The Language of the Dead: A World War II Mystery

by Stephen Kelly

  THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD

  A WORLD WAR II MYSTERY

  STEPHEN KELLY

  For the three people I love the most—Cindy, Anna and Lauren—and for my late parents, Edythe and Omer Kelly.

  THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD

  PART ONE

  A Witch’s Death

  ONE

  ON A LATE JULY DAY IN 1940, A BUTTERFLY, AN ADONIS BLUE, landed on a sprig of honeysuckle in a meadow above the village of Quimby, in Hampshire, and began to suck the blossom dry. Peter Wilkins noted the presence of the creature but did not move.

  I must, he thought.

  The words bloomed in his mind like wings opening. The boys were in the tree. Crows cawed from the branches of a dead sycamore farther down Manscome Hill. Peter gazed past the old tree toward the village.

  In that same moment, Will Blackwell moved up the hill from Quimby along the ancient path that bordered the wood. The day was hot, the sun bright, and Will moved slowly under the weight of the pitchfork and scythe he rested on his right shoulder. He came to the old sycamore in which the crows roosted; for two weeks the crows had been speaking to him, and the message he’d heard in their harsh cawing had troubled him. He knew the crows as carrion eaters, lickers of bones. As he passed beneath the tree, the crows dipped their heads in Will’s direction and shot invective at his breast, like arrows.

  Up the hill, Peter moved. Startled, the blue butterfly parted its wings and fled.

  David Wallace sat in The Fallen Diva, his hand around a pint of local bitter.

  Forty minutes earlier, he’d nipped out from the nick for what he’d told colleagues was an early supper. In fact, the detective sergeant had eaten nothing but had downed two pints of ale in less than fifteen minutes and now was on a third. He’d done his drinking at a table in a corner and spoken to no one, to decrease the chance of someone recognizing him. He felt light in the head, certainly, though not what he would call drunk. It was time, though, that he returned to work.

  A young woman entered the pub and sat alone at a table near his, away from the window. The woman had pale skin, green eyes, and auburn hair and was nicely plump, busty. She wore a simple moss-green serge suit and black high heels. Wallace thought she might be waiting for someone; he watched her for a moment from his hiding place in the corner. She threw glances about the room—nervously, he thought—as if she hoped she wasn’t being conspicuous. She turned in Wallace’s direction and their eyes met. He smiled; she looked quickly away. He thought of approaching her but decided against it. He’d been gone from the nick too long already and faced nearly a fifteen-minute walk back; he counted on the walk to sober him up a notch. The girl was attractive enough, but with the war nearly a year old now, Winchester was full of lonely women looking for a tumble.

  He rose and headed for the door. As he passed the woman’s table, he caught her eye. To his surprise, she smiled. He touched the brim of his hat. He glanced at her left hand and was relieved to see that she wore no wedding band. He did not want to cuckold some poor sod in uniform.

  Now, though, he had to hurry. His drinking had begun to scare him recently and he’d entertained glimpses of himself sinking to the bottom of a bottle. He stepped through the door into a warm, clear evening, feeling pleasantly elevated. Twenty minutes later, as he mounted the steps to the nick, he assured himself that he was in perfect command of his senses.

  He headed for his desk, where he intended to spend the last few hours of his shift attending to paperwork. He believed he needn’t worry overly much about anyone noticing his mild drunkenness, given that the only person who seemed able to unfailingly catch him out was Lamb, who had gone home for the day. In recent weeks, Wallace occasionally had detected in the Chief Inspector’s expression toward him a strange combination of exasperation and empathy. He was convinced that Lamb knew. And yet Lamb had said nothing—issued no advice, warnings, or ultimatums. In the end, Lamb’s silence had spooked more than reassured Wallace.

  The phone on his desk rang, which made him jump. Calm yourself. He picked up the receiver. The voice on the line was that of Evers, the man on duty at the front desk.

  “Have a call here I think you should take, Sarge.”

  Bloody hell. Wallace didn’t want a call. He wanted to finish his paperwork and go home. He had a bottle of gin there. He planned to fall asleep listening to the wireless.

  “Put him through,” Wallace said.

  “This is Constable Harris, in Quimby,” a voice said.

  “Go ahead, Harris.”

  “Well, sir, it’s complicated.”

  Bloody hell. Here we go. “What do you mean, ‘complicated,’ Harris?”

  “Well, sir, we have a body. A dead man.”

  “Hold on a second,” Wallace said. “Did you say Quimby?”

  “Yes, sir—Quimby. It’s just west of—”

  “I know where it is, Harris, thank you. Hold the line while I scare up a pencil.”

  Wallace found a pencil and a sheet of paper among the piles on his desk and tried to clear his head of rubbish. A dead man in Quimby. He must call Lamb, obviously, but would endeavor to get to the scene ahead of the Chief Inspector to take care of the preliminaries, so by the time Lamb arrived everything would be in order. He sighed and was disturbed to find that his breath smelled obviously of beer.

  “Go on, Harris,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  Slightly more than a mile east of Quimby, Emily Fordham pulled her bicycle off the road near the village of Lipscombe, in which she lived with her mother. She laid her bike in the lush grass at the side of the road and found a comfortable place in which to sit and study Peter’s sketch anew.

  She understood well enough from the sketch, and the photograph that Peter had enclosed with it, that Peter remained troubled by what had happened to Thomas the previous summer. Thomas’s brief disappearance had upset them all. But that had been a year ago and, in any case, Thomas had returned. Peter knew that. But one could never tell with Peter, really.

  She studied the sketch for several minutes but still could not divine what seemed to be its larger message. A spider devouring a butterfly. Was she supposed to understand its meaning? Frustrated, she folded the drawing and put it in her pocket. She would decide what to do about it later. She had to consider the idea that Peter might have sent her the sketch merely to get her attention. She knew that Peter loved her, in his way, though he didn’t understand love—couldn’t understand how love was different from friendship. She would ask to see Lord Pembroke about the matter. He would know the best way in which to approach Peter. She didn’t want to hurt Peter’s feelings.

  For the past five mornings she’d awakened feeling sick and gone to the loo to retch. Although she’d flushed it away, she worried that the smell had lingered and that her mother would detect it and divine the truth. She could not let her mother know that she was carrying Charles’s baby.

  She had not yet even told Charles about the child. She didn’t want to burden him with another worry. Instead, she prayed each day for his safe return from the skies. On some days, the Germans were forcing his squadron aloft two and even three times. She hated the Germans and their stupid war. And yet, were it not for the war, she never would have met Charles.

  She decided that she shouldn’t worry overly much about Peter. Peter, and all he represented, had become fragments of her past.

  She cared now only for the future, for Charles and the baby growing within her.

  TWO

  DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR THOMAS LAMB SAT DOWN WITH HIS wife, Marjorie, to a tea consisting of weak coffee, two poached eggs each, and dry toast. Although they had a half-
full tin of marmalade in the larder, they were rationing it—one day with and one without. Today was a “dry” day. Lamb raised his coffee to his wife.

  “Cheers,” he said, smiling. He had begun raising his cup and offering “cheers” at their evening meal three or four days earlier, as a kind of joke in defiance of the war’s scarcities. Slightly more than ten months had passed since the war had begun and, in that time, nearly everything of any worth had shrunken and diminished—food, laughter, comfort, security. But even as he said it, Lamb wondered if Marjorie was becoming tired of his little attempt at levity. Even irony had begun to wear a bit thin as the war dragged on; the too-obvious joshing seemed to contain a whiff of defeat, of whistling in the dark.

  Marjorie raised her cup and smiled slightly. “Cheers,” she said.

  Lamb had close-cropped brown hair that was graying prematurely at the temples and a generous smile that softened a buried intensity that shone in his eyes. He wanted a fag but long ago had stopped smoking at table because the smoke bedeviled his wife. It drifted into her nostrils and made her sneeze and into her eyes and made them water. And the smell of the bloody things permeated everything. Lamb reckoned he did not own a single tie, shirt, coat, or pair of trousers that did not reek of cigarettes. A week earlier, he’d decided that he would give the damned things up. They were ruining his lungs and threatening to send him to an early grave.

  As of yet, though, he’d had little success in quitting. He still smoked more than a packet a day—and that even as fags had become a matter of patriotism. One should not hoard boots, blankets, or food; all were needed on the front lines. The same was true of petrol. Now the government was making noise about bloody fags. Still and all, Lamb knew from his service in the first war the importance of cigarettes and liquor to frontline soldiers. Rum and fags allowed the average man to keep on despite the hellishness. Two days earlier he’d bought a tin of butterscotch drops and was attempting to train himself to pop one into his mouth each time he wanted a cigarette. Now, as he finished his coffee, he fished the tin from his pocket and denied himself what he really wanted.

  He unfolded the evening edition of the Hampshire Mail with slight trepidation. Evenings, he normally checked the day’s turf results, except on those days when he felt certain that he’d lost. That morning he’d put two pounds on a horse called Winter’s Tail in the fourth race at Paulsgrove, in Portsmouth, and almost immediately a bad feeling about the bet had surged through him. Such instinctual feelings came to him now and again, he didn’t know from where, and often too bloody late, he thought. He found that he couldn’t quite bring himself to check the race result. He knew he’d lost. Two bloody quid down the drain. He and Marjorie couldn’t afford it—not really. Although he didn’t believe in luck, necessarily, he couldn’t help feeling that his luck was running poorly at the moment.

  He turned instead to the usual spate of grim war news. Less than a month earlier, the Germans had defeated France and backed the British Expeditionary Force against the Channel, at Dunkirk. Then the Germans had stopped, an uncharacteristic pause that had allowed the British to evacuate more than three hundred thousand men from France. Still, the British Army was a broken one. Then, three weeks earlier, the Germans had begun bombing southern England almost daily. The reason for this bombardment was the planned German invasion of Britain from France. If the Germans could gain control of the skies above the Channel, they then would send men and arms across to invade—to crush Britain in the same way they’d crushed France and most of the rest of Western Europe.

  On four of the past eight nights, the Luftwaffe had attacked the Blenheim aircraft factory—which made bombers and lay about twenty-five miles to the southeast—though without much success. Neither side had quite yet figured out how to effectively maneuver airplanes in the dark and so the German bombers often missed the mark, and sometimes widely. Around the bomber factory they’d seemed to have blown up as much farmland and pasture as legitimate targets of war. This was partly due to the fact that the German fighters, the Messerschmitts, which escorted and protected the stodgy bombers, lacked the fuel capacity to stick around for the show once the German armada hit Britain. So they would turn and leave the bombers exposed as sitting ducks to the much faster British fighters, the Spitfires and Hurricanes. Consequently, more than a few German bombers each night turned for home and dropped their payloads willy-nilly, on all and sundry. The press had taken to calling this “tipping and running.”

  A month earlier, the Lambs’ eighteen-year-old daughter, Vera, had taken a job in the village of Quimby as its only full-time air-raid warden and civil-defense employee. With the German bombers arriving daily, even the tiniest hamlets along the coast had begun to maintain some manner of full-time civil defense presence. Quimby lay along the route the German raiders normally followed across the Channel from France to the port city of Southampton, which also had become a principal German target. Lamb and Marjorie worried that the village could become a prime target on which frightened, failed, or merely confused German pilots might unload their payloads before scarpering back to France.

  Lamb closed the paper. He knew that Marjorie had read about the previous night’s bombing in Bristol and that the story likely had called up in her the same anxieties as it had in him. Even so, neither spoke of it; they’d already exhausted the subject of what they called “Vera’s decision.”

  The telephone in the front hall rang. Lamb went into the hall and picked up the receiver.

  “Lamb.”

  It was Wallace. “Got a body, guv; an old man, past seventy. Pretty brutal, sounds like. Someone ran a pitchfork through his neck.”

  “Where is it?”

  Wallace hesitated a hitch. He knew about Vera Lamb’s civil defense posting. “Quimby. The body was found on a hill above the village.”

  The news surprised Lamb. Here he’d been worried about stray Germans unloading their bombs on Quimby. He hadn’t counted on a bloody maniac with a pitchfork roaming the place.

  “Who called it in?”

  “Local bobby. I’ve rung Harding and the doctor and rounded up Larkin and am heading there now.”

  “Do we know the old man’s name?”

  “William Blackwell. A farmhand. The bobby says he’s pretty certain the pitchfork belonged to Blackwell himself. A farmer named Abbott had hired the old man to trim a hedgerow along the edge of his property. Blackwell lived with his niece in the village proper, apparently, and when he failed to show for his tea, the niece went looking for him and sought out Abbott, who took her to the hedge, where they found the old man. Abbott tried to remove the pitchfork from the old man’s neck, after which the niece went to pieces.”

  “All right, David. We’ll have to move the body out of there before it gets too bloody dark. I’ll see you there in forty minutes or so.”

  “There’s something else, guv. Whoever killed the old man also carved a cross into his forehead, then ran a scythe through his chest.”

  Bleeding hell, Lamb thought. “A cross?” he asked. “Was this man Blackwell religious, do we know?”

  “Not that I know—though, according to the bobby, some in the village considered him to be a witch.”

  “A witch?”

  “Yes, sir. So the bobby says.”

  “But aren’t witches female?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Maybe the old boy was one of these witches who used a pitchfork rather than a broom.” As soon as he said it, Wallace realized that the joke had not come off as he’d hoped. He counseled himself not to overdo things. He believed that Lamb had not detected any hint of the fact that, less than an hour earlier, he’d been sitting in a pub feeling elevated.

  Lamb returned to the table. “I’m afraid I have to go out,” he said to Marjorie. “Someone has killed an old man near Quimby.” He emphasized the near.

  Years before, Marjorie had grown used to Lamb having to leave the house at odd hours. “What happened?” she asked.

  Lamb always tried to spare Marjorie the
gory details of the murders he investigated. “The usual thing, I’m afraid,” he said. “He probably quarreled with somebody.”

  “All right,” Marjorie said. “If you see Vera, give her my love. And try not to stay too late.” She rose, kissed Lamb’s cheek, then began to clear the dishes from the table.

  Lamb picked up the Mail, grabbed his hat, and went to his aging black Wolseley, which he parked in the lane in front of the house. He was one of the few men of his rank who drove his own car. He preferred it that way: driving himself allowed him more freedom of movement. A month earlier, though, his Wolseley had developed the habit of failing to start faithfully; sometimes he had to give the bloody thing seven or eight cranks before it turned over. He wasn’t sure what the problem was—he didn’t understand motorcars. But he hadn’t found the time to turn the thing in to be checked. In truth, he was afraid they’d take the old car from him and he didn’t want to lose it. He’d grown comfortable with it, despite its eccentricities. He understood that the entire business—becoming attached to a bloody car—was asinine. But there it was.

  He settled behind the wheel and lit a cigarette. Given that he was about to go look at an old man with a pitchfork rammed through his throat and a scythe in his chest, a butterscotch wouldn’t do. And he decided that he’d had enough of his own cowardice—he opened the paper to the turf results, where he discovered that his instincts had failed him: Winter’s Tail had won the fourth race at Paulsgrove. Rather than being two quid lighter, he was four richer.

  He pushed the starter and the ancient Wolseley sputtered to life on the first try.

  He smiled slightly and thought, Lucky indeed.

  THREE

  LAMB PULLED THE WOLSELEY TO A STOP IN FRONT OF WILL BLACKWELL’S stone cottage in Quimby. Several other dark motorcars belonging to the Hampshire police were parked by the cottage, as was the large, dark blue Buick saloon that belonged to the police surgeon, Anthony Winston-Sheed, and the van in which Blackwell’s body would be transported to the hospital in Winchester.