The Sussex Murder

by Ian Sansom

  In summary of the chaos, or at least as Morley explains it in Sussex, Bonfire Night in Lewes is organised, if that’s the word, by the various bonfire societies from different areas of the town, the Borough, Commercial Square, the Southover, the South Street Juveniles, Cliffe, St Anne’s, as well as a number of other societies from nearby Barcombe and Burwash, East Hoathly, Halland, Edenbridge, Firle and etcetera. After the initial gathering of the societies and the flaming barrel run, these groups then parade individually and collectively throughout Lewes in a series of processions. The societies spend months preparing for Bonfire Night, building their bonfires all across the town, using scrap wood, faggots and brushwood collected from local groves and copses, and stockpiling petrol, fireworks and every other imaginable kind of flammable, sparking and incendiary material. In Sussex Morley rather sweetly describes this sort of activity as ‘community building’. (He also takes the opportunity to reprint his popular article – one of his true hardy perennials – on ‘How to Create the Perfect Fire’, which bears no relation whatsoever to the bonfires of Lewes, but which, in case you haven’t read it, advises that for the perfect hearth fire you need exactly 20 split hardwood logs, 2 large oak logs, 16 hardwood sticks at 3 inches in length, 20 assorted kindling sticks at 7 inches in length, some orange peel, some pine cones and some copper nails.)

  On Bonfire Night, this ‘community building’ reaches its natural conclusion with members of the societies soaking torches in petrol, donning their smuggler outfits, and heading out onto the streets to denounce Guy Fawkes and the Pope and generally to carry on like pagans. As for the smuggler costumes, each society has its own slight variation on the theme, as well as a range of other fancy dress options: I spotted phalanxes of Lewesian Zulus and Red Indians parading that night, but there were also, apparently, Beefeaters and Vikings roaming abroad, and Morley claimed to have seen packs of women dressed in traditional Valencian costume, though it’s possible of course that they may simply have been actual women visiting from Valencia. Each society also builds its own enormous effigy that gets paraded through town and then on to each bonfire site, where there are firework displays, yet more speeches and condemnations of the Pope, politicians and all other enemies of the people, until finally the effigies are violently beaten with sticks, have their heads blown off with fireworks and their remains cast to the flames, while the revellers dance around the fire, whooping, hollering and carousing until the early hours.

  Quaint.

  Almost as soon as the processions began that evening, I became separated from Morley, Molly and Miriam: it was impossible to stick together in the crowd, which surged this way and that through the narrow streets of the town, following a giant papier-mâché Hitler head this way, a blimp-like Mussolini that. Processions passed by with Lady Lancers, brass bands and firework wheels flaming, everywhere underfoot there seemed to be small boys skimming fireworks along the ground, and the chanting of various bonfire songs echoed throughout the town – ‘Burn him in a tub of tar/ burn him like a blazing star/ burn his body from his head/ then we’ll the say old Pope is dead!’ – as did the repeated call and response, ‘What shall we do with the Pope?’ ‘Burn him! Burn him! Burn the Pope!’ I have never been to Belfast but I assume that the famous Orange marches on 12 July echo to a similar sound. Purely for the purposes of avoiding such sinister jubilations I found myself in and out of various local hostelries: the Snowdrop, the Anchor, the Bargeman’s Arms, the Schooner, excellent establishments some of them, though I cannot alas recall which, but which I do recall were more like old country pubs, where the beer was kept in barrels in the cellar, accessed by steps down from the pub kitchen and brought up a glass at the time. Bare floors, a few old tables and chairs: one might almost have been drinking in the sixteenth century. Entirely without aim or intention, I eventually found myself with a bunch of local lads at a bonfire site some time in the early hours in the suburb of Cliffe. The masquerades and fireworks having long since concluded, small groups of men and women were running and jumping through the glowing embers of the bonfire. I dimly recall our all extinguishing the flames by the traditional method, while singing the National Anthem, and my returning to the hotel to find the doors firmly locked and bolted.

  Making my way round the back to the old stables, past the undamaged Lagonda, I found where the kitchen staff had kindly settled Pablo the Bedlington on some old flour bags, and settled myself down beside him for the night.

  CHAPTER 18

  I WOKE, stiff and freezing cold, around five thirty, to the thoroughly unpleasant sensation of my pocketed stick of Brighton rock poking me in the ribs and my face being buried in dog fur – a choking, sickening sensation that I cannot recommend, and which was almost as bad as my throbbing hangover.

  As I opened my eyes I saw that the kitchen staff were making their way into the back of the White Hart. I was sorely tempted to follow them immediately into the warmth and comfort of the hotel but then I got up to stretch and my whole body felt like a damp firework exploding. I thought Pablo and I might take a quick walk around Lewes – just to loosen up and to clear my head.

  I nudged the dog. The dog did not move in response. So I nudged him again. Once more, no response. I patted him gently. The body felt stiff.

  We never quite established the cause of death of the poor creature: it could have been the cold, it could have been the shock of the fireworks, it could have been that he was a Club Row dog with a Club Row constitution. It could have been anything. All I knew at that moment, on the morning after the night of 5 November in Lewes, was that I had a dead dog on my hands and I had to do something about it.

  I headed over to the hotel kitchen.

  The brutal fact is that a body, any body, begins to decompose immediately after death. I’d seen it in Spain – and alas on my various outings with Morley. A dead body soon starts to give off a foul, sickening odour and to attract insects, and the hotter the temperature, the faster the rate of decomposition. In Spain, you were really only looking at a couple of hours before you were facing a serious problem. Admittedly, November in Sussex presents fewer problems, and of course a dog is just a dog while a human is a human, but a dead body is a dead body. I also knew from my previous experience with Morley that rigor mortis sets in pretty quickly, so ideally if you’re going to have to handle the remains at all you really want to get going before the full onset of stiffness and leakage. These are of course unpleasant matters to talk of – but then much of what is true in life is unpleasant.

  There were three of them in the hotel kitchen. Two of them small and wiry, one of them an entirely more substantial sort of a fellow, a man who looked like he was capable of doing all his own butchery: I guessed kitchen porters and the chef.

  ‘Gents, good morning,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem out the back here.’

  I had to repeat myself. They weren’t expecting anyone walking in the back door of the kitchen at five thirty in the morning: they were barely awake themselves. They looked at me, dumbfounded.

  ‘Gents,’ I said again, ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem here. And I wonder—’

  The bigger of the men approached me, and despite the fact that he was now wearing chef’s whites rather than his smuggler costume, I immediately recognised that he was none other than the gallant gent who yesterday had picked up his companion lying at Miriam’s feet. I was relieved – or at least momentarily relieved. The man stared at me with ill-concealed disgust. Admittedly, I was not looking at my best. I hadn’t shaved, I was wearing the same faded blue serge suit I’d had on since we left London, and I’d slept outside in the cold, in the cart shed, and on flour sacks.

  ‘Get out,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem,’ I said.

  ‘You’re going to have more than a bit of a problem if you don’t get out of my kitchen,’ he said.

  ‘I’m a guest,’ I said.

  ‘And I’m the King of Siam,’ he said. ‘I said get out.’

  ‘It’s t
he dog,’ I said.

  ‘What’s the dog?’ he said.

  ‘A dog, a dead dog.’ And I tried to explain that I was a guest staying at the hotel and that one of the other chefs had kindly accommodated my dog on the flour sacks out the back yesterday and that he’d died. The story was so strange and unexpected, I could see that although he was struggling to understand, he was also inclined to believe me.

  ‘Come, come and see,’ I said.

  And so the four of us trooped outside to the cart shed to see poor old Pablo.

  He looked like a sleeping lamb, curled up, his ears flat against his long sad face, his fur its distinctive tinge of blue. The big fellow immediately took charge. He instructed one of his companions to go and fetch a sheet, and the other to fetch a bucket with some warm water and some rags.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, this is a sorry business,’ he said.

  ‘It certainly is,’ I agreed.

  ‘Unaccountable bad.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have left the dog out in the cold like that, and with the fireworks and all.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘That was a bit of a mistake.’

  ‘Bloody stupid is what it was.’

  He said nothing more to me.

  When his companions returned he set to work in silence, with me assisting, lifting the dog as he cleaned all around. I then helped him lift the body while the others laid out the sheet and we arranged the animal on the sheet, as if it were sleeping, and wrapped it up tightly. We then slid the body in its winding sheet into a flour bag and knotted it securely at the top with some string.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘We can’t just leave him out here,’ said the big man.

  ‘Obviously,’ I said.

  ‘But we’re not putting him in the kitchen.’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’

  ‘We need somewhere cool and secure,’ he said, glancing around.

  ‘I suppose I could put him in the back of the Lagonda,’ I said, nodding towards the vehicle, which I had conveniently parked behind the hotel the night before.

  ‘This is yours?’

  ‘It’s not mine exactly, but it’s … Well, yes, basically it’s mine,’ I said.

  ‘That’ll do then, if you’re sure. Lads.’

  And so we laid Pablo to rest in the boot of the car.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said the big man when we’d finished and we were all standing around, smoking. ‘We need to go and get on with the breakfast, lads. We’re behind.’

  ‘Thank you very much, gents,’ I said. ‘I’m Stephen Sefton.’ I shook their hands.

  ‘Ben,’ said the first.

  ‘Jake,’ said the second. ‘What breed of dog was that?’

  ‘It was a Bedlington,’ I said. ‘A Bedlington Terrier.’

  ‘I ain’t never seen a terrier like that,’ said Jake.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I suppose they’re not that common.’

  ‘I’m Bevis,’ said the big man, shaking my hand with obvious distaste.

  ‘Thank you, Bevis. I really appreciate you helping.’

  ‘I hope someone would do it for my dog,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not actually my dog,’ I began. ‘I’m just looking after it.’

  ‘Not your dog?’ said Bevis. ‘I thought you said—’

  ‘Well, it belongs … Actually, gentlemen, if you’d excuse me, I’m going to have to clear my head,’ I said, suddenly realising that I was going to have to work out how to break the bad news to Miriam.

  ‘Go down to the Ouse,’ said Jake, ‘that’ll do the job.’

  ‘Or the park,’ said Ben. ‘Or Pells Pool. It’s not far. Five-minute walk. You just go along Market Street. Nice spot.’

  ‘It’s not open though,’ said Jake. ‘They’ve been doing some work on the place.’

  ‘Aye, not for a swim, but. It’s a nice spot. That’ll clear your head all right.’

  I had no idea exactly how quickly it would clear my head – and how quickly a bad morning was about to become considerably worse.

  CHAPTER 19

  PELLS POOL turned out to be one of those so-called ‘lidos’ that seemed to spring up everywhere during the 1930s. The lidos, many of them now fallen into disrepair, were intended by the noble and multitudinous Pleasure Grounds and Baths Committees of this country’s great local and borough councils to be necessary improvements upon and replacements for the old public baths and public park swimming lakes, many of which were themselves so far beyond disrepair at that time as to be most definitely unhygienic, if not entirely unusable. The lido craze had caught on everywhere: I remember back in London reading about the opening of a Tottenham Lido and a West Ham Lido, and I had myself on a number of occasions visited the famous Tooting Bathing Lake, which had been converted into a lido and become an unlikely south London tourist attraction.

  Morley, perhaps surprisingly, was not a great fan of the lidos, believing them to be an example of the government interfering with and trying to control every Briton’s inalienable right to swim in unsafe, unfiltered and often stagnant water wheresoever, whensoever and howsoever they wished, entirely for free and at their own risk. In his essay ‘On Liberty and the Public Good’ (Amateur Philosopher, January 1936), which does not mention the lido, but which does worry about the public park, he argues that ‘To free individuals to act in accordance with their own best interests is a sure sign of a civilised society, just as to instruct individuals on how to use their freedom is a sure sign of the barbarous.’ His ideas on such matters were, admittedly, subject to change and often contradictory but fundamentally he believed that everyone should be left alone to take responsibility for their own lives, though he also believed that we should support and provide for those who were, for whatever reason, unable to take responsibility for themselves. Basically he believed in duty and in charity and in generosity and rather distrusted what he called ‘Bolshevik’ ideas about social justice and equality. Thus, he was generally anti things like the lidos – though at other times, he could be pro. He was the kind of liberal who no longer really exists in this country, or indeed in any other: he believed in the Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, yet he also believed that men were always unlikely to work in their own best interests, let alone the interests of others. His strongest and abiding belief was in the simple idea of Englishness. If only we could educate our fellow men in English habits of discipline, self-respect and good manners, then all would be well; and maybe, in his strange, complex, muddle-headed way, he was right.

  Anyway, Pells Pool was a fine example of everything that Morley both hated and admired: a square-set, brick-built, municipal-type compound, provided for the public good, but which one had to pay for the privilege to enter.

  A stone plaque on the wall outside stated that a freshwater swimming pool had first been established here – by public subscription – in 1860, which surely must have made it one of the oldest pools in England. I was keen to see inside. The new place had been opened as recently as 1935, and was surprisingly easy to crack into. I pulled myself up and over the main entrance gate, swanned past the ticket office and into the lido.

  It was much, much larger than I’d expected – the pool was at least 50 feet wide and perhaps 150 feet long. There was a grassy lawn off to the right, with changing rooms signposted down at the far end. There were signs of recent building work or maintenance: piles of bricks, scaffolding planks, debris. The place was pleasantly cool and damp. I wondered idly if I might find the source of the spring that fed the pool.

  (At St George’s, during the years we worked together, Morley undertook a number of ambitious aquatic landscaping projects of his own. There was a stream, for example, that was fed from a series of ponds that were in turn fed by various springs, that flowed eastwards down a slope past the north side of the house, ending in a large pool that had silted up. He spent hours – weeks, months – dredging that pool and using the silt and sludge to construct an island, upon wh
ich he eventually built a grotto-cum-bathing house, designed by someone who he claimed was a ‘trained Italian grottoist’, whatever that was, and who had imported decayed lava stone from Italy, constructing walls that glistened with water from hidden pipes designed to drip and cascade, depending on the weather. It was pretty awful. In an alcove sat a little marble Venus, being constantly spurted at. The place was inspired by a Moorish palace in Seville, according to the grottoist, though it might just as well have been inspired by a visit to the Windmill Theatre in Soho. But the pond became a very pleasant natural swimming pool, and I spent many happy hours there with Miriam over the years, lounging away what little remained of my youth. Looking back, I was a lucky man.)

  Though it was still dark I could clearly see there was water in the pool. Looking closer it seemed to be only half full – just a few feet, rainwater perhaps, and there were leaves and branches, algae and scum floating on the top. I thought of the hundreds of boys and girls who had doubtless learned to swim here over the years.

  I noticed that a large area of algae had collected down by the far end of the pool – a dark mass, darker even than the rest. I wondered if this might be the source of the spring water.

  It was not.

  It was a young woman, floating face down. She seemed to have something caught around her neck.

  I waded in, fully clothed, and pulled the body to the side of the pool.

  Lizzie Walter.

  The Hudsons’

  CHAPTER 20

  I WAS EVENTUALLY TRANSPORTED – in what might now be called an unmarked police car, but which was in fact, as far as I could tell, simply a car, a Morris 6, if memory serves me right – to the Hudsons’, a grand country pile about three or four miles outside Lewes. Fortunately, on this occasion, I hadn’t actually been arrested, but I had been helping police with their enquiries: this became something of a theme during my years working on The County Guides with Morley, and I was already familiar with the routine of interviews and investigations. The Lewes police were like most of the police we encountered during those years: decent and firm but fair, with perhaps a slight emphasis on the firm. The phrase ‘a rap on the knuckles’, I can testify, derives from the once common practice of the actual rapping of actual knuckles. Similar derivations apply for phrases such as ‘a quick slap round the back of the head’, ‘he tripped and fell’ and ‘to teach someone a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry’.