The Wages of Desire (28 page)

“What is the meaning of the toy soldiers, then?” Harding asked.

“I don't know yet. But there are too many damned coincidences—or apparent coincidences—popping up in this little village. I think someone might be using the soldiers to point us in a certain direction, though I'm not certain yet whether that direction is toward or away from the killer.”

Harding looked into the foundation. “The Tigues sound like good suspects in this mess,” he said. He looked at Lamb. “I needn't tell you that we mustn't let them slip away.”

“I've advised both of them not to leave the area,” Lamb said. “But I have nothing to hold them on yet. They both argue that the children could have been buried in the basement of the house during the ten years when the place lay abandoned, though I tend to believe that the remains are older than that.” Lamb looked again at the second, larger skeleton. “If we can positively identify this boy as one of the O'Hare twins, then we should have enough to at least bring them in and hold them on suspicion of murder.”

Harding frowned. Lamb considered informing the superintendent of his working theory of the possible relationship between Lawrence Tigue and Ruth Aisquith—the theory that explained why Ruth Aisquith had been found carrying around such a large sum of cash. But he decided that he needed more evidence that the theory was correct before he informed Harding, who preferred the delivery of fact to that of theory and guesswork.

Hoping for better news, Lamb turned to Wallace for a report of his interview that morning with Oscar Strand.

Strand originally had bought the land hoping to develop it into a housing estate after the first war, Wallace said. But the Depression, and then the second war, had intervened. Strand had sold the parcel to the government only the previous year. By then, the farm had lain fallow for a decade, since Olivia Tigue had died and her sons had gone their separate ways.

“He sounded as if he was glad to be rid of the place,” Wallace said. “He'd had high hopes for it that never quite blossomed. He rented the farm to Olivia Tigue for ten years and got to know the Tigues pretty well. He said that at the time the Tigues first came to the farm, Olivia Tigue told him that the boys' father had been killed in Arras. He said that he admired Mrs. Tigue; he described her as a strong, hard-working woman who made a life for herself and her sons on the farm. He'd doubted at first that she would last long as a farmer, but she proved him wrong, and he came to respect her for that.

“He came to the farm once a month to collect the rent; Mrs. Tigue always paid on time. Neither of the boys was allowed to slack off when it came to the farm, especially Lawrence. He described Lawrence as shy and quiet—though a hard worker, like his mother—and Algernon as more open, friendly, and self-confident, even charming. He reckons that Lawrence Tigue had to become the man of the house rather early, given the father's death, whereas the little brother was free of those responsibilities. Algernon Tigue also was a bit of a whiz at maths, apparently, even then. According to Strand, Algernon went to university, while Lawrence stayed behind on the farm with his mother until she died.”

“What did he have to say about Clemmons?” Harding asked.

“I didn't tell him that we'd found a suicide note near Clemmons's body,” Wallace said. “Though I did say that we were considering the possibility that he might have poisoned himself. He described Clemmons as a bit of an oddball and said he wasn't surprised when it came out that Clemmons was a convicted pervert.”

Lamb silently assessed his situation. The information Wallace had gleaned from Oscar Strand hadn't been as detailed or as deep as Lamb hoped it might have been. He would have to press the Tigues harder, he decided, and perhaps play one off the other.

He fought off a momentary feeling that events were threatening to swamp him. At the moment he wanted nothing more than to go home to Marjorie and a decent hot meal with a glass of beer, followed by a decent cup of tea. He looked at the western sky, which still was bright and clear. But he decided that he was finished for the day—that he must extract himself from the swirl of events in order to take proper stock of them.

He looked at Vera and said, “Let's go home.”

At a little past eight o'clock that night, Gerald and Wilhemina Wimberly sat together at the table in the kitchen of the vicarage.

Earlier that day, Gerald had done everything Doris White had demanded of him; doing so had taken all the willpower he could muster, and many times, feeling humiliated by the way in which she'd seized control of him, Gerald had wanted to kill Doris. He had consoled himself with the notion that her control was only temporary, for he had worked his magic on her regardless and she had agreed to his plan. And so, in the end, he counted himself the victor.

He'd told Doris that he'd sent Wilhemina to London, though, of course, he'd done no such thing. The whole time Doris was in the vicarage that day, Wilhemina had been hiding in the attic. All the while, Wilhemina had known what Gerald and Doris were doing in the sitting room, but she had swallowed her humiliation and remained silent, as Gerald had instructed her to do. Gerald had promised that he would take care of the problem and was doing so.

Now Gerald and Wilhemina sat across from each other, as they had countless times during their marriage, the table barren even of a pot of tea. They had become conspirators rather than man and wife, though Wilhemina would have said that their marital union had come undone many years earlier.

Patiently, Gerald outlined for Wilhemina his plan to rid them of Doris White. He had convinced Doris that the two of them, Doris and he, would leave Winstead to begin a new life together. After midnight, he would go to Doris's cottage, where she would be waiting for him. He would take with him a bottle of port with which he would propose they toast their new freedom—a bottle that he had laced with a heavy dose of rat poison.

A sick feeling threatened to overtake Wilhemina, though she managed to dispel the feeling rather quickly. She had no objections to Gerald doing away with Doris, who was less than worthless to her. Her main concern was that Gerald's killing of Doris would worsen rather than improve their present situation and cause Lamb and the other police to come after them with yet more vigor.

“I've taken care of that,” Gerald assured her. “In any case, we can afford to take no chances with her. She knows too much. Eventually, she will hurt us unless we get rid of her.”

Once the poison had killed Doris, he would compose a suicide note on Doris's typewriter in which she would confess to shooting Ruth Aisquith with Gerald's gun, which she had stolen from his study a week earlier. Her motive would be jealousy; the note would contain her confession that she'd secretly been in love with him—Gerald—but had not believed it proper to act on this love. Then, when she'd noticed Ruth Aisquith coming to the church in the mornings, she'd become consumed by the idea that Ruth had romantic designs on Gerald, which she could not abide. And so she had acted in a moment of envy and rage. Afterward, she'd admitted to herself the monstrousness of her act and become remorseful and frightened that she would be caught and face a trial and hanging. Therefore, she had ended her life by swallowing rat poison in a glass of port. The note also would say that Doris had hidden the pistol in a place where no one ever would find it because she wanted to ensure that it could no longer be used for evil purposes.

“Once that's done, I will come home,” Gerald said. “We will provide each other with alibis. Each of us will say that the other never left the house.”

Wilhemina was not certain that Lamb would buy that scenario. Even so, Gerald was right—with Doris gone, Lamb never would find the pistol, and the only other eyewitness to the events in the cemetery would be out of the way forever. Lamb could entertain all the doubts he wanted, but doubts did not amount to evidence.

“It's foolproof,” Gerald assured her. He was thinking beyond the deed itself to the new life—the actual one, unfettered by human millstones—that he would begin elsewhere. Initially, he would have to take Wilhemina with him. But he could take care of her in due time. Then he would be free again.

He smiled and touched her hand. “Soon, everything will be back to normal,” he said.

TWENTY-FIVE

LILLY AWAKENED AT A LITTLE AFTER ONE A.M. FEELING RESTLESS.

She lay awake for ten minutes or so, listening to the empty house creak. The night sounds that emanated from the house's corners and hidden places still upset her, though she had tried her best to harden herself to them. Her mother had tried to pacify her by saying that the sounds merely came from the house “breathing,” which she found ridiculous, the kind of thing an adult would say to a very young child. She found it ironic that her mother had concluded that she was old enough to stay in the house alone through the night yet otherwise treated her as if she still were a little girl.

She rose from bed propelled in part by an idea she knew to be odd. Yet it also fit with her desire to face the macabre and learn from it; she wanted to see the place where the tramp had died. She had heard about the discovery of his body, of course. Although the police had yet to announce an official cause of his death, the talk in the village was that the old man had died of some natural cause, a bad heart or consumption, or merely the ravages of age. Yet more interesting—and ghoulish—was the story that had been put about the village that the man had once, long ago, been a farmhand on the Tigue farm at the time of the mess with the O'Hare suicide.

Lilly had gone to bed with her clothes on, certain that she would rise before the night was out. She grabbed a battery-powered torch and set out, moving past the darkened church and cemetery to the edge of the wood, by the path that led into the village. A misty rain fell, though the air remained warm. The night was dark, the sky cloudy and moonless, and the wood darker still. She stood on the footpath, took a deep breath, counted to three, then moved into the wood. The low, wet leaves of the undergrowth touched her ankles and bare calves, putting her in mind of the tongues of an unseen creature licking her as she passed. Once past the fringe and in among the trees, she switched on the torch, finding the rough trail the tramp had trod to and from his lean-to over the past several months.

The darkness of the wood, the dripping trees, and the proximity of the place where the tramp's dead body had so recently lain frightened her in a way she hadn't expected, and she found herself hesitating. But she countered this by quite firmly telling herself that she had nothing to fear from wet leaves and mere darkness. And she reminded herself that she did not believe in ghosts. Such inspirations, combined with a keen curiosity, urged her forward, and she continued along the rough path, pushing the low branches of young trees out of her way, until the beam of her torch caught a small clearing and the outline of a sad-looking lean-to. Although the structure remained, the police seemed to have removed from it all of the tramp's possessions. She had expected the place to feel eerie—and it did, sort of, though not to the extent that she had imagined it would. Mostly the spot seemed empty, almost as if it had been sanitized and she soon realized, to her disappointment, that the spot held little, if anything, of interest to a budding crime novelist.

A drop of water from a sodden leaf struck the top of her head, causing her to utter a muffled sound of surprise. Instinctively, she put her hand on her mouth to calm herself. She suddenly became aware of noises in the wood—small, mysterious sounds of movement, of leaves rustling and twigs cracking. But the same feeling of restlessness that had awakened her—the same keen curiosity—spurred her forward, toward Miss Wheatley's cottage. She had no idea what she might find there, but decided that she was not yet ready to return to the quiet, lonely house.

With the light of her torch she found the path that led to Miss Wheatley's place. She emerged from the wood behind the cottage, which she found to be dark and silent. By then, the misting rain had ceased. As she moved into the meadow, she saw the flash of a torch beam ahead and glimpsed a dark figure moving toward her, out of the wood, from the direction of Lawrence Tigue's house. She turned off her torch and jumped off the path, squatting and sheltering in the brush and remaining as still as she could. She heard the slightly labored breathing of the figure as it approached. Instinctively, she held her breath.