In a Dry Season (61 page)

Epilogue

After a long, rainy winter and overdue repairs by Yorkshire Water, Thornfield Reservoir filled up again and Hobb's End once more disappeared. On
27
July of the year after the Gloria Shackleton murder had entered and left the public's imagination, Vivian Elmsley lay on a king-size bed in her Florida hotel room, propped up with pillows, and watched the local news channel.

Vivian was in the midst of a national book tour, seventeen cities, and while Gainesville wasn't on the itinerary, she had enough clout with her publishers to make this brief diversion. She would have come anyway, tour or no tour. Yesterday she had been in Baltimore, Bethesda and Washington,
DC;
tomorrow she was going to Dallas, but tonight she was in Gainesville.

For tonight was the night that Edgar Konig had his appointment with Old Sparky, and after everything she had been through, Vivian desperately needed
some
sense of an ending.

It was a sultry, mosquito-ridden night, but that didn't seem to deter the crowds that gathered outside the gates of Starke Prison, about twenty-five miles away. One or two were quietly carrying placards that asked for an end to
capital punishment, but by far the majority were chanting, “Fry Konig! Fry Konig!” Bumper stickers echoed the same sentiments, and the crowd had created what the commentator called a “tailgate-party” atmosphere. It wasn't big enough to attract any of the national networks—after all, executions in Florida were as common as muggings—but the Konig case had caught a lot of local interest.

Frank Stringer would have come, too—and Vivian would have willingly paid his way—but he was in jail. English gun laws are far stricter than those in Florida. Besides, no matter how good his reasons for taking Vivian hostage at Thornfield Reservoir last September, he had committed a serious crime and occasioned a hugely expensive and highly publicized police operation. Vivian had visited him several times in jail and told him she would help him get back on his feet when he came out. It was the least she could do for Gloria's memory.

In his turn, Frank had told her how his father's sister Ivy and her husband, John, had taken good care of him during the war and how he had thought of them as his parents. When his real father came home on leave, they would spend time together. That was when they had made the first journey north, in
1943
, and he had seen his mother.

After the war, his father married and took him away from Ivy and John. Frank's stepmother turned out to be a drunk and a shrew who had no time for her husband's bastard son. Increasingly isolated and neglected, he got involved with crooks and gangs, and one thing led to another. The only constant was that he had always worshipped his true mother's memory.

Frank also told Vivian how the death of his father that
spring and the re-emergence of Hobb's End from Thornfield Reservoir had caused his obsession with the past to escalate. His father had been the first to recognize Gwen Shackleton as Vivian Elmsley on television, but Frank had confirmed it; he had memorized her eyes and her voice all those years ago, when he was eight, the same way he had also memorized his mother's face.

He couldn't explain why he had taken the trouble to find out where Vivian lived and why he had followed her and approached her at the bookshop; it was just that she was the only one left, the only one who had known Gloria. He said that he meant no harm at first, that he might even have found the courage to approach her eventually.

Then the skeleton was discovered, and he knew she must have lied all those years ago. He hated her after that; he telephoned to scare her, to make her suffer. He could have taken her anytime, but he enjoyed the anticipation. After all, once he had confronted her, it would be all over. So he followed her, watched her. When she got the taxi outside her hotel, he knew where she was going, and he felt it was fitting that things should end there, where they began.

But tonight, Vivian was alone in Gainesville with her memories, the television, a bottle of gin, ice and tonic water. And an execution.

They had already shown a fairly recent photograph of Edgar Konig. Vivian hadn't been able to recognize the gangly, baby-faced young airman with the shy eyes and the blond brush-cut. His hair was gone, his cheeks had sagged and wrinkled, his brow creased, and his eyes were deep, dark pits in which slimy monsters squirmed.

As she watched the coverage, Vivian imagined the
officials carrying out the preliminary steps of state-sanctioned murder with swift and impersonal efficiency, much like dentists or doctors.

First they would settle the patient in the heavy oak chair and buckle thick leather straps around his arms and legs. Then they would place the bit between his teeth and attach electrodes to his body as if they were carrying out an
EKG
.

She wondered if the leather straps smelled, if they were sour with the sweat and fear of previous victims. How many hands and legs had they strapped down before? Or were they replaced after every execution? What about the chair itself? How many bladders and bowels had emptied there?

Then they would clamp on the metal skull-cap. Vivian shook her head to clear the images. She felt dizzy, and she realized she was already a bit drunk. If anyone deserved this sort of end, she told herself, ambivalent as she was about the idea of capital punishment, it was probably Edgar Konig.

Vivian had been shocked when Banks told her the day after Frank's arrest that Gloria's murderer was not dead, but on death row in a Florida prison.

Did he think of Gloria now, Vivian wondered, now the end was so close? Did he spare a thought for a beautiful young woman all those years ago in a village that no longer existed, in a war long since won? And what about the others? How many had there been? Konig couldn't remember, and even Banks hadn't been able to give her a definite number. Did he think about them?

If he was like most such killers she had read about in the course of her research, he probably felt nothing but
self-pity and spent his last moments cursing the bad luck that resulted in his capture. What Banks had told her a few days after the scene at Hobb's End did nothing to dispel that idea.

Banks's
FBI
contact had interviewed Edgar Konig last December and sent in a report, which Banks had shown to Vivian. In it, Konig said he was almost certain that the first one he did was in England during the war. He couldn't remember her name or the circumstances, but he thought maybe she was a blonde. He
did
remember that he had been giving her stockings and gum and cigarettes and bourbon for more than a year, and when he came to collect, she didn't show a scrap of gratitude. He'd been drinking. He remembered the way the pressure had been building and building in him all that time until he'd had too much that night and the dam finally burst. She wouldn't have anything to do with
him
, a lowly
PX
grunt. Oh, no. She was fucking a
pilot
.

As Vivian had read the report with trembling fingers, a familiar story emerged. Konig's daddy had been a vicious alcoholic who regularly beat poor Edgar to within an inch of his life; his mother was a drunken whore who'd do it with anyone for a dime. It was always the drink, Konig complained. If it hadn't been for the drink he would never have done any of them. But booze made something deep inside him just snap, and the next thing he knew, they were dead at his feet. Then he was angry at them for dying and he used the knife. When he didn't get found out the first time, when he realized there wasn't even going to be an investigation, he thought he must be leading a charmed life, then he had the bad luck to be caught on that highway in California.

Always the drink.

So went Edgar Konig's story.

The drink. Vivian looked at her glass, then with a shaking hand, she poured herself another tumbler of gin and grasped a fistful of ice cubes from the bucket on the bedside table, tossing them in the glass carelessly, so a little gin splashed on the table. An American habit she had picked up, that, ice in her drink.

It was almost time.

After years on death row and dozens of failed appeals, Edgar Konig, just turned seventy-six, was finally getting what he deserved. Vivian still felt a twinge of guilt when she realized that Banks was right, that she
might
have helped put an end to his killing all those years ago, after Gloria, the very first victim. She was partly responsible for Konig's feeling that he led a charmed life of murder without consequence.

She had tried to rationalize it to herself so many times since Banks told her what had happened and turned his back in scorn that evening when the storm broke at Hobb's End. Even if she had reported what happened, she told herself, they would have still probably arrested Matthew. He wasn't well enough to face that sort of treatment. Though Banks was a little easier on her when they spoke the next day, she could still feel his censure, and it stung.

But what could she have told the police that would have pointed them specifically towards Edgar Konig? The whisky and Lucky Strikes on the kitchen counter? They were hardly evidence. Gloria could have got them anywhere, and they could have been lying there on the counter for a couple of days. She and Gloria had known plenty of American Air Force officers in the area, and she had no
reason at the time to suspect any of them of murder. It was all very well for Banks to say in retrospect that
she
was responsible for all those deaths, that
she
could somehow have stopped all this had she acted differently, but it wasn't fair. Twenty-twenty hindsight. And who wouldn't, given the chance, go back and change
something
?

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.

A cheer went up from the crowd outside the prison. News had come out. Edgar Konig was dead. It was all over.

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 behaviour—behaviour 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 more than fifty years and reached again for her gin.

Acknowledgements

Many people helped, both directly and indirectly, with this book. On the writing side, I would particularly like to thank my wife, Sheila, for her perceptive first reading and my agent, Dominick Abel, for his encouragement and hard work. Special thanks to my editor at Avon, 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. Also, thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Shnall for the dental information.