Hushed in Death

by Hushed in Death (retail) (epub)

  Lamb and Rivers went to the French doors off the rear terrace and found them locked. “If the front door is also locked we’ll have to break this one down when we get enough men out here to do a proper search,” Lamb said.

  He went with Rivers back round to the front of the house and saw him off down the street, then spoke with Brandt who had stood by, waiting.

  Brandt told Lamb that he’d been concerned when neither Fox nor the Hitchenses had come to the shelter on the previous night and had decided that morning to check on them. “I went to Alan’s first,” he said. “And I found him, just as you’ve seen.”

  “Tell me exactly what you found,” Lamb said. “Be as detailed as you can.”

  “I knocked on the front door first, then came round the back when I got no answer. The door to his studio was open and I saw Alan lying on the floor. I have to admit that my first thought was that he’d passed out drunk. That’s what I’d been thinking all along—that he’d slept right through the air raid last night. I called his name, but he didn’t answer, so I went inside with the intention of shaking him, to see if I could awaken him. But seeing the blood pooled round his head stopped me. Then I saw the pistol lying by his hand. I immediately decided that I should call the police and, as I said, I was coming back down the High Street to call you when we ran into each other.”

  “Did you notice anything else that was strange or out of place?”

  “No.”

  “Was there a painting on the easel?”

  “I didn’t notice. The only thing I saw was Alan lying there. That was enough.”

  “Did you touch or move anything in the studio?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see anyone else in the High Street as you walked up here?”

  “No one.”

  “Do you know if Alan Fox was having an affair with Theresa Hitchens?”

  “I don’t. As I told you before, I’m not really privy to the village gossip.”

  “Do you know of anyone else in the village who was his lover, even in the past?”

  Brandt looked away briefly.

  “Mr. Brandt?” Lamb said.

  “It was a long time ago,” Brandt said. “Not long after her husband killed himself. Alan swooped in on Janet; he was like that. I don’t think it lasted long. In fact, I’m certain it didn’t.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “Janet told me, years ago.” He briefly looked askance again, then said, “I suppose I should have told you this as well, though I truly thought it made no difference. At least until now. Janet has begun a love affair with one of the patients at the sanatorium.”

  “James Travers?”

  “Yes, Travers.”

  “Did she also tell you this or did you divine it from seeing Travers come round?”

  “Janet told me. She confides in me, you see; we confide in each other. Janet and I are more alike than you might think, Chief Inspector. She is also a bit of a loner in this village—she’s different, you see, as I am different. She’s never found an adequate replacement for her late husband, though many men have tried to replace him through the years. Despite her attractiveness to men, Janet is quite lonely—so lonely, in fact, that she’s dedicated her life to proving that the living can still communicate with the dead and that therefore hope remains that she and her husband needn’t be apart forever. I think her attraction to Travers is partly due to the fact that he reminds her of Cyril Lockhart.”

  “And how are you different, Mr. Brandt?”

  “Well, look round you, Chief Inspector. I’ve never been married and have no children. I live alone, spending my time writing plays and stories and novels that no one wants to publish. Were it not for the money my parents left me, I might well be destitute. On top of that, my best friend in the world is a snake.”

  Lamb thought he understood what Brandt was saying.

  Brandt sighed. “Janet is the only person who knows the truth,” he said. “And now you are the second. And yet I trust you, Chief Inspector; trust in your discretion. Though I can’t help what people might think or conclude about me, I’ve had no real trouble here in Marbury and would like to keep it that way, obviously.”

  “As long as it has no bearing on my inquiry, I consider your personal life none of my business, Mr. Brandt,” Lamb said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Brandt said.

  “One more thing, Mr. Brandt. Do you know if Alan Fox was left-handed?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  LAMB SENT BRANDT HOME, THEN STOOD BY THE SCENE FOR NEARLY an hour, during which he wondered if Alan Fox was really the type of man who would resort to suicide. Based on his lone meeting with Fox, he wouldn’t have thought so. Fox had seemed to him defiant and egotistical, the kind of man who, though he might have felt despair keenly enough, had too much pride to give in to it. In the meantime, he was not surprised to discover that Travers and Lockhart had become lovers. He had sensed a bond between them that was stronger than the one they pretended to have in public.

  He thought, too, of what Arthur Brandt had confessed to him and realized that Brandt must have come to trust him implicitly. He hoped that he would have no reason to betray that trust—and especially that Brandt himself would not give him reason to. Even so, he had to consider, at least for the moment, the idea that Brandt might have killed Fox.

  Rivers finally returned with Winston-Sheed, followed ten minutes later by Larkin and Sergeant Cashen, who arrived with six uniformed men, two of whom stayed with Horace Hitchens—who had not yet come round enough to be interviewed—so that Wallace could join the team at Fox’s cottage.

  “The thing appears to be rather straightforward,” the doctor told Lamb after having a look at Fox’s body. “He was shot—or shot himself—at point-blank range in the left temple at a point of about an inch inward from the brow and an inch above the eye. The bullet went through his brain and exited the skull on the right side in roughly the same area as the bullet entered on the left, though the center of the exit wound is at a slightly higher spot than that of the entrance, which suggests that the bullet traveled at a slight upward trajectory. It seems to have gone straight through his brain.”

  “Does he have any other wounds?” Lamb asked.

  “Not that I could see. Obviously, I’ll know more once I get him on the table.”

  “Would the shot have dropped him instantly?”

  “Yes.”

  Winston-Sheed was silent for several seconds, then said, “He had to have been left-handed. He couldn’t have shot himself in this fashion with his right hand.”

  “He was left-handed,” Lamb said.

  “Well, that brings me to something else that I must tell you, Tom,” the doctor said. “I finished Joseph Lee’s autopsy last night. Whoever killed him was almost certainly right-handed.”

  “Lee was dead by the time he went into the pond,” Winston-Sheed continued. “The blow to the back of the head killed him, though I’m not sure how much time elapsed between the moment he was struck and when he went into the water, though I shouldn’t think it was long. The alcohol level in his blood was quite high, and I’ve no doubt that he was drunk at the moment he was killed. It’s possible that the killer put him into the pond just to make sure that he was good and truly finished off.”

  “Why do you say the killer was right-handed?” Lamb asked.

  “He was struck only once and from behind. The blow caved in the upper right rear portion of his skull, which means the killer could not have been left-handed, unless he swung the murder weapon backhanded, in the way a tennis player does who is returning a serve to his free-hand side, which seems to me unlikely. If the killer was lefthanded then I would have expected to see more damage to the left side of the head.”

  “And the murder weapon?”

  “I’d say that your guess of a fire poker is good one.”

  Larkin interrupted the pair to show them a spent slug he’d extracted from the frame of the window that
was just beyond Fox’s easel.

  “It looks to be a .32,” the forensics man said. “The doctor is right about the trajectory, by the way. The bullet was lodged in the frame with the front angled upward.”

  “It’s possible that if someone else shot Fox, then that person was shorter than he, hence the trajectory,” Winston-Sheed said, theorizing.

  “Walter Brandt is shorter that Fox,” Rivers said.

  “So is Theresa Hitchens,” Lamb said. “And she still hasn’t come home yet.”

  A light rain arrived as Vera had moved up the pathway toward Elton House.

  When she reached the sign announcing the boundary of the sanatorium property, which was just below the pond, she entered the wood on her right and began a careful search of the forest floor. Although she thought the chances of finding a murder weapon were slim, she nonetheless appreciated her father having shown he trusted her enough to send her on such a mission. If she did find the murder weapon, that would be something indeed, she thought.

  Off the trail, the woodland ground sprouted profusions of fern, low bramble, and yellow, white, and blue wildflowers, damp and glistening from the misty rain. Vera continued to move uphill, toward the pond and the house. She had walked only twenty yards or so when she reached a remnant of a wooden fence—a gray, splintered post, well into a state of disintegration, sticking from the ground like a sentry who refused to leave his post long after the threat against which he’d guarded had passed. It must have marked the estate’s property at some long ago point in time, she thought, when the land she now trod likely had been cleared for the raising of crops and livestock.

  She continued through the wood until it began to peter out into underbrush as she approached the pond. She returned to the trail and left the wood at a spot just below the pond. The tenuous rain continued to fall, coating everything, including Vera’s uniform, in an airy dampness.

  She picked her way out of the wood and through the brush to the pond’s edge, at a point near where the old wooden dinghy lay. She walked out onto the small rickety pier and looked into the dark water, its surface vaguely rippled by the rain. She recalled David plunging into the water and her briefly comforting him afterward. She’d told him then that he needn’t worry about proving himself anew to her father, or to Harry Rivers, or any of them. But he had said that no man fully trusts another whom he knows for certain to be weaker than himself. The stronger man might be patient, even compassionate, toward the weaker man, but his faith in that man is never complete and can never be.

  “But you’re not weak,” she had said.

  “I’m weaker than I was,” he said. “That’s a fact, and your father knows it.”

  She began to circle the pond, sticking close to the edge, in the hope of finding something that might prove to be worthwhile to the inquiry. She moved slowly, deliberately, and had made it about halfway round the circumference when she spied something lying in the tall grass just ahead that appeared to be covered with a blue cloth. She moved toward it and soon realized that she had found a person—a woman—curled on the ground with the cloth atop her. The woman didn’t move and seemed not to have noticed her approach. Vera knelt beside the woman and touched her. She was relieved to find that the body was warm and that the woman seemed to be sleeping.

  “Hello,” she said tentatively. The body stirred and emitted a low groan. She could not tell if the woman was injured, though she seemed not to be.

  “Hello,” Vera repeated, touching the woman’s shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

  The woman made no sound. Vera pulled at her shoulder to turn the woman toward her. The woman put up no resistance and allowed Vera to roll her onto her back. She stared up at Vera, her eyes open but brimming with confusion; she seemed not to know where she was and did not try to speak. She was young, perhaps no more than eighteen; her long tawny-colored hair was filthy and matted and partially obscured her face.

  Vera had never seen the woman before. But she reckoned that she had found Theresa Hitchens.

  The young woman offered no resistance as Vera helped her to her feet.

  “Theresa?” Vera said. “Are you Theresa Hitchens?”

  The woman nodded.

  “There now, Theresa. We’re going to get you home.”

  Vera noticed that Theresa wore no shoes and that her feet were muddy and scratched.

  “Where are you shoes?” Vera asked.

  “I don’t have any,” Theresa said blankly. She looked away and said, “I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost it all in the pond.”

  “What have you lost?”

  “Everything.”

  “You and I are going to walk down the path to the village now,” Vera said. “I’m going to take you home.”

  Theresa wrapped the damp, woolen blanket more closely about her but did not speak. Neither did she resist as Vera began to guide her along the edge of the pond toward the footpath.

  She walked, Vera thought, as if she’d been hypnotized. And yet, when they reached the footpath, she suddenly buried her face in the blanket and began to cry.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  RIVERS EASILY SHOULDERED OPEN THE FRENCH DOORS INTO FOX’S cottage, as he, Wallace, Larkin, and the uniformed men began a search of Fox’s studio and house. Lamb especially wanted to see something written in Fox’s hand that he could compare to the apparent suicide note, and asked the men to keep their eyes open, too, for the missing painting of the drowning woman.

  Thirty minutes later, Rivers showed Lamb numerous documents in Fox’s handwriting that appeared to match the writing in the letter they’d found on the Victrola. On many of them Fox had drawn the “fox” caricature next to his signature.

  “Any sign of the painting?” Lamb asked.

  “No, but I think we’ve found something better,” Rivers said. He produced a sheaf of papers that he placed on a table in Fox’s sitting room. “They’re love letters from Theresa Hitchens. It appears that Fox had gotten her pregnant and was pressuring her to abort the child. In the last letter, which is dated only two days ago, she tells Fox she doesn’t want to go through with the termination.”

  Lamb leafed through the letters and read portions of them. As he finished, Vera came into the room.

  “I’ve found Theresa Hitchens,” she said. “She was lying in the grass by the pond. I think she’s in shock.”

  Lamb went to Vera. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. But I’m worried that something has happened to her. She seems to have lost her senses. I took her to Mr. Brandt’s house. I thought that I couldn’t take her to the pub, given the shape her father is in. And I couldn’t bring her here.”

  “You did right,” Lamb said.

  He turned to Rivers. “Tell Wallace and Larkin and the others to keep searching and make sure the doctor has the assistance he needs to move Fox’s body, then join me at Brandt’s,” he said. “It’s just down the hill on your right, just before you reach the church.”

  “I should go with you,” Vera said. “I think she trusts me. She hasn’t said much of anything but neither did she fight me.”

  Lamb looked at Vera. He felt proud of the way in which she’d handled herself. “All right,” he said.

  A few minutes later, Lamb, Rivers, and Vera were gathered round Theresa Hitchens at Arthur Brandt’s dining table. Brandt, who now stood off by the door, had fixed Theresa a cup of tea and coaxed from her the damp blanket that Vera had found her lying beneath, which he’d replaced with one of his own. She now sat huddled with the dry blanket round her shoulders as she sipped the tea. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

  “How are you, Miss Hitchens?” Lamb said.

  Theresa did not answer.

  Lamb thought that Vera probably was right; Theresa Hitchens likely had experienced some sort of shock. But he sensed that she also might be at least partially playacting, and decided to test this.

  “I know about you and Alan Fox, Theresa,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen the letters you wrote to him. He kept them.
Can you tell me about that?”

  Theresa put her hand to her mouth and her eyes began to well with tears. Clearly, she understood of what he was speaking.

  Theresa bit her hand in an effort to stop her tears. “How do you know about the letters?” she asked.

  “We came upon them as part of our inquiry.”

  “Alan gave them to you?”

  “Yes,” Lamb lied. He was not yet prepared to tell her that Fox was dead for fear that the news might tip her over the edge. He also had to consider the possibility that she might have killed Fox over his pressuring her into an abortion and then tried to make it look like suicide. He moved his chair a bit closer to the table, so that he could speak to her in a quieter tone.

  “When did you find out that you were pregnant, Theresa?” he asked. He almost whispered it.

  Theresa slumped in the chair and closed her eyes. She said nothing and made no movement.

  “I know that Alan was not happy about the baby,” Lamb continued. “That must have been terrible to endure. You must have felt as if you had no one to turn to.”

  Theresa squeezed her eyes shut and tightened her lips.

  “I know that you can hear me, Theresa, and that you understand,” Lamb said. “And I know that although this must be almost impossible for you to speak of, I believe that you had the termination last night. Is that right? Is that why you ran away?”

  Theresa burst into tears and buried her face in her crossed arms on the table. Lamb backed off and let her cry. After a couple of minutes, he looked at Vera and gestured for her to go to Theresa. Vera moved next to Theresa and gently touched her hair.

  “It’s me, Theresa. Vera; I found you by the pond.”

  Again, Theresa didn’t move or make a sound, other than some low sobbing that signaled that she had, for the moment, cried herself out.

  “I don’t blame you for being frightened,” Vera continued. “I would be too. And angry. Are you angry? Angry at what you have been forced to do?”