The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  To Cindy, Anna, and Lauren, with love.

  ONE

  AS THE VILLAGE OF WINSTEAD SLEPT BENEATH A LATE AUGUST sky threatening rain, twelve-year-old Lilly Martin settled herself in the grass of Lawrence and Alba Tigue’s rear yard.

  This was the fifth night running in which Lilly had come to spy on the Tigues. Although she had not been able to clearly hear most of what the couple said during their nightly rows, she knew from the volume and tone of their voices that neither was happy. Then, two days earlier, Mrs. Tigue suddenly had left Winstead to spend the duration of the war at her sister’s in Chesterfield—or so Lawrence had said when some in the village missed Alba and inquired after her. But as far as Lilly knew, Alba Tigue had said goodbye to no one in the village. In any case, since Mrs. Tigue’s departure, the nighttime drama at the couple’s cottage had ended.

  Lilly knew that she should not be so interested in the Tigues’ troubles. Schadenfreude. That’s what the Germans called it—the word that described the secret satisfaction one took in other people’s problems and failings. She wondered if that was one of the reasons why she’d recently come to fancy crime novels so much, because crime novels allowed one a front-row seat into someone else’s mistakes and downfalls. In crime novels, the people who fell from grace usually were wicked and deserved what they got. But though she’d never much liked Lawrence or Alba Tigue—she found them haughty beyond their station—she’d never considered either of them to be wicked.

  In the last year Lilly had grown so enamored of reading crime stories that she’d decided that she wanted to become a crime novelist. She told herself that this was why she spied on the Tigues, who seemed to her a perfect pair of characters around which to build a mystery story. In appearance, Lawrence Tigue resembled Hawley Crippen, who thirty years earlier had murdered his wife, buried her torso in the basement of his London home, then attempted to escape to Canada with his young mistress. To explain his wife’s sudden absence, Crippen had said that she had gone to the United States—just as Mr. Tigue now claimed that Mrs. Tigue had gone to Chesterfield. Neither Crippen nor Tigue looked anything like what Lilly thought a murderer should look like, which made them all the creepier. Both had round, soft faces and wore delicate-looking spectacles and looked more like accountant’s clerks than cold-blooded killers.

  Now, Lilly concluded from the dark cottage that Mr. Tigue had gone to bed. Intending to pack it in for the night, she stood and began to brush the dirt from her trousers. She had begun wandering alone at night only a couple of months earlier, in May, after her father was sent to the Mediterranean and her mother had taken a night-shift job in Southampton making, of all things, screwdriver handles. How long she stayed in any one place when she wandered the village at night depended on how she felt and if she happened upon anything interesting. She’d been surprised to discover how restless Winstead could be at night—as restless, and perhaps as lonely, as she.

  To her right lay Mr. Tigue’s henhouse and his garage, in which he kept his printing press and motorcar. The henhouse was fifteen meters from where she stood, enclosed by a low fence of chicken wire nailed to wooden posts. Lilly knew that Mr. Tigue made a bit of money on the side selling eggs to the officials at the POW camp for Italians the government was building on the abandoned farm just west of the village.

  Just to the left of Mr. Tigue’s henhouse, a narrow path led toward the road that eventually looped around to enter Winstead and become its High Street on the western side of the village. Lilly heard movement coming from along the path, near the rear of the henhouse. She crouched by the garden and made herself still. A spatter of rain began to fall.

  A figure she instantly recognized materialized from around the side of the slant-roofed shack. Flora Wheatley moved slowly, her signature girth and waddle unmistakable. She wore a dark jumper and had pulled a kind of workman’s cap down upon her head. She carried a basket looped in her right arm. She opened the rickety wire gate and trundled up the wooden ramp into the henhouse, causing the chickens to begin softly clucking. Two minutes later Miss Wheatley emerged, holding the basket delicately.

  The hypocrite! Lilly thought.

  She watched Miss Wheatley retreat up the path in the light rain. She went to the trail and saw Miss Wheatley crossing the meadow toward the small wood, beyond which she lived alone in a dilapidated cottage. Lilly followed, keeping her distance. As she came out into the meadow on the far side of the wood, she spied Miss Wheatley moving down the narrow path toward her cottage. She watched Miss Wheatley enter the ramshackle little house and wondered what the bizarre old woman was on about. She thought, too, that here might be a new mystery to investigate, one to replace the drama that had come to such an abrupt end at the Tigue place. By then, though, the rain had begun to fall harder, threatening buckets and softening Lilly’s will to spy on Miss Wheatley any longer.

  Feeling as if life intended to defeat her, Lilly gave up for the night and made her way back to the silent, empty house in which, not so long ago, she had been happy.

  TWO

  DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR THOMAS LAMB SAT IN THE PASSENGER seat of the black Wolseley, staring out the window at the meadows, farm sheds, and copses of trees that lined the southwest road out of Winchester and wondering whether he should allow his nineteen-year-old daughter, Vera, to see the dead woman’s body. According to what the vicar had told Wallace, the woman had been shot in the back, meaning that a bloody mess awaited them in the village of Winstead.

  Although Lamb had not yet discussed the matter with Vera, he was sure that she wanted to see the body. He well understood that Vera disliked the notion that he continued to believe it necessary to protect her from life’s harsher aspects—treating her, in other words, as if she still were a child. But Lamb could not help doing so; the desire to shield Vera had dominated and shaped his life since the day of her birth. Still, he’d come to realize that, too often, he’d insisted on playing the knight to his daughter-in-distress and that he must give up this role for Vera’s sake.

  He fished in the pocket of his jacket, withdrew from it a packet of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes, and lit one. He took a long drag from the cigarette and exhaled without removing it from his lips. The smoke traveled up to and tickled his right eye. He stole a glance at Vera, who sat behind the steering wheel dressed in the light blue shirt, trousers, and cap of an auxiliary constable, a rank that had come into existence with the war and the sudden shortage of men on the home front. The uniform fit Vera poorly—it was at least a size too big—because it had been cut for a man. Gamely, though, Vera had rolled up the cuffs of the shirt and trousers a notch so that they did not hang over her hands and boots, making her resemble something like—and here Lamb could not help but to conjure the word again—a child playing dress-up. She was a slender young woman with large brown eyes and brown-in-blond hair cut in a pageboy fashion. She stared ahead at the road, gripping the wheel, unaware that her father was appraising her.

  The rain had come down steadily for a few hours during the night but let up by dawn as the storm had moved south and over the Channel. Now, the mid-morning sun was bright and hot, evaporating the puddles that had formed in the low places along the road. The summer had been hot and relatively dry, though nothing like the previous summer, when the rain had disappeared for weeks at a time, clearing the skies for the German bombers that had come to southern England from occupied France nearly every day, well into the middle of September. Lamb sometimes found himself surprised to realize that nearly a year had passed since then. It seemed like only weeks ago that the Germans had been dropping their bombs. They had destroyed much in southern England during the previous summer, including the horse racing track at Paulsgrove, which, in the end, Lamb came to consider a posit
ive development because it had forced him to give up his less-than-salubrious habit of placing a bet now and again on a race at the track—a habit that had caused him to squander more money than he had collected. Since then, he had many times wished that he could give up his other ill-starred habit—smoking—as easily. But he had tried this often, employing many methods, from giving up fags outright to attempting to replace them with butterscotch drops, and every one had failed. He looked at the cigarette with longing, took a final drag from it, and tossed it, half-smoked, out the passenger side window.

  Normally, he, and not Vera, would be driving; he preferred to drive, even though his rank meant that he needn’t. Indeed, normally Vera would not be with him now, heading to the scene of a killing. But two days earlier, Lamb had sprained his left ankle falling off a ladder he’d ascended intending to clear the dead leaves and other detritus that had collected in the gutters of his house in Winchester. Lamb never had been comfortable with heights and so perennially dreaded the annual leaf cleaning and normally held off doing the job for as long as possible. But a spate of rain in the past week had made it clear that the gutters were clogged beyond ignoring any longer. Rain had spilled over the edge of the gutter at the rear of the house and down the pane of the window in the bedroom Lamb shared with his wife, Marjorie. The water had collected in the sill and seeped beneath the bottom of the window and thence down the wall to the floor of the bedroom.

  Feeling his usual trepidation regarding heights, Lamb had gone to the shed and retrieved the ladder. He’d leaned it against the rear gutter and thought he’d made the thing sturdy enough to climb. But the ground beneath the right leg of the ladder was more saturated with rain than he’d suspected. He’d managed to climb to the height of the gutter and was just beginning to remove a first handful of sodden leaves when he felt the ladder begin to list sickeningly to port as its left leg sank into the swampy ground. He felt himself falling and grabbed at the gutter but was too late. His left foot struck the ground on its side; he yelped and lay on the ground, wincing. He sat alone for a couple of minutes massaging his swelling ankle and cursing his luck. Then he limped into the house, where Marjorie had made a cold water compress in a tea towel and forced him to sit in the kitchen with his left foot propped on a chair, the compress tied with twine around his ankle.

  On the following morning, Lamb had gotten into the Wolseley, intending to drive himself to the Hampshire Constabulary. But when he’d depressed the clutch, he’d found that the pain that radiated from his tender ankle was too great for him to drive. When he’d limped back into the house intending to call Detective Sergeant David Wallace to come and fetch him, Vera, who had been at the table having breakfast with Marjorie, immediately volunteered to drive him to the nick. Vera had not been engaged in steady work for several months by then, a fact that worried Lamb and Marjorie because, during the previous spring, the government had begun to lay the groundwork for conscripting women into war duty. In April, the government had begun requiring every woman between the ages of eighteen and sixty to register their occupations. Since, the government had been interviewing the registrants and requiring those who were not gainfully employed to choose from a range of war-related jobs, a turn of events that had resulted in de facto, if not de jure, conscription for British women.

  Thankfully, Vera had not yet been called for an interview. But Lamb knew it was only a matter of time before her moment came, and he intended to shield Vera from the call-up as long as he could. Although the government did not intend for women to bear arms, female conscripts could be sent to combat zones as nurses or other essential workers. At the moment, the Germans not only were rampaging through Russia but also held the upper hand in the Mediterranean and North Africa. The war could last years still, and Vera already had experienced one too-close encounter with combat when, during the previous summer, she’d taken a job as the sole civil defense employee in the village of Quimby, near Southampton, and been present on the evening that a German bomber, having overflown its target in the city, had dropped its bombs on the village, killing two people, including one whom Vera had known well. Since that time, Vera occasionally had told her parents that she was considering training to become a combat nurse, a job she defined as “relevant,” as opposed to the safer jobs—typist, fire-watcher, Land Army girl—that her parents wished she would consider. And so, as Vera had driven him to work on the day after he’d sprained his ankle, Lamb had found himself blessed with an idea. He would ask Police Superintendent Anthony Harding if Vera could become his driver, at least until he figured out a more permanent way to keep the conscription act from sucking his daughter into the war.

  Lamb had admitted to Harding that he was attempting to protect Vera from conscription with his request—though he said nothing of this to Vera. Harding had agreed to Lamb’s idea, and since then Vera had been ferrying Lamb to and fro about his duties, dressed in her ill-fitting auxiliary constable’s uniform. Now they were headed to the scene of an obvious murder, and Lamb admitted to himself that he had not counted on his bright idea placing Vera in a situation in which she might find herself standing over a dead body.

  He glanced again at Vera and decided that he would spare her the experience of encountering the dead woman. For one, he wanted to limit the number of people who trod near the scene of the crime. But in truth he knew that he merely desired, yet again, to shield his daughter from the grim fact of death. This was stupid, he knew, and, under the circumstances of the war, probably unfair to Vera. And in that instant a small epiphany presented itself to Lamb: he sought to shield Vera from death because he feared exposure to it might somehow move the Reaper a step closer to her—that if he could somehow keep Vera out of death’s sight, death would miss her. This, too, he understood to be stupid, indeed ludicrous. His time in the trenches on the Somme, in the previous war, had taught him the truth of death’s indifference to whom it claimed, and why and when. But Vera’s was the only death he was certain that he could not endure.

  Having made his decision, Lamb allowed himself to light another cigarette as Vera headed the Wolseley down the road to the village of Winstead under a cloudless summer sky.

  THREE

  A STOUT, MIDDLE-AGED HOME GUARDSMAN ARMED WITH A BIRD gun stood by the front gate of the cemetery of Saint Michael’s Church in Winstead, alongside a thin, balding man of average height who wore round spectacles, a well-cut brown wool suit, and a burgundy tie. Over his suit, the smaller man also wore a Great War–era Sam Browne belt that had attached to it a black holster containing a .455-caliber Webley pistol.

  Twenty or so people from the village milled nearby, including a dozen unsupervised children who had climbed onto the waist-high black wrought iron fence that surrounded the cemetery, hoping for a better look at the dead woman. The men who had stationed themselves at the gate seemed at least to have had the good sense to bar anyone from entering the cemetery, Lamb thought as Vera pulled the Wolseley to a stop by the fence. An hour earlier, Wallace had taken a call at the nick in Winchester from the vicar of Saint Michael’s Church, one Gerald Wimberly, who’d reported that he’d discovered a woman’s body in the cemetery when he’d returned to the vicarage from his morning constitutional. The woman had a large bullet wound in her back, Wimberly had told Wallace, who immediately had passed the message to Lamb.

  From the spot at which Vera had stopped the Wolseley, neither she nor Lamb could see the body. Lamb turned to her and said, “I want you to stay by the car, please.”

  Vera smiled. “Meaning that I can’t see the body, then?”

  Lamb returned her smile. He had gray eyes and short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He possessed a penetrating and sometimes remorseless intelligence that was softened by the genuine warmth he felt toward most people, except those he knew for certain had willfully and maliciously perpetrated an injury toward another, and particularly those who had purposely done harm to someone who was weaker than they. With such people he could be merciless.

  “There’s n
o reason for you to see the body, really,” he said. “In any case, the fewer people who enter the scene at the moment, the better.”

  Vera touched her father’s arm. “I understand, Dad,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry? Lamb thought. She’s seen right through me. “If you get bored, you can help the uniformed men chase the gawkers away,” he said. He tugged gently at her billowing left sleeve. “You’ve the uniform for it now, you know.”

  “I think I’ll just watch for a bit,” she said. “Learn a few things before I start throwing my weight about.”

  “Not a bad idea. See you in a bit, then.”

  Lamb exited the car and walked toward the cemetery gate. “Get those children off the fence, please,” he said to one of the three uniformed constables who, with Sergeant Wallace, had followed Vera and him to the village in a separate car. Detective Inspector Harry Rivers and Cyril Larkin, the forensics man, had come in a third car. Lamb joined Wallace and Rivers by the gate, where they showed the two men who were guarding it their warrant cards and introduced themselves.

  “Thank you for securing the scene,” Lamb said to the pair. “Do you know if any of the onlookers entered the cemetery before you arrived?”

  The thinner man stepped forward.

  “We’re sure no one got in, Chief Inspector,” he said. He offered Lamb his hand. “My name is Lawrence Tigue. I am chairman of the parish civic council.” Lamb reckoned that Tigue was in his late thirties or early forties, while the one in the Home Guard uniform clearly was a few decades older, beefy and red-faced, with black grit beneath the nails of his calloused hands.

  “Tigue” rang a bell in Lamb’s memory. Two weeks earlier, the Hampshire Mail had run a story detailing how the government was constructing a prisoner-of-war camp for Italians on a long-fallow farm near Winstead. Lamb had recognized the village’s name as soon as Wallace had reported to him the vicar’s story of finding the body in the cemetery of Saint Michael’s Church. He recalled that, twenty years earlier, Winstead had been the scene of a disquieting suicide of a woman named Claire O’Hare—an incident that the Mail had been quick to remind its readers of in its story about the construction of the prison camp. At the time of the O’Hare incident, Lamb had been a uniformed constable assigned to Winchester and so had had nothing to do with the case. But, prompted by the story in the Mail, he recalled its basic details. Claire O’Hare had left a note saying that she had killed herself because her husband, Sean, had abandoned her and taken with him the couple’s five-year-old twin sons, Jack and John. The last time anyone in Winstead had reported seeing the twins was on the morning of their disappearance as they walked down the narrow dirt road that led to the farm on which the government now was building the prison—a farm that, at the time of the O’Hare incident, had been occupied by a family named Tigue.