The Language of the Dead (7 page)

“Apparently. What do
you
think, then, Sergeant—about Abbott and the niece?”

Wallace agreed with Rivers that Lydia Blackwell seemed to be lying about her relationship with Abbott. But he didn't want to undercut Lamb.

“I don't know,” he said.

Rivers smiled crookedly and clasped a hand on Wallace's shoulder, which surprised Wallace. “Loyalty, eh. That's good. Still, you have to be careful with who you're loyal to. Don't want to back the wrong horse.”

Wallace glanced at Rivers's hand on his shoulder. He wasn't exactly sure what Rivers meant except that he seemed to be referring to Lamb. Wallace wondered what had transpired between them.

“I'm comfortable with my bet,” Wallace said.

Rivers widened his oblique smile a notch, but said nothing.

Lamb made a circuit of the house but found nothing save a small toolshed in the back. He tried the door but found the interior utterly dark and without a light; he decided to leave it for tomorrow. He returned to the cottage to find Wallace and Rivers descending the stairs. The trio rendezvoused in the kitchen and shared what they'd found, which, aside from the old photos, amounted to nothing.

They returned to the chairs in the sitting room.

“We won't trouble you but for a few moments more, Miss Blackwell,” Lamb said. “Just a few more questions and then we'll be on our way.”

He showed Lydia the framed photo Rivers had taken from Will's room. “What can you tell me about this photograph?” he asked.

“That is Claire, Will's late wife.”

Lamb was surprised to hear that Will had been married. Everything he'd heard and seen suggested that the old man always had been a bachelor.

“When did Will's wife die?”

“Many years ago, sir. Before I was born. They had been married less than two years when she died.”

“And Will never remarried?”

“No, sir.”

“Did your uncle leave a will?”

Lydia's eyes widened. “No, sir,” she said. “Will never would have done that.”

“Do you know, then, what will become of his property—this cottage, for instance, and anything else he might have owned or put away?”

Lydia twisted the handkerchief. “I suppose it will come to me, sir.”

Lamb stood. “Constable Harris will look in on you tomorrow morning to see if you require anything,” he said. “We also will return tomorrow and do a more thorough search of the house for evidence. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but hopefully we won't be in your way for too long.”

Lydia nodded her assent and wiped her nose.

Outside the cottage, the faint sound of air-raid sirens some distance to the east impinged on the quiet. Lamb and Wallace had become used to distant sirens and understood that they had nothing to fear—at least for the moment—from such a far-off warning.

“It's the bomber factory again, then, would you say?” Wallace said to Lamb.

“Probably,” Lamb said.

Lamb had considered saying something to Wallace about his performance that evening—praising it while, at the same time, hinting that he knew of Wallace's drinking and was watching the situation. But at the moment this seemed to him not worth the trouble.

“Do we need to get under bloody cover?” Rivers asked. He looked at the sky. As had Lamb, Rivers had learned in the first war never to
take a warning of danger for granted. Those who did normally ended up with their stupid, bleeding heads blown off.

“Not until the ground begins to shake,” Wallace said. He was joking—a joke Rivers didn't seem to get. A bombing was nothing to joke about, of course, and, at first, almost no one had joked about the Germans. But most people did so now, at least occasionally. Oddly, at times joking seemed the only sane thing to do under the circumstances.

“Yeah,” Rivers said, eyeing Wallace with a hint of mistrust. “I see.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Wallace added. “If they do decide to come here, you'll know.”

Lamb turned to Harris.

“Can you get me a copy of a book the title of which is something along the lines of
Ghostly Legends of Hampshire
?” Lamb asked. “It was written by Lord Pembroke, apparently. Do you know it?”

“Yes, sir. I think I know where I can get my hands on a copy.”

“Good man.”

Lamb, Wallace, and Rivers walked to Lamb's Wolseley.

“I'll arrange to conduct a search of the house tomorrow morning,” Lamb said. “After that's done, we'll begin a proper canvassing of the village.”

“What about Abbott?” Rivers asked.

“I haven't forgotten about him,” Lamb said.

“He and the niece are up to something.”

“All right, then,” Lamb said, ignoring Rivers's protestation. “We'll see you tomorrow, David.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wallace was certain that he'd made it through the evening without Lamb catching on to him. Even so, he had cut it very close—
too
close—and decided that he must watch himself more carefully in the future.

PETER WILKINS SAT IN THE DECREPIT SUMMERHOUSE LEAFING THROUGH
Walton's Field Guide to Butterflies
, the kerosene lamp burning beside him.

Adonis Blue, Brown Hairstreak, Duke of Burgundy, Scarce Copper, Sooty Copper, Brown Argus, Chalkhill Blue, Purple Hairstreak … Hesperiidae, Lycaenidae, Nymphalidae, Papilionidae, Pieridae … Skippers, Hairstreaks, Dukes, Emperors, Admirals, Browns, Swallowtails
.

Cole Porter's “You're the Top” spun on the wind-up Victrola. Its repetitive refrain soothed Peter.

You're the top!

You're the Coliseum
.

You're the top!

You're the Louvre Museum
.

But the other words, the words in his mind, intruded:
I must!
He stood quickly, popping up like a jack-in-the-box, then sat again, agitated.

White Letter Hairstreak, Scotch Argus, Queen of Spain Fritillary, Mountain Ringlet, Red Admiral, Small Heath
.

Lord Pembroke had given him the Victrola and many records, but he did not like the other records. Lord Pembroke had given him
Walton's Field Guide to Butterflies.

You're the top!

You're an arrow collar
.

You're the top!

You're a Coolidge dollar
.

Now was the peak time of butterflies—the time of emerging and seeking. The estate was vast but he knew it intimately, every inch. He caught the butterflies in a net and pinned them to boards. When they crumbled, he replaced them. And he made drawings, like the drawings in
Walton's Field Guide to Butterflies
. Sometimes, too, he drew beetles, grasshoppers, bees, wasps, and spiders. He killed them with poison, then sketched their dead bodies. But he liked butterflies best.

You're a Waldorf salad!
(He liked that one because it made him laugh, though tonight he didn't laugh.)

The lamp cast its light on the book in the shape of a circle,
a hole
. The boys were in a hole.

Hermit, Wall Brown, Apollo… .

He stood.
I must!

You're the boats that glide

On the sleepy Zuider Zee,

You're an old Dutch master,

You're Lady Astor,

You're broccoli!

He'd seen the crows eat Will's eyes.

The words surged within his mind, like a wave that was not really something so singular as a wave at all, but the merest edge of an ocean, of all the oceans in the world.

At that same moment, Emily Fordham sat at the desk in her bedroom and thought of what she must write to Lord Pembroke.

She wanted to be fair to Peter. But she understood that she could not put stock in anything Peter had tried to communicate to her. The spider and the rest of it probably was nonsense. Still, Peter's recent behavior had concerned her enough that, two days earlier, she'd written to Donald. Peter's flights of fancy—his fears and aspirations and dreams—were so unlike those of a normal boy.

She wished that Donald were there. He would know what to do. Donald had been Thomas's leader on the estate the previous summer, when Thomas had run away. Donald had been glad that Lord Pembroke had forbade Thomas from returning to the estate once Thomas had surfaced. Donald had said that Thomas was a liar and schemer. But Peter had seemed to like Thomas.

She withdrew a sheet of paper from the drawer and began to write. When she was finished, she put the note in an envelope, addressed and sealed it.

She would post it tomorrow, on her way to see Charles.

Lamb pushed the starter on the Wolseley. Again, the thing responded on the first try.

He thought of how, a few hours before, he'd liked his luck. Now Harry Rivers was sitting next to him, quietly staring out the window at the dark environs of Quimby. Seeing Rivers emerge from the rear seat of Harding's car had been like watching a specter rise from the grave.

Neither of them spoke as the Wolseley crossed the stone bridge over Mills Run and left the village. Thanks to the blackout, Lamb had to maneuver the old machine in near darkness along the narrow road, as the dim beam from his hooded headlights illuminated only the portion of the road directly ahead.

Twenty-two years earlier, nearly to the day, he and Rivers had sat next to each other in a forward trench preparing to head out, in the black of night, on a reconnaissance of the German positions that
lay less than two hundred yards distant. Both had performed such raids several times before and, indeed, Lamb had developed a reputation for being quite skillful at the job, which required stealth and a sharp mind, and depended on Rivers to back and second him. Even then, Lamb entertained no idea that Rivers liked him, though he felt certain that Rivers at least respected him. Rivers's enmity seemed to be grounded in the fact that Lamb wasn't Martin Wells, the man whom he'd replaced as second lieutenant, commanding the squad of south London men that Wells had commanded. But Wells had had the unfortunate luck of getting himself killed in a raid very much like the one that Rivers and Lamb and a half dozen other hand-picked men were about to launch. Lamb often felt as if Rivers blamed him for Wells's death—as if his place in the command pipeline somehow had hastened Wells to the grave. But the main point of contention between him and Rivers had been Private Eric Parker, a cocksure eye-winker and smoker of fags, and Rivers's best friend. Rivers had talked Parker into joining the London Regiment and therefore (or so Lamb would eventually come to discover) felt duty-bound to protect Parker from the ravages of the war, an impossible task. For his part, Parker had felt no enmity toward Lamb and Lamb had come to see Parker as one of his best and most dependable men. But Parker
had
been killed and Rivers had held him—Lamb—responsible.

Rivers spoke first, his head turned to the window. “You're married with a daughter.”

Lamb wondered how Rivers knew. Obviously he'd done some checking.

“Yes. You?”

“Married to the job.”

“That has advantages.”

“It does.”

They drove in silence for ten minutes, Lamb doing his best to concentrate on the road. But he hadn't volunteered to drive Rivers to Winchester in order to fail to divine why Rivers suddenly had parachuted into Hampshire. He didn't want a showdown with Rivers, merely an explanation.

“Why are you here, Harry?” Lamb asked.

Rivers shrugged. “I was transferred, wasn't I?” He looked at Lamb. “War shortages in the south—that's what they told me, anyway. And because I'm a good soldier, when they told me to move, I saluted and did my duty.”

Lamb knew those last words were meant to pierce him and, to a degree, they hit the mark. “But you haven't answered my question,” he said.

“Haven't I?”

“I assume you knew that I was here.”