The Death Chamber

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘I might,’ she said, returning his steady regard. ‘Yes, I might need you one day, Lewis.’

  I might need you one day, Lewis.

  But it had been nearly twenty years before she did need him.

  The letter that startled him out of his uneventful days arrived on a summer morning, just after breakfast. The posts were inclined to be a bit relaxed in this small Cotswold village, because there were so many retired people living here, and the postal services either thought retired people did not need the immediacy of letters at the crack of dawn or that they could not cope with them until after breakfast. Lewis was drinking a second cup of coffee and filling in The Times crossword – it was one of his small vanities that he could still complete it inside his own time limit – when the letters dropped onto the mat; he went along to pick them up at once.

  And there it was. Unfamiliar handwriting, but unmistakably feminine. It could have been from anyone of a dozen people. Lewis opened it ahead of the others, curious to find out. It was dated three days earlier and the address was Holloway Gaol for Women.

  My dear friend.

  Do you remember many years ago saying that if ever I needed you, I should get in touch? That time has come. I do need you – I am in dreadful trouble, and feel you are the only person I can turn to.

  If you could come to see me I should be for ever grateful. I am sure they will allow it – with you being who you are.

  I am older and a little more worldly-wise now, and I think there was more than just gallantry in what you did that night in 1939. I do not ask questions, of course, but it is with that in mind that I ask for your help now.

  If you have read the newspapers, you may have realized that lies are being told about me. Lies from jealous people, people who write newspapers and make up stories to sell their papers. The lies they are telling have nothing to do with the affair that bound us together so long ago. This is an ordeal of a newer date – it began barely three months ago.

  In case you have not recognized the photographs in the papers, I should explain that my name is now Meade – I was briefly and unhappily married. I am on my own in the world, except for a very dear son who is just twenty.

  I hope and pray to hear from you.

  Your friend,

  Elizabeth

  There were tasks in life that could not be shirked. Lewis finished his coffee, tucked the letter in his pocket, and went in search of a train timetable.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  May 1958

  Saul Ketch had thought for some months that it was high time he retired. He was no longer a young man – he had not been a young man for many years – and when he looked back over his life, he resented having served the doctor for almost all that time.

  He had done some bloody risky things for Dr McNulty, and what had he finally got for it all? Bloody servant’s work, that was what he had got! Sodding kitchen work in the doctor’s posh retirement house – the house he, Ketch, had helped buy. They both knew, didn’t they, that without Ketch’s little snippets of information – a juicy titbit here, a tag-end of spicy gossip there – Doctor bleeding McNulty would not have had the money he had now. He said it was all in order to further his work, as if chasing spooks was work! Ketch did not believe a word of it.

  And then there was the travelling! Ketch would never have thought he would have to make so many journeys! Following this one, spying on that one. He had, in fact, rather enjoyed the spying – one or two ladies, there’d been, and Ketch was never averse to peering through a window if a tart was undressing or getting tupped by somebody else’s husband. Although wasn’t it just like old mean-guts, to insist Ketch travelled third class on those jaunts, doling out money as sparingly as if he minted it himself.

  You might have thought the doctor, being a man of advancing years (he must be seventy at the very least, dried-out old herring gut), would be slowing down by now, but not a bit of it. No sooner had he handed over the running of that unnatural Society of his, than they were off on a whole new series of ideas. Ketch was, on balance, inclined to be relieved they had done with the Caradoc Society. To his mind souls and suchlike were best left alone. He’d had an aunt, potty old gowk, she’d been, Ketch had never been able to make head nor tail of half she said. She reckoned to see things other folks did not, and she told how spirits used to come and knock on her door of nights. Ketch’s family laughed raucously at this every time they heard it, and said the only things to knock on Aunt Nan’s door were the bailiffs.

  Ketch always joined in the laughing, but as a small child, Aunt Nan had once said to him he was one of the gallows folk, and she saw him standing under a scaffold. That was an eerie one, no matter how you looked at it!

  The doctor was after the real gallows folk now; he was looking through the records of his years at Calvary, jabbing a bony finger at this page or that, saying as how they might put the screws on him, or him. Not so many people had ever come out of Calvary, of course – those that hadn’t been there for life had been taken to the execution chamber – but there were a few. The doctor was going after those few: he said they might have married or have taken good jobs and wouldn’t like it known they’d been inside the murderers’ prison. A good weapon, this, the doctor said, cackling to himself as he sat over his fire of an evening. It gave Ketch the creeps to hear that cackling going on.

  Anyway, the doctor had fastened on that whey-faced tart who had been got out of Calvary at the start of the war. Ketch had thought that one had already been sucked dry, but the doctor said, aha, that was where Ketch was wrong. You had to look at the thing from another angle, he said. You had to turn a situation upside-down – all right, arse about face if Ketch preferred the term – and see what you could make of it.

  And what they could make of this, said Dr smart-dick McNulty in his annoying, you are stupid and I am clever voice, was something very good indeed.

  What?

  ‘What,’ said McNulty, going jab-jab with his skinny finger, ‘happened to Elizabeth Molland after Lewis Caradoc and Edgar Higneth got her away?’

  Ketch did not know what had happened to her, but he did not say he did not much care.

  McNulty said, ‘I’ve been looking up records of marriage and suchlike. And it seems Elizabeth Molland is now Elizabeth Meade. You’d think she’d have discarded the Molland name, but not a bit of it, the brazen little cat. Or perhaps she had discarded it for everyday life but had to use it for the marriage. Anyway, there it was in the register, and if my information is right she’s a respectable widow now. So we’re going to find her, Ketch.’

  When the doctor said, We’re going to find her, what he really meant was that Ketch was going to find her. Ketch it was who had to go around the countryside, following up what the doctor called leads but what Ketch called a sodding nuisance.

  He pointed out that Molland would recognize McNulty the minute she saw him, but McNulty said, very sharply, that she would not. They had never met, and during her time at Calvary Walter Kane had been the attending doctor, or did Ketch not remember? Had Ketch’s wits gone a-begging again?

  ‘Well, she’ll recognize me,’ said Ketch sullenly, and McNulty said, possibly, and to be on the safe side Ketch had better keep well back from this one.

  Keeping well back did not, it appeared, prevent Ketch from having to do most of the legwork. But they found her, all right. Elizabeth Meade, recently moved to Southend-on-Sea – a snobby old place that was, as well! Ketch, plodding sulkily through the streets, calling at register offices and house agents to get an address, talking to neighbours and shopkeepers and vicars, hated Southend-on-Sea. He hated the way people looked down their noses and pretended not to know what you said to them, or said, Oh, you’re from the north, as if it was another planet.

  Even so, he found her. He did his long lost servant of the family act, which could be adapted to fit almost any situation, and he found her. He took the information back to the doctor: name, address, family just one child – a son of eighteen or so
. Bit of a namby-pamby one to Ketch’s mind. Bit of a mollycoddle.

  ‘Hm, interesting, that,’ the doctor said. ‘I can’t quite see Elizabeth Molland mollycoddling anyone. But we will see. Ketch, I am going to Southend-on-Sea. I am going to take a house for the summer, and I am going to get as much as I can out of that murderous little harpy.’

  It was easy. It was so easy, Ketch found himself gape-mouthed in astonishment.

  The Meade female had changed quite a lot – she was older, of course, and she had become a boring respectable woman wearing fawn cardigans with permed hair and pearls. She belonged to a gardening club and she knitted pullovers for her son, and they went for neat little drives in a tidy, well-polished little car.

  McNulty said, ‘And this is the female who helped kill five women and then a couple more on her own account. God Almighty.’ Then he said, briskly, that leopards did not change their spots and leopardesses changed them least of all, never mind the beige woollens, pleated skirts and the court shoes.

  Meade did not know who McNulty was, of course, McNulty had been quite right about that. She seemed very pleased to be made a friend of, to go on little drives or to teashops for afternoon tea. She was very fond of afternoon tea, she said. A dying custom, wasn’t it, more was the pity. Ketch, sweeping and cleaning the house McNulty had taken on the edge of the town, hiding in the kitchen when the Meade person came to Sunday lunch, wondered at times if they really had got the right woman, because it was difficult to square afternoon tea with mass murder. But he knew deep down it was the same woman. You had only to look at the hands. People thought Ketch was stupid and dull and did not notice things, but he noticed hands, and he noticed the Meade woman’s hands. Like little claws, they were. Exactly as they had been all those years ago.

  Afterwards, Ketch thought he ought to have foreseen what happened. Then he thought the doctor ought to have foreseen it, because this was Elizabeth Molland they were dealing with. Well, the doctor was dealing with her to be correct; Ketch would not have gone within a mile of the bitch, not even if she had been wearing the crown jewels or held out her hand and said, Come to bed.

  She and the doctor had gone for a walk after lunch. That was perfectly normal. Ketch had not served the lunch, of course, and he had not cooked it, either. They had a female who came in for the cooking; she cooked lunch, left a ready to heat supper of some kind, and that was that. Today there was roast pork with apple sauce, and very nice too. Ketch had his in the kitchen. He did not care where he had it.

  He followed them when they went off for their walk. This was what the doctor had told him to do. It was a nuisance to be pounding along on a hot day, but at least they did not walk very quickly. Whatever the Meade might have been in her younger days, now she belonged to the, I can’t walk far, poor little me brigade. Load of balls to Ketch’s mind; she was tough as snakeskin.

  Still, he did as he was told and kept his distance, watching what happened. Was this the day the doctor was going to tell her who he was, and say, ‘And so, my dear, unless you pay me what I ask, I shall have to tell people who you are and what happened twenty years ago?’

  How much would he ask? How much would the murdering bitch pay to keep her secret quiet? Ketch wished he could hear the conversation. Meanwhile, he watched them.

  There they went, climbing the cliff path together – the doctor would not like that very much. He would huff and puff like a stringy old grampus: his lungs were in a disgusting condition, Ketch heard him gobbing and spitting of a morning.

  They were standing at the cliff top now, and the Meade was pointing out the waves of the sea, silly tart. She was waving her hands around, making stupid gestures. Ketch wondered if she might tip herself over the cliff edge, but she did not. What she did do was dislodge the stupid scarf she wore round her neck and squeak like a frightened virgin when the wind snatched it away from her. And then – he could not quite see how it was done – but one minute she was clawing the air for the scarf and the next she was clawing straight into the doctor’s chest. Clawing at him? No, Christ Al-bloody-mighty, she was pushing him! The vicious bitch was pushing him over the cliff. Ketch began to run lumberingly forward.

  He was too late, of course. The doctor went over the edge, in a spidery cartwheel of arms and legs, his mouth and his eyes round Os of sheer horror and disbelief, because this had not been how it was supposed to be – she was the prey and he, Denzil McNulty, was the hunter. Only the prey had rounded snarlingly on the hunter, and the hunter had gone smashing onto the rocks below.

  And may God have mercy on his soul.

  ‘I never knew the finer details of the McNulty murder,’ said Mr Huxley Small, regarding his listeners. ‘A London firm had dealt with the defence – I suspect Sir Lewis Caradoc engaged them and I suspect he paid their fees as well. He simply asked me to accompany him to see a remand prisoner in Holloway Gaol – perhaps he wanted a witness to the conversations, perhaps he simply wanted an objective observer. I never asked. The prisoner was Elizabeth Molland.’

  ‘And so you met her?’ said Chad.

  ‘Oh yes. I first knew her as Meade, of course – Mrs Elizabeth Meade – but Sir Lewis told me she had been part of the infamous Fremlin trial in the thirties. They were hoping that would not come out, of course. Somehow it never did – probably because she had created such a complete new identity for herself.’

  ‘But why did Sir Lewis get involved?’ said Phin. ‘Paying her attorney and all. I don’t understand that.’

  ‘He was involved already,’ said Mr Small. ‘He had helped Molland to escape from Calvary.’

  ‘Lewis Caradoc helped her escape?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think,’ said Mr Small, ‘that Elizabeth may have been a part of his past.’

  ‘A mistress?’ said Georgina. ‘Or wouldn’t the age difference be a bit too much?’

  ‘A daughter?’ said Jude. ‘An illegitimate daughter?’

  ‘That is one possibility,’ said Mr Small guardedly.

  ‘Did Elizabeth talk about Neville Fremlin while you were there?’ asked Drusilla.

  ‘Oh yes. Not on that first day – and not for a long time. At that stage she still expected to be acquitted, so she was being discreet. Careful. And then, when she was found guilty she thought she would be able to appeal.’

  ‘Was she finally hanged?’ asked Chad.

  ‘No, they sentenced her to twenty-five years in gaol,’ said Small. ‘It was only when she knew the appeal would not be allowed that she talked to us – to Lewis Caradoc and to me – about Neville Fremlin. She was astonishingly open. I recall,’ he said, ‘that afterwards Sir Lewis used a phrase I had not previously encountered. He said she was guilty of the murderer’s vanity. He said it was something that all killers possessed.’

  August 1958

  Lewis Caradoc thought he had encountered the murderer’s vanity in practically every man or woman he had seen hanged during his years in Calvary. But he had not expected to encounter it in his own daughter.

  The years had altered her a great deal. The fair, fragile girl had become a ladylike, neatly dressed woman of forty. Even in the cell at Holloway Prison, Elizabeth Molland – now Elizabeth Meade – wore a cashmere twin-set with a pleated skirt, and good nylons. She had applied a little discreet make-up and her hair was immaculately arranged.

  ‘I did think they would at least allow me a chance to appeal,’ she said, having listened to the decision. ‘But they are spiteful and jealous men, so perhaps I should not be surprised. I’m grateful to you, Sir Lewis, and to you, Mr Small for coming to tell me, though.’

  It was Small who asked if there was anything they could get for her. ‘Anything that would make life a little more comfortable?’

  ‘Oh no, thank you. My boy will be able to bring me whatever I want. My life is over, of course. This place will be no life for me.’ A quick gesture took in the bleak surroundings. ‘All I really need are my memories to see me through the years in this p
lace,’ she said.

  ‘Memories? Neville Fremlin?’ Lewis had not known he was going to ask this, but she smiled at the words.

  ‘I knew you would ask me that,’ she said. ‘Yes, Neville is one of the memories, of course. He was an opportunity that I saw and took when I was very young. I always did seize my opportunities – you knew that, didn’t you, Lewis?’

  Lewis . . . She knew quite well who he was by this time – Lewis had never told her but he was sure she had guessed – but she still used his name with that sudden soft purr.

  ‘Is that all Fremlin was to you? Weren’t you in love with him?’ She’ll say she was, he thought. And then I might be able to find some of what she did forgivable. (And justification for what I did that night, nearly twenty years ago?)

  But she said, with incredulity, ‘Of course I wasn’t in love with him! How could I have been! I was twenty – he was nearly fifty!’

  ‘Surely there was some degree of emotion, though? He forced you to do all those things. To help him kill all those women.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, Lewis,’ she said, ‘let’s stop pretending. I don’t need to pretend any longer really, do I? You’ll never be able to repeat this conversation, will you? We both know why.’

  The memory of that rain-swept night forced its way to the surface again. Was she always this calculating? thought Lewis.

  ‘And Mr Small is bound by professional secrecy – so you won’t tell, will you, Mr Small? In any case, no one would believe you. So I can enjoy the luxury at last of telling someone that Neville Fremlin never forced me to do anything. It was the other way round. I was the one who killed them all and he was the one who tried to cover it up. I was the murderess,’ said the lady in cashmere and pearls. ‘And I enjoyed it very much.’

  Lewis thought he must be mishearing or misunderstanding. Or she must be mad. Delusional. He said, ‘Are you saying you were guilty all those years ago?’