The Wages of Desire (6 page)

“I understand. Later, then. Also, sir, I noticed an open grave in the cemetery. Can you tell me who that is for?”

“Miss Lila Tutin, a village woman—an elderly spinster. Her funeral is tomorrow.”

“And what time is the funeral?”

“Eleven.”

“This morning, when you called the constabulary to report finding the body, you failed to tell my sergeant that you had heard the gunshot or that it had been your hearing the shot that had alerted you to the trouble in the cemetery. Why was that, sir?”

Again, Wimberly became briefly silent, then smiled slightly.

“I suppose I wasn't as unaffected by the thing as I thought, then,” he said. “I can only say that I simply forgot to mention that I'd heard the shot.”

Lamb nodded. “Very well, then.”

Wimberly saw Lamb to the door. Lamb held up the shoes. “We won't keep these long, sir.”

“Take as long as you like, Chief Inspector.”

As Wimberly watched Lamb disappear from sight around the front of the church, he shook his head.
Did I really not say that I'd heard the bloody shot?
He thought that he must get rid of his service pistol as soon as possible—though the notion came to him that he wouldn't mind shooting Lamb with it first.

SEVEN

LAMB WENT BACK TO THE CEMETERY TO COLLECT WALLACE. HE
wanted to go next to the farm on which the government was building the prisoner-of-war camp. Someone there surely would have missed Ruth Aisquith by now. Indeed, he was surprised that no one from the camp had come into the village looking for her.

Winston-Sheed had left for Winchester with Aisquith's body and the area surrounding the cemetery had grown quiet. Lamb found Wallace and Larkin exiting the cemetery through its front gate. While Lamb was interviewing Gerald Wimberly, Wallace had found in the grass just beyond the rear fence of the cemetery the slug that had passed through Ruth Aisquith, and handed it over to Larkin. Now the lanky forensics man showed the bullet to Lamb; although mangled, the slug was unmistakably a .455 caliber.

“Likely a Webley,” Larkin said, touching the bridge of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose. “Not sure which vintage, though.”

Lamb glanced back in the direction of the vicarage. “The vicar owns a Mark VI; he claims it was stolen a week ago, but that he never reported the theft.”

“Do you believe him?” Wallace asked.

“I don't know,” Lamb said.

Vera joined them at the gate, which made Lamb smile. “Ready for another drive?” he asked.

“Always.”

“I hope it hasn't been too boring for you.”

“Not at all. I actually had an interesting conversation with a few of the women from the village—well, a couple of women and a girl, really. One of them claimed there's been a rash of egg thefts from the nests of the local nuthatch population. Seems people are stealing them for food—or so the oldest of the three claimed. She was very strange, eccentric—sort of chaotic, but passionate. She made me promise to tell you, and now I have.”

“We'll get right on that, then,” Wallace said. He winked at Vera, who smiled at him warmly.

Vera's smile caught Lamb's attention.
My, my
, he thought. He well knew that women tended to fall for Wallace, who was tall, dark-haired, intelligent, witty, and confident. But even beyond these qualities, Wallace possessed
something
that was hard to define that attracted feminine attention. Lamb could not quite define this quality—he thought it had something to do with an obvious penchant for action over reticence. Lamb long had hoped that when the time came, Vera would truly fall in love with the man of her choice, rather than merely fall under his spell, though he understood that he possessed no power whatever to control any of this.

He hoped that Vera possessed sense enough to recognize what men offered to her and what they withheld, and why. Only a year before, she'd had a bad experience with a young man in Quimby who'd died in the freak German bombing in that village. She'd kept her relationship with the young man a secret from him and Marjorie, though after the boy had been killed, Vera had told them everything. The boy had been slightly older than Vera and had managed to convince her that he was a far different person than he actually was; in fact, he'd been jealous, controlling, and potentially violent. The story that Vera had told Lamb about the boy—he was a man, really; Lamb wondered now why he continued to think of Arthur Lear as a boy—had forced him to admit that he'd too long denied his daughter's natural adult desires and aspirations.

Lamb also knew of at least one of Wallace's darker aspects—his drinking. Though Wallace seemed to have given up the bottle, only a year earlier the detective sergeant had been on the verge of sinking into an alcoholic haze. But Wallace had managed to right himself, partly with Lamb's assistance and encouragement, along with a few well-placed threats about where Wallace would end up if he persisted in his drinking. Lamb had made it clear to Wallace that if he lost his policeman's job thanks to alcohol, as a man in his mid-twenties, he'd go right into the war.

That said, Lamb liked Wallace. Despite Wallace's overreliance on a kind of outward charm, he was dependable, a good detective, and physically courageous in a way Lamb knew that he himself never quite had been, unless it was in defense of his wife or daughter, someone crucial to
him
. But Wallace would think nothing of running into a burning building to save a bloody dog. Since the beginning of the war, Lamb had done whatever had been in his power to keep Wallace, Larkin, and the other young men who worked under him out of combat and danger, just as he was now doing what he could to keep Vera free of it. That said, he couldn't have his detective sergeant bird-dogging his nineteen-year-old daughter, especially while they were on the clock.

“Maybe you'd prefer that I put you on that nuthatch matter right now, David,” Lamb said to Wallace without smiling.

Wallace seemed to get the message. He lost the charming smile and nodded.

“Sir,” he said.

The farm on which the government was building its prison camp for Italians lay about a half-mile west of the village, just off the road that became Winstead's High Street.

A rutted dirt lane led from the main paved road to the farmhouse. Before the government workers had arrived a month earlier, the farm had stood vacant and unused for a decade, and its twenty-seven acres, along with its abandoned house, barn, and sheds, had become badly overgrown in a tangle of underbrush and young trees, all of which had to be cleared to make way for the prison. Before that, Lawrence Tigue had lived on the farm with his mother and younger brother, whose names Lamb could not now remember, though they had popped up in the newspaper accounts of the O'Hare suicide twenty years earlier. Lamb was surprised to see no guard posted at the head of the lane.

Vera drove slowly, carefully, down the pockmarked dirt road. The land on either side of the lane was roughly cleared; the soil was churned up, soggy and dark from recent rain and spotted with fallen trees, stumps, and piles of cut brush. In the field to their right, two women were tossing bits and pieces of vegetative detritus into the back of a battered lorry that nearly was up to its fenders in mud.

At the end of the road, two dozen large dark green canvas tents stood in two parallel rows, creating a kind of muddy street between them. The scene reminded Lamb of the rear echelon camps to which the army had sent him as a respite from the hell of the Somme. Since that time he invariably connected the sight of such tents with memories of hot food, ample cigarettes, relatively clean toilets, a bath, and a temporary relief from the ceaseless anxiety, backlogged sexual longing, and endless threat to one's life that constituted the primary fact of front-line combat.

Vera pulled the Wolseley to a stop at the edge of the encampment, which smelled of freshly turned earth and burning wood. About thirty meters to their left, a number of men were clearing away what remained of the stone foundation of the farmhouse, breaking the stonework into pieces with sledgehammers and hauling it away in wheelbarrows to a rubble pile.

A man dressed in the uniform of the regular army was the first to approach them as they exited the car; Lamb saw that the man possessed the rank of corporal. He asked them their business; Lamb flashed his warrant card and asked to see the camp's commander. The corporal took what Lamb thought was an inordinate amount of time to read his identification before handing it back.

“All right, then,” he said in a northern accent. “I'll take you to Captain Walton.”

Vera waited at the car as Lamb and Wallace followed the corporal down the lane that led between the tents—which, to combat the mud, had been corduroyed with lengths of old timber torn from the former house and barn—to its end, where they found two additional tents that were slightly larger and detached from the others, facing down the lane rather than alongside it. The corporal led them to the one on the right and asked them to wait outside.

A minute later a man dressed in the uniform of an infantry captain emerged from the tent. Lamb put the captain at perhaps forty and concluded that either he was a contemporary who had remained in the service after the first war or had volunteered again at the outbreak of the latest one. The officer nodded at Lamb and Wallace in greeting. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said. “I'm Captain Walton, the camp commander. How may I help you?”

Lamb introduced himself and Wallace. “I'm afraid we have troubling news for you, sir,” he said. “We're investigating the likely murder of a woman whom we believe worked in this camp. Her name is Ruth Aisquith. I'm afraid she was found shot to death this morning in Winstead.”

Lamb handed Walton Ruth Aisquith's identity card. “This was found in the woman's possession.”

Walton stared at the card for a few seconds, then softly said, “My God.”

“So she did work here, then, sir?” Lamb asked.

Walton looked up. He seemed genuinely stunned. “Yes, yes, she did, of course, Chief Inspector, I'm sorry. She was a conscript. A cook in the camp mess, and other duties, as needed. She was a Land girl.” He looked again at the identity card, then at Lamb. “She also was a conscientious objector,” he added. “Or, at least, she had been. She was shot, you say?”

“Yes,” Lamb said. He didn't want to reveal too much to Walton yet. “She appears to have been shot while visiting the cemetery of Saint Michael's Church in the village.”

“And you've no idea who did it?”

“I was hoping you might help me with that.”

Walton straightened his shoulders. “Yes, of course,” he said. “I'm sorry, but you can imagine the shock of hearing this. I can't think of any reason why anyone would have shot Ruth Aisquith, or anyone from the camp. We've only been here a month.”

Lamb found himself surprised to hear that Ruth Aisquith had been a conscientious objector. Though he hadn't thought about it until that very moment, he realized that the newly instituted conscription of women must have led some women, as conscription had some men, to protest the call-up on religious or other grounds. He knew little about the fates of such people other than that they were required to plead their cases for exemption to local tribunals. In some cases the tribunals approved the request, though in many cases—most, Lamb thought—they did not. Those whose requests were denied but continued to defy conscription could be jailed, and some were. He wondered if Ruth Aisquith's refusal to serve the war effort, while others were doing so and dying in the process, might have caused someone to kill her, especially someone who had lost a loved one to the war.

“Was Miss Aisquith a Quaker?” Lamb asked.

“No,” Walton said. “Not that I am aware of.”

“Given that she was a conscientious objector, why was she here, then, sir? You said that she was a conscript.”

“She was a conscript, yes. The camp is staffed by them, men and women both, and some contract workers. She originally had declared herself a conscientious objector but was one no longer, you see. She'd objected at first to performing fire-watching service on the grounds that she did not believe in military conscription. A tribunal rejected her plea and she was sent to prison for several months for her further refusal to comply. She then changed her mind at some point and agreed to go to join the Women's Land Army and was assigned here; we have six Land girls here. They work in the laundry or the mess or do other light duty. In agreeing to work here, Miss Aisquith effectively ended her objection to conscription. Basically, she changed her mind, as I said. That's the way I understand it, at any rate, though frankly I never questioned her on it and I treated her as I treated all the conscripts. It's rare, I grant you—a female objector—but she was a good worker.” He looked a third time at the identity card and shook his head. “I find it impossible to believe that she's been shot.”