Chapter Seven
I walked through the ticket barrier, past the booking office and cab stand, and turned right under the glare of the sun. Two minutes later, I was breathing the dusty air of the Railway Institute reading room. The clock said twenty to six, and it ticked away the life of the super-annuated railwayman sleeping in the one armchair. The rest of the room was mostly hard wood: tall stools, and tall, sloping desks. At these, you read the paper of your choice from the selection ranged on the long table by the window.
The back numbers were stowed underneath. I hauled out a bundle of Yorkshire Posts, and leafed backwards through them until I found the account, in the paper dated Thursday, 27 April, 1911.
There was a woodcut of Hugh Lambert in the dock, and the name of the writer came to me in a flash. Stevenson. Hugh Lambert looked like Robert Louis Stevenson. The article was headed ‘The Moorby Murder – The Killing of Sir George Lambert’, then ‘The trial in summary by Our London Correspondent’. It began: ‘For the past week, the crowded court has listened closely to the sad and painful story of how a son perpetually at odds with his father finally resorted to murder.’
The killing had occurred in the early evening of Wednesday, 8 November, 1909. Hugh Lambert had made off immediately afterwards, and had eventually been arrested in London after living for more than a year abroad. It had happened during a ‘rough rabbit shoot’ in the woods close to the Hall at Adenwold, family seat of the Lamberts. Present at the shoot were Sir George Lambert, his friend the Reverend Martin Ridley, parish priest of Adenwold, and Hugh Lambert. Two villagers had also been employed to ‘walk-up’ the rabbits, but these were not named.
Hugh Lambert did not go in for country sports, and he described the shoot as ‘a debauch’, in which he had been forced to participate by his father. He had admitted that he had earlier quarrelled with his father, and that they were both drunk on the ginger liquor that his father habitually consumed before walking nightly through the coverts with his guns, of which he kept a good many. The three men on the shoot had become separated in the woods. Hugh Lambert’s account was that he had fallen down in a drunken swoon. When he returned to consciousness, an extra shotgun was beside him. He picked it up, and found that he was standing over his father’s body. A policeman called Anderson (‘Constable of the Three Adenwolds’) was just then walking through the woods with his spaniel. He had hailed Hugh, who had then run off, making his way to Paris and later Italy. The gun was later found to be one of Sir George Lambert’s, and to be covered with the finger marks of Hugh.
I read that ‘The Reverend Martin Ridley, vicar of Adenwold, spoke as to the frequent disagreements between father and son’ while John Lambert – eldest son of Sir George – had spoken for the defence about his brother’s gentle disposition and kindly nature. These pieces of evidence, however, were not detailed in the report. John Lambert had been in London on business at the time of the killing.
A doctor of Wandsworth Prison had given medical evidence that the prisoner was of sound mind – and the end of the article came as though the newspaper had suddenly realised it was running short of space. There was the heading ‘VERDICT’ in bold black type, and below it, ‘The jury’s verdict was guilty and the prisoner was sentenced to death.’
I looked up from the Post as the reading room clock tolled six with a horrible clanging. It was not enough to wake the elderly sleeper, though, and when the clock reverted to ticking it did so (it seemed to me) with a kind of weary sulkiness.
As I returned to the different heat of the railway station, a ‘down’ service trailed away north-east from Platform Eleven – half a dozen old six-wheeled rattlers. That would be the Scarborough excursion, taking Old Man Wright and his missus away. The train at the next platform was exceptionally short: just one carriage hooked up to a Class S. The train was a special. I walked towards it, and Hugh Lambert, the condemned man, was sitting in a corner seat of the carriage. I’d thought him long gone.
He looked like a man in shock, which it seems to me that people in train compartments very frequently do, especially the ones sitting in the corner seats. The three Met men were in there, too.
I moved to a position alongside the compartment, and one of the Met men stood up and turned his back to me, as if to block my view. Lambert kept his white face side-on. I did not believe that he had seen me. From somewhere a whistle blew, a shout went up and the S Class, barking furiously, dragged away this vision of death-in-waiting.
The special was out from under the station roof, and was approaching the ‘down’ signal gantry, when the irregular thing occurred. What I at first thought of as a short white stick was poked out through one of the windows. It then fell and divided: white sheets of paper floating in the hot hair – some swooping under the moving carriage and into the path of its bogies, others carrying on a little way pressed against the carriage sides, others again descending directly to the sooty ballast between the tracks. I knew immediately what had happened. Lambert had risen to his feet, and posted his papers through the compartment window.