The Death Chamber (11 page)

‘The trouble is, sir, that you see the killers when they’re beaten and caged and meek,’ one of the West Riding police inspectors said shortly after Nicholas
O’Kane’s arrest. ‘Perhaps if you saw the victims, you’d feel differently.’

‘O’Kane isn’t precisely a killer.’

‘O’Kane’s a traitor,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll grant you he hasn’t personally strangled with his own hands, or used a gun to shoot anyone through the
head, but he’s probably been responsible for a great many deaths. You know he was one of the rebels in the Easter Rising in Dublin last year?’

‘Yes. He’s half Irish.’

‘The rebels paralysed the entire city to proclaim the birth of the Irish Republic,’ said the inspector. ‘O’Kane was at the centre of it all, Sir Lewis, although it
wasn’t until months later we finally tracked him down. Somehow – and I’ll never know how he did it – he had inveigled himself into the Admiralty offices. Everything that
went through his hands – anything that gave a clue about the whereabouts of our ships – went straight to the Kaiser’s armies.’

‘He was beside himself with bitterness and fury against the British,’ said Lewis. ‘They believed in a cause, those young men. Patrick Pearse and Eamonn de Valera and all the
rest of them. O’Kane was distraught with grief and anger. He simply snatched the nearest weapon he could.’

‘The nearest weapon,’ said the inspector caustically, ‘happened to be the selling of naval information to the enemy. Because of that information our ships were torpedoed. Lives
were lost – the lives of young men fighting this country’s enemies.’

Young men’s lives . . . Lewis said, ‘You’re quite right, of course, Inspector. There’s nothing romantic about a traitor.’

‘Indeed there is not, sir. You’ve got extra guards on duty for the next three weeks, I hear.’

‘Yes.’

The inspector glanced about him, at Calvary’s bleak walls and locked doors. ‘No one’s ever escaped from here, have they?’

‘No,’ said Lewis. ‘But we’ve never had an Irish rebel before.’

‘You’re thinking someone might try to get him out?’

‘It’s a possibility I have to consider. O’Kane will leave a wife and small son, and the Irish can be sentimental about such things.’

‘I know about the wife and son,’ said the inspector thoughtfully. ‘But to my way of thinking O’Kane should have thought of that before he set about selling information to
Germany. Murderers have no business having wives and children, and in my book O’Kane is as bad as any wife killer or mistress poisoner.’

‘They’re saying this one is as bad as any wife killer,’ said Calvary’s head warder, watching the porridge-faced warder finish the grim task of digging a
grave for a man still living. ‘And I don’t know but what I wouldn’t agree with that. To my mind it’s a nasty affair, this selling out of your country. I shan’t be
sorry to see this one turned off.’

The porridge-faced warder, whose name was Saul Ketch and who had just come off guard duty on the condemned prisoner, would not be sorry, either. He disliked glossy-haired young men who behaved
with unnatural politeness in the condemned cell, and who reminded the female warders of Rudolph Valentino, so that they sighed to think of the ugly death waiting for him. That was nothing but a lot
of female nonsense to Ketch’s way of thinking. If a man had committed murder, he should pay with his life.

He laid down his spade and straightened up, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. Digging a grave made you sweat like a pig. He pulled the thick gardener’s gloves from his pocket,
because the next part of the task was to open the lime store. Ketch put on the gloves and made sure his trousers were tucked into the tops of his boots. You got two pairs of uniform trousers with
the job, but Ketch and a few of the other warders ran a nice little business selling prison-issue clothes in a second-hand shop in Kendal. You did not really need both pairs; if you were careful,
one pair could last you two or three years, and it was a nice little sideline. He had a few other sidelines as well, but the clothes one was the best, although it meant if he splashed lime on these
trousers he had not a spare pair, so he had to be careful.

He had to be careful anyway, with Old Muttonchops watching him and very likely Lewis Caradoc glancing out of the window of his posh study as well. Ketch sent a sidelong glance to the steep wall
of Calvary, but nothing seemed to be moving behind any of the windows – unless, of course, it might be old Pierrepoint creeping through the deserted passages, trying to catch a glimpse of his
man without being seen.

Ketch walked across to the corrugated iron door in a corner of the burial yard, and unfastened the padlock. He opened the door slowly, keeping well back because he was not going to get himself
burned, not for Nicholas O’bloody Kane nor Lewis Caradoc, nor anybody. Even like this – before you poured on the water that slaked it – lime could be dangerous. Volatile or some
such word they called it; Ketch did not bother overmuch about words. That tart Belinda Skelton brought in books to read when she was on duty which Ketch considered a form of showing-off. Belinda
was trying to catch the eye of the governor, of course, Ketch knew all about that, and he was watching her very closely. Most people thought the governor was cold and strict – aloof they
called it – but Ketch had seen a certain look in Lewis Caradoc’s eyes at times, particularly when he looked at Skelton. It did not take fancy words or book-learning to know when a man
was wanting to get between a tart’s legs.

Ketch did not entirely blame Sir Lewis, what with being married to that cold-eyed Lady Caradoc. A man wanted a bit of warmth in his bed of a night, and if it came down to it, Ketch was not
averse to giving any tart a good seeing-to himself, although Belinda had smacked his face when he once said that to her. Downright insulting, she had said. Women were not playthings or objects.
Ketch had not understood what she meant, but he had gone away thinking Belinda would pay for smacking his face one of these fine nights. She gave herself such airs, the slut, but Ketch would even
the score before much longer. Considering how to do that had warmed him on many a dull spell of night duty.

If the governor really did bang the slut, Ketch would go straight to the doctor with the information. The doctor had some odd ways – they said he went to those groups where people tried to
contact the dead, which to Ketch’s mind was downright daft – but he would be a bad person to cross. He liked knowing about people – he liked knowing their secrets – but if
you gave him information you had to be able to prove it was true. The doctor would not pay for any made-up stories.

‘You bring me information about people inside Calvary,’ he said to Ketch. ‘Things you see or hear or find out. If I can make use of it, you’ll get your cut. But you have
to bring me proof, mind that.’

Ketch was minding it. He was going to be watching Belinda Skelton and the governor to see if they got into bed together, and he was going to enjoy the watching. He would enjoy getting money from
Dr McNulty as well. The prospect of all this pleasurable watching and money-making enabled him to shovel out the dry lime with a good will. Even when Old Muttonchops told him off to move a bit
faster because they did not want to be here all day, Ketch said, quite meekly, ‘Sorry, Mr Millichip,’ and got on with filling up the tin vat with lime in readiness for activating and
then for chucking onto Nicholas O’Kane’s body tomorrow.

Lewis had gone back to his office after seeing O’Kane’s wife and son to Calvary’s doors and making sure arrangements had been made for their journey home.

The interview had disturbed him. The woman had been distraught, her face had been marked by extreme pallor and her eyes were swollen with constant crying. Beneath had been traces of considerable
beauty, although this was not surprising – O’Kane was not a man who would have married a plain woman. The boy had interested Lewis – he had reminded him a little of Cas at the
same age. A bright child, he thought, and hoped O’Kane’s wife would control her grief sufficiently well to handle the matter of the father’s death with tact.

It was the custom at Calvary for the female warders to bring cups of afternoon tea to the staff; Lewis did not always bother to drink his, but he encouraged the small habit which seemed to him
to maintain a fragile link with civilized behaviour in an uncivilized place.

Today it was the slant-eyed Belinda Skelton who was on tea duty. She set the cup down on his desk and Lewis noticed, as he had noticed before, that her nails were bitten but that the shape of
her hands was beautiful. Was the skin of her palms as soft as it looked?

He went on writing some notes, and was aware she hesitated. When he looked up enquiringly, she said, ‘Mrs O’Kane was dreadfully upset, wasn’t she, sir?’ and Lewis
remembered he had assigned Belinda to the condemned wing that morning. He would not normally have put a female warder there, but Nicholas O’Kane had shown no signs of violence and even if he
had, Saul Ketch had also been on duty. He had thought that the presence of a female might be reassuring for Mrs O’Kane and the child.

‘Yes, she was very upset. It’s difficult to find words of comfort at such a time, Belinda.’

‘I’ll bet
you
found them, though,’ she said. ‘
Is
he guilty, sir? Mr O’Kane?’

‘Yes, he is. He’s a traitor.’

‘Oh yes, sir.’ She paused. ‘They’re saying – the warders – that you’re worried someone might try to get him out before tomorrow.’

‘Are they, indeed? Well, you can tell them I’m not worried in the least. No one will get into Calvary tonight.’

‘Mightn’t Mr O’Kane have had his reasons for doing what he did, sir?’

‘I can’t think of any good reasons for anything he did,’ said Lewis a bit sharply.

‘I s’pose not.’ She looked at him steadily. Unusually for a fair-haired girl she had quite dark blue eyes with black lashes. Beautiful, thought Lewis, staring at her. Eyes you
could drown in. With the thought came a throb of sexual desire, which he instantly tried to repress. He reached for a sheaf of papers at random, thinking he would appear to be immersed in work, and
she would go away. He did not trust himself to look directly at her again. Had she sensed that sudden shiver of physical awareness? Yes, of course she had.

Belinda said, ‘Sorry, sir, I’m forgetting who you are and who I am.’ The words were correct, but the tone was not – Lewis recognized a note of parody. I know my place.
Like one of those saucy music-hall performers around the turn of the century, burlesquing pert maids out to seduce the master. He looked up involuntarily, and she grinned at him like an urchin. The
tension lightened at once.

‘I’ll leave you to your tea, sir.’

Despite his resolve, Lewis watched her go out, and had to repress a desire to follow her. He drank his tea, and saw that it was half past four and O’Kane had just over fifteen hours of
life left.

‘The weight’s worked out to a whisker, Sir Lewis,’ said Thomas Pierrepoint in his down-to-earth manner. Lewis had heard people say that Pierrepoint’s
manner was indicative of insensitivity, and that you could not be an executioner and have many of the finer feelings left to you. He did not agree with this; he believed Pierrepoint’s
matter-of-fact air was simply the countryman’s calm acceptance of life and death.

‘Everything’s in place,’ Pierrepoint was saying. ‘I’ll go along presently and try out the sandbags as usual. But I’ve not bungled one yet, as you know,
sir.’

‘Have you seen O’Kane? asked Lewis.

‘Aye, I’ve seen him. I saw him when they exercised him in the yard earlier on. Reckless look he has. If it’s agreeable to you, sir, we’ll hood him before we take him in,
just to be sure he doesn’t try to jump at the last minute.’

Lewis was aware of revulsion at the thought of O’Kane led like a blinded animal to his death. It’s because he’s attractive and young, he thought, that’s all. It’s
nothing to do with his fleeting resemblance to Cas – that way he has of tilting his head as if he’s challenging every authority there is. Cas did that the last time I saw him, but the
challenge then was for the Kaiser’s armies. Nicholas O’Kane’s challenge was with this country.

He said, ‘By all means put on the hood early, Mr Pierrepoint.’

‘These idealistic young men, sir, they sometimes like to make that last reckless gesture, you see,’ said Pierrepoint, almost as if he was apologizing. ‘As if they want to show
they aren’t afraid. So they try to leap down into the trap and meet death halfway, as they call it. Still, we’ve seen a lot of that these last three years. Young men going off to meet
death, thinking it’s a glorious thing.’

‘Yes, we have,’ said Lewis expressionlessly. ‘Mr Pierrepoint, I’m staying here tonight, of course, and they’ll bring me in some supper at about nine o’clock.
You’ll be very welcome to join me. And your assistant, of course.’

‘Thanking you kindly, Sir Lewis, but I can never relish a meal in company on the night before a hanging. I’m not a fanciful man, well, I wouldn’t be doing this work if I were.
I’m not one to be having an attack of nerves, female-like, or saying I can’t eat a bite, but it’s true that food never lies easy on my stomach just before turning a man off. My
assistant’ll likely be off to the King’s Head for a sup of ale later – boasting about who he is and what’s he’s doing here, I shouldn’t wonder – but
I’ll take my bite of supper by myself. And I’ll make an early night if that’s agreeable.’

Lewis said, ‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Mr Pierrepoint.’

CHAPTER EIGHT