The Language of the Dead

A WORLD WAR II MYSTERY

STEPHEN KELLY

For the three people I love the most—Cindy, Anna and Lauren—and for my late parents, Edythe and Omer Kelly.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD

ON A LATE JULY DAY IN 1940, A BUTTERFLY, AN ADONIS BLUE,
landed on a sprig of honeysuckle in a meadow above the village of Quimby, in Hampshire, and began to suck the blossom dry. Peter Wilkins noted the presence of the creature but did not move.

I must
, he thought.

The words bloomed in his mind like wings opening. The boys were in the tree. Crows cawed from the branches of a dead sycamore farther down Manscome Hill. Peter gazed past the old tree toward the village.

In that same moment, Will Blackwell moved up the hill from Quimby along the ancient path that bordered the wood. The day was hot, the sun bright, and Will moved slowly under the weight of the pitchfork and scythe he rested on his right shoulder. He came to the old sycamore in which the crows roosted; for two weeks the crows
had been speaking to him, and the message he'd heard in their harsh cawing had troubled him. He knew the crows as carrion eaters, lickers of bones. As he passed beneath the tree, the crows dipped their heads in Will's direction and shot invective at his breast, like arrows.

Up the hill, Peter moved. Startled, the blue butterfly parted its wings and fled.

David Wallace sat in The Fallen Diva, his hand around a pint of local bitter.

Forty minutes earlier, he'd nipped out from the nick for what he'd told colleagues was an early supper. In fact, the detective sergeant had eaten nothing but had downed two pints of ale in less than fifteen minutes and now was on a third. He'd done his drinking at a table in a corner and spoken to no one, to decrease the chance of someone recognizing him. He felt light in the head, certainly, though not what he would call drunk. It was time, though, that he returned to work.

A young woman entered the pub and sat alone at a table near his, away from the window. The woman had pale skin, green eyes, and auburn hair and was nicely plump, busty. She wore a simple moss-green serge suit and black high heels. Wallace thought she might be waiting for someone; he watched her for a moment from his hiding place in the corner. She threw glances about the room—nervously, he thought—as if she hoped she wasn't being conspicuous. She turned in Wallace's direction and their eyes met. He smiled; she looked quickly away. He thought of approaching her but decided against it. He'd been gone from the nick too long already and faced nearly a fifteen-minute walk back; he counted on the walk to sober him up a notch. The girl was attractive enough, but with the war nearly a year old now, Winchester was full of lonely women looking for a tumble.

He rose and headed for the door. As he passed the woman's table, he caught her eye. To his surprise, she smiled. He touched the brim
of his hat. He glanced at her left hand and was relieved to see that she wore no wedding band. He did not want to cuckold some poor sod in uniform.

Now, though, he had to hurry. His drinking had begun to scare him recently and he'd entertained glimpses of himself sinking to the bottom of a bottle. He stepped through the door into a warm, clear evening, feeling pleasantly elevated. Twenty minutes later, as he mounted the steps to the nick, he assured himself that he was in perfect command of his senses.

He headed for his desk, where he intended to spend the last few hours of his shift attending to paperwork. He believed he needn't worry overly much about anyone noticing his mild drunkenness, given that the only person who seemed able to unfailingly catch him out was Lamb, who had gone home for the day. In recent weeks, Wallace occasionally had detected in the Chief Inspector's expression toward him a strange combination of exasperation and empathy. He was convinced that Lamb
knew
. And yet Lamb had said nothing—issued no advice, warnings, or ultimatums. In the end, Lamb's silence had spooked more than reassured Wallace.

The phone on his desk rang, which made him jump.
Calm yourself
. He picked up the receiver. The voice on the line was that of Evers, the man on duty at the front desk.

“Have a call here I think you should take, Sarge.”

Bloody hell
. Wallace didn't want a call. He wanted to finish his paperwork and go home. He had a bottle of gin there. He planned to fall asleep listening to the wireless.

“Put him through,” Wallace said.

“This is Constable Harris, in Quimby,” a voice said.

“Go ahead, Harris.”

“Well, sir, it's complicated.”

Bloody hell. Here we go
. “What do you mean, ‘complicated,' Harris?”

“Well, sir, we have a body. A dead man.”

“Hold on a second,” Wallace said. “Did you say
Quimby
?”

“Yes, sir—Quimby. It's just west of—”

“I
know
where it is, Harris, thank you. Hold the line while I scare up a pencil.”

Wallace found a pencil and a sheet of paper among the piles on his desk and tried to clear his head of rubbish.
A dead man in Quimby
. He must call Lamb, obviously, but would endeavor to get to the scene ahead of the Chief Inspector to take care of the preliminaries, so by the time Lamb arrived everything would be in order. He sighed and was disturbed to find that his breath smelled obviously of beer.

“Go on, Harris,” he said. “I'm listening.”

Slightly more than a mile east of Quimby, Emily Fordham pulled her bicycle off the road near the village of Lipscombe, in which she lived with her mother. She laid her bike in the lush grass at the side of the road and found a comfortable place in which to sit and study Peter's sketch anew.

She understood well enough from the sketch, and the photograph that Peter had enclosed with it, that Peter remained troubled by what had happened to Thomas the previous summer. Thomas's brief disappearance had upset them all. But that had been a year ago and, in any case, Thomas had returned. Peter knew that. But one could never tell with Peter, really.

She studied the sketch for several minutes but still could not divine what seemed to be its larger message.
A spider devouring a butterfly.
Was she
supposed
to understand its meaning? Frustrated, she folded the drawing and put it in her pocket. She would decide what to do about it later. She had to consider the idea that Peter might have sent her the sketch merely to get her attention. She knew that Peter loved her, in his way, though he didn't understand love—couldn't understand how love was different from friendship. She would ask to see Lord Pembroke about the matter. He would know the best way in which to approach Peter. She didn't want to hurt Peter's feelings.

For the past five mornings she'd awakened feeling sick and gone to the loo to retch. Although she'd flushed it away, she worried that the smell had lingered and that her mother would detect it and divine the truth. She could not let her mother know that she was carrying Charles's baby.

She had not yet even told Charles about the child. She didn't want to burden him with another worry. Instead, she prayed each day for his safe return from the skies. On some days, the Germans were forcing his squadron aloft two and even three times. She hated the Germans and their stupid war. And yet, were it not for the war, she never would have met Charles.

She decided that she shouldn't worry overly much about Peter. Peter, and all he represented, had become fragments of her past.

She cared now only for the future, for Charles and the baby growing within her.