Blue Is the Night by Eoin McNamee

Wednesday, knowing that he would come on the Thursday morning, and did her make-up.
    ‘I do believe she’s a little bit soft on you,’ the ward sister told Ferguson. ‘She gets right and sharp if she’s not looking the part on Thursdays.’ The psychiatrist, Mr Brown, said that he believed Ferguson’s visits were therapeutic and that it enabled her to anchor herself in the real world.
    ‘That’s a bit of a gag, Harry,’ Esther had said, ‘you being her anchor to the real world.’
    ‘Not much of an anchor, is it?’
    ‘Not much of a world.’
       
    ‘Do you play bridge, Mr Ferguson?’ Doris said.
    ‘I never learned, Mrs Curran.’
    ‘We used to play with the Buntings, and with the Donalds.’
    ‘I believe it’s a game of bluff,’ Ferguson said.
    ‘Yes,’ Doris said, ‘I was rather good at it.’
    ‘So I’ve heard.’
    ‘Did your wife play?’
    ‘She isn’t much good at bluffing,’ Ferguson said. He got up and went to the window.
    ‘What is her name?’
    ‘Esther.’
    ‘I remember her now. She was a person of a nervous disposition. Not good for bridge. One needs to be fully in charge of one’s emotions.’
    Ferguson stayed at the window. The nurses said that Doris drifted in and out of personalities, inhabited and discarded them. The world in her head. The clamour of it. Minor royalty, street vendors, voices from her past, strangers wandering the psychic thoroughfares.
    ‘Where is she now? Your wife?’ Ferguson could see Doris reflected in the window, her head tilted back, a duchess, grace and favour dispensed.
    ‘At home. She doesn’t go out much.’
    ‘Perhaps I should send Lucy to her.’
    ‘Lucy?’
    ‘The maid. A harmless-looking sort of a girl. She bears no resemblance to a murderer. None at all. I enquired of her how she found herself in Broadmoor here but she wouldn’t tell me. Drowned her baby probably. That’s what most of them are in for. Infanticide. The fruit of one’s womb. Lucy’s a cheery sort. Father says she keeps me out of mischief.’
    The nurses said that Doris hid her medication. Hid it in her cheek and spat it out later. She was cunning. You had to keep your wits about you.
    ‘Where are you now, Mrs Curran?’
    ‘In Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Daddy is the superintendent. It’s a very important job. Some of the best minds of a generation end up in here. The best sort of loony, Lucy says. The very best sort of chaps.’
    There was a small garden outside the window, enclosed by the hospital buildings. It was dark and muddy, the lawn trampled. Dusk was coming in from the lough and he remembered the night Patricia had been found on the driveway of the Glen. It had been such an evening, a drizzle that fell through nightfall and on into the dark of night as though it would never stop.
    ‘Do you remember the night Patricia died, Mr Ferguson?’
    ‘I do remember it, Mrs Curran.’
       
    They had lifted Patricia from the wet ground. She was entitled to tenderness but received none. Her body was stiff and had to be forced into the back seat of the car. She was taken to the Whiteabbey surgery. She was laid out on the examining couch. Ferguson remembered the bloodless face. Thirty-seven stab wounds.
    The place had been named Whiteabbey because the monks had worn white garments. The abbey was gone. The stones of it carted seaward to build the harbour. Esther had fancies of the monks abroad in the grounds of the Glen, tending still to some dark friary, their hooded faces, mendicant, unforgiving, adrift among the trees.
    He had returned to the Glen and walked the murder site before the police arrived from the city. There was no blood. There were no drag marks. He had not seen Patricia’s art folder, books and Juliet cap, although these items were later found at the scene, dry although it had rained all night. The rain pattered on dead leaves. He had felt himself in a story, lost, harried in a storybook forest. It had not occurred to him until then that