The Language of the Dead

by Stephen Kelly

  The fires in Quimby did not burn themselves out until mid-morning the following day.

  The mill burned to its stone foundation and became something beyond even a ruin. The bombs had turned the houses to rubble. Among the casualties was Natalie Bradford’s sole toy, a rag doll she’d named Laura, after her dead mother. No one could find any trace of George Abbott’s sheep, except for the crows, which discovered bits of them among the branches of the trees surrounding the meadow.

  Marjorie and Lamb had stayed the night with Vera in her billet; they and the rest of the village finally had gone to bed in the early morning, with the fires still smoldering. Vera managed to scare up a pair of blankets for them. She tried to give her cot to her mother, but Marjorie wouldn’t hear of it. Marjorie and Lamb slept on the narrow wooden floor in their clothes.

  A couple of hours later, Lamb awakened with a sore neck and the feeling that he hadn’t really slept. Daylight streamed in through the lone window of Vera’s cramped billet. He found Vera and Marjorie sitting in the small back courtyard drinking tea and looking as he felt, emotionally and physically drained. Lamb hadn’t even heard the kettle whistle as he slept. For their breakfast, Vera sliced what was left of the bread in her box and served it with marmalade, along with what was left of her egg ration for the month, which she fried.

  Lamb and Marjorie stayed a while that morning to help with the cleanup effort. The sight of the blackened ruins of the Lear farm called up tears within Vera, but she stifled them. Keep your head, my girl.

  She was genuinely sorry for Arthur. He had been troubled and violent and dealt a bad hand in life—and might, in the end, have killed her. But she could not bring herself to believe that he deserved to die in the way he had. And in thinking of Arthur, she thought of Peter, and wondered if she ever would see him again.

  Lamb and Marjorie returned to Winchester at midday. Before they left, Lamb promised to return to Quimby later that evening with a loaf of bread and a half dozen eggs, to replenish Vera’s empty larder. Once home, he and Marjorie went to bed, exhausted.

  At a little before five P.M., the telephone in the hall jangled and Lamb rose from his slumber, still bleary, to answer it. It was Harding, who reported that Gerald Pirie had been found dead with a .22-caliber bullet in his brain, an apparent suicide.

  “He was found floating facedown in a stream south of Basingstoke, off the main road to Winchester,” Harding said. “The pistol was lying on the bank.”

  Lamb’s first thought was to beg off. Vera’s near miss in Quimby had frightened and drained him more than he had known. At the moment he didn’t bloody care that Gerald Pirie was dead.

  “Can Wallace or Rivers handle it?” he asked.

  Harding didn’t answer at first; Lamb understood that the superintendent was silently signaling his disapproval. “Are you certain Wallace is up to it?” Harding asked. The super had no intention of handing Rivers a plum after the detective inspector’s public display of insubordination on the previous day.

  “I’m certain of it,” Lamb said. “I’ve spoken to him about his conduct. He understands that he has no choice but to straighten out. He’s a good man at bottom. And he knows the case.”

  “Yes, but what about this bloody black eye and the rest of it? He’s been up to something.”

  “He says he was beaten in a robbery and I believe him. Besides, a black eye isn’t going to impede him.”

  Harding was silent again for a few seconds. More disapproval. “All right, Tom,” he said finally.

  Lamb rang off, put the kettle on the boil, and retrieved the day’s post, which included a plain envelope addressed to him, with a return address in Lipscombe. The envelope contained two notes. The first, dated the previous day, was from Lilly Schmidt, the girl who had been Emily Fordham’s best friend.

  Chief Inspector Lamb,

  The enclosed letter from Donald Fordham to Emily came in the post today. I believe it’s his response to the last letter she sent him. I thought you should see it. I’m certain that Donald wouldn’t mind under the circumstances.

  Sincerely yours,

  Lilly Schmidt

  Lamb unfolded the letter from Donald Fordham.

  Emily,

  I received your note of the fifteenth and was glad to receive it, though it worried me. Please, whatever you do, do not confide in P. He is not what he seems. I should have told you this before but didn’t want to sully your experience at the estate. I know you loved it there, as I once did. Still and all, you must believe me that P. is no good.

  I am worried about you and sorry that I cannot be there to comfort you. Please do not let any of this mess with the sketch and the photograph weigh too much on your mind. In the end, it is probably nothing. Please, please take care of yourself. I’m sorry that we must be so far apart.

  I’m also sorry that this letter is so short but my time is limited tonight and I wanted to write some response to your last letter as soon as I could. I promise that I will send a longer letter soon.

  Your loving brother,

  Donald

  Lamb thought that “P” could be Pembroke, though it also could be Pirie, or even Peter. Donald likely had used “P” to get the letter past the censors, who might have stuck at any mention of Lord Jeffrey Pembroke, who was known to publicly hold a pacifist, dissenting view of the war with Germany. Lamb believed now that Pembroke definitely had been involved in the events of the past days, though he did not yet know how or how deeply. He did not know if Emily or Donald Fordham had known Pirie. Pirie might have killed Emily and Will Blackwell. He might even have killed Michael Bradford. In any case, Lamb also felt certain now that Peter knew something that he wasn’t meant to know—something about Thomas Bennett—that he’d tried to communicate to Emily and might have communicated to Will Blackwell and now was trying to communicate to him.

  Lamb saw no reason to awaken Marjorie. He gathered up the loaf and the eggs he’d promised Vera and put them into a brown paper sack with a pound note, then put the sack in the back seat of the Wolseley. He slid behind the wheel, lit a fag—he hadn’t yet had a chance to buy a new tin of butterscotch drops—and pushed the starter. The car coughed and came to life on the first try.

  He stopped first at the nick to gather the bits of paper evidence he’d collected and put them in a cardboard portfolio. These included the three “spider” drawings—the one he’d found in Blackwell’s shed and the nearly identical one he’d found in Emily’s wallet, along with the third drawing, of the spider and the black oval that Peter had left for him the day before; the small photographic portrait of Thomas Bennett; the letter from Donald Fordham; and the brief cryptic note he’d found in Will Blackwell’s pocket: in the nut.

  He hoped that he might sit down with the evidence later, when his head was clear, and sort through the entire bloody mess again.

  He was in the incident room, about to leave the nick, when Rivers walked in, looking haggard and frustrated. They were alone in the room. Harding and the rest had gone home for the day or were clearing up the mess in Basingstoke. As punishment for Rivers’s insubordination, Harding had put him on the phones that day, taking calls and tips, all of which had struck Rivers as useless and many of which clearly had come from loonies who wanted attention. Rivers had been in the loo when Lamb arrived and now was returning. He flinched when he noticed Lamb standing on the other side of the room.

  “Lamb,” he said.

  “Harry.”

  “I didn’t see you there.”

  “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m sorry.”

  Rivers went to his desk.

  Lamb put on his hat. “Good night, then, Harry,” he said. Rivers grunted a reply but did not look up from his desk.

  Lamb was nearly out the door when Rivers said, “Lamb.”

  Lamb stopped and looked at Rivers. They were close now, only feet apart. Lamb recalled the many hours he and Rivers had spent huddled near each other in the damp, stinking trenches. Rivers turned to face Lamb, who expe
cted to see something of the anger that he normally saw in Rivers’s eyes. But Lamb saw only exhaustion, and perhaps a hint of the old anguish that Rivers had carried with him since the Somme.

  “I heard what happened in Quimby,” Rivers said. “Your daughter is all right, then?”

  Lamb hadn’t known that Rivers knew of Vera’s posting in Quimby. “Yes, she’s fine. Thanks for asking.”

  “Good,” Rivers said. He nodded his head slightly. “That’s good.”

  Lamb did not quite know what to say in response beyond “thank you.” But Rivers spoke again before Lamb could. “I’m sorry to say that you’ve run ahead of me in this business and my response has been to act an arse,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  Lamb could not hide his surprise. He stood in silence and looked at Rivers for several seconds. He expected Rivers to add, “I’m sorry.” But Rivers merely turned again to the papers on his desk.

  “Thank you, Harry,” Lamb said. Then he left.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  LAMB FOUND VERA SITTING IN THE SMALL YARD BEHIND HER BILLET, sipping tea. She also had slept into the afternoon and awakened only a few hours earlier.

  “Relief,” Lamb said, handing her the bread and the eggs. He said nothing about the pound note.

  “Thanks, dad,” she said. “I’ve eaten, though. Have you?”

  He hadn’t, but he’d already gobbled more than enough of her stores. “Yes.”

  “Tea?”

  “I wouldn’t turn it down.”

  She dragged a chair for him into the courtyard and they sat together for a time in the gathering twilight, not speaking. Then Lamb ventured a question. “How are you feeling?’

  Vera shrugged. “All right.”

  He knew that Vera had known and liked Arthur Lear, but nothing more—though he recalled the day on which he’d met Lear and suspected that the boy had Vera in his sights.

  “Was it hard?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She tried to smile. Instead, she shook her head, as if in disbelief. “I thought the bloody Germans were invading.”

  A ripple of surprise shot through Lamb; he’d never heard Vera use “bloody,” had no idea that she employed it. He’d always been reasonably good about not cursing in her presence. Then, too, she didn’t belong to him anymore—not in the way she once had, when she’d been his Doodle Doo.

  In the brief silence that followed, Vera thought of telling her father about Arthur—of telling him the entire story. She wanted to tell someone. But something stopped her; she believed that her father wasn’t ready to hear the story yet. The story of her having had a lover—and of a man who had menaced her.

  “Fancy a walk?” she asked. She wanted to move, to clear her head, not to sit and talk and keep secrets from her father.

  Lamb stood. “I could use one. My head’s still muddled.”

  They walked to the eastern edge of the village and back; Lamb smoked as they walked, lighting each fresh cigarette with the one he was finishing. He wondered about the Bradford children. By now, someone at Castle Malwood probably had told them that their father was dead. He wondered what would become of them and especially of Mike, who was old enough to understand, at least partially, the viciousness, cruelty, greed, and wretchedness that lay at the heart of his father’s death and the other recent events in Quimby.

  As they passed the place where the path that paralleled Lord Pembroke’s wood snaked up the hill, Vera told her father the story of her encounters with Peter, the strange boy who so many in Quimby seemed to know about, but who nobody really seemed to know.

  “He gave me two drawings,” she said. “They’re really quite beautiful, though one of them is also a bit disturbing.” She did not know that her father considered Peter a potential key actor in the drama that had unfolded in Quimby and Basingstoke and even a possible suspect in the murders of Will Blackwell and Emily Fordham. She and Lamb had not discussed the case.

  The fact that Peter had tried to communicate with Vera stunned Lamb. The boy seemed determined that someone receive and decipher his message. He immediately wondered if Peter saw Vera as a kind of substitute for Emily Fordham. Had he known that Peter was contacting Vera, he would have counseled her to avoid him as potentially dangerous. Now, though, he had to know what Peter had tried to tell Vera.

  “Does the drawing you found disturbing contain a spider?” Lamb asked.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “He’s been leaving drawings for me too. They all have spiders, though he’s supposed to like butterflies. His guardian, Lord Pembroke, insists that Peter can neither read nor write, but I’ve come to believe that’s not true. I think the boy is more sophisticated than most people realize. I also believe that he knows something about the killings and might himself even be in some danger. Either that, or he himself killed Will Blackwell and Emily Fordham.”

  Vera looked at her father in disbelief. She thought he sounded like Arthur Lear. “But he’s harmless,” she protested, defending Peter.

  “He’s volatile—he hates when his life is thrown into disorder. He apparently believed that Emily Fordham, the girl from Lipscombe, was in love with him. But she had moved on; she’d become pregnant by an RAF pilot from Cloverton airfield. If Peter had found this out somehow, it might have made him jealous.”

  “But why would he kill Mr. Blackwell?”

  “I don’t know—and I don’t know that he did. But last summer, one of the orphan boys who was staying on Lord Pembroke’s estate ran away. Blackwell found the boy on Manscome Hill and returned the boy to Brookings, which seemed to have upset the boy and, apparently, upset Peter.”

  “What do his drawings mean, then? What is he trying to say?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet, though I do believe that they contain some sort of message directed at whoever finds them. Have you managed to speak to him?”

  “I tried, but he always ran.”

  “This other drawing that he gave you—what is it of?”

  “A blue butterfly. I came up the hill one day and sat in the grass, hoping to see Peter, and instead I saw exactly that butterfly—a blue butterfly with white and black bands at the edges of its wings. He must have seen me watching it, then sketched it. He left the drawing for me to find on the path, I’m sure of it. He wrote a kind of note beneath it, that I don’t understand.” She spelled the note out for Lamb: tommss ded.

  Lamb recognized the weird train of letters. Peter had left exactly that message on his drawing of the spider sitting upon the dark oval that Lamb had found beneath the dead tree on the hill behind Peter’s summerhouse.

  “I think he’s trying to say that Thomas is dead,” Lamb said.

  “But who is Thomas?”

  “Thomas is the boy who ran away from Brookings last summer. We found very disturbing evidence connected with him in the home of the man who runs the orphanage in which the boys spend the rest of the year. I think that Thomas also is connected in some way to the killings of Blackwell and the girl from Lipscombe and perhaps even Michael Bradford.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “Very disturbing photographs,” Lamb said. “That’s all I’ll say.”

  “I’m no longer a little girl, dad,” Vera said, openly exasperated at her father’s unwillingness to speak to her as he would another adult.

  Lamb hesitated. He looked at Vera. She was no longer a little girl, that was true—though she still was his. That wouldn’t change; he couldn’t bear that changing. Even so, he had no cause to treat her as a child.

  “The photograph showed that the director of the orphanage was abusing Thomas sexually,” he said. “Which means the director probably abused other boys as well. They were children, and his prisoners, and could do nothing about it.”

  Vera was silent for what seemed to Lamb a long time. He wondered what she was thinking. Had she known that adults raped children, conceived of such a grievous offense to God and everything natural and good in the world? Or was he the one who
was hopelessly naïve?

  “Did this man, the orphanage director, kill Thomas, then?” Vera said finally.

  “It looks that way. Now the man himself is dead. He seems to have committed suicide. Shot himself in the head.”

  “That’s terrible. So much death. It seems to have infected everything.”

  They walked for a few minutes in silence. Then Vera asked: “But what can it mean: ‘Thomas is dead’ written beneath the sketch of a blue butterfly? If you’re right about Peter sending messages, then there has to be some significance in the way he joined the two, the drawing and the words.”

  Lamb stopped. “Hold on,” he said. He lightly laid his right hand on Vera’s shoulder. “Say that again, please, just as you just said it. The part about Thomas being dead.”

  “What—‘Thomas is dead’ beneath the sketch of a blue butterfly?”

  “Bloody hell,” Lamb said. He’d suddenly become so excited that he hadn’t even realized he’d used “bloody” in Vera’s presence. His mind was on something else entirely. A shiver ran up his spine. “I was there,” he said. “Right bloody there.”

  “What are you talking about, Dad?”

  Lamb wasn’t yet certain he was correct. But light was flooding into corners that until that instant had been dark and hidden from his view. Vera’s words had thrown open the curtains. He needed one more point of illumination: motive.

  “Can you help me, Vera?”

  “Of course.” She hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.

  “Let’s get back to your billet and put the kettle on.”

  Ten minutes later, they were seated at the table in Vera’s billet with their tea and the evidence from Lamb’s cardboard portfolio spread upon it. He explained each piece to her—where he’d found it and what he believed its significance might be. And he explained for her his newfound belief of why Peter had written the strange message beneath the sketch of the blue butterfly he’d left for her to find. “All that’s missing is motive,” he said. “A reason for all the killing.” For ten minutes, the two of them stared at the black spiders and the tiny, cryptic words, shifted them around the table as if they were puzzle pieces.