Defend and Betray - Anne Perry [112]
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Have you ever seen anyone hanged, Mrs. Carlyon?” It was brutal, but if he could not reason her into telling him, then there was little left but fear. He hated doing it. He saw her body tighten and the hands by her sides clench. Had he done this before? It brought no memory. Everything in his mind was Alexandra, the present, the death of Thaddeus Carlyon and no one else, no other time or place. “It’s an ugly thing. They don’t always die immediately. They take you from the cell to the yard where the noose is …” He swallowed hard. Execution repelled him more than any other act he knew of, because it was sanctioned by law. People would contemplate it, commit it, watch it and feel justified. They would gather together in groups and congratulate each other on its completion and say that they upheld civilization.
She stood without moving, thin and slight, her body painfully rigid.
“They lay the rope ’round your neck, after they have put a hood over your head, so you can’t see it—that’s what they say it is for. Actually I think it is so they cannot see you. Perhaps if they could look at your face, your eyes, they couldn’t do it themselves.”
“Stop it!” she said between her teeth. “I know I will hang. Do you have to tell me every step to the gallows rope so I do it more than once in my mind?”
He wanted to shake her, to reach out and take her by the arms, force her to turn around and face him, look at him. But it would only be an assault, pointless and stupid, perhaps closing the last door through which he might yet find something to help her.
“Did you try to stab him once before?” he asked suddenly.
She looked startled. “No! Whatever makes you think that?”
“The knife wound in his thigh.”
“Oh that. No—he did that himself, showing off for Valentine Furnival.”
“I see.”
She said nothing.
“Is it blackmail?” he said quietly, “Is there someone who holds some threat over you?”
“No.”
“Tell me! Perhaps we can stop them. At least let me try.”
“There is no one. What more could anyone do to me than the law will already do?”
“Nothing to you—but to someone you love? Sabella?”
“No.” There was a lift in her voice, almost like a bitter laugh, had she the strength left for it.
He did not believe her. Was this it at last? She was prepared to die to protect Sabella, in some way they had not yet imagined.
He looked at her stiff back and knew she would not tell him. He would still have to find out, if he could. There were twelve days left before the trial.
“I won’t stop trying,” he said gently. “You’ll not hang if I can prevent it—whether you wish me to or not. Good day, Mrs. Carlyon.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Monk.”
That evening Monk dined with Evan again and told him of his abortive trip to Suffolk, and Evan gave him notes of one more case which might have been the woman he had tried so hard to save. But tonight his mind was still on Alexandra, and the incomprehensible puzzle she presented.
The following day he went to Vere Street and told Oliver Rathbone of his interview in the prison, and his new thoughts. Rathbone was surprised, and then after a moment’s hesitation, more hopeful than he had been for some time. It was at least an idea which made some sense.
That evening he opened the second set of notes Evan had given him and looked at them. This was the case about Phyllis Dexter, of Shrewsbury, who had knifed her husband to death. The Shrewsbury police had had no trouble establishing the facts. Adam Dexter was a large man, a heavy drinker and known to get into the occasional brawl, but no one had heard that he had beaten his wife, or in any other way treated her more roughly than most men. Indeed, he seemed in his own way quite fond of her.
On his death the local police had been puzzled as to how they might prove, one way or the other, whether Phyllis was speaking the truth. All their efforts, expended over the first week, had left them no wiser than at the beginning. They had sent for Scotland Yard, and Runcorn had dispatched Monk.
The notes were plain that