‘Yes. But she must have told you so already.’
‘She did. You are visiting Durham on legal business?’
‘Helen’s aunt lives here. We are staying with her for a few days. That is, with Miss Julia Howlett in the South Bailey.’
If the name meant anything to Superintendent Harcourt he didn’t show it. He said, ‘I gather your wife knew the deceased.’
‘This may sound absurd, Superintendent, but then the whole thing is absurd. I do not even know who is dead.’
‘You don’t know who is dead, Mr Ansell? Well, well. The deceased is a gentleman who has caused a certain stir in this town… his name is… or was, I should say… Eustace Flask.’
‘Oh God! How did he die?’
‘He was murdered. Stabbed, it seems. A vicious blow to the neck with a sharp knife. May I take it from your response that you were also familiar with Mr Flask?’
‘Plenty of people knew him, I imagine,’ said Tom, cautiously.
‘As a matter of fact, I knew him myself,’ said Harcourt. ‘A glancing acquaintance only, mind.’
‘But he disappeared last night.’
‘Last night? Ah, you are referring to the performance at the Assembly Rooms when Mr Flask was invited to enter the magician’s booth.’
‘If you were there then you must have seen him vanish too.’
‘That was a trick, Mr Ansell.’
‘But Flask never reappeared.’
‘All part of the act, I suppose,’ said Harcourt.
‘Shouldn’t you be talking to the performers on stage, talking to Major Marmont for example, to find out exactly what happened afterwards? Flask could have died last night.’
‘The body was still warm, the blood was still flowing, when your wife found him this morning. He had only just been killed.’
Tom noted that the policeman was not implying that it was Helen who had killed Flask.
‘So he disappeared temporarily and then popped up again. Someone must have seen him in the in-between.’
‘No doubt,’ said Harcourt. ‘We will talk to the magician and others but in our own good time, Mr Ansell. We must talk to your wife first and find out what she was doing with the deceased.’
‘She wasn’t doing anything with him. She had the bad luck to find his body, that is all. You have as much as said so.’
‘Possibly, sir, possibly. But caution is the watchword in these affairs. You are lucky because I was actually on the scene of the murder.’
‘You saw it?’ said Tom, not understanding.
‘I mean that I arrived shortly afterwards, happening to be in the neighbourhood by chance. Fortunately, several of my men were also in the area. Tell me, Mr Ansell, did your wife ever express an opinion of Mr Eustace Flask?’
Helen had said several things about Flask, all of them unfavourable, so Tom cast around for a neutral way to answer. He certainly wanted to avoid any hint that she had come to Durham with the specific intention of persuading her aunt Howlett away from her infatuation with the medium. He saw Frank Harcourt looking at him, tapping the end of the pencil against his mouth. There was a shrewdness in the policeman’s eyes but also something else there which Tom couldn’t quite place.
‘Neither of us has much time for mediums and seances and that sort of thing,’ said Tom eventually. ‘We had, both of us, met Mr Flask once – at her aunt’s house as it happens.’
There was a double tap on the door and Harcourt went to answer it. A police constable stood outside. Without any preamble, he launched into an urgent explanation. The man’s accent was so broad that Tom had difficulty following him but, as far as he could gather, something had occurred which required the Superintendent’s immediate attention, something to do with the delivery of a parcel.
Harcourt came back. He said, ‘You may see your wife if you wish, Mr Ansell. There has been a development in the case.’
‘What is it?’
‘I am not at liberty to say. But if you come with me now I shall direct a warder to take you to Mrs Ansell.’
The Crown Court and the prison occupied the same site. Superintendent Harcourt led Tom down some stairs and along increasingly drab passageways until they emerged into a small high-walled yard. He rapped on an iron-barred door on the far side and, when a wooden panel slid back, grunted a few words to the whiskered face on the other side. There was the clank of keys from within.
‘I’ll leave you with Perkins, Mr Ansell. You are in good hands.’
Tom was thinking not of himself but of poor Helen as the warder escorted him across a chilly vestibule occupied only by a desk, chair and filing cabinet. Half a dozen flat blue caps were hanging from a row of pegs. Perkins took a key from the great bunch which dangled at his belt and, without looking to check whether he had the right one, unlocked another reinforced door. Beyond this was a barred gate which led directly to one of the prison wings. There was same instinctive procedure with the keys. Without saying a word, the warder beckoned Tom to follow him up a spiral metal staircase to the left of the gate and they climbed to the second tier of the building. A row of doors opened off a narrow walkway, echoed by a similar arrangement on the other side.
It was curiously silent, with no sound apart from the thud of the men’s feet. There was an acrid smell, a mixture of food and carbolic and human waste. Perkins halted at the seventh or eight door. This time the warder had to search for a specific key. When he found it, he used it to tap on the door to alert the occupant, before turning the key and swinging open the door in a single smooth action.
Helen was sitting on a bench against the far wall. Her head was bent in concentration and she was scribbling in a notebook. She looked up, blinking.
‘Tom! It’s you.’
‘Helen. You’re all right?’
‘Of course I am all right.’
‘What are you doing?’ said Tom. It was a stupid question but other words failed him. He was standing just inside the cell door.
‘’Fraid I’ll have to lock you in, sir,’ said Perkins, making a show of drawing a pocket-watch from his uniform jacket and consulting it. ‘I will wait outside on the landing. I can give you ten minutes.’
‘I am sure you can give us longer than that,’ said Helen. She glanced at Tom and surreptitiously rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.
Tom gave the man half a sovereign. The coin disappeared like magic.
‘Half an hour, sir, no longer,’ said Perkins. He shut the door and turned the key.
Helen said, ‘Well, Tom, in answer to your question I am writing down the details of my surroundings. An author never knows when these things will come in useful. I might send one of my characters to gaol at some point and, when I do, I will need to know what the inside of a cell looks like.’
Helen spoke more rapidly than usual. Tom noticed that there was some blood on her dress. She snapped the notebook shut – it was her diary, he saw – and placed it neatly beside her. She got up from the bench, came to him and he put his arms around her.
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ he said at last. ‘You are so calm, so brave. Oh Helen!’
‘Now, Tom. Do not be foolish. This is all a silly mistake. I shall be out of here very soon. After all, you have been in the same plight yourself.’
It was true. The previous year Tom had spent an unhappy night in a cell in the county gaol in Salisbury when he too had fallen under suspicion for a crime he did not commit. Helen had visited him in that place, just as he was now visiting her in this one. Tom wondered if there was some malign or mischievous fate subjecting each of them to a parallel experience of prison.
Tom released his wife and took his first careful look at the cell. With its curved ceiling, it was like a vault or the interior of a compartment in a train carriage. The flaking walls were whitewashed. A few feet above the bed there was an unglazed and barred window which allowed in small quantities of light and air. At the moment a stray draught was bringing in the ghost of summer to the cell. In the winter it would be bitterly cold. Apart from the bed, the only covering for which was a coarse blanket, there was a wooden chair and a three-legged stand for a washbasin, a ewer of water and a thick glass tumbler. A bucket was lodged under the bed.