The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  “Yes,” Vera said, slightly taken aback by the blunt way in which Miss Wheatley described her method of dispatching snakes—and by the sudden and unwanted image of a serpent slithering up a pole to invade a nest of newborn innocents.

  “The same goes for the starlings,” Miss Wheatley said. “I can’t tell you how often I find that a pair of the evil things have taken up residence in one of my boxes, thereby pushing out the nuthatch.” She patted the gun lying in her arm. “I try to kill as many of the adults as I can with this. I keep it near the front door, in case I see one in the yard. I was just going out on a bit of a hunting expedition as you passed. Sometimes one must take the bull by the horns, as they say.”

  “Yes, well, I must be getting back,” Vera said. “The captain will be waiting for me.” She glanced down the trail in the direction of the village.

  “I take the eggs, of course,” Miss Wheatley continued. “Of the starlings, I mean—if I find the eggs in the nesting boxes in the place of the nuthatch’s. Or, if the starling eggs have hatched I dispose of the hatchlings.”

  This last assertion surprised and troubled Vera. How did one “dispose” of baby birds, she thought. “What do you mean?” She couldn’t help but ask.

  “Just that. I dispose of them; twist their necks until they break. They’re filthy birds, and their numbers have become madly out of control. As I said, they’re more like rats than birds. If someone doesn’t stop them, they’ll ruin the nuthatch.”

  Vera tried to manage a smile but found she couldn’t. “Goodbye, Miss Wheatley,” she said. She didn’t wait for a reply, turning toward the little wood.

  Miss Wheatley waved at Vera’s back. “Goodbye, my dear,” she said. “Please come by again if you’ve the chance. We’ll have tea.”

  No, we won’t, Vera thought.

  As she passed the barbed-wired nesting box on her way back to the village, she heard Miss Wheatley’s bird gun explode somewhere on the other side of the little wood.

  Doris White cleaned the chapel after Lila Tutin’s funeral.

  Not that she had much to do, really. Hardly anyone had come to bid old Miss Tutin farewell, which Doris found sad in part because she once had worried that her own funeral would be the same sort of lonely, empty affair. But she needn’t worry about that any longer. She blew out the candles and put them in her bag.

  Once upon a time, Gerald had come to her in the night, leaving Wilhemina lying alone in their marital bed. On those few occasions, she had lit her cottage with candles she’d stolen from the chapel, which Gerald had found romantic.

  She left the chapel and walked to the vicarage. She did not bother to knock on the door. She entered the foyer and listened. No one seemed to be about. She concluded that the cow likely was upstairs sleeping—Wilhemina often slept during the day—and that Gerald was out, probably walking. He normally found excuses to leave the vicarage during the day because he couldn’t stand being with his wife. Doris knew that Gerald was weak and strong all at once. His wickedness made him that way. She had lost her grip on him for a time. But the woman’s murder had changed that.

  The police—Lamb and the other detective—had only just left the vicarage a half-hour or so earlier, after having interviewed Gerald and Wilhemina. She wondered what the silly cow had told the policemen, especially Lamb, who was smart, a man to be careful with. She found that she liked Lamb. He was handsome and self-possessed, almost steely. She had noticed that about him right away.

  She went into Gerald’s study as easy as you please. She looked at the place on the bookshelf where he’d displayed the Webley in its box. Of course she’d seen it the last time she’d cleaned the study. Once again, she could only imagine what lie Gerald had told Lamb to explain its absence. Now, of course, Gerald had another secret that involved the pistol that would make him obedient to her.

  She went to Gerald’s desk and pulled from the top drawer a piece of his personal stationery, the one embossed with the words The Rev. Gerald Wimberly, Vicar, St. Michael’s Church, Winstead, Hampshire. Gerald forbid anyone but himself to use the stationery, but she needn’t worry about that now. Neither did she care if Wilhemina saw the note, because Wilhemina could do nothing about it. She would complain, of course, hector Gerald in her usual way, but that, too, meant nothing.

  She sat at the desk, took up Gerald’s pen, and wrote:

  Gerald,

  I will see you tonight at my cottage at nine. Don’t be late. The detective asked me about the pistol today and I told him that I really didn’t know if you had the pistol last week. Aren’t you proud of me?

  Lovingly,

  Doris

  Once upon a time, Gerald had forsaken her, as if she was of no more value or consequence to him than yesterday’s rubbish. But she had a heart and mind and her own sense of dignity, and she knew things—secrets—that no one but she and Gerald knew.

  THIRTEEN

  WHEN SHE REACHED THE HIGH STREET, VERA DUG INTO THE TOP pocket of her tunic and withdrew from it a packet of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes—the same brand her father smoked—lit one, and began to walk toward the church. She would have to smoke the fag quickly, before she reached the car, in case her father and Rivers had finished with the vicar and were waiting for her.

  As she walked, she couldn’t help but think of her encounter with Miss Wheatley and concluded that Lilly Martin was right—the woman was loony. She conjured, then banished, from her mind a brief image of Miss Wheatley twisting a slender, fragile infant starling’s neck between her fat fingers.

  As she neared the church, she saw that her father and Rivers were still gone. She took a final drag of the Player’s then ground it out beneath the toe of her shoe. She heard the sound of someone pedaling a bicycle coming up behind her and turned to see Lilly making for her. Lilly pulled alongside Vera and got off her bike. Vera smiled and said hello.

  “Hello,” Lilly said. “Back for more fun I see.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it fun.” Lilly seemed cheeky for her age, Vera thought. She wondered if she had seemed that cheeky to adults when she was Lilly’s age.

  “Everyone’s talking about it now,” Lilly said. They began to walk together toward Lamb’s Wolseley, Lilly pushing her bicycle.

  “And what are they saying?” Vera asked.

  “That it’s all a great mystery.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “That the vicar did it, of course.”

  They reached the car. “Why the vicar? I would think he’d be the last person you’d suspect.”

  “Not if the killing takes place in a detective novel,” Lilly said. “In detective novels, the killer’s always the person you least suspect.”

  “Do you read a lot of detective novels, then?”

  “Yes, I love them. I hope to become a detective novelist myself one day.”

  “Do you? Some detective novels get a bit bloody, don’t they?”

  “I don’t mind a little blood. I’m getting myself used to accepting the fact that some people can be quite wicked. You have to if you’re going to write detective novels.”

  Vera smiled. “I suppose you’re right. You can’t have a good detective novel without a bit of wickedness.”

  “A lot of wickedness, actually.” Lilly gently laid her bike on the road. “I saw you come out of the path to Miss Wheatley’s.”

  “Yes.”

  Lilly formed her fingers into claws, like a cat’s, and pretended to scratch at Vera. “Did she get you, then? Try to put you in a pot and cook you?”

  Vera laughed. She liked Lilly. “Yes, she very nearly did, as a matter of fact.”

  “She’s like that. She’s eaten several children in the village. I’ve managed to escape her clutches, though. Mother says I shouldn’t talk about her in that way, but I think she’s a hypocritical old cow in addition to being a tremendous bore, going on as she does about this and that. Her latest obsession is the nuthatches.”

  “So I gathered. I found one of her nesting boxes.�
��

  “Yes, they’re horrible things—a blight, if you ask me.” She shrugged. “Nearly the whole village is that way, though. They’re all a bunch of loonies and hypocrites.”

  “I don’t know,” Vera said. “Your mother seemed all right.”

  Lilly shrugged again. “Mum means well. But since Dad went to North Africa, she’s become a little loony, too. She has a job now in Southampton, in a factory, making screwdrivers. She works nights and so I don’t see her much now. And she nags too much.”

  “Maybe that’s because she’s concerned about you.”

  “That’s what he says in his letters—Dad. He says Mum’s under her own kind of pressure and that I shouldn’t be cross with her.”

  Vera thought she understood the source of Lilly’s cheekiness a bit better now. Cheekiness was one way to mask emotional pain.

  “Where is your dad, exactly?” Vera asked. With the war nearly two years on, the question no longer was considered to be prying.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Lilly said with what Vera thought was a brave nonchalance. “His last letter said he was near Cairo, but that was weeks ago. He writes me separate letters, though, addressed to me and just for me. He tells me not to worry, but I know that he’s only trying to make me feel better. I read the papers. I know what’s going on there. The Germans are winning.”

  “Which branch?”

  “The infantry—the ones who get shot,” Lilly said.

  Vera didn’t quite know what to say to this young girl who seemed to have so much weighing on her shoulders. Lilly’s problems made her own seem puny in comparison. “What’s it like here in the summers, then?” she asked. She was changing the subject, and that was not very brave of her, she knew.

  Lilly shrugged. “Boring.”

  “What about the other girls in the village? There must be other girls.”

  “There are, but they’re all so—I don’t know. Silly, you know? At least the ones my age are. They only want to talk about this and that boy or how hard it is now to get decent shoes with any sense of fashion to them. I don’t care about those things.”

  Vera smiled. “You don’t like boys, then? I’m not sure I believe that.” She thought she saw Lilly smile briefly.

  “I don’t hate all boys, of course. But I’ve no intention of hanging my happiness on the whims and wants of some boy.”

  “That’s smart—and very grown-up of you,” Vera said. “But it doesn’t have to be either or, you know. There are some real rotters out there, I’ll grant you. But there are nice ones, too. Decent ones.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Who looks after you at night, then?” Vera said. Though the answer was none of her business, she couldn’t help but ask the question.

  “Nobody,” Lilly said. “I’m old enough to take care of myself and do.”

  “That’s very brave.”

  “Not really. It’s not that hard.” She glanced at the ground for an instant, then added, “Sometimes, when I get bored or can’t sleep, I go out and walk around the village.” She looked at Vera. “I thought at first that I might be scared of the dark, but it’s really not scary at all. Besides, I know the village so well.”

  “You go out in the middle of the night, you mean?”

  “Yes. It helps me to sleep sometimes. I started after Dad left and Mum started working at night. I felt restless, I suppose.” She glanced down the street, toward the heart of the village. “Sometimes I see things. It’s why I’m so convinced that so many people around here are loony. You’d be surprised how many people in this village are up and about in the middle of the night. Miss Wheatley, for one.”

  “Miss Wheatley?”

  “Yes. Only two nights ago I saw her sneak into Mr. Tigue’s henhouse, well after midnight, and steal eggs. I followed her to her cottage.”

  Vera thought of the house she’d passed with the henhouse that was next to the path that led to Miss Wheatley’s cottage; that must have been Mr. Tigue’s place. She could very easily envision Miss Wheatley stealing eggs from Mr. Tigue’s henhouse. The woman’s head seemed to be utterly addled when it came to questions of birds and eggs and Lawrence Tigue.

  “Is Mr. Tigue’s the place by the path, with the red door, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he know that Miss Wheatley stole his eggs?”

  “I don’t think so. But he’s a queer bird, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lilly hesitated for a couple of seconds, then asked, “Can you keep a secret?”

  “I suppose, yes.”

  Lilly looked directly at Vera.

  “I’ve seen and heard other things, too—besides Miss Wheatley stealing Mr. Tigue’s eggs, I mean. I’ve heard Mr. Tigue and his wife arguing, and now his wife has gone off to Chesterfield to live with her sister—or so Mr. Tigue says. He’s telling everyone that she left to get away from the bombing, to spend the duration in a safer spot, but there hasn’t been any regular bombing down here in more than a year. They don’t like each other, the Tigues—not at all.”

  Vera wondered if Lilly really had heard or seen such things or merely was saying so as a way of gaining attention. That was another reason to be cheeky—people noticed you for it. And Vera could see how Lilly, given her situation, likely needed more than the usual amount of attention.

  “Maybe the bombing last summer frightened her,” Vera said.

  “But if that’s the case, why wait a year to move?”

  “There might be all sorts of reasons why she waited.”

  “Yes, but she didn’t say goodbye to anyone in the village. She just left.”

  “Well, that does sound strange, I grant you. But you can’t possibly know, really, if she said goodbye to no one in the village. Maybe she was in a hurry for some reason.”

  “I think she has left him—or she tried to leave him,” Lilly says. “Mr. Tigue, I mean. At least I did think that anyway, until last night.”

  “What happened last night?”

  “Last night I was out along the trail and I saw Mr. Tigue. I followed him, though he didn’t know it; I thought it would be good training for me, to see how you followed someone without their knowing it—for my training as a detective novelist, I mean. Anyhow, I followed him up to the old O’Hare place; he was carrying something in a sack, which he left in the house. It’s a ruin, a spooky place.”

  “I think I saw it on my walk today; is it the place by the road, near Miss Wheatley’s?”

  “Yes, that’s it. That’s where Claire O’Hare hanged herself after her husband abandoned her.”

  “That’s terrible,” Vera said.

  Lilly shrugged. “It was more than twenty years ago. They say that if you go into the house and look into the room where it happened, you’re cursed. But I saw Mr. Tigue go into the room last night. He only stayed a minute, though he left the sack in the house somewhere.”

  Vera didn’t want to encourage Lilly if Lilly was merely gossiping. But something in the way Lilly spoke—something in her character—struck Vera as authentic. She probably had seen some of what she claimed to have seen, but might be exaggerating parts of it, tarting it up the way a detective novelist would. “What do you think was in the sack?” she asked.

  Lilly looked at Vera, her eyes afire. “I don’t know, but I’ve an idea.”

  “What’s your idea?”

  Lilly looked around, as if to make sure no one was near enough to hear. “I think it might be his wife—or bits of her,” she whispered. “I mean, if he wanted to get rid of something why do it at the O’Hare place and why in the middle of the night, unless it was something he needed to hide? Something terrible.”

  Vera laughed—briefly and uncomfortably. “Oh my, you have read too many detective novels, Lilly.”

  “But it’s the only explanation that makes sense,” Lilly protested. “Have you ever heard of Dr. Crippen? He killed his wife thirty years ago. He was having an affair with a younger woman. He killed his wife and buried her i
n the basement. Except that he only buried bits of her there. They never found her head. He put it somewhere else, but never did say where. Hardly anyone goes into the O’Hare place these days. It’s the perfect hiding place.”

  “You’re being morbid, Lilly. I’m sure Mrs. Tigue is in Chesterfield with her sister.”

  “So he says. He could be doing it in his garage, you know. It’s big enough. That’s where he keeps his printing press and his car. Or he might even be doing it in his house.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Sorting out the bits, like Dr. Crippen.”

  “You’re being silly and you know it.”

  “I just find it strange, that’s all.”

  “Well, it is strange—the skulking around in the middle of the night, I mean. But merely because it’s strange doesn’t mean that it’s wicked. Some people might find your walking around at night strange, too, but that’s not wicked.”

  “Yes, but I’m not hiding anything in a spooky old abandoned house, am I?”

  Vera conjured for Lilly her best serious, motherly expression, conscious of the fact that she was aping the expression that her mother used when she was about to address some weighty subject with her.

  “Look, Lilly, I believe what you’re saying about seeing Miss Wheatley steal the eggs and Mr. Tigue going to the O’Hare house. But I do think you’re allowing your imagination to run away with you. You can’t very well go around the village telling stories about thievery and murder. It’s too macabre.”

  “But I haven’t told anyone else.”

  “Yes, but these things have a way of getting out regardless and before you know it you’ve lost control of them. I really think you should discuss these things with your mother. It might ease your mind a bit.”

  Lilly looked at the ground. She and Vera stood in silence for a moment.

  “So,” Vera said. “Will you talk to your mother, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Lilly said. “I’ll think about it.”

  FOURTEEN