“Yes, well, I’m afraid that last summer did her in a bit. She began talking about it then, but we held off on doing anything since it seemed like such a large step. Then, with the coming of this summer, she became anxious again. I tried to convince her that the Germans were finished with us down here, though I hardly believe it myself, of course.” He looked at Lamb. “So, yes, she’s gone, Chief Inspector. She left just a couple of days ago.”
“I see,” Lamb said. “And what is your sister-in-law’s name?”
“Mary Hart. My wife’s maiden name is Hart, you see. Alba Hart.”
“And does Mary Hart have a telephone in Chesterfield?”
“Well, yes, she does.”
“May I have her number?”
“Her telephone number?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t know it from memory. I can go and fetch it if you really think it’s necessary.”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Yes, well, if you’ll just wait here, then.” He rose and left the room. A minute later, he returned and handed Lamb a slip of paper with Mary Hart’s name and telephone number on it.
“There you are, Chief Inspector.”
“Thank you,” Lamb said. He now asked the question he’d asked Algernon: “Did your mother have an affair with Sean O’Hare, sir?”
“Certainly not!” Lawrence said. “And I resent that you should ask that, Chief Inspector.”
Lamb produced the Grant figure, which Lawrence instantly recognized. Indeed, Lamb’s possession of the figure cheered him; it was further evidence that his plan was working as he hoped it would.
“Do you recognize this?” Lamb asked.
“No.”
“It comes from a set of generals made by Britain’s toy company that also includes a Napoleon figure. Your brother has a Napoleon figure sitting on his desk in his rooms at the Everly School. He told me that you gave him that figure. Is that true, Mr. Tigue?”
Tigue nearly was overcome with delight. Lamb not only had found the Grant, but also seen the Napoleon in Algernon’s rooms. He wondered at the shock that Algernon must have felt in seeing Lamb produce the Grant figure.
“I’m afraid my brother’s mistaken, Chief Inspector,” Lawrence said evenly. “I never gave him such a figure.”
“No? He claims you were an aficionado of toy soldiers, a collector.”
“Well, that’s curious,” Lawrence said. He felt entirely in control of the situation. Neither Algernon, nor Lamb, nor anyone else could touch him now.
“Why is that?”
“Well, it was Algernon who was the toy soldier aficionado, not me.” Lawrence looked around the room. “After all, you don’t see any figures on my shelves, do you?”
“Would you mind if I had a look in your garage, sir?” Lamb hoped to test his theory on the possible connection between Lawrence and Ruth Aisquith.
“Well, I don’t see why you would want to, but go right ahead,” Tigue said. “I’ll get the key.”
Tigue was confident that Lamb would find nothing—though Lamb’s asking to see the garage meant that Lamb might be getting close to discovering certain truths. Once again, Tigue reminded himself that, very soon, none of that would matter.
Tigue unlocked the garage. “There you are, Chief Inspector,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait out here.” He spoke this latter sentence in a tone that suggested he was not pleased by Lamb’s snooping around his shed.
Lamb entered the garage. He first had to move around Tigue’s 1928 Morris Minor, which, from the look of the dust that had collected on its bonnet, Tigue hadn’t driven in some time. Since the war started, most people who owned motorcars had mothballed them, given the scarcity and dearness of petrol. More than any other commodity, save food, the success of England’s war effort depended on petrol, the distribution of which the government strictly controlled and rationed. In some ways, petrol had become as valuable as gold.
Lamb moved to the rear of the garage, where he found, hard against the rear wall, a small Adana printing press and next to it a table containing a mimeograph machine. A second table, which sat beneath the window on the shed’s north side, contained bundles and stacks of papers, many of which appeared blank. Lamb knew nothing about printing presses and so was not exactly sure what he was searching for other than some evidence that Lawrence Tigue might have used his machine to produce some manner of forged or counterfeit papers for Ruth Aisquith. Lamb had spent a fair amount of time thinking about the large sum of cash they’d found in Ruth’s purse and concluded that Ruth had not brought the cash with her to Winstead merely to keep it safe from her bunkmates at the prison site. He believed she had brought the cash to Winstead to pay someone for some service rendered—but a service that did not allow the participants to be seen together without casting suspicion on themselves.
Lamb suspected that Ruth had come to the cemetery so early in the morning not to visit her grandmother’s grave, as she had told Taney and others, because Ruth’s grandmother wasn’t buried there. Indeed, Ruth’s grandmother probably wasn’t even buried in Hampshire. Lamb’s theory was that Ruth Aisquith had come to the cemetery—a normally deserted place on the far western edge of the village, and always very early in the morning—because she had not wanted to be seen. She had needed a quiet, out of the way spot in which to pick up the goods that someone in the village—perhaps Lawrence Tigue—was producing for her. In turn, she left payment for those goods hidden somewhere in the cemetery. However, on the morning of her death she’d been shot before she could complete her covert transaction.
Lamb took a final look around the garage, then rejoined Lawrence Tigue by the door.
“I expect that I will have more questions for you and must ask that you not leave Winstead for the next couple of days,” Lamb said to Tigue.
“I’ve nowhere to go in any case,” Lawrence said.
“Very good, then,” Lamb said. “Thank you for your cooperation. I can find my way back to the High Street, thank you.”
Lawrence watched Lamb disappear around the side of the house in the direction of the High Street. As he did so, he put his hand in his right pocket and felt the head of a tiny general.
TWENTY-TWO
WHILE LAMB INTERVIEWED LAWRENCE TIGUE, VERA STROLLED UP the High Street in the direction of the church. She found the cemetery deserted and stood outside its black iron fence for a moment, staring at the graves. The grave of Miss Tutin still was mounded with fresh earth but otherwise—and despite what had happened two days earlier—the cemetery appeared as if no one had entered it for years. The place felt weighted by a kind of sad shabbiness, Vera thought.
She heard a voice behind her say, “Hello, Miss Lamb” and turned to find Julia Martin, Lilly’s mother, standing behind her holding a canvas bag of groceries in each hand.
Vera had instinctively liked Julia the first time they’d met. She smiled. “Can I help you with your bags?”
Julia returned the smile. “That’s very kind, thanks.” She handed Vera one of the bags, which contained, among other food, a loaf of the coarse rationed bread the government called the National Wheatmeal Loaf and a tiny tin of strawberry jam, which had become rare and which Julia had been lucky to obtain. Julia nodded toward the western end of the village and said, “I live just up here.”
They walked toward Julia’s house. “I wonder if I would be prying to ask how the investigations are going,” Julia said. “It’s quite terrible what’s happened around here in the past few days. First these two deaths in the village and then the discovery of the child’s skeleton on the old farm. I’m afraid it’s left many of us reeling. It has me.”
“Well, I’m afraid I don’t know much, really,” Vera said. “I went with my father when Miss Wheatley led him to the body of the tramp, and I have to say that I found it all rather sad, the old man dying alone in the wood like that.”
“Yes. It is very sad—how someone can become so invisible to the rest of the world.”
<
br /> “Did you know him at all? The man who died in the wood?”
“No, though I saw him about the village now and again. He never came to our door, though I understand he came to Flora’s.”
Vera knew that her father had released very little information about what the police had found at the tramp’s campsite and so was reluctant to say more about it. “Do you remember the trouble with the O’Hares?” she asked Julia.
“Yes, I remember it; I was about Lilly’s age then. I lived in Winchester, of course, but we followed the story. They lived in a house that is not far from here.”
“How has Lilly been taking the recent upsets?” Vera asked. She wondered if Julia knew of Lilly’s nocturnal wanderings about the village, and if she should tell Julia of Lilly’s claims of having followed Miss Wheatley and Mr. Tigue in the night, and of Lilly’s fanciful theories about the fate of Alba Tigue. Although Lilly might consider it a betrayal of confidence, Vera had felt from the beginning that Lilly would be better off if her mother knew to what lengths Lilly had gone to stave off her loneliness. Even so, she held off saying anything for the moment.
“Well, it seems not to have affected her too much,” Julia said. “But you never know with children her age. They often seek to hide their emotions from their parents, unfortunately. We all do it. She’s about the village somewhere at the moment, off riding her bicycle. I’m afraid she’s a little lonely these days, with her father gone and school out for the summer term. And I’ve taken a night-shift job working in Southampton.” She sighed. “The war has been hard on Lilly—hard on all of us.”
With that, the two women became silent for a moment. They walked about fifty meters past the church before they reached a narrow road on the left called Lennox Lane that wound slightly uphill. “This is it,” Julia said. “Our house is at the very end.”
Tall English oaks lined Lennox Lane, shading it from the hot, midday sun.
“Have you lived in the village long?” Vera asked.
“Fourteen years—since my husband, Brian, and I married. He was born and grew up here. We live in the house that belonged to his parents; his father was the doctor here. His parents both were quite old, really, when they had Brian, who was their only child. We met in Winchester, where I’m from. Brian had come there after studying art at university.” She smiled, as if she considered the memory a pleasant one. “I was just finishing secondary school when we met. Six months later we were married.” She shrugged slightly. “But life is like that, isn’t it?”
Vera was curious about Julia Martin—her life and family, the choices she’d made. She thought that she could do worse than ending up as Julia had, or seemed to have. Julia clearly was intelligent and possessed a kind of quiet elegance, along with youthfulness and an unpretentious beauty. She knew from Lilly that Brian Martin was in North Africa, gone from their lives.
“Is your husband a doctor, too, then?” she asked.
Julia laughed a little. “No, nothing like that,” she said. “He’s a painter—an artist. He paints portraits on commission and makes a decent enough living at it. He’s quite good. We came to Winstead so we could take possession of the family house. His father had passed on by the time we were married, and we came to live in the house with his mother. Two years later, Lilly was born. Then Brian’s mother died. That’s been ten years ago and we’ve lived in the house, the three of us, since. That is, until Brian left in April.” She looked at Vera. “He volunteered, silly man,” she added. “He felt embarrassed in some way, within himself, by the fact that his life has been relatively easy. Most people around here don’t lead easy lives, but Brian believes his has been so. He thought it was time that he threw himself into the fray.”
Vera wasn’t sure how to respond. She thought that being a doctor’s son and a painter probably did make for rather an easy life. She was slightly surprised that Julia had told her so much about herself and so soon and all at once, as if she had been waiting for an opportunity to speak of it.
About a hundred meters down the road they came to a large white house. A stone path led from the lane to the front door.
“Well, this is it,” Julia said. “I hope you’ll come in for tea, Miss Lamb, so that I can repay the favor.”
“That would be very nice, thanks,” Vera said. “And please call me Vera.”
They entered the foyer, where Julia took the bag from Vera and bade her to find a seat in a neat sitting room off the hall. Vera sat on a yellow couch with large, firm cushions.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Julia said. “I’ll just be a minute.” She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.
A piano dominated the far side of the room. Vera wondered who played and decided that it was Julia. Perhaps Lilly also played. Vera regretted that she’d never mastered a musical instrument. In grade school, she’d played around with the clarinet for a time but had gotten bored and dropped it. She rose from the sofa, moved to the piano, and pressed one of the white keys. It sounded out of tune.
She noticed two framed portraits on the piano. The first was of Lilly at about age eight. The smiling girl in the photo seemed confident and happy. But preadolescence and the war had denuded that cheerfulness, Vera thought.
The other photo was of a man who, Vera guessed, must be Brian Martin. He was nothing like what Vera had envisioned. She had pictured a roguishly handsome man with an aquiline nose, intelligent eyes, and longish hair—an artist, a painter. She thought that perhaps she’d expected this because she considered Julia to be an attractive woman—the sort of woman who would have found it easy to win a handsome man’s attention. It was not so much that the man in the photo wasn’t handsome—he was, in his way. He had a roundish face and dark hair and happy-seeming eyes. She saw signs of Lilly in the shape of his face and the fineness of his hair. But he radiated nothing that Vera would have called “special.” But was “special” really the word she wanted? In any case, she had thought that Julia Martin’s husband would have been less ordinary looking.
Julia returned carrying a wooden tray bearing a steaming green ceramic teapot, cups, saucers, a small carafe of milk, a bowl of sugar, a plate containing four slices of the National Wheatmeal Loaf, and a small bowl into which she’d spooned strawberry jam. She sat on the sofa next to Vera and poured.
“What do you do in Southampton?” Vera asked.
“I work a lathe, of all things. I fashion handles for screwdrivers out of solid plastic tubing. Lord knows, I never would have thought that I’d work a lathe—I hardly knew what one was before I took this job.” She smiled. “But there it is. We need the money and I was lucky to get the job, considering my lack of experience.” She smiled a little and added, “Normally, I should be sleeping now, I suppose, but I couldn’t, so I thought I would go to the shop.”
“Do you like the job?” Vera asked.
“Very much, actually—surprisingly so—though it involves a circuitous bus ride to and from Southampton. I sometimes feel as if I spend half my life these days on a bus. And, of course, it keeps me away at night. I feel guilty about that—leaving Lilly alone. But I tell myself that she’s old enough now and that, in the end, it’s for the best. As I said, we need the money.” She smiled again—a forced smile, Vera thought. “But we manage. Plenty of others have had it much worse, losing their homes and loved ones in the bombings and the rest of it. I don’t like to sound as if I’m complaining.”
“I have to admit to snooping about while you were getting the tea,” Vera said. “Is the man in the photo your husband?”
“Yes, that’s Brian. I miss him. Lilly misses him,” Julia said. “I got lucky with Brian. You never can tell with men, can you? So many of them seem to have no feel for children. But Brian is different. He loves Lilly very much, and she most certainly loves him.”
“It must be hard for you.”
Julia looked at her. “It is.” Julia clearly had wanted to talk—to unburden herself—but did not want to come apart, Vera thought. She wondered if Julia wor
ried that if she allowed herself to come apart, she might not be able to pull herself together again.
“But how about you?” Julia asked. “How long have you been your father’s driver?”
“Only a few days and only because he sprained his ankle and found it too painful to work the pedals on the car,” Vera said. “I shouldn’t think the job would last more than a week, maybe two. I think my father is devising ways to avoid me being called up.”
“He must love you very much, then.”
“He does, yes. But I suppose I want to tell him that I can look after myself—that I should look after myself. I’m not sure he’s ready for that yet, though he says he is.”
The front door opened and Lilly appeared in the foyer, flush from a jaunt on her bike around the village.
“Hello, darling,” Julia said as Lilly entered the room. “Miss Lamb has stopped in for a visit.”
Lilly appeared stunned to see Vera. They hadn’t spoken since Lilly had revealed to Vera the details of her nocturnal spying on Miss Wheatley and the Tigues. Vera knew that Lilly must be thinking: Has she told mother about me?
“Hello,” Lilly said to Vera.
“Hello, Lilly,” Vera said. “Your mother and I were just talking about our jobs.”
“Oh,” Lilly said. She turned to her mother. “Is there anything for lunch?”
“I’ve just been to the shop. There’s bread and sardines in the kitchen if you’d like. And I bought some strawberry jam.”
“All right, then,” Lilly said. She abruptly turned and left the room.
“I’m sorry, Vera,” Julia said. “She doesn’t mean to be rude.”
“It’s quite all right, really.” She smiled. “I should be going, anyhow. My father’s going to want to be driven somewhere or another soon enough.” She stood. “Thank you for the tea.”
“You’re quite welcome. I hope that you’ll come and see us again.”
“I’d like that,” Vera said. She had thought it very generous of Julia to have so readily shared her ration of strawberry jam.
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