The Death Chamber

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The daughter.’

  ‘Yes?’ There was a note of hope in Lewis’s voice now. ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘Belinda put her out for adoption. It was the only thing she could do in those days.’ Oh God, thought Walter, he’s beginning to look so delighted at the prospect of a daughter he didn’t know existed. Is he remembering his son who died and thinking that this is a sort of second chance for him? Help me find the words for this, he thought. Help me to help him.

  He said, ‘Sir Lewis – the child was adopted by some people called Molland. She’s Elizabeth Molland. The prisoner awaiting execution in Calvary.’

  The light that had begun to shine in Lewis Caradoc’s eyes went out and a dark and terrible pain took its place.

  Clara Caradoc was glad that Lewis kept a car these days, and that there was usually one of the household to drive her to and from wherever she wanted to go. You might say a number of things about Lewis but you could not say he was mean, although Clara made due allowance for the fact that it was her family’s money with which Lewis was not mean.

  It had perhaps been a little casual of Dr Kane to call at the house tonight without notification or invitation, but that was modern young men for you. The visit would be something to do with that dreadful prison because Lewis had never quite relinquished the running of it to Mr Higneth. Her father said men like Lewis never really gave up their commitments, even if they lived to be a hundred. Noblesse oblige, that was what it was, he said, and Clara ought to remember it. Clara thought whatever name you gave it, it still meant Lewis went gallivanting off to committees and served on various boards and trusts. It was all very well to talk about noblesse oblige but ordering meals and household provisions was extremely difficult if you did not know whether your husband would be at home or in London, and if it was the latter how long he might be away. This war would make life a great deal worse, with the stupid government already warning about bringing in rationing for perfectly ordinary things. Clara had no opinion of governments and even less opinion of wars, although it would not do to allow that vulgar little man with the absurd ranting voice and the awful moustache to go rampaging wholesale over Europe.

  Tonight’s Caradoc Society meeting did not promise to be particularly interesting, but it was Clara’s clear duty to attend. She nearly always did attend; Lewis had tried to dissuade her from doing so over the years – he had actually said he would prefer her not to associate with Dr McNulty. Of course Clara had taken no notice. Dr McNulty was a most conscientious and dedicated man; he gave unstintingly of his time, and it was a great shame Lewis could not understand how serious and important the Society’s work was. It was even more of a shame that he had this unreasoning dislike of Dr McNulty himself. Clara had never been able to discover the reason for that, and nor had she been able to discover why, having allowed the Caradoc Society to come into being and to bear his name, Lewis refused to have any involvement with it. They had not had an argument about it, because Clara did not allow such uncivilized and undisciplined things in her house, and Lewis always walked fastidiously away from arguments anyway. But Clara was occasionally and uneasily aware that they had come close to it several times.

  This evening they would discuss the recent theories about a person’s aura being captured on photographs. Electrographic photography it was called, and Dr McNulty was very enthusiastic about it; he had been in correspondence with people in Russia who were making experiments in the field. Clara would sit politely through the lecture but the real interest would come afterwards when they would gather round the table in the big meeting room, and Violette would make yet another attempt to reach Caspar. She had never been successful in this, not since that terrible night in the North London house, but she continued to try. ‘One day I shall succeed,’ she always said. ‘After all you have done for me, dear Clara – after your generosity when the fire destroyed all our possessions – well, it is the least I can do.’

  Clara thought it was the least Violette could do, but naturally this could not be said. She usually replied that she had been very pleased to help after the shocking business of the fire – to say nothing of the even more shocking business of Bartlam taking himself off in that cavalier fashion, leaving poorest Vita absolutely bereft. Clara had been glad to suggest that Vita came to live just outside Thornbeck – really a very nice little house Clara had found for her, and it had been her pleasure to buy the lease for her friend. (There had only been five years left on the lease, so the cost had actually been extremely modest.)

  It had all been rather timely, what with the Caradoc Society so newly created and just finding its feet. Vita had been a great help in those early days, and Clara had been overjoyed to have her so near. She had foreseen many private sessions in which they would together try to bring Caspar back.

  Vita knew, of course, that Clara had never given up the hope of reaching Caspar, and she had agreed that this war would bring him closer to his mamma. He might feel a comradeship with other young men going out to fight, said Vita. You never knew with the Departed Ones. They would speak with him yet, vowed Vita.

  The trouble was that Vita’s powers seemed to have diminished with the years. Clara supposed this was the shock of the fire, and perhaps the distress of Bartlam’s leaving but as the years wheeled by, she wondered once or twice if it might have been Bartlam who had possessed the mediumistic qualities rather than Vita. If this was true, looked at purely selfishly it was a very great pity he had gone, but viewed in a spirit of friendship it was better for Vita to be rid of the dreadful man. Clara had been very much shocked to hear of Bartlam’s squalid activities in Brighton and that dreadful business in Greek Street. It had been a blessed release for Vita when news of his death reached her a few years later.

  ‘Heart failure, and in unpleasant circumstances,’ was all Vita would say, and Clara had not wished to enquire any further. She had, however, been quite surprised when Vita re-married a year after Bartlam’s death. One would have thought that at her age she would not have cared for marriage in any form, although it had to be said that Vita was a little younger than Clara herself. Perhaps she was just over fifty. Her new husband was a rather common sort of person – a local businessman – but he did not object to his wife’s involvement with the Caradoc Society which was the really important thing.

  Getting into the smart little Ford that Lewis kept at Thornbeck, Clara hoped tonight might be the night Caspar would come, although it was a pity she had got to sit through an hour and a half of photographing auras first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ‘I suppose,’ said Lewis Caradoc, ‘there isn’t any doubt about this girl’s identity?’

  He can’t quite bring himself to use her name yet, thought Walter. But he said, ‘I don’t think so. Belinda was sent photographs of her by the Molland couple. We’d need to check, but she seemed very positive.’

  ‘She was an intelligent girl,’ said Lewis, staring into the fire.‘I was going to help her to something – well, to something a little better in life. I do wish she had confided in me all those years ago.’ The pain was still in his eyes, but Walter could almost feel him forcing his mind back to a semblance of control.

  ‘When is the execution?’ he said, at last.

  ‘The twelfth.’

  ‘Have they lodged an appeal?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Walter realized that Lewis was focusing determinedly on the practicalities of the situation – practicalities with which he was so familiar – and was not allowing any other emotions to come to the surface.

  ‘I read quite a lot of the reports of the trial. It all sounded fairly straightforward.’ His voice was so down-to-earth they might have been discussing some anonymous prisoner, convicted and about to be brought to Calvary.

  ‘The evidence seemed quite clear,’ said Walter. ‘But there’s something a bit out of kilter. Something I’ve since discovered which doesn’t fit with everything else.’

  ‘What?’r />
  ‘This is difficult, because there’s the confidentiality of a patient’s condition to take into account – Oh hell,’ said Walter, ‘I can’t think it matters in this situation, and if I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anybody. Sir Lewis, the evidence at the trial said Elizabeth and Neville Fremlin had been lovers. There had apparently been testimony from people who knew them – I don’t mean friends, I don’t think they could have had any, not in the normal sense, but customers and hotel people. I didn’t hear the prosecution case, but I heard the judge’s summing up and it was fairly clear that they were making quite a lot of that.’

  Lewis said, ‘Fremlin exerted his charm over her and she thought it was acceptable to kill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a fair assumption,’ said Lewis thoughtfully. ‘Maybe he persuaded her it was – what’s the word the Americans use? Glamorous. Maybe she saw it as that.’ The shock had gone and the sharp intelligence was driving him again. Only a strained look around his lips betrayed him.

  ‘But,’ said Walter, ‘the thing that’s out of kilter is that they weren’t lovers at all. At least, not in the physical sense. I’ve examined her – the standard pregnancy examination – and she’s virgo intacta. I’m trying to decide if it makes a difference.’

  ‘It could throw the rest of the evidence into question,’ said Lewis, frowning. ‘Or could it? The relationship might have been non-sexual. An older man looking on a pretty young girl in a fatherly way.’

  Walter said drily, ‘Did you ever meet Neville Fremlin?’

  ‘You know I didn’t. I was retired by the time he came to Calvary. I saw his photograph in the newspaper reports of the trial, though.’

  ‘I don’t think Neville Fremlin would have thought of any pretty young girl in a fatherly way,’ said Walter. ‘In any case, he was only in his late forties when he met her.’

  ‘All right. But she could still have been in thrall to him – sorry, that sounds rather melodramatic, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not given the two people involved,’ said Walter. ‘She’s very quiet, but she’s somehow a very dramatic person.’

  ‘Is she?’ It came out a bit too eagerly and as if realizing he had lowered his guard but as if it would take too much energy to put it back in place, Lewis said, ‘Walter, what are we going to do about this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do realize,’ said Lewis slowly, ‘that I can’t let her hang.’

  Walter had known they would reach this point; he had known it since Belinda’s astonishing revelation. What he had not known was how he would react: he had not expected Lewis’s words to churn up the long-dead memories: the ugliness and despair of that dreary day in Calvary’s condemned cell. The fragment of the Irish poem that Nicholas O’Kane had wanted to pass to the small Walter: the poem about dying not for flag, nor king, nor emperor, but for a dream . . . Nicholas O’Kane had died for a dream that day, and in the stuffy little church that smelt of wintergreen, Walter’s mother had tried to pray for him but could not because she was crying when the church bell chimed eight o’clock. The sound of his mother’s crying had stayed with him ever since, and the look in his father’s eyes had stayed as well. And surely, no matter what you had done, no matter what your beliefs or creeds were, you should not have to be tied up with leather straps and have your neck broken while stern-faced men stood in a coldly lit room and watched?

  The memories blurred and spun, and from deep within them, Walter heard his own voice saying, ‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent it.’

  Saul Ketch had been very pleased to be asked to go back to his old duties at the prison; he had found life a bit hard these past years. You picked up what you could, and you took what you could find and sold it – clothes, jewellery, information. Especially information. But gathering information was not as easy as it had been in Ketch’s youth – in the old Calvary days when he had gone along the corridors, listening and watching. For one thing, people were more suspicious now, particularly since this war business. They wanted to know where things had come from, or how Ketch had come by them. They saw Germans behind every bush or hiding in every cellar or barn. For another thing, Ketch himself had got a bit podgy over the years and could not nip around as fast as he used to.

  So taking it all in all, Ketch had been very glad of the work at Calvary, although he had not let on about that, not he! He had said, a bit grudgingly, that he supposed he might help them for a while. He would not come for tuppence farthing, mind. If they wanted him, they must pay him a decent wage. The decent wage had been agreed – it was not too bad a wage, either, although Ketch had not said this.

  He had told the doctor about it almost immediately, going along to the house the doctor had taken on the Kendal road. It was a nice house, although a bit of a lonely spot for Ketch who liked to be at the centre of things with people around him.

  The doctor had not worked at Calvary since that business with Nicholas O’Kane – Ketch had never got to the bottom of that, but he might do so one day. (It might be worth something to get to the bottom of it!) But they still had their little arrangement, Ketch and the doctor, even though he was so taken up with that dopey society Lewis Caradoc – Sir Lewis Caradoc if you wanted to be particular – had set up. But when Ketch was given the push by Lewis bloody Caradoc on account of that tart, Belinda Skelton, the doctor had said no need to worry: he always looked after people who had helped him. And give the devil his due, he had done so. There had been many a little job the doctor had passed to Ketch – finding out things about people it mostly was. Keeping an eye on people and passing on the information. The doctor liked to know as much as he could so he could put the squeeze on people and make them pay to stop their secrets being told. Ketch was all for getting money where you could, and did not in the least mind squeezing people. He did think old McNulty must be a bit mad to spend all the money he got on his daft experiments – seeing if the soul flew out of the body and suchlike.

  Still, the doctor had managed to squeeze quite a few people over the years – with Ketch’s help, of course. You wouldn’t believe some of the things going on in Thornbeck and the villages around it. People pretending to be respectable citizens, when in fact they were no such thing – Ketch had certainly learned a thing or two about what went on behind closed curtains and locked doors, but he never told anybody anything unless he was paid.

  The doctor thought it was a very good opportunity for Ketch to work at Calvary again. All kinds of things might be happening there, he said. Things that could be made use of. Ketch must be sure to bring him all the titbits of information – he knew what was wanted, said Dr McNulty. As for Ketch not being as nippy as he once had been, oh pish, said the doctor, all he needed was to stop gorging on pies and puddings and glasses of beer, that would bring the podge off!

  It was all very well for the doctor, who had got a bit dried-up and wizened over the years; Ketch often thought a few good platefuls of steak and kidney pudding, or dumplings and beef, would do the doctor a lot of good!

  But anyway, Ketch went back to Calvary, and at times you might almost have thought there had been no twenty-year gap, because not much had changed. The governor had changed, of course. Edgar Higneth, that was the new man’s name. Ketch did not care for him, but at least he did not know the story of Ketch’s disgrace all those years ago. And now Lewis Caradoc was away in London so often, being on stupid committees all the time, there was no one likely to spill those particular beans!

  Ketch was glad to find he had not lost his old cunning when it came to Calvary and its inmates. He knew almost at once that there was something odd going on, and thought it was to do with the posh tart in the condemned cell. There was an uneasiness, almost as if somebody knew something about her. It might just be that they did not like the idea of hanging a young female, but it might be something more than that. Ketch was going to listen and watch very carefully.

  He had made sure to take a look at the tart for himself, d
oing so when they took her into the little yard under the condemned cell window for exercise and fresh air, although why anyone would want to bother with exercise and fresh air with old Pierrepoint gobbling in the background and measuring the hemp, Ketch could not think. Liz Molland, that was her name. He supposed some men would find her nice-looking, although she was a bit skinny for his taste. She’d be one of those Die-away Doras, as well: no energy and lying around on sofas, and oh dear, poor little me, I can’t cope with life. Expecting everyone to wait on her hand and foot. Neville Fremlin had waited on her, in fact if you could believe the reports, Neville Fremlin had done a lot more than wait on her, the dirty old sod. Ketch sniggered to think of Fremlin and this whey-faced tart together, but while he was sniggering he kept his ears alert for any nice little snippets of scandal the doctor might like.

  Walter always slept at Calvary when a prisoner was awaiting execution; it was only a matter of three weeks and he thought it important to be on call in case of any difficulties.

  He was doing so now for Elizabeth. The small room near the infirmary was familiar to him by this time; he had moved one or two of his own things in – some books, a couple of paintings he liked, an amber silk bed cover he had bought on a brief holiday in Italy which reminded him of a Tuscan sunset. No photographs, though. Photographs might cause one of the older warders to spot a familiar face, and say, ‘Isn’t that Nicholas O’Kane?’

  Sir Lewis had to be in London a good deal at the moment – he was involved in the setting up of internment camps for prisoners of war, and he had recently been appointed to one of the committees of the International Red Cross. ‘I thought when I left Calvary for the Home Office rehabilitation work, it would be a stepping-stone to retirement,’ he said to Walter once. ‘I thought I would eventually take up growing roses or keeping bees like Sherlock Holmes was supposed to have done. But it’s not quite working out like that.’

  ‘You’ll never retire,’ Walter had said. ‘You’ll never want to.’