Hushed in Death

  “Let me go!” she said.

  Lamb got his arm around her neck and began to pull her toward the bank closest to the house, where Rivers was now wading in to help.

  Vera reached them and helped her father to subdue the kicking, struggling Matilda Stevens. Then Wallace arrived and the three of them pulled the nurse to the bank, where Rivers, who had gone into the pond up to his knees, helped to pull her ashore with his good arm.

  All of them were soaked to the skin and partly entangled in long blades of the pond grasses, which clung to their shoulders and arms. Wallace and Lamb turned Stevens over and Wallace secured her hands behind her back with cuffs that Rivers handed to him.

  “Let me go, damn you!” the writhing Nurse Stevens gasped. “I want to go to Henry.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  TWO DAYS LATER, LAMB STOOD YET AGAIN ON THE EDGE OF THE pond at Elton House, this time with Superintendent Harding, as they watched two three-man teams probe the pond from row boats, searching for Matilda Stevens’s pistol and, Lamb hoped, Alan Fox’s painting of what he believed depicted Lady Elton drowning as the Algiers steamed away over the horizon.

  In the wake of the standoff two days earlier, Lamb had found himself in the hospital in Winchester, where doctors examined Janet Lockhart, Matilda Stevens, himself, Vera, and Wallace, and released each with a clean bill of health. They had also properly treated and bandaged Harry Rivers’s shoulder.

  Lamb worried about the shock he knew Vera must have endured, though she had endeavored to keep up a brave front, telling him as he led her, soaking wet, back to Elton House that she needn’t go to the hospital. Indeed, she was more concerned for him, asking repeatedly if he was all right. He had nonetheless insisted that she take a couple of days off, during which they would have the promised talk with her mother over her future. As they ascended the path to Elton House in their dripping clothes, Lamb had pulled Vera close to him and kissed her on the head.

  “Thank you,” he’d said. “I’m very proud of you.”

  To which she answered, shivering, “Thanks, dad. I’m proud of you too.”

  On the following day, Lamb had interrogated Matilda Stevens. She seemed to Lamb defeated and exhausted, the opposite of the frenzied woman he’d faced down on the previous day. She answered most of his questions in a subdued, flat voice that sounded noticeably older than the one he’d grown used to hearing.

  He had gathered a trove of evidence against her, which included the items they had found in her room at Elton House, and which he laid out as they spoke—the candles, which proved identical to those they’d found in Lee’s cottage, by the pond near Lee’s body, and that Lamb had taken from Lord Elton’s grave; the bullets, which matched one that Larkin dug from the stone wall in the tunnel beneath the carriage house; and the typewriter and a sheaf of writing paper that they successfully matched to the machine and the paper used to compose the love note Alan Fox supposedly had written to Theresa Hitchens and that had so upset Joseph Lee.

  The team’s search of the tunnels also had turned up, hidden among the boxes of stolen lend-lease goods, a fireplace poker wrapped in a towel that was stained with blood that matched Joseph Lee’s type, along with Lee’s fingerprints and those of Matilda Stevens. Larkin also recovered two sets of fingerprints on the pistol found lying next to Alan Fox’s body—Fox’s and Stevens’s. Finally, Lamb had the newspaper clipping detailing the incident on the Algiers, the ship’s passenger list, and the testimony of James Travers, portions of which Lamb had confirmed with Travers’s solicitors, including the fact that Travers was set to give a large sum of money to Stevens, part of which she would then donate to the sanatorium in her name.

  From this evidence and his interrogations of Stevens, Travers, and Janet Lockhart, Lamb had pieced together a narrative of the murders of Joseph Lee and Alan Fox.

  The story began nearly forty years earlier in Southampton, when two sisters, ages thirteen and twelve, were orphaned after their parents died in a fire that had started in the grate of the hearth in their bedroom.

  The girls—Catherine and Matilda Ambrose—had come of age in a children’s home in Portsmouth. When Matilda was seventeen, she attended a charity event meant to raise money for the home, where she met one of its benefactors, a well-to-do young man named Henry Elton. She and Henry talked and, to Matilda’s surprise, Henry told her that he found her to be very pretty and asked if he might visit her on the following day at the house. Everyone involved agreed the visit was a good idea, and so Henry Elton kept his promise and came to the home.

  Catherine, who was a year older, had not wanted to go to the charity event and had feigned a fever to beg off. However, by the time Henry Elton appeared she had made a miraculous recovery and awaited his arrival in her best dress. Everyone, even Matilda, had to admit that Catherine was very beautiful in her dress, with her long auburn hair tied up in a neat bun and her large, expressive hazel eyes—and, indeed, once Henry Elton saw her, he was smitten and very soon politely cast Matilda aside in favor of her sister.

  Although Matilda had fallen in love with Henry Elton, she swallowed this rejection, as she had other defeats that she had suffered at the hands of her older sister, who had always ruthlessly pursued what she wanted and—at least as far as Matilda was concerned—gotten it. Indeed, Catherine had so loathed their strict father that she had murdered her parents by purposely setting the fire that had killed them. Matilda had kept this secret all of her life.

  Henry had married Catherine in 1912 and they spent two years traveling in Italy because the country’s sunny landscape inspired

  Henry, who fancied himself a painter. When the war began in 1914, they returned to Elton House. By then, Matilda had married a maritime man named Stevens. But the marriage had not lasted long and the two separated but never divorced—though Matilda kept her married surname because she reckoned that doing so might prove useful some day. She was, even then, bent on taking revenge on her sister for stealing Henry Elton from her, though she worried that she lacked her sister’s cunning and ruthlessness and therefore might be no match for Catherine.

  Then Catherine had done something that even Matilda had not expected. She killed Henry Elton, not in self-defense as she had claimed, but to inherit his money. Matilda knew that Catherine had seduced a sallow man from Marbury, Alan Fox, who, like Henry, fancied himself an artist, and convinced him to dump Henry’s poisoned body in the pond with the promise that, once the deed was done, the two of them could be together. Although the scheme had nearly come undone, Catherine had seen it through and convinced a judge and jury that she, rather than her husband, had been the victim. She had never implicated Alan Fox in the scheme because she knew he could contradict her story. Her acquittal meant that she could inherit Henry Elton’s fortune; once she secured it, she abandoned Fox and fled to Malta. Then, unknown both by name and reputation, she quickly ensnared an elderly, rich, dim, and lonely man named Charles Berkshire and bore him a son named James.

  Matilda, who hated and loved her sister all at once, and had always been in thrall to Catherine—even to the point of helping Catherine set the fire that had killed their parents—had traveled with Catherine to Malta and acted as her female companion and nanny to James. Charles Berkshire had never known that she was Catherine’s sister because both of the sisters had come to Malta under their married surnames.

  Catherine eventually convinced Berkshire to make her the sole beneficiary of his will. Once she reckoned that enough time had elapsed that she could safely return to England and freshly green pastures under her new surname, she also killed Berkshire, just as she had killed Henry

  Elton. She had learned her lesson, though, and before performing the deed this time she read extensively on the properties of poisons. In the end she had given Berkshire a dose of something—Matilda had never known what exactly, because Catherine had refused to tell her—that caused the old man to suffer a heart attack, which a coroner ruled as the cause of his death. Catherine also had written to Alan F
ox, beckoning him to come to Malta and sail home with her and to help her establish herself anew in England, once again dangling before him the promise of their being together. She told him that she had left England not because she no longer cared for him but because she had to escape the country after the trial. Now she was ready to return—and return to him, she wrote. And Alan Fox had believed her.

  Matilda also acquiesced—as she always had—though this time Catherine had promised to share her fortune with her, which now included both what was left of Henry Elton’s estate and Charles Berkshire’s as well. She meant to share her wealth with her younger sister, she had claimed, as a way of repaying Matilda for her long-suffering loyalty. But during the voyage on the Algiers Catherine admitted to Matilda that she intended to leave her fortune solely to her son. Matilda suspected her sister did so out of sheer cruelty—to humiliate Matilda and thereby keep her under her thumb.

  But in fact even before this revelation Matilda had guessed that her sister was only lying to her anew about sharing the money and never intended to share it with her. And it was then that Matilda began to see the initial glimmerings of a way in which she could finally break free of her sister’s grip and still take possession of some of Catherine’s wealth. She didn’t want it all, but neither did she intend to live through her sister’s controlling charity. Indeed, she decided that she must become more like Catherine, strong and ruthless, in order to live in the way Catherine did. And she hoped that, in the end, when her life had run its course, she would be with Henry Elton once more as Catherine burned.

  They sailed from Malta in April 1922—Catherine, Matilda, James, and Alan Fox, who had come to be with Catherine, just as she had instructed him to do. Matilda knew that Catherine had no intention of passing her life with the weak and errant Alan Fox, and that once Fox had outlived his usefulness to her she would reject him anew. And yet, at the same time, Matilda understood that Catherine had to tread lightly with Fox because he knew the truth behind Lord Elton’s death. She reckoned that Catherine meant to push Fox into the sea at some point during the voyage, to be rid of him for good. Another man from her life gone as the result of an unfortunate accident.

  And so it was on the Algiers that Matilda began the transition to the new person she hoped to become.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  LAMB RELATED THE STORY TO HARDING AS THEY WATCHED THE TEAM search the pond, adding that he remained unconvinced that Alan Fox had committed suicide.

  “But I haven’t been able to prove that yet,” he told Harding, adding that, although Matilda Stevens had admitted to killing Joseph Lee she had steadfastly denied killing Fox and instead had accused James Travers, who also flatly denied killing Fox.

  “Who is more creditable?” Harding asked.

  “Travers, obviously, though I have to say that Stevens’s denial bothers me,” Lamb said. “She freely admitted to killing both her sister and Lee; she also admits to helping Travers plot to kill Fox but claims that Travers acted alone in the end. Travers claims that his aunt planted into his mind long ago, when he was just a boy, the idea that Fox had pushed his mother into the sea because Catherine had rejected him. After the old couple adopted James, he saw his aunt regularly at holidays and on other visits. But he claims he had no idea that Fox lived in Marbury. Indeed, to him Fox had always been a name only; his aunt had never shown him a picture of Fox, or told him anything of Fox’s life, including where he lived or that he was a painter.”

  Harding stared out over the pond. “And yet she admits to having known Fox and that Lee was blackmailing him and that she eventually killed Lee to get him out of the way?” the superintendent asked, making sure he was following the twisted path of the story Lamb was unraveling for him.

  “Yes, she killed Lee because she believed he was becoming too volatile and cocky, and worried that he might become a problem for her. You see, when she discovered that Hornby had opened a sanatorium for shell-shocked men at Elton House, she came to believe that Providence finally was moving in concert with her and saw the chance to bring her ‘plan,’ as she calls it, to its full fruition. She had been working as a private nurse off and on for nearly twenty years and so had the necessary experience. And once she was on the staff of the sanatorium she made herself indispensable to Hornby. Indeed, in some ways she essentially ran the place.

  “From the beginning, her intention was to get Travers here for treatment and convince him to transfer a sum of his mother’s fortune to her, part of which she promised to give to the sanatorium—to a fund for men who couldn’t otherwise afford to be treated here. At the same time she began plotting a way to get rid of Alan Fox. She had kept a close eye on both Fox’s and her sister’s movements during the sea voyage from Malta and on the night her sister was killed she had brought Fox with her to the dining room and invited him to sit with her and Catherine, although she knew that Catherine had been seeking to limit her public interactions on the ship with Fox, so as not to come under suspicion of his death once she rid herself of him. But Matilda turned the tables on him and her sister later that same night. She knew that Catherine had a habit of spending a bit of time late each evening by the rail watching the sea, and told Fox that Catherine had asked her, Matilda, to tell him that Catherine wanted to meet him there to discuss their future together. But when Fox showed up, Catherine was surprised to see him and she tried to send Fox away, which Fox resisted. And that is when Matilda struck, darting from the shadows of the promenade deck and pushing Catherine into the sea, shocking Alan Fox. Matilda now was the only living soul, other than Fox himself, who knew that Alan Fox had helped Catherine Elton dispose of Lord Elton’s body and so she made a sort of devil’s pact with Fox then and there—her silence on his crime for his on hers. When they reached Belfast, several of the nosier first class passengers identified Fox as someone who had been seen trying to gain Catherine Berkshire’s attention from time to time, and so police questioned him. But Stevens provided him an alibi by telling them that Fox had been with her in her cabin all that night and had never left.”

  Harding shook his head and emitted a heavy sigh. “Something always comes along to shock you anew, some new low in human depravity,” he said. He stared at the men poking along the bank. “And so she then bludgeoned Lee to death in this very spot?”

  “Yes. Hornby once told me that she had trouble sleeping and often went for walks late at night. But in fact she was visiting Lord Elton’s grave, which is in the church cemetery, where she would light candles in his memory and occasionally leave paper lilies that she made herself. When I first interviewed her on the morning we found Lee’s body, she denied having much interaction with Lee, though she saw him regularly and even befriended him. He understood her importance and tried his best to get her to notice him, even going so far as to showing her the tunnels. Lee was a stupid man and Stevens used that and Lee’s eagerness for notoriety to her advantage. When she first came to the sanatorium she was surprised to find that Lee was the gardener; she remembered him as the man who had served as Alan Fox’s steward on the Algiers, although he had no recollection of her, as he’d had no reason to encounter her aboard the ship. She reasoned that Lee might have come to Marbury because of some connection he maintained with Fox, and vowed to discover what that connection might be, believing that she might use it to her advantage. She flattered Lee’s pretensions, pretending interest in the trivial subjects in which he considered himself an expert. She won his trust and he eventually told her that he was blackmailing Fox, and showed her the news clipping from Belfast, which he’d kept since the incident. It was one of many clippings Lee had collected, but the only one that he could use in a scheme to enrich himself. Once again, I think that he admitted all of this to Stevens because he believed that it would impress her.”

  Harding shook his head again. “Pathetic,” he said.

  “In the end, she did use Lee’s connection to Fox to her advantage. Lee told her about his interest in Theresa Hitchens and she likely understood from the b
eginning that it was all a fantasy, as was so much of the rest of his life. She began to whisper in his ear that she had heard that Fox was a notorious Lothario who had his eye on Theresa—which, it turns out, was true. She wrote a bogus love letter that Fox was supposed to have written to Theresa in which he insulted Lee, hoping that this would spur Lee into a confrontation with Fox, which is exactly what happened. She told Lee that she had seen Fox drop the letter by the door of the pub and that she had swept in and nicked it on his behalf.”

  “She read Lee like a bloody book,” the superintendent said.

  “She had a knack for that,” Lamb said. “She is a very intelligent woman who nonetheless has always felt vastly inferior to her sister. At any rate, Travers witnessed the set-to between Lee and Fox in front of the church as he was leaving Janet Lockhart’s house after one of the sessions in which she put him in touch with his dead mother.”

  “Ridiculous,” Harding said. “All this mumbo-jumbo about ghosts.”

  “But Travers believed in it. In fact, he believed in it so thoroughly that Stevens began to worry that Janet Lockhart was beginning to exercise undue influence over Travers’s mind and emotions, and that he in turn was falling in love with Mrs. Lockhart. Stevens worried that Travers would see Lockhart as an older woman who could play the role of the mother figure he’d lost so many years ago. Because

  Lockhart had convinced Travers that she could facilitate his communication with his late mother, she might become psychologically indispensable to him.

  “Travers mentioned to Stevens on the following morning that he had seen Lee fighting with someone she recognized as Fox, confirming that the scheme had worked and she could now kill Lee and point the finger at Fox, which she did brilliantly. As she came up the hill from visiting Lord Elton’s grave in the late hours, she found Lee drunk and sitting alone by the pond. She went to his cottage, retrieved the poker from the stove and killed him with it, after which she kicked his body into the pond. In doing so, she dropped one of the burnt-out candles she’d retrieved from Lord Elton’s grave; it likely fell from her smock without her realizing it. Larkin found it and we found more of the same candles in Lee’s cottage, all of which matched those we found in her room.