The Language of the Dead (37 page)

The fact that Peter had tried to communicate with Vera stunned Lamb. The boy seemed determined that
someone
receive and decipher his message. He immediately wondered if Peter saw Vera as a kind of substitute for Emily Fordham. Had he known that Peter was contacting Vera, he would have counseled her to avoid him as potentially dangerous. Now, though, he had to know what Peter had tried to tell Vera.

“Does the drawing you found disturbing contain a spider?” Lamb asked.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“He's been leaving drawings for me too. They all have spiders, though he's supposed to like butterflies. His guardian, Lord Pembroke, insists that Peter can neither read nor write, but I've come to believe that's not true. I think the boy is more sophisticated than most people realize. I also believe that he knows something about the killings and might himself even be in some danger. Either that, or he himself killed Will Blackwell and Emily Fordham.”

Vera looked at her father in disbelief. She thought he sounded like Arthur Lear. “But he's harmless,” she protested, defending Peter.

“He's volatile—he hates when his life is thrown into disorder. He apparently believed that Emily Fordham, the girl from Lipscombe, was in love with him. But she had moved on; she'd become pregnant by an RAF pilot from Cloverton airfield. If Peter had found this out somehow, it might have made him jealous.”

“But why would he kill Mr. Blackwell?”

“I don't know—and I don't know that he did. But last summer, one of the orphan boys who was staying on Lord Pembroke's estate ran away. Blackwell found the boy on Manscome Hill and returned the boy to Brookings, which seemed to have upset the boy and, apparently, upset Peter.”

“What do his drawings mean, then? What is he trying to say?”

“I haven't figured that out yet, though I do believe that they contain some sort of message directed at whoever finds them. Have you managed to speak to him?”

“I tried, but he always ran.”

“This other drawing that he gave you—what is it of?”

“A blue butterfly. I came up the hill one day and sat in the grass, hoping to see Peter, and instead I saw exactly
that
butterfly—a blue butterfly with white and black bands at the edges of its wings. He must have seen me watching it, then sketched it. He left the drawing for me to find on the path, I'm sure of it. He wrote a kind of note beneath it, that I don't understand.” She spelled the note out for Lamb:
tommss ded
.

Lamb recognized the weird train of letters. Peter had left exactly that message on his drawing of the spider sitting upon the dark oval that Lamb had found beneath the dead tree on the hill behind Peter's summerhouse.

“I think he's trying to say that Thomas is dead,” Lamb said.

“But who is Thomas?”

“Thomas is the boy who ran away from Brookings last summer. We found very disturbing evidence connected with him in the home of the man who runs the orphanage in which the boys spend the rest of the year. I think that Thomas also is connected in some way to the killings of Blackwell and the girl from Lipscombe and perhaps even Michael Bradford.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“Very disturbing photographs,” Lamb said. “That's all I'll say.”

“I'm no longer a little girl, dad,” Vera said, openly exasperated at her father's unwillingness to speak to her as he would another adult.

Lamb hesitated. He looked at Vera. She was no longer a little girl, that was true—though she still was
his
. That wouldn't change; he couldn't bear that changing. Even so, he had no cause to treat her as a child.

“The photograph showed that the director of the orphanage was abusing Thomas sexually,” he said. “Which means the director probably abused other boys as well. They were children, and his prisoners, and could do nothing about it.”

Vera was silent for what seemed to Lamb a long time. He wondered what she was thinking. Had she known that adults raped children, conceived of such a grievous offense to God and everything natural and good in the world? Or was
he
the one who was hopelessly naïve?

“Did this man, the orphanage director, kill Thomas, then?” Vera said finally.

“It looks that way. Now the man himself is dead. He seems to have committed suicide. Shot himself in the head.”

“That's terrible. So much death. It seems to have infected everything.”

They walked for a few minutes in silence. Then Vera asked: “But what can it mean: ‘Thomas is dead' written beneath the sketch of a blue butterfly? If you're right about Peter sending messages, then there has to be some significance in the way he joined the two, the drawing and the words.”

Lamb stopped. “Hold on,” he said. He lightly laid his right hand on Vera's shoulder. “Say that again, please, just as you just said it. The part about Thomas being dead.”

“What—‘Thomas is dead' beneath the sketch of a blue butterfly?”

“Bloody hell,” Lamb said. He'd suddenly become so excited that he hadn't even realized he'd used “bloody” in Vera's presence. His mind was on something else entirely. A shiver ran up his spine. “I was there,” he said. “
Right
bloody there.”

“What are you talking about, Dad?”

Lamb wasn't yet certain he
was
correct. But light was flooding into corners that until that instant had been dark and hidden from his view. Vera's words had thrown open the curtains. He needed one more point of illumination: motive.

“Can you help me, Vera?”

“Of course.” She hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“Let's get back to your billet and put the kettle on.”

Ten minutes later, they were seated at the table in Vera's billet with their tea and the evidence from Lamb's cardboard portfolio
spread upon it. He explained each piece to her—where he'd found it and what he believed its significance might be. And he explained for her his newfound belief of why Peter had written the strange message beneath the sketch of the blue butterfly he'd left for her to find. “All that's missing is motive,” he said. “A reason for all the killing.” For ten minutes, the two of them stared at the black spiders and the tiny, cryptic words, shifted them around the table as if they were puzzle pieces.

Vera picked up the drawing of the spider web spun across the black oval that Peter had dropped on the hill by the tree behind the summerhouse.

“Tell me again what you think this might be,” she said.

“I don't know. A hole or void of some kind? I thought it might even represent a grave—perhaps Thomas's grave.”

Vera stared at the drawing for several minutes, turning it in her hands and squinting at it. “I wonder if it's supposed to be a knot,” she said finally. “The hole, I mean.”

“A what?

“A knot—like a knot in a tree. They're oval-shaped, from where the branches have fallen off. I wonder if a spider has spun a web across a knot in a tree that Peter knows. Maybe the spider is real and not meant to represent something else. And maybe the hole also is real.”

She laid the drawing next to the note Lamb had found in Will Blackwell's pocket:
in the nut
. “I wonder if that was what the old man was trying to say, too,” she said. “Not ‘nut,' but ‘knot,' and he misspelled it.”

Lamb recalled the photo of the tree on Peter's wall—how, on his last visit, he'd found it hanging crookedly on the wall, the only thing out of place in Peter's well-ordered cottage. And he remembered now that Peter had placed the photo between his exhibits of butterflies and spiders, as if between his ideas of safety and ruination. And he had dropped the drawing for Lamb beneath the tree. Lamb wondered how he could have been so dense. The boy had practically sketched him a bloody map.

“My God,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I think you're right—I think you're absolutely right. The
tree
. It makes perfect sense. Whatever it is, he's hidden it in the bloody tree. And Thomas is beneath the blue butterfly.”

Lamb thought he now knew what Peter had hidden in the tree, and the idea chilled him to the core.

“Which tree?” Vera asked. “And which butterfly?”

“I don't have time to explain,” Lamb said. He clasped her shoulders, as if beholding her anew after a long and trying period of separation. “But you're right, Vera. You've done it. I have to go now, but when I see you again, I'll explain everything.”

He stood and kissed her on the cheek. “First, though, I must use that official telephone of yours.”

LAMB CALLED THE CONSTABULARY AND INSTRUCTED EVERS, THE
desk sergeant, to track down Wallace and Rivers and to tell them to meet him as soon as they could at Brookings. They should not go to the front door but should come around to the back of the house and head toward the sea.

“There's a summerhouse back there, down a path in a break in the hedge,” Lamb said. “As soon as they can. Have you got that?”

“Right, guv.”

Lamb reached Brookings in darkness. He drove slowly up the drive before pulling off near the place where he had pulled off two days earlier. He eased the Wolseley a bit deeper into the wood so that it could not be seen from the drive.

He took a torch from the glove box, stuck it in his belt, and set out along the same route he'd followed previously, past the east
side of the house and the vegetable gardens, down the hedge and along the cliff edge until he reached the path that led from the lawn to Peter's cottage. He relied on the moon to light his way until he reached the back of the summerhouse and was well out of sight from the main house. The night was warm and unusually muggy and Lamb perspired heavily. The cottage was deserted and dark.

At the top of the hill, the dead tree stood out against the moonlit sky, its long leafless branches reaching out like black, bony fingers. Lamb turned on the torch and headed up the path, the beam bouncing just ahead of him. He reached the base of the tree and played the light on the trunk. Its dry gray bark was scarred, pitted, peeling.

He walked around the tree, playing the torch along its trunk, until he found an oval knot of roughly a foot in diameter at just about the height of his chest. He played the light on the knot; it appeared hollow. He peered into the hole. A brown spider with an abdomen the size of a marble sat motionless at the precise center of a web it had spun across the opening. The mummified husks of a half dozen of its victims formed a dark clump just beneath it.

Lamb destroyed the web with a stick; the spider shot somewhere into the blackness of the hollowed trunk. He reached into the hole and found that he was able to get his entire hand into the opening before his knuckles scraped its innermost side. He moved his hand down, his fingers sinking into soft, coarse, slightly moist detritus a few inches below the knot's bottom rim. He winced, in part from what he feared his hand might land upon. He imagined, lurking within, a swarming, slithering horde of tiny monsters.

Moving his hand to the right, he touched something solid that seemed to be wrapped in cloth. He found that he could get his fingers around what felt like the spine of a book. He lifted it from the hole—the thing was heavy and nearly slipped from his fingers. As he pulled it free of the tree, he saw that it was indeed a book, wrapped in a stained and tattered white cotton pillowcase.

He placed the book on the ground at the base of the tree and carefully removed it from its covering. He played the torch on the leather-bound cover, which was trimmed in gold filigree. The book seemed to be a photo album or, perhaps, one of Peter's sketchbooks. He knelt on one knee and opened the book with his right hand, as he held the torch in his left.

The first page contained a photo of a younger Peter facing the camera, naked, his hands on his hips, standing in the same white cell-like room in which a naked, frightened Thomas stood in the photo he'd found in Pirie's night-table drawer. The photo was glued to the thick, sturdy page. Peter appeared to be no more than nine. Like Thomas's, his eyes brimmed with terror and confusion; like Thomas, he was a prisoner, humiliated, powerless, and afraid.

Lamb's heart flooded with revulsion and fear. The thought of what the book must contain sickened him.

He turned the page and found a photo of a boy he didn't know, posed in an identical fashion, utterly naked and facing the camera, an identical terror in his eyes. This boy also appeared to be about ten. He had dark hair and a small cut on his right cheek.

Lamb forced himself to turn the rest of the pages. They contained photos of nineteen boys, all posed in identical fashion. One of the pages was blank, though it contained a place in its center, spotted with dry glue, from which the photo had been removed. Lamb understood that the page had contained the photo of a naked Thomas he'd found in Pirie's room.