by Sarah Rayne
Here was the condemned cell – the door was lying on the ground just inside. Georgina remembered Phin making a good story of how they had pushed it open and how it had fallen off its hinges, nearly deafening everyone. She shone the torch inside, but the room was empty – unless you counted the thick layers of agony and despair that hung on the air. Dreadful. (And were the unseen eyes still watching her?)
The shower room was next, its door wide open. It was a grisly, concrete-floored compartment, not much wider than the corridor. Incredibly an antiquated shower trough was still in place, and pipes hung out of the walls like clusters of spiders’ legs. Georgina thought the condemned cell had had some kind of basic loo behind a half screen, but they must presumably have brought the condemned prisoner in here to shower each day. Had he cared about that? If you were going to die, would you care whether you were bathed and shampooed? She shone the torch inside, but nothing moved.
She called out again, and again Calvary’s thick shadows sent her own voice back at her.
Anyone here, anyone here, HERE, . . .
Or were the echoes playing a trick? Mightn’t they be saying, someone here . . .?
She reached the end of the corridor, and stood for a moment by the oak door. Should she go back through it into Calvary’s maze of corridors and cells? She thought it might be very easy to get lost out there. Even Chad Ingram, who had a map of the layout and who had been in here before, had hesitated at one of the intersections, clearly unsure whether to turn left or right. Perhaps she ought to open the oak door and call out once more before going back. The footsteps seemed to have gone – they might not have been footsteps at all, in fact. They might have been some peculiar echo – something to do with the plumbing – water dripping somewhere. Georgina did not actually think this was very likely, but at least nothing sinister seemed to be prowling around out here.
She reached for the door’s handle, and turned it. It would not turn. Was it stuck? Georgina tried again, and then shone the torch onto the edges where the door met the wall. It was not stuck at all, it was locked – it was a simple old mechanism, and she could see the steel tongue was locked across. The key was nowhere to be seen. Was it on the other side of the door?
But Chad had definitely said he would leave this door unlocked because Georgina needed to be able to get outside the building to make a phone call in an emergency. That was why he had left her the spare key to the main outside door. But if he had left the door unlocked, who had locked it? Prickles of fear jabbed her mind, and with them suddenly came another memory, causing her to whip round and stare back down the corridor.
The bathroom door. When they came in here it had been closed. Georgina definitely remembered that; she remembered Chad pointing it out. And now it was standing wide open. Had Chad or one of the others opened it? Georgina could not think of any good reason why they would have done that.
Icy fear was scudding across her skin in waves. Someone’s in here, she thought. Someone who’s locked this door – and taken away the key – and someone who’s pushed the bathroom door back to the wall so he could stand behind it to hide.
She shone the torch over the walls again. Had there been a movement from within the bathroom? If there really was someone in here, what should she do? Could she scoot back along the passage and get inside the execution chamber and slam the door? But what then? Could the door be locked from inside?
She was just making up her mind that at least she must get back to Jude, when the movement came again. A figure darted out of the tiny bathroom, ran past the condemned cell and into the execution chamber. The door slammed hard with a dreadful booming thud, and Georgina’s earlier question was answered because in the enclosed space the sound of a lock being turned from inside was clear and unmistakable.
The owner of the footsteps had locked her into this corridor. And whoever he was, he was now inside the execution chamber with Jude.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jude had waited in an agony of impatience for Georgina to come back and say everything was all right, that after all it had only been water dripping somewhere, or mice.
If he could have got back into the room he would have gone unhesitatingly out to see who might be prowling around, and be blowed to being blind – he thought he had never hated his blindness as much as he hated it at this minute. Not even those first anguished weeks compared with this – with being stuck in this place, fearing something had happened to Georgina, and not being able to get to her. Several layers down he was aware that his anguish for Georgina was far more than it would have been if it had been Drusilla or Phin or even Chad who was in danger, but there was no time to examine this feeling. In any case Georgina was probably firmly hooked up to some revoltingly healthy man who took her disgustingly for granted, and treated her abominably . . . and had his sight. Oh hell.
After a few moments he managed to locate the steps which were in a corner of the vault, and he felt his way up them, missing his footing once or twice and banging his head when he reached the top. But although he threw his whole weight into trying to raise the small trapdoor, and also tried using the walking stick to force it upwards, it was absolutely immoveable. Damn.
He retraced his steps, expecting to hear Georgina come back. But the minutes dragged on, and there was only the thick silence. From feeling worried, Jude now began to feel genuinely frightened. Chad had said he had checked this place but how far had he been able to do that?
From overhead, he heard a sudden yell of anger or pain or both – Georgina’s voice! – and then running footsteps coming towards the execution chamber. The door was slammed and there was the sound of a key turning in the lock. Georgina? No, he could hear her voice from a long way away, shouting something. There was a second or two of relief at that, because for the moment she sounded all right. But the relief was instantly replaced by a new fear, because clearly the prowler was in the execution chamber. Even if Jude had not heard the man’s slightly laboured breathing, he would have sensed his presence.
For a moment he had absolutely no idea what to do. Did the man even know he was down here? But no sooner had the thought formed than there was the rasping of machinery. Above him something seemed to shudder, and there was the sound of pulleys engaging. The gallows trap, thought Jude. My God, he’s closing it! He’s shutting me into this God-forsaken vault!
As the door locked back into place, he felt the darkness become stifling and menacing, and was aware again of the lonely agony of the prison. Calvary’s ghosts pressed against him, holding out their dead hands, pushing their swollen discoloured faces at him . . .
Now you’re down here with us, said these unseen faces. Now you’ve joined us and you can’t get away. For a fleeting, shutter-flash second Jude saw in his mind the face he had seen the previous night. A narrow well-shaped skull, with thick just-greying hair, a sharp clear jawline that even the dislocation of the neck could not blur.
And then the inner image vanished, and he was back with the choking darkness, and the unknown prowler overhead. And Georgina trapped somewhere beyond the execution chamber.
Think, dammit, said Jude angrily to himself. You can’t get out of here by brute strength, but you might get out by using your wits – it wouldn’t be the first time you’d done that. So where’s that famed sharpness that got you out of so many awkward places in the past?
There had to be another way out of this vault. There must have been some means of taking the executed prisoners away – taking them to a mortuary, perhaps, or an infirmary room. It was unlikely that the bodies had been carried up the stairs and through the smaller trap, because the stairs were too narrow and awkward. And it was even less likely that they would have been taken through the main part of the prison. So how had it been done, how?
Mentally he reached for the map he had made of the vault – eight feet deep, and rectangular in shape. Steps up to the trap behind him, in a corner. None of that any damn good. Jude began to tap around the walls with his stick, feeling fo
r a break in the solid brickwork. There must be something, there must . . .
And there it was. A door. Set deeply into the brickwork, with a handle on one side. Jude did not give himself time to wonder if this door would be locked; he turned the handle straight away. It felt loose and it was unpleasantly rusty, but it moved and although the hinges groaned like a thousand souls in torment, the door opened outwards fairly easily. The accreted dust and dirt of years came away and a breath of foetid air gusted outwards.
For a moment panic engulfed him because anything could be beyond this door – the prowler might be crouching there, waiting to pounce. But if Jude could get near enough to a window or even an outer wall, he should be able to phone Chad. He hated having to call for help – he wanted to go rampaging through Calvary himself, find Georgina and then beat to a pulp the madman who had brought about this situation. As he felt his way cautiously forwards, he wondered briefly who the man was. Presumably he had a key. And hopefully the camcorder would have picked him up, although this would not be much comfort if Jude and Georgina were attacked and injured, and it would not be any help if the man spotted the camcorder and smashed it up.
Tapping around with the stick seemed to establish that beyond the door was a tunnel, brick lined, not very wide. It might lead anywhere or it might lead nowhere, but Jude thought there was a strong possibility that it led to the infirmary or perhaps some kind of morgue.
The ghosts were still with him as he went along – the hanged men who would have been carried along this tunnel. Had the man whose face he had seen been carried along here? Presumably he must have been. Presumably he had been a murderer, and he was buried in the prison’s grounds.
Several times he misjudged distances and twice he walked into a jutting bit of wall. The tunnel curved which made it difficult to make any kind of mental map in his head. Every few paces he stopped to listen, but there was no sound of the intruder following him. He thought the man had stayed in the execution chamber.
The tunnel widened slightly, and Jude felt a faint brush of cooler air ahead of him – a door? A window? Worth trying to get a signal again? He was just reaching for the phone when he heard the sound he had hoped not to hear. The shudder of metal and timber as the trap was opened again. That could only mean one thing: the man was about to spring down into the vault and come after him.
Jude’s every instinct screamed at him to whip round and confront whoever this was, and the familiar frustration tore through him again. I can’t see!
He plunged on as quickly as he dared, feeling for Chad’s number on the phone’s keypad at the same time. Please let it ring out – please . . . but it was still dead.
The prowler was coming quietly, but Jude could hear him. He could sense the man approaching. He could not imagine what he wanted – he supposed he was a druggie high on something. But if he pounced, Jude would put up as good a fight as he could. He gripped the walking stick gratefully, and it was then that the cooler air seemed more definite and the stick made out the shape of a doorway and of a half-open door.
Then I really am out of the tunnel thought Jude, and moved forward again, trying to fix the position of the doorway on his mental map, keeping to a left-hand wall. After a few feet he encountered what seemed to be a deep old stone sink. Was it? Yes, his hands identified old-fashioned taps and pipes. Then surely this was far enough above ground to pick up a phone signal. Would there be time to reach Chad before the madman in the tunnel made a move? Even if he did not manage to speak, surely if Chad saw a call registering from Jude’s number he would respond.
He was just reaching into his pocket for the phone when there was a rush of movement from within the tunnel, and he knew the person who had stalked the darkness was standing in front of him.
Vincent thought the plan was unrolling beautifully. It was not unrolling precisely as he had thought it would, but as long as he stopped the television people’s activities and Georgina’s delvings – and did not get caught in the process – the sequence of events did not matter.
It gave him a savage satisfaction to raise the trapdoor and shut the dark-haired man in. Vincent sensed his sudden panic. The next bit was interesting, because he wanted the man to find his way through the old mortuary tunnel, and come out into the burial yard. Would he do that? Vincent knelt on the edge of the trap, listening, hearing the tapping of the man’s stick. Yes, he had worked out that there would have to be another way out, and he was trying to find it. Ah, there he went now! Good! Vincent waited until he judged the man had got to the far end, to where the tunnel opened onto the mortuary, then raised the trap again, and sprang down into the vault. He switched on his torch, and padded very quietly along after his prey.
The man had reached the mortuary, exactly as he had hoped. Vincent waited, standing just inside the tunnel, wanting the man to move forward a little more so he could step out. His idea was to unbolt the outer door, and get the man into the burial yard. He hoped not to have to use violence, because he wanted everything to look like a genuine accident, but he would do so if necessary. Seen at closer quarters, the man was a little older than he had seemed in the King’s Head: perhaps thirty-six or thirty-eight. When he half turned his head, as if listening for sounds from within the tunnel, Vincent saw he was not wearing dark glasses. Even in the dimness it was possible to see he had remarkably vivid blue eyes. Vincent found it disconcerting, because for a moment, he had thought the man could see him. Could he? Was this some kind of elaborate trick? No, it was all right, but he knew Vincent was there, Vincent could tell.
He was moving forward again, going in the direction of the door. Perhaps he could feel cooler air coming in from it. He had stopped, though – why had he done that?
Ah, of course! He had reached into his pocket and was holding a mobile phone. He was going to call for help, probably from Dr Ingram. So, violence it would have to be. Vincent sprang forward and before the man could react or put up any kind of defence, he had knocked the phone from his hand, sending it skittering across the floor into a dusty corner.
Among the preparations he had made before leaving his house was the fashioning of a makeshift cosh. This had been easy; he had filled an old sock with soft dry soil from the end of his garden. Plainly he would have to knock the man out before he could move to the next stage of his plan. He swung the cosh and brought it down on the man’s head. He fell to his knees, then crumpled forward and lay still. Vincent bent over to make sure he was genuinely unconscious – yes, he was. Very good. The weapon wouldn’t be found – the soil could be tipped away and the sock burned.
He unbolted the outer door of the mortuary – this was the only door that was bolted from inside – and propped it open. Cool night air filtered in, and he could see the shadowy mounds of the graves beyond.
Now for the strenuous part. Vincent considered his victim, seeing he was quite slimly built but that it was the slimness of whipcord strength rather than weakness. In the end, he simply grasped the edges of the man’s coat and dragged him down to the burial yard outside. It was quite difficult but not as difficult as he had feared, although he had to pause a couple of times, and when he reached the lime store he was puffing like a grampus. He would have to watch that, it would not do to become out of condition. People would notice; they would say he was getting flabby.
He propped the man against the side of the row of outbuildings. Once he got him inside the lime store and wedged the door firmly closed, he would return for Georgina. His mind flew ahead, seeing how he would unlock the door to the execution suite, and how she would come out at once, and how he would be waiting for her. He would have to remain well hidden, of course, because if anything went wrong she must not be able to identify him afterwards. But it ought to be possible to knock her out in the darkness, and get her into the lime store as well. And then . . .
And then he would cover the drain with the supermarket carrier bag folded in his pocket and weight it in place with a stone. After he had done that he would knock away the r
usting tap from the rainwater butt and flood the courtyard.
Tomorrow, when the news got round, people would be shocked to hear that someone of Dr Ingram’s standing – actually C. R. Ingram who did all those television programmes and wrote all those books – had been so irresponsible. That he had allowed a blind man the run of Calvary, and that the man had blundered into the lime store along with Georgina Grey, and that both of them had been trapped in there, and . . .
And died? That remained to be seen, but when Vincent remembered how the small pieces of lime had reacted to water, he smiled.
He had brought the oilskin rain hat in his pocket, the thick gardening gloves and glasses, because whatever happened to these people, he was not risking any damage to himself, not he! He put these on, and then carefully opened the door. As it swung open the powdery lime, disturbed by the movement, stirred slightly. For a moment, against the blackness of the store’s interior it seemed to writhe upwards into the blurred, shifting outline of a man – a man who was trying to hold out his arms but could not because his arms ended in stumps from where the quicklime had eaten his hands away.
‘But it’s only what a murderer deserves.’
Vincent shook his head to clear this macabre image and to dispel the odd little whisper in his mind. It was not at all like him to have these fantasies and he was perfectly accustomed to Calvary’s atmosphere. The circumstances were bizarre, of course, so perhaps he was entitled to an attack of nerves.
He bent down to hook his hands under his victim’s arms, and began to drag him inside.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
September 1939
Walter Kane thought he could say with truth that he liked most people. He could usually find something to admire or enjoy or appreciate in everyone he met.
