Blue Is the Night (16 page)

Sometimes Doris liked to see Ferguson come and sometimes she found it tiresome. He was a big padding man who looked as if he put on regret every morning like a suit of clothes. They made you feel sorry for them and then they tricked you.

Lance was not like that. She did not think that Lance regretted anything in his life.

Ferguson asked her if he could piece together the night that Patricia was lost. Lost was the word he used. As though Patricia had wandered off. As though she had gone out into the woods and had strayed off the path into the shadow of the trees.

Ferguson pestered. Lucy knew what to do with a pestering man and no mistake. There’s plenty in the wards were all hands. For all they were insane they knew where to grab a girl if they were let.

‘Mrs Curran,’ Ferguson went on, ‘what happened on the day Patricia died? Did you go anywhere, for instance?’

‘I played bridge with several neighbours. Mrs Whyte, Mrs Denvir and the doctor’s wife, Mrs Wilson, between the hours of two o’clock and four o’clock.’

‘You remember it very well.’

‘We played in Mrs Denvir’s drawing room. The day was dark. It began to rain as her mantel clock struck three. She served tea. The tea set was Spode.’

Card games in provincial drawing rooms, night drawing in. Four figures stilled around the green baize card table, the sound of a coal shifting in the fire, rain against the windowpane. Events sinking into their own myth and history.

‘What time did you leave?’

‘I left at four o’clock. Mrs Wylie offered to drive but I said I would walk. It wasn’t far. A mile.’

Doris had tied a scarf tightly around her head. It was a wild evening. Not yet dark. The trees strained and wet twigs broke underfoot on the pavement. Seabirds blown in from the salt marshes and wintering grounds. White shapes picked out in the stormlight against the black trees.

Doris taking twenty minutes to walk the mile from the Denvir house to the gate lodge of the Glen.

‘Did you meet anyone on the way?’

‘I was alone.’ A solitary figure walking on the land side of the road because it was less exposed to the weather than the sea wall side. Passing the empty phone box, its lit windows sentinel against the growing dusk. Turning into the driveway of the Glen, into the avenue of trees, the woods as Patricia called them.

‘Did you see anyone on your way up the avenue? Someone in the trees or anything like that?’

After Patricia was murdered, paperboy George Chambers gave evidence that he thought he had seen someone in the undergrowth, that he felt there was someone watching him and that he had heard footsteps in the dead leaves under the trees. Chambers said that he had walked up the driveway at 5.45 p.m., an hour and twenty-five minutes after Doris Curran said she had arrived at the Glen, and twenty-five minutes after Patricia got off the Belfast bus on the main road. Chambers’s statement had never been corroborated. When Capstick had forced a confession from Iain Hay Gordon his statement had been dismissed. It was said that Chambers enjoyed the attention in court and had allowed his imagination to run away with him. But Ferguson remembered Chambers in the interrogation room at Whiteabbey police barracks where he had given his initial statement. The boy intent, trying to pick out detail. At what point in the driveway did he become aware of a presence in the trees? Were the footsteps ominous, a shuffling killer’s gait? Did he hear anything other than footsteps? Was there harsh breathing?

‘I saw Mrs McCrink.’ The housekeeper leaving the house, trying to get home before dark. The housekeeper had said she had spoken to Doris but that she had not replied.

‘You got to the house.’

‘I had lost my key and my husband had not given me another. I climbed in through the downstairs bedroom window.’

The back bedroom cold and disused. A smell of damp bedclothes in it. If the chronology of the night’s events was correct Patricia was walking towards Oxford Street bus station in Belfast with John Steel.

‘I went to the cloakroom. I took my wet coat off and put it on a hanger.’

‘Was there a car at the house?’

‘My car was there.’

‘The Ford Popular?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were there any telephone calls around that time?’

Doris waited for Lucy to say something. Keep your cakehole shut, lass, can you not see what he’s about? Don’t trust him, he’s the devil. But Lucy did not speak. Jack did not speak. Jack watched.

‘Mrs Curran, I think Patricia might have called for a lift. She didn’t like walking up the drive on her own. It was her habit to telephone from the box at the end of the avenue for someone to go down for her in the car.’

‘Patricia was a wilful girl. She did as she wanted.’

‘But she was scared. She had been attacked on the driveway before. A strange man.’

‘How did you know that?’ Doris turned to look at Ferguson. Good girl, Lucy said, give him what for.

‘What?’

‘How did you know that someone scared Patricia?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps your husband mentioned it.’

‘Judge Curran did not discuss what happened.’
So how does he know?
Jack says.
How does Harry Ferguson know that hands reached for Patricia in the dark?

Ferguson had been woken by the phone. The black telephone standing on a table placed on the parquet. Cold to the touch. There was a dire sound to its ringing. You thought of beacons lit, watchmen straining to hear, the night alarm sounding.

The phone stopped before he got out of bed. He heard Esther’s voice. When he went down to the hallway she handed the receiver to him.

‘It’s for you.’ She had been sitting on her own in the dark, drinking. One shoe was off. There was a bottle of brandy on the card table, a filled ashtray, a glass on its side. Wayposts of the fallen.

‘Hello?’

‘Harry, it’s Patricia, can you help me?’ She sounded exhausted. He’d heard the tone in men’s voices after fighting. That sleepy note. They ceded to things. They lay down in the mud and died.

‘Where are you?’

‘In Whiteabbey. At the park.’

‘I’ll be there in thirty minutes.’

He went upstairs and dressed. When he came downstairs he could see Esther’s face lit by the glow of a cigarette.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Whiteabbey.’

‘Why?’

‘You heard. Lance Curran’s daughter. She’s got herself into a scrape.’

‘Watch out for her, Ferguson. She’s a trollop. Takes one to know one.’

‘Try to go to sleep, Esther.’

‘Maybe the mother’s the same. The apple never falls far from the tree.’

Ferguson found Patricia sitting in the corner of the bandstand. It was frosty, the park grass crisp under his feet. He took off his suit jacket and put it around her.

‘What happened?’

‘I sneaked out of the window. Hilary’s father was away and she took his car. A bit of a lark. We just drove around, then she stopped at the end of the drive and walked up with me. I was going to climb back in the back bedroom window.’

‘What time?’

‘It must have been half one. We went up the drive. There wasn’t a sound. There was freezing fog in the woods. I thought I heard something.’

Night vapours in the trees. A fox barks in the parkland. A twig breaks.

‘Did you see anything?’

‘No. I heard a man breathing. Feet in the trees. We started to run. Hilary said there were two of them but I only saw one.’

A fleeing girl. A man bursting from the trees. He’s been crouched there in the feral dark. Her hair streams out behind her as she runs. She turns to double back towards the road. He catches her and grasps her arm. Without turning around she swings her arm. She plays tennis and squash. He grunts in pain and lets go. Patricia running on the avenue with a sprinter’s grace, arms pumping, muscular and fleet.

‘You didn’t see his face?’

‘No. And he didn’t say anything. I made Hilary stop the car to call you. She dropped me here.’

‘You’re shivering.’

‘Put your arms around me.’ He sat down beside her and put his arm over her shoulders. She put her head against his chest. She fell asleep. Trusting to the world the way adolescents did. The way they made the world fit them. The way they sprawled, propped themselves in old summer bandstands and bus shelters, rawboned, looselimbed. They lost themselves in the textures of things, grateful for the fabric of the world. Ferguson let her sleep, his legs folded awkwardly under him. He thought that they did not fear death. They did not run away when they saw it coming. They thought that it could be bargained with. That you could parlay with the shadows.

He let her sleep for twenty minutes, then woke her. They drove along the front. Ferguson stopped at a phone box and called the house. Curran answered. Ferguson told him what had happened. He suggested that Curran call the police at Whiteabbey and have them search the woods. They drove up the avenue and stopped outside the house.

‘You’d better go in now.’ He felt Patricia put her hand on his shoulder. She rested her face against his neck for a moment. That downturned mouth. She opened the door and got out and walked towards the steps at the front of the house. He felt the imprint of her lips against his neck, warm scapular of regret on his skin.

The door opened as she reached it. Lance Curran framed in the hall door, backlit, a staged presence. Levers creaking, ropefall through pulleys. Painted backdrops falling into place. Ferguson wound down his window.

‘Do you want me to call at the police station on the way home?’

‘No. I’ll call,’ Curran said. Patricia slipped past him in the doorway. Curran turned after her and closed the door.

After he had left her at the house Ferguson stopped the car and looked for traces of the lurking man in the beam of the headlights but the ground was frozen solid. There were no footprints in the driveway gravel or on the muddy grass at the margin between the driveway and the woods. Ferguson thought that he was being watched. He looked up at the house.

In late November 1952, following Patricia’s murder, Ferguson inspected that night’s log at Whiteabbey RUC station. The incident had not been reported.

‘Perhaps it was you,’ Doris said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The man who attacked her. Perhaps it was you.’

‘Really, Mrs Curran, I wouldn’t ever have done anything to hurt Patricia.’

Ask him why not?
Jack spoke. Lucy shrank back.

Ask him why not?

‘Why would you not hurt her, Mr Ferguson?’

‘Because she was a pleasant young person of my acquaintance, Mrs Curran.’

‘By Jesus you were acquainted with her all right.’

‘Please, Mrs Curran.’

‘Who was it that drove her home the night she said she was attacked on the avenue? The man that chased her on the driveway wasn’t the only one laid hands on her that night, I’ll lay a bet on that.’

‘I’m not sure if this is getting us anywhere.’

‘Who was driving the car?’

‘What car?’

‘The damn car that brought her home.’

‘I was.’

‘Did she show her true nature?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘Did the girl make free with her person?’

‘I think that’s enough for today.’

‘Did she charver you in the front seat of the car?’

Charver. Ferguson had heard the word used by the East End conscripts in his battalion. Charvering the West End tarts on a Saturday night.

‘The poxy bitches have the streets ruined.’ Doris was sitting back in the chair, her knees apart, in a mannish sprawl. ‘You’d get half an hour in the saddle for the price of a split loaf.’

‘You think Patricia was like that?’

Ferguson had been sent alone into cells to interview imprisoned Nazis. The lieutenants and gauleiters, brooding henchmen. The interrogation cells were cold, snow on the ground outside. They barely seemed to know he was there. They seemed to be staring past him to scenes of atrocity in their past. He knew that if they chose to attack him the Russian guards would not unlock the cell door in time. They were death’s familiars. Jeopardies he did not know the names of hung in the air. You had to press on with your task. You fumbled with the papers, asked the questions out of sequence. Were you present when? Did you command a named squad? Were you gauleiter in charge of this place or that, of the emptied districts, the ghettoes and the bone cities? If they did not answer you noted the refusal. Not answered, they said.
Not answered.

The person sitting opposite him knew this. The person sitting opposite him smiled. Ferguson had seen that kind of smile in Nuremberg. There was a range of grim amusements that were known only to the damned.

‘Did Patricia come back to the house on the night of the twelfth of November 1952, Mrs Curran, the night she was murdered?’

Not answered.

‘Why did Judge Curran not allow the police into the house and why did he not allow them to interview the family?’

Not answered.

‘Was there a large dried bloodstain on the floorboards in Patricia’s room?’

Not answered.

‘Why was Patricia’s room redecorated in the week following her murder and her belongings burned?’

Not answered.

‘Did Judge Curran call John Steel and ask him if he had seen Patricia when in fact the Judge knew that she was dead?’

Not answered.

Doris’s posture had changed. Ferguson realised that she was asleep. He unfolded the blanket that lay on her knees and draped it over her, tucking it around her shoulders. He went outside. He wondered if there was a reason why hospitals for the mad were located in such places. Sprawling sites surrounded by marshes and undrained fen. Isolated settlements prone to introspection. He could see the temporary buildings on the perimeter of the site, the Orlits and Nissen huts, looking like abandoned settlements.

He remembered the interviews in Nuremberg. There was a point where the prisoner would start to talk. He never knew the trigger. They gave dates and locations. They gave grid numbers and map references. It was important that no mistakes were made. The depth of their atrocity demanded no less. The dead must be made to answer for their crimes.