The Language of the Dead

by Stephen Kelly

  He’d awakened with much on his mind. The Blackwell case had suddenly gained a head of steam; Abbott was in his sights now, as was, perhaps, Lydia Blackwell. Even so, a notion that he was somehow missing the mark nagged at him. Peter’s drawing of the spider snaring the bird bothered him, even though he was not yet sure if the sketch had any value or connection to the inquiry. He knew very little about children such as Peter—children who seemed to have been dealt profoundly bad hands in life; children whose handicaps cut them off from most normal human intercourse and therefore the normal amounts of attention, love, praise, security; children whom many people saw as freaks of nature. He could not be sure what the spiders and the bird represented, and yet he sensed that the drawing was important and that Peter was intelligent and even purposeful despite the ways in which the gods had seen fit to cripple him.

  He told himself to forget the case for the moment and enjoy breakfast with Marjorie—or, at the very least, not to force her to sit at table with a distracted companion. As he descended the stairs he smelled the coffee, which whetted his appetite. He decided that even if today was not a marmalade day, they were going to have bloody marmalade regardless.

  Marjorie was at the kitchen table intently reading the morning edition of the Mail. Lamb saw from the headline on the front page that the Germans finally had hit the Spitfire factory in Southampton. Marjorie put down the paper. Lamb saw the worry in her eyes.

  “They bombed Southampton harbor last night,” she said.

  “Yes, I see.”

  “I called Quimby this morning; I know I’m not supposed to tie up the phone like that, but I couldn’t help it. I let it ring and ring and she finally answered. She’s all right. None of them came near the village.”

  Lamb thought of going to Marjorie, to physically comfort her, but sensed that she did not want to be held, or touched. She did not want to be condescended to—told yet again that everything would be fine.

  Lamb sat at the table and read the story. A few of the German bombs had hit the factory but failed to knock it out or even to damage it badly. Scattered memories and images began to fill his mind—of mud, rats, flies, drenching rain, lice, dysentery, cold food; of freezing in the night curled in a blanket underground and listening to the sounds of dying men outside the trenches begging for water. Eventually, the begging stopped and the night grew quiet. He’d seen many men die. Eric Parker had been one; the pilot he’d seen go down in flames was another. The same mess, twenty years on, he thought. He went to the larder and got the marmalade.

  He was just biting his toast, tasting the tang of the jam on his tongue, when the phone rang. Annoyed at the interruption, he went into the hall.

  “Lamb.”

  It was Harding. “We’ve another body, Tom. Young girl—seventeen, eighteen. She was found early this morning lying just off the main road into Lipscombe. Someone has bashed in her head.”

  He knew Lipscombe; it was on the eastern side of Brookings.

  “How far from the village?”

  “A half mile or so.”

  Feeling cheated of a minor pleasure, he went to the kitchen and crammed what remained of his toast and marmalade into his mouth.

  The road bent south around a stretch of meadow and bottomland. Beyond this, Lamb spied the church spire of Lipscombe. A few hundred meters on, he reached a pair of police cars that were parked along the right side of the road, one of which was Harding’s. A uniformed constable stood along the shoulder.

  Harding stood at the edge of the meadow in the company of three constables, Wallace, and Larkin. Wallace had fallen asleep the previous night in Delilah’s bed, holding her. They had not made love; she was too beaten up for anything like that. Even so, she had stubbornly refused to tell him who had beaten her.

  In the meadow, a young woman lay face-down in a damp depression about ten feet from the road. She wore a dress of green gingham that was hiked up to her bottom and a black shoe on her left foot. Her right shoe lay two feet to the right of her body. Her auburn hair was inundated with blood and spotted with green-black flies. The grass by her feet was splattered with blood; a black bicycle lay to the left of her body, almost parallel to it. Above this tableau, four seagulls circled and shrieked.

  “Her name is Emily Fordham,” Harding said, nodding to Lamb in greeting. “Age seventeen, from Lipscombe.” He pointed to the bike. “That’s her bicycle. A local farmer found her. He was cycling into Lipscombe and saw the body. He couldn’t see the girl’s face but recognized the bike. I sent a man into the village to see what he could find out about her. She lives with her mother; the father’s dead and her older brother’s in the Royal Navy. She apparently volunteered at the RAF infirmary near Cloverton.” He handed Lamb a slip of paper. “This is the mother’s address.”

  “Do we know what she was doing out here?”

  “No. She hasn’t been dead long by the look of it, though.”

  Winston-Sheed arrived and joined them. He looked at the sky, at the seagulls.

  “It’s the bloody war,” the doctor said, thinking aloud about what had become an unusual spate of murders. “It’s changed the rules. Some people simply are taking earlier advantage of it than others.” He smiled in the languid way he normally did.

  “Well, that may be, Doctor,” Harding said. “But the rules haven’t changed as far as I’m concerned. I’d like to get things moving here, if you don’t mind. I’ve been here nearly a half hour and hardly a damned thing has happened, save the lot of us standing around speculating.”

  The three of them, along with Wallace and Larkin, moved in to examine Emily Fordham’s body. Lamb immediately noticed several places on which the seagulls had defecated on the girl’s dress. Winston-Sheed shooed away the flies and examined the wound in the back of her head.

  “At first glance, I’d say she was struck with a blunt object, perhaps of metal or smooth, finished wood,” he said. “I don’t see any sign of splinters. I’d say our man hit her once, which probably knocked her down, though I can’t say for certain that it knocked her cold. Once she was down, he struck her several more blows to make sure.”

  He glanced up at Lamb and smiled. “All that’s speculation for the moment, of course.”

  Lamb nodded.

  The doctor continued. “This killing looks very much like Blackwell’s—sans the macabre touches, of course. But the basics are the same—a blow to the head and the job finished as the victim lies on the ground, unconscious.” Lamb had been thinking the same thing.

  Winston-Sheed took the body’s temperature and examined the skin and limbs more closely. That done, he and Lamb carefully turned the body over. Although the girl’s face was filthy from having lain in the mud, Lamb could see that she had been strikingly beautiful. She had a small nose, high cheeks, a slender jaw, and fierce green eyes that now were frozen open, icy. Lamb couldn’t help but think of Vera. She and the dead girl were about the same age.

  “Bloody Christ,” Wallace said.

  “What is it?” Lamb asked.

  “I know her.”

  “You know her?”

  “Well, I don’t know her, exactly. I just met her, at the roadblock near Cloverton airfield, the evening of the raid. She bicycled right up to the place, pretty as you please. I stopped her but she wouldn’t turn round. She insisted on waiting. She went off about a hundred meters or so and sat in the grass with her bike. I gave her a blanket and a packet of biscuits.”

  “You mean she stayed there the entire night?” Harding asked.

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “And you allowed this?” Harding asked.

  “She seemed harmless enough,” Wallace said. He knew it sounded weak.

  “Harmless?” Harding said. “How do you know she was bloody harmless? Did you search her?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good-looking, you mean. She was good-looking and so you let her stay and chatted her up a bit. Gave her a blanket and biscuits, did you? Hoping to get lucky, then?”

&nb
sp; “No, sir, it wasn’t like that.”

  “Don’t tell me it wasn’t like that, man!” Harding said. He was yelling at Wallace now. “How dare you! Of course it was like that. Good-looking girl and you let her stay, when your duty was to turn people away!”

  “The officer in charge didn’t mind.” Wallace instantly regretted saying this. He knew he should not seek to defend his mistake.

  “The officer in charge had other duties to attend to, didn’t he?” Harding shouted. “It was your job to keep these damned, bloody people clear!”

  Lamb agreed with Harding—Wallace had buggered the situation.

  “I want this looked into, Tom,” Harding said, glaring at Wallace.

  Wallace looked at Lamb, as if seeking an ally. But Lamb gave him only a hard, uncompromising stare. Harding turned his back on them and stared toward the road, as if he’d had quite enough of it all—the killings, the lack of results, the bloody damned incompetence.

  The seagulls circling above the body had increased to about a dozen. One suddenly, brazenly, dived toward Emily’s body but pulled up before it reached her.

  “Keep those damned birds away from the body,” Lamb said to no one in particular.

  One of the constables hurled a stone at the seagull but missed the bird by two feet. A wet morsel of seagull excrement struck Winston-Sheed squarely on the head. The doctor delicately touched his head with the fingers of his right hand, then withdrew them quickly. He looked at his fingers, which were sticky with excrement, and shook his head slightly. Absently, he wiped his fingers on his trouser leg.

  Larkin, who had been searching the area directly adjacent to the body, appeared, holding a green leather purse. “I found this tangled in a small bush about five meters away,” he said, handing the purse to Lamb. “It contains a wallet and some cosmetics, but no money.”

  Harding continued to stand with his back to the group. Lamb thought it best that he get Wallace away from the superintendent. He gestured for Wallace to follow him to his Wolseley, where he carefully dumped the contents of the purse onto the bonnet. The purse contained a wallet of the same green leather as the purse, a small cosmetics kit, a faux-tortoiseshell hairbrush, and a packet of chewing gum.

  The wallet contained no money, not even the odd coin, which argued that the motive could have been theft. One of its flaps contained a small cellophane window under which Emily had placed a photograph of herself standing in a small flower garden with an older woman whom Lamb assumed was her mother. He could see the family resemblance—the older woman had the same dark hair and fine facial features. He slid his finger beneath the photograph but felt nothing. The other slots in the wallet contained nothing more than a card for the library in Winchester and several ration cards.

  Wallace was poking his fingers into the purse.

  “Anything there?” Lamb asked.

  “Hold on,” Wallace said. He turned the purse over and shook it vigorously. A slender piece of cardboard—a kind of false bottom—fell onto the bonnet. Wallace thrust his fingers into the purse again and withdrew from it several pieces of what appeared to be folded paper.

  “Here we go,” he said, placing the items on the bonnet. One was indeed a slip of paper; the other two were small wallet-sized photographs. One of the photos was of a young man in the dress uniform of an RAF pilot. The pilot had dark eyes and an open smile. The other photo was of a dark-haired boy of about ten years old.

  Lamb flipped the photo of the pilot and found “With love—Charles” written on the back in blue ink. “I think I’ve found the man she was waiting for at the roadblock,” he said. He handed the photo to Wallace.

  “Reckon he’s still alive?” Wallace asked.

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  The flip side of the photo of the boy contained only three encrusted brown spots, like the points of a triangle, at which the photo appeared to have been glued to something, perhaps the page of a photo album.

  “One of the girl’s relatives?” Wallace said. “Maybe a younger brother, or nephew?”

  “According to Harding, she had only an older brother.”

  Lamb turned his attention to the slip of paper—a small, square piece of parchment of decent quality that was folded once, lengthwise. One of its edges was slightly ragged, as if it had been torn from a notebook. The paper contained at its center a small but detailed India ink drawing of a spider devouring a butterfly. Except for the difference in the spider’s victim, the drawing was nearly identical to the one Lamb had found in the shed behind Blackwell’s cottage, of a spider menacing a bird. The drawing was not signed, just as the one from the shed hadn’t been. But Lamb was certain he knew the artist. Emily Fordham had known Peter Wilkins.

  “Do you think it’s the boy again?” Wallace asked.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Is he our killer, then?”

  Lamb looked more closely at the drawing. “I don’t know. I think he might be trying to communicate something with these drawings.”

  “To who?”

  “At first guess, I’d say he was trying to communicate something to the girl and maybe to Blackwell.”

  “Why doesn’t he just bloody say it, then? Why the bloody spiders and the rest of it?”

  “I don’t know that he can say it, at least not in the way you and I would expect.” He nodded at the drawing. “The drawing’s obviously his, so she must have known him.”

  “But why hide the drawing—and the photos?”

  “Why hide anything?” Lamb asked. “To keep someone else from finding it.”

  As Lamb and Wallace examined the purse, Winston-Sheed had gone to his car. Now Lamb caught a glimpse of the doctor walking back toward Emily Fordham’s body carrying a heavy Great War–era pistol, a .45-caliber Webley Mark VI. Lamb had worn a similar pistol on his belt at the Somme.

  The sight so surprised Lamb that he said nothing at first. He watched the doctor move silently toward the body, then stop when he reached it. Winston-Sheed raised the pistol and, gripping it with both hands, aimed it at the seagulls wheeling in the sky. Lamb looked at the birds and in that instant heard the pistol fire and saw one of the gulls explode in the air. Its body plummeted to the ground at Emily Fordham’s feet. The other birds seem to rise as one, higher into the sky.

  “Brilliant shot!” Larkin said.

  Lamb ran to Winston-Sheed, who stood still, staring at the sky, the pistol at his side. “What in bloody hell are you doing?” Lamb yelled.

  Winston-Sheed raised the pistol and squeezed off another shot that missed the flock.

  “Stop it, damn you!” Lamb yelled. “You’re fouling the scene!”

  The doctor ignored Lamb and fired a third shot; a second bird exploded and fell to the ground about three feet from them.

  Winston-Sheed’s gaze remained fixed on the birds. “I think we’ve endured enough trouble from the air these last few days, don’t you?” he said without looking at Lamb.

  Lamb yelled at Larkin. “Get those bloody damned birds out of my crime scene immediately!”

  He turned to Winston-Sheed. “What in hell is wrong with you? This is a murder scene, not a damned shooting party.”

  Winston-Sheed turned to Lamb and shrugged. His casualness infuriated Lamb.

  Lamb spoke sharply to Larkin. “Get in there and mark the places where the birds fell and clean up the mess. I don’t want to find out that my evidence comes from a bloody goddamned bird!”

  “Yes, sir,” Larkin said. He seemed shaken, as if only then realizing what had happened.

  “Well, I think we’re finished here, then,” Harding said. He stood rigid, his hands behind his back. He seemed unperturbed by what Winston-Sheen had just done. Harding’s lack of emotion struck Lamb as unusual, given the way in which he’d only just reproved Wallace.

  “You’ve got a hell of a bloody mess here, Tom, no doubt about it,” Harding said. “But I’m counting on you to get results quickly. Otherwise we could end up with a kind of general panic.
It’s bad enough that the damned Germans are due any day now and our men are being shot out of the sky and slaughtered before they can even get airborne. It’s too much strain on the average person. The sooner we wrap this up, the better. I understand your frustration and your desire for protocol, but I frankly don’t see how a couple of bloody seagulls matter in the larger picture. We’ll get this cleaned up and move on.”

  Harding addressed the other men present.

  “I don’t need to tell you, of course, that we simply can’t speak of this. I’ll have the arse of any man I discover has wagged his tongue. Let’s do our duties and solve this case before the whole bloody mess ends up becoming another casualty of the war.”

  Harding turned and walked to his car. As Lamb watched him leave, he wondered if they’d all gone mad.

  FIFTEEN

  LAMB STRODE TO HIS WOLSELEY, GATHERED UP EMILY FORDHAM’S purse and its contents from the bonnet, got into the passenger seat, and slammed the door. He was too angry to drive. Wallace, understanding, eased in behind the wheel.

  Lamb fumbled in the pocket of his coat for his fags and lit one. “Bloody goddamned fools,” he muttered.

  Wallace said nothing. He approved of Winston-Sheed having shot the birds. It was past time that someone had acted. They all had spent far too much time merely waiting. He started the car. “What’s next?” he asked.

  “We’ll talk to the girl’s mother,” Lamb said. His task would be to break the news to the woman of her daughter’s death, and then endeavor to calm her enough to extract some usable information from her. He hated such interviews because he knew them to be, in their way, cruel. But there was no avoiding them. He had to speak to the mother as soon as possible in the likely case she possessed some crucial evidence or clue. For that reason, the mother’s moment of private grieving would have to wait and he would have to maneuver around that grief, keep it at bay long enough to get what he sought.

  Wallace pushed the starter button. Lamb’s Wolseley sputtered but refused to start.

  Lamb turned to Wallace. “I’m going to ask this bluntly, because I haven’t got the time to muck about: Have you been drinking?”