The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  As Vera headed back up Lennox Lane, Doris White moved up the path from the village to the church. She’d made up her face in the same way as she had on the previous night, when Gerald had come to her. She was on her way to luncheon with Gerald at the vicarage. Before last night, Gerald had never invited her to luncheon.

  The events of the previous night had gone as she’d hoped and planned. Gerald had ravished her by candlelight, just as he had done when she had been his mistress, his naughty secret. Though, once upon a time, he had then set her aside as so much rubbish, she remained drawn to him—dangerously, she knew—like a moth to flame. On the previous night, when they’d finished and were lying together, he had told her that he was developing a plan to rid them of Wilhemina.

  He’d told Doris that he’d sent Wilhemina to London, to get her out of the way so that he could have time to think. He was devising a plan, he’d said, and suggested they have lunch at the vicarage on the following day so that they could discuss it—though he’d added that she should dress as if she were coming to clean the vicarage, as usual, in case someone saw her and became suspicious. He’d looked into her eyes and said, “This will be our secret—yours and mine.”

  Although she’d dressed as Gerald had instructed, she’d defied him slightly by making up her face. She knew that he was right about not raising other people’s suspicions, but a part of her was almost beyond caring about such matters. As she strode toward the vicarage, she felt firmly in control of her life for the first time since she’d met Gerald. She was set on taking him back forever.

  Gerald peered out the window of his study and watched Doris approach. He’d decided that the time had come for him to start anew. He would have little trouble reinventing himself elsewhere. People liked and trusted him. People were like dogs, easily led, eager for a master. The war had shrunken everyone’s opportunities, of course, and the ease by which one could travel from one place to another. And he would have to endure a bit of privation as he regained his feet. But he could no longer endure the alternative—remaining in Winstead with Wilhemina and the hedgehog who cleaned his toilet.

  First, though, he must do what was necessary to avoid a scandal and a trial. If he were to see his plan through to its hoped-for conclusion, he first must minimize the damage done in Winstead. He’d begun devising the plan as soon as he’d read the note from Doris demanding that he come to her cottage. The note had stunned him at first, given his belief that he had trained Doris well over the previous three years. Even though he’d soon regained his feeling of mastery in the matter, he’d realized that he could no longer fully rely on Doris staying silent and therefore must be rid of her for good. He opened the door of the vicarage to her knock with a smile.

  “My love,” he said, offering his hand and inviting her in. That she had made up her face in defiance of his order briefly startled him. But he was expert at masking his true emotions. “You look charming.”

  Doris took his hand. “Thank you.”

  Gerald smiled and his eyes came alight with a kind of rakishness. Fending off revulsion, he bent to kiss Doris on the lips. He allowed the kiss to linger as long as he could stand it. When they parted, Doris stood still for a couple of seconds with her eyes closed. Gerald stifled an urge to do away with her in that very instant. He could wrap his hands around her rubbery neck and choke the life out of her. But he must be patient. He must stick to his plan.

  “Come in, my dear,” he said. He led her to the sitting room and poured them each a glass of sherry, then sat next to her on the couch.

  “I suppose you’ve heard about the tramp,” Doris said.

  “I have, of course. Poor man.”

  Doris smiled. “Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder if you had anything to do with it.”

  Again, Gerald hid his surprise. “Now, why would you think that, my dear? The poor fellow was just an old tramp, according to the Mail.” He smiled at Doris. “Certainly you don’t think me that wicked?”

  “Of course I do,” Doris said. “I believe you’re capable of anything, Gerald, especially if you had reason to believe that he might have seen something in the cemetery.”

  Gerald let the remark pass. He must press ahead. He moved closer to her. “Have you thought about what I suggested to you last night?” he asked.

  Doris ignored the question. She sipped the sherry, then put her hand on his knee.

  “What have you made for lunch?”

  “A vegetable stew,” he said, placing his hand on hers. “I hope you like it. I fancy myself rather a good cook.”

  She smiled. “You’re so talented at so many things, aren’t you, Gerald?” she said.

  He managed a smile. “Yes,” he said.

  “At lying, too,” she said, her smile wide and bright. “You’re very talented at lying. I find that exciting. I know I shouldn’t, but I do all the same. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you killed the tramp just to confuse the police about that poor woman in the cemetery—to put them on the wrong track. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d do.”

  He could sense her heating up and his own revulsion rising.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling and wagging his finger at her. “You do know me and I am naughty. And that’s why I must ask you again: did you think about what we discussed last night?”

  She made a playful bite at his finger. “Yes.”

  “And what did you decide?”

  “I’ll do whatever you ask, Gerald. But now, you must do as I ask.”

  She stood and unzipped her dress. It dropped to the floor around her ankles, exposing her pale, doughy flesh.

  “I can be naughty, too,” she said, smiling, her lips and cheeks a bright crimson.

  TWENTY-THREE

  LAMB LEFT LAWRENCE TIGUE’S HOUSE AND LIMPED BACK TO THE Wolseley to find that Vera had not yet returned from wherever she’d gone. He decided to make the short walk to the village school to ensure that Rivers had gotten the incident room up and running and, hopefully, to find a cup of tea.

  He indeed found Rivers in the school, leaning against a wooden table and sipping tea from a white ceramic cup. The room contained three such tables, each equipped with a telephone; a topographical map of the village and the area surrounding it was taped to a blackboard. The small desks of the students had been shoved to a corner of the room. Other than Rivers and Lamb, a trio of uniformed constables, each of whom sat at one of the desks, speaking on the telephone, fielding leads, occupied the room. Harding and Lamb had given the press only so much information about the three cases they had before them. They had not released the fact that Ruth Aisquith had been a conscientious objector, nor that she’d been found with fifty pounds of cash in her possession. In addition to not yet identifying the dead man in the woods as Albert Clemmons, they had made no mention of him having possibly committed suicide. Harding was handling the press, leaving Lamb to concentrate on the inquiries. The three cases had generated the usual glut of leads, most of which would turn out to be useless, and most of which were first screened by the constables who manned the telephones.

  Lamb was glad to see a gas ring with a steel kettle upon it sitting on the table against which Rivers was leaning. Near the ring was a black teapot that appeared to be full, along with a small container of milk and, surprisingly, a bowl of sugar. He wondered where Rivers had obtained the sugar, but decided he’d rather not know. Lamb found that the pot contained tea and poured a cup, adding to it a spoonful of the precious sugar. Rivers had not looked up when Lamb entered. Lamb thought that Rivers was deep in thought, but when Rivers looked up at him as he neared the table, Lamb thought that Rivers merely looked tired. Then, too, Rivers normally kept his emotions well concealed.

  Lamb nodded at Rivers. “Any luck with the canvass?” He was glad to catch up with Rivers; the rush of events had precluded him from speaking in detail with Rivers, Wallace, and Larkin about the inquiries. During the past two days, Lamb had felt much like the captain of a ship that was under bombardment. He’d had time
for little else than issuing orders designed merely to keep the ship from foundering.

  Apart from setting up the incident room, Rivers had spent the morning in the village continuing to take statements from residents. Rivers reported the fruits of his morning labor: no one had seen Ruth Aisquith on the morning of her death, and no one knew—or admitted to knowing—much of anything about the tramp. Lamb, in turn, told Rivers of his conversations with Ned Horton and the Tigue brothers.

  “Sounds as if the old man bollixed it pretty well,” Rivers said of Horton.

  “Yes,” Lamb said. He sipped his tea and found that it was cold.

  “I’m with you on the tramp,” Rivers said. “The suicide note is rot. In my experience, the down-and-outers don’t do themselves in. Suicide is for people who’re convinced they have something to lose, a way to escape the consequences. People like Clemmons already are neck-deep in the consequences. I agree that he was killed because he knew something about what we’re turning up at the farm.”

  “So who killed him, then?” Lamb asked.

  “One or both of the Tigues. Clemmons knew something that the brothers couldn’t allow to be known—the identity of the child buried in the cellar.”

  “You’re guessing, Harry,” Lamb said. “But so am I. We’ve no real bloody evidence yet.” He looked at Rivers. “We need to know more about Ruth Aisquith,” he said. “I want you to go up to London first thing tomorrow and find out what you can about her. Start with the Ministry of Labour and National Service, which will have the record of her conscription. She had to have had some history.”

  Rivers nodded his assent.

  Lamb took his tea to one of the desks, removed his hat, and pulled from his pocket the slip of paper on which Lawrence Tigue had written the name and number of his sister-in-law in Chesterfield. He waited for the constable stationed there to finish his call, then took possession of the telephone, dialed Mary Hart’s number, and waited as the line buzzed. But no one answered. Feeling frustrated, Lamb hung up the phone, returned his hat to his head and the tea cup to the table from which he’d fetched it, and hobbled back to the Wolseley, where he found Vera waiting for him. Seeing her lifted his spirits.

  “I’m going to have a look at the house in which Claire O’Hare died,” he said. “Would you like to come along?”

  “I know the house,” Vera said. “I passed it on my walk the other morning, when I ran into Miss Wheatley toting around her fowling piece. It’s along the same path that she led us along yesterday to the tramp’s body. It passes her cottage and leads to the house and, eventually, to the road that becomes the High Street by the church.”

  “Show me, please,” Lamb said.

  Vera looked at her father’s ankle. “Are you sure you can walk that far?” she asked. “There’s a lay-by on the road right near the house.”

  Lamb smiled. “All right, then. Drive on.”

  They got into the Wolseley and drove up the High Street, past the church and out of the western end of the village, in the direction of the former Tigue farm. Halfway there, they came to the lay-by, in which Vera parked the car. She led the way along the trail to the O’Hare place, then through the bramble and bush to a trio of half-hidden and cracked stone steps that led to the house’s wooden front door. They found the door nailed shut, a state of affairs that appeared to have been the case for some time, years probably; the door’s white paint nearly had all chipped away.

  Lamb peered through a narrow broken window just to the right of the door. The house’s interior was dark and emanated a strong odor of rot and mildew. He could just make out the form of an upturned wooden chair in the middle of a long, narrow, low-ceilinged hall that led from the door toward the rear of the house. A small animal he could hear but not see scurried across the hall, from a room on the left to one on the right, startling him and causing him to pull suddenly away from the window. Blackberry bramble had grown to mostly cover the window that looked into the room on the right of the hall.

  Wanting to see if the room might be the one in which Claire had hung herself, Lamb tried to wade into the bramble to peer into the window but found that he couldn’t without the bush snaring his trousers and jacket in a dozen places, and pricking his hands. He retreated from the window, freeing himself one by one of the petulant little snares.

  “Do you want me to try, Dad?” Vera asked. She was thinner and more agile than her father and therefore probably could easily negotiate the bramble.

  “It’s not that important,” Lamb said. “Let’s try around back.”

  They retreated from the front door and followed a narrow, dirt-worn path through the brush to the back. As they passed the right side of the house they came upon another window that looked into a room that appeared to be connected to the one into which Lamb had just tried to look, with both rooms letting out onto the narrow hall that bisected the house. The glass in the window had long ago been shattered out, with the exception of a few small, roughly triangular pieces that protruded from the bottom of the frame, like the jagged teeth of some malevolent animal.

  Lamb moved to the window and peered in; the same odor of rot assailed him. The room was dark and empty, save for the natural detritus and bits of trash that lay about the floor. Despite the murky light, he clearly saw a wooden crossbeam that bisected the room along the ceiling. This appeared to be the room in which Claire O’Hare had done her deed, he thought, though of course he could not yet be certain. The other rooms might also contain crossbeams.

  Vera had moved up behind him and was peering over his shoulder. “Can I see?” she said.

  Lamb moved aside and allowed her to look. “Is this the one, then?” she asked her father, finding the room genuinely spooky.

  “I don’t know,” Lamb said. “But it looks a good candidate.”

  “What a lonely way to have to die,” Vera said, as much to herself as to Lamb. She shuddered, as if picturing Claire O’Hare hanging there.

  Lamb actually was entertaining a vision of Claire hanging from the rafter—though his was in the service of forensics. He was trying to figure out if it was possible for Claire to have done what Ned Horton’s report had described her as doing. He decided that unless Claire was very short—essentially a midget—she likely could have managed it.

  Vera retreated from the window.

  “Let’s see if there’s a door in the back,” Lamb said.

  They were just about to move when they heard from behind them the sound of someone moving through the brush from the main trail. In the next instant, Lilly Martin stepped onto the hard-worn path.

  “Lilly,” Vera said.

  Lilly pretended to be surprised to see them, though in fact she had been following Vera since shortly after Vera had left the Martin house. She was sure that the man Vera had met by the school must be Vera’s father, the detective. When the two had driven away, Lilly had followed on her bicycle at a discreet distance and found the Wolseley parked in the lay-by. She had read that morning’s Mail and knew of all that had happened in and around Winstead in the past few days. She had not been friendly with the tramp—indeed she had mostly sought to avoid him, finding him smelly and a bit creepy—though she had seen him around the village now and again and knew that he had lived in a lean-to in the wood behind Miss Wheatley’s cottage and that he sometimes went to Miss Wheatley’s door for a handout.

  Once, about a month earlier, she had been walking down the trail at twilight when she had encountered the tramp loitering by the ramshackle chicken wire fence that marked the front of Miss Wheatley’s property. He had gestured to her then and said, “Hello,” and when she had said hello back, he had suggested that she follow him into the wood, as he had something “interesting” there to show her. But she’d been able to see clearly that he was drunk and didn’t trust him. “I’m going to tell my father that you’ve been speaking to me,” she’d said to him—to scare him off—though her father was gone by then. She’d backed away and moved quickly down the trail, and the tramp hadn
’t spoken to or bothered her again.

  She knew the story of the O’Hares well enough; everyone in the village knew something of the story, after all. Since the spring, when she had become so enamored of detective stories and murder mysteries, Lilly had begun to think a bit more about the O’Hare case and even quizzed her mother on it, who had been reluctant to say much in detail about the matter, except to seriously understate the obvious in calling it “unfortunate.” Then, too, there was the matter of Lawrence Tigue and his suddenly absent wife and his nocturnal visit to the O’Hare place. So much of interest was happening in the village, and yet she mostly was being left out of it—all of it. That’s why she had followed Vera—to see if she could see what Vera saw. Now that Vera and her father were snooping about the O’Hare place, she’d felt as if she couldn’t merely hide in the weeds and watch.

  “Hello,” Lilly said.

  “What are you doing here, Lilly?” Vera asked.

  “I was looking for you,” Lilly said. It was partly true—in a way. But now that she’d said it she had to think of a reason why that sounded plausible. She immediately invented one. “I wanted to apologize for not taking tea with you and going into the kitchen like that straightaway and eating. It was rude of me, I know, and my mum said that I should find you and apologize.”

  Vera introduced her father as Chief Inspector Thomas Lamb.

  “Are you a detective?” Lilly asked.

  “I am,” Lamb said, offering Lilly his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Martin.”

  “Thank you,” Lilly said. She nodded at the window that Lamb and Vera had just been peering in and found herself saying things she hadn’t planned to say. “I suppose you’re looking for the place where Claire O’Hare hung herself. Well, you’ve found it. It was right in there—from the rafter across the ceiling. I can show you the quickest way in if you want. We dare each other to go in. I’ve been in.”