Hushed in Death

by Hushed in Death (retail) (epub)

  Rivers smiled just a little and said, “Tally ho.”

  Lamb returned to the house to tell Hornby that he could now allow his patients and staff to come and go from the house. He was met in the hall by Nurse Stevens, who said that Hornby was not available—he was in a session with a patient—and that she would relay the message to him and let the staff know.

  Lamb then went out to his car, where he found Vera waiting for him, leaning against the bonnet.

  “Have you been terribly bored?” he asked her.

  “Not really. I took a stroll round the place, as you suggested. It must have been quite a nice place in its day, but it’s just kind of ragged now. It’s sad, really.”

  She dug into her pocket and withdrew from it the stick of gum. “And I found this: American gum; Wrigley’s Spearmint. It was lying on the ground behind the house. It looks as if it might have been lying there for a while, though it’s clearly never been opened.”

  Lamb took the gum and briefly examined it. He thought of the American Lucky Strike cigarettes that Travers had offered him, and the lieutenant’s comment that the sanatorium “seemed to have an endless supply of the things.”

  Lamb thought he knew the origin of the gum and the cigarettes. For two years, through the “lend-lease” program, American ships laden with food, war matériel, vehicles, and other essential supplies had called at British ports, including Southampton and Portsmouth, from which the supplies were distributed both to the military and civilians. The goods shipped into the southern ports moved through Hampshire on their way to London and the rest of England. Many of these goods were rationed, including some foods, and, as always, a black market had arisen to barter goods stolen from the ships that had become either scarce or hard to obtain because of rationing. Some people were willing to pay exorbitant prices for certain commodities, mostly petrol, food, liquor, and cigarettes. This did not necessarily mean that the food and cigarettes he’d seen in Elton House had been obtained illegally. But all of it taken together—the coffee, the milk, the “endless” cigarettes, and now the gum—made him suspicious.

  “What’s behind the house?” he asked.

  “Some old stables and a carriage house. But they are shuttered and boarded up.”

  “Do you mind if I keep this?” Lamb said, pulling a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and placing the gum within it before folding and replacing it.

  Vera smiled at her father. “Only if you promise not to chew it—finders-keepers after all—though I’d be happy to split it with you.”

  Lamb returned the smile. “I promise.”

  ELEVEN

  VERA PUSHED THE WOLSELEY'S START BUTTON, BUT THE CAR MERELY sputtered.

  “Wonderful,” she said under her breath. Her father’s aging car, she knew, had a habit of developing a case of the fits and starts, though they had experienced no problems with it since she had become his driver.

  “Try again,” Lamb said patiently. “It can be obstinate.”

  Vera pushed the button again—and again the car only coughed.

  “Give it a few seconds and then try a third time,” Lamb said, trying to sound optimistic.

  Vera did as her father advised; when she pushed the button a third time the car rumbled to life.

  “You know what they say about the third time,” Lamb said.

  Vera knew, but said instead, “That it’s too many?”

  “Then you do know,” Lamb said, kidding her.

  Vera headed the Wolseley down the driveway to the road, where she made a left and moved down the hill into Marbury. As they drove, Lamb stole a glance at his daughter. He was certain that Vera had wanted to say something to him when he had dropped her at the car earlier, but had held back from doing so. He thought that Wallace’s actions at the pond might have distressed her. But he decided for the moment not to broach the subject.

  The slope flattened as they entered the outskirts of Marbury, which lay in a valley formed by an insistent, tea-colored brook called the Bottle. They began to pass stone cottages with slate roofs and well- tended front gardens.

  As they reached the center of the village, the High Street split and snaked its way round both sides of an oval-shaped green that was roughly seventy-five yards long and perhaps thirty wide. On the opposite end of this oval the split lanes converged again and headed uphill to the village’s eastern end.

  Vera maneuvered down the lane on the left side of the green, which was lined with small shops, including a tea shop called London House. Near the place where the lanes converged sat a pub called the Watchman, and just east of it, a small gravel-and-dirt lot that lay hard by a stone arch bridge that conveyed the High Street over the Bottle.

  Vera parked in this lot and shut off the car, which wearily sputtered into silence. “It doesn’t sound right,” she said of the motor.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Lamb agreed. But he had no time to worry about the car. And he was concerned that Vera had eaten no lunch. He put his hand to his brow and squinted across the green. At its center was a vertical marble obelisk that he guessed contained the names of the men from Marbury who had given their lives for England in various wars.

  “The tea shop looks friendly,” he said to Vera. “Why don’t you take a bit of a break and see if they’ve any sort of worthwhile lunch. I’m going to hike up the hill and see if I can’t locate this man who argued with Lee.”

  Vera was hungry and the idea of getting lunch appealed to her. “All right,” she said. “But what about you; have you eaten?”

  “I had some very delicious coffee at Elton House.”

  “Yes, but coffee isn’t lunch, dad.”

  “I’ll survive. Go ahead now and I’ll see you back here in a bit.”

  Climbing the High Street from the village center, Lamb soon reached the Church of All Saints. He paused to gaze at the 17th-century building and saw the path leading round to the rear of the church along which Travers claimed he’d been walking when he’d heard Lee and Fox begin to argue. According to Travers, this path led round to the back of the church, where it connected to the path that led to Elton House and that passed the pond.

  He continued up the road for about fifty yards, until he spied, on his right, a wooden mailbox with the name FOX painted on it in white letters. Next to the name was a small cartoonish drawing of a fox’s face, made with two dots on either side of a cross, all of which was contained inside a V. A narrow lane led off the High Street to a cottage about thirty yards distant. As Lamb made for the front door, he heard the faint sound of orchestral music. He knocked upon the red door and waited a full minute before trying again; but neither try resulted in anyone answering.

  He stood by the door and listened more closely and soon determined that the music was coming from the rear of the house. He moved round to the left side of the house, where he found a low whitewashed wooden gate and stone path leading round back to a small stone terrace that had at its center a single round table made of metal, painted bright red, with four matching metal chairs circling it. The table held a half-dozen empty ale bottles and a yellow ceramic bowl filled nearly to its brim with cigarette butts. And it was here that Lamb found the source of the music—a large wood-slat garden shed. The shed’s door was open and the sound of an orchestra cascaded from it. Through a smudged window to the left of the door Lamb could just make out the figure of a man who appeared to be standing before a painter’s easel.

  As he moved to the door, the first thing Lamb saw inside was a Victrola, perched upon a rickety wooden table, from which the music emanated. Next to the table, a collection of phonograph records lay in what had once been a case for wine bottles. Lamb now saw the man, who had his back to the door. He was indeed standing before a large easel that he was filling with blotches of green and blue oil paint. The rest of the room was filled with canvases—some finished and some blank—leaning against the walls and a potting table beneath the window that was covered in scattered painter’s supplies: brushes, tubes of paint, glass jars fu
ll of oils and thinners. Most appeared to Lamb to be portraits of people done in what he thought must be the modern fashion, people rendered as multicolored geometric shapes.

  Unaware of Lamb’s presence, the painter stepped back from his work, as if appraising it, a half-smoked cigarette hanging on for dear life from his lips. He wore paint-stained green corduroy trousers held up by a leather belt inlaid with red, yellow, and blue beads and a rough brown cotton shirt. Fingers of his hair stuck up slightly, as if he’d recently run his hands through it.

  “Mr. Fox?” Lamb said. He nearly had to shout the name to be heard over the music. “Alan Fox?”

  Startled, Alan Fox turned round quickly, causing the lengthy ash clinging to his cigarette to fall away onto the well-trodden wooden floor.

  “Who are you?” Fox said, squinting at Lamb. He seemed poised to defend himself with the sable-haired brush, filled with blue paint, that he held in his left hand.

  Lamb pulled his warrant card from the pocket of his jacket and showed it to Fox.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Lamb,” he said. He nodded at the Victrola. “Might you turn that off for a moment, so that we can speak properly?”

  Fox stood still. “I’m busy,” he said. “Come back later. I’ll speak to you then.” He began to turn away from Lamb.

  “Joseph Lee was murdered last night, and I intend to speak to you about that now, Mr. Fox,” Lamb said, deciding he had no time to waste with Fox. “We can do it here or in a cramped little room in Winchester, with no windows. The choice is yours.”

  Fox turned back round to face Lamb; he sullenly walked to the Victrola and switched it off with an angry flourish. He took the cigarette from his lips, dropped it on the floor, and ground it out with the toe of his boot.

  “Did you say that Lee is dead?” he asked Lamb.

  “Yes. He was found this morning on the grounds of Elton House with his head battered in.”

  Fox sighed, then nodded toward the table in the middle of the terrace. “All right,” he said. “We can talk out there.”

  Fox moved toward the door and Lamb stepped back to let him pass, then followed him to the metal table, where they sat across from each other with the empty beer bottles and the ash tray between them. Fox immediately took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one. Lamb noticed that the brand was not American, but French.

  “You don’t seem too surprised to hear that Joseph Lee is dead,” Lamb said.

  “Well, I’m not—then again, if you told me he’d just gone off and married Greer Garson, I wouldn’t be surprised, either,” Fox said nonchalantly. “I know nothing about the man, really, and care even less.”

  “And yet you struck him in the face two nights ago during an argument over a woman,” Lamb said without emotion.

  Fox sat back in his chair and struck a contemplative pose, with his arm across his chest and the fingers of his right hand pressed against his mouth. He did not speak for about ten seconds before he took his hand from his mouth and said, “I hit him once and knocked him down in self-defense. He was badgering me and had been for at least two hours in the pub. Then he tried to follow me home and accosted me on the way. The stupid sod had it in his head that the publican’s daughter was in love with him and that I was trying to steal her heart away. The whole thing would have been laughable if it wasn’t so bloody pathetic. I knocked him down and I went on my way and I haven’t seen him since.”

  Fox took a drag from his cigarette and added, “He struck me as a repugnant little man who lived in a fantasy world of his own construction.”

  “Do you have any connections to Elton House?”

  “None.”

  “Have you ever been in Joseph Lee’s cottage?”

  “Never.”

  “So I shan’t find your fingerprints about the place, then?”

  Fox smiled. He exhaled smoke, then looked directly at Lamb and said, “No.”

  “Was Joseph Lee blackmailing you, Mr. Fox?”

  “Blackmailing me? Absolutely not.”

  Lamb did not answer.

  Fox then smiled—a cracked, leering grin. “You’re just guessing, Lamb; yes, I see it. You’ve nothing, no evidence, and yet you’ve still got a murder you must clear up, else your boss won’t be pleased. Am I right? Perhaps you’ve bollixed a whole string of cases recently and this one could be your last chance.”

  “Where were you last night?” Lamb asked.

  “Here, from tea time on.”

  “Can anyone else confirm that?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “What is your relationship with Theresa Hitchens?”

  “Ah—so you know her name. You have been on the job, then. But to answer your question, nothing. I have no relationship with her beyond her serving me a drink now and again.”

  “Why did Joseph Lee single you out, then, as his competition?”

  “As I just said, there was no competition, except for the one that sprang from Lee’s pathetic fantasy world. I suggest you ask Theresa if she had even the slightest interest in Lee. He was a sad nonentity who drank too much and who had created a dream world in which he was a man of consequence. It’s not an uncommon occurrence after all.”

  “Neither is murder.”

  Fox stood. “You’re fishing, Chief Inspector, and I’ve grown tired of it. I’ve answered your questions truthfully, but you seem uninterested in the truth. And so I’m going to have to insist that you leave now.”

  Lamb also stood. “Very well, Mr. Fox. I advise you not to leave Marbury.”

  Fox took a drag from his cigarette and nodded toward the gate, encouraging Lamb on his way.

  “I wish I could say it was a pleasure meeting you, but I’d be lying if I did,” he said.

  TWELVE

  LAMB HEADED BACK TOWARD THE CENTER OF MARBURY, THE landscape leveling as he reached the stone bridge beneath which flowed the Bottle.

  He stopped on the bridge to smoke a cigarette. He had found Fox arrogant but also genuinely confident. He smoked the cigarette to a nub then dropped the butt into the Bottle; the thing hit the water with a fizzle and final pant that put Lamb in mind of a man’s dying sigh, and he watched it sail away beneath the bridge, on the stream’s swift current. Beneath the brook’s surface, rushes clung to the stones just below the surface, looking very much, he thought, like a woman’s long hair flowing behind her, putting him in mind of mermaids—and, he thought, the tale of the water nymph, Ondine. He wondered if the flowing rushes were the source of such myths—of the stories of beautiful half-human female beings who lived beneath the water but yearned for men, and to enter into the light and air of human experience. He could not think of a tale or myth that told the opposite story, of feminine beauty pulling a man down to a depth from which he could not return, and in which he must inevitably drown. But this, he thought, was the more common occurrence.

  He reached the lot by the pub in which they’d parked the car, but did not find Vera there. He looked across the green and hoped that she had taken him up on his suggestion to get lunch at the tea house, and then set off in that direction to find her.

  Vera reckoned that news traveled quickly in a small, rural place such as Marbury and that, by now, some word of the discovery of Joseph Lee’s body had managed to trickle down the hill and into the village.

  For that reason, she was reluctant at first to cross the green and enter the tea shop. Given her uniform, she was sure to draw questions. Not that she would mind answering them; she’d happily do so if she knew anything—anything at all, really—about what had happened at Elton House. All she really knew was that the gardener’s body had been found floating in the pond; beyond that, she was as ignorant as any passerby whom she might encounter.

  She found herself becoming irritated by her father’s standing suggestion that she “have a look round” whenever he left her to mind the car. She believed it was meant to mollify her—to help her ward off the boredom of having to stand by while he and the others w
ent to perform the actual police work.

  She was beginning the believe that perhaps the time had come to cut herself free from her parents’ anxieties for her—to declare her independence from their desire to protect her and take her chances with the call-up, or even to enlist in one of the military organizations for women. The army had begun to allow women they considered fit for the duty to join coastal antiaircraft batteries and she reckoned she could handle that. And yet, she must also consider David, who, she worried, probably would be as opposed as was her father to her taking on any sort of dangerous war duty.

  Her pangs of hunger urging her on, she put aside her concerns about fielding questions from villagers and headed toward the tea shop—though she found its door locked and a handwritten sign affixed to it that read, “Back in twenty minutes.”

  Frustrated, she decided there was nothing for it but to have a “look round” and so began walking up the High Street. She passed several people but none stopped to ask her questions, though they did indeed notice her uniform and nodded greetings to her as they passed, which she returned. Perhaps the uniform intimidated them, she thought; if the presence of a stranger dressed in police garb assuredly meant bad news, then perhaps the locals didn’t want to hear it. Except for these few people, though, she found the High Street strangely deserted, as if most of Marbury had gone into hiding.

  She walked for what she reckoned was ten minutes, then turned round to head back toward the green. But as she turned, she found herself suddenly colliding with someone—a man. He had been approaching her from the left and she had walked directly into him as they crossed paths. Or he had walked into her. She wasn’t entirely sure. She looked to her left and saw there a narrow side street leading up the hill from the High Street—and she became aware that the man’s glasses had fallen from his head and that he had dropped something else besides. She took a step back and watched the man bend to pick up his glasses.