The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  “Was that his name, then? I’d forgotten. I remember that he was older—too old for a village bobby—and none too sharp besides. The whole thing seemed to have knocked him off his kilter, seeing the O’Hare woman hanging from the rafter like that, with her face in the way they get from a hanging, the tongue and the eyes bulging out, like. I knew right away that he wasn’t going to be much use to me.”

  “Do you remember the name of the person from the village who called Markham? I would assume that person was the first to find the body.”

  “Anonymous; wouldn’t give their name.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Female, according to the bobby.”

  “Did you find that suspicious?”

  “I did, yeah.”

  “Did Markham have a guess as to who it might have been?”

  “Didn’t have a clue. As I said, he was none too sharp.”

  “And no one ever came forward as the caller?”

  “No—as I said.” Horton’s voice suddenly became tinged with irritation, as if he considered the answer to Lamb’s question obvious.

  “I’m sorry, Ned, but you didn’t say,” Lamb said. He looked evenly at Horton.

  “Well, you said you’d seen the file,” Horton said. “It’ll be in the file.”

  “You found a suicide note,” Lamb said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “On the kitchen table.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Well, I can’t remember exactly. The gist of it was that she’d killed herself because her husband had left her and taken their sons.”

  “Can you remember anything specific about it—a phrase perhaps?”

  “It’ll be in the file.”

  “Probably, but I haven’t found it yet. The file’s large, as I’m sure you remember.”

  Horton looked at the ceiling, as if trying to recall the specific contents of the note. “Something about, ‘He’s gone and he’s never coming back and I’ll never see my boys again.’ Along those lines.”

  “How did you determine that the handwriting was Claire O’Hare’s?”

  “I found some other things she’d written—notes and lists and the like—and they matched.”

  “Who else did you show them to?”

  “Green, the forensics man.”

  “And he agreed with your assessment?”

  “Yes, and so did the coroner.”

  “Did you not think to send the note and the other materials to the Yard for handwriting analysis?”

  “Why should I have done?” Horton again sounded irritated. “What does the Yard know that I don’t? I realize it’s all the fashion these days to send your bloody evidence away to all the college-educated boys at the Yard. But in my day we handled our own inquiries. Didn’t depend on outsiders. It was her handwriting—Claire O’Hare’s. That was easy enough to see. Not only that, but a couple of people in the village told me she’d threatened to kill herself a couple of times before. She had a habit of announcing this every time she and the husband fought, or when she wanted something from him. ‘Stop or I’ll kill myself; give it to me or I’ll kill myself.’ That sort of thing. Emotional blackmail.”

  “What happened next?”

  Horton sat back in his chair and lit his pipe. Aromatic blue smoke rose in a delicate cloud in front of his face, obscuring it slightly. Horton squinted at Lamb through the miasma, as if he was trying to see through fog.

  “Well, as I secured the scene I sent Markham—the bobby—to see if he could find Sean O’Hare and the children. Although her note said they’d left, I didn’t take that as truth, of course—at least not then.” He paused to puff his pipe anew. “But it did turn out to be true. Markham never found them that night, and neither I nor anyone else that I know of ever saw them again. I concluded that he’d gone back to Ireland; he was bloody Irish—his people were from County Wicklow—and he hightailed it. Claire O’Hare was a lush and treated the bloody kids like dirt. Everyone in the village said so. So it made sense.”

  “Did you contact the Irish for help?”

  “Of course. But he’d gone to ground on his home turf, more than like. You have to remember that this was just a few years removed from the Easter Rising. Nobody who knew him from the Auld Sod was going to give him away to a bloody British copper. Not a chance of that. Probably changed his name and those of the kids, too.”

  Lamb had seen no mention in the file of Horton having contacted the Irish police.

  “Claire O’Hare was nothing in the way of a wife or mother, and her children suffered because of that,” Horton said. “They had to go wandering around the village looking for a bloody handout if they expected to eat.”

  “They were last seen that morning on the Tigue farm, where they normally went for food,” Lamb said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And Sean O’Hare last had been seen the night before, at his road job in Winchester?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you conclude happened then—that morning, I mean?”

  “Sean came home from his road work job a bit after eight on the previous night; several people said they’d heard him and Claire arguing from about then until nearly ten. Eventually, everyone in the house went to sleep and the boys rose early, as they always did, and went to the farm looking for food. They seemed to have gone to the Tigue farm for part of the morning—or so Albert Clemmons claimed. Sean O’Hare rounded them up and left. I think it took Claire several hours to even realize they’d gone. She was probably drunk or sleeping one off. Then, when she saw the truth of what had happened, she did what she had so many times threatened to do.”

  “Did no one besides Albert Clemmons report seeing either Sean or the boys around the village that morning?”

  “No. It’s in the file, as I said.”

  “Did Claire go out into the village looking for them when she realized that they were gone? Did anybody see her about?”

  “If they did, no one told me about it. As I said, she was probably drunk at the time.”

  “You checked into Albert Clemmons’s background. Why was that, if you didn’t suspect that he might have had something to do with some aspect of the case—that maybe Claire O’Hare’s suicide didn’t quite explain everything?”

  “Well, I had to check didn’t I?” He looked directly at Lamb. “Otherwise, sharpies like you would have come up behind me, nosing around and asking questions. ‘Why didn’t you check this, Ned? Why didn’t you check that?’ I remember you, by the way, Lamb. You were a uniformed PC at the time. Eager beaver type. Just the type I mean. I was a damned good detective and I followed procedure. Clemmons had been the last man to admit having seen the twins, and so I checked his background and up came this conviction for raping a thirteen-year-old girl. But there was nothing to connect him to the disappearance of Sean O’Hare and his sons—not a bloody thing. If it turns out that the body you’ve found on the farm is one of the O’Hare boys and that I was bloody well wrong, then I was bloody well wrong.” He looked directly at Lamb. “We all make mistakes.”

  “Did you interview the Tigues?”

  “Of course. They all accounted for their whereabouts. Besides which Olivia Tigue was one of them who fed the O’Hare boys, took care of them when their own mother wouldn’t. She had no cause to harm them.”

  “What about the older son, Lawrence? He was sixteen at the time.”

  “He’d spent the entire morning on the other side of the farm hunting rabbits. They owned a fowling piece, and I checked it and it had been recently fired. And they had three rabbits in the larder, waiting to be skinned.”

  “Did you speak to the younger son, Algernon?”

  “Yes, but he was only a lad at the time. Like his brother, he was away from the farm that morning—off with his mates somewhere. His mother confirmed that.”

  “Did you confirm either of the brothers’ stories with anyone else?”

  Horton straightened in his chair. The q
uestion obviously offended him. “Of course,” he said.

  “So you spoke to their mates, then?”

  Horton looked directly at Lamb. “I interviewed nearly everyone in Winstead. If you check the file you’ll see that.”

  Lamb paused for a second, then moved forward in his chair, closer to Horton. “Did you see in this morning’s Mail that we also found the body of a tramp in the wood by Saint Michael’s Church yesterday?”

  Horton crossed his legs. “Yes.”

  “That man was Albert Clemmons. He left a note admitting that he killed the O’Hare twins.”

  Horton seemed to freeze for an instant. Lamb saw genuine surprise in his eyes.

  Lamb pulled the note from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to Horton, who read it, then handed it back. “How did he die?” he asked.

  “A massive dose of arsenic.”

  Horton sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Well, as I said, if I was mistaken, then I was mistaken. If Clemmons did kill the boys then good riddance to him.”

  From the right pocket of his coat, Lamb produced the figurine of General Ulysses Grant he’d found among Clemmons’s belongings. He was fishing now, but he sometimes had a bit of luck when he fished.

  “Does this mean anything to you?” Lamb asked.

  Horton peered at the figure for a second then pulled his glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. He looked again at the tiny Grant. “Where did you get it?”

  “I found it with Clemmons’s things. It was in a little bag of what appeared to be his few keepsakes.”

  “First time I’ve ever seen one—General Grant.” He handed it back to Lamb. “If it has significance I don’t know what it would be.”

  “Did the O’Hares or the Tigue boys own toy soldiers?”

  “I don’t know. Most boys do.”

  “Did you search the farmhouse thoroughly, including the basement?”

  “No,” Horton said. “I’d no cause to.” He removed his pipe from his mouth and leaned toward Lamb. “If you’re asking me why in bloody hell I didn’t find the body you’ve found, then the only answer I can give you is that I don’t know why. I did everything that was required and then some.”

  “Does the name Ruth Aisquith mean anything to you?” Lamb asked.

  “The woman who was shot in the cemetery? No, why should it?”

  “How about Mary Forrest?”

  “No. Who is that?”

  “It’s not important.” Lamb paused for a few seconds, then said, “It sounds as if you didn’t have much sympathy for Claire O’Hare, Ned.”

  Horton looked at Lamb sharply. “Why should I have had sympathy for her?”

  “She’d lost her sons.”

  “Until then, she’d hardly noticed her bloody sons.”

  Lamb stood and offered his hand to Horton. “All right, then, Ned,” he said. “Thank you for your time.”

  Horton stood and shook Lamb’s hand. “Right,” he said. He clamped his pipe in his teeth and failed to see Lamb to the door.

  Lamb slid into the passenger seat of the Wolseley as Vera started the car. He thought of the obviously poor job that Ned Horton had done investigating the O’Hare case and how this was worse than a shame. It was, he thought, almost a kind of crime in itself.

  TWENTY

  BEFORE SHE AND LAMB HAD LEFT THE NICK THAT MORNING, VERA had reached Algernon Tigue and arranged for her father to meet Algernon in his rooms at the Everly School, where he was head of the maths department, after Lamb had finished with Ned Horton. Algernon had sounded “rather pleasant,” Vera had added when she’d informed Lamb of the interview.

  In the meantime, Lamb’s study of Horton’s file on the O’Hare case, along with his subsequent interview with Horton, had added another person to the list of those to whom Lamb wanted to speak—John Markham, the former bobby of Lower Promise, who’d called Horton to the village after finding Claire O’Hare hanging from the rafters. In addition, the events of the past twenty-four hours had forced Lamb to temporarily put aside the problem of Ruth Aisquith. Now, though, as he and Vera drove to the Everly School, he turned his mind again to the case.

  Although he believed that Gerald and Wilhemina Wimberly knew more than they were telling him about Aisquith’s death, he had collected no real evidence to connect either of them to any wrongdoing. He needed Gerald Wimberly’s Webley, but was certain that Wimberly already had gotten rid of the pistol—that it now was lying at the bottom of some pond or buried in a nearby wood. He still knew very little about Ruth Aisquith, really, and that was a disadvantage. He decided that once Rivers had finished setting up the incident room, he would dispatch the detective inspector to the Ministry of Labour and National Service, in London, to have a look at Aisquith’s government file and, hopefully, to learn more about her background and personal history.

  Because it was out for the summer term, the Everly School, in Winchester, was mostly deserted. The only person Lamb saw on his way to Algernon Tigue’s rooms was a lone gardener who was raking freshly cut grass into a sodden pile on the lawn in the school’s small main quadrangle.

  Algernon Tigue answered Lamb’s knock on his door. He resembled his older brother in some respects, with the same narrow nose. But Algernon was several inches taller and more solidly built than Lawrence, huskier in the shoulders and heavier in the waist. He wore circular, metal-rimmed glasses and had combed his longish dark hair over his head in a way that Lamb thought foppish. He offered his hand to Lamb.

  “Good morning, Chief Inspector,” he said. His grip was firm. He stood aside to allow Lamb to enter. “Please come in.”

  Tigue’s rooms were small and comfortably appointed. A high mahogany bookshelf dominated the left wall, while a large window on the right gave onto a view of the quadrangle. In front of the window was Tigue’s writing desk, upon which a collection of books and papers was neatly arranged. A door at the other end led to an anteroom, presumably Tigue’s bedroom. Along the far wall was a hearth, in front of which stood a small round table surrounded by two chairs. It was to this place that Tigue led Lamb and offered him tea, which was waiting on the table. As Lamb passed Tigue’s desk, he noticed a small military figurine beneath the lamp, as if it were standing watch there. The figure was of arguably the greatest field marshal of them all, Napoleon Bonaparte.

  “Thank you,” Lamb said to Tigue’s offer of tea.

  Tigue poured tea and sat opposite Lamb, crossing his legs. He pulled a silver cigarette case from his pocket, removed one, then offered one to Lamb, who declined. He lit the cigarette and said, “Now, how can I help you, Chief Inspector? If you don’t mind my saying so, it sounds as if you’ve quite a mess on your hands in Winstead. What you’ve found out at the farm is quite shocking. Have you identified the skull you found on the farm yet, by the way?”

  “Not yet, no. I was hoping that perhaps you might be able to help me with that.”

  Tigue exhaled and smiled. “Oh come now, Chief Inspector. How could I possibly help you with that? The only person who could help you with that is the person who buried the child there, and that certainly wasn’t me.”

  “You and your mother and brother did live at the house for several years.”

  “Of course we did. But none of us ever buried a body there.” He smiled yet again—confidently, Lamb thought. “You’re making this all sound rather like a novel—the body in the basement.”

  “It is what it is,” Lamb said flatly.

  “True. Then, too, I’m sure you’ve considered the possibility that someone might have buried the child there long after my family and I left the farm. My mother died in 1932, and Lawrence left shortly thereafter. I had left several years earlier, to begin my university education. The place has been abandoned ever since. Anyone might have come along one foggy night and buried a body there.”

  “What is your opinion, sir? Do you believe that the skull could be that of one of the O’Hare twins? As I’m sure you recall, the boys were last seen alive on the far
m.”

  Algernon shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, as I said. I can only say that if the skull does belong to one of the twins, then Albert Clemmons must have been the culprit all along, just as Ned Horton had suspected. Albert had been convicted of pedophilia, as I’m sure you must know.”

  “So neither you nor your mother nor brother had anything to do with the disappearance of the O’Hare twins, or possess any knowledge of what happened to them or their father—or, for that matter, any knowledge of the death of Claire O’Hare?” Lamb spoke without emotion, maintaining his gaze on Algernon.

  Tigue laughed, as if he found Lamb’s question a kind of game and he enjoyed games.

  “Ha! I suppose you’re only doing your job, despite what I’ve just told you. But I’ll play along. The answer, as I said, is no. I was a boy at the time, not much older than the O’Hares themselves, and my brother is incapable of violence. I assume you’ve met Lawrence, given the amount of time you must have been spending in Winstead of late; if so you’ve probably seen that for yourself. As for my mother, she probably treated the O’Hare twins with more kindness than did their own mother, who was a worthless lush. That’s why the boys came onto the farm in the first place; my mother often fed them when they were hungry.”

  “Did your mother have an affair with Sean O’Hare?” Lamb knew that even if Olivia Tigue had been at it with Sean O’Hare, Algernon would deny it. But he wanted to see how Algernon would react to the question baldly asked—whether he could, in asking the question, perhaps crack Algernon’s composure and cockiness.

  “Ha!” Algernon said. “You are a prize, Chief Inspector.” He smiled again, but Lamb sensed a rising irritation in Algernon’s voice and body language, leading Lamb to believe that he’d scored a hit. “I suppose you got that idea from the village gossip that went around at the time. But those bloody primitives in Winstead always gossiped about my mother. She was an outsider, which was bad enough in their eyes, but they also condemned her for having come to town unmarried and then having the temerity to run a farm on her own, which she did with much success, by the way. She was a strong woman who was worth ten of any of the mediocrities in Winstead who whispered about her behind her back.” Lamb noticed that Tigue had lost his smile. “So no, she had no affair with Sean O’Hare.”