The Durham Deception (19 page)

If the name meant anything to Superintendent Harcourt he didn't show it. He said, ‘I gather your wife knew the deceased.'

‘This may sound absurd, Superintendent, but then the whole thing is absurd. I do not even know who is dead.'

‘You don't know who is dead, Mr Ansell? Well, well. The deceased is a gentleman who has caused a certain stir in this town . . . his name is . . . or was, I should say . . . Eustace Flask.'

‘Oh God! How did he die?'

‘He was murdered. Stabbed, it seems. A vicious blow to the neck with a sharp knife. May I take it from your response that you were also familiar with Mr Flask?'

‘Plenty of people knew him, I imagine,' said Tom, cautiously.

‘As a matter of fact, I knew him myself,' said Harcourt. ‘A glancing acquaintance only, mind.'

‘But he disappeared last night.'

‘Last night? Ah, you are referring to the performance at the Assembly Rooms when Mr Flask was invited to enter the magician's booth.'

‘If you were there then you must have seen him vanish too.'

‘That was a trick, Mr Ansell.'

‘But Flask never reappeared.'

‘All part of the act, I suppose,' said Harcourt.

‘Shouldn't you be talking to the performers on stage, talking to Major Marmont for example, to find out exactly what happened afterwards? Flask could have died last night.'

‘The body was still warm, the blood was still flowing, when your wife found him this morning. He had only just been killed.'

Tom noted that the policeman was not implying that it was Helen who had killed Flask.

‘So he disappeared temporarily and then popped up again. Someone must have seen him in the in-between.'

‘No doubt,' said Harcourt. ‘We will talk to the magician and others but in our own good time, Mr Ansell. We must talk to your wife first and find out what she was doing with the deceased.'

‘She wasn't doing anything with him. She had the bad luck to find his body, that is all. You have as much as said so.'

‘Possibly, sir, possibly. But caution is the watchword in these affairs. You are lucky because I was actually on the scene of the murder.'

‘You saw it?' said Tom, not understanding.

‘I mean that I arrived shortly afterwards, happening to be in the neighbourhood by chance. Fortunately, several of my men were also in the area. Tell me, Mr Ansell, did your wife ever express an opinion of Mr Eustace Flask?'

Helen had said several things about Flask, all of them unfavourable, so Tom cast around for a neutral way to answer. He certainly wanted to avoid any hint that she had come to Durham with the specific intention of persuading her aunt Howlett away from her infatuation with the medium. He saw Frank Harcourt looking at him, tapping the end of the pencil against his mouth. There was a shrewdness in the policeman's eyes but also something else there which Tom couldn't quite place.

‘Neither of us has much time for mediums and séances and that sort of thing,' said Tom eventually. ‘We had, both of us, met Mr Flask once – at her aunt's house as it happens.'

There was a double tap on the door and Harcourt went to answer it. A police constable stood outside. Without any preamble, he launched into an urgent explanation. The man's accent was so broad that Tom had difficulty following him but, as far as he could gather, something had occurred which required the Superintendent's immediate attention, something to do with the delivery of a parcel.

Harcourt came back. He said, ‘You may see your wife if you wish, Mr Ansell. There has been a development in the case.'

‘What is it?'

‘I am not at liberty to say. But if you come with me now I shall direct a warder to take you to Mrs Ansell.'

The Crown Court and the prison occupied the same site. Superintendent Harcourt led Tom down some stairs and along increasingly drab passageways until they emerged into a small high-walled yard. He rapped on an iron-barred door on the far side and, when a wooden panel slid back, grunted a few words to the whiskered face on the other side. There was the clank of keys from within.

‘I'll leave you with Perkins, Mr Ansell. You are in good hands.'

Tom was thinking not of himself but of poor Helen as the warder escorted him across a chilly vestibule occupied only by a desk, chair and filing cabinet. Half a dozen flat blue caps were hanging from a row of pegs. Perkins took a key from the great bunch which dangled at his belt and, without looking to check whether he had the right one, unlocked another reinforced door. Beyond this was a barred gate which led directly to one of the prison wings. There was same instinctive procedure with the keys. Without saying a word, the warder beckoned Tom to follow him up a spiral metal staircase to the left of the gate and they climbed to the second tier of the building. A row of doors opened off a narrow walkway, echoed by a similar arrangement on the other side.

It was curiously silent, with no sound apart from the thud of the men's feet. There was an acrid smell, a mixture of food and carbolic and human waste. Perkins halted at the seventh or eight door. This time the warder had to search for a specific key. When he found it, he used it to tap on the door to alert the occupant, before turning the key and swinging open the door in a single smooth action.

Helen was sitting on a bench against the far wall. Her head was bent in concentration and she was scribbling in a notebook. She looked up, blinking.

‘Tom! It's you.'

‘Helen. You're all right?'

‘Of course I am all right.'

‘What are you doing?' said Tom. It was a stupid question but other words failed him. He was standing just inside the cell door.

‘'Fraid I'll have to lock you in, sir,' said Perkins, making a show of drawing a pocket-watch from his uniform jacket and consulting it. ‘I will wait outside on the landing. I can give you ten minutes.'

‘I am sure you can give us longer than that,' said Helen. She glanced at Tom and surreptitiously rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.

Tom gave the man half a sovereign. The coin disappeared like magic.

‘Half an hour, sir, no longer,' said Perkins. He shut the door and turned the key.

Helen said, ‘Well, Tom, in answer to your question I am writing down the details of my surroundings. An author never knows when these things will come in useful. I might send one of my characters to gaol at some point and, when I do, I will need to know what the inside of a cell looks like.'

Helen spoke more rapidly than usual. Tom noticed that there was some blood on her dress. She snapped the notebook shut – it was her diary, he saw – and placed it neatly beside her. She got up from the bench, came to him and he put his arms around her.

‘I don't know how you do it,' he said at last. ‘You are so calm, so brave. Oh Helen!'

‘Now, Tom. Do not be foolish. This is all a silly mistake. I shall be out of here very soon. After all, you have been in the same plight yourself.'

It was true. The previous year Tom had spent an unhappy night in a cell in the county gaol in Salisbury when he too had fallen under suspicion for a crime he did not commit. Helen had visited him in that place, just as he was now visiting her in this one. Tom wondered if there was some malign or mischievous fate subjecting each of them to a parallel experience of prison.

Tom released his wife and took his first careful look at the cell. With its curved ceiling, it was like a vault or the interior of a compartment in a train carriage. The flaking walls were whitewashed. A few feet above the bed there was an unglazed and barred window which allowed in small quantities of light and air. At the moment a stray draught was bringing in the ghost of summer to the cell. In the winter it would be bitterly cold. Apart from the bed, the only covering for which was a coarse blanket, there was a wooden chair and a three-legged stand for a washbasin, a ewer of water and a thick glass tumbler. A bucket was lodged under the bed.

Helen had gone back to sit on the bed. She saw Tom looking round.

‘As you can see, there is not much to note down. Not much to distract the mind or lift the spirits. Thank goodness I had my diary tucked away. They didn't have a searcher to hand and so they did not discover my diary.'

‘A searcher?' said Tom.

‘A woman who is employed to search female suspects. I already have a grasp of the police jargon, you see. I must say I will be glad to get out of here. I need to change my clothes.'

She glanced at the bloodstains on her dress. She looked at her hands. She shuddered.

‘I must have touched him. I got too close to the . . . to the body. I have washed my hands several times over but I have not been able to get my clothes laundered in this place.'

She gave an odd laugh. Tom came to sit beside her and felt the bed give under their weight. He put his arm round her. After a while, he asked Helen to tell him what had happened. Did she want to talk about it? How had she come to find Eustace Flask?

As Tom knew, she had gone out that morning to look at the shops – a rather un-Helen-like thing to do but she needed to get away from Aunt Julia who was preoccupied with the fate of Eustace Flask after his disappearance at the Assembly Rooms. Every few minutes over breakfast it was, ‘I wonder what's become of dear Mr Flask?' or ‘I do hope he's all right' or ‘Do you think we should tell the authorities?' Tom noticed that even Septimus Sheridan's patience was wearing thin. He excused himself to go and look at the notes on the Lucknow Dagger which Sebastian Marmont had written up for him, and to try to make sense of a rambling, disjointed narrative.

Helen described how she had walked to the Market Place and then lingered over the shop windows in Silver Street. It was a fine morning and she wanted to stretch her legs. She walked down the cobbled slope to Framwellgate Bridge, across which they had driven on their arrival in Durham. She paused and looked casually down at the river. Below her was the path where she and Tom had strolled the previous day. She walked to the far side of the bridge, the western end. There was a similar riverside path running below here.

She gave a start to see below the gentleman they had encountered yesterday, the one who had claimed to be returning her handkerchief. It was him, she was sure of it. The same loping stride, the same shabby coat. Perhaps, she thought, he goes up and down the river paths in search of discarded handkerchiefs.

But Helen was much more surprised, even shocked, to see a similarly tall figure emerge from the shadow of the bridge and move off in the same direction keeping the castle and cathedral to his left. There was no doubt in her mind about
his
identity. That stride which was mincing rather than loping, the rather fine attire, the pale red hair escaping from under his hat. It was Eustace Flask.

Her first reaction was, oddly, disappointment. So it was a trick after all, he hadn't been made to disappear in the Perseus Cabinet. Her next was, Aunt Julia will be relieved that he is back. Then curiosity got the better of her. What exactly had happened last night? How had Flask been made to disappear? Why, come to that, had he now chosen to reappear? Where was he going?

Before she was really aware of what she was doing Helen Ansell found herself descending the steep stone steps leading from Framwellgate Bridge down to the river level. By the time she reached the path Eustace Flask was in the far distance. Helen couldn't bring herself to shout or run after him. She set off at a regular pace, now thinking better of the idea of accosting Flask and quizzing him. What business was it of hers? To talk to the medium would give him the idea she was somehow interested in his welfare, whereas she wanted nothing more than that he should stop fleecing her aunt and leave Durham. There were other walkers on the riverbank, and a group of boys was fishing in the dirty water with makeshift rods and lines. She paused for a time to admire the view of the cathedral in its western aspect.

‘I decided to walk for a few more minutes and then go back to Framwellgate,' she said to Tom. ‘I had almost forgotten about Mr Flask. As I drew nearer to the mill on the other side of the river I heard the thud of the hammers and smelled the stench of the – what is it they use? – yes, of the ammonia. There is a second mill on this side and a couple of workmen outside were unloading sacks of wool from a wagon. The path skirts the mill and I walked further so as get a clear view of that handsome bridge where the river curves round on itself.

‘This is quite a deserted stretch of the riverbank, I suppose because it is more distant from the town or because of the noise and smell of the mills. I don't know why, Tom, but I grew suddenly alarmed when I rounded the loop of the river. The sun vanished behind a cloud and it turned gloomy. Even the river seemed to take on a blacker hue. I looked round and saw no one though I could hear the sounds of wood being chopped and sawed. I was about to retrace my steps when a figure burst from the slope of trees ahead of me and ran away. He did not see me. I cannot be sure but I think it might have been the man I noticed earlier, the one who tried to hand me a handkerchief.'

Helen paused at this point in her story. Tom looked up and saw a whiskery cheek and a single eye staring at them through the shuttered peephole in the cell door. The half-hour according to Perkins must be up. Tom mouthed the word ‘later' and rubbed his thumb against his forefinger as Helen had done. The segment of face withdrew, apparently satisfied. Helen, absorbed in what she was saying, observed none of this.

‘I was foolish, Tom. I should have turned back there and then. I should have remembered that there is always, always, a penalty to be paid for curiosity. I suspected something was amiss and I ought to have summoned help. But I walked on until I came to the point where I had seen the man running from the shelter of the trees. I waited, listening to the wind in the branches and the rushing of the water and the distant sounds of saws and axes. The sun had come out again, which fortified me. Then I heard a different sound.