Hushed in Death

  “Oh, my,” she said. “I’m very sorry.”

  The man found his glasses and put them on. He straightened and looked at Vera through them, squinting a bit. “Oh, no, no,” he said. “No, please. My fault—my fault entirely. I hope you aren’t hurt.”

  “I’m fine,” Vera said.

  The man smiled. “I wasn’t looking where I was going; I had my nose in a book, I’m afraid.”

  He looked at the ground. “Speaking of which, where is the culprit?” He saw the book lying in the road on its spine. “Ah, here we are,” he said and picked it up. As he bent over, his glasses slid down his nose and, when he straightened again, he pushed them back onto the bridge with his left index finger.

  Vera saw that the book was Voltaire’s Candide, which she’d read in school and liked. The man was a few inches taller than she and rather thin. He had longish sandy hair and, Vera thought, a nice face—both handsome and friendly—marked out by large, expressive brown eyes, a smallish, almost feminine, nose, and an unaffected, genuine-seeming smile.

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t looking where I was going, either,” she said.

  “No harm done, in any case.” He paused a couple of seconds before saying, “You’re with the police, then?”

  “Yes. I’m an auxiliary constable.”

  “I see,” he said. “Are you here about the mess up at the hospital; the man in the pond?”

  “Yes—or, I’m here with the chief inspector. I’m his driver. He’s off interviewing someone at the moment, so I was just having a look round.”

  The man shook his head. “Terrible thing, murder,” he said. “We don’t get it round here, much—though it is rather eerie how much this one resembles the last one.”

  “The last what?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Perhaps you don’t know. The last time we had a murder in Marbury, the body also was discovered floating in the pond at Elton House; the lady of the house poisoned her husband, you see. At her trial, she claimed self-defense and it worked. She disappeared after that.”

  “Oh, my,” Vera said. “It all sounds so Agatha Christie.”

  “Indeed. I sometimes forget how moldy the whole affair has become.”

  “Did you know the man?” Vera asked. “The dead man, I mean?”

  “The husband? No, I’m afraid that all occurred before my time.”

  Vera smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant the dead man found this morning.”

  “Oh, yes, I see. No—no, I didn’t know him. I gather that he was the gardener up there, though.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  A few seconds of silence passed between them, before the man said, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch your name. Mine is Arthur Brandt.”

  Brandt extended his hand and Vera shook it lightly.

  “I’m Vera Lamb,” she said. “Constable Lamb.”

  Brandt bowed slightly. “I’m pleased to meet you, Constable Lamb.”

  “Well, in truth, it’s really Auxiliary Constable.”

  “All the same; if you wear the uniform, you assume the responsibility.”

  “Yes,” Vera said, pleased by Brandt’s answer. She raised her chin and fixed her eyes on a figure moving toward them up the High Street from the direction of the green.

  “Here comes the chief inspector now,” she said. “He’ll want me to drive him somewhere, I should imagine.”

  Brandt turned to see Lamb approaching them. Vera hoped that her father would understand not to address her in a familiar or unofficial manner. She didn’t want Arthur Brandt to know she was the head man’s daughter.

  “Hello, Chief Inspector,” she said as Lamb reached them.

  To Vera’s relief, her father nodded and said, “Constable.” Better yet, he added, “Anything to report?”

  “Nothing as of yet,” Vera said. She turned toward Brandt. “This is the Chief Inspector,” she said, purposely leaving the surname unsaid.

  “This is Mr. Arthur Brandt,” she said to her father.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” Brandt said, offering Lamb his hand.

  “The pleasure’s mine,” Lamb said. He recognized the name as the one that Mrs. Lockhart had mentioned, the journalist who’d chronicled the murder of Lord Elton.

  “We were just discussing the fact that there was a previous murder at Elton House some years back,” Vera told her father.

  “Yes, Janet Lockhart mentioned to me that you had done some research on the matter,” Lamb said, speaking to Brandt.

  “Ah, so you’ve spoken to Janet, then.”

  “Yes, she found Mr. Lee’s body in the pond this morning.”

  Brandt’s brow clouded with concern. “Oh my,” he said. “Poor Janet. I hope she hasn’t had a shock.”

  “She seemed fine,” Lamb said.

  “Yes, well, that is Janet. She’s nothing if not stoic. And she told you of the case of the Eltons, then?”

  “Briefly, yes. She said you had written about it for the newspapers.”

  “Yes, I wrote a piece that appeared in the Sunday Times—looking back on a scandalous, though mostly forgotten case of murder twenty-five years after the fact. That sort of thing. Sells newspapers, you see. Something about twenty-five years having passed lends a thing a unique importance, apparently, though I’ve never understood why. Same with ten, or fifty, or seventy-five. At any rate, having grown up here in Marbury, I felt it was a natural story for me to write.”

  “You’re a journalist, then, Mr. Brandt?” Vera said.

  “Oh, no. No. Hardly a journalist. I’m a playwright—so to speak. I guess you’d call me one of the starving variety.”

  He turned again to Lamb.

  “Not that it makes much difference to your current problems, Chief Inspector, but I’d be happy to give a copy of the piece if you’d think it worthwhile.”

  “Thank you for the offer, Mr. Brandt,” Lamb said. “I might take you up on it if, as you say, it comes to matter. In the meantime, I wonder if you knew Joseph Lee?”

  “The gardener? I’m afraid I didn’t, no. I was just telling Constable Lamb that it seems such a sad affair.”

  “Had you heard anything about him getting into a row with another man by the church two nights ago?”

  “No, and I live quite near to the church.”

  “Do you know Alan Fox?”

  “Of course. Everyone in Marbury knows Alan.” He looked quizzically at Lamb. “I hope you don’t think that Alan had anything to do with this man’s murder, Chief Inspector. That is, if I’m not out of line in asking.”

  “No, you are not out of line,” Lamb said simply. “How well do you know Mr. Fox?”

  “Well enough, though I would hesitate to call us bosom companions. Alan also is a native of Marbury, so I have known him most of my life—though, of course, he’s quite a bit older than I. When I was a young boy he was already a man.”

  Lamb touched the brim of his fedora. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Brandt.”

  “Glad to be of help.”

  Lamb turned to Vera. “I have at least one more stop I’d like to make in the village this morning and I’ll need your assistance, Constable,” he said.

  “Right away,” Vera said, trying her best to sound like an eager-to- please underling. She turned to Brandt and said, “Thank you for the information, Mr. Brandt.” She found herself reluctant to say goodbye to Arthur Brandt with such an air of finality.

  Brandt blinked. “Of course. It was my pleasure.”

  He turned to Lamb. “Let me know if you’d like the story on Lady Elton,” he said. “It’s no problem, really.”

  Lamb nodded, then turned back toward the center of the village. Vera followed, nearly turning round to take a final look at Arthur Brandt, who stood by the lane and watched them leave.

  THIRTEEN

  AS THEY HEADED BACK DOWN THE HIGH STREET, VERA THANKED her father for not giving her away to Arthur Brandt.

  “I’m still a bit touchy about the nepotism,” she said.


  “Is that what has been bothering you, then?”

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, dad. But it’s so obviously unfair.”

  “It is indeed,” Lamb agreed.

  Vera looked at her father. She wanted to tell him that she was ready to break free, but found she could not quite speak the words. The time and the setting were wrong, she decided. Even so, given that they had broached the subject, she didn’t want to let it pass without saying something that might move them toward a resolution of the problem in the future.

  “I feel guilty,” she said. “Not only am I protected, but I’m doing so little to earn my keep. I’d feel better if I could at least contribute something.”

  By then, they had reached the car.

  “I understand why you feel as you do,” Lamb said. “In fact, I’m glad to hear that it bothers you; if it didn’t, I’d be more concerned.” He placed his hand on Vera’s arm. “I’m sorry that I’ve put you in this predicament, Vera. It wasn’t my intention, but I’m afraid I didn’t see all of the consequences as clearly as I should have when I came up with the bright idea of making you my driver. Perhaps I didn’t want to see them. At any rate, it is probably time for you and I and your mother to sit down again and discuss your future. I realize, as your mother does, that you can’t spend the rest of your life shuttling me here and there.”

  “I would like to talk about it,” Vera said. “It is time.”

  Lamb cocked his head in the direction of the pub, which lay to their right about fifteen yards down the High Street. “I’m afraid, though, that for the moment, I’m going to leave you with the car yet another time, while I interview the landlord of the pub and his daughter. By the way, did you ever get anything to eat?”

  “No, the tea shop was closed. The proprietor was out.”

  Lamb glanced across the green in the direction of the shop. “Now might be the time,” he said. “Once I finish here at the pub I’ll want to go back to Elton House.”

  He simply cannot stop acting like my father, Vera thought. Still, she was hungry now. Very hungry.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll make it quick.”

  “I hope I won’t be too long, either,” Lamb said.

  They stood facing each other in silence for a couple of seconds.

  “Thank you, dad,” Vera said finally.

  “You’re welcome, Vera.”

  He watched her head off across the green, then turned for the pub.

  The Watchman had yet to open for its evening hours. Lamb peered through the leaded glass of the front door but could see nothing inside. He knocked and waited but no one answered. He knocked again, louder this time. A few seconds later, the door opened and Lamb found himself facing a tall, stout, imposing-looking man he took to be the owner, Horace Hitchens.

  “Mr. Hitchens?”

  “Yes.”

  Lamb produced his warrant card and introduced himself. “I’d like a word with you and your daughter, Theresa, please.”

  “This about Lee, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had nothing to do with that, nor did Theresa.”

  “All the same. I’d like to speak to you and your daughter. I know that Lee argued with Alan Fox in your pub two nights ago.”

  “We had nothing to do with that, either. That were between Fox and Lee.” Hitchens did not move from where he stood. He was at least six inches taller, close to three stone heavier, and five or six years younger than Lamb.

  “Nevertheless, I’d appreciate your cooperation in the matter, and so I will ask again: May I come in?”

  “You can’t just barge into a man’s house. I know my rights, after all.”

  “Quite so,” Lamb said. “But I also have rights, Mr. Hitchens. I could, for example, arrest you for obstructing a murder inquiry and we could have this conversation at the nick in Winchester, where we tend to conduct our business in small, cramped windowless rooms.”

  Hitchens’s eyes widened in surprise briefly, then narrowed in anger. Even so, he stood back from the door.

  “Thank you, sir,” Lamb said as he crossed the threshold into the pub’s main room, which featured a bar along the wall opposite to the door, a trio of booths along the front window, and four square wooden tables in the center of the room. Just to the right of the bar a short hall ended at a closed door painted a bright red.

  Hitchens went to one of the tables in the middle of the room and silently sat down, glaring at Lamb, who sat across from him at the table.

  Lamb found Hitchens’s petulance annoying and suspicious. He wondered if father and daughter, having heard of Lee’s death, had discussed how to respond to questions about the altercation between the dead man and Fox. Indeed, he wondered if Theresa Hitchens wasn’t at that moment standing on the other side of the red door with her ear pressed against it, hoping to hear what her father said so that she could parrot it.

  “Will you fetch your daughter, please?” Lamb asked Hitchens. “I’d like to speak to her first.”

  He expected Hitchens to claim that his daughter was not at home. However, the publican pushed his chair back with more force than Lamb believed necessary and walked to the red door, which he opened.

  “Come out here, Theresa,” he said.

  Theresa Hitchens appeared in the room behind her father. She was of average height, plump and curvaceous, with shoulder-length blond hair and small black eyes. Lamb reckoned that she was about Vera’s age, perhaps a year older. Her father led her to the table. She said nothing as she sat and seemed uneasy. Lamb wondered about the source of her anxiety. Was it his presence or her father’s that worried her?

  “This man is from the police,” Horace Hitchens said to his daughter. “He wants to ask you about Joseph Lee.”

  Rather than sit again, Hitchens stood behind his daughter with his arms crossed.

  “I’m Detective Chief Inspector Lamb, Miss Hitchens,” Lamb said. “I’d like you to tell me what happened in the pub two nights ago involving Joseph Lee and Alan Fox.”

  Theresa turned to her right a bit, as if to look back at her father, then seemed to think better of doing so and turned back toward Lamb.

  “Mr. Lee started in harassing Alan—Mr. Fox,” she said. “Mr. Fox mostly minded his own business, but Mr. Lee was persistent.”

  “And what was Mr. Lee harassing Mr. Fox about?”

  This time Theresa did turn fully round to glance at her father before answering. Horace Hitchens nodded.

  “He said Mr. Fox was sweet on me,” Theresa said. “He said Mr. Fox was trying to steal me from him. But he was wrong, sir—Mr. Lee, I mean. I never had any interest in him, though he used to pay a lot of attention to me, flirt with me, like. But nothing ever happened between us. He said he had a letter—a love letter—from Mr. Fox to me. But Mr. Fox never sent me any love letters, sir.”

  “Did you see this letter?”

  “He was holding it up, waving it in the air, like, but I couldn’t see what was written on it.”

  “Did you notice what he did with this letter once he finished waving it round?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did he say how he came to possess this letter?”

  “No. I wondered about that too. As I said, I never had no love letters from Mr. Fox, or anybody. I wondered if Mr. Lee wrote it and only said that Mr. Fox had written it.”

  “How did Mr. Fox react to Mr. Lee’s accusations?” Lamb asked.

  “He ignored him at first. Then after a time, he told Mr. Lee to shut up.”

  “Did he yell at Mr. Lee or threaten him?”

  “No, sir. He just sat at the bar, quiet, like, as he always does. Then he paid up and left. But Mr. Lee followed him out.”

  “Did anyone else follow Lee out?”

  “No, sir. At least not that I saw.”

  “Did you follow them?”

  Theresa sat back in her chair as if Lamb had taken a swing at her. “No, sir,” she said emphatically. “I thought the
ir leaving would be the end of it.”

  “Did Mr. Lee interact with anyone else at the pub that night?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Do you know if anyone was outside of the pub when the two of them left? Someone they might have encountered there?”

  “No.”

  Lamb looked at Horace Hitchens. “And you, Mr. Hitchens? Did you see anyone follow Fox and Lee out of the pub? Or do you know if anyone was outside the pub when they left?”

  “I saw no one.”

  “Did either of them return to the pub at any time that night?”

  “Lee did,” Horace said. “His nose was bloody. He asked for a towel and I gave him one.”

  “Did you ask him how he’d managed to get a bloody nose?”

  “I figured that Fox must have punched him. Were I Fox, I’d have punched him, the way he was going on.”

  “Did he say, specifically, that Alan Fox had punched him?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask. I got him the towel and he sat in the corner booth there for a bit nursing himself and then he left.”

  “Did anyone else offer Lee assistance?”

  “No. I don’t think anyone wanted to go near him, the way he was acting. He was not well-liked to start with. He were a braggart and a liar.”

  Lamb turned back to Theresa. “Did you offer Mr. Lee any assistance, Miss Hitchens?”

  “I just said no, we hadn’t done,” Horace Hitchens said, the blood rising in his face.

  “I’m asking your daughter, sir.”

  “No,” Theresa said, as her father made a noise of displeasure. “It was like my father said; I didn’t want to get tangled up in it. I don’t know where he got the idea that I was his girl, sir. I never led him on or said anything to him. I swear it. He just sort of seemed to have made it up in his mind, like.”

  “He was a queer man,” Horace added. “Not right in the head.”

  Horace put his large right hand on his daughter’s shoulder.

  “This is partly down to me,” he said to Lamb. “Theresa had nothing to do with any of this. I should have said something to Lee about his bothering her.”

  “Have either of you spoken to Mr. Lee or Alan Fox since the previous night?”