Hushed in Death Read online

  David’s wound meant that he would not be called up for war duty, and this, along with their lovemaking and the subterfuge they were forced to practice while on duty, had caused David to begin speaking of marriage. He wanted to end the sneaking round, he said, and make their love an open fact around which they could build a life together. All of this made sense to Vera—and when she and David had become lovers she had thought then that she would marry him.

  But although she believed she loved him, she had found his sudden enthusiasm for marriage a bit frightening. And indeed, though David had not yet proposed marriage, she had begun to realize that she might be dreading the notion that he soon might.

  Enough, she thought and tried to direct her thoughts elsewhere.

  She continued to walk along the side of the house to its rear where, she reckoned, she would find herself heading back toward the trail that led to the pond. That way she could make an entire circle of the house, which seemed to her very old and caused her to wonder about its origins and history. She knew nothing of its current use except that it was a hospital for men suffering from psychological illnesses related to the war and she thought this as good a use as any for the place.

  She came to a kind of courtyard at the rear of the house that was laid in gravel and was muddy in spots. From here, the grounds of Elton House sloped downhill toward Marbury. The slope also was untended, covered in high grass, and spotted with patches of low brush and young trees, and not too far down the hill, a full-fledged wood. To the left of this lay the path to Marbury, which passed the pond.

  She went into the level courtyard, which contained a pair of old wooden buildings that Vera took to once have been the house’s stables and carriage house. To reach them, she descended a flight of stone steps that were part of a retaining wall that was built into the slope and faced the house from across the courtyard. With the sun having disappeared once more, the setting in the muddy, neglected spot, with the three-story high rear wall of the old, stone mansion looming to her left, struck Vera as rather spooky.

  She moved first to examine the stables, which she found shuttered and padlocked, its windows boarded up. The rear of the stables abutted the retaining wall, giving the place a bunker-like aspect. She lifted one of the heavy iron padlocks, which also seemed a relic of a much older time, conjuring in her mind’s eye an image of a stable boy in his flat cap, black boots, and mud-stained trousers moving among the skittish horses in the midst of a summer thunderstorm at twilight, holding a hurricane lantern above his head and whispering to the animals to hush as the wind rattled the wooden doors and indifferent mice scurried along the rafters—an image she knew came from books and films and her own imagination, which tended to visualize the past in a sentimental, amber light. Even so, the thought of a thing so seemingly elemental and romantic having passed away left her feeling fleetingly sad, and she realized that she had not thought of David for some minutes.

  She moved next to the carriage house, the high double doors of which—something like barn doors—faced the courtyard at a ninety- degree angle to those of the stables. These too she found secured with iron padlocks. Taken together, the two buildings gave off a feeling, like the grounds, of neglect, locked up tightly not only against trespassers but time itself.

  She decided to head back to the car—but a flash of color at her feet caught her eye. She looked down and saw what appeared to be a stick of gum. She bent to pick it up and found that it indeed was a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum, wrapped in a plain brown, waxy paper with green lettering. She had not seen a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum in nearly three years; since the war began such American luxuries had all but disappeared in Britain. The wrapper was damp and a bit dirty from having lain in the mud. Vera considered opening it to see the condition of the gum, but decided instead to save it and show her father. Who knew, after all, if it might not be a clue?

  He had suggested she have a look round to see if she found something interesting and now, she thought, she had.

  NINE

  ON HIS WAY TO THE POND TO ASSIST LARKIN AND RIVERS, WALLACE had stopped by the front door of Elton House to smoke a cigarette. Sergeant Cashen, who did not smoke, had gone on ahead of him with a reminder not to take too long.

  Wallace had hoped to find Vera alone, tending Lamb’s Wolseley, and was disappointed to see that she was not there and wondered where she might have gone. He decided to wait a bit to see if she showed.

  He knew that he’d been stupid to rush into the pond in the way he had. But he’d also sensed that Lamb had paused to think about whether to send in Rivers rather than himself after Lee’s body. Before his wounding, he knew, Lamb would have entertained no such second thoughts about his abilities. In the meantime, Lamb maintained a belief in Rivers as unbreakable, despite Rivers’s age. It all went back to the time they’d spent in the trenches on the Somme. Lamb therefore refused to allow that Rivers also possessed weaknesses. He had therefore gone ahead and jumped into the pond ahead of Rivers and reckoned he might do something similar again until he convinced Lamb that he was not crippled.

  Although the morning had been chilly, he hadn’t bothered with an overcoat. Now he turned up the collar of his jacket and hunched his shoulders against the damp. He didn’t relish becoming bogged down in a murder inquiry; the damned things required all of your time and he wanted to spend more time with Vera. The last one he’d handled had occurred nearly a year ago, when he’d been shot in a scuffle involving a man who had been at the end of his rope and was holding Lamb at gunpoint. The whole mess had been partly his fault because he’d failed to properly follow Lamb’s directions before storming in on the two of them. And so he’d come out of it with a permanent limp and a pass on the call-up. He didn’t mind the limp so much, especially when so many men were being maimed in much worse ways, or killed outright.

  But his pass from combat duty had left him feeling guilty, and the fact that the army now looked upon him as too defective to even consider for such duty vexed him; he did not feel weak and hated the idea that he might be seen as such. More than anything he despised pity, though he’d found that other people enjoyed dispensing it, mostly because it made them feel well disposed toward themselves.

  He stepped out into the drive to see if he could spy Vera somewhere in the vicinity, but did not see her. He was anxious to speak with her; he wanted to tell her again that he loved her, which he tried to do as often as possible in those rare moments on the job when they found themselves alone and out of earshot of the rest of the team. But he also wanted to check her mood, given that she’d seemed to him in recent days somewhat distant and even irritated with him, and he thought he knew why—three days earlier, he had brought up the subject of their possible marriage and she had surprised him in her reluctance to discuss it in depth. The day was a balmy, sunny Saturday, the sort of day he normally looked forward to in June. Vera had taken the bus from her parents’ house and met him at his apartment in Winchester; most of their meetings and all of their sexual trysts had occurred in the daytime, and on weekends, in his apartment.

  They had not gone out; rather, he had lit candles in the room and prepared them lunch. Afterward, when they were finishing off what was left of the bread and strawberry jam, he had told her that he loved her. She had smiled and taken his hand and said that she also loved him. And then he had spoken the words he now regretted. He was not even certain what had possessed him to utter the words when and in the manner he had, but he now believed that he’d gone about the thing the wrong way and bollixed it.

  “I want to make it official,” he’d said, and she had looked him, confused, and said, “Make what official?”

  “Us,” he said. “Our being together.”

  When she hadn’t answered right away, he’d added, “I’m tired of the sneaking around and having to watch the clock whenever we’re together.”

  “So am I,” she had said, then added: “But we mustn’t move too fast.”

  These last words had pierce
d him, and when he had asked her why they must wait, she had looked away from and said, “I don’t know.”

  Then she had looked him in the eye and said, “I do love you, David, but it’s too much for me to think about. I’m sorry. I’m confused.”

  She had taken his hand again and said, “I realize I’m not giving you the answer you want, and I’m not sure if I’m even giving you the answer you deserve. But I need some time to think about it.”

  He had then said that he was sorry and that he hadn’t meant to upset her and was willing to give her as long as she needed, all the while thinking that he needed no time to make up his mind. He was certain. Shorty afterward, she had left to go home.

  They had not had another chance to speak before that morning, when she stood by him as he put his shoes and socks back on and they were out of earshot of the others. She had quietly asked him how he was feeling and he’d answered “never better,” hoping that his bravado would erase some of the unease left over from their last meeting.

  She had gently scolded him for going into the pond, saying, “You shouldn’t take those sorts of risks with your leg the way it is,” and, annoyed, he had answered, “But here I am, none the worse for wear,” not bothering to camouflage the pique in his voice.

  Now he longed to find her to apologize for his impatience and to gauge whether she was angry with him. Once again he scanned the area in front of the house but saw no sign of Vera and, as he did, a thought occurred to him: Lamb might be coddling him—protecting him—not for his sake or safety but for Vera’s.

  He believed the arrangement that the three of them seemed to have quietly agreed upon could not last. That arrangement, which none of them had spoken of, had simply fallen into place, as his and Vera’s relationship ripened. It consisted mostly of Lamb acknowledging, in his own silent way, that he knew of their growing romance but had chosen not to intervene in it in exchange for their remaining discreet about it while on the job. But Wallace still was not certain that Lamb’s recognition meant that he had come to accept the fact of his and Vera’s relationship. Perhaps he had merely resigned himself to it temporarily—again for Vera’s sake, so as not to upset her. Indeed, Lamb seemed blind to the idea that his daughter was anything but an innocent, a person without adult wants, needs, desires, and ambitions.

  Frustrated, but for the moment resigned, he flicked his cigarette butt to the ground, then turned and walked down the path to Joseph Lee’s cottage.

  TEN

  LAMB WAS ANXIOUS TO GO INTO MARBURY TO SPEAK WITH ALAN FOX. But he first went to check to see if Larkin and Rivers had recovered anything worthwhile in their searches of the area round the pond and of Lee’s nearby lodgings.

  The iron clouds that had earlier dropped rain on him had cleared off to the south and given way to scudding, flat, gray-white apparitions that allowed the sun to peek through here and there.

  Larkin, who had been searching the area round the pond, saw Lamb approaching down the path and went to him, carrying the one bit of possible evidence he’d found in the grasses along the pond edge, not far from where they had pulled out Lee’s body—a stub of a thin white candle that had been burned nearly to its end.

  Larkin showed Lamb the candle and explained where he’d found it. “It’s still clean, as you can see,” the forensics man said. “It can’t have been there long.”

  Lamb examined the candle, turning it over. He had not seen any similar candles in Elton House.

  “We also found a boat—a row boat—lying in the reeds not far from the wood on the far side of the bank there,” Larkin said, pointing to a place where a short, narrow, rickety-looking pier entered the pond. “It shows no sign of having been used recently, though; its hull is dry and there is no water in its bottom, so I’m inclined to think that Lee’s killer made no use of it. I’ve also found no indication that Lee’s body was dragged to the pond either unconscious or dead. I think he was struck near the pond but I’ve found no spillage of blood in the grass and reeds and am concerned that the rain might have washed it away.”

  “Any sign of a possible weapon?” Lamb asked.

  “None, sir. But we haven’t quite gotten fully round the pond yet.”

  The news was hardly encouraging. “All right, Mr. Larkin,” Lamb said, as he handed the candle back to the forensics man. “Thank you.”

  The chief inspector continued down the path a short way until he came to an intersecting path that led a bit into the wood on his right, at the end of which lay the cottage in which Joseph Lee had lived, a small stone structure covered in ivy that once had served as the gamekeeper’s residence at Elton House. About twenty yards away lay what was left of an ice house, through which, two centuries earlier, a stream that fed the pond had run. But the stream had been rerouted more than a century earlier and the little house had been allowed to fall into disrepair.

  Lamb found the weathered wooden door of the main cottage standing open, its hinges and latch rusted nearly to the point of futility. He peered inside and saw the dark figures of Rivers and two constables within. The only light came from a rectangular window that took up most of the left side of the cottage’s front wall and an oil-fired hurricane lamp that Rivers had found, lit, and hung from a rusting iron hook hammered into one of the wooden ceiling beams.

  The room contained a narrow wooden cot along one wall; its rough straw-in-gingham mattress was askew and lay at the foot of the cot. A small wooden table with a single chair stood at the center of the room, while the corner of the far wall held an iron wood-burning stove and, next to it, a water pump and metal wash basin. Along the opposite wall was a shelf that appeared to have held books, cooking utensils, and other sundry household and personal items, most of which seemed to have been knocked to the wooden floor just below it. Indeed, the place clearly had been ransacked, Lamb thought as he entered.

  Several stacks of what appeared in the dim light to be notebooks lay on the table next to a bundle of cash. Dust drifted in the shaft of light that came from the window and the ceiling was so low that Lamb found himself ducking a bit to avoid colliding with the lamp as he entered. He nodded at the two uniformed men who were assisting Rivers in the search.

  Rivers greeted him with, “Kind of you to stop by, sir.”

  “Well, I thought I’d come down and check to make sure you weren’t slacking on the job, Harry.”

  “The place has been tossed recently, as you can see.”

  “Yes.” Lamb nodded at the cash on the table. “I see that you found some money.”

  “Yes, and more than you might expect a man like Lee to have. Eighty quid so far, all in cash, mostly ones and fives. We found it in the usual place, tucked beneath the mattress. If someone ransacked the place looking for money then they appear not to have been too savvy about where to look for it. We’ve also found more than a dozen notebooks of various sizes filled with what appear to be lists of things Lee fancied or was interested in—his favorite foods and the names of cities he’s visited and the like. He appears to have written dozens of these lists.”

  Lamb noticed two thin white candles, each of which stood within a tin holder; one sat in the middle of the table, while the other had been placed atop the shelf. He picked up each and examined them. Each had been burned down very close to their nubs.

  “Larkin found a candle stub very similar to these by the pond,” he told Rivers. “Make sure we include them in whatever we pack up and take away from here.”

  “Right,” Rivers said.

  Lamb glanced round the room hoping that something might jump out at him. He went to the stove and examined it. He found a small shovel used to remove ash but no tool with which to poke the fire in the stove’s belly.

  “The poker seems to be missing,” he said.

  Rivers looked up. “I hadn’t noticed. I’ll have a look round for it.”

  Having seen all he thought worthwhile for the moment, Lamb moved to the door and ducked out of the cottage, followed by Rivers. A brief ray of sun lit the cle
aring, warming it. Lamb stopped to light a cigarette, but did not offer one to Rivers, who did not smoke. He took a drag and then said, gesturing toward the ice house, “What about that little building there?”

  “It looks like it might have been an ice house at one time,” Rivers said. “I had a peek inside but we haven’t searched it yet. There appears to be nothing in there save cobwebs.”

  “Given the amount of cash he had stashed away, we’ve got to consider whether he was blackmailing someone,” Lamb said, returning to the subject of what the search of the cottage had yielded.

  Rivers nodded. “I agree.”

  Though he reminded himself that he must not get ahead of the game, Lamb could not help but to weigh the possible targets of blackmail whom he’d so far met. Hornby struck him as the most obvious; if the doctor was up to something untoward, then Lee, who moved about the place freely, might very well have discovered it.

  He briefly updated Rivers on what the interviews at Elton House had yielded, including that Travers had claimed to have seen and heard Lee arguing with a local man named Alan Fox.

  “How well do you trust this Travers bloke?”

  Lamb dropped his butt on the ground, extinguished it with the toe end of his shoe, retrieved it, and deposited it in his pocket.

  “I’d like to trust him; he seems right enough on the surface,” he said. “But he apparently came out of the campaign in France a bit shattered, so it’s hard to say. I’ll tell you once I’ve spoken to the fellow Alan Fox. I’m about to go into Marbury now to see if I can’t hunt him down.”