over the roadway.

Dull fires burning in the tinkers’ camp. McCrink could see dark figures in front of the fire, moving restlessly to and fro. Sometimes one would stand still, seeming to look towards the town, others joining him, stark unmoving compositions in the night, a troubled frieze.

 

McCrink had been offered offices in the larger barracks on the Belfast Road but he had decided to stay at Corry Square Station in the centre of the town. The square hemmed in by red-brick terracing and a sense of commerce in decline, weeds growing through the sleepers on the rail spur across the street. There was a convent on the hill above the barracks. Across the other side of the town the Abbey. They were built on the high ground. There was a looming, a gothic clinging to the side of hills.

The canal was less than a hundred yards away. Warehousing ran down from the backs of the houses on Corry Square to the river. The stone-built warehouses were no longer used for goods transported by rail or canal. They had been taken over by a network of small garages and workshops.

He passed the duty sergeant and went to the incident room. He stood in the doorway.

There was Pearl’s death and this was the book of it, her epistle and that of Robert’s guilt or innocence. The amassed witness statements. The halting accounts. The Remington clatter in the typing pool now silent. There was a psychic clutter here, the spilled-over A4 sheets reeking of copying fluid. The pored-over transcripts. Each one a witness. Each at the centre of their own tale, subject to encroaching fictions. They were like spies abroad in the night, skulking, untrustworthy.

 

McCrink took the file of crime-scene photographs back to his office and spread them out on the table. The location of Pearl’s clothes numbered and indexed, the crumpled body just visible where it had been dragged and partially hidden behind the rocks. He ran his eyes down the index. A stocking in American tan, laddered, torn. White Ladybird slip, soiled. White brassiere, clasp broken. The garments sized and inventoried, the intimate apparel they called it.

Beaten. Strangled. Stabbed.

McCrink could not escape the feeling that the murder of Pearl Gamble shared a quality with the Nude Murders he had investigated in London. There was an arch, scripted feel to those murders, an air of knowing asides to the audience. In the Nude Murders all of the girls had been stripped and strangled. In each case the body had been kept for a couple of days before being dumped. The investigators kept coming back to the detail. Why keep the body for forty-eight hours? They consulted psychiatrists and criminologists but they were unable to supply an explanation. McCrink was tasked with reading through the criminal casebooks to see if similar crimes had been committed in the past. He was given an office in Chiswick CID headquarters. He spent days alone with the files, working his way through the photostatted pages. Last seen getting into blue Ford Prefect. The way their lives seemed to seep backwards from their last moments like dank contrails.

He worked his way through the close-typed A4 pages for weeks. The crime scenes. The autopsies. The bare text.

He read the victims’ names aloud to himself. Elizabeth Figg also known as Ann Phillips. Gwynneth Rees also known as Tina Smart. Hannah Tailford also known as Terry Lynch. The recitation of the names settling into the pure rhythm of a chant. That was his job. To interrogate them. To make the dead account for themselves. He had found himself revisiting the places where the bodies had been dumped. Locations that had received an eerie charge from the presence of the murdered girls, the fact that the murderer had been there, a mystic force. He could feel the structure of each murder. The dark grammar of it.

There was a stillness at the heart of the London murders as there was a stillness at the heart of Pearl’s death. Stripped but left undefiled. Beaten, strangled and stabbed in an apparently uncontrolled attack, yet the killer had left no trace of himself at the scene. It pointed to a planned killing, a patient and methodical approach. The killer had taken care not only to hide the body, but to remove the murder weapons – the stabbing instrument and whatever cord had been used to strangle Pearl.

The first formal interview with McGladdery took place the following day. Present were Detective Sergeant Johnston, Detective Inspector Speers and Inspector of Constabulary McCrink. From the start McGladdery denied that he had anything to do with the murder of Pearl Gamble. Johnston took the lead in the questioning.

‘Why did you kill Miss Gamble?’

‘I never killed her.’

‘Maybe you don’t remember. Maybe you done her in in the grip of a mental illness.’

‘I never touched a hair on Pearl’s head. All I done was dance with her.’

‘The evidence says different.’

‘The evidence is that you decided I done it at the start and you haven’t bothered your arse looking at nobody else. The real murderer’s out there getting away.’

‘Everybody at the dance says you were bothering Miss Gamble.

‘Then they’re lying. Or drunk.’ Robert laughed. ‘Not much chance of them being drunk in that place, is there, Mr Speers? They’re a good-living lot up there. Not like me and you.’

‘There’s no me and you here, son.’

‘Come on, Mr Speers. When you catch the right man, me and you’ll have a laugh about this. I could help you find him. I’m no stranger to the science of detection.’

‘Give it a rest, McGladdery,’ Speers said.

‘Motive, opportunity, means, isn’t that what they say? Give me long enough I’ll work it out for you.’

‘We found books in your house. Perverted literature. Magazines. Disgusting stuff. We know what sort you are.’

‘I got an interest in anatomy is all.’

‘I’d say you got an interest in anatomy. How do you think that filthy stuff would go down with a jury? What was your relationship with the deceased?’

‘Me and the deceased never had no relationship.’

‘Witnesses say you were bothering her at the dance.’

‘Show me them witnesses. If I was bothering her then why did she dance with me three times? Tell us that, Mr Policeman?’

‘You’re a bit of a show-off, aren’t you, McGladdery? Coming back here with your fancy London suits. So where’s the suit you were wearing that night?’

‘You got the suit. The dark suit.’

‘Everybody at the dance says you were wearing a light-coloured suit and a shortie fawn jacket. Where’s the jacket?’

‘Suppose I had a shortie coat,’ Robert said, ‘I’m not saying I had. If I was given thirty-six hours on my own I would ring you and tell you where to find the shortie coat.’

Robert leaned forward in his chair. He was smiling at Johnston. McCrink wondered what was going through his head, the way he looked detached, finding ironies in the situation that no one else was aware of.

‘What are you playing at?’ Johnston said. ‘Where is the coat and suit?’

‘You didn’t get what you wanted so you stole the bicycle, cycled to Damolly Cross and waited for her, then you attacked her.’

‘I never. I went home and I went to bed.’

The witnesses’ assertions that he had been wearing a light-coloured suit were put to him but he shrugged and said that the witnesses were either mistaken or lying. There was a childish quality about his accusation of lying, a tell-tale note to his voice. You could hear the playground chant.

‘Did you ever see a man hanged, McGladdery?’ Speers said. ‘Did you ever hear the crack of the trapdoor open under his feet? I seen Evans hanged in Cardiff Gaol for the murder of Rachel the Washerwoman. You should have heard him squeal. He tried to say he was innocent but they all squeal in the heel of the hunt. Tell the truth and shame the devil. You don’t want to end up gasping for breath at the end of a rope.’

‘You don’t gasp for breath. The knot snaps the neck vertebra. Severs the spinal cord. Death is instantaneous,’ Robert said, ‘I read it.’

‘I’ll make sure you gasp, McGladdery,’ Johnston said. ‘I’ll talk to the hangman special about it.’