In the final weeks leading up to the trial it seems that Pearl has been left behind. There are photographs of Robert in the press. Agnes is quoted. Brian Faulkner and Harry West give non-committal statements on the administration of justice. There is speculation as to whether Robert will take the stand. Then another photograph of Pearl emerges. It appears to be a professional photograph, posed and studio-lit, although it is hard to tell from the yellowing, low-resolution photograph in the archive. She is seated with her back to the camera,her head angled so that she is looking back in the direction of the photographer. The photograph shows a different person from the laughing girl of the commonly used shot. Pearl looks exotic in this photograph. She is half-turned, looking at the camera over her shoulder. It has the stylised look of a Japanese portrait, the eyes upturned at the corners, the skin flawless. The face has the expressionless set of a geisha, the heavily made-up eyes and the tight pursed lips. She could be a character from one of Robert’s crime novels. You imagined her abroad in some vice-ridden oriental milieu, a Hong Kong waterfront bar, glimpsed in the opium-haunted spaces.
A week before the trial McCrink visited Doris Curran again. The previous day he had consulted with the clerk of the High Court in Belfast as to how the judge to try the McGladdery case had been appointed.
‘It depends on the list,’ the clerk said. He was a tall thin man with moles on his face. McCrink couldn’t look at him without thinking about growths, malignancies, things that ate away at you from the inside. ‘In the case of a capital murder case then it would have to be a judge of the High Court. There is a policy of rotation.’
‘But a judge can remove himself.’
‘If there were some species of personal involvement in the case, it would be expected.’
‘And the hangman?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The hangman. Who appoints the hangman?’
‘The executioner is appointed by HM Inspectorate of Prisons in consultation with the prison governor.’
McCrink arrived at Holywell just before dark. The car radio reported storm force ten on the north channel and the trees alongside the car park moved as though some large shambling thing was trying to force its way through. Through the shrubberies he could see the windows of the hospital, well-lit and provident public buildings.
The hospital corridors were quiet. A man in a white gown passed him, his lips moving in some office of the mad. Doris wasn’t in her room and a nurse directed him to the day room. The day room was a conservatory built on to the back of the hospital. Doris was on her own, sitting on a wing-backed chair facing out of the conservatory windows into the turbulent night. She was wearing a dressing gown and her white hair had been combed out. She motioned to him to sit down beside her. There was a regal tilt to her head and McCrink wondered what deformed queenship she had allotted to herself. The tiled room seemed filled with her madness. He remembered the phrase from the textbook. Delusions of exalted birth.
‘Good evening. Please take a seat,’ she said. Her diction was precise. There were formal boundaries to be observed. The table in front of her was covered with trinkets, seaside keepsakes, Minton figurines.
‘Have you come far?’ Doris said.
‘From the south,’ he said, ‘from Newry.’
‘Newry? My husband the judge is familiar with that part of the country.’
‘You must be mistaken. Your husband is a city man.’
Doris Curran turned to him. Malice unnamed deep in her eyes.
‘Lance Curran was reared in the mountains beyond that town. Beyond the Fews as it is called. Reared, or dragged up. I do not care to recall which. Seed, breed and generation.’
‘His family?’
‘His family are all deceased. They are interred in a graveyard there. His father and his brother brought him down on horseback and paid for him in cash to board at the Royal School.’
McCrink thought of the Currans, father and sons, ridden down in cohort out of the haunted drumlin country to lay down cash.
‘They came down out of that country and then rode back and never stirred themselves out of it again. On the night of my daughter’s death my husband was on the telephone,’ Doris said. The telephone again, McCrink thought, she always talks about the telephone. It was the first time she had mentioned the night of Patricia’s death directly.
‘Patricia was wilful,’ Doris said, ‘even Lance thought she was wilful.’
‘What happened?’ McCrink said.
‘I don’t know how she got outside,’ Doris said, ‘she was inside and then she was outside in the rain. Lance was on the telephone.’
‘Where were you?’ McCrink picturing the Curran house on the night of the murder, running feet, cries from the dark outside, trees tossing in the night wind.
‘Lance knew,’ Doris said. McCrink kept his eyes fixed on her, trying to find the meaning in her disconnected tale, the underlying threads. Doris like some cackling seer bent with age tossing herbs on the fire, calling up visions.
‘Knew what?’ McCrink knew he was lending himself to the scene, feeling like a supplicant come to avail of the old magic.
‘He put me in the pantry,’ Doris said in a whisper, ‘then he was gone for a long time. I heard him telephone Patricia’s friend to ask if he had seen Patricia. But he knew she was dead when he telephoned. He was lying.’
‘Because he asked where Patricia was when he already knew she was dead?’
‘He was lying. Do you not believe me?’ Doris’s tone changing, she was hunched and shrewish now. ‘If you don’t believe me you can look,’ Doris said, ‘go to the top of the house. He hid the phone records in the house. That’s where they are. There’s a box of them up there in the maid’s room. Where is that nurse?’
A nurse came to the door and called Doris. Doris stood and took McCrink’s hand.
‘So good of you to come,’ she said, ‘please come again. My children do not call. It is thoughtless in them.’
McCrink nodded. He did not point out that Desmond was in South Africa and that Patricia had been in her grave for nine years. He watched as the nurse led her away, a slight,shuffling figure. The nurse carried the tray with the trinkets and figurines. She told McCrink that Doris normally kept the tray in her room. The nurse seemed to think it a normal thing. She understood the value of keepsakes, of charms and amulets held against inner dark. McCrink did not speak. He thought about Doris locked in the pantry at the Glen while Lance Curran drew the threads of awful night together. Doris standing in the chemical dark full of cleaning products. The smells of Daz and of Omo. Feeling the weird mechanics, the chemistry of things.