Blue Is the Night by Eoin McNamee Page B

became of her.
    A friend of Desmond’s, Iain Hay Gordon, was convicted and found insane though Doris found it hard to believe that skinny little man could murder anybody. She read the papers at the time. The prosecution said that Gordon kissed Patricia at the bottom of the driveway and then things got out of hand. He said that Gordon tried to touch her but she said, ‘Don’t, you beast,’ and things got out of hand and that he lost control of his manly appetites.
    Doris knew that Patricia would not put her lips to a man such as Gordon. She would be as like to kiss a stick as kiss a bag of bones such as Gordon was. She knew the kind of men that her daughter liked, men smelling of cologne with a smile always on their lips and a lewd word.
    When Patricia was small she would sit at the dressing table watching Doris put on her make-up and well she learned. Her father would watch her with a look as though he conjured something pleasant from long ago if only he could remember what it was.
    One day Patricia removed his judge’s wig from its tin box. It was a horrid, tatty thing. Patricia walked into the dining room and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, his honour Mr Justice Curran, I condemn you to death.’ We all laughed. But her father did not laugh but brought her to the outhouse and whipped her.
    Doris had always wanted Patricia to know how dangerous the world was. Patricia had never seen the faces at the Broadmoor windows. The procuresses. The hollow-cheeked magdalens. Doris could feel Patricia’s eyes following her around the house. She wanted to tell her not to let her eyes follow people that way.
       
    The first time Doris heard of Thomas Cutbush was when she read his file from his admission to Broadmoor. The file lay open on her father’s desk and she read it.
       
    Description of Thomas Cutbush admitted from Holloway Prison
         Born: 29th June 1866
    Age: 24 years
    Height: 5 ft 9 1/2 inches
    Weight: 9 stone 6 1/2 pounds
    Hair: black
    Whiskers: black (very short)
    Eyes: dark blue (very sharp)
    Complexion: dark
    Build: slight
    Features: thin
    Marks: slight bruise on left knee. 1 tooth out in front of upper jaw
       
    When later that evening she saw a man looking at her from a window in D wing she knew it was Cutbush. He didn’t push his face up against the bars like the others did. He stayed back in the shadows. You had to imagine the short black whiskers. The eyes. They say he lived in the Minories, beside Whitechapel. That he followed women home. Doris had to walk under his window every day. He was always there, watching her. She could tell. How still he was at his window. Saucy Jack.
    They told her that Cutbush had died in 1903 but she knew that people like Cutbush never died. They were always in the shadows, just out of reach. You could feel the eyes on you. Dark blue. Very sharp.
    Some nights she lay awake and knew that Cutbush was also awake in his cell with his whiskers black and his eyes so blue, so sharp.
    The female lunatics who were trusted worked in the vegetable gardens outside her father’s office. Sometimes she walked through the gardens with him, and they would glance up at her, mute and incurious. Their eyes dark with knowledge of atrocity. When she was older she would accompany her father on his rounds.
    ‘Life is not all frocks,’ he said. He kept a model of the human brain on his desk and showed her the grey ridged thing, pointing out the lobes and hemispheres. His father had been a butcher and he kept a slaughterhouse in the prison grounds.
    Father read the newspapers everyday. Doris heard him say to the medical officer that the Jack the Ripper killings had stopped when Cutbush had been arrested. Doris sat beneath Father’s desk and heard every word. About women dead in London alleys. The female parts mutilated. Terror abroad in the Whitechapel fog, the wreathing vapours.
    Doris was not squeamish about medical matters. Broadmoor was as much a hospital as a prison. Lucy had