The Sussex Murder

by Ian Sansom

  ‘Father was thinking of doing it himself,’ she said.

  ‘I wouldn’t necessarily advise that,’ said Mr Potter. ‘Though of course it is growing in popularity as a hobby. Ladies are becoming particularly keen to master the art. Feminine taste and skill can be brought very effectively into play when it comes to taxidermy.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘I think so, miss. Certainly, from our experience here, it seems women as much as men love to collect and mount their own specimens.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ said Miriam.

  ‘A buck’s head in the dining room, say,’ said Mr Potter. ‘Or a pretty bird in the parlour.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘We’d take good care of the dog, miss.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ said Miriam. ‘It’s very kind of you. Perhaps I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Very good, miss.’

  ‘And in the meantime …’ said Morley.

  ‘We can take care of the dog in the meantime, Mr Morley, yes.’

  ‘I do appreciate that,’ said Mr Morley. ‘Very much.’

  I assisted Mr Potter in unloading Pablo, and then we were ready to depart.

  ‘Well, an amazing place,’ said Morley, shaking hands with Mr Potter. ‘I’m so glad we could make it. We shall certainly tell all our friends.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘Do you happen to know Herbert Wells?’ said Morley.

  ‘Herbert Wells? No, I don’t think so,’ said Mr Potter.

  ‘H.G.,’ said Miriam wearily. ‘H.G. Wells, he means.’

  ‘The writer?’ said Mr Potter.

  ‘Yes, writer, socialist, futurist, amateur historian, amateur scientist—’

  ‘Amateur everything,’ said Miriam, making a face in my general direction. ‘Sound familiar?’

  ‘A man of insatiable curiosity,’ said Morley.

  ‘I don’t know H.G. Wells, no, Mr Morley,’ said Mr Potter.

  ‘Well, anyway, I think Herbert would absolutely love it here.’

  ‘He’s quite odd,’ Miriam whispered to me.

  ‘I’ll definitely tell him to look you up. He published a short story a few years ago, in the Pall Mall Gazette, I think it was. “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist”. You didn’t happen to come across it?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no, Mr Morley,’ said Mr Potter.

  ‘In the story, there’s this taxidermist, who is sitting up late at night – somewhere between his first glass of whisky and his fourth – when a man, in Wells’s memorable words, “is no longer cautious and yet not drunk”.’

  ‘I am certainly familiar with that state, Mr Morley,’ said Mr Potter. ‘Our family being publicans.’

  ‘Ah yes, very good. Anyway, in the story, Wells’s taxidermist muses upon his craft. He boasts that there is no man who can stuff like him: elephants, moths, everything. He also claims to have stuffed human beings – chiefly amateur ornithologists – though of course this is merely Wells being witty.’

  ‘Hilarious,’ said Miriam.

  ‘I believe there are examples of stuffed humans in museums,’ said Mr Potter.

  ‘Really?’ said Morley.

  ‘Though the museums in which they reside are not anxious to exhibit them or publicise their existence,’ said Mr Potter. ‘As you can imagine.’

  ‘Indeed. The preparation would be exactly the same as for a gorilla, though,’ said Morley, ‘would it not?’

  ‘Yes, or a large antelope,’ said Mr Potter.

  ‘Gentlemen, please!’ said Miriam. ‘The thought is quite horrid.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Morley. ‘I wonder in fact if it might ever become a viable alternative to burial. Stuffing one’s relatives?’

  ‘Father! That’s disgusting.’

  ‘Is it though, Miriam? I can’t see the problem, in many ways. In fact, wouldn’t it be rather wonderful if you could keep all your dear ones by you once they’re dead and gone? You might even have them fitted up with clockwork, in order for them to be able to do things. Couple of coats of varnish and they’d last for years.’

  Morley was someone who was always prepared to allow his imagination to roam where others might not dare to go. It was a part of the secret of his success. He simply allowed himself to dream and his thoughts to roam.

  ‘Father!’ said Miriam. But Morley was now too far gone in his musing.

  ‘The human body is a paradox, you see, reminding us both of the presence and the absence of the self, reminding us that we wander through our lives untouched and untouchable, as through a habitat diorama, or perhaps as the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn. “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,/ Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;/ She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/ For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”’

  ‘Not following you there, Father.’

  ‘No,’ said Morley, who had a far-off look in his eye.

  On the way back we took a short detour via somewhere called Chanctonbury Ring, where the view was, admittedly, remarkable. Down below us was the village of Washington, and Arundel Castle, and the spire of Chichester Cathedral. To the north, Box Hill, Leith Hill and the Hog’s Back, to the east the Devil’s Dyke, and Wolstonbury and Poynings. To the south, Cissbury and the sea.

  Morley was unusually quiet.

  ‘Everything all right, Father?’ asked Miriam.

  ‘Not really, Miriam. I think I may have worked out what happened to poor Lizzie Walter.’

  ‘Really?’ said Miriam. ‘How? What? When?’

  ‘There are just one or two more things I need to check,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 29

  ON MY TRAVELS with Morley I often found myself in towns and in cities late at night or early in the morning and rather at a loss. What does one do in a town like Lewes when you can’t sleep? It was a problem I never seemed to face in London: then again, it was the sort of problem that made for fewer problems.

  I found myself in the cool of that morning, standing smoking in the churchyard behind St Michael’s Church on the High Street. It was a rather lovely spot: a weeping willow, a nice view of the Castle Keep, Tom Paine’s house. You get to appreciate a place early in the morning, even in the cold and the dark: Lewes, I realised, sits in a kind of shallow hollow, surrounded by hills: Firle Beacon, Mount Caburn, Mount Harry. It feels secure and permanent.

  Early mornings are deceptive.

  Morley came striding past.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Morley,’ I called to him.

  He seemed neither startled nor surprised.

  ‘Good morning, Sefton!’

  ‘Early start?’

  ‘I have been for a walk, Sefton, a good long walk, to mull things over. Up and over Mount Caburn to Glynde, from Glynde to Ringmer and then from Ringmer over the hills to Lewes again.’

  ‘That sounds like quite a walk.’

  ‘There was a lot of mulling to be done, Sefton. But yes, it was a super route. You should try it.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall.’

  A milkman came rattling past, three bottles in each hand, cigarette clamped in his mouth. Miriam’s milkman. Morley whistled a cheery hello in greeting. The milkman whistled back and carried on his way.

  ‘Come on,’ said Morley. ‘Let’s walk together. I have done my thinking and have reached my conclusion.’

  ‘Your conclusion?’

  ‘About Lizzie’s death.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘There’s good news and there’s bad news, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, shall we start with the good news?’

  ‘I say good news …’ Morley tutted, as if scolding himself. ‘I was on the telephone last night to an old friend, Bernard Spilsbury. Do you know him?’

  ‘I can’t say I do, Mr Morley.’

  The iceman was unloading ice outside the fishmonger’s.

  ‘Good morning!’ said Morley.

  ‘Good morning, gents.’

  ‘Pathologist – the Brighton tru
nk murder cases? The blazing car murder? Brides in the bath? Dr Crippen?’

  ‘They certainly ring a bell,’ I said.

  ‘He’s the best in the country, Bernard. I wanted to check something with him. It was something you said.’

  ‘Something I said?’

  ‘You said that when you pulled the poor girl from the swimming pool there was a something around her neck?’

  ‘Yes. It looked like a shoelace.’

  We passed the baker, the butcher, the window cleaner, and greeted them all.

  ‘The shoelace,’ continued Morley, ‘is what made everyone think it was murder. Yet the doctor assigned to the case here – I spoke to him yesterday evening – told me that if the girl had been strangled he would have expected a deep groove in the neck.’

  ‘A deep groove?’

  ‘Precisely. Dreadful, I know. But they found no indications of such a groove, or indeed of asphyxia. Which rather casts doubt upon the possibility that she died by strangulation. Nor was there evidence that she had been subjected to forceful sexual intercourse.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ I said.

  ‘But …’ Morley paused and stopped walking.

  When out in the country he could not spot a bird’s nest, a squirrel, a mouse or indeed almost anything else without commenting upon it. There was not a ditch he would not pause to examine, forever seeking frogs and tadpoles and admiring every variety of fern and grass. But when in town, if anything, it was worse. He liked to stop at every shop. He had paused now outside a shop selling basketware.

  ‘They also sell dog leads,’ he said. ‘Look. And paraffin, for stoves.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Morley,’ I said.

  ‘Hooks, chains, ropes. I wonder if it was at one time a chandler’s?’

  ‘I don’t know. You were saying?’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘About Lizzie?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Lizzie.’

  Lewes’s high-class greengrocer drove past in his van, bringing his provisions, ready to serve Virginia Woolf and the rest of Sussex’s artistic crème de la crème.

  ‘She was pregnant,’ said Morley.

  ‘Lizzie?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘So, you think …?’

  ‘I rather fear Henry will be charged with her murder, yes. On the assumption that the child was his and they argued and … A shoelace has been found in his possession that matches the shoelace around her neck.’

  ‘Dear me,’ I said. ‘So you think he killed her when he learned that she was pregnant?’

  ‘Oh no. I don’t think for a moment that Henry killed her, Sefton. It’s just proving that he didn’t that’s the problem.’

  I knew exactly how to prove that Henry didn’t kill Lizzie – to get Miriam to confess that she had spent the night with him. But I had given my word.

  ‘It’s hardly our problem, though, Mr Morley, is it? That’s a matter for the—’

  ‘I promised Molly I would do anything I could to assist her in proving her son’s innocence before leaving Sussex. Anything.’ He looked quite forlorn. ‘There’s one last thing left I can try, Sefton, if you’d like to accompany me. I may need your support.’

  CHAPTER 30

  WHAT YOU FORGET is the smell of the houses back then: the smell of coal, and the smell of paraffin, the all-pervasive smell of damp, from the cold and from the condensation. And you forget about the sheer endless drudgery of household chores, the clothes boiled in a copper, the food cooked on the old ranges that had to be constantly blackleaded, and the mangles, the oil lamps, the hearths, the doorsteps forever to be whitened. The old feather beds, even, that you had to retick, rubbing soap inside to stop the feathers coming through. It was never-ending, and it was awful. The good old days weren’t just times of great hardship. They were appalling. Years after the completion of The County Guides, I would receive letters from people harking back to the good old days, recalling their memories and praising the England that we knew then and we wrote about, and how things were no longer the same. And I would always think, do you really want to go back in time?

  The front door of Lizzie’s parents’ house opened to the red brick-floored living room, the kind of red brick floor that people used to rub with another brick to clean. There was a rag rug, a big old black coal range on which the cooking was done, and opposite, against the wall, a long black settle. And that was it. Leading out back you could see a tiny larder, with a little stone slab on which the milk was kept, something wrapped in brown paper. There were also a couple of earthenware crocks and the remains of something hanging on a hook in the ceiling.

  Mrs Walter, Lizzie’s mother, was doing the ironing by the range on a worn wooden board. She took up her iron, spat on it to check the heat and then proceeded.

  ‘We won’t disturb you for long, Mrs Walter. I can see that you’re busy.’

  ‘That I am,’ said Mrs Walter.

  ‘Shall we?’ Morley nodded towards the settle.

  Mrs Walter nodded and continued with her chores.

  Morley had very little grasp, to be honest, of the working and domestic lives of ordinary people. Though from the very humblest of beginnings, at St George’s he now enjoyed the assistance of a housemaid, a cook, a gardener and a gardener’s boy. At one time he also employed a gamekeeper and a chauffeur. The cook was up to light the kitchen range at five every morning. The housemaid would set the fires and lay breakfast and bring water to the bathrooms for the washbasins. The laundry was taken once a week in its wicker hamper to the washerwoman in town, and there was always someone available to clean the lamps, and the cutlery, and the shoes, and to generally sweep and polish and dust. Having come from nowhere, he had successfully created for himself the life of an Edwardian country gent. Mrs Walter’s life was the opposite. You could certainly understand why Morley was a classical liberal. And you could certainly understand why Mrs Walter and her daughter might have turned to fascism, communism, or any other -ism.

  We had introduced ourselves as school inspectors.

  ‘But we’re not school inspectors,’ I’d said to Morley.

  ‘Did we or did we not inspect Lizzie’s school when we were there?’

  ‘In a sense,’ I said. ‘Insofar as we ransacked her desk.’

  ‘There we are then,’ said Morley.

  ‘I cannot begin to imagine your grief, Mrs Walter,’ he said.

  Mrs Walter spat on her iron and said nothing.

  ‘I wonder if you might be able to help us with something.’

  Nothing.

  ‘We came across this note, Mrs Walter, in your daughter’s desk drawer at school.’ Morley produced the note with its list of names.

  Mrs Walter appeared entirely uninterested.

  ‘I believe this note, Mrs Walter, may have been responsible for driving your daughter to the most extreme of measures.’

  ‘What sort of a note?’ said Mrs Walter.

  ‘It is a note containing a list of women’s names.’

  ‘And what’s that got to do with Lizzie’s death?’

  ‘We think it might be a list of Henry Harper’s lovers.’

  I looked at Morley, startled. This, presumably, was one of the things he’d concluded on his long morning walk.

  Mrs Walter carried on ironing.

  ‘We wonder, Mrs Walter, if perhaps Lizzie felt she had no one to turn to, that she was sent this note, that she felt she was being mocked and that she therefore … But we would only be able to prove that if, for example, she had left a note.’

  Another note? The note listing Henry’s lovers and—

  ‘You mean a suicide note,’ said Mrs Walter.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Morley.

  ‘I told the police, there was no note.’

  ‘I know what you told the police, Mrs Walter. But I wonder if perhaps you might have misplaced it or overlooked it?’

  ‘I told the police there was no note.’

>   ‘If there were a note,’ said Morley. ‘If it were to find its way into our hands it would be possible for us to present it to the police, along with this note, and no questions would be asked.’

  ‘What difference would it make?’

  ‘Well, if it were the case, Mrs Walter, that your daughter had … was … a suicide, then an innocent man would be going to prison – and indeed in all likelihood would be facing the death sentence – for a murder he did not commit.’

  ‘An innocent man?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right. Henry Harper.’

  Mrs Walter had finished her ironing, which she piled up next to us on the settle. She wandered out back into her larder, took a rough-looking biscuit from the earthenware jar and poured herself a cup of milk – breakfast, presumably – and stood looking at us. She offered us nothing. She looked at us as if we were her sworn enemies.

  ‘You people have no idea.’

  ‘I don’t know which sort of people you mean by that, Mrs Walter.’

  ‘You people.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘Educated people, with your operas and your theatres, coming into town. There’s nothing in it for any of us, is there?’

  ‘But Lizzie was involved in the staging of the opera at the Hudsons’,’ said Morley.

  ‘She had ideas above her station,’ said Mrs Walter. ‘And look where it got her.’

  ‘Mrs Walter,’ said Morley, ‘do you know—’

  ‘Do you know how long my family has been in Lewes?’

  ‘I don’t, Mrs Walter.’

  ‘Four hundred years. How long have you been here?’

  ‘A couple of days,’ said Morley.

  She snorted in derision. ‘Well, you’ve had your fill. I think it’s time you went.’

  Morley and I got up to leave.

  ‘We know that Lizzie was pregnant, Mrs Walter,’ said Morley.

  ‘You do, do you? You think you know everything, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Morley, ‘but—’

  ‘And what does it matter to you, that she was pregnant?’

  ‘It … I—’

  ‘Do you know what it would have meant to her?’

  ‘Being pregnant?’ said Morley. ‘Bringing a new life into the world and—’