Hushed in Death Read online

  “Brazilian?” Lamb said. “I would think that hard to come by.”

  “Yes, well, one would think so. But Dr. Hornby does his utmost to provide his patients the best.”

  “I wonder if you heard that Joseph Lee told at least one of your nurses that the cellars here were haunted and asked to take her to a place in the house where he intended to prove this to her.”

  Nurse Stevens appeared surprised to hear this. “Haunted? No, I’ve heard nothing of that.”

  “Yes, he claimed that the cellar is haunted by the ghost of one of the former owners of the house, who apparently was murdered here sometime during the last war. Are you aware of that story? The story of the murder?”

  “I’ve heard something about it, yes. I gather it’s not spoken of much anymore, though.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Only that the master of the house was murdered. As you said. Nothing more.”

  “I understand, too, that there is a room in the cellar, along the same hall as the kitchen, that is never opened. This is the room that Lee told the nurse was haunted. Do you know what this room was used for, or is it used for anything presently?”

  “I have never been in it and I don’t know that it is used for anything. Then, too, Chief Inspector, you must understand that this house contains several rooms that are not used or little used. Even the room in which we are now speaking is rarely opened.”

  “Yes,” Lamb said.

  As usual, he stood to signal that the interview was finished. The nurse also stood and Lamb bowed slightly in her direction.

  “I want to thank you again for your assistance today,” he said. “You’ve been most helpful. For the record, I would like to know your Christian name.”

  Nurse Stevens smiled slightly. “Matilda—though hardly anyone calls me that any longer.”

  “Thank you. Now, if you might do me one more favor,” Lamb said. “I wonder if you can tell where I might find Mrs. Lockhart at this time of the day. I’ve a few more questions I’d like to ask her.”

  Nurse Stevens looked at the watch on her left wrist. “She would be on her break at the moment, I think. You might find her in the kitchen. She goes there sometimes to read and make herself a cup of tea.”

  “In the cellar, then?” Lamb said.

  “Yes, Chief Inspector. If you’d like, I’d be happy to show you.”

  SEVEN

  NURSE STEVENS LED LAMB BACK TO THE MAIN FOYER, FROM WHERE she directed him down the hall he’d traveled to reach the room in which he’d earlier met Mrs. Lockhart.

  “If you go past the common room to the end of the hall you will find a door on your left that opens onto a set of stairs that lead directly to the cellar and the hall on which you will find the kitchen,” she said. “I’m sorry that I can’t accompany you, but I have some urgent work to attend to.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lamb said. “I should be able to find my way.”

  “If you do not find Mrs. Lockhart down there, then please come back here to Dr. Hornby’s office and I will do what I can to help you to find her.”

  Lamb moved down the hall to its end, where he found on his left a shallow and quite narrow alcove that contained a sturdy wooden door. He turned the tarnished brass knob; the ancient door creaked open, to reveal a narrow wooden stairway that led down to what looked to be a second door.

  He looked for a light switch and found one just to the right of the door; he pushed it and the steps became illuminated by a single bare bulb in the ceiling of the narrow corridor. Lamb moved down the steps and into a hall much like the one he had just left, except that this one was darker; it, too, relied for light on a pair of bare bulbs in ceiling fixtures. He stood still for a moment, hoping to hear the sound of voices that might lead him in the direction of the kitchen, but heard nothing. He moved down the hall and soon came to an opening on the left; he peered inside and found a wide room with a blue tiled floor and a vast hearth along the far wall that he took to be the kitchen. He also found Janet Lockhart, who sat alone at a long, wide wooden table in the middle of the room. Behind her were two wide, deep, metal sinks with copper taps; set into a cut stone wall above these—at what Lamb understood to be the ground level at the back of the house, the stone wall being the uppermost section of the house’s foundation—were two high windows hung with blackout curtains made of a heavy, green wool.

  Mrs. Lockhart sat with her eyes looking down at the table and her hands cupped round a steaming cup of coffee. As Lamb entered, she looked up. “Oh!” she said, startled. “Chief Inspector!”

  “I’m sorry to have startled you, madam. Nurse Stevens said I might find you here.”

  “Oh, yes. I was just taking a short break.”

  “Do you have a minute to talk? I have a few more questions.”

  “Of course. Can I get you a cup of coffee? I’ve just made a pot.”

  “No thank you. I’ve just had some as a matter of fact.”

  Before sitting at the table across from Mrs. Lockhart, Lamb glanced quickly round the kitchen in an effort to understand its layout. To the left of the sinks he saw a door with a hinged window in its top half that also was covered with the heavy green blackout material. Lamb reckoned that the door opened onto the rear of the house, from where, during its heyday, servants had taken delivery of the food and other items required to keep the household humming.

  “Are you here alone, madam?” Lamb asked Mrs. Lockhart. “I would have thought there would be some staff around. Dr. Hornby said that he employs a cook.”

  “He does. But he and his assistant have gone into Marbury to buy supplies. Nurse Stevens released them to leave not fifteen minutes ago.”

  “She seems rather to run quite a tight ship here,” Lamb said.

  “Yes, indeed she does.”

  “I was just interviewing Lieutenant Travers and he told me about the support you are giving him—how you are helping him to face his grief.”

  Mrs. Lockhart smiled slightly. “I see,” she said. “And you want me to assure you that it’s all on the up and up, then.”

  “I would appreciate it if you would explain to me the nature of the assistance you render?”

  Mrs. Lockhart sighed slightly. “All right, Chief Inspector; I’ve no secrets. The fact is, I knew that this was bound to come up eventually. Some of the people in Marbury seem to think I practice some sort of witchcraft, though I assure you I do nothing of the kind.” She looked across the table directly at Lamb. “To put it plainly to you, I believe that I have a gift—a gift that allows me to sense the presence of, and even to communicate with, those who have passed to the other side. I discovered this after Cyril died and I found myself unable to disconnect my life from the one we shared together. More plainly speaking, I never really grieved his loss properly because I was not able to allow myself to accept the fact that he was truly gone. It was only after a time that I began to realize that the only times in which I felt his presence—the presence of his spirit, I mean—was when I wasn’t trying to. I realize that might not make sense to you, but there it is. Some people describe the kind of person I believe myself to be as a medium. But I prefer the term empath. I am empathetic with the dead, if you will, and this allows me to truly hear and sense their presence.”

  “I see,” Lamb said. He tried not to sound skeptical.

  “You think I’m batty, of course,” Mrs. Lockhart said. “Many people do and I suppose I can’t blame them. Before my husband died I might have said the same thing about someone who claimed to have a connection with the spirits of those who have passed on.”

  She looked down at her coffee for a few seconds before returning her gaze to Lamb. “My husband committed suicide, you see, Chief Inspector. In that way he was a casualty of the war, like the young men here, a victim of something larger than himself that he was never able to adequately reckon with.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Lamb said. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Please don’t apologize. I belie
ve that one must learn to accept death, of course, but also that the spirit can live on, can transcend the flesh. I often feel as if Cyril is near me during those moments when I need him to be. Some people have accused me of running séances, but I do nothing of the kind. Instead, I encourage the people who come to me to do what I eventually learned to do with my husband—to let the dead go, so that one may reconnect with what they have become, as opposed to what they were in life, which we fervently, but fruitlessly, long for them to continue to be.”

  “Does Dr. Hornby know of your work?”

  “Yes, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, he approves of what I do and believes it can be beneficial. But Dr. Hornby is a very forward-thinking man. I don’t suppose I’d be as welcome in other, similar places as I am here.”

  “And Travers? How are you helping him?”

  “He has suffered a great deal of loss in his life for a man so young. His father died of heart problems when James was young, and his mother died very tragically soon after. And of course he lost comrades in the war, as my husband did. But I believe that you might know something of that yourself, Chief Inspector.”

  “Yes,” Lamb said. “I understand the power of grief.”

  “But I fear you find me a charlatan all the same.”

  Lamb shrugged. “I believe one can feel the presence of the dead,” he said. “But I don’t believe in being able to speak with them.”

  “But if you can feel their presence then what’s to stop you from taking the next step and endeavoring to discover if they can sense, or feel, yours?”

  “Perhaps ‘presence’ is the wrong word, then,” Lamb said. “I believe that we maintain memories of the dead—at times very vivid memories—and that through these we maintain lasting impressions of those who have died. We remember how their voices sounded, how they walked, or some quirk they possessed. And in these impressions they can remain ‘alive’ for us, I suppose you might say. But this is a kind of remembering, rather than experiencing anything new.”

  “Perhaps you will change your mind one day.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Marbury, and this house, is filled with spirits, after all.”

  “So I understand,” Lamb said. “One of the nurses implied that a murder had occurred here during the last war.”

  “That is true, yes.”

  “You know about it, then?”

  “I was living in the village with Cyril at the time. We had only just moved to Marbury a few months earlier.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “The victim was the man who owned and ran Elton House at the time. His name was Henry Elton—or Lord Elton, as I knew him. His wife, Catherine, killed him; she poisoned him and then put his body in the pond to make it appear as if he’d drowned by accident, but the police saw through it. Lady Elton was brought to the bar on a charge of murder, but her lawyer successfully argued that she had killed her husband as an act of self-defense—that Lord Elton had abused and humiliated her in the most terrible manner during their marriage, thereby forcing her to act in order to protect herself. Several members of the Eltons’ staff testified that they had either heard or witnessed some of these instances of abuse, and, in the end, a jury acquitted her. This was in 1915. After that, she shut down Elton House and left Marbury and has never returned. The house lay unoccupied for a time until it was brought by a group of medical people who converted it into a sanatorium that treated consumptives. They packed up and left a couple of years ago and the house sat vacant again until Dr. Hornby bought it. The rumor is he got the place for a song, though it was showing its age by then.”

  “In what way had Lord Elton mistreated his wife?” Lamb asked.

  “Well, it was all rather strange and scandalous; one might even describe it as depraved. In short, Lord Elton was said to have had a kind of a perverted sexual obsession with the figure of Ondine, a mythical water nymph who rises from the depths searching for a human man as a husband so that she also can then become human. Do you know the story?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “I don’t really, either, though it has apparently inspired several artists, and Lord Elton fancied himself an artistic type. He was a painter and sculptor both, but not a very good one if the truth be told. In any case, he eroticized the character in his mind and this led him to ask of his wife sexual favors that she refused to grant, as she considered them deviant and humiliating. But Lord Elton insisted and, according to what came out at her trial, forced her to play the role of his Ondine, his eroticized water nymph. I followed the trial at the time because I had been friendly with Lady Elton; she and her husband had invited my husband and me to the house several times for parties. I couldn’t say, of course, what it all meant; one would need a psychiatrist for that, I suppose. But it is ironic, given what has happened to Mr. Lee—the way they both involve the dark water beneath the surface of which we cannot see and which holds close its secrets. It’s rather like that line between life and death that we were just discussing.”

  Mrs. Lockhart smiled again. “Now I do fear that you find me off my rocker, Chief Inspector,” she said in a joshing tone.

  “Not at all,” Lamb said. He found the story of the Eltons rather fantastic, but had no reason to doubt that it was true. Nearly two years in the trenches and twenty as a detective had convinced him that the depths of human depravity knew no limits. He doubted the case had any connection to Lee’s killing other than their common setting. Still, to be certain, he would have to check to see what else he could discover about the previous murder at Elton House.

  “Anyhow, there is a rather nice young man in Marbury named Arthur Brandt who has written about the case,” Mrs. Lockhart continued. “He fancies himself a playwright. He could tell you more about the case if you really want to know. His cottage also is in the High Street by the church.”

  Lamb jotted the name in his notebook. “Thank you, Mrs. Lockhart,” he said. “I hope I shall not have to take up too much of your time, but I must ask again that you remain in Marbury for the time being.”

  “I’ve enjoyed speaking with you, Chief Inspector. I sense that you will find some justice for Mr. Lee. In fact, I hope I am not being too forward in saying that I sense that you feel responsible for the losses of other people you have known in your life and that this might be the reason you became a policeman—to seek justice for those who have had their lives unjustly ended.”

  Lamb did not at first know quite what to say in response. She was, in a way, correct, he thought. “That is very interesting, madam, and I can’t say it’s entirely wrong,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to be presumptuous, Chief Inspector. And I certainly don’t mean to be morbid. But it’s just that none of us, really, can fully hide from our grief, nor should we.”

  EIGHT

  WHILE LAMB WENT ABOUT HIS BUSINESS IN ELTON HOUSE, VERA had taken his advice and decided to have a look round the estate’s grounds. She headed first toward the right side of the house, which faced away from the path, the pond, and Marbury. Here, the grass was moist and her shoes became a bit wet, but she didn’t mind. She could see that the grounds must have been impressive at one time—trimmed and neat and park-like, with well-spaced trees and rows of hedges and shrubs marking former terraces and other spots—but had since fallen into a neglected and shabby state.

  Inevitably, her thoughts turned to David. Indeed, since her father had dropped her at the car and bade her wait, she had thought of little else. For nearly ten months she had been serving as her father’s driver in what everyone round them understood to be a clear-cut case of nepotism her father had cooked up to keep her from being called up into a more dangerous war-related job. Vera had never liked the idea of her father using his influence on her behalf in that way, but she had swallowed her distaste for that because her job kept her close to David, who, in recent months, had become her lover.

  She could not chase away a sense of concern about David’s need to prove
that his wound had not crippled him. That was the word David himself used: crippled. He hated the idea that someone might consider him crippled. She understood why he felt this way and sympathized with him. She even sometimes felt that she shared his sense of embarrassment—and sometimes even his physical pain—as she watched his attempts to negotiate the world as if his wound didn’t exist. And yet his insistence on going into the pond that morning had struck her as too desperate an attempt on David’s part to prove that he remained the same man he’d always been. He could have easily allowed Rivers to go, she thought.

  David was essentially courageous—selfless in his desire to protect others from harm and reckless in defense of himself. These traits had attracted her to him, along with his smile and wit and easy charm and something else besides those surface allures—a kind of emotional vulnerability that he normally did not display but had shown to her. And so she had fallen in love with him—a love that, she believed, had not diminished since his wounding.

  She and David had become lovers during the initial three months of his recovery, when his doctor had forbidden him to work. During that time she had stolen whatever time was available to her in which she could visit him in his flat in Winchester. She had always been anxious to see and touch him and to hear his voice. Occasionally they had made love, mostly in the late afternoons and usually too quickly.

  But since David’s return to duty they had found it harder to find time to be together alone, in part because David had thrown himself back into the job with the zeal of a man with something to prove. While on duty, the two of them had done their best to hide the fact of their relationship from the others, though they understood that her father knew that they were in love and probably had guessed that they had become lovers. Or had he? Vera was unsure on that point and believed that their shared silence on the matter acted as a wedge between herself and her father. She had discovered—just as Wallace had discovered before her—that her father could be maddeningly intractable while on the job. Before becoming his driver, Vera had never seen this side of her father’s personality and she hadn’t fully decided yet what to make of it. Was his inscrutability a way of politely avoiding addressing the subject of what he might know about her and David? Or was he holding his cards close to his vest with the goal of laying them on the table at some point in a winning flourish?