“And what did you do when you arrived in the cemetery?”
“I don’t remember, exactly. I only remember coming into the cemetery and seeing the dead woman there and feeling suddenly very shocked.”
“Where were you standing, exactly, when you first saw the dead woman’s body?”
“Just by the gate.”
“Did you approach the body at all, to see if the woman might still be alive?”
“No. One could see that she was dead. She had that terrible wound in her back.”
“So you did get close to the body, then?” Rivers persisted.
Wilhemina narrowed her eyes. “As I just told you, Detective Inspector, I did not approach or touch the body. Perhaps you should listen more closely.”
“And yet you also just said, madam, that you could ascertain that Ruth Aisquith was dead because of the seriousness of the wound in her back, which you called, ‘terrible.’ Had you not approached the body how would you have noticed such a detail?”
“Well, I suppose I was close enough to see, then,” she said. “As I said, I don’t remember everything exactly. No one could.”
Gerald wished he could put a muzzle on Wilhemina. The stupid cow was stumbling badly—obviously lying. Even a bloody idiot could see that. He had told her that she must allow him to take control of everything—every detail—and, as usual, she had defied him. Now they were up to their necks in it.
“I’m afraid I’m to blame here, Detective Inspector,” Gerald piped up. “I approached the body, to see if the woman was dead—just as you said. I later told Wilhemina that I knew she was dead from the seriousness of her wound. One could see the gore on the gravestone near which she fell from a fair distance.”
Rivers paused again to look at his notes. He did not speak for perhaps fifteen seconds—a silence during which Gerald literally squirmed in his seat, adjusting his position on the sofa and crossing his legs. Rivers then looked at Gerald and smiled briefly at him. “I see, sir,” was all he said.
Lamb now took up the questioning, Rivers having done his job. Lamb addressed Gerald. “Did you touch anything on the body, Mr. Wimberly?”
“No.” Gerald told himself that he must be careful. They could afford no more damage to their story.
“Other than your wife, did you see anyone else in or near the cemetery?”
“No one.”
Lamb paused, as if considering what he intended to say next. After a few seconds he said, “I wonder if you might tell us what you believe happened, Mr. Wimberly, given that you apparently were the first person on the scene, other than the killer.”
Gerald shifted again and uncrossed his legs. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I follow you, Chief Inspector,” he said. “I have no idea who killed that unfortunate woman, or why anyone would want to.”
“Well, I was just wondering if you noticed anything out of the ordinary, sir—other than the body, of course. Anything that might have caught your eye.”
Gerald pretended to seriously consider the question for a few seconds. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m sorry. Just as I told you yesterday.”
“So you didn’t look into the empty grave, then?” Lamb asked. “The one that was awaiting Miss Tutin’s body?”
“Why would I do that?” That Lamb had mentioned Miss Tutin’s grave frankly shocked Gerald. Certainly Lamb could not possibly know. He counseled himself not to lose his head. Of course Lamb didn’t know. There was no chance that he knew.
“Well, it’s possible that whoever shot Miss Aisquith might have heard you coming and gotten down into the open grave to hide. It was deep and wide enough to hide a squatting man, for example. Then, once you were gone, it would have just been a matter of climbing out of the grave and running off.”
“I see,” Gerald said, trying to say no more than was necessary. “I’m afraid I didn’t think of that.”
“What did you do once you realized that your wife had followed you to the cemetery?” Lamb asked.
“She became distraught when she saw the body, as I have said. I tried to calm her. Then I took her back to the house and put her to bed. I mixed a sleeping powder and gave it to her.”
“And how long did she sleep?”
“Four or five hours.”
Lamb turned to Wilhemina. “I must ask you once again, Mrs. Wimberly, how far into the cemetery you walked.”
“As I have already said, I don’t remember.” The peevishness in her voice was palpable. “I was quite shocked.”
“Is it also possible, then, Mrs. Wimberly, that you are unsure of other aspects of the story that you have told us here today, given that you were, by your admission, sleeping at the moment the shot was fired and then in a state of shock and near collapse following it?” Lamb asked.
A desire to strangle Wilhemina nearly overcame Gerald.
“I have told you what I remembered to the best of my ability,” she said.
“Did you also know that your husband kept his service revolver in his office?”
“Of course.”
“And did you know that it had been stolen?”
Wilhemina glanced quickly at Gerald. He had told her that morning how he had explained the pistol’s absence to Lamb. “Yes,” she said, though without looking directly at Lamb.
Gerald decided that he must go on the offensive.
“Look, Chief Inspector, I know you’ve a job to do, but I must say that I believe you’ve crossed a line,” he said. “You’re harassing my wife, who has had a shock. As for the pistol, you know very well that I told you yesterday that it was stolen.”
“I merely asked your wife to clarify her recollections on the matter, sir,” Lamb said, turning to Gerald. “In the end, some of her recollections don’t match the evidence found at the scene. And, unfortunately, you failed to report the theft of your pistol, so I’ve no way of independently confirming your story about its theft.”
“Certainly, you don’t believe us liars?” Gerald said.
Lamb didn’t answer that question. “I think we’ve gotten all we need for the moment,” he said. He abruptly stood, followed by Rivers. Gerald and Wilhemina remained seated, surprised by Lamb’s sudden ending of the interview.
Feeling the need to regain his sense of self-possession, Gerald stood. “I’ll see you to the door, then,” he said.
As Lamb and Rivers were leaving, Gerald, his tone suddenly conciliatory, said, “I do hope you’ll forgive my wife and me, Chief Inspector. We’ve both had a shock, and so I’m afraid we’re still a bit cloudy. We want to help in any way we can to solve this terrible mess.”
Lamb and Rivers walked back toward the cemetery. Although Rivers considered himself to be Lamb’s opposite in some key ways—he sometimes found Lamb’s reliance on instinct in solving crime a bit too capricious—he had discovered that, in other ways, their minds functioned similarly. The two were certainly alike in one key way, Rivers thought—both were naturally suspicious, quick to smell a rat.
When the two detectives were around the corner of the church and out of earshot of Wimberly, Rivers shook his head and said, “A bloody lying vicar.”
“Yes,” Lamb said. “And a bloody lying vicar’s wife.”
TWELVE
DURING MISS TUTIN’S FUNERAL, VERA STROLLED INTO WINSTEAD.
The High Street was quiet; she passed several people to whom she nodded hello and who nodded to her in return. The village struck her as like most country places, if a bit larger. In addition to a pub called the Horn and Claw, she passed an estate agent’s, a tea shop, a shop selling food and general merchandise, and a primary school with a stone-fenced yard that was closed for the summer term. Farther up the street stood a collection of small, neat cottages with well-kept gardens in front. On the opposite side of Winstead, the village’s western end, where the church and cemetery sat, the road moved about a quarter mile out of the village proper before it intersected with the footpath that led from Lawrence Tigue’s property and past the cottage belonging to Miss Whe
atley and the O’Hare house. Thus, the road and the trail, taken together, formed a kind of oval around the village’s inhabited center.
Vera walked perhaps a half-mile along the road leading east, beyond the cottages and into the farm country, before deciding she had gone far enough and should turn back. On a hill in the distance, she saw a man walking behind a plow pulled by a pair of huge, shaggy draft horses. She found the scene beautiful, though tinged with melancholy. Even so, the walk suited her; for the moment she felt happy, optimistic about her future. She had begun to turn over in her mind what she would like to do from here out, given that she could not avoid conscription forever—no matter her father’s machinations on her behalf—and had no desire to.
She thought that she might become a nurse; the idea of tending to wounded men appealed to her because it seemed a substantial contribution. The notion of avoiding hard duty made her feel guilty and irrelevant. She did not want to look back after the war and conclude that she had shirked, that someone else had performed the difficult or dangerous duty that she might have. She did not intend to spend her life scheming and figuring ways to avoid life’s hard choices. Although her father’s efforts on her behalf touched her—she had no doubt of his love for her, after all—she must eventually take her chances with the war, as so many others had.
She also thought of David. Before becoming her father’s driver she had encountered David only a few times and always briefly; they hardly had spoken beyond having been introduced. And although she had always found him good-looking, she had felt no romantic tug from him. Mostly, he had struck her as just another of the men with whom her father worked, if a bit younger than most and more attractive and stylishly dressed.
Now, though, her feelings toward David had begun to change. He had several times flirted with her, at least a little, and in doing so flattered her. David was funnier and not nearly as impressed with himself as she had imagined he was. Indeed, he was surprisingly down-to-earth, if not exactly cerebral.
She’d been surprised to find, too, that he seemed to share her general feelings about avoiding the call-up, though in being a policeman he had a perfectly good reason to justify his deferment. Still, she liked that he seemed to have contemplated the possible consequences to someone else of his sitting out the war. In this he had shown her hints of a deeper character.
She’d been glad, too, when he’d so readily agreed to her suggestion that she go with him to interview the women at the prison camp, even though they’d both been caught off guard when they found her father waiting for them at the car. She knew that her father had noticed the signals that she and David had exchanged and that it had disconcerted him, though she did not believe that they troubled him overmuch. She hoped they hadn’t, at any rate.
As she strolled back toward the center of the village, she noticed, to her left, a narrow, well-worn public path that led from the street between two cottages. The house to the left of the path was conventionally pretty, with timbered walls, a red door with brass knocker, and a slate roof with tin gutters. A pair of tall evergreen shrubs grew on either side of the door, like sentries guarding a castle gate.
Curious about where the path led, Vera followed it between the cottages to where it gave onto a meadow as it passed a rather large wood-slat garage and then a henhouse at the rear of the neat house with the red door. In front of the henhouse, a dozen or so chickens clucked and scratched within a small bare-dirt surface surrounded by wire fencing nailed to wooden posts.
Vera moved into the meadow behind the house, which was full of tall grasses and wildflowers, thistle and low bramble. Small birds flitted here and there as she walked toward the wood on the meadow’s other side. As she approached the edge of this wood she spied, to her right, just off the path, a small rectangular wooden box mounted on a wooden pole. The box, which was about four feet from the ground, had a round hole in the middle of its side that faced the trail. Its top was slanted forward and hinged at the back so that it could be opened. Vera approached the box and found it to be built of thin pine slats hammered together with ten-penny nails. She noticed that the post on which it sat was wrapped with a strand of rusting barbed wire attached with u-shaped nails. The wire lent the contraption the aspect of some sort of ancient torture implement, Vera thought.
She listened for the sound of movement from within the box. It seemed empty. She lifted the roof and looked inside. Lying in the middle of the box was a compact nest made of summer grasses and bits of tree bark that was empty of eggs. She realized that the box was intended to provide a home for birds, which made it seem much less unpleasant, and she remembered Miss Wheatley mentioning that she had built “nesting boxes” around Winstead for the nuthatch.
Leaving the nesting box, she walked on, following the trail through the brief wood and into another patch of meadow. To the right of the trail, a thatched-roof cottage nestled in front of an extension of the wood through which she’d just walked; smoke issued from the chimney of the cottage and a low fence of chicken wire nailed to rotting wooden stakes paralleled the trail, seeming to mark the boundary of the property on which the cottage sat. A rough path led to the cottage through an unkempt meadow. The dark blue paint on the cottage’s door and window frames was faded and chipped. Vera calculated that the church was somewhere beyond the wood that lay behind the cottage and that if she kept on along the trail she would make a kind of circumnavigation of the village and end up back where she had started. As she passed the cottage, she noticed that the air smelled vaguely of decay, as if an animal lay dead somewhere nearby.
Another hundred or so meters on she came to an abandoned house that sat to the right of the trail, facing it on a slight rise. It appeared that no one had lived in the house for some time. The white paint of its shingles was faded and peeling and its windows were broken out. The remnant of what had once been a stone walkway leading from the path to the house had all but disappeared beneath the brush and bramble.
She peered up the trail and calculated that the road leading out of the western end of the village, in the direction of the prison camp, must be ahead. Sure enough, she reached the road after walking another thirty meters. The place at which the trail ended at the road was tamped down and constituted a kind of lay-by at which motorists might pull off the road or walkers could gain access to the trail. Vera noticed several cigarette butts pressed into the moist ground at her feet as she stood in the lay-by.
She remained there for a moment to get her bearings. Should she walk down the road to her right she would find herself back by the church and cemetery; should she head left she soon would reach the prison camp site.
Enjoying the walk, she decided to walk back to the church by doubling back over the path she had just trod. She turned and headed back down the trail, passing the abandoned house, which, she thought, seemed to beckon her to come closer—a spooky notion she dismissed with an audible “Rubbish!” As she passed the rummy-looking cottage that sat off the trail by the wood, however, she heard someone call her name.
“Miss Lamb!”
She turned to see Flora Wheatley waddling up the path from the cottage toward her. Vera was surprised to see Miss Wheatley carrying a shotgun over the crook of her right arm.
“Miss Lamb!”
Vera could not quite take her eyes off the gun; it was the type with which one shot birds—pheasants and other fowl. She wondered what Miss Wheatley was intending by toting around such a weapon and was glad to see that the gun’s barrel was cocked open and therefore could not go off. She thought, too, of her promise to Miss Wheatley; she had told her father about the nuthatches and therefore, thankfully, had no cause to lie to the old woman about that. Still, she felt no desire to chat with Miss Wheatley, whom she’d found pushy in their first meeting.
By the time Miss Wheatley reached the low chicken wire fence that marked the border of her property, she was nearly out of breath. “Miss Lamb, what a pleasant surprise,” she said, briefly putting her hand to her heart. “What bring
s you this way?”
Vera smiled. “Just out for a walk.”
“I say, I wonder if you’ve had a chance to tell your captain about the nuthatches,” Miss Wheatley asked. “We must do something soon, you know, otherwise the nuthatches here about will be wiped out.”
“Yes, I told him,” Vera said. She left it at that.
“Oh, thank you, my dear. Perhaps now someone finally will do something about this problem before it’s too late. I’ve put up a number of nesting boxes, but I’m afraid they’ve only made it easier for the thieves to steal the eggs. But I had to put up the boxes, you see, because the starlings also are cavity nesters and they push the nuthatches out of the natural nesting spots. The starlings are a much more aggressive species than the nuthatch. That’s why there are so bloody many of them. Rats of the air, I call them.”
“I think I just passed one of your boxes in the meadow,” Vera said. She didn’t want to engage Miss Wheatley in an extended conversation, but she was curious about the box.
Miss Wheatley gazed in the direction of the meadow. “Yes, they prefer to nest near meadows. Of course, you can’t place the boxes too close together because they each need their own bit of territory, and they have a hard enough time coping with the starlings. Then, of course, too, you have predators—not the least of which, these days, is the human variety, Lawrence Tigue being the biggest culprit, as I told you yesterday. He has chickens, you know, and supplies eggs to the people at the prison camp, and I’m certain he’s been padding his supply with nuthatch eggs. They represent pure profit to him.”
Vera began to think of a way in which she might politely extract herself from the conversation.
“I’ve taken care of the natural predators in any case,” Miss Wheatley continued. She smiled. “The barbed wire around the trunks of the nesting boxes keeps out the snakes. Horrible things. I don’t like snakes—never have. When I find them around the cottage I chop their heads off; a single whack with a sharpened hoe is all it takes. Anyhow, without the barbed wire they slither right up the post and into the nest.”
The Wages of Desire Page 9
