Margaret didn’t like dancing. The Friday evening of the trial McCrink took her to Henry T’s on Hill Street. She sat at a table off to the side drinking gin and watching the girls dance in the dresses they’d bought in C&A. Margaret had taken to wearing flat shoes, slacks and cable-knit jumpers. The clothes emphasised her loping walk, made her look sexless and eager.
The dancing girls carried gloves and patent-leather handbags, their hair shaped into beehives, the smell of Silvikrin hanging in the air.
‘I keep expecting to see you in a nudist magazine,’ McCrink told her, ‘you and a bunch of humourless Aryans, playing volley ball in your pelt.’
Outside they waited for a taxi in Margaret Square. They were the only people at the rank, the traffic sparse, tyres hissing in the rain. A ragged troupe of tinkers moved through the square and then were gone. Across the road a Teddy boy had backed a girl up against the wall. He had his hand between her legs. He was talking to her as he fondled her, easing her into the territory, the roughshod terrain, the taste of tobacco on his lips and the wall pressing into her back. The man stopped talking. The girl opened her eyes and looked at Margaret.
‘You want to take notes or something?’ she said.
When they got back to her flat she opened a bottle of Gordon’s. She looked pale.
‘I can’t believe the way that girl talked to me,’ she said.
‘Forget about it,’ McCrink said. She poured a glass of the Gordon’s and drank it down without tonic.
‘You’d like me to forget about it, wouldn’t you? You’d let a slut talk to me like that in the street.’ The Newry accent coming out, like something that seeped from the fen the town was built on, a marsh stink rising upwards.
‘Don’t drink any more of that.’
‘I’ll drink what I like. Why didn’t you arrest the knacker bitch, Mr Policeman?’ Her eyes were glittering and she was moving her hands in a wringing motion, working her way into it, finding the unstable rhythms, her sentences staccato, spat-out.
‘You could have me put away. I’d be like a suffragette. You’d have me like Mrs Pankhurst in Wormwood Scrubs with a feeding tube down my throat.’
‘That’s enough.’ He felt that he’d found himself adrift in a mad devising of the town. He imagined cracked laughter, scurrying feet outside the window.
‘People won’t talk to you in this town. They know what you are. They can smell a uniform coming a mile away.’
‘Margaret, please.’
‘Take me away from this town. Isn’t that what they say? Or take me somewhere. Take me to the pictures. Take me for a drive.’
‘It’s the middle of the night.’
‘Then talk to me.’
‘I’m trying to talk to you.’
‘You aren’t really. We don’t have much in common, you and me. The detective washed up in a dead-end job and the provincial librarian, unwed and unwanted.’
‘We have one thing in common.’
‘Don’t.’
‘I see. You want me with my mouth shut and my legs open.’
‘Don’t be crude.’
‘I’m not being crude. I’m just being truthful. You’d rather I just stayed on my back. It’s my best side. Everybody says so.’
‘Don’t get hysterical on me.’
‘I’m not hysterical. Is that the best you can do? Is that supposed to be the crushing retort, Eddie? If that doesn’t work then get the truncheons out, the handcuffs?’
In the end she fell asleep on the sofa. She lay on her back, her feet together, looking like something from the early church, pale, martyred. She woke at four o’clock.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it happens like that sometimes.’
‘What happens?’
‘They said I had a breakdown. In my twenties. They gave me ECT. Wired to the mains for my own good.’
The rubber gag between the teeth, the duress to the body, the back arched, the heels drumming. He took her hand.
‘Did you?’
‘What?’
‘Have a breakdown?’
‘I don’t think so. I went a bit off the rails is all. They had me committed. The doctors signed the forms. That was it. When I got out they gave me the job in the library. Told me to stay put.’
McCrink knowing he wasn’t getting the full truth. Knowing that wasn’t the way the town worked. The story had to be pieced together, dredged out of the alluvial mud and silt.
On Saturday morning he left her sleeping and drove to Castlereagh. McCrink went down to the archive, showing his warrant card at the door. The door was unlocked and he went in. He realised that these rooms were the heart of the place he had found himself in. Deep in the earth, temperature-controlled. Thousands of lives archived and stored in grey metal filing cabinets. People who saw themselves as ordinary were transformed by the process of having their lives examined, their mail opened, photographs taken without their knowledge. The dense, storied matter of their lives was acknowledged in this place. Their importance in the scheme of things was recognised. The act of watching made their lives shadowed things. Nuances were teased out. The unexplained was given its full weight.
He requisitioned her Special Branch file. Margaret had been seen at meetings of the Communist Party and other political events held in Christian Science halls and secondhand bookshops with posters of revolutionary leaders on the wall. He realised that she had always been drawn to the illicit. She had always held secret positions within their relationship. He could imagine her sitting on a folding chair among the trade unionists and Trotskyites. Intense men with enamelled lapel badges. He could see her among their dreams of upheaval. Her earnest face. Her furtive heart at home with the dogmas, the tendencies, the schisms.
Her father had been a trade-union official. She had been photographed marching through the town with her father and other trade unionists, seeing themselves as figures in history, marching alongside the work-booted radicals of long ago. The men who had accepted invitations to the Soviet Union and East Germany. You could see it in their faces. That they’d toured the tractor factories and fraternal institutes. That they had hearkened to the East’s dour and smoky hymnal.
He saw they were lost in some deep human need for the clandestine, the secret muster, gathered in the dark. To imagine themselves among companions, keepers of the secret.
Margaret had kept a flat in the University area where she attended political meetings in the students’ union. There were photographs of her leaving a Socialist Party meeting. There were several men around her. They were bearded, one of them wearing a beret. They were going for the dissident look, the breakaway radical. Trying to persuade the world that they had set up a liberation front. They saw themselves in historic terms as exiled radicals, plotters on the margin. Two of the group were named in the file as security service informers. Several of them had been seen in known homosexual haunts, gents’ toilets and canal banks. McCrink wondered which one she had been sleeping with. He knew she liked danger, the threat of discovery.
Her admission to Downshire Hospital was noted, and the length of her treatment. It was noted that she had been released ‘into the care of her parents’ and that ‘no further subversive contacts were observed’.
McCrink pulled Speers’s file. There were details of assignations with other men’s wives, a tawdry subtext running through a steady career ascent. The ascent had stopped in 1955. Speers had been found in a hotel in Bangor with an underage girl. ‘No further action’ was taken. No further action needed to be taken, McCrink thought. Speers would do what he was told.
Agnes spent the trial in a state of bewilderment. She saw her socalled friends from the newspapers in the press gallery but they would not meet her eye. They put her aside like any worn thing. She wished to ask the police and lawyers about what occurred in the courtroom and what was her role as a mother but they would not answer. They acted like they were the owners of the whole world but they weren’t because she had her place too. There was more than one tale to tell of the fate of Pearl Gamble. There was a man sat across from her who was in the papers to do with the case. She asked the usher who he was and the usher said that is McCrink, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary. Agnes saw him outside the court with the Mackin girl from the library. He’d do well to do some inspecting in that department and then he wouldn’t look so full of himself.
They said they were going to put her on the stand to talk about suits but then they didn’t. That sergeant, Johnston, had come to the house looking for a light suit but she said Robert did not own a light suit but only a dark one. We’ll see about that was all he said with a smile on his face that was like the gleam from a plate on a coffin lid. Afterwards in Newry courthouse she heard the Crown solicitor saying that they wished her to be declared a hostile witness. Yes, she wanted to say, I am a hostile witness when you come to my house and turn it upside down. He might have been a trial to me and a harsh gift from a father who turned his back but I would not have him prey to a man the like of Johnston.
Sometimes when she saw him in the dock it was like she was seeing him for the first time, not a man like he thought himself but a little boy like when he would swim in the pool at Warrenpoint and say look at me Ma look at me. She wished with all her might that when he went to London he had stayed there not come back to a town of decay.
Robert was sat up in the dock trying to put the smart head on him like he understood what was going on. She knew from the start he was in for a fall. Her heart forbode her when she heard he was to be put on the stand. Robert could not stop himself. He had to know how things worked and he had to act like he knew it all. As well as that he had that white face on him that you seen when he was about to have one of them headaches. Agnes could see that the prosecutor was a man like an icy knife and besides there was the judge sat on his bench like a man from the testament who puts his hand in the fire but burneth not.
The courtroom was full to capacity on Monday morning. It was known that Robert would take the stand. He was to be cross-examined for seven hours. The night before Hughes had seen Robert sitting on his bunk with his head in his hands. Hughes had asked him what was wrong and Robert had said it was nothing. Nevertheless the next morning Hughes said there wasn’t much sign of the big courtroom lawyer. There wasn’t much old chat out of him that morning, Hughes said, and a big white face on him fit to put the frights on you. You would of felt sorry for him.
Robert was escorted to the witness box by an usher and the oath was administered. It was a moment he’d read about a hundred times in crime novels. The innocent man faces down his accusers. The truth, the whole truth. Putting one hand on the Bible and raising the other. He wanted everyone to see the importance of it, the idea of a vow taken, a man sworn before his fellows. But the Bible was a grubby and stained paperback, and the usher muttered. His own voice sounded cracked and unconvincing. He felt as if he was outside his body watching himself take the oath.
From the start the story was going in a different direction. He didn’t recognise himself as the figure that began to emerge from the prosecution case, the night stalker, the unsated abroad in the dark. How he had befriended Pearl, danced with her.
‘You asked for “It’s Now or Never”. That was your request for a dance with Miss Gamble?’
‘I never asked that. I asked for “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, but they didn’t have it.’ Everything coming out of his mouth seemed unconvincing, their version of the night gaining in the telling. She turned you down. You were enraged. You swore to get your revenge on her.
‘Why were there marks on your hands?’ the judge asked suddenly. Robert was confused. He didn’t know that the judge was allowed to ask questions like that. Curran demanded that he demonstrate the shoemaker’s grip on the instrument. Robert seeing the way the jury was looking at him, approving of the judge’s line of questioning, the miscreant made to account for himself.
‘Everybody knows that a cobbler gets marks on his hands.’ He could see Mervyn in the public gallery and wanted to get him up on the stand to tell them that. He wanted Mervyn to hold up his shoemaker’s hands, scarred and notched with tool-marks. But it was too late.
‘What happened to the files you bought that afternoon?’
‘I want to explain that later on. It’s important I don’t tell you now.’
He could see Agnes watching from the gallery. He could see that look on her face that said you’re trying to be too smart, son, as usual. Tell the man what he needs to know. Part of him wanted to admire the story that was emerging from the cross-examination, the jury being guided towards the old tales, the fireside tellings of the innocent and the guilty.
It was mid-afternoon before they came to the matter of what he had been wearing that night, the suit, and the shortie jacket laid out on the evidence table, the sleeves crooked and the shoulders hunched. Robert was still struggling to get back to the testimony he had imagined giving, the dense, scripted moments. He felt harried. He couldn’t gather his thoughts. Sometimes a question had been put to him two or three times before he answered. The night of the murder itself starting to slip away as the prosecution closed in on the matter of what Robert had been wearing.
‘Why did you ask the police for thirty-six hours to turn up the light-coloured suit?’
‘I lent the suit to Will. I wanted to ask him about what had happened to it.’
‘What about the jacket?’
‘That’s the whole thing. I left the jacket in the cloakroom at the hall. When I went to get it, it was gone. It was either stole or Will took it on me. He kept saying how much he liked it. I needed to get talking to him, but I couldn’t when the peelers were following me around all the time.’
McCrink could see that the jury didn’t believe him. That they thought he was trying to shift the blame onto Copeland.
‘The files. That’s what I wanted to say earlier, the shoemaking files were in the pocket of the coat. That’s why you couldn’t find them in the house.’
Robert looked from face to face. He realised what had happened. He could see the character he had become in their eyes. The rat. The weasel. The man who would do anything to get out of a fix. Gibbering in the shadow of the noose. The courtroom was silent. He looked up and saw ‘pretty’ Joan Donergan in the public gallery. He wanted to tell them again about how he had picked her up and swung her around. How they all wanted to dance with him that night, how he made them feel fleet and graceful. The questions kept coming. Did he hide the bundle of clothes in the septic tank behind the house? Did he lie in wait for Pearl? Robert blurted out answers, contradicted himself. The mouth that was doing the talking seemed to belong to someone else.
Brown asked him about the river incident. Robert told him how Johnston had put the gun to his head, the threat to ‘blow his fucking brains out’. The wording sounding improbable, some desperado phrase from a film.
In the end there was unease about Robert’s testimony. He did not show himself to be a model citizen. His explanations of what had happened to the clothing seemed far-fetched. But his denials of involvement in the death of Pearl Gamble were vehement and repeated. ‘I had nothing to do with it.’ ‘I didn’t kill her.’ ‘It wasn’t me.’ During a cross-examination lasting almost seven hours, Robert did not crack, and Attorney General Brian McGuinness was unable to make any serious inroads into his defence.