The Wages of Desire (41 page)

“And Ned Horton?”

“He knew the truth of what Algernon had done almost from the beginning—from the time that he first stuck his nose into the matter of the cats. Algernon began with cats, you see—practiced on them—then moved to children. Horton fancied my mother, and she allowed him to believe that she fancied him in return, even to the point of yielding to him for a time. But she did this only so that Horton would protect Algernon from the consequences of his actions. And Horton did an excellent job as a protector.”

Tigue halted his narrative, sniffled, and cleared his throat. Lamb sensed anger welling beneath Tigue's controlled exterior.

“I buried them,” he continued. “All three of them. Not that
I
cared whether my brother was caught and punished for his sins. A part of me wanted him to be caught and punished. Then we—Mother and I—could be rid of him. But Mother loved Algernon in the same way as she had loved his father. A kind of blind love. And so I buried them, not for Algernon's sake, but for Mother's. As you might also have learned by now, Lamb, Sean O'Hare was not my father. To my mother, I was merely a mistake she had made with another, different man—a man who was not Sean O'Hare, the man she never stopped adoring.”

Tigue became quiet, and for a full minute made no sound. He seemed suddenly to have drifted very deeply into reminiscence, Lamb thought, almost detaching himself from his surroundings. Lamb prepared to give Wallace the signal to enter.

But Tigue suddenly spoke again. “You see, Chief Inspector, I outwitted my brother in the end. He believed me to be incapable of any sort of intrigue, an opinion he held of me to the end. Even years later, when we were adults and I gave him the Napoleon, he didn't catch on to what I was up to, despite his so-called brilliance.”

Tigue looked at Lamb wistfully—almost as if he were seeking understanding, Lamb thought.

“Do you know that I drove to Portsmouth today in Algernon's car and spent many hours toting around a bag full of cash along the docks hoping to find some shady character to take me to Ireland? I got nowhere, of course. Shady characters don't make themselves known, do they? You can't simply approach them as if they are shopkeepers with legitimate wares to sell.” Tigue smiled weakly. “Do you find that rather pathetic, Lamb? I do.”

Tigue sat back in the chair and closed his eyes for an instant, as if hoping to erase the memory of his failure. Lamb was on the knife-edge of signaling Wallace when the sound of a creaking board came from the porch. Lamb, Tigue, and Miss Wheatley all turned toward the sudden sound and in that instant Lamb's heart sunk. He immediately understood that Wallace had given away his approach.

Tigue whirled on Lamb and pointed his pistol at Lamb's head.

“Call him in!” Tigue commanded.

When Lamb hesitated, Tigue rose and went to Miss Wheatley. He stuck the barrel of his pistol into her right ear. Miss Wheatley's eyes filled with terror and she began to emit muffled screams from beneath her gag. “Do it or I'll kill her,” Tigue said evenly. “You must have figured out by now that I no longer care, Lamb.”

“Wallace,” Lamb shouted. “Come in slowly.”

The back door creaked; a few seconds later, Wallace loomed in the narrow door of the room. Tigue stood by Miss Wheatley with the pistol still pointed at her head.

“Show your hands,” Tigue said.

Wallace complied.

“Do exactly as I say or I'll blow the old woman's brains out.”

Wallace had Lamb's loaded Webley lying in its shoulder holster beneath his jacket.

“Keep your hands up, walk to the corner opposite, and remove your jacket,” Tigue commanded. Wallace did so, revealing the pistol.

“Pull the pistol very slowly from the holster, open the chamber and empty it of bullets.”

Wallace did as Tigue ordered. The bullets slid from the chamber and bounced onto the floor like so many spilled marbles.

“Kick the bullets into the hall and toss the gun there, too.”

Wallace hesitated.

“
Do
it, Sergeant,” Tigue said. “No need to compound your mistake.”

Wallace kicked the bullets toward the hall through the doorway, sending them spinning into the darkness, then tossed the pistol there, too.

“Now, move back into the corner with your hands up,” Tigue said.

Wallace moved into the corner that was opposite to the one in which Tigue had set up his chair, to which Tigue now returned.

Tigue turned his attention again to Lamb. “I want a car to Portsmouth and a boat awaiting us there—one that is large enough to get the three of us safely across to Ireland,” he said. His voice had lost its dreamy, self-pitying tone and had taken on that of a general barking orders. “You have a half-hour to leave this room, arrange it, and return unarmed. If we're not on the road to Portsmouth in thirty minutes I shall kill Miss Wheatley and the sergeant. The same is true, obviously, if you make any effort to storm the house. I shall kill them before you can get to me.” He smiled at Lamb. “And then you'll have a few more bodies to contend with, Chief Inspector.”

He pointed the pistol directly at Lamb.

“Now,” he said. “I've finished talking.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

AS THE MINUTES PASSED, VERA'S ANXIETY ABOUT HER FATHER'S
safety—and that of Wallace—grew. She could not help but recall the risk her father had taken a few hours earlier in arresting George Taney. She had not realized in how much danger he had placed himself until the incident was finished. In all the years that her father had been a policeman, Vera had never seen him handle a pistol or heard of an incident in which he'd used one. Until today, she merely had assumed—if she thought of the matter at all—that he went about his job unarmed and, in turn, was not normally menaced by armed men.

And David? Did she love him? She was not yet certain. But she believed that she could love him, given time.

The constable whom Lamb had instructed to call Julia Martin and then to call Harding had done so and then left the incident room to position himself by the path that led from Lawrence Tigue's cottage to the O'Hare place, leaving Vera and Lilly in the incident room to await Julia's arrival. But a half-hour had passed since her father and the others had set off in the direction of the O'Hare house, and Vera decided that she could no longer merely sit and wait. She did not know what she could or would do to assist her father and David, but she resolved that she must act regardless.

“You'll be fine here,” she told Lilly as she stood to leave. “I'm going to the house.”

“I want to go with you. I'm worried that he'll hurt Miss Wheatley.”

“You can't go. It's too dangerous.”

“But I'm the one who reported them.”

“Don't be silly,” Vera said. “You must stay here.”

Vera turned to go.

“But it's not fair!” Lilly said. “I'm always the one who's left alone—left
behind
.”

Vera stopped. Lilly's words pierced her because they were true. Lilly
had
been the one left alone and behind. First her father had gone to war, then Julia had gone to work in Southampton.

Lilly began to cry. Instinctively—for she hardly knew what she was doing at the moment—Vera opened her arms and Lilly flew into them. They embraced, and in that instant Vera understood that she could not leave Lilly in the incident room—that as soon as she left, Lilly would follow, silently and undercover. She could waste no more time arguing with Lilly.

Lilly roughly wiped the tears from her eyes. “I know the house better than anyone there,” she said. “You need me.”

“All right. But you must do as I say.”

Their pact thus sealed, they made their way quickly toward the church, where Lilly said she could lead them to the main path through the wood and therefore avoid the constable who was guarding the path by Lawrence Tigue's cottage. They did just that, passing the place where Albert Clemmons had been killed, and soon were on the path heading from Miss Wheatley's place toward the O'Hare house, where they moved into the verge. From where Vera and Lilly positioned themselves, neither Rivers nor Cashen could see them, and so did not know that the pair had arrived.

The image that Vera saw in the dimly lit window of the O'Hare house shocked her. Her father stood with his back to the window, his hands in the air, his fedora-topped silhouette unmistakable. Still, he was alive. She saw no sign of David or Rivers or Cashen and could only guess at where they had gone, but figured that they must be somewhere near. She tried to think in the way she believed her father would in such a situation—strategically. She recalled how he had first ascertained Taney's position by the truck before moving to capture him. She turned to Lilly.

“Don't move,” she whispered. “I'll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I'm going to see if I can find out what is happening in that room.”

She moved through the verge to within five meters of the window. She could hear the murmur of a voice coming from within the room. The voice was that of a man's, though she did not recognize its tone or cadence, and so she guessed that it must be Lawrence Tigue's.

She strained to see if David also was in the room, but the dark outline of her father's figure blocked her view. She crawled to within a meter of the window and knelt there. This allowed her to see just past her father's left side; and there she saw David standing in the corner with his hands up. She saw a portion of a woman's dress and her knees near the floor.
Miss Wheatley.

She heard the alien voice say, “Do exactly as I say or I'll blow the old woman's brains out.” She watched as David emptied the chamber of his pistol and tossed the gun away—and in that instant a plan made itself clear to her. She moved back to Lilly.

“Do you know where Miss Wheatley keeps her gun? The big one?” she asked Lilly.

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

Lilly led the way back along the trail to Miss Wheatley's cottage. The front door was open. The two-barreled .20-gauge shotgun lay on the kitchen table near the box of cartridges. Miss Wheatley must have taken the gun down from its rack on the wall by the door earlier in the day to shoot starlings and not returned it to its perch by the time Lawrence Tigue had burst into the cottage and taken her hostage. Vera picked up the bulky gun. She had never fired, or even handled, any sort of gun, and Miss Wheatley's shotgun felt alien and heavy in her hands. Her first instinct was to lay it back on the table and walk away from it. But she understood with an almost perfect clarity that she could not do that. She must overcome her trepidation—her fear—for the sake of her father and David.

“Do you know how it works?” she asked Lilly.

Lilly also knew very little about guns. But since she and Miss Wheatley had formed their partnership, she had seen Miss Wheatley load the gun. “You have to open the barrels to load it.”

Vera carefully laid the gun again on the table. “Show me,” she said.

Lilly pointed out the lever at the bottom of the barrels, which allowed them to open. “You push that to open it,” she said. She lifted the gun from the table and pushed the lever. The barrels cracked open.

“You slide the cartridges into the barrels and then close the gun,” Lilly said. “Then it's ready to fire. There's a little lever on the side. If that's on, then you can't fire the gun. It's called the safety. You have to push it so that it's off.”

Lilly picked up one of the cartridges and showed Vera how to slide it into the barrel. “You put them in with the metal end up,” she said. Vera loaded two cartridges, then snapped the barrel shut and put on the safety.

“Let's go,” Vera said.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know yet.”

They made their way back to the O'Hare house. Her father continued to stand at the window with his hands raised. “Is there another way into the house other than the back door?” Vera asked Lilly. “Other windows?”

“Most of them are blocked by things. And they have little shards of broken glass sticking from them. Mr. Tigue would hear you.”

“Is there nothing else, no other opening?”

Lilly thought on the matter for a couple of seconds. “There's the coal chute. It's in the back wall, where the kitchen was. The chute itself has been ripped out but there's a hole there, an opening. It's narrow, though.”

“Could I fit through it?”

“You might just.”

“Where is it?”

“At the rear of the house—to the right of the back door. I can show you.”

“No—I can find it.” She looked directly at Lilly. “I couldn't forgive myself if I let anything happen to you.”

“I can take care of myself,” Lilly protested. “I don't need your pity.”

“You're right,” Vera said. “I'm sorry. But there's no need in two of us going. The more people creeping about the back of the house, the more likely Tigue will hear us.”