The Language of the Dead

by Stephen Kelly

  He continued for another fifty or so meters until the hedge ended in a grassy area by the cliff edge. He walked to the edge and looked down at the sea surging and foaming among the rocks. The drop was at least thirty feet and nearly sheer. A pair of seabirds wheeled above, putting him in mind of dueling airplanes.

  He crossed to the opposite hedge and walked along it until he reached the opening that gave onto the switchback trail to Peter’s cottage. When he reached the bottom of the trail, he stopped and peered toward the cottage. He could see no sign of Peter. He moved to the front window but found it covered by the blackout curtains. He moved to the back and stopped at the corner in case Peter was in the rear yard. He was uncertain how he would communicate with Peter, even if he found him there. But he must try.

  Peter was not there. He moved to the back door and again found it open. Inside the cottage, all appeared the same as it had on the first time he’d entered. He walked among the piles of papers, drawings, and files, lifting and sorting through them, hoping they contained something that would strike him as relevant. He looked beneath Peter’s modest cot and through Peter’s small dresser. He found only books, drawings, and dust.

  He moved to the wall on which Peter had hung his collection of butterflies and other insects, the pinned-up corpses in neat rows. He stared at the papery veined wings of the butterflies, the fat venomous abdomens of the spiders, the needle-like stingers of the wasps.

  The photograph of the tree caught his eye. It was off center, whereas before it had been perfectly centered between the butterflies and the spiders. Peter liked everything in its place. Even the smallest disruptions upset him. So Pembroke had said. He moved close to the photo and this time noticed that it possessed a vaguely arty quality, depicting the dead tree silhouetted against a stormy sky. He wondered if Peter had taken it. The photo seemed to Lamb an anomaly in the tiny, well-ordered cottage, not merely in its placement near the collection of insects but because the cottage contained no other photos. Peter drew and painted; he did not seem to take photographs. Lamb took the framed photograph from the wall and flipped it over, but found nothing attached to it.

  He left the cottage and pulled shut the back door. When he turned to face the hill, he saw Peter standing at its crest, by the tree, clutching a sheet of paper in his right hand. Peter stood as if frozen, his eyes fixed on Lamb. Lamb remained still, worried that any move he made would cause Peter to run. They stood that way for several seconds, staring at each other.

  “Peter,” Lamb said finally.

  Peter flinched, poised to run.

  “I won’t hurt you, Peter. I want to talk to you about Emily and Thomas.” Lamb took a tentative step in Peter’s direction. “It’s all right, Peter. I won’t hurt you. I promise.” He took another step. “I want to help you, Peter. I know you’re frightened. I can help you.”

  Peter took a backward step. Lamb froze. They stared at each other for another few seconds before Peter, still clutching the paper, turned and sprinted past the tree, and out of Lamb’s sight.

  “Peter!” Lamb said. He ran up the hill. He reached the crest nearly out of breath and stopped beneath the tree. In front of him lay a meadow, and on the other side of this meadow lay a wood. He caught a glimpse of Peter disappearing into the wood at a run, like a scared deer fleeing into a thicket. The boy moved with alarming speed. Lamb put a hand against the ancient, skeletal tree to steady himself. He looked at the sky through its naked branches and said “Damn.”

  He then noticed that Peter had dropped the paper by the base of the tree and bent to retrieve it. It was a sheet of sketching paper on which Peter had made a rough charcoal drawing of a dark oval, in the middle of which a spider with a fat abdomen had spun a symmetrical web. Another bloody spider. The drawing was not as detailed, as fine, as the other of Peter’s drawings he’d found. Peter seemed to have rushed the sketch. Lamb flipped the paper over and found two words scrawled upon it in pencil.

  tommss ded

  He crossed the meadow to the wood into which Peter had run. He looked into the dense thicket of trees for some sign of Peter but could see nothing. He held up the drawing.

  “I know Thomas is dead, Peter,” he shouted. “But I don’t know who killed him. Did Mr. Pirie kill him? Did Mr. Pirie hurt you, too? Did he hurt the other boys?”

  Silence.

  Lamb sensed that Peter was watching, waiting. But he also sensed that time was running out for them both.

  Lamb stopped in at the nick, where he grabbed another wholly unsatisfying lunch of a cheese-and-pickle sandwich and a cup of weak tea. As compensation, he allowed himself to smoke two cigarettes in quick succession. The photo of Thomas haunted him and he wondered what sort of horrors might have transpired at The Resurrection Home for Boys.

  He was readying to head back to Basingstoke, to check on the search of Pirie’s house, when Harding entered his office.

  “I just received a call from Constable Harris, in Quimby,” the super said. “He has another body up there—a local man named Bradford. The body was found about an hour ago, in an old mill race.” Harding shook his head. “The entire business is getting out of hand, Tom.”

  Lamb sat at his desk for a few seconds, frankly stunned. The killing indeed was getting out of hand; he’d never seen anything like it. Had Pirie slipped down from Basingstoke and killed Bradford too? But how, and why?

  “I’ve got Larkin ready to go; he’ll drive out there with you,” Harding said. “I’ve also scared up three men to assist you and have called Winston-Sheed. Harris is standing by in Quimby.”

  “Yes—right,” Lamb said. “Thank you, sir.”

  “What else can I do, Tom?” Harding asked.

  “Wallace,” Lamb said. “He’s looking after the search of Pirie’s house. I’ll need him when he’s finished there. The same with Rivers. He’s taking statements in Lipscombe.”

  “Done.”

  “Also, Bradford has children—three children. The mother is dead.”

  “All right, leave it to me. I’ll make the arrangements to see that they get to Castle Malwood, at least for the short term.” Castle Malwood was a home in Minstead for children who had lost their parents to sudden tragedies. The war had created enough such children that Castle Malwood was becoming crowded.

  Lamb looked at his desk; the crumbs from his sandwich were scattered on his blotter. For some reason, the mess offended him and he brushed the crumbs to the floor.

  TWENTY-TWO

  A CAR CONTAINING A TRIO OF CONSTABLES—ALL THAT HARDING could spare—followed Lamb and Larkin, who drove in Lamb’s Wolseley. Harding promised that he would later send out a vehicle in which they could transport the body to the morgue.

  They crossed the stone bridge in the middle of Quimby; Lamb pulled off the road and parked his Wolseley. Winston-Sheed had not yet arrived. The village seemed deserted. He figured that the news of Michael Bradford’s death had made the rounds and that people had shuttered their doors, fearing another onslaught from the police. Lamb wondered where Bradford’s children were and if anyone was looking after them. He would have to question Little Mike and his sisters. They might even have witnessed their father’s death.

  Lamb led the way up the path to the mill, where he, Larkin, and the constables found Harris standing by the crumbling fence that surrounded the mill yard. “The deceased is over here, sir,” Harris said.

  He led the small group around the rubbish-strewn main yard and down a short incline to the race. Bradford lay face-up in the race about ten yards from the place where the stream diverted into it; the shallow trickle from what still managed to make its way past the debris that clogged the race moved around his still body, carrying away, in a slender stream, the blood that seeped from the back of his head. A broken gin bottle lay at his feet and his eyes were open.

  “Who found the body?”

  “A Mrs. Lewis, sir,” Harris said. “She lives just down the path, near the bridge. She came up to the mill to collect some of the wildflowers tha
t grow along the bank and found the body.” Harris gestured toward a spot slightly upstream that was alive with low, blue flowers. “She then called me.”

  “She saw nothing else?”

  “She says not.”

  “Where are Bradford’s children?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Harris said. “I haven’t had a chance to look for them. Hiding somewhere, more as like. They have a hundred hiding places about.”

  “Find them. I’ll need to speak to them, and we can’t leave them unattended in any case.”

  “Yes, sir.” Harris headed up the hill toward Bradford’s cottage.

  Lamb ordered the constables to go into the village and begin knocking on doors, taking statements. “Be persistent,” he instructed them. “Don’t allow them to shut you out. I’ve about had it with all the burrowing in around this damnable little place.”

  Lamb walked to a place a few yards above where Bradford’s body lay and eased into the stone race. He walked to the body, sloshing through the inch-deep trickle, and squatted; given the blood coming from the back of Bradford’s head, it appeared he’d either been struck a blow there or hit his head on the race as he fell. The gin bottle seemed to argue that he’d been drinking. In any case, Lamb couldn’t move the body to look at it more closely until Winston-Sheed arrived.

  He pulled himself out of the race and instructed Larkin to look around the race and mill yard for evidence. Then he walked down the lane to Mrs. Lewis’s cottage.

  She was a small, plump, gray-haired woman with a round face and fierce eyes. She showed Lamb into her neat sitting room and offered him tea, which he politely refused. Lamb concluded almost immediately that Mrs. Lewis’s husband had died many years earlier. The mantel above the hearth contained three photos of a man who was perhaps twenty years younger than she now was; the photos constituted a small shrine to his memory.

  She told Lamb the same story—of having found Bradford’s body while picking flowers—that she’d told Harris. Suddenly coming upon Bradford’s corpse hadn’t seemed to shock her. She spoke as if she believed that Bradford was bound to have met an early, violent death.

  “Not to speak ill of the dead, but Michael Bradford was a bad sort,” she said. “I shouldn’t think but his children will be better off now that he’s dead. He was an execrable father.”

  Lamb nodded. “So you saw nothing else?” he asked.

  Her fierce eyes flashed. “As I told the constable, no.”

  Lamb returned to the race to find Winston-Sheed finishing a cigarette and looking over the stream. Lamb moved next to him. A chill born of their disagreement over Winston-Sheed’s having shot the seagulls lingered between them.

  “Chief Inspector,” Winston-Sheed said.

  Lamb nodded. “Doctor.”

  “I’ll get to him in a moment, as soon as I finish my fag.” He took a long drag from his cigarette, then held up the smoldering butt pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “Horrible bloody little things when you think about it,” he said, staring at the butt. He turned back toward the path and flicked the butt into the grass. Then he moved down into the race to examine Bradford as Lamb stood by.

  A short while later, Larkin returned from his check of the mill to report that he’d found nothing useful. Lamb looked again into the race. The doctor held Bradford’s head in his hands.

  “The back of his head is bashed in; on first glance, I would say it’s not the type of injury you’d expect to see if he merely fell in and struck his head,” the doctor said. “It’s possible that he was struck in the head and either was pushed or thrown into the race.”

  “Time of death?”

  “Hard to tell yet, but I’d say at least twelve hours.”

  Lamb asked if he could lower himself into the race and examine Bradford.

  “Please do,” Winston-Sheed said. As Lamb examined Bradford’s clothes and searched his pockets, a pair of crows flew across the stream from the opposite bank, cawing, and alighted in a tall oak tree about forty yards upstream.

  “Welcome back,” the doctor said, waving to them. Lamb thought the doctor’s welcoming of the black birds strange, especially given that, only two days ago, he’d been shooting seagulls out of the sky willy-nilly.

  Bradford’s pockets contained nothing beyond a few pence.

  Wallace appeared, trudging up the path with Rivers and a pair of uniformed constables who were carrying a stretcher. Wallace looked exhausted, Lamb thought. Rivers merely looked angry.

  “We’ve brought the transport for the body,” Wallace said.

  “What happened to you?” Larkin asked when he saw Wallace.

  “Fell off my bicycle.”

  “What did you find in Pirie’s house?” Lamb asked Wallace.

  “Sod all. No more photos—nothing that would connect him to anything like that. I left one of the constables in charge of finishing, but we got to most of it before I received Harding’s call to come back down here.”

  Rivers peered into the race. “What’s the story with Bradford, then?”

  “His head’s been bashed in,” Lamb said. “I think he was killed and then dumped into the race.”

  “Did he kill Blackwell?”

  “I don’t see it,” Lamb said. “I don’t see what he would gain from killing him.”

  “Maybe he and Blackwell had a row and Bradford lost his head,” Rivers said. He was fishing. Only a couple of days before, he’d been sure that George Abbott was the culprit, but now he was not as certain. He sensed that Lamb had run ahead of him in the inquiry and suspected that Lamb had decided to keep him in the dark.

  “Yes, but then why go through all the rest of it—the pitchfork and the crucifix?” Lamb asked.

  “Maybe he was smarter than you give him credit for,” Rivers said.

  Lamb let the remark pass. “All of this is connected in some way,” he said, looking around the scene. “All that’s happened in this bleeding little village, and in Lipscombe.”

  “How?” Rivers asked. He was determined to know what Lamb knew, to prod Lamb if he must. “I don’t see it. And to be honest, I don’t see why we haven’t charged bloody Abbott with Blackwell’s murder. We’ve more than enough evidence.”

  “But Abbott couldn’t have killed Bradford,” Wallace said.

  “Bradford was a bleeding lush. He got drunk and fell into the race.” Rivers gestured toward the gin bottle, then looked at Lamb. “You ask whether Bradford had motive to kill Blackwell, but who had motive to kill Bradford? He was nobody in this village. We’re not seeing what’s right before our bloody eyes. Instead, we’re running after bloody retarded boys and ghouls.”

  Wallace glanced at Lamb, expecting him to smack Rivers down. But Lamb said nothing; he turned back toward the race and Michael Bradford’s corpse.

  Harris appeared, jogging down the trail from the abandoned cottage. He reached them puffing. “I found the children, sir,” he said. “I coaxed them back to Bradford’s cottage but couldn’t get them farther. I promised them a sweet if they stayed put.”

  “Are they hurt?” Lamb asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you have a sweet?”

  Harris exhaled, regaining his breath. “I thought I’d leave that up to you, sir.”

  “Anyone have a sweet?” Lamb asked, looking around. “Gum—anything?”

  No one spoke. Then Lamb remembered the tin of butterscotch in his jacket pocket. “I’ve got something,” he said. He pulled the silvery tin of candy from his pocket and looked at it. “I got them hoping to give up the fags,” he said, almost speaking to himself. “Every time I want a bloody fag I’m supposed to pop one of these in my mouth instead.” He frowned. “The problem is, I keep forgetting.”

  Lamb sent Wallace into the village to scare up something for the Bradford children to eat. “Sandwiches—whatever you can find,” Lamb said. “Harding is arranging for them to be sent to Castle Malwood.”

  He left Winston-Sheed and the two constables who’d arrived with Wallace to ta
ke care of the job of moving Bradford’s body to the transport, and told Harris to go up the hill ahead of him with the butterscotch drops.

  “Go inside and give them the sweets, as you promised, but say nothing about me,” Lamb said. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get them comfortable, and then I’ll come in.”

  He gestured to Rivers to follow him up the path. They walked beside each other for a minute or so before Lamb spoke. It was time they discussed Eric Parker and the lingering enmity between them.

  On that night twenty-two years earlier, Parker had been one of those who, with Lamb, Rivers, and five other men, had blackened his face in preparation for a quick raid on the German trenches that lay only two hundred meters distant. The mission was to be one of reconnaissance, to gain information for one of the many “pushes” that had marked the fighting along the Somme. But that day, too, a German machine gun had begun to spit at the British positions from a place near where their mission was to take them, killing two men, and Lamb had set himself the task of finding the gun that night and silencing it. Protective of Parker, Rivers had asked Lamb that Parker be spared the duty. But it had been Parker’s turn to go and besides, Parker was good, reliable. He kept his head, showed more than the normal amount of courage, and followed orders.

  And so, at two A.M., armed with wire cutters, knives, pistols, and a satchel of hand grenades, the eight men began to crawl on their bellies through the mud and coiled barbed wire toward the German positions. Four hours later, they had managed to map a good portion of a freshly dug extension to the main German trench that, so far as they knew, the British high command had no idea existed. Rivers looked at the sky; it would be light soon and he did not want to be caught in no man’s land when the sun rose. He signaled to Lamb that it was time to go. But Lamb raised his hand; he wasn’t yet ready. He’d seen the place where the Germans had set up the new machine gun, an MG-08. When the next push came, the thing would butcher the men who had the unlucky task of advancing on it. Rivers crawled next to him. “What’s wrong?”