The Language of the Dead

by Stephen Kelly

  Lydia nodded at the tin box, which was on the table between them. “He put it in there.”

  “And how much did he have in the box, all told?”

  “About two hundred fifty pound, sir.”

  “And where did the rest of it come from—the other seventy-five pounds?”

  “That was from what he’d saved over many, many years, sir. He didn’t like banks.”

  “And you told George Abbott about the money—about the fact that your uncle had two hundred and fifty quid in cash in a box hidden beneath the floorboards of his bedroom closet.”

  Lydia drew back from Lamb as if he’d threatened to slap her. “No, sir!” she said with a tone of resolve that surprised Lamb. “I didn’t even know about the box until two weeks ago, when Will told me about it. And it was Will told George about the money, for my sake.”

  Lydia looked away for a second. Tears began to well in her eyes. “Will were worried that he was getting old and that his time was nearly up,” she said. She shook her head. “It all sounds crazy to you, sir, I know, but he said that the crows had been speaking to him, telling him that his time was coming very soon. He thought that they were waiting for him to die—the crows—so they could feed on his remains. I tried to tell him that his thinking weren’t right, sir—that the crows had nothing to do with anything. That they were only just crows. But he wouldn’t believe me.”

  She put her hand to her mouth, staving off the urge to cry. Lamb reached across the table and gently touched her arm. “Take your time,” he said. “Will told you about the money two weeks ago?”

  Lydia sniffled. “Yes,” she said. “He said that he wanted me to have it, the money, should he …” She hesitated. “… should he die, sir. He told me where the money was and said that if he should die, that I should take it.”

  “And you say he told Abbott about the money?”

  “Yes, sir.” She pressed her fingers against the wells of her eyes. “I was certain that Will didn’t know about George and me. But he did, sir. He did. It was very hard to hide things from Will. He could see right through you, like. He said that he expected George to look after me once he was gone and that he was going to ask George to do the right thing by me.” She pursed her lips and shook her head slightly. “I suppose he thought George was more likely to give him that promise if he knew I weren’t to be a burden to George—if George knew there was to be money involved.”

  “And so on the day Will died, you and George went to the track, then?”

  Lydia nodded.

  “And George told you that you and he would take a small bit of the money from the box—say twenty quid—while Will was working on the hill, on the hedges, and that the two of you would go to the track and come back with twice that amount, maybe more, is that it?”

  She nodded again. A tear ran down her right cheek, which she wiped away as if it had burned her.

  “And how much did you take from Will’s box that morning, then?”

  “Thirty.” She barely said it.

  “And George lost it all, didn’t he?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “And after Will died, he took the cash and persuaded you to come again to the track,” Lamb continued. “He said that the two of you needed to get away and that he was sure that his luck would change. He wanted to take it all, but I think you put your foot down and told him that you would go only if you took another thirty or so. You were beginning to believe that he was going to squander the money if you didn’t stop him. Am I right about that, too?”

  “Yes.” She put her right hand against her face.

  Lamb was nearly finished. He had one more bullet to fire into the void. He produced the drawing of the spider snagging the bird that he’d found in the shed behind Blackwell’s cottage.

  “Does this sketch mean anything to you?” he asked Lydia.

  Lydia found the drawing ugly, frightening. “No.”

  “It was found in the toolshed behind your cottage lying on a kind of altar—a satanic altar—along with a butchered chicken Michael Bradford claims your uncle stole from him. Did your uncle perform satanic rituals in the shed behind the house?”

  “No! As I said before, sir, those are lies! Will weren’t a witch! He were a kind man, a good man.”

  “Did George Abbott kill your uncle, Miss Blackwell? Maybe he surprised you. You hadn’t expected him to kill Will; you only expected a day at the track. But once he showed you Will’s body, you had to do as he said. You’re afraid of him, after all, aren’t you? Afraid that he might do to you what he did to Will?”

  Lydia threw herself against the table and began to sob. “No!” she sobbed. “No!” She heaved up the words: “George was with me. He couldn’t have done it. He was with me.”

  “All right, then, Miss Blackwell,” Lamb said. He’d gotten from Lydia all he could for the moment. He signaled for the constable to take her back to her cell.

  Will Blackwell’s tin keepsake box remained on the table as a pair of uniformed constables brought George Abbott into the interview room and sat him in front of Lamb.

  Abbott eyed the box as he sat. Lamb noticed immediately that Abbott had lost the cockiness he’d displayed during their first interview.

  Lamb nodded at the box.

  “We found that dumped in the mill ruins with your fingerprints all over it, Mr. Abbott,” he said. “You took the cash Will kept in the box, which he told you about two weeks ago, then tossed the box into the mill. You persuaded him to tell you where he kept the cash because you promised to take care of Lydia after he died. He told you that he was worried about dying and you used that to your advantage. After Will’s murder, you stashed most of the cash, which we found hidden beneath your mattress. Then you took fifty pounds or so and Lydia Blackwell to the track in Portsmouth, where you promptly lost it all. You’ve been very careless and stupid, I’m afraid, Mr. Abbott. And there’s no use in your denying anything; Lydia has told me the whole story. She says she wants to save you from the gallows. As for me, I’m going to give you one chance—and one only—to explain why I shouldn’t charge you right now with Will Blackwell’s murder.”

  Abbott had not yet looked directly at Lamb. Now that he did so, Lamb saw genuine fear in his eyes. “I didn’t kill nobody,” he said with emotion. “I swear it!”

  “Then tell me what happened.”

  Abbott slumped in the chair. “I took the money,” he said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, as if preparing himself for confession. “Will told me about the money; it were two weeks ago, as you said. He told me where he kept it.” He looked at the box. “He wanted Lydia to have it and I said to him, ‘How am I to see that she gets it if I don’t know where it is?’ I hadn’t meant to steal it—not at first.” He shook his head solemnly.

  “I was bloody surprised when Lydia came to my door saying he hadn’t come home to tea. I swear it. We went up the hill to look for him. I thought we might find him up there, dead of a heart attack, as I said before. I never expected to find what we did.”

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t quite believe it at first; didn’t know what to think. Then I saw the crucifix carved into his head and I thought, ‘Someone has finally done him; one of these crazy bastards who believes him a witch. They’d done him for the bad wheat crop.’ It was horrible, him lying there, butchered. Lydia went right to pieces. I tried to pull the scythe from his chest but it wouldn’t budge. Then I tried the pitchfork. I didn’t like seeing him like that. And then I thought, ‘What in bleeding hell are you doing, Abbott?’”

  He paused, then said, “I was going to tell someone. I even went down the hill to the pub; I was going to call the constable.”

  “What did you do when you got to the bottom of the hill?” Lamb asked.

  Abbott wrung his hands. “Something came over me,” he said.

  “So rather than going to the pub to call the police, you went into Blackwell’s cottage—into his bedroom—and took the money,” Lamb said. “T
hen you called Constable Harris.”

  Abbott’s eyes flared with some of his former indignation. “I thought, ‘Why should I suffer from this?’ I was the only one who paid him any attention. For years, I was the only one who spoke to him, gave him work, treated him with anything like kindness. I meant that Lydia would get some of the money. I told her that it was better that we keep the money quiet for now, or else you lot would say that we’d done Will for it. We told you everything just how it happened, except for the money.”

  “So you took the cash and threw the box in the mill yard,” Lamb said.

  Abbott looked dumbly at his hands. “Aye.” He looked directly at Lamb. “But I didn’t kill Will.”

  Lamb himself typed Abbott’s statement, which Abbott signed.

  He then went to Harding’s office, where he informed the superintendent that he was not prepared to charge Abbott and Lydia Blackwell with murder. Instead, he would charge them only with obstructing an inquiry, mostly to keep them apart while he sorted out the case. He believed that George Abbott had not killed Blackwell, he told Harding, adding that he’d begun to consider a fresh set of assumptions.

  Harding stood from behind his desk, making his incredulity clear. “What the bloody hell do you mean, you’re not going to charge him with murder? His fingerprints are all over the box and the weapons. We’ve bloody nailed the bastard.”

  “He says he tried to pull the weapons from the old man after finding him dead and that he took the money afterward. I’m inclined to believe him.”

  “You can’t be serious, Tom?”

  “I need more.”

  “More of what? What else could you possibly need?”

  Lamb stood his ground. He knew that the super was no fool and that Harding had learned, over more than a decade working with him, to trust his judgment. In other cases, he’d taken what Harding had called “flights of fancy,” and, yet, in nearly every case, his instincts had proven correct.

  “The running off to the track doesn’t fit, for one,” Lamb said. “If he’d killed Blackwell and then decided to run, then he would have run for real, gone north probably, where we would have had a devil of a time tracking him. As it was, we had little trouble finding him.”

  “The man’s a bloody idiot,” Harding said. “Look at where he hid the money—in his bloody mattress. Maybe his mind is twisted in the bargain, as well; maybe he enjoys killing. He had opportunity and motive.”

  “But he has no connection that I can see to Emily Fordham’s killing.”

  Harding straightened. “What does Emily Fordham have to do with it?”

  “The two cases have several connections, including Peter, the mute boy who lives on Lord Pembroke’s estate. He knew both victims. Abbott insisted to me that he was Blackwell’s only friend. But Blackwell had one other friend—Peter, who left the drawing I found in Blackwell’s shed. Pembroke definitively identified the drawing as Peter’s work. And we know that Peter also gave Emily Fordham a drawing very much like the one I found in Blackwell’s shed, and that she believed that something was distressing Peter. Now, a second boy has come up as a connection. His name is Thomas, though I don’t yet know his surname. He is one of the orphans who stay at Brookings in the summers. Last summer, he ran away from the estate; he had some trouble with Emily Fordham’s brother, Donald, who helped Pembroke attend to the boys. Blackwell found the boy hiding on the hill above Quimby and returned him to the estate. Emily Fordham had a photo of Thomas in her purse, along with Peter’s drawing. I believe Peter knows something. I’ve tried to speak with him, but he ran from me. But I intend to try again. And I want to speak with the other boy, Thomas.”

  “The mute boy sounds unsound in mind,” Harding said. “I shouldn’t wonder that he’s the bloody killer, if it’s not Abbott.”

  “I haven’t ruled that out,” Lamb said. “But I need more time to sort things.”

  Harding sighed—theatrically, Lamb thought, which he knew to be a good sign.

  “I’ll give you two days, but no more,” the super said. “If you haven’t come up with something by then, we’ll charge Abbott with Blackwell’s murder. The evidence is there.”

  Harding glared at Lamb—another theatrical touch. “Don’t fail me, Tom.”

  Lamb smiled—a smile of defiance. “I don’t intend to.”

  Peter sat on the hill above his cottage, among the trees, out of sight.

  Old Will was dead and now so was Emily. Emily’s death saddened him, and he did not want the girl in Quimby to be dead too. He liked the girl in Quimby, which is why he’d left her drawings. The girl in Quimby was kind, as Emily had been kind, though Emily had been unkind, too. She went away on her bicycle. He watched her go away, day after day.

  Once, he had stopped her on the road as she was going away and she had told him in an unfriendly way that she could not stop. She had been cross with him and this had hurt him very much.

  He’d left the drawing for the girl in Quimby. The girl had called to him to come out. She’d been sitting on the hill and seen a male Adonis Blue and that had given him an idea. He’d sketched the Adonis for her. Polyommatus bellargus; Lycaenidae. The Adonis was a blue butterfly. He’d written the words beneath it the best he knew how.

  He hoped that the girl in Quimby would not be unfriendly toward him, too, as Emily had been unfriendly.

  EIGHTEEN

  AT THEIR MEETING ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, LAMB EXPLAINED to Rivers, Wallace, and Larkin his reasons for charging Abbott only with obstructing an inquiry.

  Rivers considered protesting, but held his fire. He was beginning to believe that some of what Lamb said about the mute boy being involved in the thing made sense. Even so, he still believed Lamb was giving the boy too much emphasis. Abbott had possessed more than enough opportunity and motive in Blackwell’s killing, not to mention that his prints were all over the bloody tools.

  Lamb instructed Rivers to take Sergeant Cashen and a trio of constables to Lipscombe and begin a door-to-door canvassing of the village to see if anyone could shed any further light on Emily Fordham; he put Wallace to work typing reports of the events of the past two days for Harding. They’d gotten very far behind in their paperwork, and very soon the superintendent would begin to bemoan the insufficiently full “in” box on his desk.

  Wallace had spent the previous night with Delilah. Once again, he’d held her in the darkness, then put her to bed. He’d asked her no more questions about who had beaten her. As she’d slept, he’d sat in her small sitting room alone, in the dark, drinking her Irish whiskey, until he’d had enough and fallen into bed next to her.

  He continued to walk a razor’s edge—though he asked himself why it mattered.

  Lamb drove alone to Brookings to keep the appointment with Pembroke he’d arranged on the previous day.

  “I’m sorry that such a wicked business has brought you to us again,” the brisk Parkinson said as he led Lamb toward Pembroke’s wildflower garden. “We all liked Emily very much here; she was a beautiful girl with a kind heart. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to hurt her.” He added that Pembroke had arrived home from London only an hour before.

  Pembroke sat at the iron table among the flowers, bees, and butterflies, reading the Times, a carafe of coffee and a china cup and saucer in front of him. He was dressed in a white cotton shirt and trousers and brown leather sandals.

  “Excuse me, Jeffrey,” Parkinson said. “Chief Inspector Lamb has arrived.”

  Pembroke lowered the paper. “Good morning, Chief Inspector,” he said. He gestured for Lamb to sit and then folded the Times and laid it on the table.

  “Would you like coffee?”

  Lamb looked at the rich, dark coffee in the carafe. He smiled. “No, thank you.”

  “I’ve only heard this morning about Emily,” Pembroke said. “I’ve been in London. It’s horrible. I can’t tell you how terrible it is for us here. We all liked Emily very much. It seems you have your hands very full. I shouldn’t wonder that it’s pa
rtly due to the coming of this dreadful war—all of this sudden killing. People have lost their bearings.”

  “Yes,” Lamb said. He sat. “I wonder if you can tell me what Emily did here, exactly, in the summers.”

  “She acted as a kind of helper for the children—that’s the best way I can put it.” He paused to light a cigarette that he pulled from a light blue packet. “The orphanage with which we work is for boys, and so therefore we host only boys in the summer. Until Emily, we had no girls here. But I decided we needed at least a little female presence around the place. Some of these boys never knew their mothers and have grown up around only male caretakers and other boys. Having Emily on the place was, frankly, a bit of an experiment. And although she was wonderful with the boys, I’m not certain the experiment worked.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I’m afraid that too many of the boys fell in love with her. I should have seen it coming. The only one who didn’t, of course, was her brother, Donald, who worked here as a counselor to the boys—though I’ve often wondered if Emily’s presence didn’t sour the experience for Donald as well.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I can’t say as I know, exactly. All I know is that during the summer that Emily worked here, Donald became—how should I put this?—rather less easy to get along with. Before, he’d been a model and a wonderful mentor to the younger boys particularly. But he became irritable and, to be frank, a bit of a complainer, a negative influence.”

  “This would have been last summer, then?”

  “Yes. Last summer.”

  “Has Emily contacted you recently—or tried to contact you?”

  “No. I haven’t seen her since last summer, when our season ended here and the boys returned to the orphanage.”

  “What about Peter? Do you know if she contacted him or if he attempted to contact her?”

  “If so, I’m not aware of it.” He took a drag from his cigarette, then placed it into a glass ashtray next to the coffee carafe. A dozen or so butterflies moved among the flowers behind him. “As I explained earlier, Chief Inspector, I don’t control Peter’s movements. I only provide for his needs—those he cannot provide himself. Otherwise, he is free to live his life as he sees fit.”