The Death Chamber (56 page)

‘How ridiculous,’ said Vincent. ‘Who made the identification?’

‘Miss Georgina Grey and Mr Huxley Small. I daresay you know Mr Small acts as police solicitor in most cases, and he’s seen the film. And so procedures being what they are, we have to
check it all. Perhaps you could tell me where you were last night?’

Vincent decided the best approach to this was to adopt a slightly high-handed, bluffly tolerant tone. He said he had been quietly at home all evening. No, there was no one who could confirm
that. No, no one had called or phoned. A rather quiet life he led, you see.

‘Do you have a key to Calvary, sir?’

‘Of course not,’ said Vincent at once. ‘And really, if you’re going to take any notice of some half-baked film—’ He gave another of the little laughs,
inviting them to share the nonsense with him.

They did not share it. The constable made a note in a pocketbook, and the two men got up to take their leave. ‘I daresay you won’t be going anywhere for a few days, will you? We may
want to talk to you again.’

‘I am at your disposal,’ said Vincent.

After they had gone he replayed the interview over in his mind. He was not inclined to be at all worried. There was nothing they could prove, and he had conducted himself extremely well.

‘I wasn’t very impressed by him,’ said the detective sergeant as they walked back to Thornbeck’s little police station. ‘Were you?’

‘He struck so many poses you couldn’t tell which was real and which wasn’t,’ said the young PC.

‘I wouldn’t mind having another go at Vincent N. Meade,’ said the sergeant. ‘There’s something wrong somewhere. I wouldn’t mind getting a search warrant and
seeing if we can find that key, as well. But I suppose he’ll have chucked it into the nearest lake by the time we did that.’

‘If he is guilty of something, we’ll get him one day,’ said the PC.

‘Elizabeth died in Holloway Gaol,’ said Huxley Small to his listeners.

‘I don’t think I can find it in my heart to feel sorry for her,’ said Jude drily.

‘No, indeed. Lewis Caradoc told me he spent the rest of his life regretting what he did on the night he got her out of Calvary. He felt he had – well, foisted a killer on
society.’

‘He really did fix for her to escape?’ Phin was clearly finding this part difficult to believe.

‘Of course he did,’ said Jude. ‘He thought she was Trilby to Neville Fremlin’s Svengali. They all thought it. She fooled them all.’

‘But in the end, she never really did get away with the first batch of murders,’ said Chad thoughtfully. ‘And so her son came to Thornbeck.’

‘Yes. He was only in his early twenties then, but I recall him telling people his mother had known Thornbeck briefly as a girl,’ said Mr Small. ‘He said it was somewhere he
could feel close to her.’

‘The part of Thornbeck she had known was Calvary, of course,’ said Georgina. ‘And that was what he was trying to keep secret.’

‘Yes. And he did keep it secret, you know. I only realized who he was – that he was Elizabeth’s son – because I had met her,’ said Small. ‘And by the time I
had made the connection, Vincent was already the Caradoc Society’s secretary.’

‘Difficult to dislodge,’ said Jude.

‘There was no good reason to dislodge him. Being the son of a killer was not sufficient a reason to demand his resignation. He was doing a fair enough job of the secretaryship.’
Small paused and looked at Georgina. ‘Miss Grey, Denzil McNulty tried to blackmail Elizabeth Meade, we know that for certain. It occurs to me that blackmailers seldom stop at one
victim.’

Georgina looked at him blankly.

‘Lewis Caradoc was the man behind Elizabeth’s escape from Calvary in 1939,’ said Small, ‘but Walter Kane was the prison doctor at that time.’

‘You think he might have been involved?’

‘I don’t know. But if so . . .’

‘The Caradoc legacy,’ said Georgina. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it? You think Denzil McNulty found out something discreditable about Walter – perhaps that
he had helped a murderess to escape – and so Walter had to pay him to keep quiet.’

‘It would fit the case,’ he said, and Georgina again had the tantalizing sensation of being within reach of the past but not being quite able to grasp it.

‘McNulty, according to the reports, was a fanatic about his involvement in the Caradoc Society. It’s my guess he would have stopped at nothing to further its aims.’

‘Did you know him?’ asked Chad.

‘I met him briefly a couple of times. A thin sallow man he was, humourless and absolutely driven by his investigations into psychic phenomena. There was little else in his life, in
fact.’

‘I don’t like the sound of him at all,’ said Drusilla. ‘And if he blackmailed Georgina’s great-grandfather, I’m very glad he got his come-uppance at
Elizabeth’s hands.’

‘When was the bequest made?’ asked Chad. ‘Georgina, I’m sorry if I’m going into your family’s privacy.’

‘There’s nothing private about any of it,’ said Georgina at once. ‘It was 1940, wasn’t it, Mr Small?’

‘January 1940, Miss Grey. The wording was a bit ambiguous, but it’s all perfectly legal.’

‘Just before he left for the war,’ said Georgina. ‘I wonder if you’re right about the blackmail, Mr Small. It wouldn’t explain why he abandoned his wife and
daughter, but—’

Huxley Small said, ‘But your great-grandfather was never married. I thought you knew that.’

This was the last thing Georgina had expected. She stared at Small. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

‘There are no absolutes in law, Miss Grey – at least not in that sense. We traced you through your grandmother, as you know. We just looked through the various registers for people
with the name Kane who were born between 1940 and 1950. The internet,’ said Small surprisingly, ‘is extremely useful for this part of our work these days. Your grandmother was Caroline,
born in 1941.’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s listed as being the daughter of Walter Kane and of a Catherine Kerr. But we didn’t find any marriage certificate for them, and the fact that the certificate only gives
the mother’s maiden name is significant,’ said Small, ‘although not conclusive, of course.’

‘Walter and Catherine might have been married abroad,’ said Jude, ‘or under some arcane religion not recognized in English law. Georgina, are you sure you haven’t got any
papers of any kind for your grandmother?’

‘No, nothing.’ Georgina was beginning to wonder if she was related to Walter at all. She said, ‘I don’t know a great deal about any of them. My mother died when I was in
my teens, but she talked once or twice about her mother – my grandmother.’

Chad said, ‘Phin, this is one for you. See what you can find about Catherine Kerr and Caroline Kane, will you?’

But Phin had already started a new page in his notebook and was enthusiastically scribbling the names down. If Catherine Kerr could be found, he would find her. Not through the dusty road of
ancient files and mildewed church registers or cobwebby memories, but through the sharply modern route of computer screens and keyboards, and the spidery web of the internet.

January 1940

Walter sometimes thought that when he was able to look back on these months, it would be Elizabeth Molland he would remember most vividly.

This was curious, because although Elizabeth Molland ought to have been a secondary player in the drama surrounding his father – although Walter himself had only met her those few times
– she remained strongly in his mind. He wondered if he would ever be able to ask Lewis Caradoc where he had taken his daughter that night.

The cold whiteness continued to enclose Thornbeck for most of January and when, towards the end of the month, Walter left Lewis’s house and returned to Calvary, he saw that it enclosed
Calvary as well.

But although he had recovered from the frighteningly abrupt fever and weakness, everything seemed unreal. He moved through the days like a mechanical toy, and all the while the knowledge that
Nicholas O’Kane and Neville Fremlin were one and the same person drummed relentlessly in his mind. A traitor and then a murderer. Walter thought he had just about accepted the man who had sat
in the condemned cell twenty years earlier, and who had talked about dying for a dream and whose eyes had burned with fervour and defiance, but he could not accept the urbane killer who had sat in
that same cell a second time.

He was grateful when he was notified that he had been seconded to the army’s medical corps; a rank of captain had been assigned him and he would be required to report for duty in the first
week of February.

‘I expected it, of course,’ said Higneth, when Walter told him. ‘You’re not one to stay in this backwater when there’s fighting going on.’ He regarded Walter
with a sort of sad resignation. ‘I’d better see about getting a replacement for you, Walter, although I’d have to say whoever he is, he won’t be as good.’

Walter said, hesitantly, ‘You won’t be considering McNulty, I don’t suppose?’

‘No!’ It came out with startling violence.

Walter looked at him for a moment, but only said, ‘Well, if I can help with choosing a replacement – perhaps interview applicants for you – I’d like to do so.’

‘That would be very valuable indeed,’ said Higneth with unmistakable sincerity.

‘I’m glad you’re not letting McNulty back in,’ said Walter after a moment, and then wondered if he had stepped over a line, because Higneth’s expression was
suddenly angry. Was there something he was missing? Surely McNulty could not have worked his blackmail on Higneth? Surely Higneth had never done anything to lay himself open to McNulty?

But then Higneth said, in an ordinary voice, ‘No, there’s no possibility of McNulty coming back.’

As Walter left the office, he was aware of a slight lifting of his senses. I’m going to be free of McNulty, he thought, and I’m going to be able to shake off the memories of this
place. I’ll be hundreds of miles away – France to begin with, and then who knows where? – and the danger will be different danger. I’ll find a way of severing the links and
I’ll forget about Nicholas O’Kane who cheated the gallows and then came back to them as a mass murderer.

But it seemed Nicholas’s history was to deal him one last blow.

‘So you’re leaving Thornbeck, Dr Kane,’ said Denzil McNulty.

‘I am.’ In the cold light of the January morning, McNulty looked sallower and thinner than ever. Walter thought he had the appearance of a man burning up with his own passions.
‘I’m leaving for France in two weeks,’ he said.

‘So I hear. Then,’ said McNulty, ‘I dare say you will want to put your house in order before you go. To pay all debts, for instance.’

‘Everything’s in order and I have no debts,’ said Walter shortly.

‘My dear boy, it’s a fortunate man who can say that with complete truth,’ said McNulty. ‘I’m sure, if you think back a little, you’ll recall one debt that was
never paid.’

‘I owe nobody anything.’ Walter felt a tightening of his stomach.

‘No?’ said McNulty. ‘What about the payment to me? The payment for my silence about your part in the Molland girl’s escape? You slid out of the original agreement very
neatly, didn’t you, but—’

‘We never had an agreement,’ said Walter angrily. ‘Even if I hadn’t been taken ill, I would never have allowed your inhuman experiment on Parsons! But you did it anyway,
didn’t you?’

‘Edgar Higneth was a very useful ally,’ said McNulty in an oily voice, and Walter thought: So there
was
something between them.

‘I am writing a paper on the experiment,’ said McNulty. ‘I shall present it anonymously, of course, and neither Calvary’s nor Violet Parsons’ name will appear. But
I think it will be known, in a discreet way, that I was the one behind it all.’

He’s revelling in this, thought Walter. But he’ll get his come-uppance one day. I just wish I could be the one to deliver it to him.

‘You know, Walter,’ said McNulty, ‘I think the real crux of all this is your father. You don’t care very much if the truth about Molland comes out. But you can’t
bear people to know your father was Nicholas O’Kane. And I can’t say I blame you. It’s something that might ruin you very thoroughly indeed, isn’t it?’

The doctor who turned a blind eye to the escape of a convicted murderess. It was not something that could ever be proved, but it was indeed something that might stick very firmly. McNulty was
right about that. He was also right when he said it was the truth about Walter’s father that he really flinched from – although the irony was that McNulty did not know the full extent
of that truth. But stir up the old stories about Nick O’Kane, and someone at some point might see a likeness between the two men. Lewis Caradoc had said Nicholas had made use of other people
to create his new identity. Papers had been provided – a birth certificate, perhaps other things. Some of those people might well still be alive – still in England. It could all come
tumbling out, thought Walter, appalled. It really could. Oh God, what do I do?

McNulty sensed the hesitation, of course, and he pounced, not heavily or fumblingly, but with a precision that a part of Walter’s mind could not help admiring. He said,
‘They’re both bad secrets to have, aren’t they, Walter? Elizabeth Molland and Nicholas O’Kane. A man would want to distance himself from those two as much as possible.
He’d want to break all the links leading back to them.’

A severing of the links, thought Walter. Remarkable he should use that phrase.

‘I believe,’ said McNulty, ‘that when Nick O’Kane was sentenced to execution, he made sure his only son inherited his estate.’

Nicholas O’Kane’s estate. The money that had come to Walter when he was twenty-one. The money his mother had seen as being drenched in her husband’s treachery. ‘I should
see the drowned faces of all those young men you betrayed . . .’ she had said that day, and Walter had never forgotten it.

The money was in the form of bonds and investments, and although it would have been quite an attractive sum in 1917, it was not so very large now. It had paid for Walter’s medical training
and it had bought that bouncy little car in which he had first come to Calvary. Other than that he had not touched it. He had wanted as little to do with it as possible.