Take No Farewell - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  Hermione was right. Our instincts told us that Imogen Roebuck was the murderess, not Consuela. But our heads, if we could bear to use them, said otherwise. How could she have known Rosemary and her mother would call at Clouds Frome that afternoon? If they had not, Victor would have consumed a fatal dose of arsenic. What then of her aspirations to become his wife – and later perhaps his widow?

  ‘Whatever you decide to do, Mr Staddon, I think you should first consult Consuela.’

  ‘How can I? She refuses to see me.’

  ‘Not any more. That’s why I came here this afternoon. I have a message for you from Consuela. She wants to see you. Tomorrow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I believe you heard what I said.’

  ‘But … After all this … Why?’

  ‘For the same reason she asked me to visit her. She wants to know the truth about Rodrigo’s death. She’s aware that the police tried and failed to discover who his companion was. She suspects you were that companion. She asked me point-blank if it were so.’

  ‘And what reply did you give her?’

  ‘I told her that my obligations to you meant I couldn’t answer such a question. But I think she detected a form of answer in my words. At all events, she means now to put the same question to you.’

  What could I say to her? No lie of mine would deceive her. That I knew even before I confronted her. The truth, then. It would have to be so. The truth, which was that I had deserted Rodrigo in death just as I had deserted her in life. He had died trying to save her and my misguided actions had merely ensured that he had died in vain.

  ‘Visiting time is half past two,’ said Hermione.

  I looked at her, hoping she might know what I should do. ‘You think … You think I must …’

  ‘She is under sentence of death, Mr Staddon. Need I remind you of that?’

  ‘Then the truth is the least she deserves of me.’

  Hermione nodded implacably. ‘The very least.’

  I thought of nothing else that night but what I would say to Consuela. I had prepared myself once before for such an encounter, but it had been denied me. Since then, Consuela’s plight had worsened and my sense of responsibility for it had grown. Behind all the legal doubts and forensic uncertainties, there reared a single incontrovertible truth. If I had stood by her thirteen years ago, as I had promised I would, she would not now be facing death. If I had valued love and honour more highly than wealth and ambition, she would now have nothing to fear. And nor would I.

  Windrush had still heard nothing from the Home Office when I telephoned him the following morning. I did not tell him I would be visiting his client later that day. Indeed, I could still hardly believe I would be. When the time came, however, I set out, obedient to her summons, my mind numb after too much thought, aware of little save the futility of all the ways in which I had sought to prepare for this moment.

  I travelled by Underground to Kentish Town, then walked east and north through quiet residential streets towards Holloway. A thaw had set in since the previous day’s snow, accelerated by a watery sun. As I turned onto the Camden Road and caught my first sight of the prison, smoke was rising from its chimney and the light, where it struck the wet and sloping cell-block roofs, threw back a dazzling glare. Seventy years ago, the City Architect decreed that this, like all other prisons of the period, should be modelled on a medieval castle, complete with barbican, battlements and high forbidding turrets. Little could he have known that a member of his own profession would one day wish he had not chosen to celebrate the law’s revenges with such enthusiasm, such evident approval of the punishments to be enacted within its walls.

  I quickened my pace as I drew closer. The approach to the gatehouse seemed endless, hemmed in by hopelessness as much as the soaring crenellations of the prison. I sensed rather than saw the movement of a judas flap in the door ahead. Then, before I had reached the bell-pull, a wicket-gate set in the door opened and a wardress appeared at the aperture, regarding me blankly.

  ‘What can I do for you, sir?’ The words were polite, but the tone of voice was stern and intimidating.

  ‘I’ve come to see one of your prisoners. Mrs Caswell.’

  Her expression betrayed no reaction. She merely nodded and stepped back, allowing me to enter. The hall within was dark and high-ceilinged. A fire was blazing in one corner, but its warmth was insufficient to reach me. On the far side stood iron gates and beyond them a flagged courtyard. With a crash, the door closed behind me and the wardress said: ‘Follow me, please.’ I did so, absorbing as I went the sounds and smells of the building around us. The metallic impact of key in lock, chain on rail, turning and colliding, blurred and muffled by stone and stair; and dampness, seeping, rising, trickling behind everything; the dampness, it might have been, of death.

  ‘Visitor for the condemned prisoner.’ I heard the words spoken ahead of me and, looking, saw another wardress at a desk behind a sliding glass partition. On the wall behind her was a clock and beside it a blackboard, with numbers chalked on it in boxes beneath painted headings. PRISONERS ON ROLL: 289. REMAND: 73. HOSPITAL: 6. ESCAPERS: –. CONDEMNED: 1.

  ‘Relative or friend?’ asked the wardress at the desk.

  ‘Oh … Friend.’

  ‘Expected?’

  ‘Er … Yes, I believe so.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Staddon. Geoffrey Staddon.’

  She consulted a list, then, without further explanation, slid a stout old ledger across the counter towards me. ‘Sign in, please.’

  A pen was attached to the spine of the ledger by a piece of string. It stretched taut as I dipped it in the ink-well and printed my name and address in the spaces provided. There were two blank boxes on the right-hand side of the page, headed IN and OUT. The wardress swung the ledger round when I had finished, squinted at the clock and wrote the time in the first box. Two twenty-seven.

  ‘You’ll have to wait. Her solicitor’s with her at the moment.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t—’

  ‘You’re in luck, though.’ She glanced past me. ‘Here he is now.’

  As I turned, the iron gates to the courtyard clanged open and Windrush stepped through. Instantly, they were closed and locked again behind him.

  ‘Staddon! So you came after all.’ Windrush looked thinner and paler than ever, more dishevelled as well, his eyes ringed in shadow, his hair disordered and clinging to his scalp. I had never seen him so forlorn, so manifestly crushed by circumstance.

  ‘You knew I was coming?’

  ‘She told me just now.’

  ‘But you thought I wouldn’t turn up?’

  ‘Let’s say I hoped you wouldn’t. For your sake.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He moved towards me. ‘I mean that I’d never have accepted this case if I’d known it would end like this. I believe today has been the worst day of my life.’ He gazed up at the shadowy vaults above us and sighed. ‘My God, what a terrible place this is, what a truly terrible place.’

  I clasped his arm. ‘You’ve had word from the Home Office, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’ve had their final answer, yes. I’ve just delivered it to Consuela.’ His head drooped. ‘There’s to be no reprieve, Staddon. The hanging will take place next week as scheduled.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Nothing can stop it now. Nothing in the world.’

  ‘There must—’

  ‘Would you come with me, please, Mr Staddon?’ The wardress who had admitted me was standing by the courtyard gate, staring in my direction. ‘You’ll have to leave by three o’clock, so I’d advise you not to waste time.’

  Time, so much of it and so little – thirteen years squandered and less than six days remaining – was closing around me, stronger and darker than the very walls that confined two hundred and eighty-nine prisoners, soon, all too soon, to become two hundred and eighty-eight.

  ‘Mr Staddon!’

  My hand fell from Windrush’s arm. I s
tepped forward. The wardress turned her key in the lock. And the gates swung open to receive me.

  Chapter Twenty

  DISMAL COURTYARDS, ILL-LIT staircases, shabby landings, winding corridors. How many we traversed, in what direction or sequence, I could not tell. Holloway Prison was to me a bewildering maze of draughts and echoes, of doors locking and unlocking, of keys and chains and bars, of blue uniforms and grey walls and dull defeated voices. By the time we reached our destination, I felt as if we had travelled miles, burrowing perhaps beneath the very earth, and might yet have miles more to travel. But we did not.

  The wardress pulled up by an open doorway ahead and, glancing back at me, nodded towards the room within. We were in a quieter part of the prison, where all seemed hushed and empty. There was linoleum beneath my feet, a bare bulb perversely burning above my head, a patch of daylight, mullioned by the shadows of bars, falling on the wall beside me. We had arrived, I suddenly realized, at the condemned cell.

  ‘Your visitor’s here, Caswell.’

  The voice came from inside the cell and a shudder ran through me to hear her name spoken without prefix. I had not expected deprivation to run so deep. I should have done, of course. I should have foreseen how minor denials would be dictated by major penalties. But I had not. And only now did the harshness of her existence begin to break upon me.

  A table had been placed across the entrance to the cell, blocking access, with a chair on either side. As I approached, I could see little of the interior save a bare section of floor and wall. At any moment, I knew, Consuela must appear. Yet still I was not ready, still I felt unequal to whatever might follow. I reached the table, pulled back the chair and forced myself to look. There was a high barred window opposite me and, standing beneath it, a woman. For a second, I thought it was her. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the brightness, I saw that it was only another wardress.

  ‘You will not touch. You will not whisper. You will not hand anything to the prisoner without first submitting it to us for inspection. Do you understand?’

  The wardress on my side of the table had spoken. I glanced at her and nodded in confirmation, then looked back into the cell.

  ‘Hello, Geoffrey.’

  She was no more than three feet away, thinner than I remembered and somehow – though I knew it could not be so – smaller. Her hair was short, cropped close to the head, her cheeks hollow, her eyes large and gleaming. There was a hint of fever about her, a translucency to her skin, yet also a great calmness, a serenity in the midst of adversity. She wore no make-up, of course, no jewellery, no fine clothes, just a shapeless grey dress of coarse serge, loosely belted at the waist. Yet the austerity of her appearance and the starkness of her surroundings served only to emphasize her beauty, to snatch back every memory of her loveliness and hurl it in my face. The bloom of youth had faded, it was true, but, in fading, had revealed perfection.

  ‘Please sit down.’

  I obeyed. She slipped into the chair opposite me and rested her hands lightly on the edge of the table. She no longer wore her wedding-ring – though I suspected she would have been allowed to retain it if she had wished. Behind her, in one corner of the cell, was a narrow, neatly made bed. The wardress stood between it and the window, leaning back against the wall and staring over our heads into the corridor.

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  There was no irony in the remark. She was truly grateful. But her gratitude was worse than any accusation she could have uttered. She neither smiled nor frowned, neither pleaded nor rebuked. Her eyes engaged mine and would not release them. Her only reproach lay in the frankness of her gaze.

  ‘I know you wanted to visit me before, here and at Gloucester. I am sorry I could not allow it.’

  ‘Consuela, I—’

  ‘Please do not refer to the last time we met. Please do not try to explain or apologize for what happened all those years ago. It is not why I asked you to come.’

  ‘Even so—’

  ‘You will respect my wishes in this, Geoffrey. I know I can trust you to do that much.’

  ‘Even if you can trust me to do nothing else?’

  ‘I did not say that and I did not mean it. If we had met sooner, it would have been different. I hated you for the misery you left me to endure, hated and blamed and cursed. But I do not hate you now. What has happened to me puts all such thoughts on one side. You are merely … a lapsed friend.’

  ‘And something else, surely?’ She frowned. ‘I’m talking about Jacinta.’ I looked over Consuela’s shoulder at the wardress, but she seemed to be paying us no attention whatever. ‘She is my daughter, isn’t she?’

  But Consuela did not answer. She gazed at me with a mixture of pity and puzzlement.

  ‘That’s why you sent her to me, isn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘I know you owe me nothing – less than nothing – but surely you won’t deny me certainty on such a point? – Not now.’

  ‘I cannot give you certainty. She may be yours. She may not.’

  I stared at her, scanning her face for some sign or clue that would tell me what she meant. If I was not Jacinta’s father, then Victor was. But Jacinta had been conceived in July 1911. I knew that for a fact. And in July 1911, Consuela and I … It was absurd, but I felt a jolt of something close to betrayal at the thought of what she was implying. I, who had forfeited all rights in such matters, nevertheless resented the doubt she had raised.

  ‘At the time,’ she said slowly, ‘it seemed important that Victor should not have the least cause to question my fidelity. You will remember why.’

  I looked down at the table. She had read my thoughts and provided the rebuke they merited. Whatever she had done, she had done for the best. Whereas, whatever I had done …

  ‘I hope she is yours, truly I do. I would far rather she inherited your nature than Victor’s.’

  ‘I had a son,’ I murmured. ‘He died.’

  ‘I did not know.’

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Geoffrey. It must be hard to lose a child. But it makes no difference.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it to. The arrangements you’ve made for Jacinta … are the best that can be made.’

  ‘So I believe. Francisco is a good man. He and his wife will treat Jacinta as if she were their own. I cannot ask for more than that.’

  I looked up from the table. ‘About Rodrigo …’

  ‘You were with him, weren’t you? Don’t deny it unless I really am mistaken. Don’t lie to me about it. I want no more lies, from you least of all. I would rather have silence.’ She paused and waited for me to speak, but I did not. ‘I have my answer, then. You know what happened and why it happened.’

  ‘We … He was trying to save you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He was looking for Victor’s will. He thought he knew where it was hidden. He thought it might hold the key to what happened, to why your niece was poisoned. But it was a trap. And he walked into it.’

  ‘A trap devised by Victor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And intended to bring about my brother’s death?’

  ‘Perhaps. I’m not sure. In the end, it genuinely could have been self-defence.’

  She thought for a moment, then said: ‘I want you to tell Francisco everything, Geoffrey. How and why Rodrigo died. What we once were to each other. Even the probability that Jacinta is your daughter.’

  ‘All that? To your brother?’

  ‘I want him to be able to tell Jacinta when she comes of age. I want her to know the truth, when she is old enough to understand it. I want her to know all there is to know about me, even though I will be long dead by the time she does.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Oh, but I must. I cannot face what will happen next week by pretending it will not happen. For it will. That is definite now.’

  ‘I met Windrush on my way in.’

  ‘Then you know.’ She smiled faintly. ‘You see how much
easier it is to be honest? Easier for yourself – and for others.’

  ‘There is still hope.’

  ‘There is none. I have long accepted that. Now, will you do as I have asked?’

  ‘Of course.’ I nerved myself to look at her without flinching. ‘You have my solemn promise.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you reminded me what my last promise to you was worth.’

  ‘I shall not do that. You will keep your word this time, I think.’

  ‘Yes. I will.’

  ‘Francisco and his wife are due to arrive in Liverpool on Monday aboard the SS Hildebrand. I would like you to meet them and to escort them to Hereford. I trust Hermione explained that Jacinta is now at Fern Lodge, whilst Victor takes his ease at Cap Ferrat?’

  This was the first trace of bitterness I had detected in her remarks. Whether she knew of Victor’s plan to marry Imogen Roebuck – whether it accounted for the absence of her wedding-ring – I did not dare to ask. ‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘She explained.’

  ‘How or when you tell Francisco what I have asked you to tell him I must leave you to decide. It will not be easy for you. I realize that and I am sorry for it. But who else can I ask? Who else knows what to tell him?’

  Behind her, the wardress consulted the watch that hung at her breast. Instinctively, I drew out my own watch and started at the discovery that our half hour was nearly done. ‘We have only a few more minutes,’ I said, looking back at Consuela.

  ‘Minutes, hours, days. What difference does it make, Geoffrey? We have had long enough.’

  ‘But … There’s so much else …’

  ‘Let it pass. As I must let all things pass.’

  She had made her peace with the world and the forces within it that had resolved to end her life. But it was a peace I could not subscribe to. ‘I have cursed myself more often and more bitterly than you could ever have done, Consuela. I have regretted what I did to you more deeply than I have regretted anything else in my entire life.’