The Death Chamber (44 page)

This was undeniable.

‘A tramp?’ said Georgina, a bit doubtfully.

‘It might be. But how would he get in? Chad locked all the doors, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, except for the inner door to these rooms.’ Georgina glanced uneasily over her shoulder towards the closed door. ‘Whoever it is, it’s pretty damn spooky of him to be
stomping around at this hour of the night. Had I better phone Chad to check that he or Phin haven’t come back – No, damn, there isn’t a signal in here, is there? But you’re
probably right about it being a tramp. There must be a way in Chad doesn’t know about.’

‘Yes, but you’re up there on your own, and tramps aren’t always harmless,’ said Jude. And then, explosively, ‘Oh God, if I could just bloody
see
for five
minutes—’ He broke off. ‘Georgina? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, but I’m going to find out who it is,’ said Georgina, crossing the floor to the door before she could change her mind.

‘For pity’s sake,
don’t
!’ he said at once.

‘I’m only going to call out to ask who’s there. I’ve got the torch.’

‘No, wait a minute. I’ll find the stairs to that other little trapdoor and see if I can dislodge it from down here.’

‘I’m really only going to take a quick look,’ said Georgina.

Even with the torch, stepping into the corridor beyond the execution chamber was a daunting experience. Georgina stood by the door, shining the light along the passage, seeing that the execution
chamber was at the end of a corridor, and that the corridor was a cul-de-sac, ending in a blank brick wall. She had not noticed that when they came in. Further along – to her right –
was the condemned cell, which Chad had pointed out to her, and beyond that was a tiny shower room, and then a heavily barred door leading to the condemned man’s own exercise yard. Could
someone have got in through that door? But Georgina thought it did not look as if it had been opened for years. Beyond that again was the door leading out into the main part of the prison, through
which they had come earlier.

There was no one in the passage. Georgina took a few cautious steps away from the execution chamber, holding the torch like a talisman, letting it play over the cobwebbed walls and the
pock-marked floor. Nothing stirred. Had she after all imagined the footsteps?

‘Hello? Is anyone here?’

It sounded absurd and clichéd in the extreme, but it also sounded terrifyingly eerie, because in the enclosed space her voice bounced off the walls, and swooped back at her. She went a
bit further along, ready to dart back into the execution chamber and slam the door hard. Nothing moved anywhere, but Georgina was beginning to have the feeling that she was not on her own. She had
the feeling someone was watching her through a chink or a crack. She could not decide how far to trust this feeling: it might just be nerves.

Here was the condemned cell – the door was lying on the ground just inside. Georgina remembered Phin making a good story of how they had pushed it open and how it had fallen off its
hinges, nearly deafening everyone. She shone the torch inside, but the room was empty – unless you counted the thick layers of agony and despair that hung on the air. Dreadful. (And were the
unseen eyes still watching her?)

The shower room was next, its door wide open. It was a grisly, concrete-floored compartment, not much wider than the corridor. Incredibly an antiquated shower trough was still in place, and
pipes hung out of the walls like clusters of spiders’ legs. Georgina thought the condemned cell had had some kind of basic loo behind a half screen, but they must presumably have brought the
condemned prisoner in here to shower each day. Had he cared about that? If you were going to die, would you care whether you were bathed and shampooed? She shone the torch inside, but nothing
moved.

She called out again, and again Calvary’s thick shadows sent her own voice back at her.

Anyone here, anyone here, HERE, . . .

Or were the echoes playing a trick? Mightn’t they be saying,
someone here . . .?

She reached the end of the corridor, and stood for a moment by the oak door. Should she go back through it into Calvary’s maze of corridors and cells? She thought it might be very easy to
get lost out there. Even Chad Ingram, who had a map of the layout and who had been in here before, had hesitated at one of the intersections, clearly unsure whether to turn left or right. Perhaps
she ought to open the oak door and call out once more before going back. The footsteps seemed to have gone – they might not have been footsteps at all, in fact. They might have been some
peculiar echo – something to do with the plumbing – water dripping somewhere. Georgina did not actually think this was very likely, but at least nothing sinister seemed to be prowling
around out here.

She reached for the door’s handle, and turned it. It would not turn. Was it stuck? Georgina tried again, and then shone the torch onto the edges where the door met the wall. It was not
stuck at all, it was locked – it was a simple old mechanism, and she could see the steel tongue was locked across. The key was nowhere to be seen. Was it on the other side of the door?

But Chad had definitely said he would leave this door unlocked because Georgina needed to be able to get outside the building to make a phone call in an emergency. That was why he had left her
the spare key to the main outside door. But if he had left the door unlocked, who had locked it? Prickles of fear jabbed her mind, and with them suddenly came another memory, causing her to whip
round and stare back down the corridor.

The bathroom door. When they came in here it had been closed. Georgina definitely remembered that; she remembered Chad pointing it out. And now it was standing wide open. Had Chad or one of the
others opened it? Georgina could not think of any good reason why they would have done that.

Icy fear was scudding across her skin in waves. Someone’s in here, she thought. Someone who’s locked this door – and taken away the key – and someone who’s pushed
the bathroom door back to the wall so he could stand behind it to hide.

She shone the torch over the walls again. Had there been a movement from within the bathroom? If there really was someone in here, what should she do? Could she scoot back along the passage and
get inside the execution chamber and slam the door? But what then? Could the door be locked from inside?

She was just making up her mind that at least she must get back to Jude, when the movement came again. A figure darted out of the tiny bathroom, ran past the condemned cell and into the
execution chamber. The door slammed hard with a dreadful booming thud, and Georgina’s earlier question was answered because in the enclosed space the sound of a lock being turned from inside
was clear and unmistakable.

The owner of the footsteps had locked her into this corridor. And whoever he was, he was now inside the execution chamber with Jude.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Jude had waited in an agony of impatience for Georgina to come back and say everything was all right, that after all it had only been water dripping somewhere, or mice.

If he could have got back into the room he would have gone unhesitatingly out to see who might be prowling around, and be blowed to being blind – he thought he had never hated his
blindness as much as he hated it at this minute. Not even those first anguished weeks compared with this – with being stuck in this place, fearing something had happened to Georgina, and not
being able to get to her. Several layers down he was aware that his anguish for Georgina was far more than it would have been if it had been Drusilla or Phin or even Chad who was in danger, but
there was no time to examine this feeling. In any case Georgina was probably firmly hooked up to some revoltingly healthy man who took her disgustingly for granted, and treated her abominably . . .
and had his sight. Oh hell.

After a few moments he managed to locate the steps which were in a corner of the vault, and he felt his way up them, missing his footing once or twice and banging his head when he reached the
top. But although he threw his whole weight into trying to raise the small trapdoor, and also tried using the walking stick to force it upwards, it was absolutely immoveable. Damn.

He retraced his steps, expecting to hear Georgina come back. But the minutes dragged on, and there was only the thick silence. From feeling worried, Jude now began to feel genuinely frightened.
Chad had said he had checked this place but how far had he been able to do that?

From overhead, he heard a sudden yell of anger or pain or both – Georgina’s voice! – and then running footsteps coming towards the execution chamber. The door was slammed and
there was the sound of a key turning in the lock. Georgina? No, he could hear her voice from a long way away, shouting something. There was a second or two of relief at that, because for the moment
she sounded all right. But the relief was instantly replaced by a new fear, because clearly the prowler was in the execution chamber. Even if Jude had not heard the man’s slightly laboured
breathing, he would have sensed his presence.

For a moment he had absolutely no idea what to do. Did the man even know he was down here? But no sooner had the thought formed than there was the rasping of machinery. Above him something
seemed to shudder, and there was the sound of pulleys engaging. The gallows trap, thought Jude. My God, he’s closing it! He’s shutting me into this God-forsaken vault!

As the door locked back into place, he felt the darkness become stifling and menacing, and was aware again of the lonely agony of the prison. Calvary’s ghosts pressed against him, holding
out their dead hands, pushing their swollen discoloured faces at him . . .

Now you’re down here with us, said these unseen faces. Now you’ve joined us and you can’t get away. For a fleeting, shutter-flash second Jude saw in his mind the face he had
seen the previous night. A narrow well-shaped skull, with thick just-greying hair, a sharp clear jawline that even the dislocation of the neck could not blur.

And then the inner image vanished, and he was back with the choking darkness, and the unknown prowler overhead. And Georgina trapped somewhere beyond the execution chamber.

Think, dammit, said Jude angrily to himself. You can’t get out of here by brute strength, but you might get out by using your wits – it wouldn’t be the first time you’d
done that. So where’s that famed sharpness that got you out of so many awkward places in the past?

There had to be another way out of this vault. There must have been some means of taking the executed prisoners away – taking them to a mortuary, perhaps, or an infirmary room. It was
unlikely that the bodies had been carried up the stairs and through the smaller trap, because the stairs were too narrow and awkward. And it was even less likely that they would have been taken
through the main part of the prison. So how had it been done,
how?

Mentally he reached for the map he had made of the vault – eight feet deep, and rectangular in shape. Steps up to the trap behind him, in a corner. None of that any damn good. Jude began
to tap around the walls with his stick, feeling for a break in the solid brickwork. There must be something, there must . . .

And there it was. A door. Set deeply into the brickwork, with a handle on one side. Jude did not give himself time to wonder if this door would be locked; he turned the handle straight away. It
felt loose and it was unpleasantly rusty, but it moved and although the hinges groaned like a thousand souls in torment, the door opened outwards fairly easily. The accreted dust and dirt of years
came away and a breath of foetid air gusted outwards.

For a moment panic engulfed him because anything could be beyond this door – the prowler might be crouching there, waiting to pounce. But if Jude could get near enough to a window or even
an outer wall, he should be able to phone Chad. He hated having to call for help – he wanted to go rampaging through Calvary himself, find Georgina and then beat to a pulp the madman who had
brought about this situation. As he felt his way cautiously forwards, he wondered briefly who the man was. Presumably he had a key. And hopefully the camcorder would have picked him up, although
this would not be much comfort if Jude and Georgina were attacked and injured, and it would not be any help if the man spotted the camcorder and smashed it up.

Tapping around with the stick seemed to establish that beyond the door was a tunnel, brick lined, not very wide. It might lead anywhere or it might lead nowhere, but Jude thought there was a
strong possibility that it led to the infirmary or perhaps some kind of morgue.

The ghosts were still with him as he went along – the hanged men who would have been carried along this tunnel. Had the man whose face he had seen been carried along here? Presumably he
must have been. Presumably he had been a murderer, and he was buried in the prison’s grounds.

Several times he misjudged distances and twice he walked into a jutting bit of wall. The tunnel curved which made it difficult to make any kind of mental map in his head. Every few paces he
stopped to listen, but there was no sound of the intruder following him. He thought the man had stayed in the execution chamber.