The Durham Deception (32 page)

‘It's easy enough to get hold of a sheet of hotel writing paper,' said Smight. ‘And I was in the Assembly Rooms the other morning when the good Major was demonstrating the operation of the – what is it called? – the Perseus Cabinet. I was at the back of the auditorium, lurking in the shadows you would probably say. I saw how ready you were to enter into the spirit of things and what a nice understanding you had with the military magician. I thought it would not be so difficult to entice you here, where Marmont keeps some of his apparatus. I have been keeping watch on you, on all of you, keeping watch with my invisible eye. I have been planning this for many days.'

‘And what are you planning for my husband? Why don't you content yourself with . . . with whatever you intend to do to me?'

‘Mrs Ansell, if you weren't such an evident lady, I would be tempted to call you by male terms such as gallant or chivalrous. But your selflessness will not protect your husband. If I choose to dispose of you first it is because I consider that it will add to Mr Ansell's own grief and distress. He will know something of what I have known. He must love you. I can see that you are lovable. Besides that, you are recently married, aren't you, Helen?'

‘Married this year,' said Helen. Smight's use of her first name was intimate and horrible. She felt the tears flowing again, and this time her weakness served only to irritate her. If she could have torn herself free from this floating platform, she would not have attempted to run away. She would have battled for her life against Doctor Anthony Smight. She would have bitten and scratched and gouged him like a wild animal. She would have left her marks all over him.

But she had no weapon except time. Time, she told herself, keep playing for time.

‘What about Eustace Flask?' she said. ‘He was a medium like your brother. And yet you . . .'

‘I killed him?' said Smight. ‘Is that what you were going to say, Mrs Ansell?'

Helen gulped. It was foolish perhaps to talk about this man's past murders. Smight stroked his jaw. He said, ‘Well, there is no harm in explaining, I suppose. You see, I had appointed to meet Mr Eustace Flask down by the river that morning . . .'

He carried on talking but Helen was listening with only half an ear for she thought she had detected some sound from the backstage area of the theatre, a shuffling sound. Her heart leaped. There was someone here with them in the theatre! She strained to hear more while keeping her expression absolutely fixed. Fortunately Smight was still speaking, oblivious to everything else.

But Helen heard no further noises and she grew very afraid. Afraid that she was imagining the sounds, afraid that it was no more than a draught of air pushing at a curtain. Afraid that she could not keep Smight distracted for much longer. His voice had now descended into a queer monotone and his eyes which had previously been lively had acquired a sort of stillness. She recalled that he took opium, and wondered whether she was witnessing some effect of the drug – or of its absence.

At once, Smight stopped whatever it was he'd been saying. He clapped his hands together in a soft, dismissive gesture.

‘Enough of this, Mrs Ansell. Time presses on me as it presses on you. As you are aware, you are secured to this platform by wire cords. Using the ingenuity of Major Marmont's apparatus, I intend to raise the platform by a winching device which is to the side of the stage. The wires run over the rollers which are hanging above our heads. They are covered in felt so as to muffle sounds. It is an ingenious trick and I am sorry I shall never see it employed for the diversion of an audience. While you were asleep, I made some adjustments to the wiring. The cord round your neck is secured to the stage floor and will gradually tighten as I turn the winch. It is a modified form of the garrotte. They used it in Spain, they used it in India. So now I shall disappear from before your very eyes now, just like a magician, except that you will never see me again. Do not worry, Mrs Ansell, the process of being deprived of air will be brief. Briefer than drowning, I dare say.'

Helen surprised herself by laughing out loud. It might have been hysteria, she couldn't have sworn she was not hysterical, but it sounded like genuine laughter in her own ears. The eyes in Doctor Smight's elongated face stared at her in surprise. He patted her shoulder for one last time and then, as promised, he vanished.

She heard the doctor's steps crossing the stage and after that there were no more sounds until a soft click as of some gear or ratchet being engaged. She closed her eyes tight when she felt an almost imperceptible shift in the platform on which she was lying. It was inching upwards. The pressure round her neck grew tighter, and she prayed that it would be quick.

All at once there were the noises of stamping feet and shouts and cursing and scuffling. A shot rang out and her ears rang. There was the bitter smell of cordite. The pressure around her neck did not relent but it did not grow any worse. She did not dare to open her eyes even when she felt a hand again on her shoulder. Someone said something but she couldn't make out the words because her ears were still ringing. It was Doctor Smight come back again. Something must have gone wrong with the apparatus and he had returned to comfort her and to taunt her once more and it was too horrible to be endured any longer. Someone grasped her hand.

Helen Ansell opened her eyes.

Her husband Thomas was standing over her. Other faces crowded round. Some of the faces she recognized. Then the faces swam together in a kind of dancing frieze before fading away altogether into a blessed darkness.

The Trial

The jury was out for less than half an hour. The shortness of the time they had been deliberating, the sombre expression on their faces as they filed back in, the clear-cut nature of the crime committed, all of this meant that the verdict could hardly be in doubt. But the formalities had to be gone through.

The clerk of the court addressed the jury but looked steadily at the foreman.

‘Gentlemen, have you agreed upon your verdict?'

‘We have.'

‘Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty of wilful murder?'

‘Guilty.'

There was a sigh of satisfaction and a few whispered comments from the people crowded in the gallery, as if they had just witnessed some particularly successful trick on stage.

‘And is that the verdict of you all?'

‘It is.'

Turning towards the man in the dock, the clerk said, ‘Prisoner at the bar, you stand convicted of the crime of wilful murder. Have you anything to say why this court should not give you the judgement according to law?'

‘There is nothing to say.'

This prompted a fresh outbreak of whispering in the gallery for these were almost the only words which the prisoner had uttered during his brief trial. A court usher called for silence before going to stand next to Mr Justice Barnes. He placed a black cloth over the judge's wig.

‘Anthony Smight,' said the judge, ‘you have been found guilty of the heinous crime of murder upon evidence which is as stark and indubitable as any I have ever encountered in many years of passing judgement. You shot and killed a representative of the law as he was going about his duties. It was only the intervention of Superintendent Frank Harcourt and others that prevented you carrying out the wickedly planned murder of a lady, and we may say that Superintendent Harcourt gave his own life in the attempt to apprehend you. On the dreadful and abhorrent nature of the crime which you were about to commit and of other crimes which you have almost certainly committed in the recent past, I shall not dwell. I will only say that it must be particularly shocking to all honest men and women when a doctor who, by his oath, his training and, one would hope, his temperament, ought to be dedicated to the saving of life, turns to the destroying of it. Your counsel has done his best in your defence against almost impossible odds while you have chosen not to explain yourself in this court of law and instead maintained an almost Iago-like silence. I cannot but feel that your silence has been a mercy to us all since any attempt at explanation or mitigation would have been a further outrage to all decent feeling.

‘I tell you now, Anthony Smight, that you can and should entertain no expectations of evading the consequences of your actions. The sentence of this court is that you be taken from hence to a lawful prison and from thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be buried in the prison where you shall last have been confined. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.'

Anthony Smight bowed his head slightly before he was led out of the dock by two uniformed constables. The public craned to get their last look at him. What was his expression? Was he distressed, angry, remorseful? They could tell nothing from those lined, sallow features. But Smight did glance upwards for a moment to where Tom and Helen Ansell were sitting. Was that a tiny nod he gave them, a sign of acknowledgement?

Helen gripped Tom's arm but when she rose to her feet with the rest of the court as the judge departed, she was quite composed and steady. As soon as Mr Justice Barnes had left, there was an outbreak of chatter, even some subdued laughter. Several gentlemen of the press pushed their way through the door to be first in telegraphing news of the verdict to their papers.

The same reporters had already called at Julia Howlett's house wanting to speak with Helen and get her side of the story, the sensational account of her suffering and near-death at the hands of the ‘Demon Doctor', as he had been christened in the headlines. The first reporter wormed his way into Colt House on false pretences and when Tom found out who he was he wanted to punch him in the face. It was fortunate that Aunt Julia was on hand to restrain Tom and turn the reporter out, saying firmly that Mrs Ansell required rest after her dreadful ordeal, and giving orders that no one else except the police was to be admitted under any circumstances.

This did not stop the press speculating or publishing quite unfounded stories. The death of the Seldons in Norwood was laid firmly at the doctor's door, as was the murder of Eustace Flask in Durham, as well as various unsolved crimes in other cities which had no connection to him. The London journalists hared round to see Miss Ethel Smight – ‘the well-known phrenologist' – in Tullis Street but they found her and her pinched-faced maid gone. The house was rented and Miss Smight had speedily decamped once her brother was arrested. Either she feared more attention from the police, who had threatened to charge her with being Doctor Tony's accomplice, or she wanted to avoid the intrusions of the press. Nevertheless the pressmen talked to a client who had had his scalp felt by her and who claimed to have experienced ‘strange and sinister emanations' coming from Miss Smight's fingertips, but beyond that they discovered little.

Letters and telegrams were flying to and fro between Colt House and Helen's mother in Highbury. Mrs Scott had read, with mounting horror, the earliest accounts in the papers and had only been prevented from getting the first train north by Aunt Julia's assurances that her daughter was coping well and needed fewer, not more, visitors.

In the event, the fatal shooting of Frank Harcourt was the only charge brought against Smight and it was this which dominated the proceedings. Smight's twisted programme of revenge against those whom he believed to be responsible for his brother's suicide was scarcely referred to. He was painted by the prosecuting counsel and by the press as a clever man whose mind had been turned by vindictiveness and whose moral sense had been sapped by his opium addiction. ‘For it has been well established by the leading authorities,' said the prosecution, ‘that prolonged indulgence in opiates can lead to a monomaniacal state of mind in which the subject feels compelled to satisfy his desires, however bizarre, vicious or degenerate.'

Smight's counsel tried to show that his client was not fit to plead because his sanity was in doubt, but the lawyer's heart did not seem to be in the attempt. Nor was he helped by Smight's demeanour in the dock. The doctor said almost nothing and seemed impassive, even indifferent to his fate. The public and the reporters scrutinized him for traces of remorse or moral degeneracy and, although they failed to find any sign of penitence, everyone agreed that he looked evil.

So when the guilty verdict and the sentence arrived they were regarded as a formality. But a very satisfying formality.

Meanwhile Helen was indeed coping well, remarkably well, with the aftermath of her experiences and it was she who sometimes had to soothe Tom, who was full of anger at Anthony Smight as well as blaming himself for having let Helen slip away from him.

Once he had discovered that Helen was not at the Assembly Rooms with Major Marmont, he had been plunged into a near panic. Sebastian Marmont had been nearly as concerned and once they established that Helen must have been tricked by a counterfeit letter, they asked each other where she had gone. Where had she been enticed to? Marmont mentioned the Palace of Varieties behind the Court Inn. It was where some of his magical equipment was stored. He was renting the place while he was performing in Durham and using it as a convenient space to refine his tricks. Anyone who was familiar with his movements might be aware of that.

He'd scarcely finished explaining this when Tom demanded that Marmont take him there, this instant. By now almost two hours had passed since he had last seen Helen. Marmont instructed his three sons to remain where they were but Dilip Gopal accompanied them as they ran through the streets of Durham and over the Elvet Bridge. A carriage pulled up by them on the bridge and Tom was relieved to see Harcourt and Traynor in the back.

Rapidly, all was made clear. The two policemen had arrived at the central station in Newcastle to be met by an officer of the city force, and informed that they were on a futile errand. The men apprehended in a swoop on a dubious area of the docks did not include Smight after all. The one thought to be the doctor had been identified – definitely identified – as a ne'er-do-well called Evans. It was unfortunate that the officer who arrested Evans was new to the force and had jumped to conclusions based on a slight physical similarity to Anthony Smight before he fired off the telegram to Durham.