“No,” Wallace said. He smoked his cigarette down to where he could no longer hold it then dropped it into the grass and trod on it. “Well, back to work,” he said.
“Can I go with you?” Vera asked. “I get bored just hanging about the car. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little detective work—seeing how it’s done.”
Wallace glanced across the field, to where Lamb was interviewing Taney. Earlier, Lamb had cuffed him behind the ears for flirting with Vera. He looked at Vera, who was leaning against the bonnet, as he had been, casually smoking. Something about the cigarette made her seem older. She was a good-looking girl; her curves were easy to discern even beneath the ill-fitting, baggy uniform. And she had something else, too—confidence and wit. She was nineteen; he was twenty-five. It wasn’t much of a difference, really, when one thought about it. Plenty of girls went off and got bloody well married at nineteen.
“Sure,” he said and made a little gesture with his head, inviting her to fall in with him.
Vera dropped her cigarette in the grass and said, “Splendid.”
“How are you liking the job, then?” he asked Vera as they walked into the field. “Aside from the boredom, I mean.”
“It’s not bad—though I know why my father has gotten me the job. He’s trying to keep me from being conscripted, which is lovely of him, but it makes me feel guilty.”
The words pierced Wallace. “Why do you feel guilty?”
“I don’t know—nepotism and all that. Not everyone has a father who can set it up for them to stay out of it. It’s obviously not fair. Besides nobody likes someone whose relative has paved the way. They resent it, and I don’t blame them. I’d resent it, too. Anyway, it’s not permanent.”
Wallace looked at her. “I don’t resent you.”
Vera smiled at him. “Yes, but I didn’t take your job.”
“True.”
They walked for a few seconds without speaking. Then Wallace said, “I know what you mean about the guilt, though. I feel it myself at times, with the deferral. I think, why should I be protected?”
He hadn’t quite meant to say it in a way that sounded as if he were complaining. Indeed, he found himself surprised to find that he mentioned his guilt at all. He doubted that Vera wanted to hear his grievances.
“Well, you’re a policeman and needed here,” Vera said in a forthright way that made Wallace believe that she was sincere, which made him feel grateful. “Not everyone can go off to war. If they did, the country would collapse.”
“Yes, but when you’re a man my age, people wonder. They want to know: Why are you here and my Johnny isn’t?” He looked at her. “It’s especially bad with women, by the way. They hate that their husband or son or sweetheart has gone away while you’re still here drinking tea and reading the Sunday papers.”
“Well, I’m not that way,” Vera said simply.
The women in the field left off from their labor as Wallace and Vera neared them. Wallace wondered where the other women in the camp were and guessed that they must be employed indoors at domestic labor, cooking and cleaning. Walton had said that Ruth Aisquith and the other women were members of the Land Army. Wallace didn’t know much about the Land Army, though he’d thought that the girls who joined it did farm work. The women had been clearing away underbrush that a bulldozer had churned up, which, he thought, probably was close enough to qualify as farm work. Both wore denim coveralls, brown leather boots, and thick cotton gloves. The taller of the two wore a yellow bandanna on her head. She held a cigarette firmly in her lips and squinted at Wallace and Vera through a haze of drifting smoke. The other woman was shorter and heavier.
“Good morning, ladies,” Wallace said. “I’m Detective Sergeant David Wallace of the Hampshire police.” He nodded toward Vera. “This is Auxiliary Constable Lamb,” he said, endowing her with an official rank that he made up on the spot. “We were wondering if we might have a word.”
The taller woman removed the cigarette from her mouth. “About what?” she said.
She was, Wallace thought, in her mid to late twenties. She was slender—skinny really—with curly, disheveled, shoulder-length brown hair that had tiny bits of hay stuck in it. The smaller woman had straight, silky brown hair, cut short at the ears, and large green eyes. Wallace noticed the smaller woman glance at him, and then quickly look away. He concluded from the taller one’s question that neither of them knew the fate of Ruth Aisquith. He thought that there was nothing for it but to plunge in.
“I’ve some bad news, I’m afraid. Ruth Aisquith was found dead this morning in Winstead.”
Both women appeared to freeze; neither of them spoke for several seconds. The smaller one looked at Wallace with an expression on her face that seemed to say that she hoped that the news he’d just delivered to them was part of some bizarre joke. “What do you mean that she’s dead?” she asked quietly.
“She died this morning,” Wallace said. Something in the disbelieving way the smaller woman looked at him—almost as if she were a child for whom the fact of death still was alien—pierced Wallace and he decided that he must be gentle with her. “Can you tell me your name please, miss?” he asked her.
But the taller woman answered. “Her name is Nora Bancroft; I’m Marlene Suggs—Corporal Suggs, Women’s Land Army, officially. How did she die—Ruth?”
“I’m afraid that she was shot.”
“Oh, no,” Nora whispered. She drew her arms tightly about herself; Marlene put her arm around Nora and said, “There now.” Nora put her face in her hands and began to cry. The two women stood together for a minute, saying nothing, while Nora cried. Marlene squeezed Nora. “There, there,” she repeated. She coaxed Nora into revealing her face and pushed a moist strand of Nora’s brown hair from her forehead. Vera stood by watching, transfixed but uncomfortable. Nora seemed to have cared for Ruth Aisquith, she thought.
“I wonder if you’re up to answering a few questions?” Wallace asked.
Nora wiped her eyes with her right hand, leaving a vague muddy streak on her forehead.
Marlene looked across the road to the place, about a hundred meters distant, where Lamb was standing with George Taney. “All right,” she said.
“Did Miss Aisquith have any family in Winstead or any personal relationships with anyone there?” Wallace asked.
“If she did, she never mentioned them to us,” Marlene said. She looked at Nora. “Then again, she didn’t talk much to me and Nora, did she Nora?”
“No,” Nora whispered.
“I always thought she considered us not quite good enough,” Marlene said. “She had a haughtiness to her. Spent a lot of her time reading books.” She shook her head. “Nah—me and Nora weren’t up to her level, or so she thought.”
“It sounds as if you didn’t like her much, miss,” Wallace said.
“Well, I had nothing against her, mind. I hardly knew her. But I’m not one to go begging attention from one who’s got it in her mind that she’s better than me.”
“Did you know that Miss Aisquith had gone out this morning?” Wallace asked.
“We knew,” Marlene said.
“Was it unusual for her to go out so early in the morning?”
“She went out in the morning to visit her grandmother’s grave in Winstead. She went several times a week. Taney allowed it. She came back in time to help serve breakfast; that was one of her jobs here.”
“Did she ever fail to return for breakfast?”
“Not that I remember,” Marlene said.
“How about you, Miss Bancroft?”
Nora shook her head and sniffled. “No.”
“Do you know if she ever visited anyone while she was in the village?”
“As I said, if she did, she said nothing to us about it.”
“Did she ever mention the name Mary Forrest?”
“No, who is that?”
Wallace smiled. “It’s not important,” he said. “What about the other women in the camp—did she have friendly r
elationships with any of them, or perhaps some of the men?”
“Not that I could see. Some of the men try it on with us, of course, but we’re not allowed to fraternize.”
“Where was she found?” Nora asked.
“In the cemetery.”
“Was it bad?”
“I’m afraid it was, yes.”
Nora put her hand to her mouth.
“Did Miss Aisquith mention anything to either of you about someone she might have had a disagreement or row with?”
“No,” Marlene said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if she did. She was pig-headed—a conchi. She went to prison rather than join the fire-watching service. Then she ended up here.”
“Did it bother anyone here that she was a conchi?”
“A few, I suppose.”
“Do you know who, specifically?”
“Some of the men, I suppose. Nobody talked about it. If you must know, I didn’t much fancy the idea myself. Times such as these, everyone has a duty. Apparently she thought herself too fine to do hers. Let someone else do her duty and yet she reaps the reward, if you know what I mean.”
“Did she ever talk about—mention—that someone might have threatened her because she was a conchi?”
“No.”
“Did she speak to either of you about anything that might have been troubling her?”
“She hardly said good morning to either of us.”
Nora stood with her arms still wrapped about her and looking away from Wallace toward the wood that bordered the field. Wallace concluded that he would get nothing more useful from either of the women for the moment. He would speak that day to many other people in the camp and some of them surely would know more than these two, he thought. He raised his hat and said, “Thank you, ladies.”
As Vera and Wallace turned for the car, Marlene, clearly speaking to Vera, said, “I didn’t know they let girls join the police.”
Vera turned to Marlene and smiled. She didn’t like Marlene and had concluded that Marlene sought to control and bully Nora and that Ruth Aisquith probably was nowhere near as bad as Marlene portrayed her. Class envy emanated from Marlene like heat from a fire, Vera thought.
“They don’t,” Vera said. “I’m only a driver.”
“Meaning you know somebody in high places, then?” Marlene said.
The words stung Vera because they were true. But she retained her smile. “Something like that,” she said.
They found Lamb waiting for them by the Wolseley, smoking a cigarette. Wallace secretly was cheered by Lamb’s unbreakable addiction to tobacco; it humanized Lamb, who seemed otherwise to be free of vice and weakness. Even so, Wallace felt a bit concerned that Lamb had returned to the car before he and Vera had, given that Lamb obviously now could see that Vera had gone with him to interview Marlene and Nora.
Vera spoke up first, hoping to blunt any inquiry into the matter her father might feel it necessary to launch. “I tagged along, Dad,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. It was my idea.” She smiled at her father warmly. “I was a little bored and decided I might get a little on-the-job training.”
Wallace thought that Vera’s sudden chattiness made her sound guilty, as if she were confessing to a crime before anyone could accuse her of one.
Lamb smiled. He also thought that Vera’s explanation contained a hint of confession. He cast a brief, wary eye Wallace’s way, which Wallace did not fail to notice.
“Did you learn anything?” Lamb asked.
“At least one of them—a Miss Suggs—disliked and envied Ruth Aisquith,” Wallace said. “Otherwise, Aisquith mostly kept to herself—at least according to Suggs.”
Lamb raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment of this information.
“Suggs said that Aisquith didn’t get on well with most of the other women in the camp; called her haughty. The other one, a Miss Bancroft, seemed genuinely broken up at the news of Aisquith’s death, though. If Aisquith had any family or close contacts in the village, she didn’t speak to either of these women of them.”
“All right, then,” Lamb said to Wallace. “I want you to stick here for the moment. Search Aisquith’s file and billet and talk to as many people as you can.”
Lamb added that he and Vera would return to Winstead to check on the progress of the inquiry there and would pick Wallace up later in the day before heading back to Winchester.
Lamb thought for a moment on what seemed to be blossoming between his daughter and his detective sergeant. If Vera and Wallace were sending romantic signals to one another, he would have to keep an eye on that. He didn’t want Wallace distracted or Vera hurt. He believed he had the right—even the duty—to step between them if their flirting compromised the inquiry. Otherwise, he would have to let Vera follow her path.
Late that afternoon, one of the men who were digging in the foundation of the farmhouse shoved the point of his spade into the moist ground and felt it strike something solid. The man’s name was Charlie Kinkaid; he was thirty-seven years old and had lived all of his life in Winstead and had been glad to land one of the civilian jobs helping to build the prison camp. The job kept him close to his wife and three children, though since taking it he saw them on weekends only. The rest of the time he lived in the camp, with the other conscripts.
Believing he’d hit a stone, Charlie pulled back on the spade, worked its tip beneath the obstruction, and leveraged it into the daylight. A slender gray bone about two inches long came up in the loosened earth. It looked aged.
Likely from a dog or cat, Charlie thought, though he couldn’t recall anybody ever having owned a dog at the Tigue place. Of course, he hadn’t come to the farm much when Mrs. Tigue—Olivia—had run it; he’d found Olivia Tigue and her two sons to be rather strange and never had been friendly with either of the boys. Lawrence especially had struck him as weak and aloof, wholly unappealing—though now Lawrence was the bloody chairman of the Winstead parish council and head of the village’s civil defense. At any rate, he reasoned, there must have been a cat or two around the place. Most farms had cats to keep away the mice and rats. And there had been that problem with the cats in the village, a year before the mess with Claire O’Hare. A few people had said then that they believed that the cats had come from the Tigue farm. But even as Charlie considered this scenario, another possible explanation for the bone’s presence in the foundation crowded into his consciousness. He’d been seventeen when Claire had committed suicide and Sean O’Hare had run off with their twin sons, and he remembered the case well. He’d known Sean well enough and found the man to be a louse; he also had known, as everyone in the village had, that Claire had been a terrible mother to the twins and that Sean had beaten her. And even before the disappearance of Sean and the twins, whispers had gone around the village that Sean seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time on the Tigue farm and that Olivia Tigue was hardly a saint.
He picked up the small bone and weighed it in his hand. He told himself that it couldn’t be—that such thinking was macabre. He thought that perhaps he entertained such dark thoughts because the Aisquith woman had been shot to death in the village that morning. That had set the men’s tongues wagging, and Charlie himself quietly had wondered whether Aisquith had upset Taney in some way. Either that or she’d been at it with someone in the village; all of her early-morning trips into Winstead hadn’t been to visit someone dead, but someone very much alive, he and the other men had concluded. Then that little arrangement had gone wrong somehow and the result was that Ruth had ended up shot. That was the talk, at any rate.
Charlie looked at the bone and considered tossing it away but found that he couldn’t quite. He would show it to Taney and see what the boss thought. The bell rang to signal that it was time to wash up for tea. Charlie put his shovel aside, put the bone in his shirt pocket, and went to his evening meal.
NINE
THAT NIGHT, WINSTEAD CAME ALIVE WITH CLANDESTINE MOVEMENT.
At half past midnight, a short, plum
p woman named Doris White left her cottage in the village and walked toward Saint Michael’s Church along the narrow footpath that led from the center of Winstead toward its western boundary. For three years Doris daily had cleaned the chapel and vicarage of Saint Michael’s under the eye of Wilhemina Wimberly, the vicar’s wife, who despised Doris.
In turn, Doris saw Wilhemina as a nasty frau who reveled in barking orders and criticisms. Gerald’s collars must have exactly the right amount of starch to them; the tea service must be stored in the cupboard in just a certain way; the candlesticks in the chapel must never be smudged. The candlesticks must shine, Wilhemina once had told Doris, just as her husband shined every Sunday in the pulpit. Now, though, the triangular relationship the three of them shared was about to change for good and all, Doris thought as she headed up the path in the dark.
A nearly full moon shone in a clear sky alive with stars. Doris moved past the rear of the cemetery and behind the church to the vicarage. The bedroom on the second floor—their bedroom—was dark. The only light came from Gerald’s study. She thought of moving to the window, to look in upon Gerald. But she could not risk him seeing her. Soon enough, he would come to her.
That morning, she’d been in the chapel polishing the candlesticks when she’d heard the shot. Everything that she was now about to do—the wheels that she intended to set in motion—had occurred to her in a kind of flash in that single, auspicious moment. She had put her plan into action almost immediately, surprising herself at her own ruthlessness. Then again, was she really being ruthless, given what Gerald and Wilhemina Wimberly had done to her? The more she thought about the Wimberlys, and particularly Gerald, the more the entire matter, even the shooting, made sense to her, and she wondered why, indeed, something like the murder in the cemetery hadn’t come to pass earlier.
She thought again of how utterly predictable Gerald could be, despite the wild heart that beat within his breast. Although he could be a beast, one could almost set a watch by him. He sought control above all else, and losing control enraged him. He was a conundrum in that way—a man who sought domination but was addicted to risk. Gerald seemed to see life as a kind of dangerous game, and that excited Doris. She recalled how Gerald had thrown her onto her bed and actually ripped her clothes from her body and buried his face in her sex, conjuring within her a savage pleasure she hadn’t known it was possible to feel. His passion in turn had fired within her an appetite to match his, so that their sex became like bouts—magnificent, thrilling battles—of which she’d loved every second. She had loved Gerald, too, though she knew him to be wicked. Indeed, she had loved him in part because he was wicked, and because he had taught her that she, too, could be wicked in her way and that power could reside in wickedness.
The Wages of Desire Page 6
