McCrink parked a hundred yards from the entrance to the Glen and walked to the gates. On the way the car radio had forecast gale-force westerlies. The waves were coming over the low sea wall opposite the gates to the Curran house. Seaweed and shingle had been carried over the wall onto the roadway, and the wind whipped the bare trees on the shore side, broken branches littering the pavement, the night in disarray.
Once McCrink had stepped through the gates of the Glen, the wind died a little. He walked up the driveway, glancing into the trees. The place where Patricia Curran’s body had been found. You felt as if there was a storybook evil abroad in the tree shadows. A killing from the Carpathians or some other remote and mountainous province. He could see it when he shut his eyes. A community huddled on the edge of a forest. A place of blood feuds. Of wolf-prowled outlands. Old terrors from his childhood returned. He imagined eyes watching him from the trees. He thought of a fabled man-beast from an old book of hours.
The Glen was windowless now, builders’ skips and shuttering on the lawns, and it had the look of a theatrical prop, a painted set of a gloomy mansion, put there to further the cause of overwrought fictions. But when McCrink stepped into the hallway he could feel the retained cold in the building, hear his feet on the parquet floor and could remember the way he felt when he stood looking down at the body of Elizabeth Figg in Dukes Meadows and when he had stood at Weir’s Rock in the townland of Damolly. This was the place. These were the death-realms. By torchlight he felt his way up the stairway, the brass-bound stair rods loose beneath his feet. On the second turn he looked for the servants’ stairway going upwards to the attics and roof spaces, the garret rooms. The narrow stairs took him to the second floor. He opened a small door onto a corridor where the flooring had been lifted so that you had to walk on the bare joists. The roof beams were visible and in places slates had been blown away so that the corridor was exposed to the night. The beams creaked and the slates of the old house shifted against each other. McCrink realised that he was above the room with the bloodstain on the floor, the master bedroom. Beaten, strangled, stabbed. Doris Curran had known where she would send him. There was an atmosphere of contrived dread, madwomen abroad on night-time heaths, the sound of the wind rising to a shriek. Doris raised in Broadmoor, the prison for the criminally insane, Doris counsel of the leering mad, guide and mentor to the blasted places of the soul. The box of phone records was where she had said it would be, sitting on the dressing table of the maid’s room. McCrink approaching it as though it were a kind of wergild, bounty from a madwoman’s hoard. He lifted it and took it downstairs.
He drove away from Whiteabbey with the box sitting on the passenger seat beside him. He felt as if he had come into possession of the deed and codicils to all the doings of the Currans, a bequest willed onto him out of the rancorous night.
McCrink drove to Newry and went to the phone box on Hill Street. He booked a call to Len Barrett at the Express in London. He waited for several minutes to be put through, the call routed through the cross-channel interchanges, listening to the cable hum, lost in the transnational networks. He got through to the Express building and waited on the line for Barrett.
He could hear newsroom noises in the background as he waited on the line. The presses would be turning for the morning editions. He remembered being in the place at night, feeling the whole building move to the vibration of the machinery, the production staff coming and going, chapel heads, masters of print unions, men of conviction and inner strength, burly, shirt-sleeved. Operators of vast and complex printing presses. He looked through the misted windows of the phone box, the street empty at 11.30, the blurred shapes of the mannequins in Foster Newell’s window, regret archived on provincial streetscapes.
‘Barrett?’
‘This is Eddie McCrink.’
‘What do you want at this time of night, McCrink?’
‘Have you been covering the McGladdery case?’
‘Small fry here, I’m afraid. The big news is Hanratty and the A6 murders.’
‘I think McGladdery’s been stitched up.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that. Thinking isn’t proving. McGladdery’s the kind of small-town hood that people like seeing strung up. If they think about McGladdery at all over here, which they don’t, it’s hang him and good riddance. Even the anti-death penalty crowd would be glad to see the back of him. Gives murderers a bad name.’
‘What if I show you something to do with the judge who pronounced sentence on him? He’s the father of Patricia Curran. He’s up for privy councillor.’
‘There was talk about him at the time of that murder.’
‘The parents of the girl’s boyfriend got a call from Judge Curran asking them if they had seen Patricia. The parents swore blind the call came after the girl’s body had been found.’
‘I remember. So you think that if you take down the judge, they’ll have to retry the case.’
‘They’ll have to consider commuting at least.’
‘But you can’t prove any of this. The parents could be mistaken.’
‘They’re not.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I have the phone records from that night. The calls from the Curran house are timed.’
‘How did you get those?’
‘Patricia’s mother gave them to me.’
‘Jesus, McCrink, you’re in deep water in that place. Send me the phone records and I’ll have a look.’
Robert McGladdery’s appeal against his death sentence was heard on 16th November. The appeal court president was Justice H. A. McVeigh, who had been defence counsel for Iain Hay Gordon in his trial for the murder of Patricia Curran. There were nine grounds for appeal out of which three main grounds were identified. The first was that Robert’s demeanour on the days following the murder was not consistent with someone who had committed a sordid crime and who was under relentless surveillance, and that the trial judge should have brought the jury’s attention to this. The other two grounds concerned Judge Curran’s remarks in his summing-up when he said that the jury should be slow to infer any ‘knavery’ on the part of the police on the word of a man ‘charged before this court’. Brown pointed to the implied undermining of the accused man in Curran’s phraseology. Brown’s approach to this issue suggests that he believed there was a concerted effort to make the facts of the case fit McGladdery as the killer, to the exclusion of all else. It suggests that the police were willing to go to almost any lengths to prove McGladdery guilty.
Brown brought up the word ‘knavery’ used by Judge Curran. It was a word not in common use, a medievalism, it conjures up a world of vassals and lieges, courts where dark pranksters wander gloomy banqueting halls in cap and bells.
The final main ground of appeal was the judge’s suggestion that thirteen witnesses had identified McGladdery as wearing a light-coloured suit. Brown contended that this was a determination that could only have been made by the jury. By commenting on it, Curran had effectively removed one of the central planks of the defence.
After several hours’ deliberation the Appeal Court rejected all nine grounds of appeal. The execution date was fixed for 20th December. McGladdery’s last hope was a grant of clemency from the Minister for Home Affairs, Brian Faulkner.
Robert was moved to the death cell in the basement following the failure of his appeal. Brown visited him every week to update him on the progress of his clemency appeal. Brown had contacted organisations who advocated the end of capital punishment and several had embarked on lengthy correspondences with him.
Robert exercised on his own in the prison yard after the other prisoners had been returned to their cells. During the trial he had set aside the account of his life but now he took it up again. Mervyn continued to visit him and he would ask Mervyn for details of things that had happened in his past.
‘You think you remember things but when you go to write them down they’re different,’ he told Mervyn. He asked for dates and times, the past becoming indistinct, dissolving into textures, the lough fogs hiding the town from his gaze.
‘Sometimes I feel like I’m away in the head,’ Robert said.
‘I wish you were away in the head,’ Mervyn said, ‘at least then they’d put you in the mental.’
Robert didn’t tell Mervyn that he was glad to be where he was instead of in the mental hospital. Will used to talk about it all the time. Will said he’d seen it many’s the time, the Downshire Hospital, the bedlam with its high red-brick walls. Will talked about padded rooms and doors with no handles. He said that an inmate had escaped and strangled a woman in her own bed. When Robert went up Damolly Hill in the dark he waited for the sound of padding feet in the darkness at his back. Not looking behind him for fear of what he might see. The vacant face, slack-jawed, dribbling.
‘I know what Pearl must of felt like,’ he told Mervyn.
‘Maybe you’d be as well not talking like that,’ Mervyn said.
‘What are they saying in the town?’
‘They’re saying you must of killed Pearl.’
Robert could hear them working on the gallows from his cell. The trapdoor hung from crude brass hinges. When the carpenters tested it it could be heard on B and C Wings. Robert kept getting pieces of information from the prisoners who delivered his meals and his mail. The knot on the rope was a sheepshank or some such, an artful arrangement with an improvised look to it.
On the Sunday night after the appeal he was woken by the head warder, McCulla, playing a torch on his face.
‘You wanted to know about the scaffold? It’s finished now so come on and get your fucking look.’
Robert followed him out of the cell and down the corridor, feeling the cold, the black basalt chill. McCulla opened the door of the execution chamber. There was something comical about the thing. Unserious. The knocked-together look of the whole structure. The fresh-sawn planks and shining boltheads. Wood shavings lying on the ground under the gallows.
‘There’s no rope,’ Robert said.
‘Allen’ll be here with his kit any day now,’ McCulla said. ‘I’ll let you know, don’t worry.’
Robert McGladdery’s appeal for clemency to the Minister for Home Affairs, Brian Faulkner, was turned down on 5th December 1961. Across the top of the letter informing Robert’s legal team of the decision, Faulkner has written in pen, ‘Let the law take its course.’ It is hard to know why he felt that he had to add this touch to a document that already stated his determination not to grant clemency in clear legal terms. It is as if Faulkner saw the outworking of the legal system as represented by the formal, typed letter as one thing, and the law itself as another.
James Brown told Robert about the failure of his clemency bid on the evening of 5th December. He said afterwards that Robert didn’t show any emotion. As with the delivery of the guilty verdict Brown wondered about Robert’s reaction. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t show emotion, but that emotion was in fact absent, an observation made by others at his sentencing, the same absence noticed in Ruth Ellis and James Hanratty at their murder trials.
‘I’m going to finish what I’m writing about my life,’ Robert said, ‘there’s time for that.’
The warder McCulla was as good as his word. He woke Robert on the morning of the 23rd and handed him a piece of paper. The words on it were printed in a heavy hand.
Execution Box No 2
Contents
Ropes 2
Block and fall 1
Straps 2
Sandbag 1
Measuring Rod 1
Piece of Chalk 1
Pack Thread 1
Copper Wire 1
Piece Cap 1
‘What do you think of that, McGladdery?’ McVeigh said. ‘What do you think of that?’
Robert understood what each part of the apparatus did, apart from the copper wire. There was a reassuring old-fashioned quality to the list. Plain artisanal objects. He liked the idea that the whole thing would be gone about in a workmanlike and everyday fashion. He remembered a phrase that Mervyn had used when he was showing him how to cut leather.
‘Measure twice and cut once, isn’t that what they say, Mr McCulla?’
‘Measure twice and drop once in your case, McGladdery,’ McCulla said.
‘Tell us this,’ Robert said, ‘what’s the copper wire for?’
‘You’ll find out brave and soon,’ McCulla said.
‘I just like to know how things work.’
‘Is that why you stripped Pearl to the skin? You wanted to know how girls work? You wanted to get yourself an eyeful?’
McCrink rang Harry Ferguson and arranged to meet him in the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcastle. McCrink drove down the coast in gathering dark on Monday evening. There was static in the air, thunderheads out at sea, outward-bound freighters just visible on the horizon. McCrink had made the call but felt that it was he who had been summoned, Judge Curran’s election agent waiting for him.
The crowds were sparse on the front at Newcastle. McCrink could see figures moving in the amusements, the first drops of rain falling as he parked in front of the hotel.
He found Ferguson in a glassed-in annex. He was sitting in a wing-backed armchair facing the sea. He looked like a keeper of secrets, a spymaster. Something about him made McCrink feel uncouth. A provincial policeman, rustic and untutored.
They sat in leather chairs looking out over the golf links. Golfers moving on the tees and the greens, taking shelter under the salt-lashed palms on the shoreline.
‘I wondered if you’d like a transfer back to England.’
‘I’d prefer to stay here.’
‘I read your file. Your commander in Scotland Yard reported morale problems. There were some family matters.’
‘My marriage.’
‘The women. It’s always the women, isn’t it, Eddie? I visit with Doris Curran in the mental hospital. No one else visits with her. Apart from you of course. She thought her daughter was a difficult girl. These things are always complicated.’
It was the way people like Ferguson worked. Hints and asides and things left hanging in the air. McCrink knew he was being warned off Judge Curran again.
‘Why did Faulkner not commute McGladdery’s sentence?’
‘He’s already commuted Bratty this year. Besides, how they’re seen on the mainland is important to boys like Faulkner. They like to have the hard men on their side. And the hard men like to see murderers swing.’
‘What do you think about Judge Curran’s part in the trial?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In his summing-up. He hung McGladdery out to dry. He undermined his defence.’
‘The jury were going to convict him anyway. You could see that. They wanted to.’
‘He had a chance up until Curran opened his mouth.’
‘He never had a chance.’
‘I think he had a chance.’
‘It’ll make a difference to your career, you know. A perverted murderer sent to his maker in your first year as Inspector of Constabulary. You’ve got a backwater posting now. A hanging could get you a big job.’
‘Just as long as McGladdery is executed. Whether he did it or not.’
‘If the court says he did it, then he did it, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.’
‘There is something I can do.’
‘Your friend Barrett at the Express.’
‘How did you know?’
Ferguson waved a hand in the air. McCrink thought about the Special Branch headquarters, the miles of files, the telephone intercepts.
‘He’s waiting for me to give him the go-ahead to publish the phone records on Judge Curran. It’ll prove he was lying about the night of Patricia’s murder.’
‘What do you think happened that night?’
‘I think that Patricia was killed in the house and her body was carried outside. Doris Curran was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. There are documented instances of sufferers killing loved ones under the influence of delusions.’
‘I would confirm that diagnosis before I went any further. Besides, if that is the way it happened, it is simply a case of a man desperately trying to protect his wife. It’s understandable.’
‘An innocent man was convicted of the crime. He might have gone to the gallows.’
‘But he didn’t.’
Ferguson bent down and undid the catch on the briefcase at his feet, holding it open for a minute before closing it. McCrink saw the brown cardboard folder inside. It was the file containing the phone records from the Glen.
‘How did you get that?’
‘The world moves on, Mr McCrink. The papers are full of Hanratty and the A6 murders. There’s no conspiracy. Nobody cares about McGladdery. Or about Pearl for that matter. Barrett’s editor didn’t want the story. He traded the file back to me in the hope that I’ll give him a break on some future story. That’s the way it works.’
Ferguson got to his feet. ‘You might think I’m here to mark your card and you might be right. But as I said, I read your file. A woman can be a ruination of many’s a man. When you get the chance to rebuild you should take it. McGladdery is nobody’s angel. Let the Newry boys deal with it. And don’t go back to the Glen. Patricia Curran is dead.’
‘What do you know about a woman ruining a man?’
‘I know the same things you do. My wife’s long gone. Out of my life and into a bottle. And by the way, if I were you I’d check out the Special Branch file on your new librarian friend. Read it more carefully this time. She’s still a ward of court. She can be committed against her will at any time. You could go to see her at Holywell instead of Mrs Curran. Who, incidentally, won’t be receiving any more visitors.’
McCrink watched Ferguson from the window as he walked across the car park. The wind blew his raincoat out behind him like a cloak, a ragged, flapping thing. He looked like a figure from history, a hunched janissary laden with corrupt knowledge. McCrink knew he should take Ferguson’s advice. Judge Curran and McGladdery. He had a sense of preordained happenings. The scene outside darkened as the light went behind the mountain and night fell on the town so that McCrink could see the promenade lights through the rain. Ferguson had crossed the road to Main Street and was making his way along it, an air of bad tidings in his wake. McCrink thought about the killer. The lack of forensic evidence left on the clothing. A frenzied attack but the killer left no traces of himself at the scene. He took out his notebook and read what he had written down about the items left in the septic tank. Vest. Coat. Tie. Black leather shoes.
He drove back to Newry. When he went into Corry Square Speers and Johnston were at the front desk.
‘Something we can do for you, sir?’ Johnston said. McCrink looked at Speers. Johnston made no move to leave the room. He wore his tunic open and his uniform hat pushed back on his head.
‘The clothes in the tank. Why was the suit not there? Why go to the risk of being seen putting the jacket and the shoes and tie in the tank and not put the suit in?’
‘Maybe the suit wasn’t bloodstained,’ Speers said.
‘Then why hide it?’
‘Maybe he set light to the suit, burned it in the grate,’ Johnston said.
‘He wouldn’t burn the suit and not burn the rest of the clothes.’
‘I don’t get your point, sir. You’d near think you wanted McGladdery to get off,’ Johnston said.
‘The jury did not deliberate over the evidence at all.’
‘They deliberated as much as they needed to.’
‘It’s McGladdery,’ Speers said.
‘We nailed him,’ Johnston said, ‘us and Judge Curran.’
‘That’s the way it is, Inspector,’ Speers said.
‘That’s the way it is around here,’ Johnston said.
The next day the Newry papers reported that the hangman, Harry Allen, had arrived in Belfast. The Reporter carried a photograph of Allen. A tall man with a moustache and hair Brylcreemed back from his forehead. He is wearing a bow tie and there is a carnation in his buttonhole. The photograph seems to have caught him in motion, turning towards the camera with a glass in his hand, interrupted in the act of charming a lady. He has a sensuous mouth and mournful showman’s eyes.
‘What is it about hangmen?’ McCrink said. Men plucked from obscure occupations and set upon the stage. You wanted them to be burdened with the loneliness of their calling. You wanted an awareness of last things. Instead you got second-rate theatre barkers.
‘It’s all about the theatre,’ Margaret said, ‘village entertainments on the edge of the forest. People know that bad things are lurking just outside the lamplight. You have morality plays. Actors dressed as Famine and Pestilence.’
There seemed to be a requirement that there be an unprofessional element to the execution process. The clergyman with his head bowed to his breviary. Everyone gathering around the prisoner, amateurish, bumbling.
‘They’re all like that. The guillotine. The electric chair. They’re like something you put together in the garage.’
‘It can’t be seen as being professional.’
‘There’s always stories of things going wrong. People twisting at the end of a rope.’
‘Massive voltages. Body fluids heated to boiling point. A look of surprise on the executed man’s face.’
‘It goes right back to medieval times. They brought a relish to it. The prisoner disembowelled and his entrails held up in front of his face.’
‘The way that each branch of the citizenry has to be represented. The clergyman, the doctor.’
There was more to it than that, he thought. The public did not want the process to become too professional. It was important that it be gruesome. They wanted the prisoner anatomised, rended. They wanted the viscera engaged with, the very matter and substance of the person. They wanted the death-tics, the spasms, the ghastly twitches.
‘It all reminds me of being in hospital,’ she said. ‘They give you a piece of rubber to bite on before they put the thing on your head, the electrodes.’
‘You’re not going back to that.’
‘You can’t say that. I’m going to protest outside the prison tomorrow morning. They could send me back but somebody has to do something. You’ve gone very quiet on your big campaign to bring down Judge Curran.’
‘You never told me you were still a ward of court.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Ferguson.’
‘I see.’
He stayed in her flat the night before the execution. He let himself in at seven o’clock and found her asleep on top of the bed. He left her and went out. The town was fogbound, the sound of traffic muffled. The design of the mill buildings at the end of Canal Street based on eighteenth-century Venetian palaces. You thought of cloaked figures hurrying through the evening gloom, stilettos wielded. The merchant buildings along the Mall resembled some Weimar street, the banking functions fallen into disuse. The overblown architectures of lost eras, gaunt remnants standing alongside the canal.
At the end of Hill Street he saw the Frontier cinema, the lit frontage seeming to harbour some old lonesomeness. The film was Ben-Hur. It was what he needed. Happenings on an epic scale. The thunderous chariots bearing down. Themes of betrayal. Covert sexual undertones.
He bought a ticket and went in as the newsreel was starting. He took his seat in the dark, watching footage of nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll. The dark fusion. The nano-events at work, the trance clouds, shaped and verified in the heavens, boiling upwards. And the roar of the explosion, the dream-percussive, awe rolling over the far-off ocean. McCrink understood. You weren’t here to be educated. These newsreels were here to instruct you in the terror to come. You were supposed to think about the seeping radiation, the deep cell damage. How someone can be altered on the fundamental level.
In the foyer after the film he saw Will Copeland with a group of others. Will wanted them to be blood brothers. He said they should take solemn oaths. That they should be bound for life and if something happened to one then the other should take a terrible revenge. McCrink felt Copeland’s recreant gaze on him. Where were you in the two days following the murder? He wondered if Copeland had seen the book in Robert’s room that night when they were getting ready to go out, The Long Wait, the woman poised for flight, the man straining against his bonds.
McCrink walked down Hill Street past Foster Newell’s, then crossed onto the Mall. He passed Mervyn’s shoe-repair shop. There was a light on in the back. He tried the door and found it open. He went in and lifted the flap of the shop counter and went into the back room past the lasts and glues and ranked files, the rank organic smell of the adhesives in the cold night air.
Mervyn’s darkroom was in the back of the shop. Duplicate photographs of the murder scene and of the autopsy hung above a photographer’s bath. The crossroads at Damolly, the roads leading off with a choice of endings but each destination fraught. McCrink wondered what meetings between travellers might take place at such a spot, what journeys related. Next was a series of shots of the girl’s clothing, the hapless mislaid items scattered on the fellside. Beside them the photographs of the body at the crime scene and on the autopsy slab. Nude, pornographic shots that looked like photographs of different women taken over a period of time. Looking asleep in some of them. In others posed against the landscape. Women laid out on the hillside like carrion. A directory of the dead. There was a series of close-ups of the girl’s face, the eyes open and glazed, the lips parted.
He turned to see Mervyn standing in the back door.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ Mervyn said.
‘I didn’t ask you if you did,’ McCrink said. ‘But if I had the time back I would have had you in to Corry Square and sweated you. You and Copeland and half the men in this town, and Bratty too for that matter.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Mervyn said.
‘Nothing. You can stay here with your girlfriend.’ McCrink backed out of the room and through the cobbler’s shop. He found himself on the Mall again. The fog smelt of the silt exposed at low tide as he tried to find his way back to Margaret’s flat, adrift in the river stink and corpse murk of the place, bearings lost in the marsh town.
That night Harry Ferguson played billiards with Judge Curran at one guinea a ball. Curran did not refer to the execution due to take place the following morning. He spoke about his bid for a seat on the Privy Council.
‘I trust I have Faulkner’s support?’
‘His hand is strengthened by taking a hard line on crime.’
‘He only thinks his hand is strengthened. They do not care about Faulkner in Westminster. Nevertheless there is a seat for the Province on the Privy Council to be filled and it is partly in his gift.’
‘You have his support. McCrink is unlikely to upset the apple cart. He won’t be seeing Mrs Curran any more.’
Curran bent to the table. He crooked his fingers on the baize and placed the cue across the bridge.
‘The mentally ill are less morally intact than ordinary people,’ he said.
You’re some boy to be talking about morally intact, Ferguson thought. He chalked his cue. He bent to the table. Ferguson and the judge played on into the night.
When McCrink got back to the flat Margaret was awake. She had taken a Bible from the shelf and it lay open on the bed beside her.
‘The Bible?’ he said.
‘I couldn’t think of anything else.’
‘My father used to read to us from the Bible every night.’
‘Did you ever think about the name Holywell? I wonder if there is a holy well there?’
A place steeped in belief. Rags hanging from tree branches, miraculous medals and rosary beads tied to the lower limbs. A place where the halt and the barren came to pray.
‘I’m not sure a cure’s that easily got.’
‘No. You’re probably right.’
‘Where was Pearl buried?’
‘The Meeting House graveyard.’
‘And we know where Robert is going to be buried.’ In a yard at the back of Crumlin road prison, quicklime poured on his corpse. A high-walled, sunless yard.
‘They used to say that nothing would grow in the yard where murderers were buried,’ Margaret said. The names of murderers recorded in some prison register. Ellis. Hanratty. McGladdery. Execution by hanging gave the names a weight that they did not have in life, a feel in the mouth. You felt the death-timbre on the tongue as you spoke them.
‘They should give the body back to the mother.’
‘Would she take it?’
He went to the window. The streets below still shrouded in fog. The moody small-town streetscapes. The mansions of long-dead merchants. The town built on marshland. The warehousing along the canal empty and shuttered. The river a fetid tidal sump. Upstream dyeworks discharging toxic leachates into feeder streams. A dank, malt odour from the feed mill on Merchants Quay. Further up the river there were derelict tanneries and malthouses. The sea fog drifts through Boat Street, Sugar Island, the Buttercrane, Chancellors Road, Exchequer Hill. The dead do parlay in the shadows.
She got up before dawn. He heard the front door closing and the car started outside. He picked up the Bible from the bed and turned it over in his hand. Every night his father would take down the Bible from the shelf above the wireless, the scuffed King James, and read to them, the reverenced script, his father leaning forward in the forty-watt light, reading almost painfully as though each word had to be earned, a man straining to bring truth out of the darkness, bent forward in heartfelt telling.