The Wages of Desire (9 page)

“No,” Marlene said. “But it wouldn't surprise me if she did. She was pig-headed—a conchi. She went to prison rather than join the fire-watching service. Then she ended up here.”

“Did it bother anyone here that she was a conchi?”

“A few, I suppose.”

“Do you know who, specifically?”

“Some of the men, I suppose. Nobody talked about it. If you must know, I didn't much fancy the idea myself. Times such as these, everyone has a duty. Apparently she thought herself too fine to do hers. Let someone else do her duty and yet she reaps the reward, if you know what I mean.”

“Did she ever talk about—mention—that someone might have threatened her because she was a conchi?”

“No.”

“Did she speak to either of you about anything that might have been troubling her?”

“She hardly said good morning to either of us.”

Nora stood with her arms still wrapped about her and looking away from Wallace toward the wood that bordered the field. Wallace concluded that he would get nothing more useful from either of the women for the moment. He would speak that day to many other people in the camp and some of them surely would know more than these two, he thought. He raised his hat and said, “Thank you, ladies.”

As Vera and Wallace turned for the car, Marlene, clearly speaking to Vera, said, “I didn't know they let girls join the police.”

Vera turned to Marlene and smiled. She didn't like Marlene and had concluded that Marlene sought to control and bully Nora and that Ruth Aisquith probably was nowhere near as bad as Marlene portrayed her. Class envy emanated from Marlene like heat from a fire, Vera thought.

“They don't,” Vera said. “I'm only a driver.”

“Meaning you know somebody in high places, then?” Marlene said.

The words stung Vera because they were true. But she retained her smile. “Something like that,” she said.

They found Lamb waiting for them by the Wolseley, smoking a cigarette. Wallace secretly was cheered by Lamb's unbreakable addiction to tobacco; it humanized Lamb, who seemed otherwise to be free of vice and weakness. Even so, Wallace felt a bit concerned that Lamb had returned to the car before he and Vera had, given that Lamb obviously now could see that Vera had gone with him to interview Marlene and Nora.

Vera spoke up first, hoping to blunt any inquiry into the matter her father might feel it necessary to launch. “I tagged along, Dad,” she said. “I hope you don't mind. It was my idea.” She smiled at her father warmly. “I was a little bored and decided I might get a little on-the-job training.”

Wallace thought that Vera's sudden chattiness made her sound guilty, as if she were confessing to a crime before anyone could accuse her of one.

Lamb smiled. He also thought that Vera's explanation contained a hint of confession. He cast a brief, wary eye Wallace's way, which Wallace did not fail to notice.

“Did you learn anything?” Lamb asked.

“At least one of them—a Miss Suggs—disliked and envied Ruth Aisquith,” Wallace said. “Otherwise, Aisquith mostly kept to herself—at least according to Suggs.”

Lamb raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment of this information.

“Suggs said that Aisquith didn't get on well with most of the other women in the camp; called her haughty. The other one, a Miss Bancroft, seemed genuinely broken up at the news of Aisquith's death, though. If Aisquith had any family or close contacts in the village, she didn't speak to either of these women of them.”

“All right, then,” Lamb said to Wallace. “I want you to stick here for the moment. Search Aisquith's file and billet and talk to as many people as you can.”

Lamb added that he and Vera would return to Winstead to check on the progress of the inquiry there and would pick Wallace up later in the day before heading back to Winchester.

Lamb thought for a moment on what seemed to be blossoming between his daughter and his detective sergeant. If Vera and Wallace were sending romantic signals to one another, he would have to keep an eye on that. He didn't want Wallace distracted or Vera hurt. He believed he had the right—even the duty—to step between them if their flirting compromised the inquiry. Otherwise, he would have to let Vera follow her path.

Late that afternoon, one of the men who were digging in the foundation of the farmhouse shoved the point of his spade into the moist ground and felt it strike something solid. The man's name was Charlie Kinkaid; he was thirty-seven years old and had lived all of his life in Winstead and had been glad to land one of the civilian jobs helping to build the prison camp. The job kept him close to his wife and three children, though since taking it he saw them on weekends only. The rest of the time he lived in the camp, with the other conscripts.

Believing he'd hit a stone, Charlie pulled back on the spade, worked its tip beneath the obstruction, and leveraged it into the daylight. A slender gray bone about two inches long came up in the loosened earth. It looked aged.

Likely from a dog or cat
, Charlie thought, though he couldn't recall anybody ever having owned a dog at the Tigue place. Of course, he hadn't come to the farm much when Mrs. Tigue—Olivia—had run it; he'd found Olivia Tigue and her two sons to be rather strange and never had been friendly with either of the boys. Lawrence especially had struck him as weak and aloof, wholly unappealing—though now Lawrence was the bloody chairman of the Winstead parish council and head of the village's civil defense. At any rate, he reasoned, there must have been a cat or two around the place. Most farms had cats to keep away the mice and rats. And there had been that problem with the cats in the village, a year before the mess with Claire O'Hare. A few people had said then that they believed that the cats had come from the Tigue farm. But even as Charlie considered this scenario, another possible explanation for the bone's presence in the foundation crowded into his consciousness. He'd been seventeen when Claire had committed suicide and Sean O'Hare had run off with their twin sons, and he remembered the case well. He'd known Sean well enough and found the man to be a louse; he also had known, as everyone in the village had, that Claire had been a terrible mother to the twins and that Sean had beaten her. And even before the disappearance of Sean and the twins, whispers had gone around the village that Sean seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time on the Tigue farm and that Olivia Tigue was hardly a saint.

He picked up the small bone and weighed it in his hand. He told himself that it couldn't be—that such thinking was macabre. He thought that perhaps he entertained such dark thoughts because the Aisquith woman had been shot to death in the village that morning. That had set the men's tongues wagging, and Charlie himself quietly had wondered whether Aisquith had upset Taney in some way. Either that or she'd been at it with someone in the village; all of her early-morning trips into Winstead hadn't been to visit someone dead, but someone very much alive, he and the other men had concluded. Then that little arrangement had gone wrong somehow and the result was that Ruth had ended up shot. That was the talk, at any rate.

Charlie looked at the bone and considered tossing it away but found that he couldn't quite. He would show it to Taney and see what the boss thought. The bell rang to signal that it was time to wash up for tea. Charlie put his shovel aside, put the bone in his shirt pocket, and went to his evening meal.

NINE

THAT NIGHT, WINSTEAD CAME ALIVE WITH CLANDESTINE MOVEMENT.

At half past midnight, a short, plump woman named Doris White left her cottage in the village and walked toward Saint Michael's Church along the narrow footpath that led from the center of Winstead toward its western boundary. For three years Doris daily had cleaned the chapel and vicarage of Saint Michael's under the eye of Wilhemina Wimberly, the vicar's wife, who despised Doris.

In turn, Doris saw Wilhemina as a nasty
frau
who reveled in barking orders and criticisms. Gerald's collars must have exactly the right amount of starch to them; the tea service must be stored in the cupboard in just a certain way; the candlesticks in the chapel must never be smudged. The candlesticks must shine, Wilhemina once had told Doris, just as her husband shined every Sunday in the pulpit. Now, though, the triangular relationship the three of them shared was about to change for good and all, Doris thought as she headed up the path in the dark.

A nearly full moon shone in a clear sky alive with stars. Doris moved past the rear of the cemetery and behind the church to the vicarage. The bedroom on the second floor—
their
bedroom—was dark. The only light came from Gerald's study. She thought of moving to the window, to look in upon Gerald. But she could not risk him seeing her. Soon enough, he would come to her.

That morning, she'd been in the chapel polishing the candlesticks when she'd heard the shot. Everything that she was now about to do—the wheels that she intended to set in motion—had occurred to her in a kind of flash in that single, auspicious moment. She had put her plan into action almost immediately, surprising herself at her own ruthlessness. Then again,
was
she really being ruthless, given what Gerald and Wilhemina Wimberly had done to her? The more she thought about the Wimberlys, and particularly Gerald, the more the entire matter, even the shooting, made sense to her, and she wondered why, indeed, something like the murder in the cemetery hadn't come to pass earlier.

She thought again of how utterly predictable Gerald could be, despite the wild heart that beat within his breast. Although he could be a beast, one could almost set a watch by him. He sought control above all else, and losing control enraged him. He was a conundrum in that way—a man who sought domination but was addicted to risk. Gerald seemed to see life as a kind of dangerous game, and that excited Doris. She recalled how Gerald had thrown her onto her bed and actually ripped her clothes from her body and buried his face in her sex, conjuring within her a savage pleasure she hadn't known it was possible to feel. His passion in turn had fired within her an appetite to match his, so that their sex became like bouts—magnificent, thrilling battles—of which she'd loved every second. She had loved
Gerald
, too, though she knew him to be wicked. Indeed, she had loved him in part
because
he was wicked, and because he had taught her that she, too, could be wicked in her way and that power could reside in wickedness.

Once, before he'd abandoned her, Gerald had bought her a French perfume called
Desire
, which came in a tiny blue bottle. No one had ever before bought her perfume, and, until that moment, she had not considered herself worthy of perfume. But Gerald had made her feel worthy. He splashed her with it, all over, and the scent of it had set him aflame and he'd thrown her upon the bed, roughly, as always, and overpowered and transported her. But very soon after that Gerald's fire had seemed to go out as quickly as it had flared and he'd scorned her, left her alone again, though profoundly changed.