The Wages of Desire (30 page)

Miss Wheatley began to crash through the brush in the direction of the wood; Lilly thought that she moved as if she no longer cared about maintaining stealth. She followed Miss Wheatley onto the trail that led into the damp wood; Miss Wheatley continued to move quickly, her intimate knowledge of the trail allowing her to easily negotiate its dips, turns, and obstacles in the darkness. They stopped about ten meters short of the clearing in which Clemmons had built his lean-to and moved off the trail, to the right, and crouched in the brush. The man stood in the clearing, moving the beam of his torch around it. He approached the lean-to and shone the light within it but did not attempt to enter it. He then abruptly turned back toward them and began moving along the trail back in the direction of Miss Wheatley's cottage, causing Lilly's heart to nearly jump into her throat. She and Miss Wheatley froze as the man passed them, only a few meters away.

Miss Wheatley let the man get only fifteen meters or so ahead before she abruptly set off after him again. Lilly considered staying hidden in the underbrush, but told herself again that she must not chicken out. Besides which—and this sudden emotion surprised her—she felt as if she must protect Miss Wheatley from doing anything stupid that could result in her being hurt.

The man retraced his steps past Miss Wheatley's cottage and onto the main trail, where he turned in the direction of the lay-by and his parked motorcar. Lilly and Miss Wheatley followed him there; they watched him get into the car and drive off, in the direction of Winstead. Lilly noticed that the car was the sporty kind, a convertible.

“They're up to something, the both of them,” Miss Wheatley said.

She turned to Lilly and gripped Lilly's arms with her hands. “I want you to go straight home and to bed,” she said. “Don't stop for anything. Tomorrow, we'll find Captain Lamb and tell him what we've seen. We can corroborate each other's story, and that ought to be enough to convince him that we're not merely telling tales.”

She then let loose of Lilly and moved into the road to watch Algernon Tigue's motorcar disappear in the direction of Winstead.

TWENTY-SIX

EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, LAMB AGAIN FOUND HIMSELF
standing on the edge of the farmhouse foundation with Vera, Wallace, Harding, Captain Walton, and George Taney, who, thanks to the government's sanctioning of the excavation at the prison site, had given up his opposition to the dig, though he continued to grumble that it meant that the workers at the camp “were being paid for mucking about and doing nothing.” Rivers had gone to London that morning to check the government's records on Ruth Aisquith.

Larkin stood in the hole with Winston-Sheed, preparing the site for that day's excavation. Since Lamb's visit of the previous afternoon, the forensics man and the doctor had, as Lamb had guessed they might, uncovered a portion of a third small skeleton, parallel to and a mere ten and a half inches from the second body. This third body seemed to be of the same size as the second skeleton—roughly the size of a five-year-old boy—and the close proximity of the second and third skeletons made it appear as if they had been buried together, side by side. In addition, the two graves contained scraps of clothing that matched the description of the shoes, shorts, socks, and shirts that the O'Hare twins were wearing on the day they disappeared.

Although Winston-Sheed had yet to positively identify any of the three bodies in the foundation, everyone who stood on its rim was now convinced that the two latter skeletons belonged to the O'Hares. The identity of the third, clubfooted body—the one that Charlie Kinkaid accidently had unearthed—remained a mystery.

But this was not the end of the revelations the team delivered to Lamb that morning. Late on the previous afternoon, Larkin also had discovered two nearly identical pieces of evidence. The first he'd found in the grave of the younger, clubfooted victim and the other in the first of the graves of the older children. In each, he'd found buried in the moist earth beneath the bones a lead toy general that was much like the figure of Grant that Lamb had found at Clemmons's campsite and those he'd found in the O'Hare house and seen in Algernon Tigue's rooms. The figure Larkin had uncovered in the grave of the smaller child was of British Great War general Douglas Haig, while the grave of the larger child—the one that everyone assumed contained the remains of one of the O'Hare twins—had contained John Burgoyne, who had led British troops in America during the revolution.

Lamb toted up the generals that had thus far come to earth in connection with his inquiries: Grant, Hindenburg, Napoleon, Haig, and Burgoyne. The only one missing from the Britain's set that Rivers had identified was the Duke of Wellington.

Lamb looked down at the foundation, which had been a fount of disturbing shocks in recent days, and put the figures of Haig and Burgoyne in the pocket of his jacket. If events unspooled today as he hoped they would, he might also have in his possession the Napoleon that guarded Algernon Tigue's desk, and perhaps Algernon and Lawrence Tigue both in custody—though he still was not yet entirely certain about exactly what charge he would be able to hold them on. But he believed he was close to discovering the answer to that question.

Vera drove Lamb and Wallace to Winstead, where Lamb intended to test his hunch about why Ruth Aisquith had been found carrying such a large sum of cash.

They parked by the incident room. Lamb ordered Wallace to head up to Saint Michael's Church to comb the interior and perimeter of the cemetery in search of a spot where Aisquith might have hidden or buried cash for someone to retrieve and where someone, in turn, might leave something for her. That something could be rationed food of some kind or some manner of forged documents—identity cards or rationing coupons for food, clothing, or petrol—that could be sold on the black market for profit, Lamb told Wallace.

“If I'm right, she and someone in the village were trading something in the cemetery. I think the cemetery was a drop point, and, if that's true, then we must find the specific place where the drops happened,” Lamb said. “Get on your hands and knees if you have to.”

Wallace was about to exit the car when Vera turned to her father and said, “May I go with Sergeant Wallace, sir? I could help him look, and it would save me from having to wait around in the car, feeling as if I'm making no contribution.”

Vera normally did not call her father “sir”; she called him Dad. Neither Lamb nor Wallace spoke for a second; each was too surprised by Vera's suggestion. But Lamb was seriously considering Vera's request. Her presence had helped him to discover several troubling events in the village that he might otherwise not become aware of, including the nocturnal wanderings of Lilly and Miss Wheatley. He looked at Vera and decided that he had no valid reason to mistrust his adult daughter and his detective sergeant working together, and that if he was wrong about that—if something indeed was brewing between them—then there was little he could or perhaps even should do to prevent it. It was time that he accepted the fact that his daughter irrevocably had crossed the line into adulthood. He glanced from her to Wallace and back to Vera and said, “All right.”

Vera smiled. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

Wallace remained still. Lamb winced internally at the repeated “sir,” then looked again at Wallace. “All right, then, get going,” he said. “Find me something useful.”

Wallace nodded. He looked quickly at Vera, who still was smiling, then exited the car.

Lamb walked up the High Street to Lawrence's Tigue's cottage and rapped on the door. He immediately sensed that the place was empty and worried that Tigue might have fled. He silently chastised himself for not paying more attention to Lawrence Tigue, for not recognizing Lawrence's potential importance in the inquiries earlier and not having paid enough attention early enough to both of the Tigue brothers.

He knocked on the door again and waited for a full minute, but no one answered. He walked around the perimeter of the house, to the back, where he found the door of the garage firmly padlocked and its windows covered. He peered through the slender crack between the edges of the two doors and was able to see that Tigue's motorcar still was parked within the shed. This partially relieved him given that, if Tigue had run, he'd likely have taken his car, which would afford him more mobility and concealment than buses and trains.

Lamb returned to the incident room, from where he intended to send one of the uniformed constables stationed there to keep a discreet eye on Tigue's cottage. On this morning, Lamb's favorite uniformed sergeant, Bill Cashen, and three uniformed constables staffed the room. Cashen greeted Lamb as he entered. “Good morning, sir.”

Lamb returned the greeting and went to one of the phones that, at the moment, was not in use. He found in his wallet the paper on which Lawrence Tigue had written the name and telephone number of his sister-in-law, Mary Hart. The number rang three times before a female voice answered.

“Hello,” Lamb said and identified himself. “May I speak to Alba Tigue, please?”

“I'm sorry, but Alba is not here,” the woman said. Lamb heard confusion in her voice.

“Is this her sister, Mary Hart?” Lamb asked.

“Yes it is. How can I help you, Chief Inspector?”

“I'm sorry to bother you, madam, but I'm merely checking out a few things from here in Winstead. Your brother-in-law, Lawrence, told me that your sister has come to Chesterfield to spend the duration of the war with you.”

“Alba?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don't know why he would say that. I haven't seen Alba since last Christmas, when she and Lawrence came up on the train.”

“When is the last time you spoke to your sister, madam?”

“Well, I suspect it's been close to two weeks. We try to speak on the telephone—to catch up, you know—but don't always get around to it.” Lamb heard alarm creeping into Mary Hart's voice and decided not to upset her further, given that he had no evidence that Alba Tigue was in any danger or had been hurt. She might have, as Algernon claimed, left Lawrence for a motorcar salesman, a turn of events that Alba might not yet have been willing to reveal to her sister. Then, too, Alba might have objected to, or discovered, some nefarious activity in which Lawrence had involved himself. In any case, Lawrence clearly had lied about his wife going to spend the duration of the war with her sister.

“Is there something wrong, Chief Inspector? Alba's not in any trouble, I hope?”

“You've no need to worry, madam,” Lamb said. He hoped that this was true. “We're merely looking into a few things as a matter of routine.”

“Well, all right, Chief Inspector. That sets my mind at ease, at least a bit. If there's anything I can do to help, I hope you won't hesitate to ring me back.”

“I won't, madam,” Lamb promised. “And thank you.”

He hung up the phone feeling yet more distressed and frustrated. Hoping for better news, he inquired of Cashen if any decent leads had come in to the incident room.

“The usual stuff, sir, I'm afraid,” Cashen said. “The normal loonies, fortune-tellers and mystics claiming to be able to communicate with the dead, and people claiming to have hush-hush information that you can find in any newspaper account of the crime.”

He handed Lamb a stack of about twenty-five slips of paper on which the constables had written the names, addresses, and telephone numbers—if they possessed one—of those who had called with tips, with a brief description of what the so-called tip consisted of. Lamb took a minute to quickly thumb through them and saw that Cashen's description of the callers had been accurate. The fact of the matter was that the overwhelming number of tips the police received in noteworthy cases were useless. And yet each had to at least be briefly examined to ensure that it did not contain at least a nugget of potentially useful information.