The Death Chamber (58 page)

Walter had understood this, and he said now, ‘I want to let the past go and focus on the present.’

‘Good. The house in Switzerland?’

‘Yes, that’s one of the things.’

‘It looks a beautiful place, unless these photographs are a complete lie.’

‘It is beautiful. I keep putting off signing all the papers and contracts, though. It just feels so far from everything.’

‘It’s as far as a three-hour flight,’ said Lewis. ‘Walter, if it’s a question of money—’

‘It’s not,’ Walter said at once. ‘I’m very well paid by the Swiss clinics.’

‘And you’re doing very good work.’

‘I like it. I didn’t expect to end up doing this, but it came mostly out of that stint I did with MacIndoe immediately after the war. He’s done such remarkable work, you know:
patching up the bodies and faces of the airmen who were burned or smashed up. We use a lot of his techniques at the clinics. They’re starting to call some of the procedures cosmetic surgery
now,’ said Walter, ‘which makes it sound a bit shallow and vain, but we get a lot of burns victims and there are more people from car crashes now than ever. And deformities. Lewis,
there are people with deformities or injuries who endure the most appalling lives. I had a lady last month who hadn’t been out of the house for about ten years because of a huge birthmark on
her cheek. We didn’t entirely remove it, but we made it acceptable. She cried when she saw the result. Last week she wrote to tell me she had been to a restaurant for the first time in her
life. It’s so very satisfying to be able to help people like that.’

Lewis, listening with interest, said, ‘You still have passion for your work.’

‘Yes.’

‘You look tired, though. It’s not all work, I hope. What about the other kinds of passion?’

‘I work most of the time, but I don’t always live like a monk,’ said Walter smiling. ‘But there’s never been anyone I’ve wanted to marry. Not since Catherine.
I wish there had been time to marry her – even one of those scrambled wartime marriages.’

‘I wish there had, as well. If I’d been at hand, I’d have done the scrambling for you.’

‘It wouldn’t have saved her from that wretched bomb,’ said Walter. ‘But it would have – this sounds stupidly romantical – it would have linked us for always.
It would have linked us in the eyes of the world, as well. I don’t care much about that kind of thing, but I’d like to have had things straight with her family. They wouldn’t
speak to me afterwards, you know. They wrote to tell me what had happened, but it was the barest details. I wrote to them a number of times, but they never replied. I’d have liked to share
some of their memories. Things they would have known about her that I never did – her childhood and things like that.’

‘Because sometimes,’ said Lewis thoughtfully, ‘one’s own memories aren’t quite enough, are they?’

Phin said, eagerly, ‘I’ve found her.’

They were assembled in the Caradoc House flat. Chad and the others were preparing to leave the next day; Georgina, whose ankle was almost healed, had been helping Chad make notes from
Walter’s Execution Book.

Phin had run all the way up the stairs, carrying his laptop with him. He was festooned with notes and printouts, and his face was pink with delight and exertion.

‘Who have you found?’ said Georgina. ‘Sit down. Drusilla’s making coffee.’

Phin said he would have about ten litres of coffee, please, on account of he had been up all night, and was zonked. He did not look at all zonked, in fact he looked hugely delighted with the
world.

He was given his coffee, and sat at the little gateleg table with Torven’s dramatic purple slopes behind him, and assumed a scholarly air.

‘I found Catherine Kerr,’ he said, and Georgina felt as if a corner of the mystery had finally been peeled back, and that if only she could be careful and gentle, the whole picture
might eventually be revealed.

‘She died in 1942,’ said Phin. ‘See, a lot of authorities have websites now, with all the birth, marriage and death stuff listed. It took a bit of tracking down and I spent
ages following up ones that turned out not to fit.’ He looked at Georgina, pushing his glasses back onto his nose. ‘I’m not absolutely one hundred percent copper-bottomed certain
this is your great-grandmother,’ he said. ‘But it fits so well that I think it must be.’

‘Yes. I see,’ said Georgina. I’m being so cool and so controlled and objective, she thought, when really I know quite well this
is
my great-grandmother he’s
found. Walter’s wife or girlfriend or whatever she was to him.

‘Catherine was born in 1918 in London,’ said Phin. ‘And she died in 1942, again in London. The cause of death is given as “crush injuries to chest”.’

‘Bomb victim probably,’ said Jude after a moment. ‘It was the height of the air raids.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Phin, pleased at this confirmation of his own idea. ‘And her profession is given as nurse. That would go well with Walter, wouldn’t
it? I mean, he’d have met nurses in his work.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘So then I went after her daughter,’ said Phin. ‘Caroline. That was a bit more difficult, because you had her as Caroline Kane, Georgina, later married to someone called Grey.
But Mr Small had her as Caroline Kerr. So I looked for all three surnames. I found the birth registration in 1941 – Caroline Kerr – and I found the marriage to Alaric Grey in 1961. But
I sort of wanted more. I wanted to link her with Walter. I thought you’d want that as well,’ he said to Georgina. ‘So I thought, well, what do people do in their lives.
Specifically, what do they do if they might have a father living abroad.’

‘The Swiss house Walter bought in the early fifties,’ said Georgina. ‘Oh God, yes, of course.’

‘Yes. I’d got those notes from the boxes of stuff Mr Small gave you, so that meant I had the Lucerne connection. So I started on the airline companies,’ said Phin. ‘The
lists of travellers from London to Lucerne any time after about 1951. There weren’t so very many for that time – air flight was in its infancy, really.’

Georgina dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She glanced at Jude and saw he was listening intently to Phin, with the now-familiar tilt of his head. She thought she would have given
a great deal to have been able to exchange a quick look with him and then realized, with a sudden spiral of pleasure, that she did not need to exchange a look; he knew exactly what she was
feeling.

Phin said, ‘A lady called Caroline Kerr is listed as travelling to Lucerne on 10 September 1960.’ He looked at Georgina. ‘I’m really only guessing now, but I
think—’

‘That it was the first time Walter met his daughter,’ said Georgina.

July 1960

Sometimes memories aren’t quite enough, Lewis Caradoc had said.

The letter came on a sun-drenched morning towards the end of a summer’s day. At first Walter thought it must be some kind of sick joke, then he wondered if it was a very artful confidence
trick and a request for money would be involved. You heard about such things: doctors were as good targets as the rest of the population, and Switzerland had long been known as a place for dodging
the payment of tax or other dues. He read it again, more slowly, looking for flaws and inconsistencies. This time a cautious delight began to unfold deep inside him, because if only it were true .
. .

The photograph, when Walter carefully unwrapped it from its extra layer of packaging, might have been taken twenty years earlier, on a sweet scented night in a London flat.

After a long time, he hunted out the sole photograph he had of Catherine and sat looking at it.

It’s going to be all right, he said to the photograph. I’m going to meet her. I can even start to hope that Caroline’s children – and her children in turn – get
some good things from you: charm, a sense of humour, resilience.

And grey eyes that shone like polished silk when their owner was happy.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

September 1960

As Walter waited for Caroline on the seat at the end of his garden – his favourite spot in this house – his heart was beating so fast that if he had heard it in a
patient through a stethoscope he would have been alarmed. I’m not ready for this, he thought. But when would I be ready? Catherine, why did you never tell me there was a child? Why did you
never say so in any of your letters? Didn’t you know you could have trusted me? Or was it your parents who persuaded you to act as you did?

He heard the sound of a car pulling up in the road, and his heart rate revved up even more. I don’t know what to say to her, he thought. She’s nineteen, that’s all. Caroline .
. . I like that name. I’m glad Catherine chose it. But she won’t understand. She’ll see me as some horrid old roué who seduced her mother and then vanished. What did they
tell her about me, those disapproving grandparents who took her in when Catherine died?

But she wrote that letter to me, he thought. She said she would be on the first plane if I wanted, and although it isn’t quite the first plane, it isn’t far off. This is going to be
dreadful. It’s going to be awkward and false and she’ll wish she hadn’t come. I’ll have to go up to the house now; they’ll have let her in and shown her to the guest
room, but I’ll have to be there.

He did not move, though, and when he heard the quick light footsteps coming down the path towards him he stayed where he was. Incredulously, hardly daring to believe, he saw it was not going to
be awful and it was not going to be false or wrong. She was not quite Catherine, but she was so near that Walter felt as if his dear dead love had reached out a hand and said, ‘You see?
You
should have trusted
me.
’

Walter’s daughter – Nick O’Kane’s granddaughter – stopped and looked at him, and then said in a rush of emotion, ‘It’s all right, isn’t it? I
wasn’t sure if it would be – all the way here, I was so nervous . . . I kept thinking it could go wrong . . . But it isn’t going to go wrong at all, is it?’

‘No,’ said Walter. ‘No, it isn’t going to go wrong.’ He held out his arms to her.

‘I like to think those two did meet,’ said Georgina to Jude, as they sat in the corner of the restaurant near Jude’s flat. ‘Caroline and Walter. Phin
found so much information, and we got dates and things about it all, so it looks more than likely. She travelled to Lucerne in September 1960 – Walter died two months after that if
Phin’s dates are right.’

‘I should think they are. I think he’d be very reliable about research.’

Georgina thought so as well. She was pleased that they all seemed to be staying in touch – Drusilla had asked if Georgina might be available as a freelance to consult about set dressing.
The networks had their own people, she said, but quite often freelance designers were called in.

‘When’s Chad’s programme due out?’ she said, as the food was put in front of them.

‘Spring next year, hopefully. It’ll depend on the schedulers. I’m glad he went ahead with it – I was afraid at one point he might not,’ said Jude. ‘He got a
bit more than he bargained for with this. Oh, and did you know they’re trying to squeeze out a budget for the spin-off on Neville Fremlin. Phin and Drusilla are very keen to do
that.’

‘That would be good, wouldn’t it? Will they be able to d’you think?’

‘You can never tell. They might have to see how the Calvary thing is received. Unfortunately, in television it’s nearly always down to the ratings.’ He found the wine glass and
drank, replacing it on the table with the familiar careful smooth movement. ‘Georgina, getting back to Walter, it’s deeply sad that he didn’t see more of his daughter, but
I’m thinking he was probably very happy to have met her.’