Free Blue Is the Night by Eoin McNamee

wooden benches or are driven by the night heat to stand against walls and trees like lewd statuary.
       
    Patricia took the bus to Central station and walked to Crumlin Road. The porters and RUC men at the court buildings knew her. They’d let her in through back doors, lead her down corridors, passing the rooms where prison warders and guards drank tea, their boots unlaced, caps pushed back on their heads. Places where you heard the gaolhouse sounds, clankings and men cursing in the distance.
    A warder called McConkey said he would bring her to the public gallery. He said that there was plenty of time and that he would show her the gallows. He led her through the damp limestone tunnel between the gaol and the courthouse. The dismantled scaffold was kept in the room below the execution chamber. McConkey kept trying to edge her up against the wall, the stacked members. He showed her where the main beam of the gallows fitted into the platform. He allowed her to work the trapdoor lever. A utilitarian clang in the shadowed spaces.
    ‘You need to stand witness to an execution,’ McConkey said, ‘you never seen anything like it. A man dangling from the end of a rope. I was there on the solemn occasion they done Williams. Quick and clean, a textbook example, Mr Pierrepoint says to me afterwards. The condemned man was pronounced devoid of life forty minutes after for he has to dangle that long before the doctor is allowed near him.’
    ‘Does it hurt?’
    ‘Not a bit. The knot snaps the vertebrae. The spinal cord is severed. He hangs there. You can see the evidence of his excitement.’
    Patricia didn’t really know what he was talking about. She told Hilary what he had said afterwards.
    ‘Did he really say that, Patricia?’
    ‘Yes. He was red in the face when he said it.’
    ‘I’m not surprised he was puffing and panting. A hanged man gets a stiffy when he dies. It’s something to do with the blood pressure.’
    ‘A stiffy?’
    ‘A great big bloody horn from what they say.’
    McConkey brought her to the condemned man’s cell, the door to the gallows hidden behind a bookcase. McConkey said that Williams was the last man to occupy the cell. Nineteen years old. McConkey told Patricia about the moment when they pulled the bookcase back to reveal the doorway behind. Williams shook his head and smiled at the way he’d been fooled, a weary end-of-days smile, his hands tied together behind his back.
    ‘Can they hang Taylor if he’s found guilty?’ Patricia said.
    ‘He should be,’ McConkey said, ‘and in law there’s no reason why he shouldn’t.’
    The space in the small burial yard at Crumlin Road that had been reserved for Taylor was in fact filled by Robert McGladdery after Lance Curran had convicted him and sentenced him to death for the murder of Pearl Gamble.
    ‘The corpse of the deceased is left to hang for forty minutes,’ McConkey said, ‘then the doctor steps forward and pronounces life extinct. The corpse is cut down and brought for post-mortem.’
    The warder opened the small ironbound door to the post-mortem room. There was a plain wooden table in the centre of the room with sluices leading to an open drain in the floor. A small trolley held scalpels and bone saws on its top deck and glass Kilner jars on the second tier. There was another door in the far wall.
    ‘What’s that for?’
    ‘For interment of the deceased,’ McConkey said. He took an iron key from the cluster at his belt and opened the brassbound lock. The door opened into a small high-walled yard. A gravelled sunless place with seven narrow graves without markers against the far wall.
    ‘If Taylor is found guilty and hanged then he’ll be buried right here.’ McConkey stood beside the last grave. ‘Beside our old pal Mr Williams.’
    ‘I wouldn’t like to be buried here.’ Patricia shivering as she spoke.
    ‘I wouldn’t take a pension to be planted here either, miss, but it’s not likely to happen to either of us. But