The Wages of Desire (17 page)

Miss Wheatley led the way up the path from the High Street, past Tigue's house and through the meadow, to her cottage, with Lamb, Rivers, and Vera following.

Vera had asked her father if she could accompany him and Rivers to the scene. Once again, Lamb's first thought had been that he should not allow Vera to see Albert Clemmons's dead body. But as he looked at her, he found himself questioning what, exactly, he was hoping to shield her from, and why. She must face death eventually, and it was better that she do so with him in attendance. He surveyed her as she stood in the road dressed in her ill-fitting auxiliary constable's uniform; as ridiculous as the uniform was, Vera wore it with dignity. He thought of how young she continued to seem to him—how young she indeed was. But he saw in her eyes resilience and strength of character, traits he'd always known she possessed. Besides, he was her father, not her bloody knight in shining armor. He nodded to her and said, “All right.”

As Miss Wheatley's cottage hove into sight, Lamb smelled decay on the air and immediately understood that encountering Clemmons's body was going to be more unpleasant than standing over the freshly dead body of Ruth Aisquith had been. Although he did not like facing dead bodies as a rule, he found the fresh ones bearable, but he could not stomach those that had begun to decompose. The smell was bad enough, of course, but the stench of decaying bodies also invariably reminded him—as it reminded Rivers—of the ten months the pair of them had spent together in northern France during the previous war. Rotting bodies had been a feature of the landscape there, along with mud, well-fed rats, and barbed wire. Despite the number of dead bodies Lamb had seen then and since, in his police work, the bloating and settling of the corpses, the buzzing flies and burrowing maggots, and the darkening of the skin continued to distress him. He wondered now if he'd made the right decision in agreeing to allow Vera to see the body.

They followed Miss Wheatley to the rear of her cottage and entered the wood behind it. Lamb realized that this wood was the same one that backed onto the cemetery and that they were entering the wood from its opposite side. As they walked, Miss Wheatley told them of her latest encounter with Albert Clemmons. Clemmons had grown up in Winstead, and she'd known him as a boy, she said. (“He was rather a nice little boy, actually. Very polite.”) He was about thirty when the events involving the O'Hares had occurred. Until that time, most people in Winstead had not known that Albert had served time in jail for diddling with a young girl in Southampton. He'd managed to keep that a secret. But Horton's brief investigation into Clemmons's background had “let the cat out of the bag” and, soon after, Albert had fled the village in disgrace, Miss Wheatley said.

Then, during the previous April, a filthy disheveled man had built a lean-to in the wood behind her cottage. Miss Wheatley had, she said, “marched into the wood” to confront the man and run him off.

“I thought he was just another tramp, you see,” Miss Wheatley said as she led them into the wood. “But as soon as I got close enough to really see his face, I
knew
, despite the years and the fact that he now had a full beard and was quite bedraggled. I
knew
that it was Albert. And so I allowed him to stay and gave him blankets and food when he needed it. He'd grown up here after all and I couldn't very well send him away. He lived by his wits, you see.”

Immediately upon entering the wood they began following a narrow, well-worn trail. Miss Wheatley moved slowly but without stopping, huffing and puffing as she went. “It's just up here,” she said, gesturing ahead of them.

“Why did he come back after so many years?” Vera asked.

“Well, I'm afraid that's the thing, my dear,” Miss Wheatley said. “I know it must sound macabre, but he told me that he had come home to die. I think he believed that he'd run out his string. I told him that such thinking was rot, of course—one can't know these things, really. When one must die.”

As they neared the scene, the smell of decomposition thickened and Lamb began to feel nauseated. He fought off the feeling and followed Rivers, who was directly behind Miss Wheatley, as Vera followed him. Through the trees Lamb spied what appeared to be the lean-to. He calculated that the church and vicarage were somewhere on the other side of the wood, though he was not sure how far the wood extended before it gave onto the church grounds.

They had advanced only two or three yards farther up the trail when Lamb found that he could no longer fight his rising nausea. He stepped off the trail and vomited. Vera also had been fighting a steadily creeping feeling of nausea; watching her father broke her self-control and she also turned from the trail and vomited.

Miss Wheatley turned around. The odor did not seem to bother her. “It's the smell, I should imagine,” she said. “I have no sense of smell myself, you see, and haven't had for thirty years. I'm afraid I forget sometimes that others do.” She went to Lamb and Vera.

“Are you quite all right, Miss Lamb?” she asked.

Vera, who was doubled over with her hand clasped over her mouth, nodded. She wasn't sure she was up to going on but told herself that she must not turn back.

“I'll go ahead, then,” Rivers said grimly. The rancid smell troubled but did not sicken him, and never had, even on the Somme.

Lamb waved his right hand at Rivers to show that he'd heard. Vera straightened, pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her trousers, and wiped her mouth. But Lamb doubled over and vomited again. Vera moved to him and put her hand on his back. “Are you okay, Dad?” she asked. She liked that she had outlasted her father and could comfort him, rather than the other way around.

“I will be in a minute,” he said. “I've never been much good at this, I'm afraid.”

“It's nothing to be ashamed of,” Vera said, trying to be helpful.

“No,” Lamb said. He straightened and steeled himself. “All right, let's go, then.” He turned to Miss Wheatley. “It might be best if you went back to your cottage now, Miss Wheatley. I'll come by soon to take a statement from you. Thank you for alerting us.”

To Lamb's surprise, Miss Wheatley acquiesced without even a small protest.

He and Vera moved up the trail, Lamb with a handkerchief covering his nose and mouth. The body lay in a small clearing in front of a lean-to constructed of a web of fallen branches and bits of lumber; a dark green canvas tarp covered the web. Two or three military-issue woolen blankets lay crumpled in a heap against the rear of the lean-to. Albert Clemmons's slightly bloated body buzzed with blackflies. Fully clothed, it lay near a fire pit that was ringed with stones and contained the damp, blackened remains of a wood fire that had burned down nearly to ash before expiring.

Vera looked at the body; she had never seen a corpse, not even an embalmed one. She had expected to feel something like pity for the dead man—and she did feel something like that for Albert Clemmons. Mostly, though, the sight of Clemmons's decaying body revolted her, though not in the stomach-turning manner in which the smell had. The fact of death itself, its squalor, revolted her—sickened her soul. She saw no sign of peace in Clemmons's gaunt, dirty face, which was nearly black with accumulated filth. His lips were swollen and scabbed, and his mouth lay open. A trail of dried yellow vomit led from the corner of his mouth and down his cheek. Flies flew in and out of his mouth like bats from a cave. He had only a few teeth, and those that he did possess were the color of strong tea. His clothes—he wore a green cotton shirt and green wool trousers—were filthy and ripped in places. His open eyes seemed to fix themselves on hers, and yet they contained no hint of life or light. For Albert Clemmons, death seemed to have represented a final misery in a life spent mostly in wretchedness.

The sight of Clemmons also revolted Lamb—though, as a matter for forensic investigation, the apparent condition of the body relieved him. Clemmons was not as far gone as he'd feared. Other than the swarming flies, insects had not yet begun to invade the body in force, and it appeared that the local animals had so far let it be. He saw no outward signs of trauma on the body and hoped that Clemmons's heart merely had given out or that some other natural cause had killed him. He was in no mood to take on another murder inquiry.

Rivers squatted by the body but did not touch it. Someone would have to search the man's fetid clothing. Rivers decided that he would do so and spare Lamb the duty. “No sign of anything,” he said. “Might be natural. He's old enough by the look of it.”

“Yes,” Lamb said. He forced himself to move closer for a better look. Vera stayed where she was, watching her father.

Lamb squatted by the body, the handkerchief still covering his mouth and nose. The stench nearly overcame him, but he managed to stave off another wave of nausea. He saw nothing that indicated foul play in Clemmons's death, except that Clemmons had vomited. People who had been poisoned sometimes vomited. He stood and turned toward the lean-to, within which he noticed an upturned wooden box that seemed to have a slip of paper lying on it. Lamb moved to the box and found a single sheet of paper lying upon it that was weighted in place with a small stone. A short note was written in pencil on the paper.

Lamb picked up the note and read it.

20 years ago I kiled the O'Hare boys and so now have kiled my self. May god have mercsy on my soule.

Albert Clemmons

Rivers read the note over Lamb's shoulder. He swatted a fly from his face and said, “Bloody hell.”

SIXTEEN

LAMB LEFT RIVERS WITH THE BODY OF ALBERT CLEMMONS. HE AND
Vera hiked back to the village, from where Lamb began to organize a response to the discovery of the tramp's body. It appeared possible that Clemmons had committed suicide. But the fact that Clemmons had vomited in his death throes bothered Lamb. Clemmons might have poisoned himself, of course, though neither he nor Rivers had found poison in or around Clemmons's lean-to during their brief initial search of the site. In the meantime, Lamb wondered who else in the village had known that the tramp living in the wood by the church was Albert Clemmons.

He was not yet certain what to make of the apparent suicide note. But since coming to Winstead on the previous day, Lamb had felt the presence of the O'Hare family continuing to hover over, and even oppress, the village.

As they walked back to the village, Vera reported to her father Lilly's story about Miss Wheatley's nocturnal thieving from Mr. Tigue's henhouse and Tigue's visit to the O'Hare house in the middle of the night, along with Lilly's macabre theory on what the bag Tigue had been toting at the time contained. She added the caveat that Lilly was about twelve, that her father was in North Africa and her mother worked nights in Southampton, and that Lilly clearly was lonely and seemed to have an active imagination. “She's desperate for attention,” Vera said. “So she might be exaggerating some of what she claims to have seen, or even making it up. I feel rather bad for her, actually.” She also told her father that Lawrence Tigue's wife apparently had left the village in recent days and that Lawrence had told those who asked after his wife that she'd gone to spend the duration of the war with her sister in Chesterfield because she was afraid the Germans would return to bomb southern England again.

The mention of Lawrence Tigue's name concerned Lamb slightly, given that Tigue had lived on the old farm with Clemmons during the time when the O'Hares had disappeared and so had a connection to the tramp. The idea of a lonely young girl wandering the village at night also concerned him. But he could not put much stock in Lilly's tale. He found it credible that Lilly might have seen Miss Wheatley steal eggs from Lawrence Tigue's henhouse; Miss Wheatley clearly saw Tigue as the primary villain in the drama she'd created around the village nuthatch population. He also thought that Miss Wheatley probably had intended to give at least some of the eggs she stole from Tigue to Albert Clemmons.

As for Lilly's claims about Tigue hiding something in the O'Hare house, Lamb was less certain. Lilly might not like Lawrence Tigue or might merely consider him odd and thus good fodder for a spooky story. He in no way believed, however, that if Tigue had hidden something in the O'Hare place, this something had been chopped-up bits of his wife. In any case, it would be easy enough to confirm whether Mrs. Tigue had indeed gone to her sister's in Chesterfield, as Lawrence Tigue claimed. Still, he spent a moment considering what the bag Tigue had carried
might
have contained,
if
Lilly's story was true, and the germ of an idea began to form in his ever-skeptical, curious mind that might explain the bag's contents—one that, if true, might also explain why Ruth Aisquith had come to Winstead carrying fifty quid in cash. He asked Vera to keep him informed if Lilly said anything else that struck her as concerning. He didn't entirely discount the idea that Lawrence Tigue might have been skulking about Winstead in the dead of night, but for the moment he couldn't expend time following up on the likely tall tales of a lonely twelve-year-old girl.