The Death Chamber

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Did you know him?’ asked Chad.

  ‘I met him briefly a couple of times. A thin sallow man he was, humourless and absolutely driven by his investigations into psychic phenomena. There was little else in his life, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of him at all,’ said Drusilla. ‘And if he blackmailed Georgina’s great-grandfather, I’m very glad he got his come-uppance at Elizabeth’s hands.’

  ‘When was the bequest made?’ asked Chad. ‘Georgina, I’m sorry if I’m going into your family’s privacy.’

  ‘There’s nothing private about any of it,’ said Georgina at once. ‘It was 1940, wasn’t it, Mr Small?’

  ‘January 1940, Miss Grey. The wording was a bit ambiguous, but it’s all perfectly legal.’

  ‘Just before he left for the war,’ said Georgina. ‘I wonder if you’re right about the blackmail, Mr Small. It wouldn’t explain why he abandoned his wife and daughter, but—’

  Huxley Small said, ‘But your great-grandfather was never married. I thought you knew that.’

  This was the last thing Georgina had expected. She stared at Small. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  ‘There are no absolutes in law, Miss Grey – at least not in that sense. We traced you through your grandmother, as you know. We just looked through the various registers for people with the name Kane who were born between 1940 and 1950. The internet,’ said Small surprisingly, ‘is extremely useful for this part of our work these days. Your grandmother was Caroline, born in 1941.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s listed as being the daughter of Walter Kane and of a Catherine Kerr. But we didn’t find any marriage certificate for them, and the fact that the certificate only gives the mother’s maiden name is significant,’ said Small, ‘although not conclusive, of course.’

  ‘Walter and Catherine might have been married abroad,’ said Jude, ‘or under some arcane religion not recognized in English law. Georgina, are you sure you haven’t got any papers of any kind for your grandmother?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ Georgina was beginning to wonder if she was related to Walter at all. She said, ‘I don’t know a great deal about any of them. My mother died when I was in my teens, but she talked once or twice about her mother – my grandmother.’

  Chad said, ‘Phin, this is one for you. See what you can find about Catherine Kerr and Caroline Kane, will you?’

  But Phin had already started a new page in his notebook and was enthusiastically scribbling the names down. If Catherine Kerr could be found, he would find her. Not through the dusty road of ancient files and mildewed church registers or cobwebby memories, but through the sharply modern route of computer screens and keyboards, and the spidery web of the internet.

  January 1940

  Walter sometimes thought that when he was able to look back on these months, it would be Elizabeth Molland he would remember most vividly.

  This was curious, because although Elizabeth Molland ought to have been a secondary player in the drama surrounding his father – although Walter himself had only met her those few times – she remained strongly in his mind. He wondered if he would ever be able to ask Lewis Caradoc where he had taken his daughter that night.

  The cold whiteness continued to enclose Thornbeck for most of January and when, towards the end of the month, Walter left Lewis’s house and returned to Calvary, he saw that it enclosed Calvary as well.

  But although he had recovered from the frighteningly abrupt fever and weakness, everything seemed unreal. He moved through the days like a mechanical toy, and all the while the knowledge that Nicholas O’Kane and Neville Fremlin were one and the same person drummed relentlessly in his mind. A traitor and then a murderer. Walter thought he had just about accepted the man who had sat in the condemned cell twenty years earlier, and who had talked about dying for a dream and whose eyes had burned with fervour and defiance, but he could not accept the urbane killer who had sat in that same cell a second time.

  He was grateful when he was notified that he had been seconded to the army’s medical corps; a rank of captain had been assigned him and he would be required to report for duty in the first week of February.

  ‘I expected it, of course,’ said Higneth, when Walter told him. ‘You’re not one to stay in this backwater when there’s fighting going on.’ He regarded Walter with a sort of sad resignation. ‘I’d better see about getting a replacement for you, Walter, although I’d have to say whoever he is, he won’t be as good.’

  Walter said, hesitantly, ‘You won’t be considering McNulty, I don’t suppose?’

  ‘No!’ It came out with startling violence.

  Walter looked at him for a moment, but only said, ‘Well, if I can help with choosing a replacement – perhaps interview applicants for you – I’d like to do so.’

  ‘That would be very valuable indeed,’ said Higneth with unmistakable sincerity.

  ‘I’m glad you’re not letting McNulty back in,’ said Walter after a moment, and then wondered if he had stepped over a line, because Higneth’s expression was suddenly angry. Was there something he was missing? Surely McNulty could not have worked his blackmail on Higneth? Surely Higneth had never done anything to lay himself open to McNulty?

  But then Higneth said, in an ordinary voice, ‘No, there’s no possibility of McNulty coming back.’

  As Walter left the office, he was aware of a slight lifting of his senses. I’m going to be free of McNulty, he thought, and I’m going to be able to shake off the memories of this place. I’ll be hundreds of miles away – France to begin with, and then who knows where? – and the danger will be different danger. I’ll find a way of severing the links and I’ll forget about Nicholas O’Kane who cheated the gallows and then came back to them as a mass murderer.

  But it seemed Nicholas’s history was to deal him one last blow.

  ‘So you’re leaving Thornbeck, Dr Kane,’ said Denzil McNulty.

  ‘I am.’ In the cold light of the January morning, McNulty looked sallower and thinner than ever. Walter thought he had the appearance of a man burning up with his own passions. ‘I’m leaving for France in two weeks,’ he said.

  ‘So I hear. Then,’ said McNulty, ‘I dare say you will want to put your house in order before you go. To pay all debts, for instance.’

  ‘Everything’s in order and I have no debts,’ said Walter shortly.

  ‘My dear boy, it’s a fortunate man who can say that with complete truth,’ said McNulty. ‘I’m sure, if you think back a little, you’ll recall one debt that was never paid.’

  ‘I owe nobody anything.’ Walter felt a tightening of his stomach.

  ‘No?’ said McNulty. ‘What about the payment to me? The payment for my silence about your part in the Molland girl’s escape? You slid out of the original agreement very neatly, didn’t you, but—’

  ‘We never had an agreement,’ said Walter angrily. ‘Even if I hadn’t been taken ill, I would never have allowed your inhuman experiment on Parsons! But you did it anyway, didn’t you?’

  ‘Edgar Higneth was a very useful ally,’ said McNulty in an oily voice, and Walter thought: So there was something between them.

  ‘I am writing a paper on the experiment,’ said McNulty. ‘I shall present it anonymously, of course, and neither Calvary’s nor Violet Parsons’ name will appear. But I think it will be known, in a discreet way, that I was the one behind it all.’

  He’s revelling in this, thought Walter. But he’ll get his come-uppance one day. I just wish I could be the one to deliver it to him.

  ‘You know, Walter,’ said McNulty, ‘I think the real crux of all this is your father. You don’t care very much if the truth about Molland comes out. But you can’t bear people to know your father was Nicholas O’Kane. And I can’t say I blame you. It’s something that might ruin you very thoroughly indeed, isn’t it?’

  The doctor who turned a blind eye to the escape of a convicted murderess. It was not something that could ever be proved, but it was in
deed something that might stick very firmly. McNulty was right about that. He was also right when he said it was the truth about Walter’s father that he really flinched from – although the irony was that McNulty did not know the full extent of that truth. But stir up the old stories about Nick O’Kane, and someone at some point might see a likeness between the two men. Lewis Caradoc had said Nicholas had made use of other people to create his new identity. Papers had been provided – a birth certificate, perhaps other things. Some of those people might well still be alive – still in England. It could all come tumbling out, thought Walter, appalled. It really could. Oh God, what do I do?

  McNulty sensed the hesitation, of course, and he pounced, not heavily or fumblingly, but with a precision that a part of Walter’s mind could not help admiring. He said, ‘They’re both bad secrets to have, aren’t they, Walter? Elizabeth Molland and Nicholas O’Kane. A man would want to distance himself from those two as much as possible. He’d want to break all the links leading back to them.’

  A severing of the links, thought Walter. Remarkable he should use that phrase.

  ‘I believe,’ said McNulty, ‘that when Nick O’Kane was sentenced to execution, he made sure his only son inherited his estate.’

  Nicholas O’Kane’s estate. The money that had come to Walter when he was twenty-one. The money his mother had seen as being drenched in her husband’s treachery. ‘I should see the drowned faces of all those young men you betrayed . . .’ she had said that day, and Walter had never forgotten it.

  The money was in the form of bonds and investments, and although it would have been quite an attractive sum in 1917, it was not so very large now. It had paid for Walter’s medical training and it had bought that bouncy little car in which he had first come to Calvary. Other than that he had not touched it. He had wanted as little to do with it as possible.

  The money was the last sad, shameful link to those twin evils, Nick O’Kane and Neville Fremlin, and Walter thought if it was the price he had to pay for Denzil McNulty’s silence, he would pay it and feel better for it.

  He looked at McNulty very steadily, and said, ‘Would a Deed of Gift meet the case?’

  ‘It would.’

  ‘To the Caradoc Society?’

  ‘What else?’

  What else, indeed, thought Walter. The man’s a fanatic, but I suppose there’s a symmetry about handing over Nick’s money to him – to his Society. Lewis’s Society. He could not decide if the fact that Lewis Caradoc’s name headed the Society made any difference. Probably it did not.

  He said to McNulty, ‘It must be understood that there will never be anything more between us. This is a once and for all payment. You can threaten me until hell freezes but you won’t get anything else – not money, not favours, not blind eyes turned to bizarre death experiments – nothing.’

  ‘I understand.’

  I’m severing the link for good, thought Walter, going about the unfamiliar process of transferring his father’s money to the Caradoc Society. There’s a symbolism in this. I’m repudiating everything about my father. He need never appear in my life or my thoughts or my memories again. And one day McNulty will get his come-uppance, I’ll keep believing that.

  Once in France, his whole energy devoted to the appalling injuries inflicted by war, Walter thought less and less about the past. He did not dare think about the future – he had no idea if he would live to see it, and he had no idea if the people he worked alongside – the other doctors, the chaplains and nurses – would see it either. He would have been sorry to see any of them killed – they were loyal hardworking comrades – but there were one or two he would have been devastated to lose. One or two. One. One in particular . . . She had grey eyes rimmed with black, and when she was moved by something they became very clear and shining.

  ‘I have a vision,’ he said to her. ‘And it’s of you and I having dinner in London on my next leave. A civilized dinner – a good restaurant. Good food and perfumed air and wine.’

  ‘And candlelight,’ she said, smiling, so that the grey eyes shone. ‘I’d like candlelight.’

  ‘I’ll arrange the candlelight as well,’ said Walter. ‘I’ll light up the whole of London with candles if you’d like it.’

  ‘I don’t need the whole of London,’ she said. ‘Just you, Walter.’

  ‘We’ll survive to eat that dinner, Catherine.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He was to think, a long time afterwards, that at least the image he had of Catherine to carry with him through the years after her death was the image she would have liked.

  He had taken her to the Hungaria – Sir Lewis, appealed to for somewhere to eat in war-torn London where the food and service were still reliable, had recommended it and had even known the head waiter. Walter was given a quiet corner table and attentive service. In the candlelight Catherine’s eyes had had the clear glowing look of deep happiness.

  They had talked and talked, because there might not be time for them to talk in the future and because this was only a seventy-two hour leave for Walter who was being posted to North Africa. And then after dinner, because there might never be time in the future and there might not be a future for either of them, they had gone back to the flat Catherine shared with two other nurses, who were away, and there had been candlelight again, this time in the little bedroom overlooking a quiet London square.

  ‘We’re making memories,’ she said to him in the rose and gold dawn, shortly before he left. ‘They’ll last a long time, these memories.’

  The memories were made up of shining grey eyes and candlelight and wine . . . of the scents and sounds of midnight filtering through a partly open bedroom window, with thin curtains moving slightly in a soft summer wind . . .

  It turned out that all Walter would have of Catherine would be those memories because a year later, when he was still in Tobruk, news had come that her Red Cross post in London had been bombed, and a letter came saying so sorry to report, so dreadfully sorry to tell him Catherine Kerr had been among those killed.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Vincent had played and re-played the police interview, and he was confident they had accepted his word. In any case, he had nothing to be worried about. No one knew what he had done at Calvary that night.

  No one knew, either, what he had done over forty years ago, on that afternoon in the bleak cell where they had taken Mother.

  August 1958

  She had submitted to the cruel jealousies and plots of the men in court – the men who had hated her and wanted her to be punished.

  ‘I have had to suffer jealousy for most of my life,’ she had said to him in the horrid grey room where they had kept her throughout the trial. ‘And now, because a stupid old man tumbled off a cliff, I have to suffer this. He was an impostor, Vincent, you do know that, don’t you? A man who had known me in my sad youth, that was who he was. A man who would have liked to have his revenge on me. Well, they shall not know about any of that, I can promise you. What happened to me all those years ago is nothing to do with anyone and I believe I have distanced myself from those years. I believe I can keep that sad part of my life closed. Remember, Vincent, if anyone asks you, that you know nothing about my girlhood. No matter what it costs, you must never know anything.’

  Vincent had promised, but in fact he had been asked very little by the police and he had not been called to give evidence in court. If he had, he would have protested Mother’s innocence. A friendship with the man they said she had killed, he would have said. An innocent friendship, embarked on out of the goodness of Mother’s heart. She had a kindliness for old, lonely bachelors. Where was the harm? As Mother said to him, if the silly bumbling old fool must needs fall off the cliff it was nothing to do with her.

  But the cold-eyed men in the court and the envious women on the jury had thought it was very much to do with Mother and they had said she must be put in prison.

  Prison! Vincent had been horrified and filled with panic. Prison for the ge
ntle unaware woman who had always wanted to surround herself with beautiful things – who had liked roses and porcelain figurines and silk dresses. Iron bars and locked doors and communal showers with concrete floors. Squalid lavatory arrangements in a cell shared by two or three women. Mother would never endure it. Vincent would never allow her to endure it.

  No matter what it cost.

  In the end she had to endure it for three months, which was the length of time it took for bewildering things such as visiting orders to be arranged, and arrangements to be made to travel to Holloway itself. Vincent managed to find rooms to rent in a narrow, mean, house fairly near the gaol. The house smelt of cooking and cigarette smoke and of the people who lived in the basement and who seemed to live on fiercely spicy curries. Vincent put up with it because Mother would be putting up with far worse than this.

  He put all the things from the Southend house – the house they had shared – into storage, taking only his clothes and a few books and private papers. But there was one other thing he took, and that was the packet of digitalis tablets that had belonged to the Bournemouth major. They were quite old and they might not work, but they could be tried. If they did not work, Vincent would think of something else.

  They did work. The entire plan worked very well.

  Visiting took place in a big ugly room, where you had to sit opposite one another at a small table. Mother wore a shapeless apron, which enabled the warders to see she was not being given drugs by her visitor and sliding them into a pocket. Under the apron she wore her normal clothes: a cream silk blouse and a brown skirt. Vincent saw the jealous looks of the other women.

  ‘Spiteful,’ said Mother. ‘They are a spiteful lot of women, Vincent. I expect you can see that for yourself.’

  Vincent saw it very clearly. He saw, as well, how things were arranged on visiting days, and that cups of tea were available for the visitors, but that there was particular vigilance for those who drank them.

  ‘Drugs,’ said Mother, shuddering. ‘That’s what they watch for.’