by Sarah Rayne
Lewis said, ‘I can’t make any promises but if ever it’s in my power to give him any help, then I’ll do so.’
‘Thank you,’ said Nicholas after a moment. ‘I trust you on that.’
‘McNulty?’
‘I don’t pretend to any kind of honour,’ said McNulty, ‘and I shan’t forget that you intended to murder me this morning, Sir Lewis. But providing you keep your promise about founding a society for psychic research with me as its head, I’ll agree never to speak of any of this.’
Extract from Talismans of the Mind, by C. R. Ingram
In the latter years of the First World War and in the years immediately following it, psychic societies mushroomed and flourished everywhere as lushly as the Old Testament bay tree flourished in the wilderness.
They travelled different roads and they went by different names, those societies, but stripped of frills and verbiage, they all had the same aim: to prove or disprove the existence of life beyond death – the soul, pre-existence, post-existence, the human essence, the quiddity, the survival of the human spark. The quick, the dead, the heart and the soul, the flesh and the devil. It was all grist to the mills of these people, some of whom may have believed themselves genuine, but too many of whom battened on the weak and the gullible and saw the pursuance of the soul’s origins as a means of amassing a fat bank balance.
The enquirers numbered among them the ascetic – Carmelite nuns, Trappist monks, and followers of Buddha, with fasting commonplace and shoulders to be kept to the wheel no matter if it was tantric, tarot, or merely chariot. They touched on the downright sybaritic – the infamous, self-styled black magician of the 1920s, Aleister Crowley, pursuing Pan down a number of priapic paths – and gentlemen (often also ladies) whose tastes ran ghoulishly to human sacrifice and virgins.
And then, of course, there’s our old friend Bartlam Partridge, he of the two-tier sherry and the velvet smoking jackets and that unfortunate predilection he developed in later life for the company of very young ladies. The 1924 indecency case was not very widely reported, but it seems the unrepentant Bartlam importuned teenage flappers on Brighton Promenade, and invited them back to his rooms which were at a boarding house called Seaview. The only views the flappers were given, however, were of Bartlam wallowing amid bedsheets wearing nothing but a silk dressing gown and suggesting that in order to achieve a higher plane of consciousness, the flappers should disrobe, join him in the bed, and perform what he liked to call the rite of creation. (It has been called a great many other things in its time, that particular rite, but Bartlam always liked to dress these things up a little.)
When one of the young ladies squeaked in alarm (because Bartlam, unclothed cannot have been the best of sights), the Seaview landlady came running up the stairs and Bartlam was hauled to justice. Perhaps if Violette had still been sharing the nuptial couch, Bart might have behaved with a little more decorum, but Violette, who had grumbled at having to share the cabbage-and-laundry scented rooms with the nameless friends, seems to have vanished without trace.
However, it must be said that not all the psychic societies of the era were quite so venal or so artificial. Indeed, a number of them were perfectly reputable, and some could even be described as scholarly. One such is the Caradoc Society, founded early in 1918, its name taken from Sir Lewis Caradoc who sponsored its creation. Not a great deal is known about Lewis Caradoc, other than his work for various prison reform inquiries during the First World War and the early 1920s which caused him to be regarded with considerable respect. He did not take much part in the Society that bore his name; the first actual chairman was a doctor: a man who seems to have worked with Sir Lewis on prison reform and rehabilitation.
His name was Denzil McNulty.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Georgina had wondered whether she ought to include Vincent Meade in the modest lunch party. It was, after all, the Caradoc Society’s house, and it seemed a bit discourteous to invite people there without at least telling him. In the end, she wrote a careful note which she put through the door of the office; not precisely saying she hoped there was no objection to her having a couple of guests, but explaining she had met two of the television team in the King’s Head, and they would be calling around lunchtime to take a look at some of the material she had found. She read it through twice, to make sure it did not sound as if she was inviting him to come along as well.
Drusilla telephoned shortly after half past nine, to ask if Georgina would mind another guest for lunch.
‘We’re bringing some culinary offerings with us, of course. It’s Jude Stratton who’s the extra one – he’s been helping Chad with the research.’
Georgina asked who Jude Stratton was, and Drusilla explained.
‘Yes, of course bring him. Only . . .’
‘Yes’
‘You’ll be looking at photographs and letters and we’ll all be talking about them. Will it be all right to do that with someone there who can’t see?’
‘Oh, perfectly,’ said Drusilla. ‘Jude will simply ask you to read things aloud for him. As far as I can tell it makes him furious if people seem to make concessions.’
‘Thanks for the tip.’ Georgina had made the connection now; she remembered seeing Jude on one or two newsclips after he was blinded by the Iraqi bomb. A cameraman or a sound engineer had been killed as well and the news programmes had made quite a feature of it at the time. She asked if he was anything like the TV news reports.
‘He’s exactly like that, only more so, if you know what I mean,’ said Drusilla. ‘Impatient, aggressive, frequently bloody rude. But,’ she had added thoughtfully, ‘he’s devastatingly attractive as well.’
Georgina rang off wondering if Drusilla was intending to lay siege to the attractive, aggressive, rude Jude Stratton and if she was warning Georgina off as a result. If so, Georgina would have to find a way of telling Drusilla that she did not need warning off anybody, because she was going to give all men a wide berth for about the next ten years, especially aggressive attractive ones.
Vincent read Georgina’s note with astonishment. The bitch had actually had the effrontery to invite the television people to Caradoc House! The very people Vincent had intended to befriend! The people for whom he had written those really excellent notes about Thornbeck and Calvary.
If you were sufficiently charitable, you could say Georgina had been quite polite about letting Vincent know she had asked people to Caradoc House. Mother would certainly have approved of the note. ‘The correct thing to do,’ she would have said, although she would have added, ‘I see she does not include you in her luncheon party, Vincent, which would have been a mannerly thing for her to do, I would have thought.’
Vincent would have thought so as well. He would have enjoyed having lunch in such company, discussing the television programme, talking about the introduction he had written. He would have been at his best among such people – gently witty and erudite.
But this was not the issue. The issue was that Georgina Grey and Dr Ingram’s team would be pooling their resources. They would be exchanging information, and anything might come to light in that kind of situation, anything. Vincent felt quite ill with panic when he thought about it. If he had had any doubts as to whether Georgina must be dealt with, he had them no longer. She would have to be attended to as swiftly as possible.
Vincent kept a watch for the arrival of Dr Ingram and the others, doing so discreetly, of course, since he was not going to be noticed peering through windows as if he was a common snoop. But he saw them arrive: Dr Ingram, the Drusilla female, and the American boy. With them was a man Vincent had not seen before – a dark-haired man in his middle thirties. He studied this man with interest. Some women might regard him as rather striking, although it was Vincent’s opinion that most ladies preferred manly men with a good healthy colour to their cheeks and neatly trimmed hair, rather than thin-faced creatures who looked like untidy eighteenth-century poets. He watched for a moment because any informa
tion about Dr Ingram’s team might come in useful, and it was only when the American took the man’s arm to guide him through the main door of the house that Vincent realized he was blind. Or was he? Yes, the boy was keeping hold of his arm, guiding him through into the main hall. Vincent thought vaguely that it was unexpected that Dr Ingram should have a blind man involved in his work.
He waited until they had all gone upstairs to the little flat, and until he heard the door close, then he locked up the office, and went along to his own house and got out his car.
He always liked the drive to Calvary even though the lane was overgrown and rutted. You would have thought the council would have done something about it years ago but they had not. He parked three quarters of the way up the narrow track, tucking his car into the semi-concealment of some trees and walked the rest of the way, keeping a sharp eye out. It was a lonely spot but you sometimes got people exercising their dogs out here or pretending to take vigorous exercise, or engaging in back-seat bonking which Vincent always found sordid, especially when the collapsed-balloon consequences were left to litter the ground. It was a pity the council did not do something about that, as well.
For years no one had ever gone to Calvary, not even a tramp looking for a night’s shelter. Then one Halloween a group of teenagers had broken in and held a drunken seance in the condemned cell, and there had been a great outcry when it was discovered. After that the prison authorities had employed Huxley Small and the local surveyor to check the place regularly.
But Calvary was not as secure as old Small and the surveyor thought. There were three ways in and out and Vincent knew them all. There was the main entrance – the huge iron-studded gates you stepped through into a little inner courtyard with guard rooms on each side, and from there through the door into the prison itself. Then there was the door inside the burial yard which led down to the mortuary. The mortuary door did not have a lock, but was secured by two heavy-duty bolts on the inside, which were always firmly in place. Finally, there was a third door at the very back of the building, which opened onto the big stone-floored kitchens. Few people knew about this door but Vincent knew about it and it had been absurdly easy to make it his private door into the prison. He had simply waited for a holiday week and then driven out to Keswick which was always busily full of tourists at that time of year, and at a big anonymous DIY store he had bought a small but sturdy lock and key. Then he had waited for a rainy weekday when people were unlikely to be around, and had driven to Calvary, taking with him an old shooting-stick that had been at the back of his wardrobe – he thought it had belonged to one of mother’s gentleman, probably the Southend Bachelor who had liked going to race meetings as a young man.
He had done a very good job on the door. It had taken a bit longer than he had thought to break off the existing lock, but the shooting stick was a good solid one and in the end it did the trick and Vincent was able to attach the new lock. He made a neat job of it – he was quite good with small carpentry tasks – and when he finished he was confident no one would realize what he had done. The surveyor, on his six-monthly inspection, would use the main door at the front. He presumably checked the fabric of the place, made sure all doors were secure, and left. If he noticed a newly fitted lock he would assume it to be part of the solicitor’s caretaking work and was unlikely to realize that the bunch of keys labelled ‘Calvary Gaol’ no longer included a key that fitted the scullery door. Which meant, providing Vincent chose his times carefully, he could come and go inside Calvary as much as he liked.
He did like. Calvary drew him like a magnet – it had done so ever since he had first heard its name as a child. It was a castle, his dark enchanted realm and the people of the past walked there. The first time Vincent, greatly daring, walked there, he knew that as long as the past stayed here it was secret and safe, shut away from the prying eyes of the present. He saw himself as a guardian of that past, keeping it safely sealed away behind the massive walls.
When he first went into the execution suite, he saw at once that the heavy oak door – the door that separated the condemned cell and the execution chamber from the rest of the prison – had its own lock. How useful might it be to have a key to this door? To the door of the execution chamber itself? Think ahead, Vincent, said Mother’s voice in his mind.
And again, it was absurdly easy to take the big old keys that no one had ever thought it worth removing from the thick oak door and from the door of the execution chamber, and drive over to Lancaster (Vincent was not going to risk the same DIY store twice!), to get duplicates cut. An elderly aunt’s house, Vincent said, handing them over. She was always losing keys and they – the family – were making sure they all had extra sets. He conveyed the impression of a slightly scatty old lady, living in a big house with old-fashioned locks, and of himself as an affectionate, slightly exasperated nephew, collaborating with other family members. Both images were light years away from Calvary Gaol.
But this afternoon he had only brought the scullery key, although he did not think he would even need that. He went around the outer walls and opened the door into the burial yard. The latch crackled as he pushed it, like dead finger-bones in a coffin, the flesh eaten away by burning lime . . .
Lime. Lime.
The burial yard was dank and sunless, and Calvary’s darkness seemed to lie heavily over it so that for a moment it was difficult to breathe. Was this how it had felt for all those men and the few women who had died here? This choking constriction? It would have been a very bad thing to die here.
Yes, it was, it was . . . To die here was a very bad thing, Vincent.
On his right were the burial plots of all the murderers executed here: the men who had strangled or shot their wives; the wives who had poisoned or stabbed their husbands; greedy nephews or nieces who had wanted rich aunts or godfathers out of the way so that they could inherit . . . The traitor Nicholas O’Kane was here. Vincent glanced across at O’Kane’s grave. There was a story that he had gone to his death reciting poetry, which Vincent thought affected, but people had remembered him for quite a long time. ‘Nick O’Kane,’ they said in the bitter hating way they were later to say, ‘Adolf Hitler’, or ‘Saddam Hussain’. Often, they added, with contempt, ‘O’Kane was the man who sold England’s secrets to the Kaiser and who quoted Tom Kettle’s poetry on the gallows.’
But O’Kane had been almost forgotten by now and the poem he had clung to in the last moments of his life had also been forgotten, which just went to show that affectation and poetry availed you absolutely nothing in the end.
In one corner of the burial yard was a second courtyard, almost hidden from view by a jutting piece of wall, but opening into another small courtyard. Set against the main prison wall was a jumble of what, in a house, would be regarded as outbuildings: little more than lean-to structures with rather flimsy doors. Two were open and clearly empty, but two were padlocked. One of the padlocked doors had a sheet of corrugated iron across it and Vincent regarded this with a thump of anticipation. The lime store.
This was a door that would have been kept firmly locked all down Calvary’s history, and it looked as if it was still locked today.
It was important not to get too carried away because there were two very negative possibilities here. The first was that there would not be any limestone left. The second was that even if there were, after so many years it would have lost its effective properties. Vincent was not very well up on chemical matters but he knew that in Calvary’s hanging days, lime had been burnt in a massive kiln a few miles outside Thornbeck village, after which the rocks had been brought to the burial yard and stored. When there was a hanging, the warders shovelled the lime into metal buckets and then added water after which they simply tipped the steaming, smoking, corrosive lime straight into the grave. Vincent had an idea that in later years they had not always bothered with the slaking but had just poured the dry lime in. But people did not have much use for lime these days, although Vincent thought farmers still u
sed slaked lime putty as a wash for outbuildings.
The door had a bolt across it, held in place by a small padlock, and Vincent inspected this carefully. It was very rusty: it looked as if it could be snapped off easily.
As far as possible, he had come prepared to tackle the lime store – he had certainly come prepared to make a small experiment on it – but he was not going to take any risks. He wound a thick scarf around his neck, and put on a rainhat of the oilskin sou’wester kind used by fishermen, and dark glasses. He was wearing gloves which came well over his wrists, and he had again brought the Southend Bachelor’s very useful shooting stick. Keeping to one side of the lime store, he reached this across to the padlock. A sharp blow knocked it to the ground, the door gave a little sighing groan, and an inch of blackness showed around the rim where it had sprung slightly open. As easy as that.
Still standing at arm’s length, he levered the end of the shooting-stick into the gap and coaxed the door open, taking his time so that there would not be any sudden gusting out of anything noxious. The hinges creaked, but eventually Vincent had pushed the door all the way back to the wall.
A thin wisp of something like pale smoke curled up from inside the open stores and he instinctively stepped back. A little gust of wind blew in and there was a faint pallid flurry from within. Keeping his face well covered, Vincent looked inside. It was quite a small place: not much bigger than the coalhouses that used to be attached to quite ordinary houses. The lime blocks were irregularly shaped lumps of rock of various sizes, but here and there were mounds of chalky powder where some of it had crumbled.
The lime was still here, it was still here. But how harmful might it be? After so many years the chances were that it had completely dried out. It might sting the skin a bit if someone were shut in here for any length of time, but it would not actually kill. And in any case, it was not necessary for Georgina to die. Or was it? Mightn’t that be the safest thing?