Time.
The first shock would boil his brain and turn all the nerve cells to jelly; the second or third shock would stop his heart. His body would jerk and arch against the straps; his muscles would contract sharply, and a few small bones would probably snap. Most likely the fingers, the fingers he had used to strangle Gloria.
If he didn’t have a leather band strapped across his eyes, the heat would cause his eyeballs to explode. The death chamber would be filled with the smell of burning hair and flesh. Steam and smoke would puff out from under the hood. The hood itself might catch fire. When it was over, someone would have to turn on an air vent to get rid of the stench. Then a doctor would come, pronounce him dead, and the public would be informed.
Besides, Vivian told herself as she watched the people chanting outside the prison gates, others could have stopped him, too, if the system had worked properly. It wasn’t only her fault. She had acted only from the purest of motives: love of her brother. These past few weeks, she had read all the articles on Edgar Konig and his impending doom. There had been plenty of them.
Konig had finally been caught in California in the late sixties, when he was about forty-five, attacking a young female hitchhiker by the side of a lonely road. Fortunately for her, another motorist had happened along. Even more fortunate, this man wasn’t the kind who scared easily or who didn’t want to get involved. He was an ex-serviceman, and he was armed. When he saw a woman in trouble, he stopped and managed to disarm and disable Konig before calling the police. Already the girl was unconscious from strangulation. She had five stab wounds, but she survived.
Konig served nine years of a fourteen-year sentence. He was released early because of good behavior and prison overcrowding. A lot of people in the know opposed his release, regarding him as extremely dangerous and suspecting – but never being able to prove – his involvement in at least four murders. The prison officials said there wasn’t much else they could do at the time but let him go.
After his release in the late seventies, for years Konig was driven from one community to another as people found out what he was, trying to get work as a store clerk, more often than not failing and going on welfare. Just a few years ago he had finally settled in the small Florida town where it all came to a messy and predictable end.
His neighbors had already started protesting, and one local business had even offered him money to up sticks and move elsewhere. But Konig stayed on. Then, one day, a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses came to call and saw, through the screen door, Konig with a knife in his hand standing over the body of a woman, who turned out to be a local prostitute. They called the police on their mobile phone. Konig was drunk; he offered no resistance. After that, of course, came the obligatory years of waiting for trial, for sentencing, the failed appeals, death row.
And it was all over now. A cheer went up from the crowd outside the prison. News had come out. Edgar Konig was dead.
Why was it that Vivian felt no relief, felt nothing but the stirrings of a bad headache? She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to the lids. All over. All over. She was so tired. Konig’s statement to the FBI had been bald and unembellished, but with her morbid imagination, Vivian was able to fill in the nuances and the emotions.
She saw Gloria run into the kitchen as she became frightened by PX’s erratic behavior, behavior she had witnessed in embryo at the VE-Day party – saw her frantically pulling tins of tea and cocoa out of the kitchen cupboard, looking for the gun, shocked and scared to find that it wasn’t there. Did she realize in the last moments of her life that Gwen must have taken it?
Next, Vivian saw PX grab Gloria, put his hands around her throat, felt the breath going out of her. Then she saw him pick up the kitchen knife from the counter, felt one sharp pain, then another, another, everything starting to slip away from her.
Vivian put her hand to her throat.
The gun.
She was the one who had taken the gun, the one thing that might have saved Gloria’s life if she had got to it in time. And Brenda Hamilton’s life. And all the others.
Then, for all those terrible years, she had cared for Matthew in his fallen state, believing he was a murderer. Poor, gentle Matthew, who wouldn’t harm a soul, who couldn’t even kill himself, no more than her husband Ronald could, despite the pain. Vivian had helped them both: Ronald with an extra dose of morphine, and Matthew, all those years ago…
Before she started crying, she had a vivid memory of that afternoon in Leeds when she came back from the shops and saw Matthew sitting in the chair with the gun in his mouth, the gun she had taken from Gloria, kept and brought all the way from Hobb’s End. He was trying to find the courage, willing himself to pull the trigger.
But he couldn’t do it. Just like all the other times he had tried and failed. He had such a forlorn expression on his face, such a hopelessness about him. His eyes pleaded with her, and this time, almost without thinking, she walked over to him, tenderly wrapped her hand around his, kissed his forehead and pressed his finger on the trigger.
Outside Starke Prison the crowd was dancing and chanting, shaking up bottles and spraying beer at each other. In the hotel room, Vivian Elmsley let her tears flow freely for the first time in over fifty years and reached again for her gin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people helped, both directly and indirectly, with this book. On the writing side, I would particularly like to thank my wife Sheila Halladay for her perceptive first reading and my agent Dominick Abel for his encouragement and hard work. Special thanks to my editor at Avon Books, Patricia Lande Grader, for her faith and for pushing me to the limit, and to Cynthia Good at Penguin for keeping me on track, as ever. I would also like to thank Robert Barnard for reading and commenting on the manuscript, and copy editors Mary Adachi and Erika Schmid for spotting those important details the rest of us overlooked.
Then there are those who helped me reconstruct the past. Thanks to my father, Clifford Robinson, for sharing his wartime memories of Yorkshire; to Jimmy Williamson for informing me about the war in Burma; to Dan Harrington, USAFE History Officer, for patiently answering my E-mail messages; to Jack McFadyen for tracking down the uniforms and buttons, and to Dr. Aaron Elkins for his help with the forensic anthropology.
A number of police officers also answered my questions, and if I got any of it wrong, it’s not their fault. Thanks to Detective Sergeant Keith Wright, as ever, and to the crowd who drink in The Whale: Sergeant Claire Stevens, Chief Inspector Phil Gormley and Detective Inspector Alan Young. Particular thanks to Alan for the tour of the police station and the pint in the police bar afterward.
Last but not least, thanks to John Halladay, of the Law Faculty at the University of Buckingham, and to Judith Rhodes, of the Leeds Library Services, for answering a variety of questions.
About the Author
PETER ROBINSON’S award-winning novels have been named a Best-Book-of-the-Year by Publishers Weekly, a Notable Book by the New York Times, and a Page-Turner-of-the-Week by People magazine. Robinson was born and brought up in Yorkshire, England, but has lived in North America for nearly twenty-five years.
www.peterrobinsonbooks.com
