The Wages of Desire (21 page)

Horton determined that Claire O'Hare had stood on a chair she'd taken from the kitchen, knotted one end of the belt of her yellow dressing gown around her neck and the other around the rafter, then stepped off the chair into oblivion. She wore only the dressing gown itself, which lay open on her dangling body. Horton had found a brief suicide note on the kitchen table in Claire's handwriting that stated that she had killed herself in despair over her husband having abandoned her and taken their five-year-old twin sons with him. (In his search of the first two boxes, Lamb had not been able to find the note itself or a document that contained its exact wording, which also troubled him.) The cottage displayed no evidence of a struggle having taken place within it. The coroner had determined that Claire had hung herself at no earlier than noon of that day.

Sean O'Hare and his sons seemed to have disappeared from Winstead at some point during that morning. Horton seemed never to have determined with any certainty to where Sean had fled with the boys, though the primary rumor around Winstead was that he had gone to County Wicklow, in Ireland, from where, it was said, his parents had immigrated during the previous century. He and Claire both were known to drink and to regularly row loudly and violently.

The twins last had been seen at roughly ten fifteen on that same morning—Tuesday, August 17, 1919—by Albert Clemmons, who had been working in the front field of the Tigue farm. When questioned, Clemmons had told Horton that he'd seen the boys walking down the dirt road that led from the paved road toward the farmhouse, but that he had not seen them again that day. The twins often went to the Tigue farm because Olivia Tigue considered them to be neglected and often fed them. More than a dozen people in the village, along with Clemmons, testified that the boys often knocked on the doors of people whom they trusted and found to be kindly, seeking handouts of food. On the day they and their father disappeared, the boys were five years and ten months old and, according to Clemmons, wore matching tan cotton short trousers and white cotton socks; Jack wore a light blue cotton collared and buttoned shirt, while John wore a light green shirt of the same style. Sean, a sporadically employed carpenter and performer of odd jobs, was last seen on the evening before his disappearance by the men with whom he was working on a temporary road construction job near Winchester.

Several people to whom Horton spoke had described Claire O'Hare as an exceedingly negligent mother and said that, long before the boys' disappearance, she had faced general criticism in the village for failing to feed and bathe the boys properly and allowing them to wander too far from home without supervision at too young an age.

Horton seemed to have suspected Clemmons of having done something with the boys primarily because of Clemmons's previous conviction for pedophilia. Otherwise, Horton had found no connection between the boys and Clemmons—though Horton's revelation of Clemmons's conviction in Southampton two years earlier for having sexually toyed with a thirteen-year-old girl had ruined Clemmons's reputation in the village, causing Clemmons to eventually leave Winstead.

Olivia Tigue and her sons—Lawrence, who was sixteen at the time, and Algernon, who was thirteen—all claimed not to have seen the twins on the farm that day, and Horton seemed never to have seriously considered any of the Tigues as having any connection to the events surrounding the O'Hares.

Lamb felt dissatisfied as he finished his perusal of the first two boxes of the files. He considered taking a cursory look at the contents of the third, hoping to find within it Horton's original report and Claire O'Hare's suicide note, but time would not allow it for the moment. The apparent source of his frustration and suspicions—retired DI Ned Horton—was waiting for him in Southampton.

As he was about to leave, his phone rang. It was the police surgeon, Anthony Winston-Sheed.

“Preliminarily, your tramp, Mr. Clemmons, didn't die of natural causes, though I haven't quite finished the autopsy yet,” the doctor said.

“What did he die of, then?” Lamb asked.

“A massive dose of arsenic, the kind of thing one finds in rat poison or common insecticides, and in a quantity far more than was necessary to send him to the hereafter. Either he was very determined to kill himself or someone else very much wanted him dead.”

NINETEEN

NED HORTON LIVED IN A SMALL COTTAGE ON THE EASTERN EDGE
of Winchester. The cottage's front yard featured a small, well-tended flower garden edged in stone, which was alive with a profusion of red roses, yellow carnations, and blue cornflowers.

Vera stayed with the car as Lamb went to Horton's door and knocked. The man who answered was of medium height, with a high, creased forehead, stubby pugilist's nose, and thin, uncompromising lips, all of which were offset by a full head of brown hair that was long enough to touch the tops of his ears, softening his otherwise severe countenance. An unlit pipe protruded from the left corner of his mouth, and he had not shaved that morning. Seeing the way in which Horton had aged surprised Lamb for an instant; Horton had left the police force within a year of the O'Hare case, and Lamb hadn't seen him in nearly twenty years. The picture he'd kept in his mind of Horton was that of the man's younger version.

Horton stepped back from the door and invited Lamb into a cramped but neat sitting room that, Lamb thought, his own mother might have been proud to call her own. A lime-green couch sat in front of a mahogany coffee table, and facing these were two upholstered chairs of the same color. The linen curtains behind the couch were of a contrasting light red that was almost pink. The table fairly gleamed, and Lamb detected in the room not a single speck of dust or stray cobweb. All that seemed to be missing were the lace doilies, Lamb thought. In the corner of the room was another highly polished table upon which sat a large wireless.

“Can I get you something?” Horton asked. “I've a couple of bottles of ale if you fancy that.”

Lamb smiled. “A bit early for me, thanks.”

“Tea, then? I've a bit of milk and sugar both.”

“Tea would be fine, thanks.”

Lamb waited in the living room for Horton to return with the tea. He noticed as he sat on the sofa that, despite the sitting room's neat and homey aspects, it contained no photographs. Horton never had married and had no children. Perhaps he preferred keeping his memories to himself, Lamb thought.

Horton returned with a tray containing tea in a small red ceramic pot, two matching cups, milk, and sugar. He poured Lamb and himself each a cup, then sat in one of the upholstered chairs opposite Lamb. “What do you want to know, then?” he asked.

“As much as you can remember,” Lamb said. “Why don't we start at the beginning.”

“You've seen the file?”

“I had a look at it.”

Horton sat back in his chair.

“It was nine o'clock and bloody well nearly dark by the time I got to Winstead. I went alone at first, as there was no one else available in the nick at the time the call came in, and I didn't really know what I would find out there. You never do in these bloody little villages—though, of course, once I saw what I had I called in forensics and the surgeon.”

Lamb withdrew from the inner pocket of his jacket a notebook into which he had jotted the notes he'd taken that morning while perusing the files. “The village bobby from Lower Promise called you,” he said, glancing at the notebook. “A man named Markham.”

“Was that his name, then? I'd forgotten. I remember that he was older—too old for a village bobby—and none too sharp besides. The whole thing seemed to have knocked him off his kilter, seeing the O'Hare woman hanging from the rafter like that, with her face in the way they get from a hanging, the tongue and the eyes bulging out, like. I knew right away that he wasn't going to be much use to me.”

“Do you remember the name of the person from the village who called Markham? I would assume that person was the first to find the body.”

“Anonymous; wouldn't give their name.”

“Male or female?”

“Female, according to the bobby.”

“Did you find that suspicious?”

“I did, yeah.”

“Did Markham have a guess as to who it might have been?”

“Didn't have a clue. As I said, he was none too sharp.”

“And no one ever came forward as the caller?”

“No—as I said.” Horton's voice suddenly became tinged with irritation, as if he considered the answer to Lamb's question obvious.

“I'm sorry, Ned, but you didn't say,” Lamb said. He looked evenly at Horton.

“Well, you said you'd seen the file,” Horton said. “It'll be in the file.”

“You found a suicide note,” Lamb said.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“On the kitchen table.”

“What did it say?”

“Well, I can't remember exactly. The gist of it was that she'd killed herself because her husband had left her and taken their sons.”

“Can you remember anything specific about it—a phrase perhaps?”

“It'll be in the file.”

“Probably, but I haven't found it yet. The file's large, as I'm sure you remember.”

Horton looked at the ceiling, as if trying to recall the specific contents of the note. “Something about, ‘He's gone and he's never coming back and I'll never see my boys again.' Along those lines.”

“How did you determine that the handwriting was Claire O'Hare's?”

“I found some other things she'd written—notes and lists and the like—and they matched.”

“Who else did you show them to?”

“Green, the forensics man.”

“And he agreed with your assessment?”

“Yes, and so did the coroner.”

“Did you not think to send the note and the other materials to the Yard for handwriting analysis?”

“Why should I have done?” Horton again sounded irritated. “What does the Yard know that I don't? I realize it's all the fashion these days to send your bloody evidence away to all the college-educated boys at the Yard. But in my day we handled our own inquiries. Didn't depend on outsiders. It was her handwriting—Claire O'Hare's. That was easy enough to see. Not only that, but a couple of people in the village told me she'd threatened to kill herself a couple of times before. She had a habit of announcing this every time she and the husband fought, or when she wanted something from him. ‘Stop or I'll kill myself; give it to me or I'll kill myself.' That sort of thing. Emotional blackmail.”

“What happened next?”

Horton sat back in his chair and lit his pipe. Aromatic blue smoke rose in a delicate cloud in front of his face, obscuring it slightly. Horton squinted at Lamb through the miasma, as if he was trying to see through fog.

“Well, as I secured the scene I sent Markham—the bobby—to see if he could find Sean O'Hare and the children. Although her note said they'd left, I didn't take that as truth, of course—at least not then.” He paused to puff his pipe anew. “But it did turn out to be true. Markham never found them that night, and neither I nor anyone else that I know of ever saw them again. I concluded that he'd gone back to Ireland; he was bloody Irish—his people were from County Wicklow—and he hightailed it. Claire O'Hare was a lush and treated the bloody kids like dirt. Everyone in the village said so. So it made sense.”

“Did you contact the Irish for help?”

“Of course. But he'd gone to ground on his home turf, more than like. You have to remember that this was just a few years removed from the Easter Rising. Nobody who knew him from the Auld Sod was going to give him away to a bloody British copper. Not a chance of that. Probably changed his name and those of the kids, too.”

Lamb had seen no mention in the file of Horton having contacted the Irish police.

“Claire O'Hare was nothing in the way of a wife or mother, and her children suffered because of that,” Horton said. “They had to go wandering around the village looking for a bloody handout if they expected to eat.”

“They were last seen that morning on the Tigue farm, where they normally went for food,” Lamb said.

“That's right.”

“And Sean O'Hare last had been seen the night before, at his road job in Winchester?”

“Yes.”

“What did you conclude happened then—that morning, I mean?”

“Sean came home from his road work job a bit after eight on the previous night; several people said they'd heard him and Claire arguing from about then until nearly ten. Eventually, everyone in the house went to sleep and the boys rose early, as they always did, and went to the farm looking for food. They seemed to have gone to the Tigue farm for part of the morning—or so Albert Clemmons claimed. Sean O'Hare rounded them up and left. I think it took Claire several hours to even realize they'd gone. She was probably drunk or sleeping one off. Then, when she saw the truth of what had happened, she did what she had so many times threatened to do.”