The Death Chamber (38 page)

‘I suppose,’ said Lewis Caradoc, ‘there isn’t any doubt about this girl’s identity?’

He can’t quite bring himself to use her name yet, thought Walter. But he said, ‘I don’t think so. Belinda was sent photographs of her by the Molland couple. We’d need to
check, but she seemed very positive.’

‘She was an intelligent girl,’ said Lewis, staring into the fire.‘I was going to help her to something – well, to something a little better in life. I do wish she had
confided in me all those years ago.’ The pain was still in his eyes, but Walter could almost feel him forcing his mind back to a semblance of control.

‘When is the execution?’ he said, at last.

‘The twelfth.’

‘Have they lodged an appeal?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Walter realized that Lewis was focusing determinedly on the practicalities of the situation – practicalities with which he was so familiar – and
was not allowing any other emotions to come to the surface.

‘I read quite a lot of the reports of the trial. It all sounded fairly straightforward.’ His voice was so down-to-earth they might have been discussing some anonymous prisoner,
convicted and about to be brought to Calvary.

‘The evidence seemed quite clear,’ said Walter. ‘But there’s something a bit out of kilter. Something I’ve since discovered which doesn’t fit with everything
else.’

‘What?’

‘This is difficult, because there’s the confidentiality of a patient’s condition to take into account – Oh hell,’ said Walter, ‘I can’t think it matters
in this situation, and if I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anybody. Sir Lewis, the evidence at the trial said Elizabeth and Neville Fremlin had been lovers. There had apparently been
testimony from people who knew them – I don’t mean friends, I don’t think they could have had any, not in the normal sense, but customers and hotel people. I didn’t hear the
prosecution case, but I heard the judge’s summing up and it was fairly clear that they were making quite a lot of that.’

Lewis said, ‘Fremlin exerted his charm over her and she thought it was acceptable to kill?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a fair assumption,’ said Lewis thoughtfully. ‘Maybe he persuaded her it was – what’s the word the Americans use? Glamorous. Maybe she saw it as
that.’ The shock had gone and the sharp intelligence was driving him again. Only a strained look around his lips betrayed him.

‘But,’ said Walter, ‘the thing that’s out of kilter is that they weren’t lovers at all. At least, not in the physical sense. I’ve examined her – the
standard pregnancy examination – and she’s
virgo intacta
. I’m trying to decide if it makes a difference.’

‘It could throw the rest of the evidence into question,’ said Lewis, frowning. ‘Or could it? The relationship might have been non-sexual. An older man looking on a pretty young
girl in a fatherly way.’

Walter said drily, ‘Did you ever meet Neville Fremlin?’

‘You know I didn’t. I was retired by the time he came to Calvary. I saw his photograph in the newspaper reports of the trial, though.’

‘I don’t think Neville Fremlin would have thought of any pretty young girl in a fatherly way,’ said Walter. ‘In any case, he was only in his late forties when he met
her.’

‘All right. But she could still have been in thrall to him – sorry, that sounds rather melodramatic, doesn’t it?’

‘Not given the two people involved,’ said Walter. ‘She’s very quiet, but she’s somehow a very dramatic person.’

‘Is she?’ It came out a bit too eagerly and as if realizing he had lowered his guard but as if it would take too much energy to put it back in place, Lewis said, ‘Walter, what
are we going to do about this?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You do realize,’ said Lewis slowly, ‘that I can’t let her hang.’

Walter had known they would reach this point; he had known it since Belinda’s astonishing revelation. What he had not known was how he would react: he had not expected Lewis’s words
to churn up the long-dead memories: the ugliness and despair of that dreary day in Calvary’s condemned cell. The fragment of the Irish poem that Nicholas O’Kane had wanted to pass to
the small Walter: the poem about dying not for flag, nor king, nor emperor, but for a dream . . . Nicholas O’Kane had died for a dream that day, and in the stuffy little church that smelt of
wintergreen, Walter’s mother had tried to pray for him but could not because she was crying when the church bell chimed eight o’clock. The sound of his mother’s crying had stayed
with him ever since, and the look in his father’s eyes had stayed as well. And surely, no matter what you had done, no matter what your beliefs or creeds were, you should not have to be tied
up with leather straps and have your neck broken while stern-faced men stood in a coldly lit room and watched?

The memories blurred and spun, and from deep within them, Walter heard his own voice saying, ‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent it.’

Saul Ketch had been very pleased to be asked to go back to his old duties at the prison; he had found life a bit hard these past years. You picked up what you could, and you
took what you could find and sold it – clothes, jewellery, information. Especially information. But gathering information was not as easy as it had been in Ketch’s youth – in the
old Calvary days when he had gone along the corridors, listening and watching. For one thing, people were more suspicious now, particularly since this war business. They wanted to know where things
had come from, or how Ketch had come by them. They saw Germans behind every bush or hiding in every cellar or barn. For another thing, Ketch himself had got a bit podgy over the years and could not
nip around as fast as he used to.

So taking it all in all, Ketch had been very glad of the work at Calvary, although he had not let on about that, not he! He had said, a bit grudgingly, that he supposed he might help them for a
while. He would not come for tuppence farthing, mind. If they wanted him, they must pay him a decent wage. The decent wage had been agreed – it was not too bad a wage, either, although Ketch
had not said this.

He had told the doctor about it almost immediately, going along to the house the doctor had taken on the Kendal road. It was a nice house, although a bit of a lonely spot for Ketch who liked to
be at the centre of things with people around him.

The doctor had not worked at Calvary since that business with Nicholas O’Kane – Ketch had never got to the bottom of that, but he might do so one day. (It might be worth something to
get to the bottom of it!) But they still had their little arrangement, Ketch and the doctor, even though he was so taken up with that dopey society Lewis Caradoc –
Sir
Lewis Caradoc
if you wanted to be particular – had set up. But when Ketch was given the push by Lewis bloody Caradoc on account of that tart, Belinda Skelton, the doctor had said no need to worry: he
always looked after people who had helped him. And give the devil his due, he had done so. There had been many a little job the doctor had passed to Ketch – finding out things about people it
mostly was. Keeping an eye on people and passing on the information. The doctor liked to know as much as he could so he could put the squeeze on people and make them pay to stop their secrets being
told. Ketch was all for getting money where you could, and did not in the least mind squeezing people. He did think old McNulty must be a bit mad to spend all the money he got on his daft
experiments – seeing if the soul flew out of the body and suchlike.

Still, the doctor had managed to squeeze quite a few people over the years – with Ketch’s help, of course. You wouldn’t believe some of the things going on in Thornbeck and the
villages around it. People pretending to be respectable citizens, when in fact they were no such thing – Ketch had certainly learned a thing or two about what went on behind closed curtains
and locked doors, but he never told anybody anything unless he was paid.

The doctor thought it was a very good opportunity for Ketch to work at Calvary again. All kinds of things might be happening there, he said. Things that could be made use of. Ketch must be sure
to bring him all the titbits of information – he knew what was wanted, said Dr McNulty. As for Ketch not being as nippy as he once had been, oh pish, said the doctor, all he needed was to
stop gorging on pies and puddings and glasses of beer, that would bring the podge off!

It was all very well for the doctor, who had got a bit dried-up and wizened over the years; Ketch often thought a few good platefuls of steak and kidney pudding, or dumplings and beef, would do
the doctor a lot of good!

But anyway, Ketch went back to Calvary, and at times you might almost have thought there had been no twenty-year gap, because not much had changed. The governor had changed, of course. Edgar
Higneth, that was the new man’s name. Ketch did not care for him, but at least he did not know the story of Ketch’s disgrace all those years ago. And now Lewis Caradoc was away in
London so often, being on stupid committees all the time, there was no one likely to spill those particular beans!

Ketch was glad to find he had not lost his old cunning when it came to Calvary and its inmates. He knew almost at once that there was something odd going on, and thought it was to do with the
posh tart in the condemned cell. There was an uneasiness, almost as if somebody knew something about her. It might just be that they did not like the idea of hanging a young female, but it might be
something more than that. Ketch was going to listen and watch very carefully.

He had made sure to take a look at the tart for himself, doing so when they took her into the little yard under the condemned cell window for exercise and fresh air, although why anyone would
want to bother with exercise and fresh air with old Pierrepoint gobbling in the background and measuring the hemp, Ketch could not think. Liz Molland, that was her name. He supposed some men would
find her nice-looking, although she was a bit skinny for his taste. She’d be one of those Die-away Doras, as well: no energy and lying around on sofas, and oh dear, poor little me, I
can’t cope with life. Expecting everyone to wait on her hand and foot. Neville Fremlin had waited on her, in fact if you could believe the reports, Neville Fremlin had done a lot more than
wait on her, the dirty old sod. Ketch sniggered to think of Fremlin and this whey-faced tart together, but while he was sniggering he kept his ears alert for any nice little snippets of scandal the
doctor might like.

Walter always slept at Calvary when a prisoner was awaiting execution; it was only a matter of three weeks and he thought it important to be on call in case of any
difficulties.

He was doing so now for Elizabeth. The small room near the infirmary was familiar to him by this time; he had moved one or two of his own things in – some books, a couple of paintings he
liked, an amber silk bed cover he had bought on a brief holiday in Italy which reminded him of a Tuscan sunset. No photographs, though. Photographs might cause one of the older warders to spot a
familiar face, and say, ‘Isn’t that Nicholas O’Kane?’

Sir Lewis had to be in London a good deal at the moment – he was involved in the setting up of internment camps for prisoners of war, and he had recently been appointed to one of the
committees of the International Red Cross. ‘I thought when I left Calvary for the Home Office rehabilitation work, it would be a stepping-stone to retirement,’ he said to Walter once.
‘I thought I would eventually take up growing roses or keeping bees like Sherlock Holmes was supposed to have done. But it’s not quite working out like that.’

‘You’ll never retire,’ Walter had said. ‘You’ll never want to.’

He had seen Sir Lewis only once since that appalling night he had told him about Elizabeth, but he had been able to visit Belinda twice, using the pretext of checking on her health. Neither of
them asked to see Elizabeth – Walter thought Belinda would not do so. But he saw the longing in Lewis’s eyes and thought that very soon Lewis would want to see his daughter so much he
would make some discreet arrangement to visit her.

He had given both Lewis and Belinda carefully edited reports, knowing quite well they were both aware of the scenes that sometimes took place in the condemned cell. But they appeared to believe
him when he said Elizabeth was perfectly calm, and that she apparently accepted her fate. He did not mention how her behaviour had gradually changed – he did not tell them about the storms of
weeping, or the pleas for a reprieve, or the night she had clung to him for more than hour, sobbing and hysterical, begging him to save her, because it was all a terrible mistake, and she could not
bear to die.

He said Elizabeth had not talked about Neville Fremlin or the murders, and he had not pressed her on the subject. He would stay with her on the night before the execution; he would be with her
to the end. There would be sedatives given, of course; he would increase them gradually as they neared the last morning. But just as he did not tell them about Elizabeth’s hysteria, nor did
he tell them about the resentment and unease that seemed to be filling Calvary because a young and good-looking female was awaiting the death penalty.

He worried a lot about what he would do if Lewis proposed an escape plan to him, but he could see no way in which Lewis could save Elizabeth from being hanged.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN