“Did it not bother you that he’d been convicted of pedophilia?”
Miss Wheatley threw up her chubby hands.
“Please, Captain—that’s a load of rubbish. Albert was no pedophile. He merely made a mistake with a girl who was too young. Some girls, as you know, can seem quite old at thirteen. And as for Ned Horton’s suspicions of him regarding the O’Hare boys, he was cleared in that, and rightly so, though it cursed him for living here any longer. He’d been branded a pervert and that was that. He was an only child, and both his parents are long dead. He said he came back here to die, but I thought that rubbish, too. I believe he returned here because he still considered Winstead his home, despite the terrible thing that had happened to him here. I was glad to see that he’d returned, if you must know. He’d fallen so very far, you see.”
“And how was it that you found his body this morning?”
“Well, I simply went up the trail to check on him. I hadn’t seen him in a day or so and was worried that he might be sick.”
Lamb sipped his tea and daubed his lips. “Why were you out in the village two nights ago, and well after midnight?” he asked as he replaced his cup in its saucer. “You were seen in Mr. Tigue’s backyard—coming from his henhouse as a matter of fact.”
Miss Wheatley’s eyes widened and, for a moment, Lamb believed that he’d actually struck her speechless. Obviously Lilly had not lied about seeing Miss Wheatley steal the eggs, he thought.
“May I ask, Captain, who saw me?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say.”
“I see.” She was silent for a few more seconds, then raised her chin. “Yes, I took the eggs and I’m not sorry,” she said. “Tit for tat I call it. He takes from the nuthatch and I from him. If you must know, I intended to give the eggs to Albert—and to keep one or two for myself, of course.”
She went to the crowded counter by the sink and retrieved a blue ceramic bowl covered with a yellow cloth. She put the bowl on the table and withdrew the cloth, revealing seven brown chicken eggs.
“You see, Captain, I still have them,” she said. “I took them with me this morning when I went to check on Albert.” She paused, then added, “That’s when I found him.” Her eyes suddenly began to fill with tears. “Poor Albert,” she said.
Lamb considered returning the eggs to Tigue but decided to let the matter go. He was inclined toward believing that Miss Wheatley had nothing to do with Albert Clemmons’s death.
“One other thing, Miss Wheatley. Do you know if Albert Clemmons finished school?”
Confusion briefly clouded Miss Wheatley’s eyes. “Why, yes, he did,” she said after a pause. “He made it through primary school at any rate.”
Lamb stood.
“I’m afraid I’ve done a very naughty thing, haven’t I, Captain?” Miss Wheatley said, looking up at him.
“Yes you have, Miss Wheatley. But I’m confident that you won’t do it again.”
“No, Captain,” she said. “No, I won’t. I promise.”
SEVENTEEN
DURING THE AFTERNOON AND INTO THE EARLY EVENING, LAMB remained in Winstead as Winston-Sheed examined Clemmons’s body in situ and then removed it for autopsy.
The doctor found no sign of trauma on the body—no one had bludgeoned, strangled, cut, or shot Albert Clemmons. Other than the suicide note and the rat poison, Lamb and his team collected no useful evidence from the scene. At the same time, Harding had taken care of negotiating with the army the bureaucratic necessities of shutting down work at the prison camp until the police removed whatever evidence the farmhouse foundation contained.
Lamb very much wanted to go to the prison camp to have a look at what the workers had unearthed in the foundation of the farmhouse. He also wanted to speak again with Lawrence Tigue, who had connections to the farm and Albert Clemmons. At the time of the O’Hare case, Tigue had lived on the farm with his mother and younger brother, and they had employed Albert Clemmons as a farmhand. Now Miss Wheatley had alleged that Sean O’Hare might have been having an affair with Olivia Tigue. Lamb feared that the small skull that had been found on the farm indeed belonged to one of the O’Hare twins, and that Larkin might soon turn up a second skull to match it.
If the bones did turn out to belong to one or more of the O’Hares, then someone who lived on the farm, or had access to it, had buried them in the basement. In any case, someone’s remains had come to earth in the foundation of the building that Lawrence Tigue once had called home—though it was possible that the bodies had been buried in the house after the Tigues had left the farm and the house had lain abandoned.
Lamb wondered if Tigue had known that the tramp who’d taken up residence in the wood had been Clemmons. He also yearned to look at the O’Hare file and to track down and interview Ned Horton, the detective who had investigated the case more than two decades earlier. He also must track down Lawrence’s younger brother, about whom he knew nothing, and, if she still was alive, Olivia Tigue. On top of that, none of his team had yet found an opportunity to thoroughly look at Ruth Aisquith’s background.
As twilight descended upon Winstead, Lamb began to feel as if he needed to be in too many places at once and lacked time to get to all of them promptly enough. Before he left Winstead, he found Lawrence Tigue’s cottage and rapped on its red front door. No one answered. Vera stood by her father’s side.
Lamb rapped again with more vigor. “Mr. Tigue?” he said. “Police, sir. I’d like to speak with you.”
Silence.
He went to the window of the sitting room but found it curtained. Frustrated, Lamb went around to the back of the house and knocked on the door to the kitchen. Still nothing. Here, too, he found a heavily curtained window. He turned his attention to the garage and the henhouse next to it. He found the double doors of the garage firmly locked—he could not even give them a good rattle—and its lone window shrouded with a blanket. Rivers had said that Tigue ran a small freelance printing business out of the garage. He hoped that he had not made a mistake in failing to focus more attention on Lawrence Tigue. He could see now how all of the digging and shoveling at the prison camp might have made Tigue nervous—though Tigue had not appeared even remotely uneasy when Lamb had interviewed him outside the cemetery gate on the previous morning.
Lamb closed his left eye and with his right peered through the narrow space between the locked double doors of the garage. He saw the front of a motorcar, though he could not identify its make in the fading, murky daylight that managed to pierce the garage’s interior.
He turned to Vera. “Let’s get onto the farm, then, before it gets too dark,” he said. As Lamb and Vera drove away, Tigue risked parting the curtain on the window by the sitting room to watch them leave. He knew that he must not seek to dodge Lamb indefinitely—that he must keep from arousing Lamb’s suspicions further until his preparations were complete.
On the previous evening, he’d taken the bus into Winchester to meet with his younger brother, Algernon, and had come away from that meeting certain that he was in control of the situation—though Algernon, of course, believed differently, as he always had. But it made no matter now what Algernon thought. Although the events of recent days had obstructed his plans, Lawrence believed that he still had enough time and opportunity left in which to salvage most, if not all, of what he’d originally sought. But he must keep his head and not lose the courage to act and to continue to risk. Once everything was in order he could forget Lamb, and Winstead, his wife and brother, and the O’Hares and Albert Clemmons and the whole sordid mess—a mess that had never been his doing but that he’d been forced to clean up nonetheless.
Thirty minutes later, Lamb and Vera stood on the edge of the foundation of the farmhouse with Wallace, Superintendent Harding, Rivers, Taney, Captain Walton, Corporal Baker, and a dozen uniformed constables. Lamb lit a cigarette and stared down at Larkin, who was on his knees in the dirt, carefully unearthing a small human skeleton—one that appeared to have belonged to a child who
would have been about the age that Jack and John O’Hare had been when they’d disappeared from Winstead. Darkness was descending and the forensics man was about to call it quits for the night and return to the job on the following morning. Harding had assigned two men to guard the scene through the night. The army had agreed to stop construction on the camp for three days only, which Harding believed was insufficient.
“We’re going to have to get to the bottom of this quickly, Tom,” the super said, as he stood next to Lamb and watched Larkin begin to pack up his kit.
“Yes,” Lamb said, though he doubted that fulfilling such a wish was possible. Although a very neat solution to a crime he hadn’t even known had been committed seemed almost literally to have fallen into his lap—Albert Clemmons had killed the O’Hare twins, buried their bodies in the basement of the house of the farm on which he’d been a laborer, and confessed to the murders, then killed himself in remorse—many aspects of that tidy scenario bothered Lamb, including the fact that Clemmons’s apparent suicide note appeared to have been written by someone semiliterate while—at least according to Miss Wheatley—Clemmons had finished primary school, which meant that, at the very least, he probably had been able to spell simple words, such as soul, properly.
“It seems likely that Clemmons realized that the work here would unearth the bodies,” Harding said, giving voice to Lamb’s thoughts. “So he killed himself to avoid hanging.”
Lamb took a drag from his Player’s. “Yes, it’s possible, certainly.”
“But too neat. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Tom? You love to bloody cloud things.”
Lamb let the remark pass. He possessed not a shred of doubt that Harding trusted his instincts and usually yielded to them, and would now if he presented a strong enough case for his skepticism.
“I wonder why Clemmons felt the need to kill himself—if he did kill himself,” Lamb said after a pause. “He was cleared of any connection to the O’Hare mess twenty years ago and was living nearly anonymously as a tramp in the woods in Winstead. I could see the suicide if there were more at stake for him—if an unmasking would have ruined his good reputation or left his wife and children shocked and betrayed. But he had no reputation and no family. He had very little to lose.”
“Perhaps the guilt ate him up. He was exhausted—tired of the hiding, living as a tramp, the squalor and isolation, and this,” Harding nodded at the hole, “pushed him over the edge.”
“And yet his suicide note seemed to be missing any real sense of remorse or guilt. It read almost like a telegram. And it contained misspellings—killed, mercy, soul—that strike me as false, as if someone had written the note and thought, ‘Well, here’s how a tramp would write it.’ Except that Clemmons was not a tramp in the usual sense; he wasn’t uneducated or illiterate. He’d finished grammar school.”
“The army has given us three days to clear up this mess,” Harding said. “Then we’re to clear out so they can make way for the bloody Italians.”
Lamb dropped his cigarette in the mud and ground it out with the tip of his shoe. A slight shiver shot down his spine. The shiver wasn’t fear, exactly—though neither was the sensation free of trepidation, unease, foreboding. He did not believe in ghosts. And yet he felt surrounded by distressed spirits reaching out to him, importuning, wanting justice and an end to their secret misery.
At a few minutes past midnight, Wilhemina Wimberly was in the living room when Gerald came in and told her that he was going to Doris White’s cottage. Gerald had shown her the note that Doris had left on his desk in the vicarage and insisted that they had no choice but to give in to Doris’s demand that he come to her cottage that night. He promised Wilhemina that he would see to the problem but that she must give him time and, in the meantime, keep her mouth shut and not interfere.
He reminded her of how easily Lamb and Rivers had picked apart her story. He told her that, although the police had their little bits of evidence—their footprints and so on—and their suspicions, none of it amounted to anything worthwhile. Even though Lamb had found the bullet, he never would find the Webley. He’d seen to that.
Wilhemina stood in the living room, facing Gerald, a mixture of defiance and disgust on her face. She was about to give in again to Gerald, as she always did. Both of them had learned long ago that her defiance of Gerald was a pose designed to allow her to retain some dignity within her act of submission.
He reached for Wilhemina and touched her hand. “I’m doing this for you as much as for myself,” he said. “I hope you realize that.”
Wilhemina looked at Gerald’s hand on hers. Once, she had loved him. She supposed she still did, despite the myriad times and ways in which he had betrayed and mistreated her. Now, though, she must depend on him. Gerald had a way of making problems disappear. He was never slowed, riddled with anxiety, or made tongue-tied by feelings of remorse or guilt, sorrow, or shame. Doris White had them by the hair, and neither of them could do anything about that for the moment, save give in to her, as Gerald said. Eventually, Gerald would act, as he always did. She did not delude herself that he would act for her sake, however, as he claimed. Gerald acted only in his interest.
“I’m off, then,” Gerald said. He smiled. He seemed confident, Wilhemina thought. She could not fathom his iciness. “Don’t wait up,” he added.
Wilhemina turned her back to Gerald and wrapped her arms about herself. As Gerald closed the door behind him she began to cry.
Gerald walked into the village along the path. He believed that he still held sway over Doris and could convince her to keep quiet until he figured out a permanent solution to the problem she represented. She was a stupid little cow, easily suggestible. Seducing her three years ago had presented him no challenge—which had caused him to become bored of her practically in the same moment in which he’d conquered her. He recalled that moment now with disgust and wondered what in God’s name he’d been thinking when he’d seduced her. She was repellent, stupid and dull, hairy and pasty. She was worse than a cow, really. She was a kind of odious badger. But his sexual appetites sometimes led him astray.
At the time of his seduction of Doris, he’d quickly realized his mistake and talked his way out of the affair—again, quite easily. He’d spoken to Doris of his guilt in the eyes of God of the sin of adultery, and she’d swallowed that. Even so, he’d felt it wise to give her the job of cleaning up around the church to ensure her silence. Each day, when she came to the church, he had worked on her, a little at a time, like someone training a dog to sit or beg. Eventually she’d responded and he’d become satisfied that he had nothing to fear from her publicly revealing their affair. Her regular presence around the church had upset Wilhemina, of course, but that hardly concerned him. The insolent note that Doris had left on his desk that afternoon had surprised him a bit—her cheek had surprised him. But he told himself that it meant nothing. His job now was to discover how much she actually knew versus how much she was guessing at.
He did not knock on her door; he never had. He entered Doris’s cottage to find the sitting room lit with at least two dozen candles he recognized as being from the church. He realized that Doris had nicked the candles from Miss Tutin’s funeral.
As Doris emerged, Gerald immediately believed that he had little or nothing to worry about. She was the same loathsome, suggestible badger. She walked from the relative gloom of the kitchen, as if walking onto a stage. She was dressed in the same dull green dress she invariably wore to Sunday services and the same square brown shoes. She’d hideously painted her face with lipstick and rouge. He thought that she looked sick—even a bit mad—and thoroughly repulsive.
“Hello, Gerald,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”
“I received your note,” he said. He made his voice sound gentle, conciliatory.
“I hope it didn’t upset you.”
“Why would it upset me?”
“Because you don’t love me. I know that you don’t. You said you did once. But
you were lying.”
“How can you say that? Look at all I’ve done for you. And I’m here now, aren’t I?”
“You’re here only because you’re afraid of me. You’re afraid of me because I know things.” She stood, tentatively, on the threshold between the darkness of the kitchen and the soft candlelight of the sitting room.
He took a small step toward her. “I’m not afraid of you. I trust you.”
“I know things,” she said. She stood very still, watching him.
“I know that you do. But I trust you.” He took another step toward her. “You look very beautiful. I’m glad you dressed up.”
“I dressed for you. I don’t know why.”
“I know why. You haven’t changed the way you feel about me.”
She took a step toward him; he held out his hand to her.
“I like what you’ve done with the candles,” he said.
“I nicked them—from the chapel.”
He smiled. In a low, conspiratorial voice, he said, “I know. That was very naughty of you, wasn’t it? You haven’t forgotten that I like it when you’re naughty.”
To his surprise, she took a step backward, toward the darkened kitchen. “I won’t let you seduce me,” she said.
“I remember how delicious you are.”
“You can’t seduce me,” she repeated. “I know things. I know what you did with the pistol. I saw you. Last night, in the cemetery.”
This shocked him. How could she possibly have known that he would bury the Webley in Miss Tutin’s grave? A pang of fear shot through the depths of his gut. Nonetheless, he smiled. “What did you see, my darling?”
“I saw what you did.”
“What did I do?”
“You buried the pistol in Miss Tutin’s grave. Then, today, the grave was covered up forever.”
“You’re mistaken.” He must be careful. He did not want to antagonize her. He must try to convince her that she did not see what she believed she saw. “That wasn’t the pistol. It was Wilhemina’s shoes. I knew that the police would ask for them so I buried them.”
The Wages of Desire Page 13
