The Language of the Dead

by Stephen Kelly

  “No!” Bradford protested. “I don’t know why he stole my chicken. I never did him any harm.”

  “Do you know anybody in the village who ever harmed Mr. Blackwell or wanted to?”

  Bradford looked at the floor, as if he were contemplating the question. He shook his head. “No. Like I said, stories is one thing, black dogs and that. But murder is another.”

  No one in Quimby seemed to be on Will Blackwell’s side, Lamb thought. No one, perhaps except his niece, seemed sufficiently shocked or outraged by the old man’s murder. And though nearly everyone spoke of how Blackwell was an unwelcome presence in Quimby, they also took pains to point out that they personally meant him no harm and claimed to know no one else who might have harmed him. Lamb normally was not a believer in conspiracy theories; still, he sensed that the residents of Quimby possessed almost a kind of unspoken agreement about Will Blackwell’s status as a pariah and had decided that his death was a subject unfit for conversation or inquiry.

  “I’d like to talk to your son, Mike,” Lamb said. “He seems to get about the village and the hill and I’m hopeful that he might have seen something that might help us in our inquiries.”

  “He saw nothing, either. He would have told me if he had.”

  “All the same,” Lamb said—the same words he’d used with Rivers. “It would save me from having to take the two of you to Winchester to answer my questions there.”

  Without taking his eyes from Lamb, Bradford yelled for his son. “Mike!” A moment later, the boy appeared in the threshold of the door. Lamb guessed that the children had been watching him since at least the time he’d arrived at the mill with Rivers, and had followed him to the house, keeping out of sight, little goblins of Manscome Hill.

  “Come here,” the elder Bradford said to Mike. He didn’t look at the boy when he spoke. “Policeman here has some questions about old Blackwell. I want you to tell him what you know.” He added: “And no lies. If you lie, I’ll know.”

  Mike wore short black trousers with no shirt or shoes; his knees were scabbed. Lamb sensed that the boy’s fear of his father kept him rooted to the spot on which he stood. He noticed that Mike had a bruise on his upper right arm.

  “Hello, Mike,” Lamb said. “You and I met a few nights ago in front of Will Blackwell’s cottage and then, the next day, on the path up Manscome Hill. Do you remember?”

  Mike did not speak or move.

  “Mike!” his father said. He glared at the boy.

  “Yes,” Mike said.

  “It’s all right, Mike,” Lamb said. “You’re in no trouble.”

  Mike looked at the ground.

  “I want you to think back to the day on which Will Blackwell died. Did you see anything strange or unusual on the hill that day? It’s very important that you tell me the truth, Mike. I give you my word that you are in no trouble.”

  Mike glanced at his father. Lamb wasn’t sure if Michael Bradford nodded.

  “I only seen the man,” Mike said.

  Lamb tried not to appear as stunned as he felt; he had not expected that Mike had seen anything so important as a man on the hill that morning—a man who very well could be the killer. “Who was this man?” he asked.

  “The man on the hill,” Mike said.

  “Did you recognize him?”

  Mike hesitated a hitch, then said “No.”

  “What did the man look like?”

  “He were tall.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “In regular clothes.”

  “Tell me what he was wearing.”

  Mike seemed to consider the question for a couple of seconds. “He were wearing a white shirt and tan trousers and a brown hat.”

  “Can you tell me anything more specific about him? Did you see his face?”

  “No.”

  Lamb wondered now if Mike might be telling a lie cooked up by his father and rehearsed with him under the threat of violence. Michael Bradford badly wanted the reward money, after all, and might have anticipated that the police would want to speak with Mike. If Mike was lying, then Lamb would have to expose that lie—and yet in so doing, he might also expose Mike to a beating from his father.

  “When did you see this man?” Lamb asked, treading carefully.

  “In the morning.”

  “The morning of the day on which Will died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it in the early morning, or late morning?”

  “Late morning.”

  Lamb turned to the father. “Does this sound like anyone you know?”

  “No,” Michael Bradford said.

  Lamb turned again to Mike. “Did this man see you, Mike?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know that he didn’t see you?”

  A look of surprise—leavened with fear—crossed Mike’s face. Lamb guessed that this was because, if Mike was lying, the boy and his father hadn’t anticipated the question and so had rehearsed no answer to it. “He were far off,” Mike said after a pause. “Far off down the hill.”

  “You mean by the village?” Lamb asked. He could sense Mike struggling.

  Mike stole another glance at his father. Michael Bradford made no move or expression. He was leaving the child on his own, Lamb thought, like an animal in a trap. “Just down the hill,” Mike said.

  “I see,” Lamb said. He smiled. “You’re doing fine, Mike. We’re almost finished.”

  Mike continued standing at attention, his eyes darting from Lamb to his father, who stood just to the right of Lamb with his sinewy arms crossed against his naked chest.

  “Did you ever speak to Will Blackwell, Mike—or did he ever speak to you?”

  “No. Old Will were a witch. He seen the Shuck. He’d put the evil eye on you.”

  “How about a boy named Peter, who draws insects? Do you know him?”

  Mike glanced quickly at his father, then back to Lamb. This time, Bradford definitely nodded.

  “He don’t talk,” Mike said. “The devil has his tongue. Old Will were teaching him about the devil.”

  “Is it possible that the tall man you saw on the hill the day Will was killed was Peter?”

  Mike glanced at his father. “It were Peter,” he said, turning back toward Lamb.

  “Are you sure?” Lamb asked.

  “It were Peter.” He sounded like a parrot.

  Lamb wasn’t convinced. “Why do you say now that it was Peter when before you said you weren’t sure, Mike?”

  Mike froze. For a second, he seemed unable to speak.

  “Mike!” his father barked.

  “Because you said so,” Mike said to Lamb.

  “Because I said so.”

  “Yes. You said it were Peter.”

  “So that’s why you’re telling me now that it’s Peter?”

  “Yes.”

  Lamb realized he’d blundered in suggesting to Mike that the man might have been Peter Wilkins. “Forget for a moment what I said, Mike. I’m interested in what you saw. Did you see Peter on the hill that day?”

  “Yes. It were Peter.”

  Lamb saw no reason to continue. He touched Mike on the head and said, “You’ve done well and I believe you.”

  “Do we get the twenty quid, then?” Bradford asked.

  “We’ll have to see,” Lamb said. To protect Mike from Bradford, he added, “The information Mike has given me has been very useful.”

  “All right, then,” Bradford said. He seemed pleased. He absently mussed Mike’s hair. Mike flinched at his father’s touch.

  “Can I go?” Mike asked.

  “Yes,” Lamb said.

  Mike ran through the door and disappeared.

  Michael Bradford stood with his arms crossed. Lamb moved a step closer to him. “If I find out the boy is lying, then you, not he, will pay the consequences, Mr. Bradford,” he said.

  Bradford uncrossed his arms and thrust out his chest, as if preparing to defend himself. “Wot?” he said. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”


  “I hope for your sake that’s true,” Lamb said. He straightened himself to meet Bradford’s physical response. “More importantly, if I find out you’ve laid a hand on the boy, or any of your children, I will come back here and personally do the same to you, twice over.”

  Bradford threw his shoulders back. “Wot?”

  “Don’t test me, Bradford.” He smiled. “You know as well as I that we policemen can do whatever we damned well please and get away with it. Don’t test me. And don’t disappoint me.”

  With that, Lamb turned and walked through the trash-strewn yard to the path.

  TWELVE

  RIVERS HOISTED HIMSELF OVER THE LOW WALL AND MOVED through the mill yard.

  He stopped at the opening that once had held the mill’s main door and peered in. The interior was damp and dark, penetrated here and there by dust-choked shafts of sunlight. It stunk of mildew and other rot.

  He stepped inside and moved carefully through the wood-and-metal detritus that littered the floor; the floorboards creaked beneath his weight. He knew enough about how such mills worked that he was certain that the room below him contained the water-driven mill machinery. The floor he was now in had been a kind of warehouse in which the milled grain had been packaged for transport. The far right side of the room contained the wide frame of what had once been a door that gave onto a loading dock.

  He moved to the wall that was opposite the door; it contained three high windows from which the frames had long ago been broken out and used for firewood. He peered out of one and saw, ten feet below, Mills Run and the five-foot-deep stone race that had diverted the rushing stream to the wooden mill wheel. The wheel was gone and the place where the race met the stream had long ago become clogged with deadfall, though a trickle of water continued to move through the race and over and around the bits of wooden shingles, broken pieces of the slate roof, and chunks of ruined masonry that had fallen into it. He thought again of how Lamb was wasting his time, undermining him.

  To his right, a steep, narrow wooden staircase led to the floor below. He moved down the stairs carefully, testing each before he put his weight on it to ensure that it wouldn’t give way. The stairs ended in a room that was much like the one he’d just left, though darker and damper. At its center lay the rusted and broken remnants of the machinery that had crushed and milled the grain. The iron shaft that had connected the machinery to the mill wheel protruded from a damp moss-covered fieldstone wall.

  On the wall opposite the steps was an opening—its door also was gone—that gave onto a lower yard of packed dirt that, like the front yard, was choked with weeds and detritus. As Rivers made his way into the yard, picking his way through the rubbish, something caught his eye among a pile of charred boards. He knelt to look closely at the object and saw that it was a red tin box with silver edges. The box appeared to be nearly new; unlike the rest of the metal rubbish that littered the yard, its paint was bright and clean.

  He flipped the box’s latch and opened it. He found in it three photographs of Will Blackwell and his wife, Claire, on their wedding day. He recognized the couple from the photographs he’d found in Blackwell’s bedroom. In the photos, Blackwell posed, rigid, in a black suit with waistcoat, a high-collared, starched white shirt, and dark tie. Claire wore a white dress with a veil. She clutched a bouquet of light-colored flowers to her chest and smiled faintly.

  “Bloody hell,” he said to himself.

  The box must have belonged to Will Blackwell, he thought. If Blackwell had squirreled away any cash, then he likely would have kept it in such a box, with his other keepsakes. His suspicions of Abbott and Lydia Blackwell hardened into a credible narrative: the pair of them had killed the old man, taken his cash, tossed away the box, and done a runner.

  He extricated himself from the lower mill yard and headed up the path toward Bradford’s cottage. He met Lamb coming down the path.

  “I found something,” Rivers said. He stood next to Lamb beneath a clearing sky and opened the box. “It hasn’t been there long, obviously. The photos look like the old man’s keepsakes, the ones that were most important to him. My guess is that he kept his valuables in there. Whoever took it had to have been close enough to him to know he had the box and where he kept it—which means the niece and Abbott.”

  He considered saying that Lamb had been right about searching the mill. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. He wasn’t sure if Lamb was as surprised as he that he’d actually found something worthwhile in the ruins—whether Lamb hadn’t in fact sent him on a wild goose chase that unexpectedly had turned up a gold nugget.

  “Good work,” Lamb said.

  “Right,” Rivers said. “So do we toss Abbott’s house, then?”

  Lamb’s first thought was the same as Rivers’s had been—that Abbott or Lydia likely had thrown the box into the mill yard. Only someone who was close enough to Will to know something of his daily life would be aware that he’d kept such a box of photographs and known where he’d kept it—and known, too, whether Will had kept anything else in the box, including cash. In any case, Rivers was right: it was time they had a closer look at Abbott’s house, if only in the hope of finding some clue as to where he and Lydia Blackwell might have gone. But they must do it legally. He thought that the discovery of the box, and the argument that only someone close to Will likely would have had access to the photos, constituted sufficient cause for a warrant.

  “Yes,” he said to Rivers.

  Rivers grinned in triumph. Lamb finally seemed to be seeing sense.

  “But we’ll do it legally.”

  He sent Rivers to Winchester to get a warrant to search Abbott’s and Lydia Blackwell’s cottages. Less than two hours later, Rivers returned with the warrant, and the group of them left the hill and trudged up the path to Abbott’s cottage, sending Abbott’s sheep trotting away yet again.

  Rivers banged on the front door. “Open up—police!” He stepped back and looked at Lamb. “He’s not there.”

  “Try again.”

  “He’s not bloody there,” Rivers protested.

  “Again,” Lamb said evenly.

  Rivers sighed peevishly. “Abbott, police!” he yelled. “Open the bloody door!” He turned back to Lamb.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I thought I might have heard a woman scream inside just now,” Wallace added. He smiled and winked at Larkin.

  “Okay,” Lamb said. “Break it down.”

  Rivers heaved his shoulder against the door. The old metal latch that held it fast splintered away from the jamb and the door popped open.

  Rivers and Wallace headed up the stairs to Abbott’s bedroom, while Lamb searched the sitting room and Larkin the kitchen. It took Rivers a scant five minutes to find something worthwhile. Beneath Abbott’s bed he found a leather satchel stuffed with cash. “Here,” he said to Wallace. He pulled the satchel from beneath the bed and he and Wallace performed a quick count of its contents. It contained nearly two hundred pounds in cash.

  “A bloody fortune,” Wallace murmured.

  They took the money downstairs. “There’s nearly two hundred quid here,” Rivers said. “No way a man like Abbott saves that much, especially if he’s up to his arse in it at the bloody track.”

  Lamb agreed—though he wondered where Blackwell had gotten so much cash—if indeed the money was Blackwell’s. And if Abbott had done a runner with Lydia, then why had he left the cash behind? He pulled a pencil and pad from his pocket, wrote Albert Gilley’s name and telephone number on it, and handed it to Rivers.

  “Get back to the nick and call this man,” Lamb said. “He’s my contact at Paulsgrove. He knows everything that goes on at the track. I want you to get down there this afternoon and meet him. If Abbott’s there with Lydia Blackwell, I want you to find them and bring them back.”

  Rivers took the paper and held his tongue. He continued to believe that the chances of Abbott having run off to Paulsgrove were slim. Still, Lamb had been right about the mill—or he’
d at least made a lucky guess that it might contain useful evidence. Even so, Rivers couldn’t resist asking the obvious question. “If he’s on the run, why didn’t he take all of it?”

  Lamb looked at Rivers. “Because he intends to come back.”

  They descended the hill. Rivers went on his way, while the rest of them went to Lydia Blackwell’s cottage. Lamb knocked on the door but received no answer. He tried the knob and found the door unlocked. He stepped into the house, followed by the others. “Miss Blackwell?” he said. Nothing.

  He set Larkin to search the ground floor while he and Wallace mounted the narrow stair to the second. He entered Blackwell’s sparsely furnished bedroom, stood in the middle of it and looked around. He pulled the drawers from the dresser and put them on the bed, but found no place within the dresser or the drawers in which Blackwell might have hidden the tin box. He moved close to the walls and examined them but saw no sign of concealed panels. He checked the frame of the wooden bed but also found nothing.

  He went to the closet, knocked on its walls, and found them to be solid. He glanced at the floor of the closet and noticed a small notch in the right side of a floorboard that was wide enough to accept a man’s finger. He bent, put his finger in the hole, and lifted the board; it came away easily from its narrow slot. The space beneath it was empty.

  Lamb went to the top of the stair and asked Larkin to bring the box into Blackwell’s room. The three of them stood by Blackwell’s closet as Larkin slipped the box into the space.

  It fit perfectly.

  “We’ve got him,” Larkin said.

  That evening, Wallace arrived at The Fallen Diva an hour before last call. But Delilah wasn’t there. He asked the landlord if she’d been in.

  “Not tonight, mate. Sorry.”

  Fifteen minutes later, having made his way through the blacked-out streets to Delilah’s little house, he rapped on the door. He waited for what he considered a reasonable time for her to answer before knocking again. “Delilah?” He listened but heard no movement within the house. He tried the knob but found the door locked.