The Wages of Desire (20 page)

“I hope it didn't upset you.”

“Why would it upset me?”

“Because you don't love me. I know that you don't. You said you did once. But you were lying.”

“How can you say that? Look at all I've done for you. And I'm here now, aren't I?”

“You're here only because you're afraid of me. You're afraid of me because I know things.” She stood, tentatively, on the threshold between the darkness of the kitchen and the soft candlelight of the sitting room.

He took a small step toward her. “I'm not afraid of you. I trust you.”

“I know things,” she said. She stood very still, watching him.

“I know that you do. But I trust you.” He took another step toward her. “You look very beautiful. I'm glad you dressed up.”

“I dressed for you. I don't know why.”

“I know why. You haven't changed the way you feel about me.”

She took a step toward him; he held out his hand to her.

“I like what you've done with the candles,” he said.

“I nicked them—from the chapel.”

He smiled. In a low, conspiratorial voice, he said, “I know. That was very naughty of you, wasn't it? You haven't forgotten that I like it when you're naughty.”

To his surprise, she took a step backward, toward the darkened kitchen. “I won't let you seduce me,” she said.

“I remember how delicious you are.”

“You can't seduce me,” she repeated. “I know things. I know what you did with the pistol. I saw you. Last night, in the cemetery.”

This shocked him. How could she possibly have known that he would bury the Webley in Miss Tutin's grave? A pang of fear shot through the depths of his gut. Nonetheless, he smiled. “What did you see, my darling?”

“I saw what you did.”

“What did I do?”

“You buried the pistol in Miss Tutin's grave. Then, today, the grave was covered up forever.”

“You're mistaken.” He must be careful. He did not want to antagonize her. He must try to convince her that she did not see what she believed she saw. “That wasn't the pistol. It was Wilhemina's shoes. I knew that the police would ask for them so I buried them.”

Doris stepped out of the darkness. “Do you like the candles?”

“Very much.” He was uncertain what she was up to. Even so, he must remain patient—must not rush or upset her.

“It was naughty of me, wasn't it—to nick the candles?” She took another step toward him.

“Very naughty.”

She stepped fully into the candlelight and put the palms of her hands on Gerald's chest. Internally, he recoiled. Outwardly, he smiled again.

“You're lying about Wilhemina's shoes being in the bag,” she said, her voice suddenly husky. She playfully picked at a piece of lint on Gerald's sweater, then looked directly into his eyes. “I will tell the police all I know unless you do as I say.”

Gerald fought an urge to strike the badger's hideous face. Instead, in a voice that made it sound as if he was merely playing a mischievous game, he said, “And what is it that you want?”

She lifted her sticky, painted lips toward his. He found the sensation of her breath on his face ghastly.

“For you to pretend that you love me,” she said.

EIGHTEEN

LAMB AND VERA ROSE EARLY, PAUSING ONLY LONG ENOUGH TO
share with Marjorie a cup of coffee and a slice of toast with a bit of marmalade before heading to the nick. Lamb had awakened that morning still feeling a keen desire to learn as much as he could, as quickly as he could, about the O'Hare case. He intended to take at least a cursory look that morning at the dusty files of the case and hoped to track down and interview Ned Horton that day.

Also, the story he'd read in the
Hampshire Mail
a few months earlier that had detailed the government's intention to build the POW camp on the farm near Winstead had mentioned that the farm had been owned since 1917 by an estate agent from Winchester whose name Lamb could not recall. This man therefore had been Olivia Tigue's landlord. He intended to put Vera to the job of finding the agent's name, as the man might possess memories of the Tigues and the case. On the drive to the nick, Lamb filled Vera in on what he recalled of the O'Hare case, reasoning that the residents of Winstead would begin speaking about the case again and that one of them might say something to Vera or anyone else on the team—even in passing—that could prove valuable. He and Vera arrived at the nick to find that Rivers, too, had come in early; he was hunched over the typewriter at his desk, writing a report on the canvass of Winstead he'd led in the wake of the Aisquith killing.

On the previous night, Lamb and Harding had decided that the inquiry team needed an incident room in Winstead, from which it could coordinate its various inquiries. Lamb had noticed the small stone school in the village and thought that it would do nicely, given that classes were out for the summer term. Lamb now sat by Rivers's desk and explained to Rivers what he desired in Winstead. Rivers promised he would take a few constables to the village that morning and set up the incident room.

Rivers also had a bit of news that surprised Lamb. “I made a telephone call yesterday,” he said. “The toy soldier—Grant—comes from a set manufactured by the W. Britain Limited toy company between 1900 and 1930 of field marshals and generals. Each set had six figurines, all generals, all made of cast lead.”

In the rush of events Lamb had forgotten about the Grant figure. He was uncertain if the figure was significant, though it had been just odd enough—just enough out of place—to potentially be so. Lamb was glad to see that Rivers had been thinking along the same lines.

“I had a set when I was a boy,” Rivers said. “Wellington, Napoleon, Edward IV, von Hindenburg, Johnny Burgoyne, and Grant. The man I talked to at Britain's said that, after the last war, they replaced Edward IV in the set with Haig. Keeping up with the times.” Douglas Haig had led the British Army during most of the Great War.

Lamb smiled. “Nice work, Harry,” he said.

“We'll see,” Rivers said. “It might mean bollocks.”

“Maybe,” Lamb said.

Lamb again consulted the newspaper file and found the story on the prison camp that had been in the
Mail
. The name of the man who had owned the farm was Oscar Strand, an estate agent in Winchester. Because Wallace had yet to come in, Lamb sat Vera at the detective sergeant's desk and gave her the task of calling Strand and inquiring if he was free that day to speak to a policeman about his former tenants, the O'Hares. If he claimed to be busy, Vera was to push a bit and say that the matter was rather urgent. The story also contained the name of the younger O'Hare brother, Algernon, who, the paper reported, was the head of the mathematics department at the Everly School in Winchester. Algernon's and Lawrence's mother, Olivia Tigue, had died some years earlier, according to the story. Vera also was to call Algernon Tigue and arrange a time that day during which Lamb could speak to him.

“If he's seen this morning's
Mail
—and my guess is that he has—he'll understand why I want to speak with him,” Lamb said of Algernon Tigue.

That morning's paper had reported on its front page the discovery of a child's skeleton in the foundation of the farmhouse near Winstead. Although Harding had made it clear to the press that the constabulary had not yet determined the identity of the child, the
Mail
once again had reminded its readers that Winstead had been the scene of Claire O'Hare's suicide more than twenty years earlier. The paper also had reported that morning the discovery of a body that police said they had not yet identified—likely that of a tramp, and likely a case of suicide, the story said—in the wood near Saint Michael's Church in Winstead on the previous day, though the editors had decided that this story merited only five paragraphs on page seven.

Lamb went to his office, where he found the files of the O'Hare case lying on the floor next to his desk in three cardboard boxes, and closed the door. He believed that he must treat the case as if it was fresh. And to do that, he must go back to the beginning and reconstruct the day on which Claire O'Hare was found hanging from the end of a rope tied to a rafter in her parlor.

He peeked into one of the boxes, which emitted a musty smell. The files seemed to be in relatively good order; Lamb had worried that a kind of volcanic mess of paper awaited him in the boxes. He also found on his desk a slip of paper, which Harding had placed there, on which was written Ned Horton's telephone number and address. Lamb sat at his desk and dialed the number. After a couple of rings, a voice answered, gruffly: “Horton.”

“Mr. Horton, this is Chief Inspector Tom Lamb.”

“I expected that you—or someone like you—would call.”

“So you saw the
Mail
this morning, then?”

“I saw.”

“We're not sure yet who the body belongs to.”

Horton said nothing.

“I'd like to come by this morning and talk to you about the case,” Lamb said. He decided that he would wait to tell Horton that he believed that the tramp who'd died in the wood by the church was Albert Clemmons.

“I'll be home all day.”

“How about ten?”

“Ten will do.”

“Thank you, Mr. Horton. I'll see you at ten, then.”

Horton emitted a grunt that sounded like “Right,” then hung up.

Vera knocked on the door and Lamb bade her enter. She laid a slip of paper on his desk with Oscar Strand's name, address, and telephone number on it and the notation that he was free that morning from ten to noon. She stood before her father in her baggy uniform, looking rather serious. He sensed the pride she felt in completing the assignment he'd given her.

“Nice work,” Lamb said.

“Thank you.”

Lamb thought he had heard Wallace's voice in the outer room. He checked his watch; if the detective sergeant hadn't yet arrived, he was past due.

“Is Wallace in yet?” he asked Vera.

“He's just arrived.”

“Could you ask him to pop in and see me, please?” Lamb felt it slightly odd to be ordering around his daughter as if she were his secretary, but he thought it best that Vera stay busy during the time she worked for him and that she and Harding and the rest of the team came away from her tenure with the nick feeling as if she'd at least earned her keep.

“Of course,” Vera said.

A minute later, Wallace stood in the doorway.

“Come in,” Lamb said. He delivered to Wallace the same brief summation of the O'Hare case that he'd delivered to Vera, then handed Wallace the paper on which Vera had written the contact information for Oscar Strand and explained Strand's relationship with the Tigues. “He might recall something useful about them and the O'Hare case,” Lamb said. “I'd like you to speak with him this morning, before you head out to the prison site.”

Wallace took the paper. “Right,” he said.

And steer clear of my daughter in the meantime
, Lamb thought, though he merely nodded at Wallace in acknowledgment and watched the detective sergeant exit.

Again alone in his office, Lamb picked up the first of the boxes containing the O'Hare files and began to go through it. The file turned out to be deeper than he had expected, given that Horton's conclusion seemed to have been the obvious one—that Claire O'Hare had committed suicide and that her husband had abandoned her for parts unknown and taken their twin sons with him. He spent an hour sorting through the first two of the three boxes and found himself frustrated in his attempt to find Horton's first official report on the case, which he hoped would contain a narrative of Horton's initial call to the scene of Claire O'Hare's suicide and his discovery that Sean O'Hare and the couple's sons were gone. He found the absence of such a document troubling, though portions of old files sometimes went missing and were rearranged over time. Despite this missing piece, Lamb was able to cobble together a basic outline of the case through what the boxes contained—some of Horton's handwritten notes, witness statements, later official reports, and a few clippings on the case from the
Mail.

An unnamed resident of Winstead had called the constable in the neighboring village of Lower Promise—Winstead had had no constable of its own at the time—to say that they suspected that some violence had been committed in the O'Hare cottage, though the file did not say what sort of violence the neighbor believed had occurred.

The constable, a man named John Markham, arrived a half-hour later, at roughly eight
P.M.
, to find the door to the O'Hare cottage open. He entered the house to find Claire O'Hare hanging, dead, from a rafter in the cottage's parlor. He'd immediately gone to the pub to call the nick in Winchester and request a CID man, who turned out to be Ned Horton.