He held up the key he had shown to Ruth and Martin that afternoon. He fitted it into the lock. And, with a squealing creak of hinges, the iron door swung inwards.
A sudden animation seized that whole group, and they began talking twenty to the dozen. Martin afterwards supposed he must have talked too.
The babble of their voices carried them through into a passage some eight feet wide and twenty feet long, ending in a dead-wall facing them. It was floored with very dirty asphalt In the wall to the left, eternally the grey-brick, was a door which faced across to a corresponding door on the right.
Stannard, taking one of the lamps from Ricky, propped it up a little slantways against the floor and the dead-end wall so that it should shine straight down the passage.
"Would you like first—" he put his hand on the knob of the left-hand door—"to see the execution shed first?"
"No!" cried Ruth. "The other one. I mean, the beginning. I mean, after all, the condemned cell is the beginning."
Stannard turned to the other door.
"I have always understood," rattled Dr. Laurier loudly, "the condemned cell really is a room, with wall-paper and religious pictures."
"Oh, yes," said Stannard. (Damn the man, thought Martin; his voice rasps on you like a lecturer's). "Oak door," he went on. "Notice the little glass peep-hole high up. The condemned man had two warders — or wardresses, if it happened to be a woman — with him or her every instant of the time. That peephole was for the hangman."
"Hangman?" Ricky's voice went up.