The Death Chamber (55 page)

Lewis was unable to take his eyes from her. ‘At the beginning, people thought Neville Fremlin had killed you. Your parents thought it.’

‘I know. Well, I didn’t know at the time, but I knew afterwards. I used to go into Neville’s shop – I pretended it was to buy things, but really I knew he was fascinated
by me, so I thought he might be a way of getting away from my parents.’

‘Why did you want to get away from them?’ It was so long since Huxley Small had spoken that his voice made Lewis jump.

‘Because they were so dull,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Stuffy. They made my life so dull. There were rules and I had to keep them, and I found it boring. I was nineteen – twenty
– and I wanted excitement. Of course,’ she said, in the ladylike tones that were so bizarrely at odds with her words, ‘of course, I have since learned better. But in those days .
. . Anyway, I told Neville my parents thought I was visiting a cousin in Margate. I can’t imagine why I said Margate, but for some reason it was the first place I thought of. So he thought it
was safe to be together for a little while. You know, it is
so
good to tell someone all this,’ she said again.

‘Like the confessional of the Roman Catholic church,’ observed Mr Small, and she turned to him smiling.

‘Yes, of course. How clever of you to see that. Neville once said something very similar. It made me wonder if he might have followed the Catholic religion himself at some time in his
life. Well, quite soon, I found that Neville hadn’t got as much money as I thought, and I hadn’t any money at all. That was dreadful – I wondered if I had made a mistake.
I’ve always liked to have money.’

Memory unrolled again, and Lewis saw the younger Elizabeth’s face look avidly at him when he said there was money for her to get to Ireland and begin afresh. In his mind he heard the
younger voice, saying, ‘How much money?’

It was Small who said, ‘Money must always be honestly come by, however.’

‘My money
was
honestly come by. I worked for it,’ she said indignantly. ‘When I realized Neville wasn’t as rich as I thought, I worked out a plan to get money
from somewhere else. From women – older women on their own. I had to go quite far afield to find them in case I was seen by people who knew me and I had to be particularly careful to avoid
places where my parents might go, of course. But it wasn’t so difficult. I got into conversation with women in teashops and on buses and things. I befriended them and I listened to them
talking about their youth – how they had never married, or how their sweethearts were killed in the war. I mean the first war,’ she said. ‘Not this last one. It was very dreary
listening to them, but I did it very well.’

She would have done it very well indeed, Lewis could see that. Those lonely women would have been pleased at the attention of such a pretty, well-mannered girl and they would have liked bringing
out their sad memories to share with her. And then she had killed them. He said, ‘But didn’t Fremlin realize what you were doing?’

‘Not until I told him.’ She smiled at them, and again Lewis was aware of the murderer’s vanity looking out of her eyes.

‘I had five altogether,’ she said. ‘Five ladies I used to meet, all quite separately of course. All wealthy. I’d meet them for lunch or tea, or an afternoon concert.
Eventually I suggested to them – still one at a time, you understand – that we took a boat trip on the River Nidd. I said there was a boathouse that hired boats and a man to row us.
They all thought it was such a good idea – so nice of me to suggest such an outing. The boathouse had long since been closed up, but none of them knew that. It was a lonely place, that
boathouse,’ she said. ‘And it was very dark and quiet inside.’

For a moment, the scene was dreadfully clear. Lewis could see the deserted boathouse, and he could smell the damp timbers and hear the soft lapping of the river. He could see Elizabeth – a
much younger Elizabeth than now – crouching in the shadows, waiting for her victims. Or had she quite openly taken them inside?

‘The boathouse was where you hid jewellery later on,’ he said, his mind going back to that earlier trial.

‘Yes, it was. There was a little cubbyhole near the door,’ she said.

‘And you killed all those women? Neville Fremlin’s five victims?’

‘I did,’ she said. ‘One by one. Quite close together, actually – in one case there was only a couple of days between, although by the time the police found the bodies in
Beck’s Forest, they were – well, it was no longer possible for the police to know exactly when any of them died.’

‘No,’ said Lewis, staring at her. ‘No, that’s something they never established.’

‘They’d be able to know today, wouldn’t they?’ she said, as if considering an academic point. ‘They have so many tests they make now.’

‘How did you kill them?’ said Lewis.

‘The first two I strangled, using my silk scarf – I did it from behind and it took them by surprise. It was easier than I had expected, but they struggled a lot, so I stabbed the
others through the base of the skull with a skewer. Once each one was dead I took her keys and went to her house to take money and jewellery and so on.’ She frowned, and Lewis saw she had
almost forgotten her surroundings, and that her mind was back in the past. ‘I managed to drag the bodies to the edge of the decking so that they’d be washed into the river,’ she
said. ‘At least, that was what I meant to happen. The boathouse generally flooded in heavy rain so I thought all I had to do was wait for rain and everything would be washed away.’

‘But it wasn’t?’ said Huxley Small.

‘No. It didn’t rain at all,’ she said. ‘Can you believe that in England! And the police were starting to be suspicious by then. Three of the ladies were regular customers
at Neville’s shop – that was how I met them – and the police were seeing that as a link. I began to panic. In the end I told Neville.’

‘You told him what you had done?’

‘Yes, I did. I cried a lot,’ she said reminiscently. ‘I said I had done a terrible thing – that I thought I must have been mad for a time – that I had been jealous
of the women for having money when I had hardly any – I said all kinds of things on those lines. Then I asked him to help me and in the end he agreed. I knew he would; he would have done
anything in the world for me.’ There, again, was the soft complacency.

‘He buried them for you?’ said Lewis. ‘In Becks Forest?’

‘Yes. He made me take him to the boathouse – he said something about confronting the consequences of what I had done. I remember it was late afternoon – the days were already
growing shorter and it was that half-light that plays tricks on your vision. We parked the car and walked along the river path. It was very quiet. I pushed open the door of the boathouse, and there
they all were. Lying where I’d left them. Some of the faces were turned to the door as if watching for someone to come in and they were like things out of a nightmare by then –
I’ve never forgotten how they looked. I remember there was waterlight from the river. It rippled over the walls, so that the dead faces looked as if they were moving.’ She shuddered
again, and then said, in a brisker voice, ‘I don’t think Neville believed me until then – he just stood in the doorway and his face was absolutely white. But he made me go away
while he dealt with it all. I stayed at an hotel in York – I liked York,’ she said. ‘And Neville took the bodies out of the boathouse one at a time over the next couple of weeks.
I think he had to take at least two of them back to his shop to get rid of their clothes and wedding rings – everything that might identify them. He left intervals between the trips in case
anyone noticed him coming and going – he was clever like that, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Lewis. ‘Yes, I know he was.’

‘Once he came out to York to tell me what he was doing. He talked to me for hours that night. He said he didn’t believe I was really wicked, but people sometimes did bad things in
their lives especially when they were very young. You got in the grip of a strange madness; he said when he was young he had been in the grip of madness for a time.’

O’Kane’s traitorism, thought Lewis. Did she really never know who he was? But he thought she had not; he thought she had always been immensely self-centred.

‘Neville said the important thing was to recognise that you had been wicked and mad, and do what you could to put it right,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Do good in the world if you could
– sort of atonement. I told you I thought he was once Roman Catholic, didn’t I? Oh, and he said never to make the mistake again and never to let the madness in again. So I cried some
more and said I was sorry and I really did think I had been mad, and then I talked about entering a convent to – what do they call it? – to purge my soul of the sin. I thought
he’d like that. But I think by then he knew the police were watching him,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He had sold the jewellery for me, you see.
I
couldn’t go into horrid
pawn shops to sell the stuff or into sleazy secondhand jewellers’. So Neville did it. And if there was money – actual cash – he put that in his bank. I didn’t have a bank
account. Females didn’t in those days – at least girls of twenty didn’t.’

‘He kept the money and the jewellery?’ asked Huxley Small.

‘Not at first. He had some silly idea of trying to find the families of the dead women. I told him they hadn’t had any family: that was why I picked them,’ she said.
‘Then he decided to give the money to charity, although I expect I’d have persuaded him to keep it if they hadn’t arrested him. The police found the bank entries or deposits or
whatever you call them. That was all very incriminating indeed.’ She looked at them. ‘Then they caught him burying the last of the bodies. Are you wondering why he took all the blame
for me?’ she said.

‘I can just about accept that a mother might go to the gallows for a child, or even a brother for a beloved sister,’ said Lewis slowly. ‘But Fremlin only knew you for a few
months.’

‘It wasn’t completely for me,’ she said, and Lewis thought, so she’s not quite as self-centred as I believed. ‘Neville thought he deserved to die for whatever it
was he did when he was young. I didn’t really understand and I don’t understand now. But I do remember that on the night before they arrested him, he sat up all night, talking to me.
There had been lots of police questions and interviews by then, and he thought they would charge him and that he could end up being hanged. But he said it would be a – what did he call it?
– a rough justice. I think it’s a quotation or something,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He liked quoting things. He said he deserved to die because he had been responsible for the
deaths of a lot of young men in the Great War. He had sold information to Germany or something, and because of it ships had been sunk. I said if he felt so guilty why didn’t he just confess,
but he said it was very complicated – there was somebody out in the world he wanted to protect. Personally,’ she said, ‘I thought he was being ridiculous. I still think
so.’

Lewis said, ‘Come back to the present. Tell me about Denzil McNulty?’

‘There isn’t much to tell. You know it all, don’t you?’

‘Why did you kill him?’

She looked at him as if he might be mad. ‘He threatened to tell the world who I really was,’ she said. ‘To – what do they call it? – to blow my cover. My beautiful
comfortable life that I had created over the years would have been in tatters. My boy’s life would have been utterly ruined.’

‘So that’s why you killed McNulty. To stop him from talking.’

‘Of course that’s why I killed him,’ said Elizabeth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Vincent was surprised to answer a knock on his door just after lunch, and to find two policemen there. A detective sergeant, it seemed, and an ordinary constable. Might they
come in and have a little word with him?

Once inside, the detective sergeant said a disturbance had taken place at Calvary the previous night. ‘You’ll have heard about it, I daresay? News travels in a small place like this,
doesn’t it?’

‘Indeed I have heard about it, Sergeant. Dreadful, I thought it.’ Vincent had in fact gone out and about quite early that morning, specifically to find out if the news had yet got
round. He had bought groceries in the supermarket and a newspaper at the newsagents’, and he had gone into the post office for stamps. By midday everyone was talking about what had happened,
so he felt perfectly safe in admitting to knowing about it, and to asking how he could be of help.

‘It seems,’ said the detective sergeant, ‘that Dr Ingram and his assistants put a camcorder inside Calvary last night.’

‘My goodness,’ said Vincent, but an icy hand had closed around his stomach.

‘We’ve watched the footage – Dr Ingram was very helpful in passing it over to us – and there’s a figure on it that isn’t part of his team. A man went into the
execution chamber last night, and shut the gallows trap – we understand Mr Stratton was down there at the time, as part of the programme.’

‘Mr Stratton?’

‘Mr Jude Stratton.’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘The thing is, Mr Meade,’ said the sergeant, ‘the figure on the film has been identified as being you.’