The Wages of Desire (34 page)

“And did Ned Horton attempt to steer Fulton away from the Tigues, as he had turned away your husband?” Lamb asked.

“Yes, exactly so, Chief Inspector. Fulton shared his suspicions with Horton, too. After all, why wouldn't he? He believed that Horton and he were on the same side in the matter. But of course they weren't. Horton was on the side of the Tigues—their protector. Before he returned to Cornwall, Fulton told my husband that Ned Horton had assured him that the Tigues couldn't have been involved, but that Fulton remained unsure. Unfortunately, though, that was the end of it. Fulton never returned to Winstead, and John heard later that the matter in Four Corners had withered on the vine there. That's why I had to call when I saw the story in the
Mail
this morning. I've kept the secret too long—for John's sake, as I said. But now my conscience won't allow me to continue to be silent on the matter. I believe that Fulton and John were right all along and that Tim Gordon's body has been lying in the basement of that wretched house since the day he disappeared.”

Mrs. Markham suddenly brought her right hand to her mouth in an attempt to stifle herself from dissolving into tears. Lamb immediately reached across the table to touch her hand. He'd used the method many times—touching someone who was about to cry—and it always had worked in delaying them from doing so until he'd finished questioning them.

“You're right to have spoken up,” Lamb said. “For your sake and for John's. And I promise you that if Ned Horton did act in the way that you've described, I'll do my best to see that he pays the price, and I'll see that John's reputation and memory are not tarnished in any way as a result.”

Mrs. Markham looked at Lamb. “Thank you,” she said.

“But I must ask you to tell me a bit more before we're finished,” Lamb said. “I need to know about your husband's involvement in the O'Hare case. Ned Horton's files mention that John was the first policeman on the scene of Claire O'Hare's suicide.”

Mrs. Markham put her hand on her forehead and was silent for a couple of seconds before she answered.

“Yes,” she said. “John found her and, of course, called the constabulary to notify them that an inspector was required on the scene. And once again the man who showed up was Ned Horton. The coroner ruled Claire O'Hare's death a suicide and everyone accepted that, just as they accepted that Sean O'Hare had abandoned her and taken their sons with him.”

“I take it that John was not among those who accepted the coroner's verdict,” Lamb said.

“John never saw the suicide note that Ned Horton claimed he'd found in the O'Hare place and which he came to believe was counterfeit. Horton shut John out of the O'Hare case just as he had the matter with the cats. I wish that we had stood up to Horton, but it was just after the war and we couldn't afford to lose John's posting. It would have come down to John's word against Ned Horton's, and Ned Horton had the rank and the power.”

“Did your husband ever discover the identity of the person who called and alerted him to the fact that Claire O'Hare was dead?”

“No.”

“Did John have any reason to believe that the Tigues might have had any connection to the events that took place at the O'Hare cottage?”

“He
suspected
them, yes. He suspected them because of what he believed about Algernon and because he knew what Olivia was capable of when it came to protecting Algernon. And so he was suspicious of them. But he had no proof that any of them had had anything to do with the O'Hare matter.”

“I've heard that a rumor had gone 'round the village at the time that Sean O'Hare might have been having some sort of dalliance with Olivia Tigue. Did John also believe or suspect that?”

“He believed it possible and even likely. But again, he had no proof of such an affair.”

“Did
you
know the O'Hares, Mrs. Markham?” Lamb asked.

“Only by reputation.”

“What can you tell me about them?”

“Sean was a reprobate and drunk—though he was good-looking and could be charming, a ladies' man, or so I heard on many occasions. He was one of those men who seemed to have a hold over a certain kind of woman, and Claire, I suppose, was one of those. She was a local girl, you see, and Sean O'Hare was a man of the world, and an older man, twenty or so years older. Claire also drank heavily and was by everyone's account an utter failure as a mother.”

“What do you believe became of Sean O'Hare and the twins?”

“I don't know.” She shook her head.

“How about John? Did he have an idea?”

“He came to believe what most people around here came to believe—that Sean had gone away with the boys. It was easier for us to believe that, I suppose—easier on our consciences.”

Mrs. Markham again looked away from Lamb.

“He was never proud of that, was John—of his giving in to Horton's threats.” She turned back to face Lamb, with a look of beseeching in her eyes. “But he didn't want to lose his job.”

“It sounds as if Ned Horton gave him little choice but to obey,” Lamb said, hoping that this would comfort her.

“That's what I told John. But he never believed it. He believed he'd taken the coward's way out and regretted it for the rest of his life.” Tears welled again in Sylvia Markham's eyes. “He was never the same man after that.”

THIRTY

LAMB HEADED BACK TO WINSTEAD, HIS ANKLE SMARTING AS HE
worked the clutch. He was furious at Ned Horton but told himself that he must not expend undue energy on Horton until he'd cleared up the rest of the mess facing him. The information that Mrs. Markham had given him made him feel for the first time that his inquiries were finally moving forward. Although he was becoming more certain that he was correct in his theory about Ruth Aisquith's frequent early-morning visits to the village cemetery, he remained stumped on who had shot Aisquith and why. If the other portion of his guess was correct—that Lawrence Tigue might have been supplying Aisquith with some sort of forged documents—then Lawrence likely hadn't been Aisquith's killer, given that Lawrence had something to lose from Aisquith's death. Unless, of course, Aisquith had double-crossed Lawrence in some way.

He parked at the school but did not go into the incident room. Instead, he walked up the High Street toward Lawrence Tigue's cottage, where he found the constable he'd assigned to watch the house sheltering in a spot just across from and slightly down the street from Tigue's place. When the man noticed Lamb approaching, he straightened to attention.

Lamb smiled. “At ease,” he said. “Any sign of our man?”

“None, sir.”

Lamb pulled his packet of Player's from his coat pocket and offered one to the constable, who, surprised, took one. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

Lamb lit the constable's cigarette and then his own. He took a long drag and, as he exhaled, eyed Tigue's empty cottage. He again chastised himself for not paying more attention to the Tigues. He smiled at the young constable and said, “Keep on it, then. We'll get you some relief soon enough.”

He then returned to the school, where he found Vera waiting for him by the Wolseley.

“I couldn't find Lilly,” Vera said. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't worry yourself about it,” Lamb told her. “We've still time to straighten things out.” He felt as if he was trying to assure himself, as much as Vera, of the truth of this notion.

“I'd like for you to drive me back to Winchester,” he said. “I'm afraid the little drive over to Lower Promise has left my ankle the worse for wear.”

Vera smiled briefly at this, then slid behind the wheel of the Wolseley.

On the drive to Winchester, Lamb remained mostly silent. He did not feel it necessary to fill Vera in on all that he learned that day. There would be time for that as events continued to spool out. Instead, he smoked and attempted to clear his mind of rubbish—of the useless emotions surrounding his failure to adequately recognize the importance of the Tigues and his anger at the way Ned Horton had handled the cases in Winstead twenty years earlier. He closed his eyes and willed himself to relax and was surprised to find, when they arrived at the nick, Vera gently nudging him awake.

He sent Vera to the pub across the street from the nick to pick up cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and tea for the both of them—neither had yet eaten lunch—then went immediately to his office, where he began to fill out the forms necessary to obtain a warrant to search Lawrence Tigue's premises on the grounds that he believed that Lawrence had been producing counterfeit documents on the printing press in his garage. This was a long shot, based on his theory about who might have been conspiring with Ruth Aisquith and why. But he believed they'd collected enough circumstantial evidence of Lawrence's apparent participation in such an operation to convince a magistrate to issue the warrant.

While Lamb was working, Evers, the man at the front desk, put through a telephone call to Lamb from Wallace, who reported that Algernon Tigue was not in his rooms. Wallace had asked around the school but no one he'd spoken to knew where Algernon had gone.

“Maybe they've run together,” Wallace offered.

“It's possible,” Lamb said. He told Wallace to take over the job of watching Lawrence's cottage from the constable.

When Lamb finished the warrant application, he called a magistrate he knew well and explained the circumstances to the man, who said he would sign the document. Lamb gave the papers to a uniformed constable with instructions to deliver them to the magistrate and return with the signed warrant. By then, Vera had returned with the sandwiches and tea; Lamb took his into his office and ate alone. As he was gulping the last of the weak tea, Rivers, freshly returned from London, appeared at his door.

“Ruth Aisquith isn't her real name,” Rivers announced. “It's Maureen Tigue, and she seems to be mixed up with the Irish. She also might have killed the real Ruth Aisquith and stolen that woman's identity.”

Lamb sat at his desk for a couple of seconds in silence, trying to digest what Rivers had just said. The information stunned him—and, yet, too, it seemed to confirm the scenario that he'd been building in his mind. Working the case had been like unraveling a tangled ball of string, strand by strand; now Rivers seemed to have loosened a primary knot.

Rivers removed his hat, sat in one of the chairs facing Lamb's desk, and told Lamb the story of his visit to London.

After he'd seen Ruth Aisquith's file and become convinced that the woman whose photo was attached to the file was not the woman who was shot in the cemetery, he and Captain Willis had gone to the file room, where they'd examined the files of the handful of women who had claimed and been denied immunity from conscription on the basis of conscience and at some point afterward gone to prison. All had lost their appeals and had subsequently been ordered to report for duty. When they'd refused to report, they'd been convicted of noncompliance and fined. All had refused to pay the fine and been sent to prison for an initial term of three months, pending a second hearing before the tribunal.

“That's how it works,” Rivers told Lamb. “All of them followed the same path of staunch refusal leading to jail. Less than a hundred women have applied for conchi status since the conscription act went into effect. Of those, roughly three in ten were excused from the call-up. The rest, save these seven, gave up the nut at some point in the process to avoid jail. Most men follow the same path; only the hard cases go to prison.”

He'd only sorted through three of the seven files when he noticed the name Maureen Tigue on the fourth, he told Lamb. The surname had caught his eye. He opened the file and found attached to it a photo of the woman they'd found shot to death in the cemetery.

“According to her file, Maureen Tigue objected on the grounds that conscription is coercive, undemocratic. Ruth Aisquith had objected on the same grounds. In both cases the tribunal called that bollocks. Aisquith landed in prison four days after Maureen Tigue, in April. Slightly more than two months later—roughly seven weeks ago—Aisquith died in prison of a sudden heart attack, although she was only thirty-four and had no history of heart trouble. The coroner ruled it death by cardiac arrest; the report was in her file.

“Two days later, Maureen Tigue requested a second hearing in front of the tribunal on the grounds that she was willing to forego her application for immunity and would answer the call-up. That hearing was granted and three weeks later she left prison and was assigned to report for duty at the POW camp project in Winstead. But she appears to have arrived at the prison camp bearing the identity of Ruth Aisquith, rather than Maureen Tigue. She must have paid off someone on the prison end to provide her with Aisquith's identity and background. Walton might also have been paid to look the other way. I think it's likely that she was working for the IRA and that they were paying the freight. She was arrested in 1938 for agitating on behalf of Irish Republicanism. She was swept up in what was thought at the time to be a plot to bomb a police station in Cornwall, though nothing much seemed to have come of it. She then seemed to have gone underground until she filed for conscientious objector status. Her file listed her mother as Martha Tigue of Four Corners, in Cornwall. The file says the mother is deceased and that she has no siblings. It also lists her father as ‘unknown.'”