As a writer, he had been thinking about the case for years but he “couldn’t find a way into it”; her photograph, and the discovery that Gordon had whistled a tune, The Blue Tango – which was in the charts at the time – in between interrogations gave him “not just the title of the book, it’s the texture of it, it’s the noir feel of it.

A report from April 1953 - just one month after the Scotsman’s arrival at Holywell - paints a striking picture of a community united against Gordon. To say it was improper for a judge, a solicitor and a serving member of the RUC to have risked the destruction of forensic evidence at the crime scene is a rank understatement - it verged on the criminal. McNamee γοητεύεται από την άλυτη υπόθεση δολοφονίας της δεκαεννιάχρονης Πατρίσια Κάραν το 1952, κοντά στο Μπέλφαστ, και το χρησιμοποιεί ως πηγή έμπνευσης για το συγκεκριμένο μυθιστόρημα που ήταν υποψήφιο στη μακρά λίστα του Man Booker Prize 2001.The family solicitor, Malcolm Davison, whom Curran rang before speaking to Constable Rutherford, helped them to load the already stiffening body into his car. They took Patricia to the family doctor, Kenneth Wilson, reaching his surgery at 2.20am. A short time later, Chambers also went up the same avenue delivering his papers. There was a rustle of leaves, which was drowned by the noise of a local factory horn that sounded to end the working day at 5.45pm each evening. While returning down the drive, he again heard noise like someone walking on leaves and, frightened, he fled the area. This could have been the reaction of a child to any noise, but does it fit into the events that followed. Rather than immediately question the family, the RUC launched a murder hunt which saw them take statements from over 40,000 members of the public. Eventually, the finger of suspicion fell on a 20-year-old Glaswegian Iain Hay Gordon, serving with the RAF and stationed in Belfast. A bit of a loner, Gordon was a friend of Desmond Curran, Patricia’s brother. The story that unfolds from here is an indictment as to why we should not have capital punishment. In many murder cases, a synopsis is generally easy to put together; that is not the case with this one. First, there is a brutal murder, an investigation which results in over 40,000 statements, many of which are conflicting, and then a trial which, it could be said, was partisan. Then, 48 years later, an appeal to have the verdict overturned by the convicted man, which even led to a change in British law so that it could be heard, and the very lengthy summary of that hearing into the original case. This story has troubled me since I was an eight-year-old boy in Dublin in 1953 reading the court reports in my father’s Irish Press. I hope I have made some sense of it at last.”

But no matter how hurtful the allegations may have been to Fr Curran, he remained friendly, courteous and good humoured throughout the three days he spent in the company of John Linklater and myself — enjoying meals out with us each night after interviews. But the unfortunate Scotsman stayed put, and soon people began to challenge the veracity of the case against him. I make this plea to anyone who knows the present whereabouts of Desmond Curran, the only surviving actor of this ghastly tragedy; it’s rumoured that he lives in a monastery somewhere in N Ireland.Outside Holywell, Gordon’s mother and her friend Dorothy Turtle were campaigning for his release, and this bore fruit in September 1960 when a visitor from the Home Office in London instructed Gordon to go home to Scotland. I used to work quite close to where the action of the novel takes place and had heard about the case from my father. The facts of the case sounded so sensational that the book couldn't miss.. but unfortunately it came as a huge surprise to me to find that much of the writing is downright terrible. My goodness, the author is fond of obscure wordy sort of words and phrases - such as she "raged at him in the darkened house as though the night itself had been rendered violate"....

A JESUIT priest from a devoutly Protestant family at the heart of the Northern Ireland establishment has died in South Africa - taking to his grave the last chance of shedding further light on one the north's most notorious murders.Patricia Curran had tea with a fellow student John Steel on 12 November 1952 before he escorted her to Smithfield Bus Station, where she boarded the 5pm bus which would take her home. She was last seen at 5.20pm as she alighted from the bus close to the driveway that led to her house.

Nor could could they see in this immature and confused young man any sign of the disciplined criminal mind who had, a jury had found, committed a most horrific assault on a young woman, and managed to conceal every trace of evidence linking him to the crime. Desmond, who was then a barrister , was a member of the local Presbyterian church and a crusading religious group to which he hoped to convert young Scottish RAF technician, Iain Hay Gordon, who would later be blamed for the killing. I had to make that boy tell me the truth about his private life and most secret thoughts. Only then could I begin to believe him she he began to tell the truth about Patricia Curran. I hated to use what might well seem to be ruthless measures. I was never sorrier for any criminal than for that unhappy, maladjusted youngster. But his mask had to be broken. Not only did Gordon pose a threat, they suggested that his very presence at the hospital ‘increased the risk of leading other patients towards action more dangerous than those to which they might now be inclined’. He was, as the medical director soon discovered, neither guilty nor insane but as the alternative was sending to him a regular prison with all the harshness that involved, it was thought best to let to let him stay there,” Mr Fegan told the Guardian this week.Gordon’s medical records reveal that he received no treatment for insanity and was quietly released seven years later, in 1960. He returned to Scotland and lived with his mother under an assumed name. He found it difficult to adjust to normal life. Eventually, he got a job in the stores of a publisher, on condition that he use the name John and was warned that he must never mention his case. Major Sir Lancelot Ernest Curran (8 March 1899 – 20 October 1984 [1]) was a Northern Ireland High Court judge and parliamentarian. After two days of intense questioning, which he now describes as a "game of charades" where detectives suggested certain scenarios and pushed him to acquiesce, he broke, terrified the police would reveal his past gay experimentation in an age when homosexuality was still illegal and considered a mortal sin by many. He went on to write two more books about murder cases overseen by Judge Curran – Orchid Blue and Blue is the Night – which deal with, respectively, the judge’s sentencing of Robert McGladdery – the last man to be hanged in Northern Ireland – for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble in 1961 and the Robert the Painter case, about a Protestant, Robert Taylor, on trial for the murder of a Catholic woman, Mary McGowan, in Belfast in 1949, who the judge ensures walks free. My thinking started out as, who murdered Patricia Curran, and it ended up being, who was Patricia Curran?”