On Monday afternoon both counsels delivered their closing statements. The prosecution went back over the main points of their case. McGuinness admitted that the evidence against the defendant was all circumstantial, but was ‘none the worse for that’. The shoemaker’s file bought in Woolworths, the witnesses who testified as to what McGladdery had been wearing. The jury were reminded that Pearl ‘had been known’ to McGladdery before that night. He conjured up the picture of the accused practising his stabbing technique on the copy of the Mickey Spillane novel The Long Wait. He invited them to recognise the type. McGladdery was a drifter, a no-good, a corner boy who had tried to shift the blame for his crime to his friend. Pearl had rejected his advances that night and he had lain in wait for her at Damolly Cross, beaten, stabbed and strangled her. McGuinness dwelt on Pearl’s nakedness, the stripped remains, eyes opened to the unholy night, her nude, violated stare.
Brown’s defence was measured. The evidence against McGladdery was all circumstantial. Each strand of the prosecution case was open to interpretation. The witnesses were not consistent as to what the defendant had been wearing. A hand other than Robert’s could have placed the bundle of clothes in the septic tank. Robert had only met Pearl in passing as a child – he did not know her. The marks in the paperback were not proof of a stabbing technique being ‘practised’. There was no fingerprint or forensic evidence. No eye-witness testimony as to Robert’s presence at the murder scene. Robert’s explanation as to what had happened to his shortie jacket was plausible. Despite Robert’s demeanour in the witness box it was possible that Will Copeland or someone else had taken the jacket from the cloakroom at the Orange hall that night.
Brown made much of the river incident. Was it believable that the police had taken the defendant into Corry Square so that his clothes could dry? He could have dried his clothes at home, or changed into fresh clothes. Brown said that the jury must believe Robert’s story about being interrogated by teams of detectives until late at night. If they had lied about that, what else had they lied about? What stealthy hand had placed the bundle of clothing in the septic tank?
With regard to the evidence of what Robert had been wearing, Brown pointed out that the lights in the hall had been low during the dance, and that the air was full of cigarette smoke. That it was possible for certain materials to shimmer and appear lighter than they actually were. He said that eye-witnesses were often mistaken, even multiple eye-witnesses, not that they were lying but that they were drawn into the current of a story and their accounts were shaped by it unbeknownst to themselves.
Brown told the jury that the night yielded up more than one version of events. Could anyone have carried Pearl over half a mile from Damolly Cross to Weir’s Rock? He reminded the jury about the car that Ronnie Whitcroft had seen driving towards Damolly Cross as she was driven back down the hill.
Brown closed on the matter of motive. Pearl was only one of a number of girls that Robert had danced with that night. Despite what the prosecution had said, he barely knew her. One witness had suggested some discord between them when they danced, but no one else had noticed anything. Robert’s attention seemed to have been focused on Joan Donergan. Much weight had been placed on the request for the Elvis Presley song ‘It’s Now or Never’, allegedly requested by Robert for his final dance with Pearl. But Robert had in fact asked for a different song. The marks on Robert’s hands were consistent with the use of a shoemaker’s file. The marks on his face tallied with his assertion that there had been an accident with the bullworker.
During both closing statements Robert seemed dreamy and absent. He did not look at either counsel, or at the jury.
On 17th October 1961, the second last day of Robert’s trial, a petty thief, James Hanratty, was arrested in Liverpool and charged with murder. On 22nd August Michael Gregston had been sitting in a car with Valerie Storie at a layby on the A6 when they were approached by a man wearing a black suit. After abducting the couple and forcing them to drive around Berkshire for several hours, the man shot Gregston, raped and then shot Storie, who was crippled but survived. Hanratty was picked out of an identity parade by Storie after each of the men on the identity parade repeated the phrase used by the murderer, ‘Be quiet, will you, I’m thinking.’
Despite a lack of forensic evidence and strong alibi evidence, Hanratty was found guilty and sentenced to death in what became known as the A6 murder case. He would be scheduled to hang on 22nd February 1962.
There was widespread disquiet following the conviction. The case of Ruth Ellis was referred to. Ruth Ellis was a nightclub hostess who had been convicted of shooting and killing her lover, David Blakely, outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead on 10th April 1955. Ellis admitted to the murder during unsupervised police interrogation and in reply to a direct question from prosecution counsel during her trial. Shortly before her execution she was visited by the Bishop of Stepney, Joost de Blank. He repeated the phrase she used. ‘It is quite clear to me that I was not the person who shot him. When I saw myself with the revolver I knew I was another person.’
Despite her admission of guilt, doubts persisted about the quality of the police evidence and the ability of Ellis, whose hands had been damaged by rheumatic fever as a child, to fire six accurate shots from the heavy Smith & Wesson revolver. Twenty-eight-year-old Ellis was hanged at Holloway prison on 13th July 1955 by Albert Pierrepoint.
Threads of petty thievery and vice run through both accounts. Ellis had given birth to children by two different fathers. She worked as a nightclub hostess. Hanratty was a petty criminal and car thief. Gregston and Storie had been conducting an affair when their car was approached in the dark approaches to Shepperton village. Storie was subject to a violent assault before she was shot and left for dead.
There were shadowy figures in each background. Ellis said in the days before her execution that she had been driven to the Magdala pub by a friend called Cussen who had then given her the weapon. Her solicitor, whom she later dismissed, was a friend of Cussen’s. Observers were puzzled as to why, when she confessed her guilt under questioning by prosecution counsel, she used the exact form of words that would guarantee a conviction for murder rather than manslaughter and so put her on a path to the scaffold. Ellis was also friendly with the procurer Stephen Ward, who ten years later was a central figure in the Profumo scandal.
A world of fences, half-alibis, small-time roguery. Girls who worked as hostesses in seedy nightclubs. The Black Cat. The Magdala. There was a feeling that they still operated within the confines of wartime shortages. Much of their lives had an improvised feel to it. They had been brought up in the era of rationing and post-war shortages and they hungered for the threadbare glamour on offer. They appeared in the News of the World, brazen, no better than they should be. They bring to mind the photograph of Myra Hindley, the sluttish mouth and brassy unrepentant stare.
Observers at McGladdery’s trial said that he did not seem to be fully aware of what was happening to him. There is a theme of absence running through these cases, people inattentive to their own cause. Ellis, Hanratty and McGladdery. In each case they seem complicit in their own downfall.
That night when Robert was taken back to Crumlin Road, Hughes was waiting for him with a torn-out front page from the Telegraph.
‘They commuted Bratty,’ he said, ‘detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Robert said, ‘it’s too late for me anyhow.’
The following day was set aside for Judge Curran’s summing-up and the beginning of the jury’s deliberations. McCrink took his place early in the public gallery. A verdict was not expected that day. There was a sense of the court ceremonials coming into their own as the verdict approached. The ill-fitting wigs and shabby gowns. The archaic commands. The words of condemnation given their due weight. Lance Curran had prepared extensive notes and he read from them in a monotone, moving through each aspect of the case and giving it due weight. At first Robert appeared to be following him, but after a while he drifted off. The details of the case were like something that had happened to someone else a long time ago. A dusty, archived murder. Something you read about in an old newspaper you found lining a drawer, Judge Curran being meticulous, dry as a bone, working his way through the forensics, the time of death, the body temperatures. McCrink saw him looking up at Robert at that point, staring at him over the top of his glasses. McCrink sat up. Malice hanging like ectoplasm in the silent courtroom. Patricia Curran and Pearl Gamble. McCrink shivered. He felt as if cold nineteen-year-old hands were drawing him downwards into some elaborate devising of the underworld. Judge Curran started to deal with the dry clothes incident which Brown had made much of in his closing arguments.
‘Before you would agree there is any knavery on the part of the police force you will want strong evidence and not merely the say-so of a man charged by this court.’
Curran moved on to the issue of what Robert had been wearing on the night of the murder.
‘Thirteen witnesses said that McGladdery wore a light-blue suit. You will be very slow to say they were all mistaken.’
McCrink saw the barrister Brown half-rise to his feet as Curran was speaking, then sink back into his seat.
Judge Curran finished his summing-up by reminding the jury that they must deliver a unanimous verdict and they withdrew to the jury room. Forty minutes later, they were back.
McCrink had met Speers and Johnston in the foyer outside the courtroom.
‘He sabotaged McGladdery’s case,’ McCrink said, ‘the judge deliberately pulled the rug out from under him.’
‘It wasn’t much of a case to begin with, the murdering little shit,’ Johnston said, ‘the fatherless little fuck.’
‘Who put the clothes in the tank?’ McCrink said.
‘The jury will tell you that, and that’s not going to take them long by the look of it,’ Speers said. ‘The clothes were in the tank. This town takes care of its own.’
‘And who takes care of you?’ McCrink said. ‘I saw your branch file. The hotel in Bangor? That’s enough for them to own you for the rest of your natural life. I know the way it works.’
‘You and McGladdery’s got something in common, you know that?’ Johnston said. ‘You come back here in your fancy London duds and act the big shot. We took McGladdery down and we’ll take you down too.’
‘That’s enough, Sergeant,’ Speers said, ‘let me talk to the inspector.’
McCrink and Speers faced each other in the court foyer.
‘Maybe you’d like to go outside and express your reservations about McGladdery to Mrs Gamble out there,’ Speers said. ‘Do you remember going to that house?’
‘You decided McGladdery was guilty and went after him on that basis. You never looked at anyone else.’
‘It’s up to the jury to decide if he’s innocent or guilty.’
‘No it’s not. You and Judge Curran already decided.’
‘Do you know what you should do? Go home out of this and get your own house in order. See to that woman of yours, the librarian. Maybe you’ll look after her better than you did the last one.’
McCrink looked up to see the court ushers move among the people in the foyer informing them that the jury had come back. He started to walk towards the courtroom and found himself face to face with Agnes McGladdery. She was wearing a yellow dress and her make-up was garish; she resembled a forlorn Pierrot, a face turned to the crowd in lurid woe. The ushers were telling people to take their seats in the courthouse and McCrink saw the judge’s tipstaff slip through his chamber door like a man who knew that bad tidings were at hand. Brown was talking to the solicitor Luke Curran and shaking his head. McCrink knew that a jury out for such a short time was not a good sign. At the courtroom door Mervyn caught McCrink by the arm.
‘What’s happening, Mr McCrink? It’s all changed.’ There was a sense of something long-incubated coming to pass, plans come to fruition. McCrink wondered how much of it led back to the judge’s door. Speers and Johnston went into the courtroom in front of him, followed by the robed and bewigged attendants of the prosecution, the court ushers and tipstaffs.
Years later one of the jurors, Jack Landelis, described what had happened in the jury room. ‘I took an A4 sheet of paper and tore it into twelve pieces and passed it around. I says, on that piece of paper write either guilty or not guilty, and then we’ll start discussing it.’
From Landelis’s account there did not appear to be any deliberation at all over any aspect of the evidence. There would not have been time for any deliberation. The jury returned with a verdict forty minutes after retiring. Each piece of paper carried a guilty verdict. Later in the interview Landelis discusses McGladdery’s demeanour in court. ‘He didn’t come across as a goody two-shoes,’ he says, and laughs.
Contemporary accounts of the McGladdery case report the guilty finding and the sentence of death passed on Robert McGladdery by Judge Curran. Curran asks if there is any reason ‘why judgement of death and execution should not now be awarded to you’.
Robert replies, ‘There’s a whole lot of things I could say, but it wouldn’t make any difference. I understand that your Honour has a duty to perform, but there is no man in this court who can say I murdered Pearl Gamble for I didn’t. I am innocent of the crime.’
The coverage is muted, carried on the inside pages of the newspapers, reported as second or third item on the radio news. Compared to the coverage of the investigation the guilty verdict was low-key, the newspaper accounts faltering when it came to the sentencing. McGladdery pale and guilty in the dock, the sentence handed down, Lance Curran placing the square of black silk on his head to pronounce the death penalty, scenes that appeared to come to them out of the past, the flickering melodramas of early cinema. Both Curran and McGladdery seem aware that the moment should not be understated, that a level of the high-flown is required, that in the face of last things, a certain amount of formal rhetoric is acceptable.
You are reminded of the cover of the Mickey Spillane novel found in Robert’s room, the man struggling with his bonds, his eyes fixed on the faithless woman.
However, once Robert had spoken he sat down again and seemed to take no more interest in proceedings. Observers in the public gallery remarked on his apparent lack of emotion.
That night people gathered on high streets to see the images of the case. It was the start of the era of mass production of televisions and the sets were made available through high-street outlets. There was a feeling that the new medium would know how to address the verdict and sentencing. People stood rapt, watching the silent footage of McGladdery being escorted from Downpatrick courthouse into a prison van. There was some kind of high-spec theatrics at work in the televisual images. Through the transmission static there was a burnish on the scene, a futurist hue.
When the coverage cut away to the murder scene at Weir’s Rock, it had the eerie look of studio-lit fictions. People understood that new truths were being made available to them. The world of rumoured happenings, sightings, half-truths, the allusive and fleeting values of the medium.
McCrink stopped at the Ardmore Hotel on his way into Newry. Margaret was waiting for him. They watched the news in the television lounge. The hotel looked across to Damolly and they could see the street lights along the terrace of mill houses where Agnes McGladdery lived, the stubble field and Weir’s Rock rising up in the darkness where the lights ended.
‘The execution date has been fixed for the 7th November, but McGladdery has appealed,’ McCrink said.
‘I wonder what his mother’s thinking now,’ Margaret said.
‘Brown has a few weeks to prepare for the Court of Appeal. If that fails then the only other option is an appeal for clemency to Brian Faulkner.’
‘Will any of it work?’
‘They commuted Bratty. They won’t want to commute another one. And there’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘Curran.’ The judge pronouncing sentence. The judge taking the blood that was owed him.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘The judge sabotaged McGladdery. I’m going to sabotage the judge.’
‘You can’t do that. You know the place you’re in.’
Nyuk. The town of thieves. McCrink drove home to Rostrevor past the old counting house. The tinkers were awake. You could see shapes against the firelight. They never sleep. They wander lost through their own narrative. They are night’s children. No one knows them.