The Language of the Dead (13 page)

After returning to the nick from Quimby, he spent nearly an hour laboriously typing a report for Lamb on the results of the grid search. He hated typing and, in any case, found it difficult to compose a report that said, in effect, “I found nothing.”

It was now getting on toward teatime. He glanced toward Lamb's small office; the door was closed. Lamb seemed to have gone home. Rivers also seemed to have disappeared and Larkin had gone to the lab to dust the murder weapons for fingerprints. Wallace was just about to knock off when Harding entered the room.

“The RAF have asked for our assistance manning a roadblock near Cloverton,” the super said. “The thing is on the main road into the base, just south of it. Round up three men and get out there. Someone there will give you your marching orders.”

Bloody fucking hell
. He stood. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Harding nodded. “I'll see that you're relieved in due time.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Get going, then. It sounds as if the bloody place is burning up.”

Wallace rounded up three uniformed constables and headed to the airfield, which was roughly four miles northeast of Winchester. He found the roadblock about a half mile from the base. A youthful RAF lieutenant, a dozen soldiers, and a Bren gun crew surrounded by sandbags manned the post. Columns of black smoke rose from the airfield and an acrid smell filled the air—a mixture of burning wood, gasoline, oil, and cordite.

The young officer was waving a tanker truck full of water and a heavier truck with a bulldozer on its bed through the barrier. Wallace ordered the constable at the wheel of the Wolseley to pull off the road onto a slight hill near the gate, just beyond the Bren gun crew. He saw an anti-aircraft emplacement just to the west, its gun pointing skyward. Its crew, having engaged the Stukas, now lounged about the sandbags, sipping coffee. Wallace approached the boyish lieutenant, who was kicking one of the rear tires of the truck transporting the bulldozer and yelling at the driver to “get the bloody goddamned thing moving!”

Wallace offered the man his hand and introduced himself. The officer replied by telling Wallace his last name: Glendon.

“I've a pair of ambulances coming up the road any minute,” Glendon said. “Keep the bloody goddamned civilians out of the way. Bloody nuisance. Tell them to go home.”

Without waiting for Wallace's reply, Glendon turned back to the trucks and shouted at them to move.

Wallace returned to his squad of constables and deployed them along the road, two on each side, about fifty yards from the roadblock. “No civilians,” he told them.

Over the next thirty minutes, he and his men turned back seven people who arrived in motorcars—four men, one of whom was quite old, and three women. None resisted or argued when told that they must turn around and go away. Wallace wondered who they were;
some likely were relatives of those who were stationed at or working at the airfield; others might have been mere curiosity seekers. His job had taught him that some people possessed a bottomless fascination with death, were drawn to it as flies to a corpse.

Over the next two hours, his crew turned away an additional dozen civilians and waved through the ambulances Glendon had been waiting on, along with another four trucks full of water, a fire engine from Portsmouth, several trucks carrying Home Guard men, and a single RAF staff car flying on its front bumper the standards of a very senior officer. Wallace stole a glance into the back seat and thought he spied the severe visage of Hugh “Stuffy” Dowding, the head of RAF fighter command. Glendon saluted the vehicle as it passed.

The traffic at the roadblock had begun to thin and the smoke from the airfield to abate when Wallace saw a woman on a bicycle pedaling toward the checkpoint from the south. The woman came on, steadily and stoically in the twilight, until one of the constables intercepted her. Wallace watched as the constable spoke to the woman. She was a good-looking girl, with longish auburn hair—a bit windswept now from the bike ride—and particularly nice legs. She raised her voice to the constable, though Wallace couldn't hear exactly what she said—something about “having a right.”

He watched the girl get onto her bicycle and attempt to pedal past the constable; the constable grabbed the bike's handlebars and stopped her progress. Wallace guessed that love—or some semblance of it—was urging her on. Women fell for the bloody pilots like bowling pins.

He approached the woman and the constable barring her way. “Hold on there, miss,” he said. “It's not safe ahead.” He nodded to the constable. “I'll handle this, Boyce.”

Emily Fordham looked fiercely at Wallace. “I don't care,” she said. “I'm going forward. I've been through this gate before. I know what I'm doing. I've a right to go in.”

“I'm afraid that doesn't count today, miss,” Wallace said.

Emily Fordham dismounted the bike and pushed it to the side of the road. “Then I'll wait,” she said. She folded her arms.

Wallace smiled, hoping to disarm her. “You could be in for a very long wait. Perhaps all night.”

“I don't care,” Emily said. She sat in the grass by the side of the road.

“You'll get cold when the sun goes down. I assume you brought a blanket with you.”

Emily didn't answer.

Wallace liked her spunk. He envied the flyboy who'd aroused such passion in her. He went to the boot of the Wolseley and withdrew from it a dark green wool blanket that was part of an emergency kit with which the constabulary equipped its vehicles. He also withdrew a packet of tea biscuits. He laid them in the grass next to Emily. “Are you certain I can't give you a ride back to wherever you're from?” he asked.

“I can take care of myself.” She looked at him. “Thank you for the blanket.”

“I'll tell the officer at the checkpoint that you're here,” Wallace said.

“Thank you,” Emily said. But as she spoke, she was looking at the airfield and not at Wallace.

A half hour later, Sergeant Cashen and a trio of fresh constables arrived to relieve Wallace and his men. Wallace told Cashen about Emily. She remained sitting by the road, the blanket lying, still folded, on the ground next to her.

He hoped her lover boy hadn't been killed in the raid. She was, he thought, too young to cry over someone's grave.

LAMB WOKE ALONE. HE HEARD MARJORIE PUTTERING ABOUT
downstairs in the kitchen and hoped she'd made coffee.

He washed, shaved, and dressed. On his way downstairs, he stopped at Vera's room. He wasn't certain why he stopped, other than that he missed Vera. Her bed, with its pale green cotton blanket, was neatly made, as always, though she hadn't slept in it since taking the job in Quimby. Certificates on the wall honored her school accomplishments: one for being crowned champion of her primary school spelling bee in her fifth year, one for having completed a swimming and life-saving course, and one for having earned the runner-up spot in the junior girls division of the 1939 Hampshire cross-country championships.

He thought of the nursery rhyme from which he'd taken his nickname for her, “Doodle Doo.”

Doodle Doodle Doo,

The Princess lost her shoe;

Her Highness hopped—

The fiddler stopped,

Not knowing what to do
.

The rhyme had been one of Vera's favorites when she was a toddler. As Lamb read it to her, she'd acted out the parts of the princess searching for her shoe, her highness hopping, and the fiddler stopping. As the fiddler, she always came to an abrupt halt and looked around the room with a baroque look of confusion on her little face, which always made Lamb laugh.

He saw on Vera's vanity the accoutrements of her young womanhood that she'd left behind—several hairbrushes, a jewelry box, some odds and ends related to makeup, the small dark blue bottle of perfume he and Marjorie had given her the previous Christmas. It had a French name he couldn't remember; Marjorie had picked it out. He hadn't thought much of it at the time but now realized that young women wore perfume for one reason.

He left the room, closing the door behind him.

He was surprised to find that Marjorie was not in the kitchen, though she'd indeed made coffee. The morning edition of the
Mail
was on the table, its front page given over to stories detailing yet another German raid on the Blenheim factory on the previous night. Lamb glanced at it. Once again, the Germans had bollixed the raid, dropping more bombs around the factory than on it. But in the process they'd killed fourteen people, innocents whose houses and farms had inconveniently been in the path of the errant bombs.

The paper also contained a story on Will Blackwell's murder that included prominent mention of the rumor that he practiced witchcraft. The story quoted Harding as saying that the police were inquiring into the black-magic angle, but downplaying it.

Lamb looked out the kitchen window to the rear yard, where Marjorie kept a small flower and vegetable garden. The sky was blue, the weather clear, sunny, and unseasonably hot, which meant that the Germans surely would come again that day and probably that night.
The summer was fast shaping up as the driest and hottest on record. They'd had no rain in two weeks and none was forecast for the following three days.

Marjorie was standing by her small rose garden, her arms wrapped about herself, as if she were cold. He poured two cups of coffee—adding a drop of milk to Marjorie's—and carried them outside. He came up behind Marjorie and kissed her on the back of the neck. “Good morning,” he said and handed her the coffee. He dispensed with “cheers.”

He handed Marjorie the warm cup. “Thank you,” she said; she allowed Lamb to draw her in close to him and they stood together for a minute, not speaking. When the war had begun, he and Marjorie had tried to persuade Vera to take a “safe” war job, perhaps as a typist or telephone operator. But she had resisted this advice, declaring her intention to do her part.

“They bombed the Blenheim factory again last night,” Marjorie said after a moment.

“Yes. But they bollixed it.”

“That's what frightens me.”

“I know.”

“It's all down to chance; there's no guarantee that any of that will bleed into the countryside.” Marjorie looked away. “Damn her muleheadedness,” she said.

“She's determined to do what she will do and we must let her.” He pulled Marjorie closer. “We can't protect her—not entirely. She must learn to protect herself.”

Marjorie emitted a sigh of resignation and shook her head.

“Let's have breakfast,” Lamb said. He took her by the arm and led her back inside.

At the nick, Lamb found Harding sequestered in his office, speaking on the phone. Neither Rivers, nor Wallace, nor Larkin had arrived—though on his desk, Lamb found Larkin's report on the
murder weapons. Larkin had found two sets of fingerprints on the handles of the pitchfork and scythe—Blackwell's and Abbott's. Neither matched the thumbprint he'd found on the drawing. He'd found no usable print on the makeshift altar.

His phone rang. “Lamb.”

“Morning, guv,” Albert Gilley said.

“Hello, Albert.”

“Your Mr. Abbott's into it for at least two hundred, total, with a couple of different blokes, both of whom are losing their patience.”

Lamb whistled, impressed. Two hundred was more than a year's wages for a man like Abbott. “Thank you, Albert,” he said.

“Anything else, guv? There's a nice-looking filly in the second, name of Summer Wind. Five to one.”

“I'll pass today, thanks.”

“Suit yourself. Give my best to the missus.”