During the winter months Judge Curran would travel every third week to the Isle of Man where gambling was permitted, flying from Aldergrove, the British Airways DC-10 with an air of evacuation about it, the last plane from a beset city, the engine note rising and falling, hitting the low pressure systems swept down from Greenland, rain squalls blowing across the landing lights at Douglas airport.
Lance Curran would play bezique at the Colony Rooms in Douglas early in the evening, moving on to roulette at the Vogue Casino.
In late February following the arraignment of McGladdery Ferguson travelled with Judge Curran. He had never been to the island before but as a young man he had raced motorcycles at Nutts Corner and Tyrella and he wanted to see the Isle of Man TT course. All he had ever wanted to know was there, expressed in terms of speed and transcendence. Ray Amm and Mike Hailwood crouched behind the fibreglass fairing, dropping down the gears for Ballaugh Bridge. In 1955 Ray Amm was flung from his MV Augusta and killed at Imola. Hailwood was to die in the rain outside Birmingham. Ferguson remembered cutting out photographs of them on the winners’ podium and pasting them into a scrapbook. Sombre, garlanded figures.
Ferguson joined Judge Curran for a drink in the bar of the Grand Hotel. There were other men from the Bar library present. Queen’s Counsel and solicitors nodding to Ferguson as he made his way through the tables.
He saw Isaac Hanna, a QC from Antrim town. Ferguson had heard that Hanna had given land recently for the building of a fundamentalist chapel.
‘You know Hay Gordon was released? The buck that murdered Curran’s daughter?’
‘No. When did this happen?’
‘You’re not on the ball at all, Ferguson. The murderer was released eighteen months ago, sent back to Scotland and told to keep the beak shut if he knew what was good for him.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘On the grounds that he probably never killed Patricia Curran at all. You’d of thought that Curran would of told you.’
‘He knows?’
‘What do you think? For all he keeps his nose stuck in the air, the judge knows what’s going on. He’s keeping you in the dark, Ferguson.’
‘Why would he do that, Isaac?’
‘It was Brian Faulkner who ordered the release of Gordon. Maybe Curran put the word in his ear. Maybe Mr Justice Curran knows rightly who killed his daughter. Anyway. Water under the bridge. What’s more to the fore is the question of whether or not the judge is going to disqualify himself from the McGladdery case. It’s the talk of the Bar library.’
‘The judge takes his own counsel.’
‘That’s a fact. I hope he takes you along with him when he goes to the House of Lords.’
‘Why would he go to the House of Lords?’
‘There’s an opening for a Lord Justice of Appeal coming up. Did he not tell you that either? Our Lance is vain enough to fancy himself in the old ermine, don’t you think, Ferguson? A lord’s fur collar’d be a snug enough fit around thon crafty old bird’s neck.’
Ferguson saw Curran at the bar and walked towards him. Curran had in fact spoken to him about the possibility of a seat in the House of Lords, but Ferguson had not been told about the release of Iain Hay Gordon.
The barman had put two Black and Whites on the bar, with a soda siphon beside them.
‘Patricia used to like to do this, do you remember, Ferguson?’ It was the first time since his daughter’s death that her name had been spoken between them.
When Patricia was young, Ferguson remembered, she used to ask to fill their glasses with the soda. He remembered the look of concentration on her face as she hefted the siphon, the lab-flask feel to it, the valve-hiss, the wreathing vapours in the glass.
‘I didn’t know that Gordon had been released,’ Ferguson said.
‘Released,’ the judge said, ‘released, renamed and consigned to some wretched Glasgow tenement.’
‘Doesn’t seem right in the light of the damage that he did.’
‘No,’ the judge said, ‘considering the damage that he did. If she had lived Patricia would have been twenty-eight years old now. Would you set odds as to the likelihood of Gordon’s guilt, Ferguson?’
Ferguson looked down into his drink. Who would run a book on his child’s death? What would be the stake in such a wager, and on whom would fall the burden of paying?
‘I don’t think it would be a right thing to do,’ Ferguson said. The judge ignored him.
‘I would put it at eight to one, perhaps. No higher.’
‘This is not appropriate, judge.’
‘And if the odds are set so high against the convicted man, then what odds could be ventured against others, Mr Ferguson? Do you think I am unaware of what is whispered around the Bar library? My son a papist priest, my wife committed to an asylum, my daughter in her grave nine years. You use the word appropriate, Ferguson.’
Ferguson was aware of traffic passing in the rain on the esplanade outside. Laughter from the lounge bar. He wondered what had brought him to this place. He looked around the faces in the lounge. Dark-suited artful men, leaning towards each other. They would be recounting anecdotes of the Bar. Ferguson had often called to the Bar library in the evening on constituency business when Judge Curran had been a QC. The silks preparing the following day’s casework, taking down the case records. The All England Law Reports. The Criminal Law Review. Setting themselves to the dusty interlinking narratives. The hanging fluorescent tubes were switched off, the library lit by desk lights here and there. There were murmured conversations. Men passing in the shadows under a dim devotional light. You thought of objects that were handed on from generation to generation. A lighting which evoked the volumes held sacred. The books of the law.
Curran had followed Ferguson’s eyes.
‘Don’t waste yourself on them. They are the corrupt servants of a corrupt province. Not one of them was man enough to defend Gordon. They are linked by family, school and profession. They passed his defence to a scholarship boy.’
‘They didn’t want to offend you. Or your office.’
‘I heard the other rumours as well. I know that Gordon changed his defence team. I know that it is said that he admitted his guilt in private and that the original defence team could no longer represent him on that basis.’
‘It would be unethical for them to assert his innocence when they were aware of his guilt.’
‘Yes. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if this admission of guilt had not in fact happened? What if the whole story was a fabrication to conceal the fact that they were too craven to offend their superior? What if someone deliberately created the story, simply to protect themselves?’
It is also said that your daughter did not die where she was found. That she was killed in the house and her body carried out onto the driveway. There were thirty-seven stab wounds and yet there was no blood on the ground around her.
‘I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.’
‘I’m saying their blood is befouled with cynicism, Ferguson. Tell me this, if I did not sit on the bench for the McGladdery case, would one of them serve? Would one of them be judge in this cause?’
‘It would have to be a local man, all right.’
‘And would they hang McGladdery to please me? Their superior whose own daughter was murdered? Would they see fit to take my vengeance for me, since Gordon escaped the gallows?’
‘You wouldn’t put it past them.’
‘So by taking the case myself, I am perhaps giving McGladdery a better chance of a fair trial than otherwise.’
‘And that’s why you’re taking the case. To ensure a fair trial for McGladdery.’
You must think I was born yesterday, Ferguson thought. Sleet driven down from the north channel rattled on the glass skylight over their head as though some manic thing sought entry. They both glanced upwards.
‘It is wintertime,’ the judge said.
‘It is that all right.’
‘There is a coldness in men’s hearts that cannot be gainsaid by any judgement that I might or might not pass down. To equate law with equity is a mistake. Justice is a by-product of our system of law, not an end.’
Ferguson thought of two nineteen-year-old girls killed and left in the open and wondered if they too were a by-product.
‘Shall we go?’ the judge said. ‘I feel that fortune is on my side tonight.’
He stood to go. The sleet beat insistently on the skylight above them. Ferguson sat for a moment, his unseeing eyes fixed on the window, and on the wintry bight beyond.
Thirty-six hours after the appeal for the missing item of apparel a letter was delivered to Corry Square. The anonymous letter was addressed to McCrink and had been typed on a single sheet of A4 paper. The detectives were told to search a septic tank which they would find two hundred yards to the rear of the McGladdery house.
The detectives had received dozens of anonymous letters in the weeks since the murder. Some referred to the Lord’s judgement being delivered on Pearl. Others pointed to the suspicious behaviour of various local men. The canal bank and the public toilets on the Mall were reported as homosexual meeting places. This kind of correspondence seemed a necessary part of a murder inquiry. The detectives were reminded that there were other contexts to their investigation. It was felt that the detectives needed access to the psychic undertow of the town. Apparitions were reported, spirit worlds invoked. They received articles clipped out of the local press with key words ringed in biro.
Speers read the letter first. The directions were careful. The writer seemed to have gone to the trouble of measuring, or at least pacing out, the distances involved. Unlike the other letters, the prose was unadorned. Speers examined the typeface with a magnifying glass, looking for damage to the metalling of the keys that would identify the typewriter. Under the magnifying glass each letter looked monumental, flawed. McCrink envisaged a sparsely furnished room with a typewriter on a bare table, a Remington in gun-metal grey.
‘This one’s worth a follow-up,’ Speers said, ‘this one’s definitely got legs.’
‘Round up some of the local uniforms. We’ll have a look first thing in the morning.’
Speers was enthusiastic about the letter. There was a textual sparseness to it that appealed to him. A sense that the writer was picking up clear narrative threads, identifying and developing themes. Ordered progress was possible. McCrink was less sure. The letter-writer wasn’t acting out of a sense of civic duty. He felt more at home with the inherent fearfulness of the other anonymous letter-writers, their sense that unseen forces were at work.
They left Corry Square at dawn on the 24th. Johnston had called up members of the Special Constabulary. He liked the drama of it, the intimations of a repressive state apparatus, uniformed policemen clambering into unmarked vans in the pre-dawn chill. It made you think of front doors smashed down, booted feet on the stairs.
They drove in convoy to the Belfast Road. They parked on the hard shoulder. Technicians from the Belfast laboratory unpacked rudimentary forensic kits. They moved across the fields in a fanned-out formation. The septic tank was found within minutes. The technicians examined the concrete lid which was then photographed. When they lifted the lid they found a bundle of filthy clothing suspended from a length of cord. The bundle was partly submerged in the contents of the septic tank.
McCrink and Speers accompanied the technicians back to the forensic laboratory in Belfast. The laboratory was situated in a complex in a residential area close to the university. The laboratories were housed in nondescript red-brick buildings. McCrink could see that the scientists preferred it that way. They liked the atmosphere of scientific advances in lowkey surroundings. The scientists were white-coated, aloof. They moved silently in pairs along the corridors in a way that suggested inwardness. Wall-mounted posters depicted the Periodic Table and the structure of the atom. There was a hushed monastic atmosphere in the public spaces.
The bundle of clothing had been taken to a laboratory upstairs. When McCrink and Speers arrived technicians were opening the bundle with tweezers, taking samples as they went. One of the technicians pointed to the Burton label.
When the bundle was opened out, Speers shook his head.
‘We’ll never get any forensics out of that lot.’ The bundle consisted of a shortie jacket wrapped around a pair of black shoes and a red-and-black tie. The fawn colour of the jacket was barely detectable under the sodden matter adhering to it from the septic tank. McCrink didn’t speak. He had seen the bodies of those who had met violent death but the still bodies, the faces expressionless, vacated, lacked the power of these ravaged garments, the jacket crumpled, reeking of organic matter. The jacket seemed to do justice to the events of 28th January, the crime done by night, filling the room with its corpse stink. The shoulders were stiff and hunched and the elbows crooked. It implied the existence of a perpetrator equal to its uncanny shapes, a murderer by night, shambling, fiendish. McCrink found himself thinking about the writer of the anonymous letter, the double-spaced lettering.
The detectives waited until the technicians had established that the jacket pockets were empty. Speers kept pointing to stains, talking knowledgeably about decomposition rates and blood spatter.
It was almost night before they were back in Newry. Uniformed policemen had been left at the septic tank. As they passed by on the Belfast Road they could see a light in the fields and men standing around. McCrink thought they looked like travellers, lamplit, sent from afar.
‘You can smell it the car,’ Speers said.
‘What?’
‘McGladdery’s suit. The stench of that soakpit from it. It’s like something you’ll never be rid of.’