The Death Chamber

by Sarah Rayne

  But he could not find anything to admire or enjoy or appreciate in Denzil McNulty. He had met him a couple of times because McNulty had acted as locum at Calvary when Walter was away. He had not been away much at all since coming here, but he had taken a short holiday the previous spring, and he had had one or two long weekends in London. He always returned with pleased anticipation of the work ahead and the men in his care.

  He supposed McNulty was a good doctor, but he could not find any humanity or humour in the man. He certainly could not find any on the morning after Elizabeth Molland vanished from the dark road between Thornbeck and Kendal, when McNulty came up to Calvary and requested to see Walter as soon as convenient.

  Walter, thinking there might be a medical matter on which McNulty wanted to consult him, or even that McNulty was trying to lure him into the Caradoc Society’s various activities, saw him at once.

  ‘I should perhaps apologize for coming in when everything’s in such turmoil,’ said McNulty, taking the seat Walter indicated. ‘A very shocking thing, this business with Elizabeth Molland.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘It must be a great relief to you to know that at least she didn’t have acute appendicitis.’

  Walter had the sensation of something suddenly squeezing around his ribcage, but he said, ‘That was not a definite diagnosis. But she was presenting with enough of the symptoms to make it imperative to have it investigated. It was a difficult situation but—’

  Denzil McNulty said, ‘But a patient with acute appendicitis could hardly have walked out of an ambulance and got into a car on the road between Thornbeck and Kendal almost unaided, could she, Dr Kane?’

  ‘I think,’ said Walter carefully, ‘that you’re under some kind of misapprehension, Dr McNulty. Or someone has been spreading spiteful lies.’ Saul Ketch, he thought. I knew he was a sly greedy one, out to make trouble! ‘The crash knocked me out for several minutes. I have absolutely no idea what happened or how she got away.’

  He stood up, hoping McNulty would take this as dismissal but McNulty did not. He said, ‘I’m not misinformed and I don’t think there have been any lies. I don’t think you were knocked out at all.’ He leaned forward. ‘Dr Kane, let us not play these games. Somebody gave Elizabeth Molland some kind of emetic, and that somebody coached her in the symptoms of appendicitis. Probably it was a hefty measure of mustard in warm water – easily done without anyone noticing it. Especially if you happen to be the prison doctor. Or,’ he said very softly, ‘a distinguished visitor.’

  Again, Walter experienced the sudden tight panic around his chest. Lewis. But he said, ‘If you’re thinking I arranged an escape for her—’

  ‘I don’t think you actually arranged it,’ said McNulty. ‘But I think you let someone else take advantage of the situation – perhaps you even guessed the situation was false.’

  Walter said furiously, ‘You’ll take that back, McNulty.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t care who it was who fed the girl an emetic, but I do think the two of you were in it together.’ He broke off and then said, ‘You and Elizabeth’s father.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. I’ve met Molland and he’s the last person—’

  ‘I’m talking about her real father, Dr Kane. Lewis Caradoc.’ As Walter stared at him, he said, ‘Did you really think I didn’t know? I always knew what went on inside this prison, Walter. To a great extent, I still know. People tell me things. Useful things. Twenty-odd years ago Lewis Caradoc fathered a child onto that slut Belinda Skelton, and it was Caradoc who was the grey eminence behind Elizabeth’s disappearance last night. He arranged for her to be spirited away, and he did it so well she hasn’t been found’. He waited, but when Walter did not reply, said, ‘And so, having laid our cards on the table, I think it’s time to be open. I think we can be of use to one another, Dr Kane. Because for the sake of you and Lewis Caradoc, I think you’ll want me to keep very quiet about all this.’

  ‘I did nothing,’ said Walter angrily.

  ‘Let’s hope the General Medical Council come to the same conclusion.’

  ‘If you have some mad idea of blackmail,’ said Walter, ‘you can go to hell. Even if I were likely to submit to that, I haven’t any money. I’m a bad choice for blackmail, McNulty.’ But Lewis isn’t.

  ‘It isn’t money I want,’ said McNulty, and quite suddenly he seemed to change. Walter stared at him and saw the thin figure become sly. He did not precisely hunch his bony shoulders, but the impression of someone hugging a secret to his chest was strongly there.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I want,’ said McNulty, ‘to conduct an experiment in the execution chamber. I’ve tried it before and it went wrong. That was in Lewis Caradoc’s day.’ He paused briefly and Walter, still trying to sort out the confusion in his mind, saw a spasm cross McNulty’s face and saw that Denzil McNulty hated Sir Lewis. ‘I’ve been waiting twenty years for another opportunity,’ said McNulty. ‘I’m a very patient man, you see, Dr Kane.’

  ‘The execution chamber? But I couldn’t possibly give my help in any kind of experiment in the last moment’s of a man’s life,’ said Walter, staring at him.

  ‘I think you will,’ said McNulty, and smiled. ‘I think when it comes to it, you’ll give your consent.’

  ‘I certainly will not! I don’t even want to hear what your experiment is, McNulty. Because whatever it is, I won’t be part of it.’

  ‘Oh, I think you will,’ said McNulty. ‘I shall talk to you again about that. I can’t tell when – it may be a long time in the future or it may be quite soon. It depends when a condemned prisoner next comes here. But in the meantime, remember that the next man to be hanged at Calvary is mine.’

  He went out, leaving Walter at the mercy of a tumult of emotions. Uppermost was that he was not going to give in to McNulty’s bizarre experiment, whatever it turned out to be. If he had to, he would face the music over Elizabeth Molland. His conscience was not precisely clear – he had believed Elizabeth’s symptoms, but he had made those phone calls to Lewis and Molland. ‘I thought you should know,’ he had said, and Lewis had said, ‘I understand.’ And in a very short while there had been the car on that dark road, and Walter had watched Elizabeth taken out of the ambulance by a tall man whose face he could not see.

  As he went about his normal work, McNulty’s words kept repeating in his mind, ‘The next man to be hanged at Calvary is mine.’ That was what McNulty had said, ‘The next man to be hanged is mine.’ I won’t allow his experiment, whatever it is, he thought. Of course I won’t. But would McNulty really report him to the General Medical Council? If there were to be an investigation he would almost certainly be cleared, but people would remember afterwards. Oh yes, Dr Kane, they would say, wasn’t there something about him helping a murderer to escape from prison?

  ‘The next man to be hanged is mine.’

  Walter was to think – a long time later, when he could think clearly again – that neither he nor Denzil McNulty could possibly have foreseen that the next man to be hanged at Calvary would not be a man at all.

  It would be a woman.

  December 1939

  ‘Violet Parsons,’ said Edgar Higneth, facing Walter in his office in the bleak light of a freezing December morning. ‘She’s being sentenced tomorrow, and there’s not much doubt about the verdict.’

  Walter had been immersed in work – there had been an outbreak of influenza and a number of the men and several of the staff had gone down with it – but Higneth’s words jerked him sickeningly back to the conversation with McNulty. The next man to be hanged, he had said. Would he care that it was a woman? What exactly did he want?

  He asked Higneth for details about Violet Parsons. ‘I must have missed the newspaper reports about this one, and with the influenza epidemic we’ve had here . . .’

  ‘There’s hardly been anything in the papers,’ said Higneth. ‘It’s all war news, of course. A single murder gets a bit overshadowed by Hitler, and Parsons isn’t a pa
rticularly interesting case from the point of view of the newspapers. Just a middle-aged woman who killed her husband.’

  ‘She’s been found guilty?’ said Walter.

  ‘Oh yes. The jury were out for only four hours. There is one curious feature of the case though. It didn’t get much attention but apparently she used to hold seances with her husband in the twenties. Violette Partridge she was then.’ He looked at the calendar he kept on his desk. ‘If it is the death sentence,’ he said, ‘she’ll be here by Friday. And – oh, my lord, this will be a nasty one. Counting the required three weeks exactly, execution would fall on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Christmas dinner and the carol service,’ said Walter expressionlessly, and Higneth shot him a quick look.

  ‘They’ll most likely make it just after Christmas,’ he said. ‘Boxing Day or the next one, I expect. But I’m thinking more of Calvary being snowed up and cut off, so that Mr Pierrepoint or one of his colleagues can’t get here to carry out the sentence. Parsons might be penned up here, not knowing how long she’s got to wait before we hang her.’

  ‘That’ll be inhumane,’ said Walter. ‘Mightn’t they send her somewhere else for the execution?’

  ‘They might. I’m telegraphing them to suggest that, in fact. They may insist, however. But I’ve pointed out that if she does come here her execution might have to be a makeshift affair. With snowstorms and blizzards forecast, it’s possible that all the usual people won’t be able to get here.’

  Clara Caradoc thought there were times in life when you were extremely glad you had removed yourself from a situation and a group of people, especially when that situation – and those people – had turned into something very distasteful indeed.

  Once she would have championed the lady she had known as Violette Partridge. She would have said, very earnestly, that poorest Vita had been shockingly treated and that excuses must be found for her. That Man, Clara would have said in scathing reference to the perfidious Bartlam, had ruined Vita’s life and deserved all he got.

  But nobody deserved to be poisoned with rat-bane taken from the gardener’s potting shed, not even Bartlam. Clara, faced with the undoubted fact that Vita had administered the poison and had stood gloatingly by while Bartlam writhed and suffered and finally expired, did not want to hear the woman’s name ever again. She told Lewis it was a scandal and a disgrace, and she would not have thought it of Vita – indeed, of any woman.

  ‘Poison so often is a woman’s weapon, I’m afraid,’ said Lewis, looking up from a report he was writing for some government department. Something to do with the incarceration of prisoners of war, it was, and the setting up of some kind of internment centres for them. Clara had not enquired into the details although, of course, it was very praiseworthy of Lewis to be contributing to the war effort and quite gratifying that the government had sought his assistance. Father had said so, only a week earlier.

  Clara herself would naturally be doing what she could for her king and country in due time; it was being said there would actually be raids on English cities from the air, and that Red Cross centres would be set up to help treat the injured. This seemed scarcely possible, but Clara had already thought that her organizational skills would be very useful there. Mamma had done something similar in the Great War and Clara, in the months before Caspar was killed, had helped her.

  ‘I went to the first day of the trial,’ said Clara suddenly. She had not known she was going to tell Lewis this, but the words were out before she realized it.

  ‘Did you?’ He looked up from his report, not shocked or annoyed, merely interested and prepared to discuss it if she wanted to. This was another of the things Clara’s father admired about him; quiet concentration on whatever you said to him. That was what you noticed about Caradoc and even though he was older now – approaching his seventieth birthday, that quality had not diminished. It was a quality that for once Clara found extremely comforting.

  ‘I was very plainly dressed,’ she said. ‘No one recognized me.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered if anyone had. How much of the trial did you see? Did you form any opinion as to her innocence or guilt?’

  ‘I tried to be completely impartial at the start,’ said Clara. ‘But the facts were quite overwhelming. Do you know, Lewis, when she made that second marriage – that bluff little man, rather common I always thought him—’

  ‘Fairly well-off, of course.’

  Clara ignored the trace of cynicism in Lewis’s voice. ‘She must have known perfectly well that Bartlam was still alive.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she had known all along,’ said Lewis.

  ‘A bigamist,’ said Clara, trying out the ugly word. ‘That was what she was. Well, one can only thank God there were no children.’

  ‘I’ve only read the briefest of details about the case,’ said Lewis, ‘but didn’t the real husband – what was his name? Bartlam, was it? Didn’t he turn up and try to blackmail her?’

  ‘Yes, he did, which does not surprise me in the least. If there was any money to be made out of any situation, then Bartlam Partridge was the one to make it,’ said Clara. ‘A very untrustworthy person. There had been some very distasteful episodes over the years.’ She frowned, and in a different voice said, ‘But for Violette to feed him poison – Well, I see now that I was sadly mistaken in her, Lewis. A cruel and heartless woman and I have absolutely no sympathy for her at all.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ‘There’ll be absolutely no sympathy for this one at all,’ said Edgar Higneth, reading the Home Office telegram to Walter, the telegram that confirmed Violet Parsons would be brought to Calvary Gaol, where the sentence of death would be carried out.

  ‘A cruel and heartless woman,’ he said. ‘She married her second husband knowing full well Bartlam Partridge was still alive. And given Bartlam’s apparent history, she should have known he’d use the fact to get money out of her. As a rule I dislike seeing any woman brought to the gallows, Walter, but in this case I can’t find it in my heart to pity her.’

  ‘D’you think she’ll be a difficult prisoner?’ said Walter, his mind going back just three months to another female prisoner who had not been in the least difficult, but who had turned his life upside-down. Where was she now, Elizabeth Molland? Would he ever dare ask Lewis about her? And had it in fact been Lewis that night? You can’t be sure, thought Walter, you really can’t.

  Higneth said, ‘You can never tell who’ll be difficult and who won’t. Sometimes it’s the quiet ones who give the most trouble at the end.’

  ‘How old is Violet Parsons?’

  ‘Fifty.’ Higneth glanced back at the telegram. ‘They say Mr Pierrepoint is being engaged for the twenty-seventh of December.’

  ‘She will have to go through Christmas, then.’

  ‘Yes, she will, but we’ll try to keep the festivities as much removed from her as we can.’

  Walter did not say the festivities at Calvary were fairly subdued anyway. There was morning service in the prison chapel, followed by a turkey dinner for the men. Small gifts were allowed from their immediate families, and there was a carol concert in the afternoon, given by one of the local church choirs. Walter would attend the service, but afterwards he had been invited to Christmas dinner with Sir Lewis and Lady Caradoc. There would be a party of about a dozen and probably charades and bridge during the afternoon. Dancing in the evening – probably in the big oak-floored hall. Lady Caradoc had graciously suggested they could play gramophone records for that. Walter was looking forward to it.

  ‘I know I said I haven’t got any sympathy for Violet Parsons,’ said Higneth, ‘and nor I have. But in common humanity, Walter, we’ll have to do what we can to make it as easy as possible for her.’

  Violet Parsons did not look like a woman who had stirred rat-bane into her husband’s drink and then watched him die writhing in agony. Nor did she look like a woman who held seances and purported to talk to the spirits of the dead in return for mone
y. She looked like a woman whose counterpart could be found in almost any English village. A devout church-goer, an indefatigable collector for charitable causes and a sitter on committees. When she was brought in, she was wearing a grey skirt and a fawn-coloured blouse with a coffee-coloured lace modesty vest. Her hair was arranged neatly, and the only faintly exotic note was a velvet cape which she wore over her shoulders, and a drift of rather cloying violet perfume.

  Once in the condemned cell, she listened politely to Walter’s careful explanation as to how he would hope to help her through the days ahead, and replied with perfect composure to his medical enquiries. No, she was not on medication of any kind, save the occasional soda mint for dyspepsia if she drank tea that was too strong. Yes, she would accept any sedative doses Dr Kane prepared for her. She had no illnesses or conditions he needed to know about. She had no allergies other than shellfish, which gave her a rash. Lobster was particularly troublesome on that score, although she did not suppose lobster would be served to her here.

  Asked what religion she practised, Violet Parsons said religion was a very individual matter, and she regarded herself as being on a higher spiritual plane than that symbolized by the singing of hymns or the holding of fêtes for rebuilding the church spire. She believed she was about to pass over to the Other Side where she would meet loved friends and dear ones who had Gone Before. She would be asking forgiveness of those she might have injured when she got to the Other Side, so there was not much point in the chaplain trying to forestall this by badgering her for confessions or admissions of sin. In the meantime, if they had to mark her down as anything, they might as well put Church of England. It was all one to her.

  When Walter tentatively broached the matter of Christmas Day, Violet Parsons said, composedly, that she knew it was the custom to celebrate the birth of the Christian Prophet, although for herself she could not see how eating roast turkey and plum pudding did that. She would be agreeable to being served with her share of it if that was all the kitchens had to offer on the day, but would they remember not to include sage and onion stuffing and to put only a very few Brussels sprouts in the dish because they always provoked her dyspepsia. Thank you so much.