The Wages of Desire (43 page)

Harding relented, but he ordered Lamb and Vera to immediately return home and rest. An hour later, the pair returned to Marjorie in the wee hours, filthy, exhausted and stinking of burned kerosene. Marjorie made a fuss over them—prepared them tea and buttered bread—after which they slept, spent physically and emotionally.

The O'Hare house had burned to its foundation by the time a pumper arrived from Southampton later that evening. Julia Martin arrived and took Lilly home. Miss Wheatley was rushed to the hospital in Winchester, where she came awake in bed at six the following morning, confused but safe. Wallace also went to the hospital, where doctors discovered that the bullet that had entered his right thigh had shattered the tibia, which meant that his leg would be in a cast for months.

Lawrence Tigue was to spend several days in the hospital, healing from the blow to the head he'd received when Wallace had dived into him and from the broken nose that Rivers had inflicted upon him to go with his swollen eye. He was charged with treason for his part in the counterfeiting scheme and with murder in the killing of his younger brother. An autopsy revealed that Algernon Tigue had been shot in the forehead at point-blank range with the same .22-caliber pistol with which Lawrence Tigue had shot Wallace and nearly shot Miss Wheatley and Lamb. Taney also was charged with treason.

On the afternoon following the events at the O'Hare house, Lamb woke after having indulged in a long, healing slumber and prepared to go into the nick alone. Vera also awakened and asked her father why he was readying to leave without her. Lamb insisted that she should spend the day resting and that, besides, his ankle had healed well enough for him to drive, which was not true. Vera knew this to be untrue and, in turn, insisted that her father allow her to drive him to the constabulary and to visit David in the hospital. Once again, Lamb acquiesced.

He realized how close he'd come to being shot and initially found himself unable to adequately express his gratitude toward Vera—she had risked her life for him. He had not expected that such a thing ever would have been necessary. In trying to keep her from the danger of the war and conscription, he had placed Vera into an entirely different kind of danger. And she had responded brilliantly. This insight had first come to him quickly, all at once, in the chaos of the moment of the fire itself, and, despite his realization of it, words had failed him. Now, as they settled in the front seat of the Wolseley to drive to the nick, Lamb thanked Vera for saving his life. A part of him was angry at her for having disobeyed his instructions and putting her life in danger, but he refrained for the moment from saying so.

In that moment, Vera also found herself unable to adequately express all that she wanted to say to her father about the events of the past few days—of her fears for his safety, which had driven her to actions that she now saw, in the light of the morning, to have been risky almost to the point of stupidity and, at the same time, the respect and awe she felt at her father's bravery and his willingness to put himself in mortal danger for the sake of another's life. And yet, she also took a quiet satisfaction in her own actions. Yes, she had acted stupidly. But what else might she have done? She was glad she had acted as she had.

As they drove to the nick, Lamb asked, “Do you want me to keep you on for a while longer?”

Vera wasn't certain of her answer. She realized that, despite her misgivings at her father's nepotism, she was not quite ready for this moment in her life—this experience—to end. For one, she didn't want to find herself immediately cut off from regular contact with David. She also intended to keep a discreet eye on her father for a few more days, to ensure that he was as healed as he claimed to be. And she herself needed looking after—to ensure that she, too, wasn't deluding herself about her own steadiness. She was certain that her father would be looking for any sign that she needed tending.

“Can we wait and see for a bit?” she said.

Lamb smiled. “Okay.”

Even in the wake of the climactic events at the O'Hare house, threads remained for Lamb to unravel. His subsequent follow-up interrogation of Lawrence Tigue provided him with most of what he needed in order to divine the truth of what had occurred in Winstead, in the present and the past.

Lamb interviewed Tigue as Tigue recuperated in the hospital. Lamb found Tigue surprisingly eager to talk, and continued to believe that Tigue was motivated by a desire to achieve what he considered a kind of clearing of his name—a clearing of the accusation so often leveled at him by his brother and his cousin, Maureen, and eventually his wife, and perhaps even his mother while she was alive—that he was weak, hesitant, easily manipulated, and humiliated, a small person in spirit and vigor whose feelings therefore were hardly worth considering and whose actual intelligence and strength (at least as these qualities existed in Lawrence's own mind) never had been properly recognized and respected.

Lawrence described Algernon as a malignant soul who thrilled to the sensation of choking the life from someone as they stared at him, terrified—as one who enjoyed playing what he considered to be the role of God, deciding who would die and when. According to Lawrence, this seed had been planted in Algernon by his father, Sean O'Hare, a man whom Lawrence described as a “charming but dangerous rogue” who had seduced both his mother, Olivia, and her older sister, Martha, the consequence of which had been the births of Algernon to Olivia and Maureen to Martha. Algernon had been Olivia's second illegitimate son; several years earlier, Lawrence had been the result of a brief dalliance Olivia had conducted with a local boy who had later gone off to the war in France.

Although Sean O'Hare had left Four Corners and abandoned the young Tigue sisters and his children, Olivia Tigue never had stopped loving Sean and had maintained, even in the face of much contradictory evidence, that Sean one day would return to fetch her and Algernon. Lawrence refused to reveal his father's name to Lamb, though he allowed that the man had died in Arras during the war, and that Olivia had used this story to explain the absence of a husband when she'd moved to Winstead with two sons.

“From a very young age, I knew that my brother had a different father, whose name was Sean; my mother told me that much,” Lawrence told Lamb. “But I knew nothing of Sean O'Hare the actual man until my mother uprooted and moved us to Winstead so that she could be near him again.”

In December 1918, Olivia Tigue had received a letter from Sean O'Hare in which he claimed he'd never stopped loving her, apologized for his long absence, and asked that she join him in Winstead—a letter that, in Olivia's mind, confirmed her assertion that Sean would not forsake her forever. In this letter, Sean admitted that he had a wife and two young children in Winstead, but promised Olivia that he would leave them soon enough and that the two of them could be together. He'd married and had children only to lessen his chances of being called up in the first war and, now that the war was finished, he no longer need worry about that, he wrote Olivia. He also claimed that he wanted to get to know the son whom he had fathered with Olivia. But for all of that to come to pass, Olivia must come to Winstead and establish herself there, the letter insisted.

“My mother was driven by a passion for Sean O'Hare that was like a drug,” Lawrence said. “She had the same sort of love for Algernon. Neither could do any wrong in her eyes, which was why I had to be vigilant in protecting her.”

Once the Tigues moved to Winstead, Sean began seeing Olivia again, creeping to her bed in the night. And he came to know Algernon and saw in his son the same narcissistic cold-heartedness that was the hallmark of his own personality. But Sean also saw that, in addition, Algernon possessed a wickedness that went even beyond that of Sean's, Lawrence claimed. Indeed, Sean became convinced of Algernon's wickedness during the family's first summer in Winstead, when Algernon killed several of the cats that loitered about the family's barn and hung them up in the village for the sheer pleasure it gave him.

“That first summer was when Ned Horton entered our lives, ostensibly as the man who was going to solve the mystery of the murdered cats,” Lawrence said. He laughed—a kind of cackle that Lamb found bizarre. “But Horton was putty in Sean's and my mother's hands. He immediately fell for my mother, you see, and very soon baldly offered her a deal—that he would protect Algernon from arrest and prosecution in the matter of the cats if she acceded to his ‘requests.' And my mother did accede to Horton's deal—and with Sean O'Hare's blessing—in order to save Algernon from the consequences of his depredations. My mother wanted to protect Algernon because she loved him blindly, as I said. But Sean also wanted to protect Algernon because he had plans for him. Not only that, but Sean saw right away that a compromised Horton eventually would prove useful to him. And Horton did prove useful. Very useful.”

During the family's visit to Four Corners that succeeding fall, Algernon crossed the point of no return and moved from killing animals to children. Tim Gordon had been an easy victim of opportunity for Algernon, who had coaxed the boy back to Martha Tigue's farm and strangled him in the barn, Lawrence said.

“He derived a sexual pleasure from it,” Lawrence added. “Afterward, he told my mother and I what he'd done. Even then, he'd convinced himself that he never would be caught and that my mother never would give him up. This was his arrogance, you see, Chief Inspector—the same arrogance that eventually led to his downfall.”

“And so you brought Tim's body to Winstead in the boot of your aunt's motorcar and buried it in the basement of the farmhouse?”

“Yes. I buried Tim—to save Algernon for Mother's sake, though Mother never cared for me in the way she did Algernon.”

“And Horton covered for you again, just as he had with the cats, and under the same arrangement?”

“Yes, though this time Sean became directly involved. He told Horton quite plainly that if Horton didn't cooperate with him and my mother on the matter, they would make it known that Horton had consorted with my mother while on duty and been derelict in his investigation of the matter of the cats to gain sexual access to my mother. They were taking a risk in doing this, of course. But Sean had read Horton correctly and bet that Horton would conclude that he had trapped himself and had no choice but to comply—that otherwise his career and reputation would be ruined. From then, Sean O'Hare controlled Horton, as surely as a master controls a mongrel.”

“Tell me what happened to the O'Hares,” Lamb said.

“It was quite simple, really,” Lawrence said. “No big mystery—nothing in the way it has been made out to be in the papers. Had any sort of decent detective been on the case, it would have been solved. But, of course, Ned Horton was the man on the job, and so it remained a great puzzle.”

“Sean killed Claire?”

“Of course,” Lawrence said. “He strangled her and then made it look as if she had hung herself from the rafter of their sitting room. Then he handed over his twin sons to Algernon, who killed them in our barn. Sean had planned it all out, you see, right down to the point of having his oldest son kill his younger ones, thereby leaving his hands clean in the matter, and the lead policeman on the case compromised beyond the point of no return. Prior to this, of course, he'd made the usual promises to my mother about remaining with her for the rest of their days. But that had been a lie, just another part of his grand plan. As soon as the deed was done and he was free of Claire and the twins, he fled, just as he always had done. This shocked my mother at first and, for a short time at least, she considered confessing everything to the police. But that would have meant giving up Algernon, too, and she simply couldn't bring herself to do that, though she knew full well what Algernon had done to the O'Hares, just as she had known what he'd done to Tim Gordon. Eventually, my mother found the courage to send Horton packing. She became convinced—and rightly so—that he never would reveal what he knew.”

“And so you buried the O'Hares next to Tim?”

“I cleaned up that mess, too, yes. And do you know that my mother never thanked me for it?” He looked away from Lamb for a second. “Never a word of thanks.”

“But you had had the foresight to keep the toy soldiers that Tim had been playing with when Algernon had killed him.”

Tigue smiled—a broad, contented smile that left Lamb convinced that the evil seed hadn't been exclusive to Maureen and Algernon Tigue. Indeed, all of the Tigues seemed to have been cursed in one way or another with a dark malevolence at the core.

“Yes, Algernon had left them scattered on the floor of my aunt's barn, and as soon as I saw them I had a kind of instinctual inkling that they would prove useful to me someday,” Lawrence said. “You see, Chief Inspector, I never deluded myself that one day I, too, would need to protect myself from Algernon. And so I was able to use the soldiers to show my brother that he could not play God with me, as he had played it with others. In the bargain, I was able to also deploy the generals to point you toward him.”