The Language of the Dead (9 page)

“Rough night, then, David?” Lamb asked.

Wallace suddenly worried that his clothes smelled of whiskey; Lamb seemed able to detect things about him that he'd missed. “Nothing out of the ordinary.” He felt transparent as glass. He tried a smile, though he knew it wouldn't work. “Showtime, guv,” he said. “Harding's ready.”

Harding stood at the front of the incident room; behind him, Larkin had taped several large photos of Will Blackwell's dead body to a large chalkboard.

Lamb wondered if Harding had noticed Wallace's appearance and figured that the super must have noticed. Although Harding appeared, in manner, to be obtuse, he was nothing of the kind. He noticed
everything
. Lamb knew that Wallace held a low opinion of Harding
and therefore badly underestimated him. Lamb liked Wallace very much and considered him to be an excellent detective. He'd already decided that he would do whatever was in his power to keep Wallace out of the war. But Wallace depended in part on charm to make his way, and Harding despised charm.

Rivers still sat at Walters's old desk; Wallace took his place at his desk. Lamb settled himself against the room's back wall and folded his arms.

“Now then,” Harding said, “as I'm sure you're all aware, we've rather a brutal bit of business to attend to in Quimby. The macabre nature of the thing is bound to attract press attention. I'll handle that aspect so that you men can stick to the job of finding the killer. I've arranged a twenty-pound reward for information leading to an arrest of a viable suspect, which should loosen tongues in the village.”

He nodded at Lamb. “DCI Lamb will take the lead, seconded by DI Harry Rivers and DS Wallace.” Harding raised his hand in Rivers's direction. “Rivers arrived yesterday from Warwickshire; he'll be replacing DI Walters. I'll leave it up to you to make introductions among yourselves.”

Harding then yielded the floor to Lamb, who spent five minutes reviewing the particulars of the case.

“At the moment, Abbott is our best suspect, though we have nothing solid to connect him to the killing,” he said. “We expect to find his fingerprints on the pitchfork and the scythe both. He claims he tried to pull them out of Blackwell's body after he and the niece found the body and the niece went into hysterics—a claim the niece confirmed last night.”

He assigned Rivers to take charge of the canvassing of the village for statements and Wallace to take charge of the search of Blackwell's cottage and a grid search of Manscome Hill. A mild look of surprise crossed Rivers's face. He had expected Lamb to assign him to something unimportant—to keep him out of the way.

They drove to Quimby in several cars—Rivers and his team of three constables in one; Sergeant Cashen and the remaining uniformed
men in the second and third cars; and Lamb, Wallace, and Larkin in Lamb's temperamental Wolseley (which took only two tries to kick over, causing Lamb to wonder if he hadn't made a mistake in not placing a bet that day).

They rendezvoused in front of Blackwell's cottage, where they found Harris awaiting them. Unlike on the previous night, no one seemed to be about; the village seemed to have shut itself up, as Lamb had feared it might.

“How is Miss Blackwell?” Lamb asked Harris.

“She's gone off to her sewing job.”

“Has she now?” The news surprised him.

“Not the grieving type, then,” Rivers said.

“What about Abbott?” Lamb asked.

“He doesn't seem to be home, sir. He likes the ponies, so he might have gone down to Paulsgrove. He normally goes midweek.” It was Wednesday.

“Also not the grieving type, then,” Rivers said. “Neither of them seem too broken up over the old man's death, despite what they said yesterday.”

Lamb was thinking the same thing. He found it interesting that Abbott was a betting man and wondered how Abbott's luck had been running recently. Also, Abbott had ignored his admonition of the previous night not to stray too far from the village.

Harris removed from the pocket of his tunic a small, slender book with a red cover and black spine, which he offered to Lamb. “And I have this for you, sir—
Myths and Legends of the Supernatural in Hampshire
by Lord Jeffrey Pembroke.” The title was embossed in gold lettering. “It belongs to the wife. She has an interest in the supernatural, ghost stories and the like. She's marked two stories she has an idea might be helpful.”

Lamb glanced in the book and found two places marked with blotting paper. “Please tell your wife thank you,” he said.

With that, they got down to work. As Rivers and Wallace deployed their teams, Lamb went to the rear of Blackwell's cottage, intending
to inspect the toolshed he'd found the previous evening. He pushed open the door and stepped inside; the shed's dark, musty interior was roughly eight feet long and six wide. It was nearly empty, which Lamb found strange. Dusty shafts of light filtered in through the irregularly spaced wall slats. A rusting shovel leaned against the right wall by the door, along with perhaps a dozen pieces of milled wood of various lengths. A wooden crate that appeared to be full of rags lay in the middle of the floor. The stench of something dead assailed Lamb.

He peered at the back of the shed and saw what he thought might be another crate. He moved toward it, catching a dangling strand of derelict cobweb on his fedora. The crate—or whatever it was—was flush against the back wall of the shed and appeared to be shrouded with a white handkerchief. He fished a box of matches from the pocket of his jacket, lit one, and squatted before the box. The flame illuminated what appeared to be a kind of small altar—an upturned apple crate with the stubs of a pair of red candles stuck to it; the white object that he took to have been a handkerchief was a sheet of paper.

The match went out, and he lit another. He saw now that a dead chicken—the source of the smell—lay at the base of the altar, its throat cut, its blood coagulating in the dirt. He retrieved the paper from the altar and took it outside so that he could examine it in the light.

He found on it a pencil drawing that fascinated and troubled him at once—that of a small bird snared in a spider's web. The bird's wings were spread wide and bent unnaturally due to the way in which the web ensnared it. Its head lolled, lifeless, and its eyes were slits. But what struck Lamb most about the drawing was its excellence. The drawing was no mere scribble or approximation of its subject; it was highly detailed and, in its way, beautiful, even touching. The way in which the artist had depicted the bird's face pierced him; he could feel the creature's life spark having gone out. He thought of Peter, the mute boy, whom Abbott and Lydia Blackwell both had described as spending much of his time sketching insects. He put the drawing in the rear seat of his car and headed up Manscome Hill along the well-worn trail that paralleled the wood.

He crossed Mills Run on the wooden footbridge. To his left, he saw Wallace, Cashen, and the constables beginning to walk their patches near the hedge where Blackwell's body had been found, beating the meadow grass with sticks.

He walked to the top of the hill, where he stood for a moment gazing down at Quimby; he thought of how it resembled the kind of bucolic hamlet that inevitably featured in paintings of a pastoral England that was quickly disappearing, along with the pastoral ways.

He took from his jacket pocket the copy of
Myths and Legends of the Supernatural in Hampshire
, sat in the lush grass, and opened the book to the chapters that Harris's wife had marked with blotting paper.

The first, entitled “A Milkmaid's Murder,” related the tale of Agnes Clemmons, an elderly spinster who had lived in the nearby village of Moresham. On a cold March afternoon in 1882, she'd been walking near her home when a local farmhand, John Pilson, had attacked and killed her. After knocking Clemmons unconscious with a hefty branch he'd taken from the ground, Pilson had run the tines of his pitchfork through her neck. He'd then carved a crucifix into her forehead with the blade of his scythe before burying the scythe in her chest. Pilson had believed Clemmons to be a witch. When the previous fall's wheat harvest had gone inexplicably bad, he'd fingered her as the source of the failure. He freely admitted to police that he'd killed Clemmons because she had ruined the wheat harvest by running toads over the fields in the dead of night. He believed he'd done the village a favor in dispatching her and genuinely expected to be rewarded for it. Instead, he was hanged.

The chapter entitled “A Black Dog on Manscome Hill” told the story of Will Blackwell's alleged encounter with a demon dog. The incident was said to have occurred in 1880, when Will was ten. At the time, Will lived with his mother and four older sisters on the other side of Manscome Hill. Will was said to have possessed a talent with animals; he seemed able to communicate with most creatures without the aid of prods, whips, leashes, harnesses, saddles, or spurs. Some in the village found his uncanny abilities queer and
wondered if their origin was pure. On an evening in mid-July, Will was ascending Manscome Hill from Quimby, along the ancient path, on his way home, when a black dog—an omen of impending death—suddenly appeared to him in the twilight. The dog was said to have had fiery, unnatural red eyes. That same night Will's oldest sister, Meredith, died suddenly—though of what no one ever was certain. Meredith had not even been ill. She'd screamed in the night, and by the time her mother reached her she'd been dead. A rumor spread in Quimby that Will had made a bargain with the black beast to take his sister instead of him. In return, he'd promised to serve Satan through the practice of witchcraft.

“It strikes one as unfair to label Will Blackwell a witch,” Lord Jeffrey Pembroke wrote. “He seems merely to have been a quiet soul who had an unusual affinity for animals. But ignorance and fear are powerful masters, particularly in those areas of rural England in which science, the Enlightenment, and the tenets of Progressive thinking have failed to gain an adequate foothold.”

Lamb closed the book and headed down the hill to the village. He'd found the stories interesting—especially the fact that the milkmaid had been killed in a way that was nearly identical to Blackwell's murder—though, in the end, unenlightening. Anyone who might have wanted to tart up Will Blackwell's murder in a macabre cloak might have read or heard the story.

As he crossed the wooden bridge, the urchin boy to whom he'd spoken on the previous night emerged from the wood onto the path. The boy froze when he saw Lamb.

“Good morning,” Lamb said. He smiled.

The boy's eyes widened in surprise and fear. He turned and ran back into the wood.

“Wait,” Lamb said.

But the boy ignored him and an instant later disappeared from Lamb's sight.

Vera sat at the small desk in the room that served as the civil defense office of the Quimby Parish Council. The room, which was on the second floor of a building on the High Street that also contained a sundries shop (which occupied the front room of the first floor) and her tiny billet (which was in the back), barely was large enough to hold its furnishings, which, in addition to the desk, included a squat brown metal filing cabinet, a small round wooden table with two chairs, and a telephone. Her accoutrements also included a Great War–era infantry helmet, a ponderous thing with chipped green paint. Outside the door, at the bottom of the steps leading to the small room, was a hand-cranked siren that Vera was required to sound in the case of a German attack.

Her daily duties required her to call her superiors in Southampton and Portsmouth once an hour to ensure that the telephone lines hadn't been sabotaged. Now and again, too, someone from Southampton delivered a box of informational fliers for her to deliver in the village. The latest, which she'd delivered last week to every occupied building in Quimby, had contained instructions on what to do if the Germans invaded, including “Stay put and hide your bicycle.”

She tapped the telephone with a pencil and thought with some trepidation of Arthur Lear. She and Arthur had made love again on the previous evening, in the narrow iron cot in her billet. She thought of how quickly and easily Arthur had seduced her; he had not swept her off her feet so much as he had eased her onto her back and relieved her of her virginity, which had left her surprised at her own lenience.

They'd met a month earlier, a few days after she'd begun her job in Quimby. She'd been leaving the sundries shop in the early evening, her arms laden with a loaf of bread, three tins of sardines, a bit of bacon, two eggs, and a packet of tea. As she'd backed out of the shop, hurrying more than she had needed and not looking where she was going, she'd run into a man entering the shop—a young man with dark hair. That had been her first, quick impression of Arthur Lear: that he had nice hair. They'd collided and she'd dropped her bread, tea, and eggs, the latter of which had shattered on the concrete walk in front of the store.