The Wages of Desire (2 page)

On the following morning, Lamb had gotten into the Wolseley, intending to drive himself to the Hampshire Constabulary. But when he'd depressed the clutch, he'd found that the pain that radiated from his tender ankle was too great for him to drive. When he'd limped back into the house intending to call Detective Sergeant David Wallace to come and fetch him, Vera, who had been at the table having breakfast with Marjorie, immediately volunteered to drive him to the nick. Vera had not been engaged in steady work for several months by then, a fact that worried Lamb and Marjorie because, during the previous spring, the government had begun to lay the groundwork for conscripting women into war duty. In April, the government had begun requiring every woman between the ages of eighteen and sixty to register their occupations. Since, the government had been interviewing the registrants and requiring those who were not gainfully employed to choose from a range of war-related jobs, a turn of events that had resulted in de facto, if not de jure, conscription for British women.

Thankfully, Vera had not yet been called for an interview. But Lamb knew it was only a matter of time before her moment came, and he intended to shield Vera from the call-up as long as he could. Although the government did not intend for women to bear arms, female conscripts could be sent to combat zones as nurses or other essential workers. At the moment, the Germans not only were rampaging through Russia but also held the upper hand in the Mediterranean and North Africa. The war could last years still, and Vera already had experienced one too-close encounter with combat when, during the previous summer, she'd taken a job as the sole civil defense employee in the village of Quimby, near Southampton, and been present on the evening that a German bomber, having overflown its target in the city, had dropped its bombs on the village, killing two people, including one whom Vera had known well. Since that time, Vera occasionally had told her parents that she was considering training to become a combat nurse, a job she defined as “relevant,” as opposed to the safer jobs—typist, fire-watcher, Land Army girl—that her parents wished she would consider. And so, as Vera had driven him to work on the day after he'd sprained his ankle, Lamb had found himself blessed with an idea. He would ask Police Superintendent Anthony Harding if Vera could become his driver, at least until he figured out a more permanent way to keep the conscription act from sucking his daughter into the war.

Lamb had admitted to Harding that he was attempting to protect Vera from conscription with his request—though he said nothing of this to Vera. Harding had agreed to Lamb's idea, and since then Vera had been ferrying Lamb to and fro about his duties, dressed in her ill-fitting auxiliary constable's uniform. Now they were headed to the scene of an obvious murder, and Lamb admitted to himself that he had not counted on his bright idea placing Vera in a situation in which she might find herself standing over a dead body.

He glanced again at Vera and decided that he would spare her the experience of encountering the dead woman. For one, he wanted to limit the number of people who trod near the scene of the crime. But in truth he knew that he merely desired, yet again, to shield his daughter from the grim fact of death. This was stupid, he knew, and, under the circumstances of the war, probably unfair to Vera. And in that instant a small epiphany presented itself to Lamb: he sought to shield Vera from death because he feared exposure to it might somehow move the Reaper a step closer to her—that if he could somehow keep Vera out of death's sight, death would miss her. This, too, he understood to be stupid, indeed ludicrous. His time in the trenches on the Somme, in the previous war, had taught him the truth of death's indifference to whom it claimed, and why and when. But Vera's was the only death he was certain that he could not endure.

Having made his decision, Lamb allowed himself to light another cigarette as Vera headed the Wolseley down the road to the village of Winstead under a cloudless summer sky.

THREE

A STOUT, MIDDLE-AGED HOME GUARDSMAN ARMED WITH A BIRD
gun stood by the front gate of the cemetery of Saint Michael's Church in Winstead, alongside a thin, balding man of average height who wore round spectacles, a well-cut brown wool suit, and a burgundy tie. Over his suit, the smaller man also wore a Great War–era Sam Browne belt that had attached to it a black holster containing a .455-caliber Webley pistol.

Twenty or so people from the village milled nearby, including a dozen unsupervised children who had climbed onto the waist-high black wrought iron fence that surrounded the cemetery, hoping for a better look at the dead woman. The men who had stationed themselves at the gate seemed at least to have had the good sense to bar anyone from entering the cemetery, Lamb thought as Vera pulled the Wolseley to a stop by the fence. An hour earlier, Wallace had taken a call at the nick in Winchester from the vicar of Saint Michael's Church, one Gerald Wimberly, who'd reported that he'd discovered a woman's body in the cemetery when he'd returned to the vicarage from his morning constitutional. The woman had a large bullet wound in her back, Wimberly had told Wallace, who immediately had passed the message to Lamb.

From the spot at which Vera had stopped the Wolseley, neither she nor Lamb could see the body. Lamb turned to her and said, “I want you to stay by the car, please.”

Vera smiled. “Meaning that I can't see the body, then?”

Lamb returned her smile. He had gray eyes and short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He possessed a penetrating and sometimes remorseless intelligence that was softened by the genuine warmth he felt toward most people, except those he knew for certain had willfully and maliciously perpetrated an injury toward another, and particularly those who had purposely done harm to someone who was weaker than they. With such people he could be merciless.

“There's no reason for you to see the body, really,” he said. “In any case, the fewer people who enter the scene at the moment, the better.”

Vera touched her father's arm. “I understand, Dad,” she said. “Don't worry.”

Don't worry?
Lamb thought.
She's seen right through me.
“If you get bored, you can help the uniformed men chase the gawkers away,” he said. He tugged gently at her billowing left sleeve. “You've the uniform for it now, you know.”

“I think I'll just watch for a bit,” she said. “Learn a few things before I start throwing my weight about.”

“Not a bad idea. See you in a bit, then.”

Lamb exited the car and walked toward the cemetery gate. “Get those children off the fence, please,” he said to one of the three uniformed constables who, with Sergeant Wallace, had followed Vera and him to the village in a separate car. Detective Inspector Harry Rivers and Cyril Larkin, the forensics man, had come in a third car. Lamb joined Wallace and Rivers by the gate, where they showed the two men who were guarding it their warrant cards and introduced themselves.

“Thank you for securing the scene,” Lamb said to the pair. “Do you know if any of the onlookers entered the cemetery before you arrived?”

The thinner man stepped forward.

“We're sure no one got in, Chief Inspector,” he said. He offered Lamb his hand. “My name is Lawrence Tigue. I am chairman of the parish civic council.” Lamb reckoned that Tigue was in his late thirties or early forties, while the one in the Home Guard uniform clearly was a few decades older, beefy and red-faced, with black grit beneath the nails of his calloused hands.

“Tigue” rang a bell in Lamb's memory. Two weeks earlier, the
Hampshire Mail
had run a story detailing how the government was constructing a prisoner-of-war camp for Italians on a long-fallow farm near Winstead. Lamb had recognized the village's name as soon as Wallace had reported to him the vicar's story of finding the body in the cemetery of Saint Michael's Church. He recalled that, twenty years earlier, Winstead had been the scene of a disquieting suicide of a woman named Claire O'Hare—an incident that the
Mail
had been quick to remind its readers of in its story about the construction of the prison camp. At the time of the O'Hare incident, Lamb had been a uniformed constable assigned to Winchester and so had had nothing to do with the case. But, prompted by the story in the
Mail
, he recalled its basic details. Claire O'Hare had left a note saying that she had killed herself because her husband, Sean, had abandoned her and taken with him the couple's five-year-old twin sons, Jack and John. The last time anyone in Winstead had reported seeing the twins was on the morning of their disappearance as they walked down the narrow dirt road that led to the farm on which the government now was building the prison—a farm that, at the time of the O'Hare incident, had been occupied by a family named Tigue.

Lawrence Tigue nodded at his compatriot with the shotgun. “This is Mr. Samuel Built,” he said. “He is a member of the LDV and our acting police constable. The police have yet to replace our former constable, Nate Goodson, who was killed in Belgium last summer.”

Tigue smiled slightly. Lamb sensed that Tigue was not complaining about the police not yet having replaced Nate Goodson as much as he was merely informing Lamb of the fact that the village hadn't had a proper bobby for the past year, which was why he and Built had taken into their hands the matter of securing the scene of the crime.

“I'm sorry about the constable,” Lamb said. “We'll have to look into correcting that.”

Tigue smiled again. “That would be much appreciated, certainly, Chief Inspector.”

“Which of you arrived first?” Lamb asked the men.

“I did,” Built said. He nodded over his shoulder in the direction of the church. “The vicar found the body and called for me. I had to put my uniform on, so as to look official. Otherwise the lot hanging by the fence would have run all over the place.” He paused, then added, “We haven't had a proper constable here since the war.” Built looked at Wallace and said, “He were about your age, was Nate.”

Wallace thought he knew what Built was implying. Since the war had begun, others also had implied it—or said it outright—when they first met him:
Why are you, an obviously healthy young man, not in uniform, as is my husband, son, brother, friend, lover?

The idea that Britain might still require a functioning police force, despite the war, seemed not to have occurred to people such as Built, Wallace thought. Even so, Built's words stung his conscience.

“We're sorry about Mr. Goodson,” Lamb said, coming to Wallace's relief. “I'm sure he was a fine man.” Lamb also understood what Built had been implying with his remark to Wallace—that perhaps Wallace, as an obviously healthy young man, should have been fighting for England. Because he was a police officer, the government had granted Wallace and other men on the force of his age an occupational deferment from conscription, a fact that Built might have been unaware of or simply chosen to ignore, Lamb thought. That said, Lamb had learned many years earlier, during his service in France, that no good way existed to respond to people who bluntly informed you that the war had snuffed out the life of someone they had known or loved. It was best to move on from the subject as soon as decorum allowed. With that, Lamb turned his attention back to Lawrence Tigue.

“I take it you arrived soon after Mr. Built, sir?” he said.

“Yes. Mr. Built called me.”

“And where did you get your Webley?”

Tigue looked at the pistol as if he had forgotten he was wearing it. “Oh, this,” he said. “I bought it secondhand shortly after the war began.” He straightened his shoulders a bit. “It seemed a good idea, especially last summer, when there was no telling when or if Jerry would drop in.”

“Yes, that's wise,” Lamb said. “And where is the vicar now?”

“Vicarage,” Built said. “The whole business has given his wife a shock.”

“What exactly did the vicar tell you when he called you, Mr. Built?” Lamb said.

Built looked at Lamb as if he thought the answer to the question obvious. “He told me there were a dead girl in the church cemetery. Shot to death, he said.”

“Have you seen the girl?”

“I glanced at her. I don't like dead bodies as a rule.”

“Did you recognize her?”

“Well, I didn't see her face, like, as she were lying on her stomach. But no, she didn't look familiar to me.”

“And you, Mr. Tigue? Did you recognize her?”

“Well, it's hard to know for sure, of course, as she was lying facedown, as Mr. Built said.”

“Did the vicar tell you how he had found the body, Mr. Built?”

“He said he were just returning from his morning walk when he heard a gunshot from the direction of the cemetery. That's when he went there and found the girl, dead as you please.”

Built's version of the vicar's story conflicted slightly with the one that the vicar had told Wallace on the telephone. According to Wallace, Gerald Wimberly had made no mention of having heard a gunshot from the cemetery; he'd said only that he'd returned from a walk and found the woman lying among the graves.