In the silence of the billiard room Judge Curran studied the fall of the balls on the table. He potted an isolated red and left the cue ball flush to the cushion to line up the black for the bottom left. The Reform Club dining room had been busy that night. Ferguson had watched the judge walk between the tables. He saw the judge mark who was in attendance. The shipyard bondholders and shire bosses. The garbed clergy. He saw the judge’s unyielding regard fall on their wives and the way they looked after him when he passed, some bleak appetite stirred. Ferguson had heard rumours about women on the judge’s trips to London. Rumours that followed him through the gaming rooms of Piccadilly.
Three days previously a handwritten note had been delivered to Ferguson’s office in Whiteabbey. It was from Constable Rutherford who said that he would be attending the High Court in Belfast as a witness the following day, and asked Ferguson to meet him.
Rutherford was waiting for Ferguson in the great hall. Ferguson had not seen him since he had appeared as a witness in the Patricia Curran case. He was wearing dress uniform. Many of the constabulary had been in the army or navy before they joined up. They had the bearing. Boots and belting spit-polished and shellacked. Ferguson shook hands.
‘What can I do for you, Constable?’
‘I brought a visitor to the Glen a few months ago. I been thinking about it. I told Mr West. He said that you and his Honour should know.’
‘Who?’
‘The Inspector of Constabulary, Mr McCrink.’
‘What in the name of blazes was he doing there?’
Rutherford told him about the workmen’s discovery of what appeared to be a large bloodstain on the floorboards in the master bedroom.
‘What did you think?’
‘I was on the Arctic convoys during the war. I seen men killed, Mr Ferguson.’ Rutherford had served as a merchant seaman sailing on convoys from Southampton to Spitsbergen in the winter of 1943. One convoy was attacked by Stuka divebombers a hundred and twenty nautical miles north-west of Shetland. Travelling at fourteen knots in a heavy swell. The salt spray froze as it landed on stanchions and handrails and men were sent aloft to chip it from sonar relays and mast tines. Gannets and blackheaded gulls followed in her wake, waiting for the slit gash bags to be flung from her stern. They followed her by day and by night. Screeching in the night as though awful revels took place in the ship’s wake. Rutherford had seen men killed, strafed by gunfire and shrapnel on the open deck during the attack.
‘I seen butchery on board ship. I seen what blood looks like dried into a wooden deck. It resembles itself and nothing else.’
‘Tell no one else about this, Rutherford. What’s done is done.’
‘The convicted murderer Gordon has been released.’
‘Released and taken care of.’
‘Then there is nothing to be gained.’
‘No, Constable. There is nothing to be gained.’
Curran listened in silence as Ferguson told him about his meeting with Rutherford.
‘What do we know of this McCrink?’ Curran said.
‘Native of the province. Career detective. Joined the London murder squad. He was regarded as a high flyer. Then he requests a transfer back to Ulster. No explanation given.’
‘Find out. A detective who does not believe his own evidence is fatal to a case. Particularly a case which depends on circumstantial evidence. Who is appearing for the defence?’
‘Brown. As you know he has the reputation of never having lost a man to the rope.’
The judge rolled the white along the cushion to strike the black ball. The black hung in the jaws of the pocket for a moment and then fell. Ferguson respotted the ball as the judge walked to the end of the table and bent to calculate the angle on the next red. He potted the red then went to a side table. He poured a whiskey and siphoned soda into the glass. As he bent over the bottle and glass Ferguson thought he looked like some stoop-backed necromancer bent to his decadent elixir.
‘What about Bratty? The man charged with the homicide of the girl in Hillsborough. There was a sexual dimension to that crime as well, wasn’t there?’ Curran said.
‘I spoke to the Minister for Home Affairs about Bratty. He is of a mind to commute the sentence.’
‘Then it will have to be McGladdery. Brown will lose his man.’
Brown came to the gaol every Tuesday at two o’clock. He sat with Robert for hours going over the events of the night of 28th January. What time did he arrive at the Orange hall? Did he speak to anyone on the way in? When did he first set eyes on Pearl? Robert understood that they had to work their way towards the main event of the night. Brown had yet to bring up Robert’s journey home from the hall. These conversations would be difficult, halting. First the night had to be remade, contexts established, clear roles given to each character. The evening was not as Robert remembered it. A dance at a parochial hall with mill girls and shopworkers began to appear as something shadowy, a dimly-lit masque. In his memory the dancers seemed like people from the old times moving in silence around him, dancing some ghostly and sinister pavane.
‘I am obliged to say that if you plead guilty it is probable that the capital sentence will not be imposed,’ Brown said. ‘And if the sentence is imposed there is a greater chance of a clemency appeal succeeding.’
‘I can’t plead guilty if I never done it.’
‘That is true. However, I have to inform you of the options.’
‘I’m pleading innocent.’
‘Fair enough. That brings us to the second matter.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Whether you should take the stand or not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Crown’s case is built on circumstantial evidence. They have no witnesses to the actual murder and obviously no confession. In circumstances like these, the accused often exercises his option not to testify.’
‘So I keep the mouth shut. Does that not look bad with the jury?’
Robert’s approach to the case was dogged by his visions of dramatic robed jurists, by his misuse of legal vocabularies.
‘The judge will instruct them to the effect that they must not base any opinion on the accused declining to testify.’
‘Why would I not testify when I’m innocent? I can tell them everything I done that night. I can put them on the right road. I’ve a few things up my sleeve.’
‘It’s your decision, Robert. The problem is that an experienced prosecutor can guide you into saying things that you do not really mean. He can lay emphasis on parts of your testimony detrimental to your case, and deflect the jury’s attention from aspects that may be beneficial. My advice would be to stay out of the witness box. But the decision is yours. Think it over for a day or two.’
‘What’s he up to?’ Hughes said that night.
‘Fuck knows,’ Robert said.
‘Boy thinks you can’t defend yourself on the stand. It’s your right to get up on the two hind legs and let them have it. An innocent man. It’s wrote all over your face.’
‘You don’t understand legal strategy though.’
‘He’ll strategy you into the arms of Allen is what he’ll do.’
‘Me and Mr Brown discussed the matter at length.’
‘Length. Six foot of hemp. That’s the length we’re talking about here.’
Robert hadn’t seen the way Hughes had been looking at him recently. Hughes slipping into the stereotype of treacherous sidekick. Hughes had spent six months listening to Robert and had decided to ‘bring him down a peg or two’, as he told other prisoners in the kitchen.
‘He thinks he’s a gaolhouse lawyer. Discussed the matter at length my arse. He’d sicken your hole going on about writing books and Russian spies. Russian spies my fucking eye. He says he’s going to be world bodybuilding champion. I’ve seen bigger muscles on a sparrow.’
Hughes also said he didn’t like the way Robert talked about Bratty. ‘It was Bratty this and Bratty that, but mainly he kept saying that if they commuted Bratty they’d have to commute him. Plus, he said, “Bratty admitted doing it and I never done it.”’
Robert borrowed law books from the prison library. Textbooks on evidence and criminal intent. He started dropping legal phrases into his conversations with Hughes. He talked about the defence of provocation and the defence of diminished responsibility. He spent days reading about the great criminal trials. Regina vs Cole. Regina vs Dalton. He told Hughes he was developing expertise in the field of the criminal mind and the criminals who committed them, their storied lives. Enraged husbands, poisoners. He imagined himself as a cosmopolitan murderer. Subtle, clean-shaven, capable of nuanced atrocities that would be elegantly debated in court by men in wigs. He imagined lengthy appeals, courteous exchanges with members of the higher courts. His name spoken of with grudging respect in the law courts and the Bar library. Women watching spellbound from the public gallery, recognising in Robert the exercise of a higher calling.
At the end of June he told Brown that he intended to take the stand in his own defence.
‘I’d say he has Brown tormented with talk about the law,’ Hughes said. But Brown understood the necessities that overtook a man fighting for his life, and knew that you couldn’t deny someone who had uncovered a sense of last-ditch heroics and was determined to pursue it for all it was worth.
‘How do you stand for a man that you know is guilty?’ Robert asked Brown one day.
‘You cannot know he is guilty until the court finds he is guilty. That is the mechanism of the law,’ Brown said.
Even though the day was warm outside, the interview room was cold. Brown had suffered from constant colds since he had started to come to Crumlin Road. He shivered in bed at night. He felt that he carried something back to the hotel from the prison. He went to the doctor and was given antibiotics. He felt that he was suffering from nineteenth-century prison agues. He felt racked by chills and gaol fevers.
‘It’s the basalt in the walls,’ Robert said, ‘it absorbs the moisture.’
Black basalt quarried behind the mountain and drawn in carts to the city after dark, the dressed blocks stacked two deep as though cut from the substance of the night itself. The stone became the material of retribution. The stuff of punishment gathered on the site and assembled. It was necessary that the manner of building be sufficient to the recorded crime. The design of the prison based on Pentonville Prison in London, built as a model gaol. The prisoner was to be isolated, the architecture worked to direct the mind inward. Regimes of silence were enforced, inmates were to move about the prison without speaking under pain of flogging and forfeiture of time. The light of heaven would pour in from skylights, the eye drawn upwards. The prisoners were provided with Bibles and moral texts. They were to lay themselves bare before heaven and be shriven of their crimes.
As the summer went on Robert’s thoughts were not drawn upwards. He kept thinking about the basement at the bottom of C Wing. Hughes told him that the gallows was struck down after each execution and rebuilt anew each time it was required. His mind kept returning to the unlit chamber, the dismantled machine of execution. Its stacked beams. He kept asking the head warder, McCulla, if he could see it.
‘You’ll be seeing it soon enough and seeing it plenty,’ McCulla said.
During his interviews with Robert in Crumlin Road gaol, Brown brought up the river-crossing incident from the week when Robert was under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
‘Why did you walk through the river?’
‘They were following me everywhere. I says to the peeler outside the house, if you want to follow me, then follow me across the river. I did it for the laugh.’
‘What happened then?’
‘This other policeman picked me up on the other side of the river. Johnston.’
‘What do you mean picked you up?’
‘He put a gun to the side of my head and told me he’d blow my fucking brains out if I didn’t get in the car.’
‘Was he on his own?’
‘There was another policeman in the front of the car. He kept his face turned away the whole time so I couldn’t see who he was. They took me to Corry Square.’
‘Johnston says there was only him. That he took you back to Corry Square to fix you up with dry clothes.’
‘I never seen any dry clothes. They took me there to make me say that I done it. They kept asking me about the suit, the light-coloured suit. Johnston and his crew of local boys. Coming at me in teams. They kept at me all night.’
‘When you say all night? According to their account you arrived at the barracks at 2.20 p.m. and left at 4.25 p.m.’
‘I got home at about twelve that night after they threw me out.’
‘There is no record of this interview.’
‘Record or not, Johnston told me he was going to make sure I swung for Pearl. When I said I never done it he only laughed. I got the feeling there was somebody else telling him what to do. He kept going out of the room and coming back with new questions.’
They were slamming fists on the table. Where are the clothes you were wearing that night? The clothes. The fancy duds. The London gear. Tell us where they are so we can fucking bury you in them. Coming at him in relays. You asked her for a kiss, didn’t you, Robert? You wanted something more. You fancied a little tit and she wouldn’t give it to you. You’ll be took out of here in a box unless you give us something,McGladdery. There’s no Her Majesty’s Inspector of fucking Constabulary to help you here. Where’d you get the cuts on your face? Did Pearl scrab you? Is that why you hit her?
‘They kept trying to get me to confess, Mr Brown, but I kept the mouth shut. Because I never done it.’