The Language of the Dead (3 page)

A young man dressed in dark slacks and a bone-colored sweater kept pace with Vera. His right arm was missing from the elbow down
and the right sleeve of his shirt was pinned back at the shoulder. He appeared to be no more than twenty. Lamb wondered if he had lost his arm at Dunkirk—though Dunkirk had only just happened.

Vera embraced her father briefly and kissed his cheek. They hadn't seen each other in more than a week, when Vera had spent most of a Sunday with Marjorie and Lamb at home in Winchester.

“Hello, Vera,” he said, smiling. He missed her presence around the house. Even so, he kept his tone businesslike, so as not to embarrass her. “Your mother sends her love.”

Vera smiled back. “Love to mother,” she said. She was a slender girl, with a youthful face, though Lamb had long believed that she possessed what people sometimes called an “old soul”—a seriousness of purpose and wisdom beyond her years. She had big, bright brown eyes and smiled often and was capable of great stubbornness in defense of ideas and people she respected or loved. She glanced toward Blackwell's cottage. “It's terrible what's happened,” she said.

“Yes,” Lamb said. “Did you know him?”

“Not really. I heard, though, that he was just a quiet old man.”

“He was a bit more than that,” said the young man. He was slender and, Lamb thought, quite handsome, with luxuriant black hair that was a bit longer than normal and dark eyes that seemed fired with emotion.

“Dad, this is Arthur Lear,” Vera said. “He and his father have a farm near the village.” Vera smiled at Arthur Lear in a way that left Lamb feeling unsettled.

Arthur extended his lone hand—his left—and smiled. “Pleased to meet you, sir,” he said.

“The pleasure's mine,” Lamb said, shaking Arthur's hand.

“Well, we should let you go, Dad,” Vera said. “I'm sure you're busy and we don't want to get in the way. We only heard an hour or so ago.”

Seeing her father had left Vera feeling more conflicted than she'd guessed it would. She might have come without Arthur—kept him a secret. She probably should have done. Her feelings about him had begun to change recently, and she'd begun to worry if she'd done the right thing in allowing herself to become so quickly involved with him.

“Well, I'm glad you came,” Lamb said. “If I have time, I'll stop by your billet.”

She smiled. “No need, Dad. You've got a lot to do and I'm fine.”

Lamb wondered if Vera planned on going back to her billet with Arthur Lear. “All right,” he said. He wanted to kiss her on the forehead—but that, too, would embarrass her. “I'll give your love to your mother.” He turned toward Arthur. Arthur certainly had his eye on Vera, he decided. He felt bad that the boy had lost his arm, but he also understood how a lost arm might play to Arthur's advantage.

Vera nodded farewell to her father, then she and Arthur went back down the High Street toward her billet. As he watched her go, Lamb felt that Vera had moved to a point in her life in which she was all but out of his reach. Strangely, he hadn't seen that moment coming, as he should have.

He turned to Harris. “Let's go, Constable,” he said.

Lamb and Harris moved up Manscome Hill through an area bordered on their left by meadows and hedges and on their right by a small wood.

The twilight air had grown cool and redolent of the fragrances of wildflowers and windblown grasses. Bees and butterflies busied themselves in the meadows, and the first bats appeared. Small birds occasionally darted from thickets to alight on sagging fences. The sun had eased its way down to a point just beneath the tops of the highest trees of the wood to their right, slanting shadows across the footpath.

They soon passed a gate through which the path branched off and led to George Abbott's farmhouse. Their passing frightened a flock of fat sheep that scuttled, bleating, off the path into a meadow.

“You were the first called to the scene?” Lamb asked Harris.

“Yes, sir. The body was discovered by Miss Blackwell and Mr. Abbott; seems Miss Blackwell missed her uncle when he failed to show for his tea. The deceased was, according to his niece, a man of
singular habits who never missed his tea. So when he failed to show after Miss Blackwell had finished her own tea, she began to worry and came up the hill to fetch Mr. Abbott, who had hired the deceased to trim the hedges along one of his fields.”

“So they went in search of Mr. Blackwell together, then?” Lamb asked.

“Yes, sir. According to Miss Blackwell, Mr. Abbott went directly to the spot. Afterward, they called me from the pub—I live in Moresham—then went to Miss Blackwell's cottage, where I met them. That was about half past six. When I arrived, Miss Blackwell was still very much in a state. They led me to the scene, after which I told Mr. Abbott to wait at his house. I escorted Miss Blackwell back to her cottage. I then telephoned the constabulary and spoke to Sergeant Wallace.”

They passed beneath a massive, long-dead sycamore near a small wooden bridge that conveyed the path across Mills Run. From here, the creek moved into, through, and out the opposite side of the wood to their right, where it once had powered a grain mill, which had lain abandoned now for nearly fifty years and fallen into ruin.

Once they were across the footbridge, Harris led Lamb off the path into the meadow on their left, where they began a gentle, sloping climb of about a hundred meters to the place where Will Blackwell's body lay. Several people stood in a rough circle around the old man's body. One of these was Wallace, who approached Lamb.

“Evening, sir,” he said, touching the brim of his fedora. As usual, Wallace was dressed in a smart-looking dark suit. He wore a yellow silk tie and an expensive-looking pair of black patent leather shoes, which had become stained with mud.

“What have we got?” Lamb asked.

“A complicated scene, I'm afraid. We've photographed the body and the immediate surrounding area. We're trying to get the out-of-door matters cleared up before it gets dark.”

The doctor, Winston-Sheed, was kneeling next to the body, while Cyril Larkin, the forensics man, stood by. Lamb exchanged nods of greeting with them, then turned his attention to the body.

Will Blackwell's arms were flung away from his body, as if in a gesture of ecstatic welcome, and his legs spread wide. The position of the old man's limbs put Lamb in mind of a child lying in the snow making angels. The leftmost tine of a rusting pitchfork with a worn, weathered handle was thrust into the center of his neck while a scythe with a curved blade of roughly twenty inches long—also partly rusted—protruded from his chest. A copious amount of blood had pooled in the dry grass around the body, and the old man's eye sockets were full of fleshy pulp.

“Best guess at the moment is that he's been dead about six or seven hours,” Winston-Sheed said. “It appears he put up no fight. My guess is that he was first knocked unconscious, probably from behind. The killer then thrust the scythe and the pitchfork into him. Given the amount of blood around the head and neck, I'd say the pitchfork came first; the lack of blood from the chest argues that he was dead when the killer drove the scythe in there. Still, either one would have killed him outright; the second would have been unnecessary if the killer's goal merely was to send Mr. Blackwell to the hereafter. Both implements are buried very deep, which would suggest that the old man was on his back and not resisting when the thrusts were made.”

Winston-Sheed stood and pulled a tarnished silver cigarette case from the pocket of his waistcoat. “At some point the killer carved a cross into his forehead, also post-mortem,” he continued. “It's possible the cross was inscribed with the tip of the scythe. As for his eyes, they appear to have been pecked out. Crows, probably. I shouldn't wonder that when we take a look at this mess in the light of morning, we shall see their unpleasant little footprints in the ground around the body. In fact, the little blighters have stuck around for the show.”

Winston-Sheed nodded in the direction of the dead sycamore, a hundred meters down the hill. Eight or nine silent crows roosted in the tree's crooked branches. Lamb thought that they seemed to be waiting for the human interlopers to leave so they could resume their feast. They reminded him of the rats that scurried through the trenches on the Somme and over the rotting bodies lying in no man's
land—opportunists attuned to death. One of the birds suddenly took off from the tree and made its way across the meadow, as if it realized that Lamb was scrutinizing it and was guilty.

Winston-Sheed offered Lamb a cigarette from his silver case. “Thanks, but no,” Lamb said. The pain of refusal was nearly physical. Reluctantly, he dug into the pocket of his jacket, found the tin of butterscotches, and popped one into his mouth.

Lamb stared at the body for a moment, rolling the candy in his mouth. The killer seemed to have posed the old man, he thought. “It all seems too bloody obvious somehow, doesn't it?” he said finally, as much to himself as to Winston-Sheed. “Too dressed up.”

Winston-Sheed lit a cigarette. He was a tall, slender man of about forty. His father was some sort of titled someone—Lamb was not sure who, or from where. His appearance, speech, and manner bespoke the casual elegance of a born aristocrat, though he was not averse to dirtying himself at a crime scene and was tireless in the work he did on behalf of the constabulary. Winston-Sheed exhaled and looked at the sky, which was growing darker. In Quimby and all over England, the blackout soon would fall. That meant all outdoor lights extinguished, all windows shuttered or curtained, and no torches. Even fags were discouraged, for fear that their glow might give the German bombers a target.

Winston-Sheed looked at his cigarette with affection. “I sincerely hope this doesn't bring the Stukas down on us,” he said. “It's rather too uncivilized to think that we should go without a fag now and again just to avoid attracting a few bombs.” He took a long drag of the cigarette, which made Lamb jealous. “There is rather a baroque viciousness to the thing, certainly,” the doctor said, returning to the matter at hand.

“Given the depth of the wounds, the killer must have been a man, yes?” Lamb asked.

“I should think so,” Winston-Sheed said. “Either that or a very strong and vicious woman.”

Lamb examined Blackwell's clothes, digging into the pockets of his trousers and jacket, but found them empty save for a scrap of paper upon
which someone—presumably Blackwell—had written, in a shaky hand:
in the nut
. He held the note out so that Wallace and Winston-Sheed could read it. “What do you make of this?” he asked.

“Damned if I know,” Wallace said. “Perhaps something to do with gathering nuts? They do that sort of thing hereabouts, I would imagine. Gathering nuts and berries and the like.”

“Perhaps,” Lamb said absently. He pulled a billfold from his pocket and placed the note within it. He looked at the sky; they had perhaps an hour of decent light in which to work. They would have to accomplish what they could for the moment and save the rest for tomorrow.

“Have you done all you need to do for now?” he asked Winston-Sheed.

“For now, yes,” the doctor said.

Lamb stepped away from the body. “All right, then, Mr. Larkin—your turn,” he said to the forensics man. “We'll have to move quickly.”

Larkin was a tall, reed-thin young man whose dark suits didn't fit him properly; his trouser legs and the sleeves of his jacket always appeared to be several inches too short for his limbs. He wore heavy-framed glasses with thick lenses that invariably slid down his nose. When Lamb had first met Larkin, he'd thought
The bloody forensics man can't see!
But he'd discovered that Larkin possessed a kind of lanky, wiry energy and a good mind.

Larkin had come to the constabulary two months earlier, after Hampshire's longtime forensics man, Harold Llewellyn, had joined the RAF as a medical officer. Lamb had liked and trusted Llewellyn and had been sorry to lose him. But he also knew that Llewellyn was to be only the first of many solid, skilled men the war would vacuum up. First, the experienced, able-bodied men would go off to battle, to be replaced by the less experienced and able. Then, if the thing dragged on long enough, even these replacements would be taken up, to be replaced by—who? He could see a time coming when solving domestic crimes, even murder, might get pushed so far down the list of priorities that it ceased to matter.

Worse for Lamb even than the loss of Llewellyn, though, was the departure into the Army of DI Richard Walters, his primary
lieutenant and good friend. He and Dick Walters had come of age together in the Hampshire Constabulary. Two months earlier, as the Germans were on the verge of defeating France, Walters had quit the police in a surge of patriotism and entered the Army as a captain of military intelligence. Lamb admired Walters's spirit and partly shared it. But he was not about to leave Marjorie and Vera for a foreign field. He'd done his bit the first time round. Police Superintendent Anthony Harding had not yet replaced Walters, though the super had told Lamb less than a week earlier that a transfer was due in soon from up north.