The Death Chamber

by Sarah Rayne

  But they did not particularly watch Vincent, and before the third visit he carefully crushed up the digitalis tablets. It was easier than he had dared hope to conceal the powder in his handkerchief and sprinkle it in the tea his mother drank. Vincent had said a cup of tea would be welcome after his journey here, and Mother agreed to have one as well, to be companionable.

  ‘Dreadful tea,’ she said. ‘Always so strong. Quite bitter.’

  The strong, bitter tea, had an almost immediate effect. She frowned, and then put a hand up to her throat as if it was suddenly difficult to breathe. Vincent glanced over his shoulder to see if they were being watched. Yes, the nearest of the warders had turned to see if anything was wrong.

  Mother half rose from the table, clawing at the air. The colour drained from her face leaving it pinched and grey. She fell forward, gasping, and within four minutes she was dead.

  There was an inquest, of course, but although the digitalis was found, an open verdict was recorded. It was fairly clear to Vincent, sitting haggard-faced in the public gallery, that the coroner thought it was a case of suicide, and that Mother had managed to come by the digitalis in some underhand way. It was also clear that there was pressure from higher up for the coroner not to record a verdict of suicide. Suicides in prisons were not liked; they meant internal investigations, possibly sackings, trouble and bad publicity. Far easier all round to let it be thought the prisoner had mistaken an ordinary dosage or had mixed up some innocent pills with that of another inmate. Sympathy was extended rather perfunctorily to the family of the deceased.

  Vincent, thankfully leaving the sleazy rooms near the prison, making arrangements to get Mother’s things out of storage and buy a nice little house of his own, was glad to know he had been able to release her. Four minutes was very quick. He would think of an appropriate inscription to go on her headstone. She would have wanted a suitable epitaph.

  November 1958

  ‘They’ve managed to hush it up very well,’ said Lewis Caradoc to Walter. ‘Just a small paragraph in the newspaper.’

  Walter said slowly, ‘And so the woman really responsible for all those murders – the woman who was your daughter and who caused my father to go down as one of the century’s most cold-blooded killers – died ingloriously in a prison cell in Holloway Gaol.’

  ‘She did. But the thing to remember above all the rest,’ said Lewis, ‘is that your father was innocent. He was innocent, Walter. He believed Elizabeth was worthy of a second chance, and he died in her place.’

  ‘One day,’ his father had said, ‘you might understand me a little better.’ He wanted me to know, thought Walter. He hoped that one day I would find out.

  He looked at Lewis. ‘Was it for Elizabeth he died, or because of what he did in 1916? I think I might find myself grappling with that one for a long time.’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ Lewis said. ‘Perhaps he didn’t know himself by then. But myself I think it was for 1916. Elizabeth said he talked about rough justice, and quoted the words of some Irish poet to her – she hadn’t bothered to remember the words, but I know what that would have been and so do you.’

  Walter said, half to himself,

  ‘Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead

  Died not for flag, nor king, nor emperor,

  But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,

  And for the secret scripture of the poor.’

  ‘Yes, of course I know. He quoted it to me when I was very small. I think it was that kind of emotion that drove him.’

  ‘He was a dreamer and a visionary,’ said Lewis. ‘Even though his dream was misguided and people died because of it. But later on he saw what he had done and he tried to make amends. Don’t forget he studied pharmacy – he must have been in his thirties by then, Walter, and it couldn’t have been an easy path to take. Maybe he saw it as carving out a new life and as a way of helping people. It’s a branch of medicine, after all.’

  ‘I told him I wanted to be a doctor,’ said Walter. ‘On that last day of his life – on what I thought was the last day.’

  ‘It may have had something to do with his own decision. You’ll never know that, but it’s possible. It’s something to hold on to. That and his innocence. You could perhaps mount some kind of campaign to get his name cleared.’

  ‘Could I? But it would rake up so many things.’ Walter did not say, And it would drag out all the facts about Elizabeth, but he knew they both thought it. He knew it was why Lewis and Huxley Small had agreed not to report the conversation they had held with her that day. She would be in prison for most of her life in any case, Lewis had said. ‘If we requested a review of the sentence – presented the new evidence – they might change the twenty-five years to the death sentence. And I can’t do it to her, Walter. She’s a monster, but I still can’t do it to her.’

  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 . . .

  I’ve only just discovered your existence, and I probably wouldn’t have done so if I wasn’t about to get married and had to ask my grandparents for a copy of my birth certificate. That was when they admitted you hadn’t died in the war, as they had always led me to believe, and that as far as they knew you were still alive. This is the last address they had for you, so I do hope it reaches you.

  The first thing I have to say is going to sound a bit absurd, and like something out of East Lynne, but I’ve also found out you didn’t know about me. My mother, it seems, never told you in case you felt some obligation to marry her. My grandparents, in turn, never told me, because of the Shame.

  But here we are, at the start of a new decade – the nineteen sixties – and nobody worries much about Shame any longer – I certainly don’t. If you hate the idea of meeting I’ll understand, but if not, and if you feel you could bear to see me, I’ll be on the first available plane.

  I should say that I don’t think you would have regarded marrying my mother as an obligation at all. My grandparents filled me up with some very odd tales about you, but I don’t believe more than about a tenth of them and I’d like to make up my own mind.

  I won’t send my love – not yet – but I’ll hope very much to hear from you.

  Caroline Kerr

  PS I’ve enclosed a photograph of myself, so that you can see what you might have inherited.

  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.’

  ‘If Phin’s Caroline is the right one,’ said Georgina, ‘and I think she is, I might have the explanation I wanted.’