The Death Chamber (17 page)

He called out. ‘Major? Are you there? It’s me, Vincent.’

The study door opened at once and Vincent’s mother said, ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ She stood in the doorway but the lamp on the major’s desk was on and Vincent
could see straight into the room.

At first he could not make any sense of what he saw because it looked as if the major was asleep in the chair. But he was asleep with his eyes open and his face was white and marbly. There was a
mess of something all down his shirt front and a dreadful sour smell of sick. Vincent began to feel frightened. He looked at his mother and felt even more frightened because she was different. Her
face was flushed and there was a shininess to her eyes as if a light had been switched on. But she said again, in an ordinary voice, ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were at
John’s house for the evening.’

She glanced back at the major lying in the chair and then stepped out into the hall and shut the door firmly.

Vincent mumbled about whooping cough and having to come home and Mother said thoughtfully, ‘Oh, I see.’ In a sharper voice, she said, ‘Did you tell anyone you were coming here?
Or see anyone on your way?’

‘No.’

‘Ah.’ Vincent had the feeling his mother was pleased with this.

She said, ‘Well now, Vincent, I’m afraid Major Thodden was taken very poorly a little while ago.’

‘Should we get a doctor?’

‘Oh no,’ said Mother at once. ‘No, there’d be no point. I’m afraid – well, you’re so grown-up these days I think I can tell you. He’s dead, the
poor man. A heart attack, that’s what it was, I should think.’

They looked at one another and for a long time neither of them spoke. Vincent had never seen anyone dead, but he had seen pictures in comics. He was not supposed to read comics but they were
sometimes passed round at school. He could not remember the dead people in comics looking anything like the major looked now. ‘What do we have to do?’

Mother appeared to think for a moment, then she said, ‘As you know, it’s my rule not to become involved in unpleasantness. And people might be very unkind if they knew I had been
here tonight. A widow alone with a gentleman – taking a drink with him . . .’ She looked at the glasses she held in her hand. One was a small sherry glass; the other was the chunky
tumbler the major used for his whisky.

‘I thought,’ Mother was saying, ‘that it would be a kindness to just set the room to rights a little. Major Thodden would not like anyone thinking he lived untidily. And people
would not believe I only drank sherry. Gin, that’s what they would say. So I’m going to wash these glasses and put them away in the cabinet and there will be no trace of my visit. You
can come into the scullery to help me. Don’t go into the study, will you? And once we’ve dealt with the glasses, we will go home and remember nothing about any of this. That’s the
plan, Vincent. It’s very important to have a plan and to keep to it. A wise man taught me that when I was very young.’

They washed the glasses and put them away in the dining-room cupboard. Then they went home and had scrambled eggs and Vincent did his homework. The next day he went to school as usual and he did
not tell anyone what had happened. Mother had said he must not, she had been very firm about it.

‘No one at all, Vincent, not even your very best friends. You are my brave boy and such a comfort to me. And I have brought you up to be a gentleman, and a gentleman never betrays a
lady’s secret, so I am trusting you. What happened last night must be our special secret.’

Vincent did not really see why the major dying had to be a secret, but he wanted to be worthy of Mother’s trust and he wanted them to have the special secret together.

The major’s body was discovered two days later by a cleaning lady, whose shrieks could apparently be heard halfway along the Avenue. ‘How very vulgar,’ Mother said
disapprovingly when she was told. ‘No self-control, that type of person.’

There was a report of the major’s death in the local newspaper because he had fought in the war and been wounded at Gallipoli, and the newspaper thought that made him interesting to
people. The article said he had had a heart condition. ‘But,’ said Mother, in what Vincent could not help thinking of as a
satisfied
voice, ‘the post mortem concluded he
died accidentally as a result of taking too much digitalis. That’s heart medicine, Vincent. It helps the heart beat more strongly. Very important for people who have a weak heart. But they
think the major swallowed his usual dose and then felt unwell and took a second one and possibly even a third. Perhaps as much as half a grain altogether.’

Half a grain did not sound very much to Vincent, but Mother seemed pleased. She read out how the amount might easily have been fatal to someone with low blood pressure and a kidney condition
which was what the major had had. ‘They make the point that the dosage of digitalis has to be controlled very strictly,’ she said, and lowering the newspaper for a moment she looked
directly at Vincent. ‘But none of this is anything to do with us and we must stick to the plan.’

They had stuck to the plan and they had not told anybody anything. No one asked them where they had been on the night the Bournemouth major died; there was no reason why anyone would do so.

Not many people attended the major’s funeral because not many people had known him very well. Shy, they said, reserved. Or simply downright aloof, depending on your point of view. Mother
was asked by neighbours if she had gone to the service – she had known the major, hadn’t she? – but she said she had hardly known him at all. ‘Only to say good
morning.’

When a man called from a solicitor’s office to tell Mother Major Thodden had left her all his money, she shed some tears into a lace handkerchief. Then she pulled herself together and gave
a sad smile. ‘Poor man,’ she said, ‘he had no family and he was very lonely, you know. I’m glad if I gave him some companionship these last months, although I hadn’t
actually seen him for two or three weeks before his death. How extremely generous of him to do such a thing. I don’t in fact need the money, of course, my husband was a prudent man and as you
can see I am very well provided for.’ One hand indicated the house and its comfortable furniture. ‘I may decide to give most of Major Thodden’s bequest to a charity. Not all of it
– that would be like rejecting his kindness – but a large portion of it. Perhaps you would advise me on suitable charities. Distressed army officers, something of that kind – he
would like that, wouldn’t he? But I do wish I had been there with him when he died. A lonely death, it must have been.’

After a while they left Bournemouth and went to live in Chichester. A very cultured town, said Mother. There were theatre festivals there and a cathedral, and they would meet a very nice type of
person. They had a bigger house in Chichester and a lady came in to clean three times a week and to prepare some of the meals. A man came twice a week to keep the garden in order because Mother
found gardening exhausting. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t much stamina.’ She liked to sit beneath the apple tree with a book and to talk about My Roses. Vincent went to a new school
where the uniform was very smart indeed. The only other difference to their lives was that Mother coloured her hair a much darker shade. ‘But we do not tell people that,’ she said.
‘It is still thought rather common to dye one’s hair. When I was a young girl, it was taken to mean that one was rather fast.’

They made a few friends – not too many because it was best not to give people the opportunity to know all your business. But there were one or two boys at Vincent’s school who might
be invited to tea, and Mother joined a small gardening club and after a while found a new gentleman friend. ‘A very nice person,’ she said, pleased. ‘A bachelor. Not a very young
man, but that does not matter. You see, Vincent, how important it is to work out a proper plan and to keep to it?’

A plan. A proper plan that you had worked out and kept to. Those words had stayed with Vincent ever since. Mother’s shining look when she came out of the dead
major’s study stayed with him as well. He thought of it as a beacon, lighting up his life.

After he left the Caradoc House flat he spent an hour in the office downstairs, but his mind was not on the Society: it was still busy with the question of Georgina Grey. When you were going to
get rid of someone you needed a weapon, just as his mother had used the digitalis as a weapon against the Bournemouth major. Neither of them had ever said this, of course, and it had not been until
many years later Vincent had understood what had happened.

Had Vincent a weapon he could use against Georgina? He frowned, thinking hard, and then quite suddenly saw the answer. Calvary. Calvary was the weapon he would use to get rid of this prying
great-granddaughter of Dr Walter Kane.

The more he thought about this the more he liked the symmetry of it. But how should it be done? At mid-day he walked along to his own house and while he made himself some lunch, he reviewed what
he knew about the place. At the moment it was owned by H M Prisons, which was to say the government, and Huxley Small’s firm acted as agents, making sure it was not occupied by squatters or
tramps, sending out a surveyor once a year to see it had not fallen down or been burned to a crisp. Managing the place, they called it. Keeping it secure. Vincent knew perfectly well that managing
Calvary was a sinecure because there was nothing that really needed managing: even the surveyor only had to look out last year’s report, tweak a few phrases to make it seem newly written, and
send it along with an invoice for a fat fee. Very nice too.

So, to practicalities. First, he hunted out the sketch plan he had managed to acquire some years ago of the gaol’s interior and spread it out on his dining table to study. It was a plan
the indolent surveyor had drawn years earlier, and was very clear and exactly to scale. There were the cells and the communal rooms, the refectory, the governor’s office, the medical block,
the chapel and the old burial yard. The mortuary with its brick tunnel beneath the execution chamber. And the condemned block, which was a little apartment on its own containing the cell for the
man awaiting execution. The execution chamber itself with its grisly gallows trap . . . The lime store.

The lime store . . .

CHAPTER TWELVE

The more Vincent thought about his plan, the clearer it became and the better it looked. He put away the layout of Calvary’s interior, and felt able to return to Caradoc
House. Once inside he paused at the foot of the stairs, wondering whether to go back up to see Georgina, but decided it was better not to do so. He would get the details of his plan sorted out
properly in his mind before he saw her again.

He was engaged in packing the Society’s files away: labelling and dating things as much as possible, and tying folders into neat bundles. It was dusty and unproductive work, but it had to
be done and Vincent would not have trusted anyone else to do it. So far nobody had told him what was going to happen to all these files, which was very discourteous; you would have thought he was
owed that after so many years. But he was going to leave everything in apple-pie order for Huxley Small and the accountants, so that when they did move in, they would remark on what a very
meticulous secretary the Society had had in Vincent Meade and wonder why they had not realized it before. They might even consider employing him in some other capacity, although if they made any
kind of offer it would give Vincent great pleasure to decline; he was not going to be at anyone’s beck and call, thank you very much!

In any case, he might have other fish to fry. A rather exciting project was starting to take shape in his mind: this was the creation of his own psychic society. It was quite an ambitious idea,
but Vincent did not see why he could not make a success of it. He fancied he was rather well known in psychic circles, and people would recognize his name and be interested. ‘Is that the
Vincent N. Meade of the Caradoc Society?’ they would say. ‘What an enterprising chap to be starting his own society. And he’ll know what he’s talking about after all these
years. We must certainly see about joining that.’

This was a very promising prospect, and Vincent was nearly sure he was going to do it.

While he worked, he considered how he might get Georgina out to Calvary, because clearly this was the next stage of the plan. Mother had always believed in keeping such plans as simple as
possible and Vincent was going to follow her precepts. He thought he could offer to show Georgina the place where her great-grandfather had worked. He tried out a little dialogue to himself.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he would say, ‘that you ought to see where your great-grandfather worked. So I’ve arranged to borrow the Calvary keys from Huxley Small. He
took a bit of persuading, but he agreed in the end. I’ll drive you out there if you like.’

Would she like? Vincent thought so; he had already seen how much Walter Kane intrigued her. If he implied that he had gone to some trouble to get the keys, she could not very well refuse. Yes,
it ought to work very neatly.