The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  “I thought he was just another tramp, you see,” Miss Wheatley said as she led them into the wood. “But as soon as I got close enough to really see his face, I knew, despite the years and the fact that he now had a full beard and was quite bedraggled. I knew that it was Albert. And so I allowed him to stay and gave him blankets and food when he needed it. He’d grown up here after all and I couldn’t very well send him away. He lived by his wits, you see.”

  Immediately upon entering the wood they began following a narrow, well-worn trail. Miss Wheatley moved slowly but without stopping, huffing and puffing as she went. “It’s just up here,” she said, gesturing ahead of them.

  “Why did he come back after so many years?” Vera asked.

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s the thing, my dear,” Miss Wheatley said. “I know it must sound macabre, but he told me that he had come home to die. I think he believed that he’d run out his string. I told him that such thinking was rot, of course—one can’t know these things, really. When one must die.”

  As they neared the scene, the smell of decomposition thickened and Lamb began to feel nauseated. He fought off the feeling and followed Rivers, who was directly behind Miss Wheatley, as Vera followed him. Through the trees Lamb spied what appeared to be the lean-to. He calculated that the church and vicarage were somewhere on the other side of the wood, though he was not sure how far the wood extended before it gave onto the church grounds.

  They had advanced only two or three yards farther up the trail when Lamb found that he could no longer fight his rising nausea. He stepped off the trail and vomited. Vera also had been fighting a steadily creeping feeling of nausea; watching her father broke her self-control and she also turned from the trail and vomited.

  Miss Wheatley turned around. The odor did not seem to bother her. “It’s the smell, I should imagine,” she said. “I have no sense of smell myself, you see, and haven’t had for thirty years. I’m afraid I forget sometimes that others do.” She went to Lamb and Vera.

  “Are you quite all right, Miss Lamb?” she asked.

  Vera, who was doubled over with her hand clasped over her mouth, nodded. She wasn’t sure she was up to going on but told herself that she must not turn back.

  “I’ll go ahead, then,” Rivers said grimly. The rancid smell troubled but did not sicken him, and never had, even on the Somme.

  Lamb waved his right hand at Rivers to show that he’d heard. Vera straightened, pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her trousers, and wiped her mouth. But Lamb doubled over and vomited again. Vera moved to him and put her hand on his back. “Are you okay, Dad?” she asked. She liked that she had outlasted her father and could comfort him, rather than the other way around.

  “I will be in a minute,” he said. “I’ve never been much good at this, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Vera said, trying to be helpful.

  “No,” Lamb said. He straightened and steeled himself. “All right, let’s go, then.” He turned to Miss Wheatley. “It might be best if you went back to your cottage now, Miss Wheatley. I’ll come by soon to take a statement from you. Thank you for alerting us.”

  To Lamb’s surprise, Miss Wheatley acquiesced without even a small protest.

  He and Vera moved up the trail, Lamb with a handkerchief covering his nose and mouth. The body lay in a small clearing in front of a lean-to constructed of a web of fallen branches and bits of lumber; a dark green canvas tarp covered the web. Two or three military-issue woolen blankets lay crumpled in a heap against the rear of the lean-to. Albert Clemmons’s slightly bloated body buzzed with blackflies. Fully clothed, it lay near a fire pit that was ringed with stones and contained the damp, blackened remains of a wood fire that had burned down nearly to ash before expiring.

  Vera looked at the body; she had never seen a corpse, not even an embalmed one. She had expected to feel something like pity for the dead man—and she did feel something like that for Albert Clemmons. Mostly, though, the sight of Clemmons’s decaying body revolted her, though not in the stomach-turning manner in which the smell had. The fact of death itself, its squalor, revolted her—sickened her soul. She saw no sign of peace in Clemmons’s gaunt, dirty face, which was nearly black with accumulated filth. His lips were swollen and scabbed, and his mouth lay open. A trail of dried yellow vomit led from the corner of his mouth and down his cheek. Flies flew in and out of his mouth like bats from a cave. He had only a few teeth, and those that he did possess were the color of strong tea. His clothes—he wore a green cotton shirt and green wool trousers—were filthy and ripped in places. His open eyes seemed to fix themselves on hers, and yet they contained no hint of life or light. For Albert Clemmons, death seemed to have represented a final misery in a life spent mostly in wretchedness.

  The sight of Clemmons also revolted Lamb—though, as a matter for forensic investigation, the apparent condition of the body relieved him. Clemmons was not as far gone as he’d feared. Other than the swarming flies, insects had not yet begun to invade the body in force, and it appeared that the local animals had so far let it be. He saw no outward signs of trauma on the body and hoped that Clemmons’s heart merely had given out or that some other natural cause had killed him. He was in no mood to take on another murder inquiry.

  Rivers squatted by the body but did not touch it. Someone would have to search the man’s fetid clothing. Rivers decided that he would do so and spare Lamb the duty. “No sign of anything,” he said. “Might be natural. He’s old enough by the look of it.”

  “Yes,” Lamb said. He forced himself to move closer for a better look. Vera stayed where she was, watching her father.

  Lamb squatted by the body, the handkerchief still covering his mouth and nose. The stench nearly overcame him, but he managed to stave off another wave of nausea. He saw nothing that indicated foul play in Clemmons’s death, except that Clemmons had vomited. People who had been poisoned sometimes vomited. He stood and turned toward the lean-to, within which he noticed an upturned wooden box that seemed to have a slip of paper lying on it. Lamb moved to the box and found a single sheet of paper lying upon it that was weighted in place with a small stone. A short note was written in pencil on the paper.

  Lamb picked up the note and read it.

  20 years ago I kiled the O’Hare boys and so now have kiled my self. May god have mercsy on my soule.

  Albert Clemmons

  Rivers read the note over Lamb’s shoulder. He swatted a fly from his face and said, “Bloody hell.”

  SIXTEEN

  LAMB LEFT RIVERS WITH THE BODY OF ALBERT CLEMMONS. HE AND Vera hiked back to the village, from where Lamb began to organize a response to the discovery of the tramp’s body. It appeared possible that Clemmons had committed suicide. But the fact that Clemmons had vomited in his death throes bothered Lamb. Clemmons might have poisoned himself, of course, though neither he nor Rivers had found poison in or around Clemmons’s lean-to during their brief initial search of the site. In the meantime, Lamb wondered who else in the village had known that the tramp living in the wood by the church was Albert Clemmons.

  He was not yet certain what to make of the apparent suicide note. But since coming to Winstead on the previous day, Lamb had felt the presence of the O’Hare family continuing to hover over, and even oppress, the village.

  As they walked back to the village, Vera reported to her father Lilly’s story about Miss Wheatley’s nocturnal thieving from Mr. Tigue’s henhouse and Tigue’s visit to the O’Hare house in the middle of the night, along with Lilly’s macabre theory on what the bag Tigue had been toting at the time contained. She added the caveat that Lilly was about twelve, that her father was in North Africa and her mother worked nights in Southampton, and that Lilly clearly was lonely and seemed to have an active imagination. “She’s desperate for attention,” Vera said. “So she might be exaggerating some of what she claims to have seen, or even making it up. I feel rather bad for her, actually.” She also told her father that Lawrenc
e Tigue’s wife apparently had left the village in recent days and that Lawrence had told those who asked after his wife that she’d gone to spend the duration of the war with her sister in Chesterfield because she was afraid the Germans would return to bomb southern England again.

  The mention of Lawrence Tigue’s name concerned Lamb slightly, given that Tigue had lived on the old farm with Clemmons during the time when the O’Hares had disappeared and so had a connection to the tramp. The idea of a lonely young girl wandering the village at night also concerned him. But he could not put much stock in Lilly’s tale. He found it credible that Lilly might have seen Miss Wheatley steal eggs from Lawrence Tigue’s henhouse; Miss Wheatley clearly saw Tigue as the primary villain in the drama she’d created around the village nuthatch population. He also thought that Miss Wheatley probably had intended to give at least some of the eggs she stole from Tigue to Albert Clemmons.

  As for Lilly’s claims about Tigue hiding something in the O’Hare house, Lamb was less certain. Lilly might not like Lawrence Tigue or might merely consider him odd and thus good fodder for a spooky story. He in no way believed, however, that if Tigue had hidden something in the O’Hare place, this something had been chopped-up bits of his wife. In any case, it would be easy enough to confirm whether Mrs. Tigue had indeed gone to her sister’s in Chesterfield, as Lawrence Tigue claimed. Still, he spent a moment considering what the bag Tigue had carried might have contained, if Lilly’s story was true, and the germ of an idea began to form in his ever-skeptical, curious mind that might explain the bag’s contents—one that, if true, might also explain why Ruth Aisquith had come to Winstead carrying fifty quid in cash. He asked Vera to keep him informed if Lilly said anything else that struck her as concerning. He didn’t entirely discount the idea that Lawrence Tigue might have been skulking about Winstead in the dead of night, but for the moment he couldn’t expend time following up on the likely tall tales of a lonely twelve-year-old girl.

  In the Winstead village pub, as Lamb got Evers, the duty sergeant in Winchester, on the telephone to report the Clemmons matter, Evers immediately told Lamb that Harding had been trying to reach him and that he should stand by. A few seconds later, the superintendent came on the line. He allowed Lamb to explain the situation in Winstead before he dropped in Lamb’s lap the news of the simultaneous discovery at the prison camp.

  The rush of events left Lamb feeling mildly stunned. He and his team seemed suddenly to have found themselves saddled with the challenge of making sense of a grave and mysterious coincidence—the simultaneous discovery of a child’s skull on the old Tigue farm and the seeming confession of Albert Clemmons, who had worked and lived on that farm, of his having murdered the O’Hare twins twenty years earlier. Lamb had learned not to discount coincidence, including those that on the surface seemed rather improbable or convenient. But neither did he trust coincidence, necessarily. He preferred to assess coincidences on their merits—or lack thereof—and this one seemed to him questionable.

  “I’ve sent Larkin out to the prison camp to set up a proper dig of the foundation for evidence,” Harding said. “Obviously, we’ll also have to start an inquiry into Clemmons’s death. I’ll send the doctor to Winstead this afternoon.” Harding added that he would put someone to the task of digging out the old files on the O’Hare case for Lamb, since that investigation now appeared, at least potentially, to be in the picture again.

  Lamb stopped for a minute to consider what lay before him. He faced one certain murder inquiry, that of Ruth Aisquith; one of a possible suicide, Albert Clemmons’s; and the probable reopening of the inquiry into the suicide of Claire O’Hare and the subsequent disappearance of her husband and twin sons. He found his packet of Player’s, lit one, took a good long drag from it, and told himself that he must do as he always did, as he had no choice but to do—to approach the mess one step at a time.

  He returned to Clemmons’s campsite, where, by then, Rivers had gone through the tramp’s pockets—in which he found nothing save a rusty folding knife—and begun searching the contents of the lean-to. In doing so, Rivers had found a small tin of rat poison by the pile of blankets and rags on which Clemmons apparently had slept.

  “It’s been opened,” Rivers said. “He has no marks on him and there’s no sign about of a struggle.”

  Lamb picked up the container; it contained arsenic, which induced vomiting when ingested in sufficient amounts. He replaced the container on the ground and wiped his fingers on his pant leg. Placing his handkerchief over his mouth and nose again, he waded into the disarray of the lean-to and began to search through Clemmons’s scattered belongings—a pile of soiled socks and clothing; a metal cup, along with knife, fork, and spoon that lay inside a rusting iron pot; four or five tins of canned fruit and vegetables and one of sardines; a second large green canvas cloth; a half loaf of coarse brown bread that had begun to grow white mold.

  He also found lying among the items of clothing a small satchel made of heavy blue cotton that was cinched closed with string. He parted the strings and looked in the satchel. It contained two shillings and five pence, a nearly empty box of matches, a dull stub of a pencil tucked within several folded pieces of unmarked paper (Lamb immediately wondered if the pencil had been used to write the suicide note) and—curiously—a three-inch-high leaden figurine of the American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. The toy was well detailed and carefully painted, down to the golden sash Grant wore around his waist and his signature brown beard. Indeed, the figure seemed almost too pristine, given its owner and the conditions in which he lived, and seemed to have been the only thing resembling a personal keepsake that Clemmons possessed.

  He held up the figure so that Rivers could see it. “What do you think of this, Harry?”

  “General Grant, then?”

  “Yes, but why? He doesn’t seem to have kept anything else in the manner of a keepsake. Why a toy soldier and why an American? And look how bloody clean it is.”

  “Maybe he fancied the American Civil War.”

  “Yes, but there’s nothing else—no books or other personal items.”

  “Maybe his mum or dad gave it to him, a long time ago. Maybe our man”—Rivers nodded at Clemmons’s body—“was a sentimentalist at heart.”

  Lamb stared at the figurine for another couple of seconds then, on impulse, put it into the pocket of his jacket.

  “All right, Harry, keep at it,” he said. He added that Winston-Sheed was on the way to examine and move the body and that a few uniformed constables also were due to lend him a hand.

  Lamb retraced his steps along the path through the wood to Miss Wheatley’s cottage. She answered his knock. Lamb thought that the distress at Albert Clemmons’s death that Miss Wheatley had exhibited only an hour before seemed to have lessened.

  “Captain,” she said. “Come in.”

  Little natural light penetrated Miss Wheatley’s small, close cottage, tucked, as it was, hard against the wood. The place was crammed with packaged and canned food, piles of newspapers and magazines that appeared as if they might go back years, even decades, along with bits of paper, empty bottles, and boxes and crates of various sizes stacked in corners. Upon entering Lamb could not see a clear place on which to sit.

  Miss Wheatley moved a stack of newspapers from one of three chairs that surrounded an oval wooden table in the middle of her kitchen. “Won’t you sit down, Captain?” she said. “I’ll get us tea.”

  “That sounds fine, thank you.”

  As she brewed the tea, Miss Wheatley regaled Lamb with her tale of the sad fate of the local nuthatch and renewed her claim that Lawrence Tigue was the worst of the offenders. He allowed her to spin out her tale to its end and promised that he would look into the matter.

  She sat opposite him at the table and poured the tea from a bone white china pot with matching cups and saucers. She offered no milk, nor made mention of possessing any, though she produced a small bowl of sugar. Lamb thanked her, sipped his tea, and, falling
short of the truth, pronounced it delicious.

  “I wonder if you know yet how Albert died, Captain?” she asked.

  “It appears as if he died of natural causes.”

  “Well, that’s a comfort. Poor man. I’m afraid he lived a very difficult life.”

  “Did you have reason to believe that he might have died in some way other than naturally?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure,” she said. “Given his past history with the village one couldn’t know for sure.”

  “Meaning you believe that there are people living in Winstead who might have liked to have seen him dead?”

  “Well, the mess with the O’Hares upset and frightened people here, as you might imagine. Some hereabout never fully bought into the idea that Claire O’Hare killed herself. Claire was no angel and an execrable mother, to be sure, but Sean was a bad sort, too. He drank and beat Claire about. In fact, the rumor had gotten around at the time that he was up to something with Olivia Tigue, the woman who ran the farm on which they’re building the prison camp now.”

  “Lawrence Tigue’s mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Lamb could not recall hearing of such a rumor at the time of the O’Hare case—though his distance from the case would have precluded him from being privy to village rumor. He wondered, though, whether the rumor Miss Wheatley recalled was a product of her dislike and mistrust of Lawrence Tigue. He made a mental note to check the rumor when he looked at the O’Hare case files Harding had promised to pull from the vaults.

  “You said that you knew Albert as a boy growing up here and recognized him when you encountered him in the wood in April,” he said. “Do you know if anyone else in the village recognized him?”

  “Well, I suppose they did.” She paused to sip her tea, then added, “Though I don’t know for certain. Most people just avoided him, as they normally do tramps.”