The Language of the Dead (25 page)

“You haven't upset me. I'm fine.”

“But I can tell that you're upset. That you hate me.”

“I don't hate you, Arthur.”

“You do. I can tell.” He was being childish now. That, too, was manipulative—and pitiful.

“I can't talk about this now, Arthur. I'm on duty.”

“You see,” he said. “You could talk to me if you wanted, but you don't. Because I've upset you.”

“Please, Arthur.”

“It's Peter; you like him. I sometimes think you like him more than you like me. Is that one of his drawings?” He made a move to take the drawing from her, but she yanked it away.

Arthur laughed slightly—a laugh that contained a sarcastic, derisive edge. “And here I thought you might even have loved me,” he said.

“Please, Arthur. I must go back to work. I'm on duty.”

She tried to move around him, to ascend the stairs, but he blocked her way.

“I see,” Arthur said. “Because he draws the beautiful pictures, is that it?” He held aloft the stub of his right arm; his eyes narrowed in a menacing way. “Not all of us can draw, can we, Vera?”

She hated his implication that she disliked him because of his arm. That was the most manipulative of all.
He
used his arm, deployed it. It had made no difference to her.

“Your arm has nothing to do with it and never has,” she said.

He hit the railing of the stair with his fist. “Bollocks!” he said. “I know what you want. You want to be rid of me. You'd rather spend your time with a bleeding idiot who draws spiders.”

“That's not true. And it's not fair.”

He held his stump aloft again, his eyes aflame. “No,
this
isn't bloody fair. You're a liar, Vera, a liar. And you're a whore. Well, I'll tell you something.
He
hasn't got one, has he? Or if he does, he doesn't know what to do with it.”

A whore
. She would rather that he had struck her in the face. She had given herself to him because she trusted and pitied him. She saw the true extent of her mistake and no longer even wanted to be in his presence.

“Get out!” she yelled, pointing toward the street. “Get the bloody hell out!”

Arthur took a step toward her, as if he meant to strike her. Vera drew back from him, frightened.

He smiled a crooked, contemptuous smile. “You're bloody pathetic,” he said. “You and your idiot eunuch.” He pointed at her, jabbing. “I better not catch the two of you together, or I'll make both of you regret it.”

“Get out!” She moved as if to turn the siren crank, to awaken the village.

Arthur backed away from the stair. He began to cry. “I hate you!” he yelled. Then he ran into the street and toward his father's farm.

Vera ran up the stairs to the Council room, slammed the door, and locked it, her heart beating furiously. She burst into tears and kicked the door in a gesture of shock, sorrow, and anger.

ALBERT GILLEY HAD FOUND IT RATHER EASY TO TRACK DOWN
George Abbott and therefore to point Rivers in the right direction. Abbott and Lydia had been hanging around the track since the day after Blackwell's killing, flashing cash and losing badly, Gilley told Rivers. They were staying in a doss house near the track.

A bleary-eyed Lydia had answered Rivers's knock on the door of their room, simple as that. She'd seemed genuinely surprised to see Rivers. Abbott was snoring in bed.

A few hours later, in an interview room in Winchester, Lamb began his interrogation of Lydia by reminding her that people who were convicted of murder were hanged and that, if she had not killed her uncle, the only way for her to avoid the gallows was to tell the truth. In response, she retched up her story in a flood of repressed emotion and bitter tears.

She hadn't expected her uncle to be killed—she truly hadn't. The plan had been for Abbott to set Will to work on his hedges that morning, and for her and Abbott to take a bit of Will's money and go to Paulsgrove. It was supposed to have been a lark, a one-off thing, though she hadn't been convinced that they could do it all in a single day and still return to Quimby before Will came home for his tea. She'd never been to the racetrack or any sort of gambling establishment. But Abbott—she called him George—told her they could do it easily and that Will never would know they'd been gone. And they
had
done it. They'd bet on a few races and lost most of the thirty pounds they'd stolen from Will's box, then gotten back to Quimby on time. But then Will had failed to show for his tea.

She had known Abbott most of her life, but they hadn't begun “relations,” as she called it, until about fourteen months earlier. She was lonely, had always been lonely, and had never had much. Abbott had things—a farm and house of his own, sheep, a phonograph, and other possessions. And he
had
helped Will—given him work—when no one else would. Then, about two months after she and Abbott had begun their “relations,” the boy ran away from Lord Pembroke's estate and Will brought the boy home… .

The words stunned Lamb.

“Hold on,” he said. “Which boy?”

“His name were Thomas,” Lydia said. “I don't know his surname.”

Lamb signaled to the constable who stood by the door. The man came to the table and Lamb whispered something to him. The constable nodded and left the room. Lamb turned back to Lydia.

“You say that Will brought the boy, Thomas, home?”

“Yes, sir.” She felt vaguely irritated with Lamb; she was trying to tell him the truth about what had happened on the day her uncle died, and yet he was interrupting her with irrelevant questions about Thomas.

“What do you mean when you say that Will brought Thomas home?”

“Just that. The boy had run away from Brookings—he was one of the orphan boys who stay there summers. And he ran away and ended
up on the hill, where Will found him, hiding. He were hungry and scared. The boy took to Will; he told Will he didn't want to go back to Brookings. He'd had some trouble there with someone.”

“Donald Fordham?” Lamb asked.

“I don't know, sir,” Lydia said. “I didn't talk to the boy, really. Shortly after he found the boy, Will hiked over to Brookings and, an hour later, returned with Lord Pembroke in Lord Pembroke's motorcar and Lord Pembroke took the boy back to Brookings.”

The constable returned with the snapshot of the boy they'd found in Emily Fordham's wallet. Lamb placed it on the table. “Is this Thomas?”

Lydia looked at the photo. “Yes, sir, that is the boy.”

“Do you know a woman named Emily Fordham, Miss Blackwell?”

Lydia looked genuinely confused. “No. I've never heard of no one named Emily Fordham, sir.” Lamb was getting far off the track, she thought. She was trying to tell him about Will's money. She didn't want George to go to the gallows; she loved George. Lamb had said to tell the truth, and she was doing that. Better that she should tell the truth than that Lamb should believe that George had killed her uncle.

“You said when we spoke the first time that Peter Wilkins sometimes came over from Lord Pembroke's estate to sit with Will while Will worked,” Lamb said. “Do you know if Peter Wilkins showed Will where Thomas was hiding on the hill?”

Lamb considered the question another shot in the dark. He was beginning to arrange in his mind a scenario in which the killings had occurred and why, though he hadn't a bloody scrap of evidence yet to support such a scenario.

“Peter Wilkins, sir?” Lydia thought the question strange. Peter Wilkins was deaf and dumb as a mule. He didn't even speak, only grunted.

“Yes, Peter Wilkins,” Lamb said. “Is it possible that he led your uncle to where Thomas was hiding?”

Lydia shook her head. “I don't know, sir.” Her patience finally ran out. “But I'm trying to tell you about the money. I don't want George to hang. He didn't do it.”

Seeing that Lydia seemed to know little about Thomas, Lamb returned to the question of Will Blackwell's money. “Yes, please tell me about the money.”

“Lord Pembroke gave it to him. A hundred and seventy-five pound. For finding Thomas.”

For a second time, Lamb found himself stunned by what Lydia Blackwell had told him. “And what did your uncle do with this money?” he asked.

Lydia nodded at the tin box, which was on the table between them. “He put it in there.”

“And how much did he have in the box, all told?”

“About two hundred fifty pound, sir.”

“And where did the rest of it come from—the other seventy-five pounds?”

“That was from what he'd saved over many, many years, sir. He didn't like banks.”

“And you told George Abbott about the money—about the fact that your uncle had two hundred and fifty quid in cash in a box hidden beneath the floorboards of his bedroom closet.”

Lydia drew back from Lamb as if he'd threatened to slap her. “No, sir!” she said with a tone of resolve that surprised Lamb. “I didn't even know about the box until two weeks ago, when Will told me about it. And it was Will told George about the money, for my sake.”

Lydia looked away for a second. Tears began to well in her eyes. “Will were worried that he was getting old and that his time was nearly up,” she said. She shook her head. “It all sounds crazy to you, sir, I know, but he said that the crows had been speaking to him, telling him that his time was coming very soon. He thought that they were waiting for him to die—the crows—so they could feed on his remains. I tried to tell him that his thinking weren't right, sir—that the crows had nothing to do with anything. That they were only just crows. But he wouldn't believe me.”

She put her hand to her mouth, staving off the urge to cry. Lamb reached across the table and gently touched her arm. “Take your time,” he said. “Will told you about the money two weeks ago?”

Lydia sniffled. “Yes,” she said. “He said that he wanted me to have it, the money, should he …” She hesitated. “… should he
die
, sir. He told me where the money was and said that if he should die, that I should take it.”

“And you say
he
told Abbott about the money?”

“Yes, sir.” She pressed her fingers against the wells of her eyes. “I was certain that Will didn't know about George and me. But he did, sir. He did. It was very hard to hide things from Will. He could see right through you, like. He said that he expected George to look after me once he was gone and that he was going to ask George to do the right thing by me.” She pursed her lips and shook her head slightly. “I suppose he thought George was more likely to give him that promise if he knew I weren't to be a burden to George—if George knew there was to be money involved.”

“And so on the day Will died, you and George went to the track, then?”

Lydia nodded.

“And George told you that you and he would take a small bit of the money from the box—say twenty quid—while Will was working on the hill, on the hedges, and that the two of you would go to the track and come back with twice that amount, maybe more, is that it?”

She nodded again. A tear ran down her right cheek, which she wiped away as if it had burned her.

“And how much did you take from Will's box that morning, then?”

“Thirty.” She barely said it.

“And George lost it all, didn't he?”

She didn't answer.

“And after Will died, he took the cash and persuaded you to come again to the track,” Lamb continued. “He said that the two of you needed to get away and that he was sure that his luck would change. He wanted to take it all, but I think you put your foot down and told him that you would go only if you took another thirty or so. You were beginning to believe that he was going to squander the money if you didn't stop him. Am I right about that, too?”

“Yes.” She put her right hand against her face.

Lamb was nearly finished. He had one more bullet to fire into the void. He produced the drawing of the spider snagging the bird that he'd found in the shed behind Blackwell's cottage.

“Does this sketch mean anything to you?” he asked Lydia.

Lydia found the drawing ugly, frightening. “No.”

“It was found in the toolshed behind your cottage lying on a kind of altar—a satanic altar—along with a butchered chicken Michael Bradford claims your uncle stole from him. Did your uncle perform satanic rituals in the shed behind the house?”

“No! As I said before, sir, those are lies! Will weren't a witch! He were a kind man, a good man.”

“Did George Abbott kill your uncle, Miss Blackwell? Maybe he surprised you. You hadn't expected him to kill Will; you only expected a day at the track. But once he showed you Will's body, you had to do as he said. You're afraid of him, after all, aren't you? Afraid that he might do to you what he did to Will?”