the thud of police boots. There was a flash and a violent bang which left him deafened.
A body was lying in the wings next to the winding apparatus and he hoped it was Smight but, no, the doctor was still standing, waving a revolver in the air. Smight took aim at another figure, possibly Sebastian Marmont, but simultaneously with his straightening his arm to loose off a second shot, half a dozen individuals smothered him and brought him to the ground. The gun flew up in the air.
Tom stood by, still trying to push the floating platform down. Then he attempted to loosen the wire about Helen’s neck but it was secured to a block underneath and he was terrified of increasing the pressure. He spoke to her, said her name, but did not know whether she heard. He grasped her hand and she opened her eyes, saw him and smiled. Then she closed her eyes again and seemed to lose consciousness.
Major Marmont took control of the winding mechanism and lowered the levitating platform so that the wire about Helen’s neck slackened. Others freed her from the bonds about her hands and feet. Anthony Smight stood to one side, his hands already cuffed behind his back and with two of the constables gripping him tightly by either shoulder.
William Traynor went up to Smight. By now Tom’s ears had stopped ringing. He heard the detective say to the doctor in a low but emphatic voice, ‘You’ll swing for this.’
At some point later Tom asked Helen if she remembered laughing out loud. At first she didn’t wish to dwell on her captivity at the hands of Doctor Smight but, by degrees, Tom heard most of the story; Smight’s explanation for his motives and actions, his desire to hurt Tom by taking her first. The crazily elaborate plan for murdering Helen.
‘I wondered why he did not use the gun,’ she said. ‘He must have had it in his pocket and when you and the police burst in, he was quick enough to shoot poor Superintendent Harcourt. But I believe that he wanted me to suffer a little of what his brother Ernest had suffered as he drowned in the Thames. To be deprived of air, to be gasping for life. Like the Seldons, only with them he employed gas.’
Tom could say nothing. In his mind’s eye, he saw Helen strapped to the levitation platform, the thin wire fastened tight about her white neck. The mark of that wire took more than two weeks to fade. Helen wore high- collared dresses to hide it. Tom turned cold at the memory as he did a dozen times a day. But now Helen was cheerful and wanted to talk.
‘I saw myself as Smight must have seen me, a woman, a young woman tied to a platform on stage, for whom a tortuous death had been conceived. I was in a theatre, Tom! Even though there was no audience to see us. But it was like a scene from a melodrama where the villain has his hands on the heroine and is about to despatch her in a very lurid manner. If you are watching you may be thrilled but you also know that it is not real, it is almost absurd. You have faith too that at the last moment, the very last moment, rescue will come. The hero will burst through the window or break down the door of the cellar. He will strike out at the villain with a manly blow from his fist. He will sweep the heroine into his arms. If I was laughing it was because it was like such a scene.’
‘But you did not know that rescue would come.’
‘I did not know but I hoped.’
Execution
Tom and Helen Ansell had left Durham by the time sentence was carried out on Doctor Anthony Smight. The execution was fixed for three weeks after the end of the trial. There was no attempt at an appeal, no petition for clemency. Few new facts had been discovered about Smight and the story of the Demon Doctor faded from the front pages. The Durham superintendent who had been assigned by Chief Constable Huggins with the investigation of the murder of Eustace Flask, following Harcourt’s own death, quietly closed the file since it was obvious that the doctor had killed the medium. No one greatly regretted Flask’s demise apart, perhaps, from Julia Howlett — and she had been so absorbed in her niece’s fate that she had little time to spare for ‘poor Eustace’.
Smight had been an exemplary prisoner, in that he caused no trouble and made no requests. One day the governor of the gaol brought him a letter. It was an ill-written missive from George Forester, the man who had spied on the houses belonging to the Seldons and the Ansells in London. Forester, as Inspector Traynor had explained, could not square his conscience with his suspicions about the Seldons’ deaths and so had informed on Smight. Naturally Forester said nothing of this in the letter but he expressed his regret that the good Doctor Tony was in gaol (‘goal’ as he wrote it) and his hope that he would find comfort (‘cumfert’) in the Lord. Oh, and Annie and the kids, specially (‘spesherly’) Mike, sent their loves.
Smight glanced at the letter, then screwed it up and tossed it into a corner of the cell. He was sent no other communication apart from two proposals of marriage which he never read because the governor intercepted and destroyed them. If his sister Ethel knew of his fate, she did not get in touch. He had no visitors other than, early on, his counsel wanting to discuss an appeal. Smight rejected the proposal.
If Smight was an exemplary prisoner he wasn’t a popular one, in the way that some condemned men and women became popular by striking up a weird sort of friendship with the warders. Those assigned to guard Smight reminisced fondly about the recent occupants of the condemned quarter of the gaol, honest men brought down by drink or temper, everyday individuals who’d tumbled into murder by accident. They even had a good word for Mary Ann Cotton, who had been executed the previous year after an extensive poisoning spree. Mary was a dangerous bird all right, but she’d crack a joke with her keepers and pass the time of day with them, unlike the yellow-faced sour-guts presently sitting in the condemned cell. They said he was lucky. A few years earlier and the doctor would have been topped outside the gaol — or outside the new courthouse more precisely — for all the world to see. There’d have been a good turnout for a public turning-off, one to rival old Mary Cotton’s.
Did Anthony Smight care about any of this? He did not appear to. He read poetry! He took his twice-daily exercise in the condemned yard which, with its high walls giving a view of nothing but sky and neighbouring chimney stacks, was like a prison within a prison. If he was pining for an opium-pipe, he did not indicate it by a single gesture or word. In fact, he continued to say almost nothing.
On the afternoon before the day of Smight’s execution, the hangman William Marcraft arrived from London. He booked into one of the city’s cheaper hotels and reported to the prison shortly before four o’clock, the hour stipulated in his memorandum of conditions. There he examined the scaffold and the pit in the yard, even though he was already familiar with these items. He tested the lever and trapdoors, he peered into the brick-lined pit below. He obtained details of the condemned man’s weight and height from the prison doctor and snatched a look at Anthony Smight through a peephole in the cell door. He saw an individual stretched out on his bed, hands behind his head. He could not tell whether Smight was asleep.
Marcraft then returned to his inexpensive hotel and made a few calculations in a black-bound notebook which he kept for this purpose. He compared Smight’s physical details with those of a couple of other individuals listed in the book. Marcraft went downstairs and had a supper of steak-and-kidney pie in the hotel dining room. He drank half a pint of porter. He was a naturally abstemious man whether in his regular trade as a barber or his occasional work as a hangman. The landlord knew the reason for Marcraft’s presence in Durham as, most likely, did all of the staff, but no one said a word about it to the hangman’s face. Nor did he mention it, again a condition that was laid down in his memorandum.
While William Marcraft was eating his pie, Anthony Smight was taking his last supper. He turned in at ten o’clock and, to those who inspected him throughout the night, he appeared to sleep soundly. So soundly that he had to be roused the next morning when the chaplain slipped into the cell, together with two warders. Smight had already rejected the chaplain’s overtures on earlier visits and he proceeded to ignore the man as he tried a mixture of prayer, consolation and conversation while the doctor ate his breakfast. Smight did not eat much but he chewed and swallowed composedly.
Shortly before eight William Marcraft entered the cell, with the governor and another pair of warders. The hangman shook Smight’s hand, a gesture that wasn’t entirely courteous since it enabled him to half immobilize the condemned man as well as to gauge his nervousness by feeling him, palm to palm. But Anthony Smight’s hand was dry as dust and he offered no struggle as his arms and hands were pinioned by two of the warders.
Then, with the neatness of a long-practised military drill, Smight was half-marched, half-escorted out of the cell and into the yard. It was already a fine morning, just past midsummer though no sun had yet reached the yard. Smight was placed between the posts of the scaffold and over the trapdoors which opened into the pit. He was
