Blue Is the Night

The Glen, Whiteabbey. Lancelot Curran had bought the Glen shortly after the trial of Robert Taylor for the murder of Mary McGowan in 1949. No record had been kept as to the builder of the house or the year of its construction. It was a large house at the end of a long avenue lined with aspen, pine and birch trees. The avenue led down to the Whiteabbey Road and to the sea. The name of the house had been intended to convey the sense of some Arcadian setting, leafy and gentle. But the glens recalled by the Scottish lowlanders who had settled this coast were not Arcadian. They were places of ambuscade and murder. Genocidal shadows lingered.

The family housekeeper, Mrs McCrink, didn’t like being alone in the house after dark, so she finished at four on winter evenings if the Currans were out. It was a rainy evening and it was to be a dark night. Mrs McCrink had closed the front door behind her. Judge Curran had not allowed her a key. Curran was strict about keys. Mrs McCrink knew that the Judge’s wife, Doris, had lost hers, and that he had not given her a new one. If the family were out, then Mrs Curran had to climb through a back bedroom window. Mrs McCrink said that it was not dignified for Mrs Curran to climb through windows.

On the way down the drive the wind from the lough tore at the shrubs and trees. It was a black wind and Mrs McCrink drew her coat around her and wished that she had left earlier. Whiteabbey had been a monastic settlement and Mrs McCrink believed that there were hauntings, old stirrings.

On the mid-point angle of the drive McCrink almost cried out when she saw a shape coming towards her. Later she said that she thought she had met a figure of premonition or of judgement coming to her out of the turbulent night. She remembered that Doris played bridge in Whiteabbey on a Thursday afternoon and would return home at that time. Doris was wearing a headscarf and gaberdine raincoat and had her head bent. As she drew level Mrs McCrink spoke her name but Doris did not reply. Mrs McCrink spoke again and Doris looked up this time. Mrs McCrink said afterwards that considering the events of the night to come she wished that Doris had not looked at her. It was like somebody you met in a hospital. It was a hollow-cheeked, asylum look, someone shuffling in a sanatorium corridor.

Mrs McCrink knew that Doris ‘had her moments’. She would go into her bedroom and lock the door. Patricia would knock on the door for hours.
Mother, let me in.
But Doris would not answer. Mrs McCrink was aware that there were tensions between nineteen-year-old Patricia and her mother but said that it was ‘not her place’ to intervene.

Mrs McCrink stood to the side of the avenue and watched Doris walk towards the house until she was lost in the drizzle and the dusk. Afterwards she told people she knew that there was something different about that evening. People were happy to believe her. This is the night when the Curran family begin to recede from the everyday. That their names are appended to the night’s roster of bedlamites and fanatics, the damned and the dead. Mrs McCrink walked to the empty gatehouse to the lodge, then turned and looked back. It seemed as if she looked into the darkness of some forest, a storied place, set about with old tellings.

Patricia Curran died later that night. Her body was found on the driveway to the Glen. She had been stabbed thirty-seven times. One year later, twenty-seven-year-old army conscript Iain Hay Gordon was convicted of the murder. His conviction was overturned in 2000. The mystery of Patricia’s death has never been solved. Doris Curran was incarcerated in Holywell Mental Hospital and did not leave it until her death. Desmond Curran, Patricia’s renegade brother, left the law and turned papish, a Roman Catholic missionary priest. Lance Curran moved to England in 1964, where he remarried following the death of his wife.

Her name is Doris Agnes Curran. She was born in 1896 in Kent, England. In 1953 she was committed to Holywell mental institution, where she now resides. Her son Desmond is a Roman priest. Her husband Lancelot is a judge and privy councillor. Her daughter Patricia was murdered by a hand unknown in November 1952. Harry Ferguson visits her sometimes. Ferguson used to be her husband’s employee in election matters and in many other things. He comes to see her. He sits in front of her in the Holywell mental hospital and pretends that he is interested in her welfare but she knows what really interests him and that is her dead daughter Patricia.

‘How long is it since Patricia died?’

‘Nine years.’

‘I wonder what happened to her Juliet cap?’ Doris said. Patricia’s hair was not like her mother’s, long and silky. Patricia’s was dark and wiry. She kept it from her face with two clips to either side and she wore a yellow Juliet cap to keep it in place.

‘The Juliet cap was found the morning after,’ Ferguson said, ‘by the drive. As if someone had left it there, for nobody found it that night.’

‘A Juliet cap sits at the crown of your head, and can be adorned with pearls, beading, or any other materials that co-ordinate with your gown. You can wear a Juliet cap alone, or use it to attach a veil. The Juliet cap style is not something we regularly see, but it’s undeniably pretty and unusual.’

‘You have a great memory for some things, Mrs Curran.’

And not for others. Doris remembers seeing the cap flung on the chair in the hallway. Patricia was always careless with her things and slapdash in her manner.

‘Has Desmond written to you?’

Her son Desmond went to Africa. With the Bible in his hand, bringing the word to the natives like Livingstone. There was a globe of the Earth in the hallway and he would hold it between his hands and say is this all of it, Mother, is this all the world? Desmond was a solemn boy, Wednesday’s child full of woe. Patricia wasn’t like that. Her eyes would follow Doris wherever she went. She would find herself checking her hair or if her slip was showing. Doris said to Lance that she was on parade every day in her own house like a guardsman on Horse Guards’. Lance replied that Patricia was only a child. The two of them were always thick as thieves.

There was something about Patricia that she could not understand. Even as a baby she was independent. Doris had dreamed of having a daughter. She turned the word motherhood over in her head. But when Patricia looked at her she kept seeing the pale, medicated stare of the murderesses in Broadmoor.

‘Do you remember the first time I came to your house, Mrs Curran?’

‘The Glen.’

‘No, your first house. On the Malone Road. After the Taylor murder.’

‘The knave.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I thought of him as a character from a card game.’

‘I see.’

Doris had attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College. They did tarot readings in the dormitory at night. There are other worlds. The names of the cards frightened her. The empress. The hanged man. Judgement. The ouija board frightened her, she didn’t have to be told there were other worlds. And one night they sat around a table holding hands in a séance, five girls in nightdresses with the lights out. You waited for candles flickering in eerie draughts, eyes rolling back in the head. She waited for the silence to be broken. She waited for a voice to say
I am Thomas Cutbush
.

‘Maybe you don’t recall.’

‘I recall it perfectly.’

Lance was not home in the evening, which was commonplace. Desmond was doing his modelling. Patricia had taken the bridge cards from the card-table drawer and was playing patience with them on the floor. Patricia knew she was not allowed to handle the expensive Waddington cards but Doris quenched her irritation. The family rarely spent time together in this manner and Doris was determined not to start an argument.

At such times Doris thought they could be a real family, a true family of evening walks and civility over the dinner table, but they lived in a house of silences, varied so that Doris thought you could write them down in a book like a catalogue of all the silences there ever were.

Desmond had answered the door to Ferguson.

‘Is the Attorney General home?’

‘Father isn’t here. Is everything all right?’

‘Nothing that affects the family, Desmond, but a woman has been slain in Newington.’

‘I see. Come in, Mr Ferguson.’

Curran had bought a house on the Malone Road in Belfast in 1947. Doris wanted to be close to the city and the picture houses, although the city was nothing like London and there was nothing of the glamour of Piccadilly or walks in Hyde Park or Regent’s Park with nursemaids pushing carriages.

Doris came to the doorway of the drawing room as Ferguson entered the hall.

‘Good evening, Mr Ferguson. Desmond, bring Mr Ferguson in to the fire. There is a strange chill to the night air, isn’t there? I think it’s because the city is built on a swamp.’

‘Mother doesn’t like living in the provinces,’ Patricia said. ‘She doesn’t see why we have to live out here in the benighted sticks. Can a stick be benighted?’

‘Stop moaning, Patricia,’ Desmond said. ‘Mr Ferguson doesn’t want to listen to your spoiled meanderings. Someone has been murdered.’

‘A murder?’ Patricia was kneeling on the floor in front of the fire. Looking up into Ferguson’s face. Alert and troubled.

‘A lady killed in her own home.’

‘Mr Curran will want to be told,’ Doris said. ‘He may be at the Reform Club.’

‘I looked in the club but he hadn’t been in.’

Desmond turned his back on Ferguson. He sat down at a card table placed against the wall. There were half-finished models of warships on the table. The Tirpitz. The Graf Spee. There were balsa shavings on the floor. There were miniature tins of Humbrol for painting the models. Desmond had built a Spitfire which hung from his bedroom ceiling on fishing line. The table smelt of epoxies and resins. There was a row of sheathed modelling knives. Desmond sitting at the table for hours, his fringe falling over his forehead.

‘How is Mrs Ferguson?’ Doris said.

‘She’s fine,’ Ferguson said. Doris looking at Ferguson like butter wouldn’t melt, Patricia told her friend Hilary Douglas later, though she knows that Esther Ferguson is high-strung as piano wire and a lush to boot. Doris is craftier than anyone thinks, Patricia said, though not all the time.

‘I saw her in town the other day,’ Patricia said. ‘She looked lovely.’ Though Patricia told Hilary that Esther’s lipstick had been awry and her eyes were glittery.

‘It’s pleasant to hear you give a compliment, Patricia,’ Doris said. ‘You so seldom compliment those around you.’

Patricia bowed her head. She had heard the tone in her mother’s voice. Before Ferguson had entered the evening had been building around Doris’s mood. Desmond and Patricia knew what direction it was taking. There would be slammed doors. There would be long silences. Doris working down through the increments of blame until she reached the rich trove of marital loss, the treasured disappointments. The wasted life. The absent husband. The ungrateful children. This was the wife-bounty. Plundered from the ruins.

‘You look lovely too, Mother,’ Patricia said in a small voice.

‘Your mother is a beautiful dancer,’ Ferguson said. He could feel what was going on. The air in the room charged with Doris’s mood, the soul-chagrin, and they deferred to it.

‘Mother taught me to dance,’ Desmond said. ‘The Charleston, isn’t that right?’

‘It was your father taught me,’ Doris said. ‘The first time I saw it we were at the pictures. Their Own Desire with Norma Shearer. I thought I’d never learn it. I was all elbows and feet.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ Ferguson said.

‘If Lance were here he could tell you. But he is not.’

He saw Desmond and Patricia exchange a look. He glanced at his watch. Patricia touched his arm. Now was not the time to go. He knew he should not leave them to it, the familial web of half-truths.

Patricia was wearing a blue satinette dressing gown. She leaned forward to dry her hair before the fire. Ferguson could see the nape of her neck, the poise of her body under the material, the folds and pleatings, the way she gathered the skirt under her, the way it let in glimpses, the word bare
and the word skin. She held her hair bunched in one hand and glanced at him from under it, making a funny face that none of the others could see, knowing that he could see her shoulder where the robe had slipped, winking at him with her tongue in the corner of her mouth, bringing a low-key sexual drollery to the moment before dropping her hair over her face again.

‘Perhaps Father got lost in the woods,’ Patricia said.

Patricia called the garden the woods. No one ever went into the woods. They were like the forest from a tale. There would be clearings, paths that doubled back, rustlings in the undergrowth.

‘A spine-chilling howl was heard. Desmond felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He heard the patter of feet on the leaves . . .’

‘Do shut up, Patricia,’ Desmond said.

‘Patricia. Do not tease your brother.’

‘Honestly, Mother, you’re all such stick-in-the-muds. Dessie can stand up for himself, can’t you, Desmond?’

‘I wish your father would take a firmer line with you, Patricia,’ Doris said.

‘He would need to get home a little earlier to take a firm line with me. I’ll have to remind him in the morning.’

‘You would do well to keep your mouth shut, hussy.’ Doris had moved to the unlit niche beside the fireplace. It felt like a moment foretold. Something that went back into the history of story. A fireside gathering joined by a stranger, a teller of arcane tales, travellers fearing to look into the darkness beyond the firelight where the stranger stood.

‘Mother, please,’ Desmond said.

‘And you who think yourself the head of wit. A gawk stood on a street corner handing out tracts to those more witless than yourself.’

Ferguson saw Desmond look at Patricia.
This has happened before.
Patricia got to her feet and ran lightly to her mother, silk pumps on her feet under the robe like some slippered princess. She took her mother by the hands as if she would lead her into the light.

‘Come upstairs, Mother, I’ll brush your hair. You like that.’

‘Did I not say to keep your mouth shut? Mouth and legs shut is the way of it for a lass around here.’

‘Upstairs now, Dorrie Curran. It’s getting cold in here,’ Patricia said. Doris’s face was in darkness but Ferguson saw her bearing change, a masculine stance, an air of someone who would command the shadows, would gather them about. Desmond stood beside the fire while Patricia uttered little noises of cajoling, of comfort and drawing out. When she at last brought Doris into the firelight her mother’s hair hung around her face and she moved like a frail elder, waving her hands blindly in front of her. Patricia held her hand. Desmond took her elbow and they moved her to the door and into the hallway beyond. The door closed, leaving Ferguson alone in the drawing room to wonder if this outlandish processional had taken place.

Ferguson waited for Curran until just before twelve. The fire went down. Ferguson could hear voices upstairs but could not make out what they were saying, offstage reckonings and shiftings. As the night went on the voices became more indistinct. Although he knew the Currans were still there, the house began to feel empty, the voices like something out of the past, the voices of ancient summonings. He wondered how old the house was. In olden days was there the brush of crinolines in unfurnished drawing rooms? The electricity wavered and almost went out.

Ferguson closed the door behind him and lit a cigarette. As he opened the car door he heard feet on the gravel behind him. He turned quickly to see Patricia. She was bare-legged, wearing a belted raincoat.

‘Christ,’ he said.

‘I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ Patricia said. ‘I came out for a smoke. Mother doesn’t agree. I hid my cigs in the laundry but I think she must have found them and thrown them out.’

‘She’s right. You shouldn’t be smoking.’

‘Don’t be such a hypocrite, Harry. Let me have a pull of yours.’ She leaned forward and took the cigarette from his hand.

‘I don’t think your father would approve.’

‘Father doesn’t approve of much, really. Besides, we smoke all the time in school.’

‘I’m surprised they let you.’

‘They don’t know. We do it in the lavatories.’

The lore of illicit cigarettes, schoolgirls clustered in the cubicles, the quick shared drags, butts nipped to a duck’s arse. Toilet-door graffiti and drawings, inked-in and smutty, genitalia outlined in pen, scribbled pubes.

‘I’m sorry about Mother.’

‘I know that her nerves trouble her, Patricia.’

‘Her language was atrocious.’

‘I’ve heard worse.’

‘So have I, Harry.’

Patricia leaned forward and took the cigarette from his hand. She inhaled and held the smoke, a faraway look on her face as though she considered the substance of it. She exhaled, the smoke hanging in the night air, then handed the cigarette back to him, the butt dampish, lipstick on it.

‘Thank you, Harry. You won’t tell Father, will you?’ she said, putting her hand on his arm for a moment. Ferguson tried to remember the last time he had stood like this with a woman, close enough to be aware of her warmth, lost in her meaning touches.

‘I better go,’ he said. She leaned forward and he could feel the length of her body against his, a thoughtful look on her face, a kind of carnal fathoming. Her lips touched his cheek and then she was gone into the night. Ferguson looked up. He thought he saw a curtain move in an upstairs window. He ground the cigarette into the gravel and got into the car.

At Whiteabbey he saw headlights coming along the lough shore. He stopped his car and got out. The Attorney General’s black Lancia, travelling fast. The speeding car itself like bad tiding in transit through the night, the paintwork gleaming, a glimpse of the attorney’s face set hard and tight-lipped. Ferguson wondering if he had been called home from gaming to deal with his wife.

Curran slowed when he saw Ferguson’s car. He parked at the sea wall and crossed the road.

‘There’s been a killing,’ Ferguson said.

‘I heard.’

‘Some pup called Taylor from the Shankill murdered a woman by the name of McGowan in Newington. If we convict Taylor we’ll have to hang him. The town will go up in flames. Therefore there won’t be a guilty verdict. There’s a couple of prosecutors in your office will take it on. Old hands. They’ll put up a show of a fight and take a swan dive at the end. Justice is seen to be done. Taylor walks in the end.’

‘I’m going to take the case myself.’

‘Are you sure you want to do that? The Attorney General shouldn’t be dirtying his hands with this. The world and his mother knows that Taylor done it. It won’t look good. The Attorney throwing a case.’

‘I don’t intend to throw it. I intend to win it.’

‘Win it? You can’t convict Taylor and hope to build a political career in the province,’ Ferguson said. ‘The mob won’t have it and the bar won’t have it.’

‘What odds would you give, Ferguson, that I can prosecute Taylor, win the case and then join the High Court as a judge?’

‘No odds at all, Mr Curran. I’d give you no odds at all.’

‘What was the character of the dead woman?’

‘Respectable Roman Catholic, given to the telling of her beads, statues, mass, the whole papish lot.’

‘The defendant?’

‘A bad lot. In and out of employment. Lightfingered by the sound of it. His girlfriend was in the family way and he was due to marry her a few days after the murder. He was asking around the town if he could borrow money.’

‘Guilty then?’

‘As sin.’

‘And is it not my job to chastise sinners?’

‘Let God look after his sins. We’ll look after the city.’

‘I’m going to convict him, Harry.’

‘Then it’s a long haul to the judge’s bench.’

‘Do you remember when we met, Harry? We took that seat against the odds, didn’t we?’

‘There’s odds and there’s odds, Mr Curran. You’ve dealt me a bad hand here.’

‘It’s not the hand, Harry, it’s how the cards are played.’