The Language of the Dead: A World War II Mystery

by Stephen Kelly

  “A bit late for the old man, isn’t it?” Wallace asked.

  Lamb sighed. “I don’t think it’s ever too late for him.” He turned to Harris. “Wait here, please, Constable.”

  Harding stepped from the rear seat of the car with a man Lamb recognized immediately, although he had not seen the man—nor had he wanted to—in more than twenty years. The sight of Harry Rivers so stunned Lamb that he literally stopped. He immediately understood what was happening—Harry Rivers was to be Dick Walters’s replacement.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” Harding said. “It sounds as if we’ve rather a mess here.”

  “Nothing we can’t handle, sir,” Wallace said.

  Harding glanced at Wallace; the super considered Wallace a good detective, though volatile and potentially unreliable; Wallace secretly loathed Harding as pompous. Lamb, though, trusted and respected Harding’s blunt honesty.

  Harry Rivers moved next to Harding, who was unaware of the past that Rivers and Lamb shared. “This is DI Harry Rivers,” Harding said. “He’ll be replacing Dick Walters, at least for the time being. He comes to us from Warwickshire, where, as we’re all aware, the Germans aren’t dropping as many bloody bombs.” Harding nodded at Lamb and Wallace. “DCI Tom Lamb and DS David Wallace.”

  Wallace offered Rivers his hand. “Rivers,” he said. “Welcome aboard.”

  “Thanks,” Rivers said, shaking Wallace’s hand.

  Rivers turned to face Lamb. “Lieutenant,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes,” Lamb said. “Quite a long time, Harry.”

  “You two know each other, then?” Harding asked, looking from Lamb to Rivers, genuinely surprised.

  “Second Somme,” Rivers said. “Fourth London. DCI Lamb was my direct commanding officer.” Rivers smiled slightly, a smile lacking warmth. “He was Second Lieutenant Lamb then. I was Sergeant Rivers.”

  “Old comrades, then,” Harding said, bringing his hands together, pleased. “All the better.”

  The four men stood close together for a couple of seconds in silence. Wallace sensed Lamb’s discomfort.

  “Rivers arrived a few hours ago,” Harding said. “Given that we have a bit of a juicy situation here, I thought it best that he jump right in. Old man with a pitchfork in his neck, then?”

  “That and a bit more,” Lamb said.

  “And there’s a possible witchcraft angle of some kind?”

  “Well, there’s some talk that the dead man was known in the village to be a witch or warlock or something of the kind.”

  “What’s the bloody difference?” Harding asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lamb said. “It might turn out to be nothing.”

  “A ruse, then? Well, let’s not let it distract us overly much. In the meantime, the three of you can get to work on it together from the start line.”

  Lamb thought of asking Harding if Rivers wouldn’t be more useful clearing up Walters’s backlog. But that would sound puny and calculating. He didn’t want to work with Rivers and doubted that Rivers wanted to work with him. His last impression of Harry Rivers had been of how thoroughly Rivers had loathed him, though he knew Rivers’s hate to have been misplaced, a kind of war casualty rooted in genuine grief, and guilt. For that reason, Lamb hadn’t entirely begrudged Rivers his antipathy. But when the war had finished, Lamb had been glad to rid himself of it and of Harry Rivers. He’d joined the Hampshire police, married Marjorie, and got on with his life.

  “Very well, then, I’ll leave the three of you to it,” Harding said. “We’ll meet tomorrow at the nick, eight A.M. You can fill me in then.” He rose slightly on his toes. “Rivers has taken rooms for the moment in Winchester. I’m expecting that one of you can give him a lift back.”

  “I can give DI Rivers a lift,” Lamb said. He glanced at Rivers, who seemed not to react to his offer, which would sequester them alone in a car for the half-hour drive back to Winchester.

  “Splendid,” Harding said. He climbed into the back seat of the saloon and left.

  Lamb turned toward the door of Will Blackwell’s cottage with Wallace and Harry Rivers in tow. He rummaged in his pocket for the butterscotch tin.

  Earlier, Harris had given Wallace a brief history of the relationship Will Blackwell had shared with his niece, Lydia, and Wallace had delivered the same history to Lamb as they’d descended Manscome Hill. Lydia had come to live with her uncle thirty years earlier, at the age of eight, after her mother, who was Will’s sister, had died. She worked as a seamstress for a small factory in a village north of Southampton that made woolen coats and had done so for as long as anyone could remember. She seemed to have no men in her life beside her uncle and, like her uncle, generally kept to herself.

  Before they entered the cottage, Wallace delivered to Rivers a brief summary of Abbott’s and Lydia Blackwell’s story of finding Blackwell’s body, along with the fact that Abbott denied sharing any close relationship to Lydia. Rivers found the story dubious.

  The detectives removed their hats as they entered Will Blackwell’s cottage. The cottage’s ground floor consisted of a small rectangular space that was divided into a mudroom, kitchen, and sitting room. Cut-up dark woolen blankets shrouded the windows. Lydia sat in a green upholstered chair, near a cold fireplace, in the sitting room. She clutched a robin’s-egg-blue handkerchief embroidered with yellow lace.

  Lamb noticed in the kitchen a round table surrounded by four wooden chairs. “Fetch us some chairs, please, Constable,” he said to Harris.

  While Harris got the chairs, Lamb approached Lydia. Her face was flushed and her fingers skeletal, the skin stretched tight over them. One of the pins she used to keep up her brown hair had come loose so that a strand slightly obscured her right eye. Lamb wondered what sort of relationship she’d had with her uncle—an old bachelor sharing a cottage in a remote village with a younger female relative.

  Harris placed three chairs from the kitchen near the hearth. Lamb introduced himself, Wallace, and Rivers, and asked Lydia Blackwell’s permission to sit in her parlor. He sensed that few people bothered to ask Lydia Blackwell’s permission for anything.

  “Yes,” Lydia said. “Yes, sir.” She straightened in her chair.

  The policemen sat before her; Rivers sat next to Lamb, a move Lamb thought deliberate. Wallace removed a small notebook and pencil from the pocket of his jacket, flipped open the book, and laid it on his knee.

  “First, let me say that I am sorry about your uncle,” Lamb said.

  Lydia sniffed. “Yes,” she said. “Will were a good man.”

  “Constable Harris tells me that you arrived home from work this evening and found Will gone.”

  “Yes. Will never misses his tea. I usually get home from my job a little after five and wash up the dishes.”

  “And where is Will, usually, when you arrive home from work?”

  “Sitting here in front of the fire,” she said. She gestured to the wooden chair that faced the hearth. “Smoking his pipe.”

  “He never went out after his tea—say for an evening constitutional?” Rivers interjected.

  “No,” Lydia said. “He waits for me to wash up the tea things, then to cook my own meal. Then he sits with me while I eat.”

  Lamb noticed that Lydia continued to speak of her uncle as if he were alive. If this was an act to convince him of her grief and devastation, it was a sophisticated one, he thought.

  “And did you talk while you ate?” Lamb asked. Rivers glanced quickly and queerly at Lamb, as if he thought the question irrelevant.

  “Yes.”

  “What about?”

  “He usually tells me about his day, though sometimes he likes to talk to me about his birds.”

  “His birds?”

  “Yes, sir. Will believes that he can talk to birds and they to him. He can entice a songbird, a sparrow, like, to eat right out of his hand.”

  Lamb decided to leave alone for the moment the subject of Will Blackwell’s alleged ability to communi
cate with birds. He could see, though, how such beliefs and behaviors might have led some of the least-educated souls of Quimby to believe Will a witch.

  “Had Will spoken to you in recent days or weeks about something that might have been weighing on his mind?” Lamb asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “How about a dispute he might have been having with someone? Had he a row or an argument?”

  “No. Will didn’t spend much time with other people.”

  “So Will hadn’t had a disagreement with Mr. Abbott recently?”

  The question seemed to surprise Lydia. “No,” she said quickly. “Will didn’t have no disputes with people.”

  “But everyone has disputes with people, Miss Blackwell,” Rivers interjected.

  Lydia looked at Rivers with something like wariness in her eyes. Lamb worried that Rivers’s bluntness might cause Lydia to fold up her wings. Apparently, Rivers hadn’t changed much since the war.

  “Will didn’t,” she said to Rivers. “He stayed away from people.”

  “Except for yourself and Mr. Abbott, of course,” Rivers said. He didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm in his tone.

  Lydia glanced at the floor. “Yes.”

  Lamb leaned forward in his chair and rested his hands between his knees. “How did your uncle treat you, Miss Blackwell?” he asked. “Did he treat you well?”

  “How did he treat me, sir?” she asked.

  “Yes. Was he kind to you? Did he have a temper? You told us that you washed up his tea things every day, even though you had yourself just returned from a full day’s work. If you weren’t prompt in this, might Will have become angry with you?”

  “Washing up is one of the jobs I do to earn my keep,” she said, as if the answer to Lamb’s question was self-evident.

  “So when Will failed to return for his tea, you went to Mr. Abbott, is that correct?” Lamb asked.

  “Yes. I knew that Will was to trim some hedges for him.”

  She recited for them the narrative of her fetching Abbott and the two of them heading up the hill to the hedge to find Will. Her story fit with Abbott’s. Lamb found it interesting that Lydia exhibited no strong emotion as she described breaking down upon seeing her uncle’s mutilated body. Perhaps she had cried herself out for the moment. Perhaps, too, her earlier tears hadn’t been genuine.

  “Did Mr. Abbott attempt to remove the tools from your uncle’s body?” Lamb asked.

  Lydia wrung the handkerchief. “Yes, he did, sir.” She looked at Lamb. “For my sake,” she added woodenly. “I was just so shocked, you see.”

  “How would you describe your relationship with Mr. Abbott?”

  Lydia sat up straighter and smoothed her dress over her legs. Wallace and Rivers exchanged quick, knowing glances. “My relationship, sir?” Lydia asked.

  “Yes,” Lamb said. “Did the two of you know each other well? Had you ever taken tea with him, perhaps? Or danced with him? Did he ever write you a letter or give you a gift? Did you fancy him? Did he fancy you?”

  Lydia looked askance. “No, sir—nothing like that.”

  Now Wallace piped in. “So Mr. Abbott never made any advances toward you, Miss Blackwell? Never tried to have his way with you?”

  Lydia smoothed her dress again—roughly this time—and looked directly at Wallace. Her eyes flared, indignant. “No, sir,” she said. “Nothing like that. Mr. Abbott has always been a gentleman to me.”

  Her expression hardened, and Lamb sensed for the first time that she was afraid.

  “Several people have mentioned to us that some in the village believed Will to be a witch,” Lamb said. “That he’d once seen a black dog on the hill and that he’d since been mixed up in some way with the black arts.”

  “Those are lies, sir,” Lydia said, looking directly at Lamb. “Will was no witch. Those are hateful people who think that way.”

  Lamb withdrew from his pocket the note he’d found on Blackwell’s body and showed it to Lydia. “Does this look like Will’s handwriting?”

  Lydia looked at the note: in the nut. “Yes. That’s Will’s writing.”

  “I found this note in the pocket of your uncle’s jacket,” Lamb said. “Do you have any idea what it might mean?”

  Lydia shook her head. “No, sir.”

  “Mr. Abbott told us of a boy who sometimes visited Will—a boy from Lord Pembroke’s manor who can’t speak,” Lamb said. “Do you know this boy?”

  “Yes, sir. That is Peter.”

  “Can you tell me anything about Peter? How long has Will known him?”

  “He draws things—bugs and that. He likes to watch Will work. But he’s soft in the head; he don’t speak.”

  “Do you know if Will was supposed to see Peter today?”

  “Peter just shows up, like.”

  “Do you know if Will had any disagreements with Peter, especially recently?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Does Peter strike you as a strong boy—someone who could overpower Will if he’d a mind to?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s skinny—lanky, like—but tall.”

  “Have you ever seen Peter get angry?”

  Lydia mulled the question. “Just the once. I looked out the window and he was in the front there, stomping around. Will was out there and I think Will might have said something to make Peter mad.”

  “Did you ask your uncle what he might have done to make Peter angry?”

  “No, sir. It weren’t my business.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last summer.”

  Lamb was dying for a fag. He and the other two still had to make at least a cursory search of Blackwell’s house, inside and out. Tomorrow they could return and make a more thorough exploration of the place.

  “I realize that this has been a trying day for you, Miss Blackwell,” he said. “But I’m afraid we have one more duty we must perform before we leave. Perhaps I can have Constable Harris make you a cup of tea?”

  Rivers shifted in his seat, as if uncomfortable and wanting to make his discomfort obvious. Again, he briefly looked at Lamb quizzically. He wondered why Lamb was treating the niece with such solicitousness. Instinctually, he felt certain that she was involved with her uncle’s murder.

  Lydia shook her head. “No—no, thank you.”

  “Very well,” Lamb said. “Sergeant Wallace and DI Rivers are going to search upstairs. They shouldn’t be too long. If I could just prevail upon you to wait here a bit longer, then we can all go to bed. Constable Harris will sit with you.”

  “Where will you be, sir?” She couldn’t quite hide the wariness in her eyes.

  “Outside,” Lamb said without elucidating. “I’ll also be back shortly.”

  Wallace fetched Harris from his post outside the door. Harris removed his hat and sat in the chair that Wallace had occupied. Lydia sat with her hands between her knees, staring into the cold hearth. She sniffled.

  Lamb, Wallace, and Rivers went into the front yard, where they could speak without Lydia hearing them. “You two see to upstairs and I’ll have a look around outside,” Lamb said.

  “She’s lying about Abbott,” Rivers said.

  “Maybe,” Lamb said.

  “No maybe about it. She practically jumped out of her chair when you asked about him.”

  “We’ll see,” Lamb said.

  Rivers and Wallace climbed a narrow, switchback staircase that led to a small landing on the second floor. The landing gave on to a short, narrow hall lit by a single bulb in the ceiling. Off the hall were two rooms, one to the right and one at the end.

  Wallace opened the door to the room on the right and shined his torch into it. It contained a small single bed upon which sat a wicker basket full of freshly washed women’s clothes—dresses, petticoats, and stockings. He found a switch on the wall and turned on the light, another bare bulb in the ceiling. The bed was neatly made, with a yellow blanket pulled over, then tucked beneath a single pillow. A narrow space existed between the foot of
the bed and the wall opposite the door, and on this wall was a single window shrouded with a dark green wool blanket. Above the bed was a painting of red flowers arranged in a white vase. Near the foot of the bed, against the wall, was a bureau. On the bureau lay several combs and brushes; above the bureau a mirror was positioned on the wall.

  “Looks as if this is the niece’s room,” Wallace said.

  “Right,” Rivers said. “You have a look round and I’ll take the old man’s room.”

  Wallace searched Lydia Blackwell’s tiny bedroom thoroughly but found nothing interesting save a diary. He flipped through its pages but found they contained only notations of the weather and meals and an occasional passage describing a walk Lydia had taken in or around Quimby. He found no impassioned confessions of love, lust, anger, remorse, guilt, or the desire for revenge; no explication of fantasies and dreams, triumphs, or heartbreaks; nothing dear and intimate—not a single letter or photograph; not even a flower—pressed between the pages. As he closed the diary, he felt pity for Lydia Blackwell.

  In Will’s room, Rivers found a narrow bed against the left wall, next to a closet, and a squat wooden bureau against the right wall. The room’s whitewashed plastered walls were bare of ornament, and the top of the bureau contained only a razor and shaving cup. The mirror above the bureau was cracked and missing a portion of its bottom left corner. The shallow closet contained several shirts, jackets, and trousers hanging from a wooden rod. Rivers went through the pockets of the clothes but found nothing save a few pence. He looked beneath Will’s bed but found only a layer of dust and a few cobwebs.

  In the bureau he found three shirts, four pairs of socks, and two pairs of old black trousers with holes in the knees. Beneath the trousers he found a framed photograph of a young woman and a small drawstring pouch made of blue felt. The photo clearly had been shot in a studio. The woman was posed on a chair, by a small table on which stood a vase brimming with large roses. He guessed, given the clothing the woman wore, that the photograph had been taken near the turn of the century. Rivers opened the pouch and found that it contained a heart-shaped gold locket on a gold chain. He opened the locket and found in it a photograph of a young man standing by the sea that he guessed was Will Blackwell. The man was tall and slender. He wore a dark suit, a bowler hat, and a broad smile.