Hushed in Death

by Hushed in Death (retail) (epub)

  “No,” Hitchens said. “Neither of us have.”

  Lamb wondered if that was true but knew that Theresa would not contradict her father in Horace’s presence.

  With that, he stood, thanked the Hitchenses for their time, and left the pub convinced that at least one of the three people to whom he had spoken to in Marbury that morning had lied to him.

  FOURTEEN

  LAMB RETURNED TO THE WOLSELEY TO FIND THAT VERA WAS NOT there. He walked across the green and found her just finishing a plate of toast, jam, and cheese and a cup of tea. He waited for her to finish and pay and then the two of them headed back to the car. As they reached it, Arthur Brandt appeared, moving down the High Street at a jog. He held up in his right hand what appeared to be a newspaper.

  “Chief Inspector,” he yelled, “might I have a word?”

  He reached them, panting slightly.

  “So sorry to hold you up,” he said somewhat breathlessly. He bent over slightly and put his hands on his knees. “Whew! My fitness level is appallingly low.” He straightened again, took a deep breath. “All that time sitting at a desk staring at a typewriter has ruined me, I’m afraid.”

  “How can I help you, Mr. Brandt?” Lamb asked.

  Brandt held up the thing he’d been toting. It was indeed a newspaper—a portion of the London Times from a Sunday edition published in the spring of 1940.

  “I wanted to give you this; it’s the piece I wrote on the first murder at Elton House,” he said. “I know you said that you’d take it if you needed it but I thought it might prove useful and I wasn’t sure if I’d run into you or Constable Lamb again. I imagine you should be quite busy doing other more important things.”

  Lamb took the newspaper from Brandt and thanked him.

  “My pleasure, Chief Inspector,” Brandt said. He drew in another deep breath, which he released with a kind of happy shrug.

  Like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill yet another time, Lamb returned to Elton House. He wanted to check a final time on the progress Larkin, Rivers, and the others had made and wrap up for the day. On the following day, he would send Rivers into Marbury to conduct a house-to-house canvass of the village. He wanted to know who else in Marbury had witnessed the set-to between Lee and Fox in the Watchman and if anyone besides Travers had seen the men arguing by the church.

  Before heading to the pond, though, he asked Vera to show him the place where she had found the gum wrapper. She took him round the back to the horse sheds and pointed out the spot by the stables. Lamb squatted down to look at the spot, then glanced round the courtyard. He tried to open the double doors to the stables but found them locked, just as Vera had. The same was true of the doors to the carriage house.

  He looked at Vera and said, “Are you interested in doing a bit of snooping?”

  “Of course.”

  “All right, then. Let’s have a closer look round these buildings and along the back of the house. I’ll take the stables and you take the carriage house.”

  Lamb spent fifteen minutes patiently searching the area round the stables, but found nothing. Neither did he find anything along the base of the back wall of the house, though he recognized the doors he found there as those he’d seen in the kitchen that opened onto the courtyard.

  He did, however, notice tire tracks left in the mud by vehicles that had moved through the yard. It made sense that the clinic would take deliveries of food and other supplies round the back of the house and that some of this would be delivered by lorry. He wondered, though, if a secret cargo might also have found its way to the house by lorry. He made a rough measurement of one of the tracks and estimated its width at six inches and that it had made an impression in the hard packed mud that was perhaps a half-inch deep.

  Vera had more luck in her search round the carriage house. A mix of dried leaves and other natural detritus, blown there by the autumn and winter winds, had gathered in the one of the corners where the rear of the side of the house met the stone wall abutment, built into the slope that faced the house. Among this brown-gray pile of litter Vera spotted what appeared to be the yellowing edges of a slip of white paper. She stooped to pluck it from the pile and found that it was indeed a piece of paper, moist and partially balled. She was careful as she unfolded and flattened it. She saw that a portion of it seemed to have been torn away, leaving a jagged edge. She flipped it over and found written on its opposite side, in faded black letters: U.S. ARMY FIELD RATION D and just beneath that: 2 OUNCES NET WEIGHT. A horizontal fold line ran just below the writing and beneath that Vera found these words, stacked in three horizontal lines:

  MANUFACTURED BY

  HERSHEY CHOCOLATE CORPORATION

  HERSHEY, PA.

  She brought the paper up to her nose and sniffed it and found that it smelled as the dead leaves smelled. She moved the toe of her shoe through the detritus but found nothing else there. Believing she had struck gold, she went to her father and showed him the wrapper.

  “Look at this,” she said, gently handing the paper to her father. “Careful, it’s damp.”

  Lamb took the paper by its edge and laid it in the palm of his left hand. He took a second to read what was written on the paper.

  “Is it important?” Vera asked.

  “I think it might be.”

  Lamb handed the wrapper back to Vera and asked her to hold it while he removed from his pocket the handkerchief in which he’d placed the stick of gum. He opened the handkerchief and laid it on the ground between them and moved the gum to the corner. Vera then laid the chocolate wrapper in the middle of the handkerchief and Lamb carefully folded it and returned it to his pocket.

  “What is it?” Vera said.

  “I think it’s from a field ration—the sort of thing combat soldiers eat when they are in the line. The food comes in packets of this and that, wrapped in paper or foil. When I was on the Somme they gave us tinned meat and condensed milk, and crackers and biscuits in little packets like the one you just found.”

  “Yes, but do soldiers get gum and chocolate?”

  “We got hard little sweets sometimes,” Lamb said. “I imagine that the Americans have moved well beyond that by now. Gum and chocolate, certainly. And cigarettes. And who knows what else.”

  “Is this lend-lease, then?”

  “It’s got to be lend-lease. But I believe it’s meant for military rather than civilian use. This wrapper and the one round the gum you found are plain; but normal Hershey’s chocolate and Wrigley’s gum don’t come in plain wrappers. The ones you’ve found are from field rations meant to be issued to soldiers on the line. I’m nearly certain of it.”

  “Maybe Elton House is allowed some because it serves shell shocked men.”

  “That could be. That’s a question I intend to ask Dr. Hornby. The place also has a healthy supply of American cigarettes.”

  Lamb nodded toward the stables.

  “Perhaps it’s time we found out what’s behind those locked doors.”

  They went round to the front of the house and entered the foyer and found the door to the anteroom of Dr. Hornby’s office closed. Lamb tried the knob but it was locked. He knocked on the door but received no response.

  He looked round for someone who could help him but saw no one. With Vera at his heels, he moved down the main hall to the room in which Wallace and Cashen had interviewed the patients and staff, but found it empty. Frustrated, he went back to the foyer, where he again knocked on the door to the anteroom—and again received no answer.

  He turned back to the hall with the intention of checking the kitchen, when he saw Nurse Stevens heading toward him, apparently having just come from the cellar.

  “Chief Inspector,” she said, surprised to see Lamb again. “How can I help you?”

  “I’d like to speak with Dr. Hornby.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s gone to Southampton on business.”

  “Can you reach him there by telephone?”

  “I’m sorry, I
can’t. You see, I’m not exactly sure where he’s gone.”

  “Did he not tell you where he was going?”

  “No. He seemed to be in a bit of a hurry. He left a note on my desk in the anteroom. It said that he was going to Southampton and that he would return tomorrow morning. He didn’t say where he was going. He sometimes does that—leaves in a bit of a hurry. He has so many responsibilities.”

  “Did he leave you in charge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’d like to request your permission to open the stables and the carriage house at the back of the house. Both are locked.”

  “But why would you need to look in the stables, Chief Inspector? I doubt they’ve been used since the last war.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t believe it important,” Lamb said.

  “It would be irregular for me to do so without first speaking to Dr. Hornby,” she said. “In any case I haven’t the key.”

  “Is there only a single key to those locks?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. We simply don’t use them, you see, so there is no need, really, for duplicate keys. I’m surprised Dr. Hornby hasn’t had the sheds removed, to be honest. I should think they would be nothing more than vermin nests.”

  “Who has this single key?” Lamb asked, believing he knew the answer.

  “Dr. Hornby, of course.”

  Lamb found Dr. Hornby’s sudden trip to Southampton suspicious.

  “Very well, Nurse,” he said, then turned on his heel and strode out of Elton House with Vera at his elbow.

  FIFTEEN

  ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, THE TEAM MET AT THE NICK WITH Superintendent Harding to go over the day’s plan.

  Lamb began by running down all they had learned on the previous day, including the fact of the large sums of cash they’d found in Lee’s lodgings, and his and Rivers’s suspicion that Lee might have obtained it through blackmail. He also mentioned that they had found no fireplace poker in Lee’s cottage.

  Harding liked the notion that Alan Fox might have been a victim of blackmail. “That and the fact that the two fought; it’s our best connection of anyone with Lee,” he said. “Now we’ve got to figure out what Lee had over Fox.”

  “If anything,” Lamb added, aware that Harding enjoyed making giant leaps toward a quick result, even if those leaps were not always in the proper direction.

  Larkin said he’d spent some time examining the cash and discovered something odd on a five pound note.

  “It appears to be a doodle of a fox,” Larkin said. He held up the note and pointed out the drawing, which was just beneath the government’s rendering of Saint George slaying his dragon. Lamb recognized the doodle as the same one he’d seen on Fox’s mailbox and mentioned this.

  “It does resemble a fox,” Wallace said.

  “Indeed it does,” Harding agreed. “There you go, then, Tom. Another connection.”

  “Yes, but we have no idea whether Fox drew it, of course,” Larkin gently reminded the superintendent.

  “Isn’t just a bit too obvious, though, sir?” Wallace said to Harding. “What if someone is trying to frame Fox?”

  “How did it get in among Lee’s cash, then?” Harding parried.

  “Maybe someone planted it there. Lee’s room was tossed.”

  Harding looked at Lamb. “Tom?”

  “I don’t know,” Lamb said. “Fox is an artist—a painter. He might well doodle on his bank notes. But I think Sergeant Wallace is right. I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions for the moment.”

  Lamb then briefed the team on the chocolate and gum wrappers that Vera had found by the horse sheds and the seeming prevalence of American cigarettes at Elton House, all of which had led Lamb to wonder if Hornby was not obtaining black market lend-lease goods. He pointed out that one of Larkin’s duties that day would be to see if a facility such as the Elton House Sanatorium was eligible to receive lend-lease goods that normally would go to frontline soldiers. Lamb added that he had tried to discuss the matter with Hornby on the previous day, and to gain permission to open the horse sheds, but been frustrated by Hornby’s sudden disappearance to Southampton. He hoped to speak to Hornby later that morning, he said.

  “You don’t think he’s done a runner then?” Wallace asked.

  “No. He has too much invested in the sanatorium and his experiment. But it’s possible he’s worried that we might find something if we continue poking round the estate.”

  The team’s main goal that day was to complete a house-to-house canvass of Marbury, Lamb said. “It’s not a particularly big place so I hope that we can wrap it up before dark.”

  Rivers would lead the operation, seconded by Wallace, Cashen, and nine uniformed men.

  Larkin would remain in Winchester, where, in addition to checking on whether the sanatorium legally received lend-lease goods, he was to check the land records to see if a blueprint or some other document showing the layout of Elton House existed. Lamb also wanted the foren- sics man to sort through the notebooks and other papers they’d retrieved from Lee’s cottage, and to check on the criminal backgrounds—if any existed—of Joseph Lee, Alan Fox, Dr. Hornby, Janet Lockhart, James Travers, and the nurse, Matilda Stevens.

  Finally, he brought up Lord Elton’s murder at the house nearly three decades earlier and briefly described what had happened, as best he knew the details, including the fact Lord Elton’s body also had been dumped in the pond. He also said that he and Vera had met a local man named Arthur Brandt in Marbury who had given him a newspaper article he’d written that looked back on the case, and that he intended to read it when he got a chance, but only for the purposes of edification.

  “I tell you this because the subject is likely to come up as you interview the residents, and particularly the older ones who were living there at the time. That said, there is no reason to believe that it has anything to do with Lee’s murder—and please inform your teams that they should not speculate on whether or not it does with anyone in the village. If the people whom we interview don’t mention it, then we shouldn’t either.”

  Before the team left for Marbury, Vera and Wallace found a moment to talk alone. But their conversation devolved into an argument about marriage when Wallace had asked her why she was reluctant to discuss the matter.

  Did she not love him? he asked.

  “That’s not fair, and you know it,” Vera said, believing he had deployed the word—and indeed the very concept of love—as a kind of conversational weapon. Whenever he wanted to attack he brought up the word, she thought. Love. Did she not love him? Did she not believe that he loved her? It was almost as if he wanted her to swear an oath to him: I hereby love you. It was as if having given herself to him—in mind and body—hadn’t been enough proof of her love.

  Later, when the pair got into Lamb’s car along with Cashen, Lamb found the tension between them palpable, leaving him to wonder if the relationship between his daughter and his detective sergeant was coming to a head.

  SIXTEEN

  LAMB BURIED HIMSELF IN READING ARTHUR BRANDT'S NEWSPAPER account of Lord Elton’s murder as Vera, icily quiet, drove to Marbury. Wallace, who also made nary a sound, sat in the back with Cashen.

  The chief inspector found intriguing the story of Lady Elton’s botched attempt to make her husband’s killing appear to be an accidental drowning, and her being acquitted of the crime on the grounds of self-defense. Brandt, however, did not paint a portrait of Lady Elton as an innocent, frightened, and unalloyed victim-turned-killer; his story quoted several people who had lived in Marbury at the time describing Lady Elton as essentially cruel; they spread the rumor that she might gave had a lover who helped her to murder Lord Elton—a rumor for which no evidence ever had come to light.

  As they entered Marbury, Lamb noticed that the village had come to life since the previous day. More people were moving along the High Street near the green and the Watchman had opened. Vera parked in the same lot by the pub and the four of them exited the car to m
eet with Rivers and the uniformed men, who had come in two other cars. Lamb stuck around as Rivers deployed the men in three teams, each led by an officer—himself, Wallace, and Sergeant Cashen. Wallace would take his men into the east side of the village, while Cashen would take the west and Rivers and his men the shops and central Marbury.

  That done, Lamb and Vera returned to the Wolseley; Lamb was anxious to get back up the hill to Elton House and to speak with Dr. Hornby. But as he slid into the passenger seat, he glanced at Vera and saw the disquiet in her expression. She pushed the starter button with what he considered a bit too much force, though the car did not turn over.

  “Damn this thing,” Vera said under her breath. “Has it ever worked properly?”

  Lamb touched her arm and said, “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  Vera slumped behind the wheel. “No,” she said without looking at her father. Then she sighed heavily and said, “I don’t know.”

  “You argued with David this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at her father. “He wants to marry me.”

  “Do you want to marry him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking away again. She felt as if she might cry, but did her best to stop the tears. “It’s not that I don’t love him.” She shook her head. She looked at her father again. “It’s just that I feel as if I haven’t had a chance to live my own life yet. Everyone seems to want to create a life for me.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” Lamb said.

  “No—I don’t think you do, dad.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I know you only want the best for me, but I feel as if I don’t even know what I’m capable of. And yet I also feel as if I’m capable of so much. But I haven’t had a chance to find out what those capabilities are. And now David wants to marry me and I can’t help but feel as if I’d be agreeing to let myself be sewn up in a bag.”