The Language of the Dead: A World War II Mystery

by Stephen Kelly

  Now Lamb saw a Spitfire moving westward with a German fighter, a Messerschmitt 109, on its tail. The Messerschmitt had been hovering nearby, acting as a protective escort to the slow-moving Stukas, and had jumped on the Spitfire. Lamb could not tell if the Spitfire was one of the two British fighters he had seen seconds earlier, but thought that it must be. The RAF man rocked his wings, then circled upward. The German in the Messerschmitt followed.

  The British pilot continued to race skyward so that his plane was nearly perpendicular to the earth. Reaching the apex of his climb, he suddenly maneuvered the plane into a backward loop and headed toward the ground in a steep dive. Lamb wondered if the German had managed to hit the Spitfire, though he saw no smoke coming from the plane. He thought: He’s going right into the ground.

  But when the pilot was less than a hundred meters from the ground, from death, he suddenly leveled his plane and raced in Lamb’s direction. Incredibly, the German had performed the identical maneuver and continued to follow.

  The Spitfire was perhaps a hundred meters above and moving toward the meadow. A second later, it swept past Lamb at what seemed to him an astounding rate of speed—and yet he’d clearly seen the form of the pilot in the cockpit. The Messerschmitt followed. As the German plane passed Lamb, its guns fired a quick burst; it then swept away to the east. Lamb’s bowels tightened.

  The Spitfire headed sharply upward, trailing gray smoke from its right wing. Once again, when the pilot reached the apex of his climb, he turned his plane into a dive. The plane leveled out and headed back toward Lamb—though as it came on, Lamb saw that that Spitfire was losing altitude and that oily black smoke rippled from the place where the gray smoke had been.

  The fighter roared past Lamb; this time he saw that its cockpit was aflame and caught the merest glimpse of the pilot’s silhouette among the licking fire. He felt dumb, rooted, irrelevant. The plane sped on for a few seconds more before it suddenly nosed down and headed for the ground. It smacked into the earth about three quarters of a mile distant and exploded in a ball of fire that shook the ground on which Lamb was standing.

  He felt his knees give way and, an instant later, he fainted.

  He came to a few seconds later, lying on his back. The first thing he glimpsed was a remnant of the smoke from the burning Spitfire dissipating in the blue sky. He managed to pull himself to his feet. The German swarm had passed and the meadow had become so quiet that Lamb could hear the buzz of insects. He looked in the direction of the place where the Spitfire had disappeared. A dense column of acrid black smoke billowed toward the sky.

  Dead, he thought. The boy is dead.

  A memory of Eric Parker’s blackened, lifeless face assailed him. He thought that he should go to the plane, but realized there was nothing he could do. He had no desire to see the wreckage. Cleaning up the mess was someone else’s duty.

  Mildly confounded, he moved back through the wood to his car and drove the rest of the way to Winchester in a daze. Rather than going to the nick, he went directly home, to Marjorie. He found her sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea. She’d just returned from shopping, during which time she’d spent a half hour standing in line to snag a decent-sized cod, which she intended to bake that afternoon for their tea. Lamb’s unexpected entrance startled her. She immediately saw the disquiet in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. She stood and guided him toward a chair.

  He sat and put his hat on the table. “I had to stop,” he said. “I was on the road, in the open.” He looked at her quizzically. “The Germans didn’t come here, then?”

  “No.” She sat next to him. “Can you tell me about it?”

  Since the bombing had begun, Marjorie knew that Lamb inevitably must face a moment when the war returned to him. During the early years of their marriage, nightmares had disturbed his sleep. In the past decade or so, he’d managed to bury his memories of the Somme in the routines and concerns of his daily life, and the nightmares mostly had ceased. Seeing the stunned look in her husband’s eyes, Marjorie knew that something Lamb had witnessed had dredged those submerged memories to the surface.

  “Stukas; I think they were going for the airfield at Cloverton,” Lamb said. “They were so bloody low.” He thought of the Spitfire pilot in the burning cockpit. “I saw a pilot die. I was coming from Quimby when I heard them in the sky and realized that I was in the open.” He paused, then added, “I suppose I panicked a bit. I found some cover in a wood and went to the edge and watched them pass. They were like wasps. A boy in a Spitfire came in among them—went straight into them. He sacrificed himself. I watched him go down; his plane was burning. He went down in a field and there was an explosion.”

  He looked at Marjorie. “I fainted. I couldn’t help it—couldn’t control it.”

  She touched his cheek. “You mustn’t feel ashamed of merely surviving,” she said. She had told him this many times, though she hadn’t needed to in many years.

  He’d hoped not to worry Marjorie with the problem of Harry Rivers. But he saw now that he was wrong to think that Marjorie shouldn’t know. And he’d been wrong to believe that he could keep the old war at bay in the midst of the new one. He would need Marjorie’s help to keep his balance—to stay on the beam—just as he’d needed her twenty years earlier, when he’d returned from the trenches, and as he’d needed her ever since.

  “Dick Walters’s replacement came yesterday,” he said. “It’s Harry Rivers.”

  “Rivers?” For a second, Marjorie wondered if her husband was delusional. Harry Rivers was among the phantoms of the first war that Lamb had buried.

  “He was transferred. He bollixed a case in Warwickshire and was transferred.”

  “But here, of all places… .”

  “I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

  Many years earlier, Marjorie had heard Lamb’s explanation of why he’d tolerated Rivers’s enmity and found it unconvincing. She was sure that Lamb felt responsible for Parker’s death, when he shouldn’t. The bloody Germans were responsible for Parker’s death. She believed that Harry Rivers had done too good a job of playing on her husband’s sense of guilt in Parker’s death as a way of relieving himself of his own feelings of culpability, and she had told Lamb this, too, on many occasions, though not in many years.

  But she repeated none of that now. She said only, “I’m glad you told me all the same.” She squeezed his hand in hers. “You owe him nothing. Just remember that.”

  “I know,” Lamb whispered.

  Marjorie kissed his head. “You know,” she said. “But you don’t believe. And you must believe.”

  NINE

  LAMB SAT AT THE TABLE SIPPING TEA FOR AN HOUR BEFORE HE FELT ready again to face the world.

  During that time, he temporarily put aside his guilt about fouling the kitchen and smoked a half dozen cigarettes to the nub. When he was done, he told himself he must get back to his job and willed himself to leave the kitchen and go out to the Wolseley. Marjorie followed him to the car. She kissed him again and promised that she would have a baked cod ready for their tea when he returned home.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’d do without—”

  She put her finger to his lips. “It’s all right,” she said. She smiled. “Just try not to be late.”

  He drove to the hospital, where he picked up a copy of Blackwell’s autopsy from Winston-Sheed, and from there to the nick. He found himself glancing out the window of the Wolseley at the sky, looking for planes, and told himself that he must stop. He could not afford to give in to his fears and anxieties. He had too bloody much work to do.

  When he arrived at the constabulary, Harding confirmed Lamb’s guess that the Stukas had been on their way to attack the RAF’s Cloverton airfield. The German dive-bombers had set the field’s fuel depot aflame, destroyed a half dozen British fighter planes on the ground, and left the grass landing strip scarred with bomb craters. Harding added that he’d put the Hampshire police for
ce on alert in case they were needed to assist the RAF.

  Lamb said nothing to Harding of his own encounter with the Stukas. He did not want the super to know that seeing the planes had left him shaken. It was better that he give Harding no reason to doubt his ability. Instead, he delivered to the super a brief rundown of what he and his men had found—or hadn’t found—in Quimby that morning.

  “Very well,” Harding said, displeased by the lack of progress. “When the rest of them return, we’ll meet, get everything bloody straight.”

  Lamb read Blackwell’s autopsy in his cramped office, sucking on a butterscotch. The report described the most savage killing Lamb had encountered in his twenty-one years as a police officer. Someone had bashed in the back of the old man’s head with an oak branch; the presence of mud in his nostrils indicated that he had hit the ground face-first while still alive. The killer had then spun the old man onto his back and driven the left tine of the pitchfork into the middle of Blackwell’s neck, severing Blackwell’s larynx and killing him. The killer had then gouged the cross into Blackwell’s head with the scythe before thrusting the tool into the old man’s chest. The blade had pierced and ruptured Blackwell’s heart. Blackwell had lain near the hedge long enough to nearly bleed out. In the end, birds had pecked out his eyes.

  Lamb put the report on his desk, closed his eyes, and sorted the evidence he’d so far collected. It wasn’t much. They’d find Abbott’s fingerprints on the pitchfork and scythe; but Abbott had a convenient story to explain that. And Lydia Blackwell had confirmed Abbott’s story of how they’d found the body. He would need to speak with both of them again, press them more forcefully. And he must speak as soon as possible with Lord Pembroke and the boy, Peter.

  He felt the need to escape the nick; he could still feel the anxiety the Stukas had called up in him—at seeing the pilot die—sitting at the nadir of his gut. He picked up the issue of Sporting Life, walked onto the sunny street and lit a cigarette, then headed for The Fallen Diva. He sat alone at a table near the back of the pub (coincidentally, the same table Wallace had occupied on the previous afternoon, at lunch), smoking and sipping a half pint of ale. Hoping to clear his mind of rubbish, he gazed at the listing of the following day’s races at Paulsgrove, circling the names of horses he might bet on. He found a horse in the second race called Summer Wind.

  Summer Wind—Winter’s Tail? Maybe there was something there, some symbiosis, he thought? He threw his pencil onto the table in a mild fit of self-disgust. Summer Bloody Wind? Why did he even entertain such ridiculous notions?

  Marjorie was right; he musn’t feel guilty about surviving. He’d thought he’d made his peace with that idea, and with the memory of Eric Parker, twenty years ago. Apparently that peace was more fragile than he’d known. He told himself to straighten up and get on with it. He folded the paper, tucked it beneath his arm, and returned to the nick. He found Wallace, Rivers, and Larkin in the incident room talking with Harding. He removed his hat and joined them.

  “Any news?” he asked.

  Rivers raised his chin. “Man named Michael Bradford claims that someone stole a chicken from his henhouse two nights ago. I took him to the shed and showed him the chicken we found on the altar. He claimed it was his.”

  “Did he seem surprised that Blackwell had stolen the chicken?” Lamb asked.

  “No. As a matter of fact, he went on a bit—maybe a bit too much—about how he wasn’t surprised, given that Blackwell was a witch and the rest of it.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Rivers shrugged. “He keeps a henhouse behind his cottage. He lives in one of the old mill houses. The place is barely fit for pigs. According to Harris, he’s a widower and lives in the house with his three kiddies.”

  “A boy and two girls?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wants the bloody reward,” Wallace interjected. “He’ll tell us whatever he thinks we want to hear.”

  “What else have we got, then?” Harding asked.

  Larkin reported that he’d found distinct thumb and forefinger impressions on the drawing of the bird trapped in the spider’s web but nothing on the altar. “I checked the prints against Blackwell’s but they don’t match, nor do they match those of Abbott or the niece. I haven’t finished yet with the weapons. Also, I found nothing else of interest in the shed.”

  He returned the weird drawing to Lamb. Harding sighed impatiently.

  “All right,” Lamb said. “We’ll go at the hill again tomorrow—widen things a bit. And we need to track down Abbott. Harris claims that Abbott plays the ponies, so if it comes to it we’ll send a man to Paulsgrove to look for him. We’ll rendezvous here tomorrow morning.”

  Harding followed Lamb into Lamb’s office and closed the door.

  “I spoke to the man from the Mail, so there’ll be a story in tomorrow’s paper,” Harding said. “I’ll assign a couple of constables to handle the bloody phones for the next few days, but I haven’t men to waste.” He laid a hand on Lamb’s shoulder—a gesture of trust and camaraderie he never would have displayed in front of the lower ranks. “We need a quick result, Tom. Tamp down the bloody nonsense and keep the press off our backs. This is just the sort of thing they feed on, especially with the bombings and the rest of it going on. People are looking for something to take their minds off the bloody Germans.”

  Lamb nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, though he was far from a “quick result.”

  When Harding left, Lamb sat at his desk and made two telephone calls. The first was to Brookings, the ancestral estate of Lord Jeffrey Pembroke.

  Lamb never had met Pembroke but knew that Pembroke enjoyed a reputation as a philanthropist and a kind of rebel against his class. Some of the highborn apparently even considered Lord Jeffrey an outright traitor. He had refused to take his seat in the House of Lords for reasons that Lamb was not entirely certain of, except that Pembroke believed that the English class system had endowed people such as himself with too many advantages and that he hoped to break down those class barriers.

  Pembroke was well known for his practice each summer of playing host to two dozen boys from an orphanage in Basingstoke. The boys stayed at Brookings from the beginning of June until the end of August, living in barracks that Pembroke had built for the purpose. The boys spent the summer studying the flora and fauna of Brookings, collecting specimens, and keeping journals on what they’d discovered. They also tended the estate’s extensive flower and vegetable gardens. Gardening was among Pembroke’s passions and he actively supervised the boys’ work. The vegetable gardens provided food not only for the estate but a large surplus that Pembroke distributed free to the people of the neighboring villages, including Quimby, which bordered his estate to the west.

  Lamb found a listing for Brookings in the Hampshire telephone directory. He called the number and, after a half dozen rings, a ponderous, ancient-sounding voice answered, “Brookings. How may I help you?”

  Lamb identified himself and asked to speak to Pembroke.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but Lord Pembroke is not available at the moment,” the voice said. Lamb imagined an ancient butler arrayed in the Edwardian manner, holding the telephone to his ear with lips pursed, slightly suspicious of the voice on the other end and, indeed, of the very existence of the telephone itself. “You may, however, speak with Lord Pembroke’s secretary, Mr. Parkinson, sir,” the voice said.

  “Yes, please,” Lamb said. “That would be fine.”

  “Very well, sir. Please hold the line and I will fetch Mr. Parkinson.”

  A minute later a clear voice fairly barked, “Hallo—Chief Inspector? Leonard Parkinson here. How may I help you, sir?”

  “Yes, Mr. Parkinson,” Lamb said. “Thank you for taking my call. I’d like to arrange to speak with Lord Pembroke as soon as you can arrange it.”

  “Well, that should be no problem at all, Chief Inspector. Might I ask what about?”

  “I’d like to speak with him in connection with a murder inqu
iry. You might have heard that an old man was killed in Quimby yesterday. This man was said to have been known in the village as a witch and was killed in a way that seemed to suggest that some sort of black-magic ritual might have been involved.”

  “Yes, I did hear something about that. And you’d like to consult with Lord Pembroke on this black-magic angle then?”

  “Basically, yes. In fact, Lord Pembroke mentioned the dead man, William Blackwell, in his book. Blackwell was supposed to have seen some sort of demon hound in his boyhood. And the manner in which he was killed is similar to that used to kill a milkmaid in the last century—a story that Lord Pembroke also mentions in his book.”

  “Well, it sounds a terrible tragedy and I’m sure that Lord Pembroke would be happy to help you in any way he can. Can you meet him here tomorrow morning at ten?”

  “That would be fine,” Lamb said.

  “I should say, though, Chief Inspector, that Lord Jeffrey doesn’t have much of an interest in the supernatural these days. That was more a youthful fancy. He’s moved on to more weighty concerns.”

  “All the same, I believe that speaking with him could prove helpful.”

  “Of course, of course,” Parkinson said. “We look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning, then. Just come to the front door and Hatton will fetch me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure, Chief Inspector.”

  Lamb hung up the phone and, playing a hunch, called the number of a man he’d known for twenty years. Indeed, Albert Gilley had provided Lamb his first big success as a detective, when he’d shut down Gilley’s numbers ring in Portsmouth. Gilley had done three years for that, then sworn off criminal enterprise—or so he’d claimed. He now spent his days at Paulsgrove racetrack in what he liked to call a “consulting” role. He placed bets on horses for Lamb and other “clients” and then sent the clients their winnings in the post, after deducting a ten-percent fee for his trouble. It was penny-ante stuff and perfectly legal, if not necessarily savory. Gilley knew Paulsgrove and its denizens perhaps better than anyone.