Hushed in Death Read online

“Do you know this because you often saw him in the pub?”

  “No. I don’t go to the pub much. But, yes, I have seen him there on occasion.”

  “And how long have you lived in the village, madam?”

  “Nearly thirty years. I moved here with my husband in 1915, just after we were married.”

  “And you mentioned that your husband was deceased?”

  “Yes. He died in 1921.”

  “I’m sorry”.

  “Thank you.”

  Lamb was silent for a few seconds before steering the conversation back toward Joseph Lee. “I understand that Mr. Lee possessed a habit of trotting out his superior knowledge of this or that trivial matter.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Lockhart answered. “He seemed to have committed to memory the dates of famous events and tidbits of information about well-known people and historical figures.”

  “Did you find him irritating?”

  “Not really. But then, I didn’t encounter him often.”

  “Was he a violent man? Easy to anger, perhaps?”

  “Not that I knew.”

  “Had you heard anything of Mr. Lee getting into a row or fight with anyone at the hospital or in the village recently?”

  Mrs. Lockhart looked out the window and seemed to pause to consider the question. She sighed, then turned back to Lamb.

  “I don’t want to be a gossip, Chief Inspector,” she said. “I detest gossip; it has no purpose but to wound others as far as I am concerned.”

  “All the same, madam; this is a murder inquiry and even the smallest bits of information can prove to be important,” Lamb said. “I give you my promise that I will do my best to confirm the truth of anything you tell me. That is my job in the end.”

  She sighed again. “Well, I don’t know all of the details, but James—Lieutenant Travers—told me that he’d seen Lee arguing with a local man on the High Street by the church on the night before last.”

  “What were they arguing about?”

  She paused again before answering. “I’d feel better if you’d ask Lieutenant Travers about it, Chief Inspector. He was the one who saw it, you see. What I know of the incident is only secondhand.”

  But Lamb remained gently insistent. “It would be best if you tell me what you know and I will confirm that with the lieutenant,” he said.

  “He said he thought they were arguing about the daughter of the man who owns the pub in Marbury. It sounded to him as if Mr. Lee was perhaps jealous of the other man’s attentions toward the girl.”

  “And did the lieutenant recognize this other man?”

  “He didn’t, but when he described him to me, I thought I knew who it was.”

  Lamb waited for Mrs. Lockhart to tell him the other man’s name, but when she didn’t, he asked, “And who did you believe it was?”

  For a third time, Mrs. Lockhart turned away from Lamb to glance out the window and sigh before turning back to answer him. “It sounded very much to me like a man named Alan Fox. He lives just up the hill from me in Marbury, just off the High Street.” Her face clouded with distress and she added, “But I can’t really see a man such as Alan arguing in the street with a man such as Mr. Lee, Chief Inspector. I’ve known Alan practically since the day I arrived in Marbury; and I knew his parents well. His father was a solicitor and a prominent man locally.”

  “And is Mr. Fox also a solicitor?”

  “No. He’s an artist; a painter. I’m afraid he’s rather lived off the money his father left him. But I believe him to be a decent man, all the same.”

  “What time did this argument occur?”

  “I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask Lieutenant Travers.”

  “And when did Lieutenant Travers tell you that he had witnessed this argument?”

  “This morning, after he and I went to the pond with Dr. Hornby.”

  “And were the two of you speaking with Dr. Hornby at the time?”

  “No. We were alone.”

  “I wonder if you might tell me the publican’s name.”

  “Hitchens. Horace Hitchens.”

  “And his daughter?”

  “Theresa Hitchens.”

  “Also, I wonder if you could tell me, specifically, where Alan Fox lives in Marbury, please madam?”

  “On the eastern side of the village, just off the High Street and up the hill a bit from the village green. You will pass the church on your left and Alan’s house is a bit beyond that, on the right. It’s down a short lane, but his name is on the mailbox by the lane.”

  Lamb stood and offered Mrs. Lockhart his hand. “Thank you for being honest with me, Mrs. Lockhart,” he said. “I think that we are finished for the moment.”

  Mrs. Lockhart stood and shook Lamb’s hand. “You’re welcome, Chief Inspector. It’s such a terrible thing, what has happened to poor Mr. Lee.”

  “I’ll have to request that you not leave Marbury at present,” Lamb added. “I may want to speak with you again.”

  Janet Lockhart smiled. “Of course,” she said.

  FOUR

  EARLIER THAT MORNING LAMB HAD BRIEFLY MET LIEUTENANT James Travers, as he had Dr. Hornby and Mrs. Lockhart, before he’d hiked down the path to the scene of Joseph Lee’s murder. At that time, Lamb had requested of Hornby that Travers remain in his room, sequestered from the nurses and other patients until he, Lamb, had interviewed him in detail. Hornby had assented to the request and Travers had added that he didn’t mind at all waiting in his room for Lamb. Indeed, Travers had even explained to Lamb how to reach his room when Lamb was ready to talk. Now Lamb tried to recall those directions as he moved again into the main hall of the house.

  Elton House had been built in 1725 by a man named Samuel Elton, who made his fortune importing tea and other goods from China, India, and parts of the Middle East. At the peak of its success in the middle-to-late 17th century, the Samuel Elton Trading Company had operated a fleet of more than twenty ships out of Southampton and Portsmouth, and Elton had built his mansion on a spot that was close enough to those port cities while, at the same time, removed from their hurly-burly. He married a young Hampshire woman named Bess, who bore him three children—three daughters and a son, whom he named after himself. The second Samuel Elton apparently had not possessed the same business acumen as had his father, preferring to live instead off the older man’s wealth, and this, combined with the taxes levied on imported goods to pay for Britain’s war with the French in the American colonies, meant that the family’s traditional business had begun to decline during the final decades of the century. However, Samuel Elton Jr., who was not entirely without enterprise, turned to smuggling, mostly of Indian tea and American tobacco, but also rum and gin, streamlining his fleet and employing local men as go-betweens and confederates who depended upon his trade and, in some cases, became loyal to him. Indeed, the rumor had gone round the countryside surrounding Elton House that Samuel had dug a series of underground tunnels and storage areas—much like the priest holes of an earlier time—in which he stored the contraband until the time that he was able to sell it on a thriving black market centered in London. In this way, the younger Samuel had amassed a fortune of his own, which his heirs had lived upon through the end of the early years of the twentieth century, when the family had sold the house and the estate, not long after the outbreak of the Great War.

  After the war, the house had successfully been converted into a working sanatorium for consumptives that, at its peak, treated up to seventy-five patients at once. Since buying the house for his much smaller operation, Hornby had closed off portions of the building. Even so, Lamb found himself slightly confused as he wended his way along a trio of halls and up a flight of stairs in search of Trav- ers’s room.

  He was beginning to become frustrated when he again encountered Nurse Stevens, who recognized Lamb’s predicament and asked if she could be of assistance. When Lamb told her what he was searching for, she led him directly to it and, as before, rapped briskly on the door.

 
; “Lieutenant Travers, sir,” she said. “Chief Inspector Lamb is here to speak with you.”

  Seconds later, Travers opened the door.

  “Thank you, Nurse,” Lamb said to Stevens, who nodded and went on her way.

  James Travers was a tall, thin young man possessed of dark eyes and foppish brown hair cut in a sort of a Bohemian style. “Please come in, Chief Inspector,” he said.

  He ushered Lamb into what the Chief Inspector considered rather a large room, with a bed against the wall that lay to the left of the door, and a large window on the wall opposite the door that looked out upon the grounds behind the house, including the pond in which Joseph Lee had been found floating that morning. Against the right wall was a dressing table and armoire; between these and the bed lay a small round wooden table, well polished, with two chairs, which Travers led Lamb to and at which the two sat.

  Travers pulled out a silver cigarette holder and opened it. “Do you smoke, Chief Inspector?” he asked.

  “Yes, but I’ll refrain for the moment, thank you.”

  “Do you mind if I smoke, then?”

  “Not at all.”

  Lamb noticed that the cigarettes were an American brand, Lucky Strike, which had become scarce in England since the beginning of the war, as had cigarettes generally.

  “American, then?” Lamb asked.

  Travers smiled. “Yes. They seem to have an abundance of them about the place.” He lit a cigarette, shook out the match, then tossed it into a glass ashtray that lay on the table. “And the comforts, generally,” the lieutenant added. “I must say that Dr. Hornby provides you your money’s worth. I’m sorry about Mr. Lee, by the way. I thought him a bit sad and lonely, but harmless in the end.”

  “At what time did you awaken this morning, sir?” Lamb asked.

  “The nurses wake us at six thirty. Like clockwork.”

  “I notice that your window looks out onto the pond. Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary from that area last night or early this morning?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “After rising, did you follow your normal morning routine?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you didn’t leave the hospital at any time this morning?”

  “Not until I went for my walk, which is part of my prescribed treatment. I walk for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Weather permitting, of course.”

  Travers took a pull from his cigarette. “A few minutes after setting out on my walk, I met Mrs. Lockhart,” he continued. “She was coming up the path from the village and seemed rather put out. She immediately told me that she’d just come upon what she thought was a dead body floating in the pond.”

  “Did she use that word—dead?”

  “Yes. Otherwise, I would have thought it the right thing to do to check and see if the person was in distress. But I could tell from the way she looked and the way she spoke that she wasn’t exaggerating.”

  “How did she look?”

  “She was ashen, and trembling a bit.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “She and I fetched Dr. Hornby and the three of us went to the pond.”

  “Did you have any notion, before you reached the pond, who the dead man might be?”

  Travers sat back in his chair. “Well, I did, actually; I thought that the man might have been Lee.”

  “Why Lee?”

  “Well, because the body was on the grounds, and in the pond specifically. Lee rather seemed to like the pond; he used to sit by it in the twilight. I saw him from my window many times. And he had full run of the estate. Also, he’d had an encounter with a man from the village, near the pub, a couple of nights ago. It had something to do with the publican’s daughter, whom I gather Lee had his eye on. It seemed Lee was jealous of this other fellow and challenged him.”

  “And how is it that you know the details of this fight?”

  “I saw it—or, that is, I heard it at first. I was walking along the path by the church in Marbury when I heard two men begin to argue rather loudly out on the High Street, so I went to have a look. I came to the end of the path, which intersects the street, and there, just up the street, I saw a man I recognized as Lee arguing with another man. They both sounded drunk and, as I said, seemed to be arguing about a woman—’Theresa’ they called her. Lee accused the man of trying to ‘steal’ Theresa from him; that was the word he used. Stealing. The other man said he was crazy and told Lee to leave him be. When the other man tried to leave and head up the High Street, Lee grabbed him rather roughly, which turned out to be a mistake because the other fellow came round swinging and hit Lee squarely in the face, knocking him flat. He told Lee a final time to stay away from him and then walked off. I went to Lee and helped him to his feet; I offered to help him back to his cottage, but he shook me off and said he wanted to return to the pub.”

  “Did he appear to be seriously hurt?”

  “Not that I could tell, though I supposed he must have ended up with a bruise of some sort on his face. He was drunk, as I said, but the blow didn’t seem to have knocked him cold. In fact, he seemed to have a bit of fight in him still. He shook his fist at this other man and said something to the effect that he’d make him pay. That sort of thing.”

  “Do you recall his exact words?”

  “Not really. As I said, it was along the lines of, ‘You’ll pay for this’ or ‘I’ll see that you pay for this.’”

  “And did the other man respond?”

  “No. He continued up the street.”

  “Do you know if the other man saw you?”

  “I don’t think he did. I stayed out of sight until I went into the street to help Lee. There is a hedge along the path by the street and I stayed near to that, which would have put me out of their sight.”

  “Did you see anyone else in the High Street, or nearby?”

  “No.”

  “Did Mr. Lee then return to the pub, as he said he would?”

  “As far as I know. After I left him, I came back up here, up the footpath. I was on my way back here in fact when I heard the argument.”

  “What time was this, sir?”

  “About nine thirty. Lights out here for patients is ten.”

  “And what were you doing in Marbury at that hour?”

  “I was out for my evening walk. Dr. Hornby doesn’t mind if I wander down into the village. Indeed, he encourages it. The patients here are on individual recovery plans, you see. After the evening meal, I am allowed to leave the house to walk the grounds and even to go into the village, as long as I return before the doors are locked. I usually walk just before dinner and then again afterward. Sometimes, though, I enjoy walking a bit later, especially with the days lengthening and becoming warmer.”

  “And yet, it rained two nights ago,” Lamb said.

  “A misting, yes, you’re right,” Travers agreed. “At least that’s what it was doing during the time I was walking. It might have rained harder later on.”

  “Did you know the man with whom Lee argued?”

  “Not until this morning, when I mentioned to Mrs. Lockhart that I had seen Lee arguing with a man by the church. When I described him to her, she said she thought she might know who it was—a man named Fox, she said. Rather an easy name to recall, though, that said, I’m not sure I remember what she said his first name was. Albert, perhaps, or Alan? I think it was Alan. Alan Fox.”

  “And do you know who Theresa is?”

  “No—again not until I spoke to Mrs. Lockhart this morning, at any rate. She told me that the man who owns the pub has a daughter named Theresa. Apparently, she’s known as a local beauty.”

  “So you have never met Theresa or her father?”

  “No.”

  “Or Alan Fox?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell Dr. Hornby that you had witnessed this row involving Lee?”

  “No, though I meant to do so. I suppose I should have told him earlier, but frankly I haven’t seen him be
tween then and this morning, when Mrs. Lockhart and I went to fetch him.”

  “Did you see Mr. Lee again between the time you saw him arguing with Alan Fox and this morning?”

  “No.”

  “What was your relationship with Lee, Lieutenant? Beyond the incident you’ve just described?”

  “I used to run into him now and then on my walks about the grounds and village. He liked to talk—enjoyed the sound of his own voice.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “Not really. He was one of those people who seemed to have no inkling at all of how boring they are. And he possessed a sort of strange arrogance, as if he believed he was someone more important or impressive than he actually was. That said, I saw no reason to be rude toward him.”

  “And what is the nature of your relationship with Mrs. Lockhart?”

  Travers shrugged. “She strikes me as a kind, helpful woman. And she misses her late husband terribly; she brings him up in conversation regularly.”

  “So you have no relationship with her apart from the one she shares with you and the other men, as a volunteer?”

  “No. But in the interest of not wanting to be caught out lying to the police, I will say that she has been helping me a bit with my recovery here—though I fear that explaining how might come off as seeming a bit out of the ordinary.”

  “All the same, sir, it would be best if you told me. You are absolutely correct in your desire to avoid being caught out lying to the police.”

  Travers sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and took a long drag from his cigarette before lightly placing it in the ashtray.

  “Well, I suppose there is no good way to say it, but to say it without adornment—she has been helping me face my grief by helping me to make contact with those whom I am grieving.”

  “Meaning those who have died?”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous on its face, Chief Inspector. But yes, that’s essentially the goal. That said, I don’t want you to conclude that this is some sort of fraudulent séance with the moving tables and the books falling off shelves and the candles suddenly going out for no reason. Instead, Mrs. Lockhart encourages me to remember those whom I grieve—how they looked, spoke, acted, even smelled; the clothes they wore; the books they liked; their favorite food and drink. Her theory is that we grieve best by remembering and not forgetting, and I have come to believe that’s true.”