The Death Chamber (49 page)

Lewis was saying, ‘Can you manage it? Perhaps offer to sit with the prisoner while the duty warders have their supper?’

It would be an unusual thing to do, but it would not be entirely out of pattern with a prisoner under the death sentence. Higneth knew this, and Lewis knew it as well.

‘Is that all you want me to do?’

‘Yes. Just do this, and then afterwards know absolutely nothing.’

Higneth had waited until the time for the warders’ supper break, and then had found a task for the relief warder – an important letter that must catch the evening
post, he said, and there was no one else free to take it down to the village. The prisoner? That was easily dealt with: he would sit with her himself for an hour. Had they served the evening drink
to her yet? No? Then perhaps they would bring along two mugs.

It was a little unconventional, but Edgar Higneth was by this time known for his humane treatment of condemned prisoners. For him to elect to drink his own mid-evening mug of cocoa with
Elizabeth Molland was not so very remarkable.

As he went into the execution suite he still had no idea if he was going to do this. If he did, how would the plan unfold? Clearly Sir Lewis intended Elizabeth to be ill – presumably to
require hospital treatment. Then was Walter Kane part of it all? Higneth was inclined to think not, but he had better not make any assumptions.

Seated opposite Molland, he thought again how difficult it was to believe this fair frail creature could have killed anyone.

She seemed unaware that there might be a plan to free her. She thanked him for coming and the conversation turned to Neville Fremlin. The tears welled up in her eyes almost at once.

‘I trusted him so much,’ she said. ‘He spun magic. Like an enchanter in a story. He bound me with a spell. But it was a monstrous magic. He destroyed me.’

She said it so wistfully and Higneth thought: the words, the sentiments of an innocent child, surely. A guileless young girl, still half in childhood, still seeing magic in people. But as she
had said, it had been a monstrous magic that had trapped her.

He thought he was still unsure what to do, but he realized the decision had already been made. Not saying anything, he handed over the envelope Lewis Caradoc had given him. She took it without
speaking, but Higneth saw her eyes go to the small washbasin behind the screen. Warm water from the tap. The tin mug which had contained her cocoa. The warders would return soon, but she would find
a way to mix the drink that would make her sick, and she would find a way to tamper with the thermometer so it would appear that she had a fever – perhaps she would manage to take a mouthful
of hot water, or furtively put the thermometer itself in a mug of hot water. Whatever she did, it would set in motion Lewis Caradoc’s plan to save his daughter from the gallows.

Edgar Higneth thought they had got away with it. He thought no one had known, or would ever know. Until, three months later, Dr McNulty sat in his office, and put forth the
most preposterous request Higneth had ever heard.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Certainly not. Good God man, even if I were to agree – the soul isn’t a thing that can be measured!’

‘That’s what I intend to find out,’ said McNulty. ‘And I think you will agree in the end. It’s a small, very swift, procedure – it can’t possibly make
any difference to the prisoner – but it will contribute greatly to our knowledge.’

Higneth thought Denzil McNulty was probably more interested in contributing to his own reputation in the peculiar world of psychic investigation, but he did not say so. He tried to think how
best to handle this.

‘It is such a censorious world, isn’t it?’ McNulty said before he could speak. ‘A prurient world, as well. If I were to tell people what I knew – what had been
found in the condemned cell – What Saul Ketch saw the night Molland was taken—’

‘What did he see?’ The question came out too sharply, and McNulty smiled.

‘Oh, merely the prisoner being taken from the ambulance to a car.’

‘Then he should have said so at the time.’

‘But it’s as well for you he didn’t, isn’t it?’ said McNulty, and Higneth was unable to tell if Ketch really had seen something that night and told McNulty about
it, or if McNulty was making it up to lend weight to his polite threat.

McNulty said, ‘If I were to tell what I know, no matter how strong your denials, there would be extremely unpleasant talk. People would wonder and speculate. You might not care about your
own skin, Higneth, but Walter Kane’s career would be irreparably damaged.’

‘Dr Kane has nothing to do with any of this,’ said Higneth at once.

‘Hasn’t he? Are you absolutely sure of that?’

This was the real difficulty; Higneth was not absolutely sure. He thought he would probably have sacrificed Lewis Caradoc (what
had
Saul Ketch seen that night?), but he did not think he
could risk sacrificing Walter. A treacherous little voice in his mind asked whether the small experiment McNulty was proposing could really matter to this woman, this Violet Parsons, who had sent
an unwanted husband to a painful death? What could it matter to her that she was asked to undergo a brief, extra weighing procedure on the morning of her execution? The prisoners were weighed each
day in any case for the executioner to calculate the precise drop needed.

Higneth knew perfectly well that this reasoning was akin to what Catholics called casuistry – finding acceptable reasons for an unacceptable or a sinful action – but it was a thought
that gave him some small comfort. He looked at McNulty and saw the man was smiling and nodding, as if he had followed these thoughts with disturbing ease. Unpleasant little weasel. Higneth would
make very sure the man was not employed at Calvary in any respect whatsoever after this. He would find a way to dismiss Saul Ketch as well, and be damned to the shortage of men!

But when McNulty said, ‘Well? You’ll do it?’ Higneth heard his own voice say, quite calmly, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’

When the grey morning of the first of January 1940 finally dawned, Edgar Higneth was glad to know that at least he had made the whole execution process so much swifter. There
was no longer the almost ceremonious walk out of the condemned cell into the execution chamber: no longer the solemn intoning of the funeral service during the procession. Calvary was an old and
stubborn building and its modernization had been difficult and costly, but Higneth had stuck to his guns and finally the changes had been made. Violet Parsons would barely have time to realize that
she was being taken to the scaffold before the noose was round her neck, and the trap was being dropped.

When Higneth entered the condemned cell shortly before eight o’clock, McNulty eagerly in his wake, the chaplain waiting outside, he was relieved to see that Parsons seemed perfectly calm.
She appeared grateful for McNulty’s presence; she took his hand, and said she was glad to have a dear friend to help her to the Other Side. Higneth remembered the stories of how Parsons and
the husband she had poisoned, had held seances in London during and immediately after the Great War. It had not been much mentioned in the trial, but he thought there had been a suggestion
somewhere that the seances had been full of tricks and devices to cheat the vulnerable bereaved clients who attended. But fraudster or not, faced with death it certainly seemed Parsons’ own
belief was genuine. Higneth hoped it would help her through the final moments.

The two duty warders did not seem especially curious about the weighing machine which McNulty had told them to carry in. Probably they thought it was part of the new methods which Higneth had
introduced. It was an unwieldy machine with an unusually large platform – Higneth wondered if McNulty had had it specially constructed – and horizontal brass rods with what looked like
dozens of tiny squares attached to them, each one a different size, each one marked as being pounds or ounces. The ounces were divided into sections, so that it would be possible to take the
minutest fraction of an ounce into consideration.

‘I am using ounces troy, not ounces avoirdupois,’ said McNulty seeing Higneth’s look. ‘Troy allows for a little more precision – four hundred and eighty grains to
the ounce.’

Violet Parsons weighed fourteen stone, five pound, four ounces and two hundred grains. McNulty wrote this down, and Violet said, ‘I am glad to know I am contributing to our work. You will
write this up, of course.’

‘I shall, and it shall always be known as the Parsons’ Experiment,’ said McNulty. ‘You will live on in our work, my dear Vita. But in two or three minutes you will be
with the loved ones we have so often spoken with.’ He stepped back, nodding to the waiting warders to indicate that he had finished his work.

Mr Pierrepoint’s assistant was as swift and efficient as could be wished. Violet Parsons accepted the hood, and submitted to the strapping of her hands and ankles; there was a bad moment
when Higneth thought the executioner’s hands were shaking, but he seemed to manage well enough, and they did not shake when he depressed the lever. Twenty seconds from the moment they had
taken Parsons out of the condemned cell to the moment the trap dropped. Smooth and swift and clean.

To do McNulty credit, once he had heard the heart slow down and then stop, he behaved with complete detachment. He waved the assistant aside, and went down into the vault himself where he cut
the body down. Higneth saw the warders had carried the machine down – he supposed McNulty had asked them to do so straight after the execution. Despite himself, he felt a sudden anticipation.
What would the findings be? Would anything be proved?
Could
anything be proved?

The executioner seemed uncertain as to his role, but McNulty called up to say they would send for him presently, and Higneth asked the warders to take the man to his office, to wait there. He
thought the chaplain looked curiously at the open trap, but he, too, seemed to shrug, and went quietly out. Higneth stayed where he was. A part of him wanted to distance himself as much as possible
from the entire business and he certainly did not believe in any part of McNulty’s experiment. But a tiny part of him was strongly curious, and he wanted to see this out.

Violet Parsons’ body lay a bit untidily on the weighing machine’s large platform while McNulty moved back and forth, writing down figures, and making calculations. It seemed to take
him a very long time. Higneth, standing almost forgotten on the edge of the gallows trap, thought surely there could be no real evidence of the soul’s existence in all this? Dead weight was
different to live weight anyway. And there were so many other factors that would cause a change of weight: the stretching of muscles – the neck could stretch by several inches. The loss of
bodily fluids. Could McNulty allow for all that precisely enough to form a theory or make a judgement?

It seemed as if he could. At least, he seemed as if he thought he could. He suddenly looked up at Higneth, his thin sallow face framed in the open gallows trap. His eyes were glowing with an
unnatural light, and he said, ‘A detectable change in weight. The weight is less by twenty grains.’

You’re mad, thought Higneth, staring at him. You’re a man obsessed. This isn’t proof of anything at all – certainly not of the soul existing.

But he said, rather coldly, ‘I see. I am glad you found your experiment satisfactory. Thank you for attending in Dr Kane’s place.’ And turned on his heel and left. As he went
along the passage of the execution suite, behind him he heard the door of the execution chamber being closed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

After Georgina heard the door of the execution chamber being closed, she wasted several minutes and a great deal of energy trying to open it. Then she wasted even more minutes
and even more energy trying to open the thick oak door leading out to the main part of Calvary. Neither would budge. Calvary’s locks might be old, but they were solid and they held.

She heard the mechanism of the gallows trap being operated – it thrummed and shivered even through the closed door, and Georgina realized with horror that whoever it was who had locked her
in here, had now shut Jude in the gallows vault. The thought of Jude helpless and trapped, was so appalling she almost forgot her own danger. She paced up and down the corridor, clutching the torch
which might serve as a weapon, and began to examine systematically the entire suite to see if she could find some other way out.

The exercise yard seemed a reasonable possibility, but the lock on its door was rusted so firmly into place that it would take hours to break it. What else? Was there a window in the shower
room? There was not. Calvary had not been built in the days when bathrooms had to have either windows or efficient extractor fans, and probably this one had only been used when there was a prisoner
here who was under sentence of death. That left the condemned cell.

The atmosphere in there was nearly as bad as the execution chamber, but Georgina shone the torch painstakingly around the walls and the floor. There was nothing, not even the smallest air vent
through which a desperate prisoner might squeeze. She glanced at her watch and saw far too long a time had elapsed since she had been shut in here.