Hushed in Death Read online

  HUSHED

  IN DEATH

  AN INSPECTOR LAMB NOVEL

  STEPHEN KELLY

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For Bryan Denson, my lifelong friend.

  Smile on, you newly dead, whose griefless masks

  Are emptied of mortality of mind;

  Safe is your secret from the world that asks

  If death be dark—all lost and left behind.

  —Siegfried Sassoon, from

  “Words for the Wordless”

  HUSHED

  IN DEATH

  ONE

  JOSEPH LEE WAS DEAD. THE GARDENER OF ELTON HOUSE FLOATED facedown in the pond that lay along the path that led from the aging mansion to the village of Marbury.

  A half-dozen members of the Hampshire Constabulary stood along the edge of the pond, among the tall, unruly grasses and reeds, as a slight breeze appeared from the south and stirred the waters of the pond and, with it, Lee’s body, which began to float yet farther from their reach, like a toy boat gone astray.

  Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Lamb stood about ten yards from the pond alongside police surgeon Anthony Winston-Sheed and Frederick Hornby, a psychiatrist who was the director of The Elton House Sanatorium, a medical retreat for military men who were suffering from the traumatic effects of combat. The pond lay within the sanatorium’s grounds, which had once been the grounds of the estate connected to Elton House; the house itself stood atop one side of an ancient, gently sloped valley, while Marbury, the village, nestled below.

  Lamb looked at Detective Sergeant David Wallace, who was standing nearer to the pond, and thought about whether he should order Wallace to fetch Lee’s body. Normally, Wallace would be exactly the man for the job. But Lamb worried that Wallace’s fresh disability might cause him to fall into the cold water, which, besides embarrassing Wallace, would complicate matters unnecessarily.

  Lamb looked also at Detective Inspector Harry Rivers, who stood next to Wallace; Rivers was twice Wallace’s age and nowhere near as agile as the young sergeant, even given Wallace’s wounded leg. But Rivers was indestructible and always had been. Even on the Somme, Rivers had never truly and fully broken down physically or psychologically, the only man—himself included—Lamb had known during the war about whom he could sincerely say that.

  Lamb did not want to send out an obvious signal to his team that he harbored some doubt about Wallace’s ability to do the job at hand. As a kind of compromise, then, he decided to send Wallace and Rivers into the pond as a team, expecting that Rivers, as the senior officer, naturally would take the lead.

  He nodded at the waiting pair and said, “Fish him out, please, gentlemen.”

  In anticipation of the order, Rivers had already scoured up a longish fallen branch with a broken piece at the end that formed a kind of hook. He nodded his affirmation and began to move toward the pond’s edge with the branch in hand, Wallace following and limping as he went. Lamb glanced at his daughter, Vera, and saw her wince slightly as she watched Wallace struggle to navigate the uneven, boggy bank. Wallace stumbled but caught his fall with his right hand, straightened himself, and went on. Vera looked away briefly.

  In truth, Lamb thought, he should send Vera after the body. Not only was she more agile than either of the detectives, she was the best swimmer among them, including the other uniformed men her age. She had been her secondary school’s swimming champion and among its best cross country runners; in addition to which she was spirited, confident, and brave. But she was merely his driver, and merely a young woman, an auxiliary constable who owed her job to the coming of the war and the resulting shortage of men and her father’s unfair intervention on her behalf, and to send her in Wallace’s and Rivers’s stead would publicly humiliate them, Wallace particularly.

  As the detectives reached the pond, it became clear to everyone gathered along the bank that Lee had floated just out of the range of Rivers’s branch, meaning that one of the men would have to wade partially into the pond after the body, whose feet pointed toward the men.

  “I’ll go,” Wallace said. He immediately sat and began to pull off his shoes.

  Rivers glanced at Lamb for instruction in the matter; Lamb nodded slightly, giving Rivers permission to stand aside.

  Wallace removed his socks and began to roll up his expensive trousers. Rivers decided it best to remove his own shoes and socks and so sat next to Wallace and did so. Despite the relative seriousness of the proceedings, Rivers could not help but to goad Wallace a bit. He liked Wallace—and indeed had begun to see in Wallace a version of what he considered to have been his younger self—but found the sergeant’s taste for stylish suits, neckties, and shoes an affectation.

  “What about those lovely trousers, then?” Rivers asked as he pulled off his decidedly unstylish brown boots, which were blotted with mud stains even before they had reached the pond that morning. “A week’s pay at least, right down the bog.”

  Wallace stood in his bare feet. “Sod the trousers.”

  Rivers suppressed a laugh. He removed his socks and also stood.

  “All right, then,” Rivers said. “It’s your bank account.” He then handed the hooked branch to Wallace and added, with a genuine smile, “But don’t come crying to me for a bloody loan afterward.”

  Wallace took the stick and returned a slanted smile. “I’d drown first,” he said.

  This time Rivers could not entirely suppress a quiet chuckle. “Good luck, then,” he said.

  Holding the branch in his right hand, and Rivers’s hand in his left, Wallace waded into the cold, murky pond nearly up to his knees, forcing Rivers to follow to his ankles. Vera watched intently but was careful not to utter a sound. She thought that Wallace’s feet and legs must be freezing and worried that he would step on something that would cause his damaged leg to fail him. Lamb entertained an identical anxiety. The doctors—Hornby, the psychiatrist, and Winston-Sheed—also watched with anticipation, as did the other officer present, Sergeant Bill Cashen, a uniformed man whom Lamb relied on heavily, and the forensics man, Cyril Larkin. Rivers tightened his lips against the cold water and held firm to Wallace’s hand.

  “Careful now,” he said, as Wallace moved the hook-end of the branch toward Lee’s head.

  But Wallace seemed blind to their concern. He extended his arm and the stick as far as it would go and was just able to snag the rear collar of Lee’s jacket.

  “Okay,” he said to Rivers. “I’ve got him.” With that, Wallace began to move methodically closer to the shore, pulling the floating body with him. Lee spun round like a leaf caught in a current, the top of his head coming round to face the bank.

  Larkin moved to help Wallace and Rivers drag Lee’s body from the pond and into the grass, where they laid it facedown. Lamb and Winston-Sheed knelt by the corpse and briefly examined it.

  The back of Lee’s head oozed with a fresh wound; someone appeared to have caved in the man’s skull with “a blunt object of some kind,” according to the doctor.

  “I’d say that either the blow killed him outright or disabled him to the extent that, once he went into the water, he could not save himself from drowning,” he told Lamb.

  “Let’s turn him over, then,” Lamb said.

  Rivers and Larkin turned the body faceup; Lee rolled stiffly, like a log. He was dressed in green corduroy trousers with muddy knees, a brown shirt of rough cotton, an olive tweed jacket that was becoming threadbare, and a pair of well-worn black leather boots. The area round his right eye was swollen and bruised.

  Larkin straightened and pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “Looks as if he also was hit in the face,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Winston-S
heed, squatting again by the body to examine the wound as Rivers bent to the job of searching Lee’s clothing and Larkin retrieved his boxy Rolleiflex camera and began to photograph Lee from a variety of angles and distances.

  Lamb stood by silently, taking in the scene—the pond, the surrounding woodland, the worn muddy path to Marbury, and the gray, ivy-covered estate house on the hill, surrounded by long-neglected grounds. It had rained the previous morning, but not since. Still, the late April air remained moist and chilled. The spot reminded Lamb of the vaguely eerie rural places in which the Thomas Hardy novels he’d been required to read as a schoolboy had been set; places that always had seemed to him sodden with sorrow.

  As Winston-Sheed tended to the job of moving Lee’s body to a waiting van, Lamb moved thirty yards up the path, closer to the rear of Elton House, where he lit a cigarette and waited for Wallace to put on his shoes.

  He spent a minute contemplating what the scene at the pond had told him about the killing of Joseph Lee. It appeared that someone had bludgeoned Lee and then dumped his body in the pond. He suspected the killing had occurred at the pond, though he couldn’t yet be certain whether Lee was struck at some distance from the pond and then dragged there. But he had little doubt that the blow had incapacitated Lee. Lee’s swollen eye suggested that Lee might have fought with his killer before the fatal blow was struck.

  Given the proximity of the hospital, he had to consider the idea that one of the patients might have killed Lee for motives that were not yet apparent, or perhaps not even what one would normally consider logical, perhaps rooted in some form of illness to the mind. He took a drag from his cigarette and felt a stray drop of rain strike the rim of his fedora. He looked at the sky and saw that it had turned a slate gray.

  The team had arrived in three cars—Lamb, Wallace, and Rivers in Lamb’s aging Wolseley, with Vera at the wheel, with Larkin and nine uniformed men, including Sergeant Cashen, in the other vehicles.

  Before climbing the hill for his smoke, Lamb had instructed Larkin to take two of the uniformed men and begin a search of the area surrounding the pond for any sign of a potential murder weapon and the possibility that the body might have been dragged or otherwise transported to the scene from elsewhere. He’d also assigned a pair of uniformed constables to Rivers and put the detective inspector to the job of searching Lee’s lodgings, a small stone cottage near the pond. Lamb had obtained the key from Hornby.

  Once all was settled by the pond, Lamb, Wallace, and Sergeant Cashen would return to the house, where the latter two would begin the job of taking statements from the staff and patients. He’d already sent Cashen and the remaining constables to the house to begin arranging for a room for the interviews. For his part, Lamb intended to interview in more detail Dr. Hornby and the two people who had reported finding Lee’s body in the pond—a woman named Janet Lockhart, who Hornby said was a volunteer worker at the sanatorium, and a patient, Lieutenant James Travers—long enough to instruct all three not to speak to anyone about Lee until he’d had a chance to interview them properly. He’d also told Hornby that no one was to leave the grounds until he deemed it permissible.

  From his vantage point up the trail, Lamb watched Wallace limp to where Vera stood, toting his shoes and lank woolen socks. He thought that Vera certainly yearned to comfort Wallace, but was resisting doing so in front of the others. Wallace eased himself into a sitting position and began to dry his wet feet and calves with a towel one of the uniformed men had fetched for him. Vera moved surreptitiously to his side and began to speak to him, though Lamb was too far up the path to hear what they said.

  He watched Wallace tie his shoes and Vera help Wallace to his feet. During the team’s last murder inquiry, ten months earlier, Wallace had taken a bullet in the leg during a tussle, sending him to hospital for two months, from which he’d emerged with a permanent limp. For three months Wallace had walked with a cane, but in recent weeks had taught himself to do without it.

  Now, Vera took Wallace’s arm and gently brushed off the back of his coat with her hand. The gesture was just shy of a caress, Lamb thought.

  Another lone, heavy drop of rain struck his hat. He dropped the stub of his cigarette onto the path, ground it out with the toe of his shoe, then picked up the stub and put it into his coat pocket so it wouldn’t be mistaken for evidence.

  Wallace and Vera moved up the path to join Lamb and the three of them set off in the direction of the house. As they had done since Wallace had left the hospital, Lamb and Vera consciously slowed their pace so that Wallace, who was still learning to walk without the cane, could keep up.

  Elton House loomed at the top of the hill, gray and silent. When they had arrived, Lamb and his team had found the estate’s high wrought iron gates lying wide open; dead leaves, twigs, and other natural detritus had gathered near the base of the gates and their black paint had chipped away here and there, leaving small blots of rust. Lamb wondered if the gates hadn’t stood open in just that way for years.

  The paved drive that led to the house from the main road into Marbury was short, and the grounds on either side of it unkempt; a wood had begun to sprout up in what had once been a cultivated park-like setting. Several old large trees that had fallen across the drive over the years had been cut and cleared away at the point at which they met the road, leaving the bulk of the beasts lying where they had fallen, their long, barren branches, blackened with age, reaching up, Lamb thought, like giant crooked fingers from the grave.

  The granite-and-stone three-story mansion—which had been cloaked in morning mist when they arrived—was compact and sturdy-looking rather than elegant, and possessed a patched-up quality, as if someone had endeavored to save it from the same neglect the estate’s grounds had suffered. Its arched twelve-paned windows put Lamb in mind of a cathedral, though he noticed that a pair of them on the second floor had been bricked in.

  As Lamb, Wallace, and Vera reached the front door of the house, Lamb ordered the detective sergeant to join the constables inside and begin the interviews. Wallace lingered for a couple of seconds. He seemed to move to touch Vera’s arm, but refrained. Then he turned and went into the house.

  The team’s vehicles were parked along the edge of the semicircular driveway in front of the old mansion-cum-hospital, along with Winston-Sheed’s Buick saloon and the van in which Lee’s body would be driven to the morgue. Lamb walked Vera to his Wolseley and instructed her to wait for him there.

  “If you get bored, you might have a look round the grounds,” he said. He touched Vera’s slender arm and said in a fatherly tone, “I’ll fetch you when we’re ready.”

  Vera looked at her father. Lamb believed that she wanted to say something to him; her expression contained almost a quality of beseeching, he thought. He waited several seconds for her to speak, but when Vera said nothing, he said, now in his chief inspector’s voice, “All right, then. Carry on.”

  TWO

  DR. HORNBY HAD PRECEDED LAMB UP THE PATH TO THE HOUSE. During their initial conversation, he had told Lamb that the Elton House Sanatorium housed nine patients and employed fourteen staff, including himself, a cook, one kitchen assistant, a gardener—Lee, who also acted as a handyman—and ten nurses.

  Now, as Lamb entered the hospital’s foyer and removed his hat, he saw moving rapidly toward him down the main hall a middle-aged nurse neatly attired in a white hat and longish green cotton dress covered with a white apron. She introduced herself as Nurse Stevens and informed him that Doctor Hornby was waiting for Lamb in his office.

  She led Lamb through double doors just off the foyer that opened onto an anteroom that contained a chair and desk and, along three of its four walls, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that Lamb thought must have been a relic from the days in which Elton House served as a home to some titled family. Now the shelves were empty of books and anything else save several stacks of files and a few odds and ends—a hurricane lantern, and electric torch, and a potted aspidistra.

  A door on
the opposite wall led into Hornby’s office. The doctor rose from behind a large cherry desk. “Come in, Chief Inspector,” he said to Lamb, gesturing toward a pair of simple wooden chairs with worn green woolen cushions that faced his desk. “Please sit down. I was just going through some papers before we spoke."

  Hornby was a tall, thin, balding man who possessed what Lamb considered to be an honest, somewhat haggard countenance, his tie slightly askew and jacket faintly rumpled.

  “I’m afraid one doesn’t really know exactly what to do in a situation like this,” Hornby said, settling again in his chair. “I hope we have provided you with all that you need.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Lamb said. “You’ve been helpful.”

  Hornby looked away from Lamb briefly and said, “Poor Mr. Lee. One almost can’t believe it.” He shook his head, as if not quite able to accept what had occurred.

  “Yes, it is difficult,” Lamb offered.

  “Still, it does no good to lose one’s head,” Hornby said. He looked again at Lamb. “What else do you require of me, Chief Inspector?”

  “Please tell me your version of this morning’s events.”

  “I was at my desk when Nurse Stevens knocked and said that Mrs. Lockhart wished to speak to me.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I suppose it was around nine, though honestly I didn’t think to check. But I’m normally at my desk by seven and I had been working for two hours or so. At any rate, the pair of them entered—Mrs. Lockhart along with Lieutenant James Travers, one of our patients. Mrs. Lockhart said that she believed that there was a dead man floating in the pond—that she’d been on her way to the house from Marbury along the path and come upon the body. She seemed very shaken, on the verge of tears. You can imagine my shock. I asked her if she was quite sure and she said that, yes, she was certain.”