Blue Is the Night (3 page)

‘We’re short seventy, maybe eighty,’ he said. ‘Even at that you’ll have to work every vote. You need to be out at every church gate, every fete and funeral. You’ll have to do the revival meetings and the dog tracks.’

‘I’ll do what I have to do,’ Curran said. ‘As will you, Harry.’

‘Come to the window,’ Ferguson said. Curran stood and came to the window.

‘There,’ Ferguson said, ‘can you see the patch of green over there, and that one?’ Look like parks?’

‘There are no parks up there.’

‘No. City never seen fit to build them. But they’re open spaces nevertheless.’  

‘I can see that.’ Curran plotting the city in his head, airborne, looking for the green spaces, the phantom parklands. ‘Milltown,’ he said, ‘Milltown and Dundonald. The cemeteries.’

‘That’s right. The cemeteries. We take a roll call of Milltown. The deceased might have finished with life but it hasn’t finished with them. We register them, as many as we need, and then they vote. You’ll have your seat, Mr Curran.’

Curran went to the table. He rolled up Ferguson’s map and put it under his arm, then turned to him.

‘This conversation didn’t take place, Harry.’ Curran did not look back. Ferguson heard his footsteps on the metal stairway. Ferguson unlocked a metal filing cabinet and took out a hardback account book titled ‘Ratepayers, Deceased’. He had drawn the boundary of his bond with Curran and now set ghosts to patrol it. He reflected that Curran had got good value for his £50. He opened the book in front of him and bent to his ledger of the dead.

The accused, Robert Taylor, was being held at Glenravel Street RUC barracks. Ferguson and his wife Esther drove down the Antrim Road into the city centre.

‘Did he do it?’ Esther asked.

‘I’d say so,’ Ferguson said.

‘That poor woman.’ Esther looked out of the window. ‘He’ll get off with it, won’t he?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘The people that run this city. They won’t let one of their own be convicted for something like this.’

‘I believe that in certain American states, a white man will not hang for the murder of a Negro. In some places I believe it is considered a misdemeanour.’

‘They’ll let the same thing happen here. You will, I should say.’

‘Am I one of them, Esther?’

‘Of course you are, Harry.’

Carlisle Circus was empty. A Crossley tender was parked beside the entrance to the New Lodge Road. Evening in the city. Ferguson turned towards the city centre.

‘What will happen, Harry?’

‘They’ll find a reason not to proceed to trial. The waters will be muddied. Besides, a jury will never convict in this town. Not for murdering a papist.’ Ferguson felt her shudder.

Ferguson stopped outside North Queen Street RUC station. They waited in the evening silence. Ferguson could smell his wife’s perfume. Schoolgirls in Methody uniforms crossed the street in front of them, then entered a side street and were gone, so that Ferguson wondered if he had in fact seen them or some phantasm of adolescence lost in the evening street.

Ferguson had met Esther at a tennis club dance at the boat club on the banks of the Lagan at Hay Island. Esther did not belong to the bare-legged athletic girls, their blonde hair shining as they gathered in the sunlight, intent, laughing, already fading into a history of midsummer evenings. Esther stayed at the bar all night. She was like a woman he had seen in films at the Curzon and the Vogue. The born to be bad and the gone to the bad. Trading come-hithers across downtown cocktail bars.

Three weeks after the dance Esther telephoned him from Larne. She said her sister had gone to London to work and had left her mansionette flat empty. The mansionettes stood on high ground overlooking the docks. They had stayed in the flat for three days. She would not be sated.

The mansionettes were now derelict. The facades had been left standing, roofless, the windows empty. Ferguson drove past them every evening. The dark houses of his desire.

‘Will you wait in the car for me?’ Ferguson said.

‘I think I might walk as far as the Reform Club,’ Esther said. She leaned over to him. He felt her light, dry-lipped kiss.

‘They say that Taylor looks like Bobby Breen.’ She opened her door and got out of the car.

‘Who?’

‘Bobby Breen. He was a child film star. Cheery and cheesy with curly hair and a button nose. Sang as well. A child soprano.’

‘That’s all I need.’

‘You remember the song. It was on the radio all the time.’

‘No, I don’t remember.’

‘It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.’ Esther bending down to tell him, then walking away from him towards the Fountain, towards Royal Avenue and the Reform Club.

Inspector McConnell was waiting for him at the reception desk of the police station. There were uniformed policemen with Lee-Enfields at the front door and at the entrance to the cell block and Ferguson noted that they had chosen positions which commanded a field of fire the length of the stuccoed hallway. The men regarded him without expression. They had stood this way through riot and pogrom. At their posts throughout the empire. Night’s constables holding the line. ‘They’ll not spring him with them boys keeping watch,’ McConnell said.

‘Will they try?’ Ferguson said.

‘They’d haul him out and shoulder him down the Shankill Road if they could get at him. They would carry him and proclaim the glory of the lord,’ McConnell said. ‘My men have orders to plug the first bastard comes through that door.’

‘Bail?’

‘The bloody magistrate near gave it to him. DPP opposed. Had to tell the beak there’d be civil war out there if he walked free.’

Ferguson knew the thinking. Another one gone and all to the good. But you had to watch out for civil unrest. Men gathering in the margins of old battlegrounds, the Brickfields, Smithfield, hands in pockets, waiting for dark.

McConnell took him down a distempered brick corridor to the cells. Ferguson had been here before. He had been duty solicitor when the Negro soldier Wiley Harris had been arrested for the murder of Harry Coogan. The soldier haggling over price with the pimp then stabbing him. The bored girl waiting in the bomb shelter, bargained over, the pimp’s reward a knife in the guts under a gibbet moon. Harris sitting quietly in the cell, wearing USAAF fatigues, his hands between his knees.

‘Did you do it?’ Ferguson had asked.

‘Does it matter if I did, sir? I’m in trouble anyway.’

‘You’re in the right place for trouble.’

‘Same as the place I came from. Exact same.’

‘Taylor’s in cell eight, sir,’ the sergeant in charge said.

‘What’s your impression, sergeant?’ Ferguson said.

‘If wrong had a human form, I’d say it’s sat behind that door, Mr Ferguson.’

The gaoler opened the cell door and Ferguson stepped inside, stooping a little. Taylor stood in the middle of the cell so that the evening sun shone on him. Ferguson remembered what Esther had said about Bobby Breen. Taylor had wavy brown hair, parted on the right, the button nose, the cheery demeanour.
A low-rent Fauntleroy
, Ferguson thought.
Babyface killer.

‘Are you with the police?’ Taylor said.

‘My name’s Harry Ferguson.’

‘Do I not get to pick my own solicitor?’

‘Not unless you got plenty of money.’

‘They say I’m going to need a hotshot.’

‘Who says that?’

‘The peelers. Them boys out there.’

‘Never mind what they say. I want you to tell me what happened.’

‘It’s all a mistake, Harry. I never went next nor near that woman.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘I done work for her when I worked for Barrett the painter. She was dry as a bone and mean to boot.’

‘Did you go to her house yesterday afternoon?’

‘Like fuck I did.’

‘I’ll take that as a no. Did you go to her house at any other time after you worked for Barrett?’

‘I’m supposed to be getting married, Harry. I was looking for a bit of work, there’s no crime in that.’

‘You asked Mrs McGowan for work?’

‘You might as well ask that wall for a chance in life as talk to her.’

‘And she turned you down.’

‘I’m as good as the next man when it comes to a brush.’

‘That’s all I want to know for the moment.’ Ferguson rose to go.

‘Hang on a second, Harry, you going to leave me here? What about bail?’

‘You’ll be back in the magistrates’ court on Monday. They’ll talk about bail then.’

‘I was supposed to be getting married on Monday.’

‘Is that right. Wedding all paid for?’

‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’

‘I’ve questioned better men than you, son.’

Ferguson had served as a legal officer for the occupying powers after the war, conducting interrogations at Nuremberg prison. A place of dark pine trees and snow-filled approaches. He had been present at the interrogation of Rudolf Hess and other high-ranking officers. Blond, insolent. He had taken depositions which were later presented at the Nuremberg tribunals. At night he read transcripts of atrocity. He felt himself alone with the almanacs of the damned. He entered the prison at night and left it before dawn. Although there was the appearance of law he well knew what process was set in train here and to what end it led.

‘You’re a sly dog, Harry.’ Taylor got up and walked up to Ferguson. He took his lapel between his finger and thumb and rubbed it gently. ‘You think I done her for the money? Not true. No way José. I was getting fifteen pound last night as a loan from a friend. That was to pay for the nuptials.’

Ferguson took a step back. Away from the freckles. The earnest man-boy eyes. Fixed in the forty-watt low-fidelity light of gaolhouse candour. Ferguson knew the sergeant in charge was watching them through the peephole.
If wrong had a human form.

‘Nice piece of herringbone,’ Taylor said, ‘nice piece of cloth in the jacket.’ Ferguson took his hand away and knocked on the door. The duty sergeant opened it.

‘Mr Lunn’s in station reception,’ he said. Ferguson nodded. Lunn would want to be Taylor’s solicitor. He followed the sergeant, the man’s hobnail boots loud on the parquetry. Lunn stood in the middle of the floor. He was a tall florid man with small eyes, a backstreet opportunist, rabble-rouser and slum leaseholder.

‘Harry,’ Lunn said, his eyes narrowing, ‘I didn’t think I’d find you here.’

Ferguson nodded to him and sat down on a wooden bench that stood along the wall.

‘Lunn.’

‘Curran’s going to prosecute Mr Taylor.’

‘That’s right.’

‘He’ll go in with kid gloves.’

‘Curran will do what he wants to do.’

‘He’s an ambitious man, Harry. He’ll put up a bit of a show and then throw in the towel.’

‘That sounds a bit like an instruction to me.’

‘Take it any way you like, Harry. The truth of the matter is that the mob will decide what happens. They always do.’

‘What about the judge and jury?’

‘You’re a comedian, Ferguson. I didn’t know that about you. Your sense of humour escaped my notice so far. Why do you think there’s men standing here with guns? You think it’s because the mob will try to punish Taylor? They’d carry him out of here shoulder high if they were let. You know it and Curran knows it and if he goes for a guilty verdict he might as well pack his bags.’

‘I’m not here to tell Mr Curran what to do.’

‘No you’re not. That’s for sure and certain. You’re Curran’s dog is what you are. When he says tail you start wagging. When he says bite somebody in this town gets bit.’

Lunn pushed past the sergeant in charge and descended towards the cells.

‘He’ll meet his match with that boy’, the sergeant said. ‘The harm of the world is in him.’

On the 14th of July 1949 twenty-seven-year-old Robert Taylor was charged with the murder of forty-nine-year-old Mary McGowan. It was alleged that Taylor had entered Mrs McGowan’s house at 18 Ponsonby Avenue, on the pretence of using the telephone. He had previously been part of a Barretts of Sunnyside Street crew painting the house, so Mrs McGowan wasn’t suspicious when he came to the door. The prosecution stated that Taylor had choked Mrs McGowan with a cord, beaten and stabbed her, then poured hot soup over her.

Despite her injuries, Mrs McGowan had retained consciousness for two days. On six separate occasions she identified ‘Robert the Painter’ as the man who had attacked her.

It was alleged that Taylor was looking for money. He was due to be married to his pregnant girlfriend three days after the crime and he had gambled away the money he needed to pay for the wedding. He had made several attempts to borrow money from friends and associates without success.

Although the victim had identified him as a painter who had worked on the house in Newington eight months previously, Taylor maintained that he had not been in the area since.

The names. Newington. Ponsonby. The aspirant classes. The grid of streets. Neat between-the-wars housing. They had raised themselves above the darkness. The murder seen in the context of political unrest. The city had a history of pogrom, murder and arson, the handed-down rancours of the age. Factions did battle in the streets. Preachers stood on street corners, kin to the ranters of old. There were boilermakers, keel-layers, riveters. They thought in tonnages, vast displacements. There was God in these things. They wanted it known that these were works of the imagination, the wrought matter of the mind.

The courthouse faced the Crumlin Road jail, its basalt slabs carted from the quarries of the black mountain to the north of the city. An underground passage led from the gaol to the courthouse. In all thirteen prisoners were hanged in Crumlin Road. They were interred in the prison yard. Their names and dates of execution were etched on the wall congruent to their burial place. Taylor was to be represented by Robert Hanna QC, Mr Justice Sheil presiding. The prosecuting counsel was named as Attorney General Lancelot Curran QC.