Following Robert’s arrest Agnes often saw Ronnie on Hill Street. Gone were the low-cut tops and the short skirts. There was a girl who knew which side her bread was buttered. She saw the way people came up to Ronnie and put these big faces on as if to say isn’t this is a heartbreak but you’ll get through it. And Ronnie would look back at them with this big soft head on her as though to say yes I am full of sorrow. Agnes knew the only sorrow that had come to her door was the sorrow of not luring a married man from his lawful bed. If Agnes had the right of it then McKnight ran a mile in fear of questioning. Where were you on the night of the 14th of this month? On the night of the 15th of this month?
Agnes could swear it was all the books and reading that got Robert into trouble. He took grand notions about himself until she cried out in her heart there is no grandeur for the likes of you and me in this vale, only scorn.
She knew from the start that she lived in a cruel town but how cruel she had not realised. A place where men thought they had a right to her person and women looked at her in seaside tea rooms as though she was muck. There was a Mrs McDonald whose husband was a solicitor and a Mrs Keenan whose husband was a doctor would stick their big heads in the air any time they seen Agnes. Their faces wrinkled up so that you’d think they had shit on the ends of their noses so that one day Agnes marches right up to them and says to them take that snoot off your faces or I’ll take it off for you.
Robert was reported to have settled in well to prison life. The prison MO, James Newell, examined him on 21st May. He said, ‘McGladdery presents a cheerful and well-adjusted exterior. He has expressed the wish to “make the most” of his situation and says he is confident that the “truth will out”.’
Newell’s medical exam concluded that Robert was in ‘reasonable’ health although there was some evidence of malnutrition in infancy. His torso showed evidence of bodybuilding. His blood pressure was normal. The lesions on his face had healed. It was recommended that McGladdery attend the prison dentist as he exhibited extensive dental caries.
The inmate complained of wheeziness. This appeared to be some impairment of lung function which merited further investigation.
‘Unless he gets fucking typhoid,’ the chief prison officer, McBride, said, ‘let it lie.’
Hughes told Robert not to go near the prison dentist.
‘He’s half-cut or hungover most of the time. He’ll rip the jaw off you and leave you lying in your own blood. Save yourself the agony, my son. You’ll not be needing teeth if Allen gets his mitts on you anyhow.’
Robert told Hughes that it was something he had in common with Pearl. They both had unusually shaped teeth.
‘For fuck’s sakes would you quit that?’ Hughes said. ‘The girl’s dead and buried. You’ll have that in common too if you keep on about having the same teeth.’
Robert read volumes on self-improvement which he took from the prison library. He told Hughes about the importance of being ‘up’ no matter what. ‘The upbeat personality will always prosper,’ he said, ‘while the more “down” type of character will struggle to perform the simplest tasks.’
After lock-up Robert continued with his writing. He wrote by hand on sheets of unlined foolscap. He was amazed to learn that paper had weights, and that it came in reams and quartos and folios. There was a whole mechanics to the process that he had never known about. Papers that were embossed and offset. It seemed to give his words more weight on the page. He began to worry about his spelling and his grammar. He thought about master craftsmen, the trans-European guilds. There was a whole dimension to the business of writing things down that he hadn’t thought about. He imagined the craftworkers gathering, aproned freemen.
He wanted to tell his story but elements of it had started to get away from him. There were things that he had taken for granted.
Hughes said that Robert did not appear alarmed by the guilty verdict in the Bratty case.
‘Bratty won’t swing,’ he said confidentially, ‘the weight of public opinion is against hanging mental defectives.’ Hughes wasn’t so sure.
‘The weight of public opinion would be as happy swinging off Bratty’s ankles on the scaffold to make sure his neck’s good and broke.’
Robert’s solicitors had engaged a Belfast QC, James Brown, to represent him. Brown had the reputation of never having lost a man to the gallows. Brown took the brief on the day of the Bratty verdict. He went to Crumlin Road prison the following day accompanied by an elderly solicitor’s clerk from the Newry office. A warder led him through ill-lit passageways and anterooms. He unlocked doors with keys carried on the chain at his waist. The clerk walked at his side, aware of the theatrics of the place, the doom-laden clanking of doors and the purposeful movement in secure spaces, the architecture designed to address the transgressive self. The brick walls and barred windows and ornate ironwork carried in doleful spans across the empty central hall. The inmates’ pale faces glimpsed in the penal gloom.
‘I know what I’d do to a man who would be fit to do the likes of that to a girl,’ the warder said. The warder had the look of a lay preacher. ‘He’s for the rope anyhow,’ the clerk said, ‘that’ll drive the devil out of him.’
‘He says he never done it.’
‘They all say that till they see the scaffold,’ the warder said. The two men talked all the way to Robert’s cell.
‘You have him up on B wing,’ the clerk said, ‘high security.’
‘He’s on the sex offenders’ wing,’ the warder said, ‘for fear the other prisoners will do the hangman’s job for him.’
The two men seemed to regard lugubrious dialogue as part of their office, that Brown would feel let down if they were not there to exchange grim drolleries in the shadow of the gallows.
The warder opened the door to McGladdery’s cell and Brown saw him for the first time. The image stayed with him for many years. McGladdery looking like a lone charismatic, pale-faced, seeing himself as beset on every side.
The warder and clerk stepped aside. Brown stepped into the cell. McGladdery was sitting on his bed. Brown always found something devotional in these spaces. The window placed high in the wall so that light streamed down. The prisoner’s pale face picked out like a supplicant in some medieval illumination, looking upwards, bathed in the god light.
McGladdery was sitting on the bed. There were books lying on the blankets, novels with cracked spines, the covers foxed and the corners turned up. Brown had defended those facing the death sentence in several jurisdictions. There were those who seemed to be lost in their own murderous transcendence but McGladdery was different, boyish and involved.
‘I want to tell my story, Mr Brown. I’m going to write it down so people understand.’
‘I’m sure you do, Robert.’ Brown had met gaolhouse writers before. Sex criminals usually, bespectacled men who uncovered psychologically complex narratives in themselves. They believed themselves lost in the lonely mechanics of desire. Their writings reeked of self-justification.
‘Just don’t admit anything.’
‘I don’t have nothing to admit to. I never laid a hand on her.’
‘The Crown have a lot of circumstantial evidence.’
‘The Crown’s got damn-all if I never done it. When people get to read about me they can make up their own minds.’
‘There are a fair few who have already made up their mind,Robert. That’s the problem. Perhaps you would tell me what happened on the 29th January?’
‘I’ll start with the day. There was a fair slap of drink on board.’
‘Who were you drinking with?’
‘Me and Will Copeland. We were in Hollywood’s. Then we went down to the Legion. We laid a few bets in Hughes.’
The winter Saturday afternoon. The races coming through on the bookmaker’s tannoy. Haydock. Sandown Park. The horses labouring into the dusk, the muted silks and hoofbeats fading into the drizzle. Men giving way to an unforeseen wistfulness, darkness gathering on the streets outside.
‘What happened then?’ Brown felt himself being drawn into the day.
‘We finished off in the Legion …’
‘Did you buy anything?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you go into any shops during the day?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘The prosecution say you went into Woolworths and bought shoemaker’s tools. An off-duty policewoman maintains that she witnessed you buying them.’
‘I suppose I must of then.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Me and Will went to my house. I gave him a go on the bullworker.’
‘Bullworker?’
‘Expands the chest muscles so it does. You ever see Charles Atlas? Nobody messes with Charles Atlas. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I put near an inch on my chest with it. I put about a half an inch on my upper arms and near a quarter on the neck. That’ll give Harry Allen something to think about.’
‘Harry Allen?’
‘The hangman. He has to measure the neck and weigh you and then calculate the drop.’
‘The warder. The boy who brought you in here. Says the head can be tore clean off if they don’t get it right. When he hits the trapdoor. I hear tell Allen has a whole book of calculations for all sorts of weights. It’s harder to hang a woman they say. A woman’s body would be a different mass. You’d snap a woman’s neck like a twig.’
Beaten. Stabbed. Strangled. Robert always having to know how things worked. Keeping the whole thing at bay with the mathematics. Fascinated that the hanging had its own dark science, that there were men in thrall to its arts. He couldn’t stop talking about it.
‘Did anything happen in the room when you were using the bullworker?’
‘I had my foot through one of the handles. It slipped and the handle flew up and hit me in the face, scraped me. I put some of the ma’s foundation on the scrape to hide it.’
‘What were you wearing that night, Robert?’
‘Fawn shortie overcoat and this dark drape suit I got in London. And blue suede shoes.’
‘That’s not what the witnesses say.’
‘What do the witnesses say?’
‘The witnesses say you were wearing a light-coloured suit with a white shirt and a black-and-red tie.’
‘That’s the tie I lent to Will. That tie cost three pounds on the King’s Road. Will was always going on about it. How the women would be throwing themselves at him. In the end I give in. Here, I says, borrow it if it means so much to you.’
‘Witnesses don’t mention what Mr Copeland was wearing.’
‘He was wearing the light suit and the black-and-red tie. He borrowed the suit.’
‘What is your relationship with Mr Copeland?’
‘Friends. Blood brothers. We done everything together. Tell us this, Mr Brown. Pearl was found half a mile from Damolly Cross.’
‘She was.’
‘Could she have run there?’
‘Hardly.’
‘I hear tell about people getting shot and the like who keep running. Not a drop of blood in them and them running like a four-minute-miler. The nerves keep the legs working. Do you think that could have happened with Pearl?’
‘I don’t think so. The police are saying she was dragged there.’
It would be a pattern with Robert. Going over the murder scene, constructing scenarios. Was Pearl beaten or stabbed first? Was the killer right-handed or left-handed? Did Brown think she had taken her clothes off first for ‘matters of a consensual nature’ as Robert put it, or had the killer torn at them in a frenzy? Brown had never come across this behaviour from a suspect before. Robert coming across as dogged and simple-minded.
Robert told Brown how he had danced with Pearl and with Joan Donergan.
‘What happened at the end of the dance?’
‘I waited for Joan Donergan. When she didn’t come out I went home.’
‘You didn’t take a bicycle from outside the Orange hall?’
‘I never seen a bicycle. I walked home and went to bed.’
Brown felt that Robert was holding something back. It seemed that he could follow Robert to the door of the dance hall but that afterwards he lost sight of him.
‘Did you know Miss Gamble before the night of the killing?’
‘I might have met her when we were small but I don’t remember.’
‘But you remember dancing with her that night?’
‘I remember, but people wanted to dance with me.’
‘Did you request “It’s Now or Never” from the band?’
‘No, I never. I asked for “Chattanooga Choo Choo” but they didn’t know it so they said they’d play “It’s Now or Never” instead.’
Robert a good dancer like his father before him. Showing the girls the new dance steps, the jive, the mashed potato. Getting Pearl up for the slow set, ‘It’s Now or Never’, Robert’s luck running out in three-two time.
McCrink went to the evidence locker and took out the bags of books they had taken from McGladdery’s house. He tipped them out onto the desk. There were bodybuilding books and rudimentary self-help books. Improve Your IQ in Ninety Days. There were Reader’s Digests and National Geographics. There were copies of Mayfair. There was a sheaf of Health and Education magazines featuring nude girls playing volleyball. The girls were blonde and smiling. They looked like naturists from before the war, Aryans given to mass gymnastic displays. McCrink preferred the Mayfair models. Girls in French maid’s costumes and schoolgirl outfits, smutty and knowing.
The other bag contained novels. McCrink tipped them out onto the desk. Crime fiction and westerns. He flicked through. Riders of the Purple Sage. Ian Fleming. He picked out a Mickey Spillane novel, The Long Wait.
The cover shows a man and a woman in an undefined urban interior. There is what looks like an overturned packing case in the back. The man has been tied to a chair and is straining at his bonds. His white shirt is ripped at the shoulder. He has black hair and a square jaw. The woman is in the foreground, half-lying on the ground. She has blonde hair to her shoulders and is wearing a low-cut yellow dress. The illustration is composed in such a way that your eye is drawn to her face, to the exposed portion of her breasts. She is looking up at someone or something just out of frame. Her pencilled-in eyebrows are arched, and her gaze is calculating. She has a blowsy, gone-to-the-bad look about her, and the tied man is watching her with apprehension. She might untie him before she makes a break for it or strikes up an alliance with his captor, but they’ve both been on the receiving end of too many tawdry outcomes to make this a foregone conclusion.
The novel was subtitled ‘The New Thriller by the author of The Big Kill’. McCrink turned it over to read the back. He ran his hand over the cover and felt the indentations in it. He opened the cover. It had been punched through. There were holes everywhere. He counted thirty. The holes seemed to be star-shaped. He rang Speers.
‘The wounds on Pearl’s body match the shape of a cobbler’s file, the one that McGladdery was supposed to have bought in Woolworths?’
‘I know that.’
‘I’ve got something else. A paperback with stab wounds in it, the same shape.’
‘He was practising his stabbing at home.’
‘It proves he had a punch. It doesn’t prove he was practising stabbing someone.’
‘It’ll be put to him in the box. I’d like the jury to hear him deny it.’
McCrink put on his coat and went outside. He walked down Mary Street to the canal. It was damp and foggy. He thought about the man and the woman on the cover of The Long Wait. He wondered if McGladdery had lost himself in their fictional jeopardies. If he had imagined himself abroad in their fogbound milieu.