by Rod Madocks
Lizzie had slipped away back into the darkness. I slid the heavy pillow case under the ottoman. The cold made my feet ache, the dark walls seemed to bend in on me. I could hear something—something was going on in the hall, ess, something was definitely going on in the hallway. I crept to the door. Lord! I could make out shapes. A man’s voice was muttering and there was a lit bulls-eye lantern on the floor. I could hear Lizzie saying, “No!” and again, “No!” then the low mumbling from the figure. He had his back to me and Lizzie was crammed up in the alcove. I had to do it but I don’t mind saying how frit I was. I snatched at his shoulder. The figure turned and jabbed me in the guts, kicked my feet from under me and pushed me backwards. I went to wrench myself back up but he was on me. The fellow was strong and fast. I could hardly breathe and I thought my heart would jump out of my chest. Thrashed and kicked from the floor but I was straddled and held down. There was a masked face above me with fierce eyes, someone come ready for trouble.
I struggled and bucked and kicked but felt the strength going out of me. Lizzie started mauling at the man’s head. He pushed her off and jumped to his feet. I then got a kick in the ribs that rolled me across the floor. He pulled down the scarf. It was Harrington and he was mad enough to gore me to bits! We clamped and roiled around again. I pushed him back for a moment but he was so much stronger than me. I hauled out my hammer and waved it above my head. I told him to go to Hell in a whisper from a mouth as dry as paper. ’Twas strange to be fighting and whispering at the same time. Nort seemed to stop the varment. Harrington feinted a jab then caught hold of the hammer and twisted it right it out of my grip. He got me against a wall with the shaft of my own hammer jammed across my throat. He set to squeezing me to blackness.
A voice came flying out. The voice called out, “What is it?” That sound stopped everything.
“Who is there?” There was a light moving on the stair and a creaking of the boards. The pressure eased off my neck. It was the Missis coming down the stairs holding a candlestick. She must have heard us despite the storm. Harrington pulled away from me and all three of us ranged back. None of us said a thing but Harrington crept out of sight into the alcove under the stairs. Miss Keyse stopped on the landing and raised her candle to see us better.
“Wickedness!” is all she said on seeing me and Lizzie standing guilty-like in the hall and all dressed in our day clothes.
Then Harrington, reaching up quick from the alcove, dragged her down the last few steps to slam forward onto the floor. It happened so fast and so unexpected-like that there was no time to move. Lizzie also kept me clamped in a strong grip.
Miss Keyse landed on her knees, her dropped candle stub spinning around on the floor boards. Everything was lit clear by the bulls-eye lamp. We could hear her crying out, “Oh! Oh!” and scrabbling on hands and knees. She began to mutter something like, “Oh God, thou wilt not… John! Are you there?” She made to clutch at the banister and tried to drag herself up. Harrington punched her hard on the side of the head. She cried out but clung on to the stair rods. At first I was rooted to the spot with it all then I tried to get to the villain and smash him but Lizzie held me hard. Then Harrington was above the Missis, his arm raised. There was a sound like a pumpkin being dropped. The Missis fell instantly. Harrington stood over her and gave her two more heavy whacks to the head while she was on the ground. Then I saw what in his hand. Dear Lord, it was my hammer. There were trails of wet and dark stains on the walls behind. Miss Keyse was very quiet and still for a moment but after a few seconds a horrible powerful noise started coming out of her.
Oh, how she groaned after Harrington hit her. She made a beastly grunting sound that started low but got louder. I asked Harrington what he had done. He stared back at me with goggle eyes and said that he had to do it. I told him he was a mad snake and he was going to get us all hanged. Lizzie asked if we could stop the noise the old lady was making. Harrington raised up the hammer as if he was going to hit her again but then he let the thing fall to the floor with a loud bang. He slowly put his hands to his face. Lizzie was the only one with nerve enough to look on it. She went to the shaking figure on the floor and rolled her over onto her back. The horrible rattling moan came even louder then. A black stain opened out around the head. Lizzie went to Harrington and told him he must end it. He seemed about ready to heave up. Lizzie next came up to me and told me to finish it. I said I could not, she was my mistress. Lizzie hissed at us that we were not men. She went to the hall, rummaged about, then took out the weeding knife that was always kept there. She looked at it and tried the blade then tossed it back down. She went to Harrington with her hand out and told him to give it to her. He slowly drew back his coat, took something out, and handed it to her. Lizzie came up to me. She had his long sailor’s knife. She pressed it into my hand and said that I was to finish it for the Lord’s sake. I shook my head and she said even more loudly that I must help the ole dumman.
“Finish it, Jack—do it for me,” she kept saying. Somehow I began to move near to the shivering shape on the floor. Lizzie pushed me closer.
I crouched down by Miss Keyse. The beastly snoring sound rattled loudly. Close to, I could see her peepers were open and she seemed to be staring at me. Her hands were stretched out stiff in front of her and her whole body was shaking. It seemed like she was begging me. I put the blade out to touch her neck and asked her to forgive me. I pressed down a bit but could not do it. I told Lizzie I could not go on. Lizzie leant right over me, pressing me down. Her strong right hand clamped over my knife hand and the other grabbed onto Miss Keyse’s hair and drew her head back. Lizzie told me to go on and at the same time pressed down hard over my hand, making the knife jerk mightily to and fro like a saw. Miss Keyse’ heels drummed on the wood floor. Then something gave way and the blade sunk home. I felt her breath puff out of her for the last time. I pushed down further until the blade grated on bone, and a hot wet wash went right over my hands. It felt like something went out of her and into me in that moment.
Lizzie took the knife from me, the blood kept pouring out, a black flood in the lamplight. I asked her how we could stop it. She gave me the cloth covering from Miss Keyse’ chair and I tried sopping it up but it was no good and I knelt there and began to cry out at the pity of it. Harrington seemed to have been puking in the corner, he wiped his face on his sleeve and said that we were jiggered and should run while there was time Lizzie pulled at me to get up. She gave me a shake to bring me back my senses. I turned to Harrington and told him he was a bastard and asked why he did such a thing to the ole lady. He just shrugged. Lizzie told us not to fall out. She said it was done and couldn’t be helped and we were in it together. She seemed to take charge and we let her. She kept her head through it all. She told us to burn the house quick. Flame everything and ’t would all be an accident and none would know. First she got us to shift the body out the road. Harrington took the Missis’ heels and I had the other end. Her head kept bumping against my legs as we moved her. We dragged the body into the dining room and laid her in front of the ottoman. Harrington cursed at me to cover her face so I put a newspaper over it. Lizzie ordered us about as the clock ticked away during those last terrible night hours. We pulled out more newspapers and piled them into a heap onto the body. Lizzie started tipping the lamps over and emptying out paraffin onto the furnishings and carpets. A stink of lamp oil began to fill the rooms. I asked her about the Necks, still upstairs there. She said to let the old birds roast. When I looked doubtful she said that they cared nort for us. I crept up the stairs and went to the left and into Miss Keyse’s bedroom. I was frit to go in there. I thought somehow her spirit would rise up out of her fourposter to ask me my business. I pulled down the servants’ bell cord to make it seem like she was giving alarm for a fire. Emptied out a lamp onto her bedding. Tried to light it with a Lucifer. The damn thing wouldn’t go until I’d added some papers from her bedside cabinet. A yellow flame grew then faded then caught again. Outside the wind boomed over the
roof.
Downstairs Lizzie was setting fires here and there in the dining room. The terrace door was wide open and I found Harrington with his knife in his hands stabbing it into the earth of the flowerbeds. I asked him what he was doing and he answered that he was cleaning up. He sounded then as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He wiped the blade on a piece of cloth. It looked like a shred from off Miss Keyse’s nightdress. He started to go on about me taking Lizzie from him but I told him he was a cuddy, bastard, murdering rat and to keep away from me.
There was a rank smell of scorch and lamp fuel. I got on my hands and knees and tried to swab the worst of the blood off the hallway. I found one of Miss Keyse’s stockings and a slipper all sodden and could only think to thrust them out of sight under the hall mat. It began to get all too much for me. I tried to get up, slipped in my wet socks on a patch of blood and began to cry out to Lizzie that I couldn’t stand it no more and asked if we could just run for it. But she would have none of it, saying to pull myself together, get on and hurry. My foot banged against something. It was my hammer, dropped by Harrington. I swabbed it with paper and put it head first into my trouser pocket.
We ran from room to room trying to fire everything. A bitter thick smoke began to fill the corridors but the wind continued to howl outside and our fires keep blowing out as if the gale was trying to stop them. We struck match after match and make heaps of newspapers and eventually Lizzie fetched out the can of Alexandra oil from under my bed in the pantry and slopped it over everything.
She poured half the can over the body of Miss Keyse and at last the flames begin to really take hold. The ottoman was well alight covered with sparking orange flames. At one stage I heard a wail and a pale flash passed me. It was poor old Tib the cat fleeing from some hidey hole and all on fire.
When was it I saw the Necks? Maybe they had watched everything from the beginning, maybe peering down through the banisters as it all went on? I first ran into Eliza on the smoke-ridden landing. She looked frit as if she would flee from me but I called out to her that I would not let her burn. I led her downstairs through the thick fume. She shouted out that the Missis was on the floor when we got to where Miss Keyse was lying. Pieces of burning wood began to come off the dining room ceiling and everything was lit more brightly for a moment.
Once the flames had really got a grip then we switched round and pretended to fight the fire. Lizzie went upstairs and called to Jane Neck. She threw a bit of water on the flames using her bed pot.
I led Jane Neck down the stairs with an arm around her shoulders. I felt her shaking. As soon as I got her out onto the terrace she began to scream, “Fire!” The wind drowned her calling. She went back into the dining room and began to try and stamp out the flames by the body. We were both coughing something terrible from the smoke.
I smashed my left fist through the glass of the dining room windows and rammed the right one in also. I wanted to get rid of those hands, to mix my own blood with that of my mistress. The pain was devilish and I moaned to Jane about my arms as she reeled about the blazing mess of the dining room. Lizzie came out the smoke, got hold of me and whispered to remember that there was the fire and nort else. I was asleep and there was the fire. Nort else. She again said we were together in this. I asked her where Harrington had got to. She said the coward had gone and he was never here. Did I understand? I understood alright and I have vulishly kept to that story ever since.
The last moments have become a mazy blur. Mainly I tried to cover up everything as best I could, crawling through the smoke and throwing bloody towels and paper onto the fires. The body of my poor mistress was well alight then. I also pushed my pillow case into the fire and with it all the things I had aimed to take away with me that night. As far as I had known I was only going to take some valuables and run away with Lizzie to a new life that night. Instead what I got was bloody ruin.
It seemed like everything speeded up in the end. I put the empty oil can back in the pantry. My cut arms were killing me and my blood kept trickling onto everything. Gert flaming lumps begin to drop on my head as the ceiling caught and the dining room fire ate through to the upstairs rooms. Lizzie told me to go out and to get Gaskin. I ran to the Cary Arms and called out to him that Miss Keyse had been burnt to death.
The whole thing then opened up. Gasking was dressing and shouting questions to me, lights were beginning to appear at windows. I went back to the Glen next to the angry sea and saw Lizzie running to get Harris and the coastguards further up Beach Road. That’s how the whole …
[recording ends]
Two
Investigations
To Each His Own
I’ve replayed that particular loop many times. I suppose I should get it digitized in order to preserve it. The sound of the Webster machine has a weird clarity to it, you can hear each deep gushing sigh and gasp Lee made. He also seemed to be tapping something—there is a tickety-tack sound that recurs throughout this last one. I’ve wondered if it’s the way he’s gripping the microphone particularly tightly and maybe he’s rocking to and fro and knocking against something. My transcription has not really captured his spooky breathing and groaning. It sounded like he’s in some sort of chamber. Perhaps he crawled into the bathroom to make it. He seems as if he was at the farthest reaches from us when recording this yet maybe he is the nearest to telling the truth. The whole sad business threatens to infect you when you listen to it. It seems to filter into one’s empty spaces like blown sand. At least it does mine. It really was a grue-fest, that night at the Glen.
I don’t mind saying that I’d always thought that Lee was guilty. It’s been my unconscious assumption that the male has a tendency to dissemble, distance and deny. It turns out that I was partially right. Lee had indeed ended Miss Keyse’s life but he seems to have done it out of the motive of easing her suffering. That and being unable to say ‘no’ to Lizzie. His sister had obviously got her claws back into him and dragged him into the whole mess. I’m still not sure if she planned for Harrington to be around on that night, perhaps as insurance in case Lee failed to go through with the plan to rob Miss Keyse and scram. More likely I suppose was that Harrington had sensed Lizzie was betraying him and had turned up to confront her on that night. Lee wasn’t much given to charity, though his mistress’ agony evidently did touch him on the murder night. It took Lizzie’s hard and forceful hands to drive his knife hand down.
No wonder Lee felt able to believe he was innocent yet still labored under a blood-guilt all his life. The horrible events on that night and Lizzie’s betrayals help explain his disconnected state during the inquest and the trial. Lee must have felt that he carried Miss Keyse within him forever; she became part of him. It seems likely that Lizzie remained his dark angel all through his younger life. It’s clear even at the trial that he was still crazy about her even as she strung that hanging rope around his neck with her evidence. I reckon that he would have kept on looking for her after being let out of prison if not for that 1908 article in the English newspaper saying that she had made a death-bed confession.
I never went to my own parents’ funeral. I guess people thought I was still in shock. I was thirteen. The last time I saw my dad was that terrible moment when I punched him and he fell backwards into the book case and there was a splintering of glass. I used to get those True Detective magazines as a teen. I’d stare at the pictures of the dead. Victims of killings. I wanted to understand what had happened to them. I’d try and get closer and closer to the images until they blurred out into black dots. The dead, they turn their faces away from you even though you can never get rid of them.
I’m not sure when Lee made those last recordings, maybe the early weeks of March, 1945 before he got too weak to move. There was one more fragment of wire recording left unplayed. I was greedy for more revelations and couldn’t wait to spool it up and run it.
What I got seemed like a blank recording then halfway along came the rich breathy voice of an old-time radio announ
cer introducing a new tune, “Alright, listeners, let’s sizzle with the Modernnaires,” then there was a flourish of twirling strings and a syrupy song played. It sounded like music you get in shopping malls or elevators. I worked out the song was called ‘To Each His Own’. It was apparently a hit in 1946 for a number of singers including Tony Martin and the Ink Spots. It seemed a total bummer to have such a wild card stuck into the rich pack of Lee’s recordings. It must have been recorded by Doctor Kaiser at least a year after Lee had died. Maybe he made many recordings and this was only a chance survivor. I wasn’t sure why he chose it. The song implies that there is a coupling in the universe, that for love to flourish it must be reciprocated. The song lyrics are full of paired images. It’s a clunking, sickly ditty. I even took to playing it loudly in my apartment, crooning along to, “if a flame is to grow there must be a glow. To open each door is a key. I need you I know, I can’t let you go, your touch means too much for me…” The more I listened to them however, the words began to grow a new significance. The lyrics stuck with me and became strangely catchy; sometimes I imagined it was John Lee singing them to me.
At some stage those faintly mocking lyrics of ‘To Each His Own’ pushed me into the sudden ugly thought that this whole thing might be hoax. The idea was like a fish flopping in my chest. Maybe someone with an infernal talent for mimesis had created the wire recordings and planted the stuff in the box. The whole thing could be an obscure con like the Maybrick diary they tried to sell a few years back. I was relieved to argue myself out of that notion—for one thing that old Lysol box in the yard sale was clearly due for the trash bin if I hadn’t come along. Usually one wants to profit from the labor of an elaborate hoax. Surely there was enough weight of evidence there to anchor me to the truth?