“A few hours later, Horace Hitchens came to the cottage to confront Lee about what he supposedly knew that could compromise or ‘ruin’ Alan Fox, as Lee had claimed in the pub after he’d fought with Fox. But Hitchens found Lee gone and so ransacked the place until he dug up what he was looking for—which turned out to be the newspaper clipping about Fox having been a suspect in Catherine Elton’s death. The entire time in which Hitchens was tossing Lee’s cottage, Lee was floating dead in the pond, but Hitchens never went to the pond. Stevens’s plan in killing Lee was to point us at Fox, then to shoot Fox and make it appear that he had committed suicide because he’d buckled under the pressure of being a prime suspect in a murder and feared the gallows.
“But this is where her story diverges from Travers’s. She claims that she and Travers planned Fox’s murder together; that the two of them would kill Fox and together avenge Catherine Elton’s murder. Stevens had spent a lifetime convincing Travers that Fox had pushed his mother into the sea and even that Travers himself had witnessed the killing but repressed that memory. What Travers didn’t know is that Stevens then planned to do the same to him—to give him the sleeping pills and make it appear as if he had succeeded in doing what he had tried to do once before but failed in. She wanted them both out of the way so that she could enjoy living off the money Travers had agreed to give her—which, in the end, had been the money her sister had promised her and then cruelly withdrawn. Despite all this, she still steadfastly denies that she had any hand in Fox’s death and that Travers killed Fox with a gun he brought solely for that purpose.”
“But her fingerprints were on the gun and Travers’s weren’t,” Harding pointed out.
“That’s true,” Lamb said. “Stevens claims that Travers tricked her into touching the gun—that he showed it to her one day as it lay in the drawer of the dresser in his room at the sanatorium and that she made the mistake of picking it up, though she only realized that this was a mistake later, after Travers shot Fox and then tried to frame her for the crime. She believes that, after that moment when she touched the gun, Travers handled it only with gloves. When I asked her the caliber of the pistol she claims Travers showed her, she said it was a .32, which is the caliber of the gun that fired the bullet that killed Fox. She says that, despite his outward appearance to the contrary, Travers has inherited his mother’s ruthlessness. As she said to me, ‘It’s in his blood.’”
“Nonsense,” Harding said. “We’ve got her to rights and she knows it, and so is making a last desperate attempt to implicate her nephew. She obviously cares nothing for him. She tried to bloody kill him after all, not to mention the fact that she took advantage of his having suffered shell shock to lure him here in the first place.”
Lamb had to agree. All of what Harding said was true.
And yet, a small flame of doubt, like that of a candle burning down to its nub in a dark room, continued to flicker in the nether regions of his mind, illuminating a thought that he could not entirely dismiss.
What if Matilda Stevens was telling the truth?
THIRTY-EIGHT
SERGEANT CASHEN HAILED LAMB AND HARDING FROM THE BOAT in which he was searching. “We’ve got something, sir.”
A minute later, Lamb was helping Cashen from the dinghy onto the dock, where a uniformed sergeant handed Lamb a small ceramic statue of what appeared to be a woman emerging from a deep green pool of water.
“No sign of the pistol or the painting yet, but we found this,” Cashen said.
Lamb immediately recalled Lady Elton’s so-called Ondine defense and the way in which Brandt had depicted her in his story for the Times—as a far cry from the victim she had convinced the judge and jury she was. And he remembered how Brandt had said that he’d spoken to a maid who had worked for the Eltons who had told him that she believed that Lady Elton, rather than her husband, had the interest in the tale of the water nymph and even that Lady Elton had kept a small, cheap statue depicting Ondine emerging from the water. Lamb was certain that the statue he now held in his hand—obviously cheaply made, its colors faded and detail less than fine—was the same one Lady Elton had kept and that she must have thrown it into the pond to ensure that no one outside the house would ever see or identify it. A sliver of pond grass clung to the figure’s upraised right arm—the grass was exactly like that which had clung to him, Wallace, Vera, and Stevens as they had emerged from the pond two days earlier—and seeing this brought to the surface a memory from the depths of Lamb’s mind.
“Ondine rising,” he muttered to himself.
“What’s that?” Harding asked.
“Ondine bloody rising,” he said. “I had Fox’s painting wrong; the drowning woman wasn’t sinking, she was rising. She had sea grasses clinging to her hand as this one does and as I did, and Wallace and Vera and Stevens did, when Rivers pulled us from the pond.”
“You’re not making any sense, Tom,” Harding said.
“Arthur Brandt said that Alan Fox painted his life—that he tended to depict the events of his life, which, at least to Brandt’s mind, limited his range and ability as an artist. But there it was; Fox even doodled a little figure of a fox next to his bloody signature. He was a thoroughgoing narcissist in that way. It makes perfect bloody sense but I didn’t see it—something that is sinking would not be entangled with underwater grasses, only something rising from the bottom would. Travers claimed he never met Fox, but I now think that is a lie. Fox painted Ondine rising because that’s how it must have seemed to him—that Lady Catherine Elton was rising again into his life in the form of her son. James Travers must have seemed like a spirit come back from the dead to Alan Fox.”
Lamb turned to look up the slope once again at the looming gray edifice of Elton House. “I must find Travers.”
“But you released him,” Harding said. “You had no cause to hold him.”
“I might have made a mistake.”
Lamb handed the statue back to Cashen. “Keep at it until you find the gun and the painting, if it’s there,” he said, then left the pier and headed up the path to Elton House.
The sanatorium was in a mild state of disarray. The staff were preparing to send the patients home or move them to other facilities. In addition, Harding had informed the Home Office of the discovery of the stolen lend-lease goods, and in response the army had posted a sentry at the tunnel entrances until the material could be catalogued and moved.
Lamb went to Travers’s room but found it empty and cleared of the lieutenant’s possessions. After a brief search of the house, he found Nurse Anderson, whom Joseph Lee had tried to coax into the blind staircase in the cellar with the promise of seeing a ghost, who told Lamb that Travers had been to the house that morning but had not stayed long and had left about thirty minutes earlier with Janet Lockhart.
Lamb descended the hill and rapped on the front door of Janet Lockhart’s cottage. When no one answered, he tried the door and found it open and went inside, where he found Mrs. Lockhart sitting silently in her living room before a single candle and a photograph of her late husband. She looked up at Lamb but said nothing.
“Where is James?”
“I don’t know,” she said without looking up.
“You just left Elton House with him not thirty minutes ago.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You can’t protect him Mrs. Lockhart, and if you attempt to you will suffer the consequences.”
She looked up at Lamb but did not speak.
“I see now that he lied to me about Alan Fox and that he did so not only to protect himself, but you,” Lamb continued. “He didn’t want you to become entangled in all of this because he’d fallen in love with you. After he shot Alan Fox, he took the painting from Fox’s easel because he knew what it depicted.”
Tears welled in Janet Lockhart’s eyes.
“I fear that I am responsible,” she said. “I thought I was helping him, but she had buried deep in his psyche the idea that Alan had killed his mot
her. She poisoned his mind for her own greedy ends.”
“You must tell me where he is,” Lamb said. “Otherwise he might hurt someone else. Surely you see that. Don’t compound Matilda Stevens’s sins. It’s past time for the lying and the killing to end.”
“He is at Arthur Brandt’s,” she said. “When he returned from Alan’s cottage that morning, he had the painting, as you say. But I told him that we must hide it. The sun was only then rising and we had no time, so I suggested he hide it among the clutter in Arthur’s study, to lean it against the wall and to pile some of the boxes and papers in front of it. And that is what he did, while Arthur slept.”
“You knew, then, that he had shot Fox,” Lamb said.
Mrs. Lockhart looked at Lamb, he eyes seeming to plead for his forgiveness.
“I was dazed and shocked,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that James had killed Alan; I refused to believe it. And now I’ve put Arthur’s life in danger.”
Lamb rushed into Brandt’s study to find James Travers standing with his back to the door, Fox’s painting beneath his arm, and holding a small pistol aimed at Arthur Brandt, who stood very still by his desk, about three yards away, with his pet snake hanging from his shoulders and his hands in the air. Papers and other objects littered the floor.
Travers turned toward the door. He held the pistol high and told Lamb to put his hands up and not to move.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody, Chief Inspector,” Travers said. “But I will if you force me to.”
“No one is going to force you to do anything, Mr. Travers,” Lamb said.
“Now move out of the way,” Travers said to Lamb.
Lamb did not move. “But where will you go, James? You haven’t a car.”
“Janet has a car.”
“And how far do you think you’ll get?”
Travers gestured with the gun. “Move aside, Chief Inspector,” he said angrily. “Don’t make me shoot you.”
“I was on the Somme,” Lamb said. “For an entire bloody year. I know what it was like—what you went through in France, how all of what you’d kept down since the time you were a boy must have come rushing back at you, forcing you to break down. Some of them must have called you a coward then. But you weren’t a coward. I know; I saw it in the trenches, brave men breaking down. It got to all of us in the end, one way or another. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of in surviving. But why kill again? You had your reasons for killing Fox, but now the killing must stop. Think of those men you knew who died in France and how you grieved their loss and still grieve it, and how you grieved the loss of your mother. Your aunt took advantage of your youth and innocence to implant an idea in your mind, James. That’s a mitigating circumstance.”
“But Fox was guilty,” Travers said. “Janet helped me to see that. I remembered what I had long ago repressed; I remembered seeing Alan Fox push my mother into the sea. I went to see Fox for the first time a week ago, but not to harm him, only to see if he was real. He seemed a disheveled, sad man, and after leaving him I even began to doubt what Aunt Matilda had told me. But then I made contact with my mother with Janet’s help and she showed me what I had forgotten. And so I had to act.”
“Think of Janet—of what it would do to her if you killed again.”
Travers looked hard at Lamb. “Stand aside, Chief Inspector,” he said.
Lamb took a small step backward. As Travers began to move toward him, Lamb glanced at Brandt and saw him nod, as if saying to Lamb that he understood what he must do.
“Lieutenant, you forgot your painting,” Brandt shouted.
Stunned, Travers checked to see that he still had the painting; he then looked at Brandt, who, in that instant, took Terry from his shoulders and tossed the snake at Travers.
As Travers instinctively raised his hands to cover his face, Lamb tackled him; the pistol and the painting both fell from Travers’s grip. A second later Brandt was also atop Travers and he and Lamb together subdued the lieutenant. Lamb retrieved Travers’s pistol from the ground and pointed it at Travers.
“Stand up,” he said to Travers.
As Travers stood, Brandt searched for Terry and found him curled in a ball upon the floor, terrified but unhurt.
“Terry, old friend,” Brandt said to the snake. “I’m so very bloody sorry. Will you ever forgive me?”
Alan Fox’s painting lay at Lamb’s feet, torn in two.
THIRTY-NINE
FOR THE SECOND TIME THAT DAY, LAMB STOOD BY THE POND, watching Sergeant Cashen and his squad of men continue their search. Harding, Rivers, and Wallace had returned to Winchester with James Travers in custody, charged with the murder of Alan Fox. They had also arrested Janet Lockhart, whom Lamb intended to charge with abetting Travers.
As Lamb waited in the sun, smoking and trying his best to feel at ease, Arthur Brandt appeared up the footpath with Terry round his neck.
“I thought I might find you here, Chief Inspector,” Brandt said, joining Lamb by the edge of the pond. “Still searching I see.”
“Yes,” Lamb said. He had thanked Brandt for his assistance earlier, but felt compelled to do so again. “I want to thank you again for your help, Mr. Brandt.”
“Oh, please, Chief Inspector. I was glad for the chance to be part of it.” He smiled at Lamb and added: “Who knows, perhaps I’ll write about it. It mightn’t make a half-bad novel in the end.”
“But I thought you wrote plays?”
“I do. But I haven’t had much luck with that, I’m afraid. It might be time to try my hand at something else.”
The pair looked over the water for a couple of seconds, as Terry moved slowly round Brandt’s shoulders, flicking its tongue and testing the fragrant summer air.
“You know, I must say I was quite smitten with Constable Lamb,” Brandt said. “Not smitten in the usual sense of the word, obviously, but very taken with her spirit and optimism and the easy way she has with people. You have quite a gem there, Chief Inspector. I daresay she wouldn’t make a fine detective herself some day.”
“I also am very impressed with her,” Lamb said. He turned to Brandt. “I suppose I should tell you that she’s my daughter. She didn’t want you to know because she feels embarrassed by the obvious nepotism.”
“Well, she shouldn’t be; she seems to have earned her place well enough. But in any case, I figured out the connection on my own.”
“How so?”
“Well, you know what they say about the apple never falling far from the tree, Chief Inspector. Besides, I wondered why you or she never mentioned your surname. I wonder if she has a beau, by the way? I certainly hope so.”
“She does.”
“And does she love him?”
“I believe so.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Yes.”
They watched as two of the boats drew together at the center of the pond, one of which contained the familiar figure of Sergeant Cashen, who began to wave at them.
“We’ve found the pistol, sir,” Cashen said.
Brandt put his hands together. “Bravo,” he said. He touched Terry’s snout, and said to the snake, “What do you think of that, old boy? Success!”
He followed Lamb to the pier. As they made their way through the reeds and grasses, Brandt glanced back at Elton House.
“I wonder what will become of it,” he said. “I suppose someone else shall buy it. I imagine it shall come rather cheap under the circumstances.”
Cashen’s dinghy drew alongside the pier. He laid the wet pistol, which was partially ensnarled in pond grass, as the statue had been, on the pier.
“We also found this,” Cashen said to Lamb, gesturing for the constable in the boat to hand him the other item.
Lamb felt his anxiety spike as he realized what the other item Cashen had found must be—the remains of Theresa Hitchens’s aborted child.
But the only thing Cashen laid next to the pistol was a small, sodden and tattered paper lily.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Language of the Dead
The Wages of Desire
HUSHED IN DEATH
Pegasus Books Ltd.
148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen Kelly
First Pegasus Books cloth edition November 2018
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-68177-868-6
ISBN: 978-1-68177-933-1 (ebk.)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Hushed in Death Page 22