The Language of the Dead (11 page)

She began to move toward him, intending to ask his name. She got close enough to see the focused intensity in his eyes. She was just about to speak to him when he leapt into motion. With a sinewy grace, he moved quickly through the tall grass and thistle of the meadow and disappeared into Lord Pembroke's wood.

AT HALF PAST NOON, LAMB RENDEZVOUSED WITH HIS MEN AT THE
stone bridge over Mills Run, near Will Blackwell's cottage.

No one had good news to report. Rivers and his men had not fared well. Even with Harris in tow, they'd encountered more shuttered doors and drawn curtains than not. The villagers to whom they'd spoken claimed to have seen or heard nothing suspicious on the previous day. Nor had the search of Blackwell's cottage or the ongoing grid search of the hill turned up anything useful, Wallace reported.

Lamb described the altar he'd found in the shed and showed everyone the drawing. He said he reckoned that the mute boy, Peter, had drawn it, given that he was known for drawing insects.

“It's quite good,” Larkin said of the drawing, adjusting his glasses. “Brilliant, really.”

“Yes, but what the bloody hell is it supposed to mean?” Rivers asked.

“Maybe Blackwell is supposed to be the bird?” Wallace offered. He shrugged. “He talked to birds—or so his niece claimed.”

“Then Abbott's the spider,” Rivers said.

Lamb gave the drawing to Larkin with instructions to check it for fingerprints and to check the shed more thoroughly for further evidence. He instructed Rivers and Wallace and their men to return to their respective tasks after lunch, then headed back to Winchester, hoping that Winston-Sheed had finished Blackwell's autopsy and he could read it.

He was driving through open country, fifteen minutes from Winchester, when he heard the sound of aircraft overhead. He glanced skyward and was surprised to see a formation of German dive-bombers, Stukas, heading north. He'd heard no warning sirens. The German planes appeared to be flying unusually low; their nearness spooked him and he felt exposed. Meadow and crop fields surrounded the stretch of road on which he was driving. Roughly two hundred yards ahead, though, it entered a small wood. He stepped on the gas as the Stukas neared.

In the wood, he pulled the Wolseley to the shoulder and left it running. He got out of the car and moved into the trees. He could hear the droning of the planes not far above. He walked into the wood in part to distance himself from his car; he knew his thinking was partly irrational. The chances of a bomb hitting the Wolseley and it exploding were practically nil. And yet he had seen other men die in far more freakish ways.

His heart throbbing, he moved to the edge of the wood, to a place where he could see over the meadow he'd just passed, and peered at the sky. A formation of perhaps twenty Stukas was passing overhead. On the Somme, he'd never felt menaced by airplanes. Then, most planes didn't carry bombs that could be dropped with impunity on all and sundry. But warfare had changed drastically since, and the German Blitzkrieg attacks on the continent had confirmed the new lethality
of the airplane. He was about to retreat into the relative safety of the wood when he saw a pair of British fighters, Spitfires, suddenly appear from the north, one flying slightly above the other. They headed straight at the Germans with such fierce intent that Lamb wondered if they meant to ram the Stukas. The higher of the two Spitfires suddenly swooped upward, while the lower plane kept straight on. The British pilot flew into the midst of the Stukas like a bee attacking a swarm of wasps. Lamb heard a brief cackle of gunfire—and almost immediately one of the Germans began to trail white smoke. A second later the Stuka exploded and plummeted in two flaming pieces. It all seemed to happen in an instant. Then a second Stuka began to trail smoke. It kept its northward course for a few more seconds before its white vapor trail turned black and it veered sharply to the east and disappeared.

Now Lamb saw a Spitfire moving westward with a German fighter, a Messerschmitt 109, on its tail. The Messerschmitt had been hovering nearby, acting as a protective escort to the slow-moving Stukas, and had jumped on the Spitfire. Lamb could not tell if the Spitfire was one of the two British fighters he had seen seconds earlier, but thought that it must be. The RAF man rocked his wings, then circled upward. The German in the Messerschmitt followed.

The British pilot continued to race skyward so that his plane was nearly perpendicular to the earth. Reaching the apex of his climb, he suddenly maneuvered the plane into a backward loop and headed toward the ground in a steep dive. Lamb wondered if the German had managed to hit the Spitfire, though he saw no smoke coming from the plane. He thought:
He's going right into the ground.

But when the pilot was less than a hundred meters from the ground, from death, he suddenly leveled his plane and raced in Lamb's direction. Incredibly, the German had performed the identical maneuver and continued to follow.

The Spitfire was perhaps a hundred meters above and moving toward the meadow. A second later, it swept past Lamb at what seemed to him an astounding rate of speed—and yet he'd clearly seen the
form of the pilot in the cockpit. The Messerschmitt followed. As the German plane passed Lamb, its guns fired a quick burst; it then swept away to the east. Lamb's bowels tightened.

The Spitfire headed sharply upward, trailing gray smoke from its right wing. Once again, when the pilot reached the apex of his climb, he turned his plane into a dive. The plane leveled out and headed back toward Lamb—though as it came on, Lamb saw that that Spitfire was losing altitude and that oily black smoke rippled from the place where the gray smoke had been.

The fighter roared past Lamb; this time he saw that its cockpit was aflame and caught the merest glimpse of the pilot's silhouette among the licking fire. He felt dumb, rooted, irrelevant. The plane sped on for a few seconds more before it suddenly nosed down and headed for the ground. It smacked into the earth about three quarters of a mile distant and exploded in a ball of fire that shook the ground on which Lamb was standing.

He felt his knees give way and, an instant later, he fainted.

He came to a few seconds later, lying on his back. The first thing he glimpsed was a remnant of the smoke from the burning Spitfire dissipating in the blue sky. He managed to pull himself to his feet. The German swarm had passed and the meadow had become so quiet that Lamb could hear the buzz of insects. He looked in the direction of the place where the Spitfire had disappeared. A dense column of acrid black smoke billowed toward the sky.

Dead
, he thought.
The boy is dead.

A memory of Eric Parker's blackened, lifeless face assailed him. He thought that he should go to the plane, but realized there was nothing he could do. He had no desire to see the wreckage. Cleaning up the mess was someone else's duty.

Mildly confounded, he moved back through the wood to his car and drove the rest of the way to Winchester in a daze. Rather than
going to the nick, he went directly home, to Marjorie. He found her sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea. She'd just returned from shopping, during which time she'd spent a half hour standing in line to snag a decent-sized cod, which she intended to bake that afternoon for their tea. Lamb's unexpected entrance startled her. She immediately saw the disquiet in his eyes.

“What's wrong?” she asked. She stood and guided him toward a chair.

He sat and put his hat on the table. “I had to stop,” he said. “I was on the road, in the open.” He looked at her quizzically. “The Germans didn't come here, then?”

“No.” She sat next to him. “Can you tell me about it?”

Since the bombing had begun, Marjorie knew that Lamb inevitably must face a moment when the war returned to him. During the early years of their marriage, nightmares had disturbed his sleep. In the past decade or so, he'd managed to bury his memories of the Somme in the routines and concerns of his daily life, and the nightmares mostly had ceased. Seeing the stunned look in her husband's eyes, Marjorie knew that something Lamb had witnessed had dredged those submerged memories to the surface.

“Stukas; I think they were going for the airfield at Cloverton,” Lamb said. “They were so bloody low.” He thought of the Spitfire pilot in the burning cockpit. “I saw a pilot die. I was coming from Quimby when I heard them in the sky and realized that I was in the open.” He paused, then added, “I suppose I panicked a bit. I found some cover in a wood and went to the edge and watched them pass. They were like wasps. A boy in a Spitfire came in among them—went straight into them. He sacrificed himself. I watched him go down; his plane was burning. He went down in a field and there was an explosion.”

He looked at Marjorie. “I fainted. I couldn't help it—couldn't control it.”

She touched his cheek. “You mustn't feel ashamed of merely surviving,” she said. She had told him this many times, though she hadn't needed to in many years.

He'd hoped not to worry Marjorie with the problem of Harry Rivers. But he saw now that he was wrong to think that Marjorie shouldn't know. And he'd been wrong to believe that he could keep the old war at bay in the midst of the new one. He would need Marjorie's help to keep his balance—to stay on the beam—just as he'd needed her twenty years earlier, when he'd returned from the trenches, and as he'd needed her ever since.

“Dick Walters's replacement came yesterday,” he said. “It's Harry Rivers.”

“Rivers?” For a second, Marjorie wondered if her husband was delusional. Harry Rivers was among the phantoms of the first war that Lamb had buried.

“He was transferred. He bollixed a case in Warwickshire and was transferred.”

“Bu
t here,
of all places… .”

“I didn't want to bother you with it.”

Many years earlier, Marjorie had heard Lamb's explanation of why he'd tolerated Rivers's enmity and found it unconvincing. She was sure that Lamb felt responsible for Parker's death, when he shouldn't. The bloody Germans were responsible for Parker's death. She believed that Harry Rivers had done too good a job of playing on her husband's sense of guilt in Parker's death as a way of relieving himself of his own feelings of culpability, and she had told Lamb this, too, on many occasions, though not in many years.

But she repeated none of that now. She said only, “I'm glad you told me all the same.” She squeezed his hand in hers. “You owe him nothing. Just remember that.”

“I know,” Lamb whispered.

Marjorie kissed his head. “You know,” she said. “But you don't believe. And you must believe.”

LAMB SAT AT THE TABLE SIPPING TEA FOR AN HOUR BEFORE HE FELT
ready again to face the world.

During that time, he temporarily put aside his guilt about fouling the kitchen and smoked a half dozen cigarettes to the nub. When he was done, he told himself he must get back to his job and willed himself to leave the kitchen and go out to the Wolseley. Marjorie followed him to the car. She kissed him again and promised that she would have a baked cod ready for their tea when he returned home.