A little death, p.1
A Little Death, page 1
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
OBITUARIES
PART ONE
ADA
GEORGINA
ADA
EDMUND
GEORGINA
ADA
EDMUND
ADA
GEORGINA
ADA
EDMUND
ADA
GEORGINA
EDMUND
GEORGINA
EDMUND
ADA
EDMUND
GEORGINA
EDMUND
ADA
PART TWO
GEORGINA
ADA
EDMUND
A LITTLE DEATH
Laura Wilson
First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Oriel
This ebook edition published in 2013 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
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7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © Laura Wilson 1999
The right of Laura Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78087 944 4
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
Laura Wilson’s acclaimed and award-winning crime novels have won her many fans. Her novel Stratton’s War won the CWA Ellis Peters Award and two of her novels have been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. Laura is the Guardian’s crime reviewer. She lives in Islington, London.
Also by Laura Wilson
Dying Voices
My Best Friend
Hello Bunny Alice
The Lover
A Thousand Lies
DI Stratton Series
Stratton’s War
An Empty Death
A Capital Crime
A Willing Victim
The Riot
Critical acclaim for A Little Death
‘Remarkably skilled first novel, told through three narrators flashing back from the 1950s to the First World War. Works as both a locked-room mystery and a nugget of social history. Great promise’
Mike Ripley, Daily Telegraph
‘Laura Wilson weaves a spellbinding and atmospheric tale that re-creates vivid pictures of period living. And with the ventriloquist skill of the truly imaginative writer, she gets under the skin of her narrators to produce a haunting tragedy of damaged and distorted lives’
Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News
‘I urge everyone towards an offbeat, literate, wonderfully imagined novel … Tightly written, completely true to period, quietly horrifying’
Poisoned Pen
‘An accomplished first novel … an evocative picture of a past era with a childhood death which remains unexplained until the final pages. A very promising debut’
Susanna Yager, Daily Telegraph
‘ … winds up the intrigue so that the book is difficult to put down. Written in a deceptively sedate style, it nevertheless had me galloping through the pages to see what the characters would get up to in the next chapter. A Little Death provides a strong sense of time and place, it is understated, witty and sharply observed, building a multi-layered, seductive and spell-binding mystery’
Crime Time
To my parents, June and William Wilson,
and to the memory of Liz Rimmer (1970–1997)
I am very grateful to Judith Amanthis, Paula Breslich, Harriet Brittain, Tony Colwell, Claire Foster, Jane Gregory, Lisanne Radice, Janet Ravenscroft, Michael Rimmer, Paul Sidey, Selina Walker, Jane Wood, Catriona Woodburn and Cathy Woodman for their encouragement, advice and support.
FRIDAY 11 NOVEMBER 1994
OBITUARIES
Louisa, Lady Kellway, CBE, died in hospital after a short illness on November 6 aged 104.
She was born on 20 July 1890.
When Louisa, Lady Kellway died last week, the final hope of solving two of the most celebrated British murder mysteries of the century died with her. Born Louisa Lomax in the Victorian twilight of 1890, Lady Kellway was one of a generation who believed that a lady’s name should appear in the newspapers only at birth, marriage and death. Daughter of a country squire, she came from a family whose values were rooted in the certainty of an immutable class system and an empire upon which the sun would never set. In 1920 she married David, Lord Kellway, a war hero and the owner of a stately home, a magnificent Italianate garden and several hundred acres of Wiltshire, now administered by the National Trust. It was a happy marriage and there was one child, Caroline, born in 1921. Lady Kellway’s was a worthy life, including service as a JP and as the chairwoman of the local WI. As she herself said in a radio interview in 1977, it was all about ‘being sensible and getting on with it – no fuss or divorces or anything like that’.
This was true as far as her own life went, but Lady Kellway knew all about scandal. She was the first cousin of Georgina Gresham, without whose name no true-crime collection would be complete, and it is for her connection with this enigmatic woman that she will be remembered. A watercolour of the two girls by a long-forgotten RA shows two classic profiles with dazzling complexions and alabaster shoulders rising out of clouds of tulle. The portrait gives no clue that although Georgina Gresham, née Lomax, came from the same foursquare county background as her cousin, she stood trial in 1928 for the murder of her husband, millionaire James Gresham, and was acquitted to howls of public fury. In 1955, Georgina’s body was discovered in her London home, together with those of her brother, Edmund Lomax, and their housekeeper, Ada Pepper. All three had died from gunshot wounds and the police concluded that one of the trio must have shot the others before committing suicide. Despite a lengthy investigation, however, which one and why was never established.
Photographs of Georgina reveal little more than the portrait. One, dating from 1926, shows her arm in arm with her alleged lover, the Hon. Edward ‘Teddy’ Booth, now Lord Tranmere, watching the cars at the Brooklands motor-racing circuit. Others, taken during her trial, picture her being escorted in and out of the Old Bailey, and one depicts her leaving court after her acquittal, cloche hat pulled down over haughty, heavy-lidded eyes, one gloved hand holding the collar of her fur coat tightly round her neck. Louisa and Georgina’s brother Edmund stand on either side of her, fringed by journalists with out-thrust notebooks and flash-bulbs.
The last known photograph of Georgina Gresham was taken in 1952, three years before her death. She is in London’s Cromwell Road, with the Natural History Museum in the background. In what looks like the same fur coat, she has a large number of coloured scarves tied round her head and is wearing white ankle socks. At 62, her skin has the stretched, parchment look of someone far older and the surprising lengths of bare arm and leg sticking out of either end of the mangy fur are needle thin.
The questions raised when Georgina’s name first appeared in the newspapers almost seventy years ago remain unanswered today. Her husband, James Gresham, died from a massive overdose of sedatives and the prosecution asserted that Georgina had administered them to him, possibly with Edward Booth’s connivance, because Gresham refused to grant her a divorce. In other words, it was a crime passionnel, scarcely different from the case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters in 1922, which resulted in the hanging of both – except in two respects: first, the complete absence of love letters or any other physical evidence to tie Georgina and Booth to each other and second, class. The gloss of his father Lord Tranmere had clearly rubbed off on Mr Booth, at least so far as the judge, Mr Justice Cudlip, was concerned; twice during the summing up he referred to Booth as Lord Tranmere. Although the newspapers of the day promised mouth-watering revelations of how the other half committed adultery, no evidence ever materialised. Both Georgina and Booth insisted that they had never had ‘improper relations’ and the judge consistently refused to allow the prosecution lawyers to challenge this denial. Booth’s word as a gentleman, the judge said, was enough, adding bizarrely that ‘no decent man would expect a lady to admit to such a thing, even if it were true’. He may also have been influenced by the appearance of Edward Booth. Portly, ruddy-faced and 54 years old, he seemed an unlikely paramour for chic, beautiful Georgina Gresham.
The public, however, were not convinced, especially when the jury reached a verdict of not guilty. It was ironic, given the mutterings of ‘one law for the rich …’ in the weeks following the trial, that as soon as her husband died, Georgina abruptly ceased to be one of their number. The Greshams had no children and although James Gresham left a small amount of money to his brother-in-law, the bulk of his fortune went not to his wife, but to a distant cousin, Leo Gresham, who sailed from Canada, claimed his inheritance and turned Georgina out of the Hampstead mansion she and her husband had shared.
Although Lady Kellway, Edward Booth and Edmund Lomax had all stated, on oath, that the Greshams were on good terms, Georgina’s replies, when asked about her feelings for her husband, were oddly equivocal and unaffectionate. A court reporter recalled that she had a ‘shower-bath col
The death of James Gresham and his wife’s conduct during her trial remain as much of a mystery today as they were in 1928. So, too, does Georgina’s own death, twenty-seven years later. After Leo Gresham had taken possession of the Hampstead mansion, Georgina and her brother Edmund moved to 83 Thurloe Street, a small terraced house in South Kensington. This was where her body, together with those of Edmund and their housekeeper, was discovered by the milkman, Ernest Sharpe, on the morning of 16 August 1955. Unable to get a response to his knocking, Mr Sharpe peered through the front-door letter-box and saw the body of the housekeeper, Ada Pepper. ‘The very first thing I saw was her eyes,’ Sharpe said. ‘They were staring straight at me, right on a level with mine. She was only a couple of feet away, sat on the floor with her legs stuck out in front and blood all down her overall.’
Mr Sharpe fetched the police. The front door of no. 83 was locked and bolted on the inside, so Constables Robert Hartley and Harry Rowse smashed a pane of glass in the basement door and went down the corridor and up the steps that led to the main part of the house. However, before they could get into the hall, they had first to open the door at the top of the basement steps. This door opened outwards and Miss Pepper’s body was leaning against it. Not realising the nature of the obstruction, the two men forced open the door, dislodging the housekeeper’s body, which fell on to its side on the hall carpet where, due to rigor mortis, it remained in its L-shaped sitting position. Although Miss Pepper was wearing her overall, her face was heavily powdered, there were several silk flowers in her hair and she was wearing a pair of white gloves.
The next thing the two constables saw was the body of Georgina’s brother, Edmund Lomax, in the doorway of the sitting-room they shared. Mr Lomax, dressed in pyjamas and slippers, was lying on his side. He had massive injuries to his face and the skirting boards and the lower parts of the sitting-room door were splashed with blood.
There was a lot of blood on the tiled floor of the hall and the end of the threadbare strip of carpet where Ada Pepper’s body had been seated was saturated with it. By the time the two policemen had stepped over Miss Pepper’s body and around Edmund Lomax’s to open the front door, they had added a number of bloody footprints to the original stains, and the sergeant they let in must also have contributed his share as the three officers doubled back and entered the sitting-room. Seated in an armchair in the corner was the body of Georgina Gresham. She was wearing a georgette evening gown of prewar design and matching gloves. The back of her head was missing from just above the hairline and the wall behind the chair was covered with blood and brain tissue.
Although all three bodies had gunshot wounds, there was no gun in sight. The only thing which could possibly have been described as a weapon was a heavy kitchen mincer which lay on the floor under Georgina’s chair, but this was ruled out because, although it was spattered with blood, there was no forensic evidence to suggest that it had been used to hit anyone.
The house was in a filthy condition and most of the rooms were so cluttered that they were impossible to enter. Eight chandeliers were found packed away in pieces, along with three sets of golf clubs, thirty-eight clocks, forty-three cigarette cases, a four-foot-high electro-plated nickel table centrepiece in the shape of a palm tree and an enormous box of cutlery which had obviously been pilfered from hotels with names like the Metropole and the Grand. There was a collection of women’s clothes from designers like Mainbocher, Schiaparelli and Jean Patou, and dozens of boxes of gloves, fans and hair ornaments, plus a trunk of linen with the perfectly mummified body of a cat lying on top of the sheets. When the contents of the house were eventually taken into storage, a total of 614 crates was removed. What was missing was a single clue, either to the deaths of Georgina and Edmund Lomax and their housekeeper Ada Pepper, or to that of James Gresham twenty-seven years earlier. The police did, however, discover a revolver wedged behind a stack of newspapers under the hall table. Unfortunately, it was too heavily blood-stained to yield any fingerprints. Ernest Sharpe remembered seeing ‘something that might have been a gun’ on the floor near Miss Pepper’s left hand when he looked through the letter box, so it is possible that the weapon was dislodged when the two constables opened the basement door, knocking over her body. In the weeks that followed the discovery of the bodies, there was much speculation as to whose hand had been nearest the gun – the housekeeper’s or Edmund Lomax’s.
Lady Kellway was called to give evidence at the inquest into the deaths, although she had been at her Wiltshire home on the night of the shootings. When she was asked if she knew of any reason why her cousins would have killed each other or committed suicide, she replied that they were becoming depressed because their health was failing. Pestered by journalists, she issued a statement saying that she had nothing further to add. Like Edward Booth, she was to maintain her silence until she died.
It is, of course, possible that Lady Kellway had nothing further to add. But it could also be that this tweedy, matronly figure, with her common-sense Christianity and noblesse oblige, knew a good deal more about her cousin than she was prepared to divulge. The hallmarks of the Gresham trial – the bland testimony of Georgina Gresham’s friends, the loyalty of her servants, the deferential attitude of the judge and the fact that the defendant herself seemed to expect all this as of right – are those of a different age.
It is too late now to discover the truth. The horses have not been frightened, the boat remains unrocked.
Lady Kellway is survived by her daughter, Caroline Cornford.
— PART ONE —
83 Thurloe Street, SW
July 1955
ADA
It was my birthday last week. Lovely flowers from Master Edmund, beautiful. He always remembers, but Miss Georgina doesn’t pay attention to those sorts of things and I don’t expect it. Anyway, birthdays aren’t important when you get to my age. But this afternoon when I was having my rest, I heard her go thump-thump on the floor with the broom for me to go up there. I told her, ‘Don’t you go summoning me up here again in a hurry, my knees are poorly.’
She said, ‘Sit down, Greymalkin.’ That’s what she calls me at present, though I don’t know what it means. Six months ago she was calling me Brunhilde, and before that it was something else just as daft. But I don’t take any notice, it’s just her games. I took Master Edmund’s chair next to hers in the window where she sits all day and looks out. Then she says, ‘Really, Ada, you make such a fuss about everything. I’m not asking you to charge into the valley of death with the six hundred. I only asked you to come up because I’ve got a present for you,’ and she wallops down a box of chocolates on my worst knee. The doctor says I’m diabetic now, so I can’t have chocolates and sweets, and she’d know that if she ever bothered to think, which she doesn’t. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘Very nice, I don’t think,’ but I kept mum, so of course she said, ‘Well, don’t I deserve a thank you?’
‘It’s very kind of you, Miss Georgina, I’m sure.’ That’s typical, making me look ungrateful like that.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with these blasted chocolates. They had to go straight into the back of the cupboard, so I wouldn’t be wanting to eat them, and then of course I had to go and drop a tin of peas on my foot doing that, so now that’s something else that hurts along with the knee. I’ll have a sit-down and look out into the yard. It used to be a nice view from my little kitchen when Master Edmund got me the tubs of flowers, but they didn’t thrive; there’s not enough light for them down here.
Master Edmund calls us his two guardsmen. Me and Miss Georgina, he means. One guards the front and the other the back. Although what there is to guard in this basement I don’t know.
Miss Georgina never goes outside any more. She stopped getting the people coming up to her a long time ago, so it isn’t that. I think she’s lost interest in what goes on, apart from the papers. As long as she can have a read and do her crossword, that’s all she cares about, really. This wasn’t the house where it happened, of course, nothing like it, but we moved up here straight after, while it was all still in the papers, and we did get the odd one or two sniffing around. Not reporters, just normal people. I caught a couple of them on the front porch once. Two women. I’d come out the basement door and I looked up and there they were. Broad daylight and one of them was peering through the letter-box. The other one’s stood behind her, going, ‘Can you see anything, then?’ But that was nothing to what went before. Miss Georgina used to get people shouting at her, nasty letters, all kinds of things. It was always women who did it; you don’t get men doing that sort of thing, do you?
