The Language of the Dead: A World War II Mystery

by Stephen Kelly

  “Gilley,” he answered.

  “It’s Lamb, Albert.”

  “A pleasure to hear your voice, as always, guv. What can I do for you?”

  “Have you sent the four quid I won on Winter’s Tail yet?”

  “I was just about to put it in the post as you called, guv.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ve got a job for you; if you come through, the money is yours.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “I want you to ask after a man named George Abbott. He’s from up this way, a farmer. He’s an older man but powerful looking—looks as if he might be able to handle someone half his age if it came to it. He likes a drink and probably shoots off his mouth more than he should.”

  “I think I might know the gentleman, guv.”

  “I’d like to know if he’s in deep to anybody and if so, by how much.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. Anything else?”

  “Not for now, Albert.”

  “All right then, guv. I’ll call when I have something. The usual number, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Appreciate the business, as always, guv. Say hello to the missus for me.”

  Lamb hung up the phone feeling slightly more hopeful about his chances than he’d felt even an hour before. Still, he could not rid himself of the image of the young pilot burning in the cockpit and the sound and sensation of the Spitfire shattering in the distant meadow. He reached for the butterscotch tin in his right jacket pocket, then withdrew his hand, whispered “Sod it all,” found his cigarettes in the left pocket, and lit one.

  He lay back a bit in his chair, closed his eyes, and tried to relax. But the first thing he saw in his mind’s eye was Eric Parker’s frozen-eyed face staring back at him.

  Wallace wanted a drink and to see Delilah.

  He’d been thinking of Delilah all day; the way she’d poured the whiskey over herself had driven him fairly wild. Even so, he’d nearly bollixed things that morning by coming in to work looking like something the bloody cat dragged in. He was surprised that Lamb hadn’t interrogated him more thoroughly. Even so, he decided that he could continue with Delilah if she was willing. But he must be more careful with her, just as he must be careful with his drinking.

  After returning to the nick from Quimby, he spent nearly an hour laboriously typing a report for Lamb on the results of the grid search. He hated typing and, in any case, found it difficult to compose a report that said, in effect, “I found nothing.”

  It was now getting on toward teatime. He glanced toward Lamb’s small office; the door was closed. Lamb seemed to have gone home. Rivers also seemed to have disappeared and Larkin had gone to the lab to dust the murder weapons for fingerprints. Wallace was just about to knock off when Harding entered the room.

  “The RAF have asked for our assistance manning a roadblock near Cloverton,” the super said. “The thing is on the main road into the base, just south of it. Round up three men and get out there. Someone there will give you your marching orders.”

  Bloody fucking hell. He stood. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Harding nodded. “I’ll see that you’re relieved in due time.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Get going, then. It sounds as if the bloody place is burning up.”

  Wallace rounded up three uniformed constables and headed to the airfield, which was roughly four miles northeast of Winchester. He found the roadblock about a half mile from the base. A youthful RAF lieutenant, a dozen soldiers, and a Bren gun crew surrounded by sandbags manned the post. Columns of black smoke rose from the airfield and an acrid smell filled the air—a mixture of burning wood, gasoline, oil, and cordite.

  The young officer was waving a tanker truck full of water and a heavier truck with a bulldozer on its bed through the barrier. Wallace ordered the constable at the wheel of the Wolseley to pull off the road onto a slight hill near the gate, just beyond the Bren gun crew. He saw an anti-aircraft emplacement just to the west, its gun pointing skyward. Its crew, having engaged the Stukas, now lounged about the sandbags, sipping coffee. Wallace approached the boyish lieutenant, who was kicking one of the rear tires of the truck transporting the bulldozer and yelling at the driver to “get the bloody goddamned thing moving!”

  Wallace offered the man his hand and introduced himself. The officer replied by telling Wallace his last name: Glendon.

  “I’ve a pair of ambulances coming up the road any minute,” Glendon said. “Keep the bloody goddamned civilians out of the way. Bloody nuisance. Tell them to go home.”

  Without waiting for Wallace’s reply, Glendon turned back to the trucks and shouted at them to move.

  Wallace returned to his squad of constables and deployed them along the road, two on each side, about fifty yards from the roadblock. “No civilians,” he told them.

  Over the next thirty minutes, he and his men turned back seven people who arrived in motorcars—four men, one of whom was quite old, and three women. None resisted or argued when told that they must turn around and go away. Wallace wondered who they were; some likely were relatives of those who were stationed at or working at the airfield; others might have been mere curiosity seekers. His job had taught him that some people possessed a bottomless fascination with death, were drawn to it as flies to a corpse.

  Over the next two hours, his crew turned away an additional dozen civilians and waved through the ambulances Glendon had been waiting on, along with another four trucks full of water, a fire engine from Portsmouth, several trucks carrying Home Guard men, and a single RAF staff car flying on its front bumper the standards of a very senior officer. Wallace stole a glance into the back seat and thought he spied the severe visage of Hugh “Stuffy” Dowding, the head of RAF fighter command. Glendon saluted the vehicle as it passed.

  The traffic at the roadblock had begun to thin and the smoke from the airfield to abate when Wallace saw a woman on a bicycle pedaling toward the checkpoint from the south. The woman came on, steadily and stoically in the twilight, until one of the constables intercepted her. Wallace watched as the constable spoke to the woman. She was a good-looking girl, with longish auburn hair—a bit windswept now from the bike ride—and particularly nice legs. She raised her voice to the constable, though Wallace couldn’t hear exactly what she said—something about “having a right.”

  He watched the girl get onto her bicycle and attempt to pedal past the constable; the constable grabbed the bike’s handlebars and stopped her progress. Wallace guessed that love—or some semblance of it—was urging her on. Women fell for the bloody pilots like bowling pins.

  He approached the woman and the constable barring her way. “Hold on there, miss,” he said. “It’s not safe ahead.” He nodded to the constable. “I’ll handle this, Boyce.”

  Emily Fordham looked fiercely at Wallace. “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m going forward. I’ve been through this gate before. I know what I’m doing. I’ve a right to go in.”

  “I’m afraid that doesn’t count today, miss,” Wallace said.

  Emily Fordham dismounted the bike and pushed it to the side of the road. “Then I’ll wait,” she said. She folded her arms.

  Wallace smiled, hoping to disarm her. “You could be in for a very long wait. Perhaps all night.”

  “I don’t care,” Emily said. She sat in the grass by the side of the road.

  “You’ll get cold when the sun goes down. I assume you brought a blanket with you.”

  Emily didn’t answer.

  Wallace liked her spunk. He envied the flyboy who’d aroused such passion in her. He went to the boot of the Wolseley and withdrew from it a dark green wool blanket that was part of an emergency kit with which the constabulary equipped its vehicles. He also withdrew a packet of tea biscuits. He laid them in the grass next to Emily. “Are you certain I can’t give you a ride back to wherever you’re from?” he asked.

  “I can take care of myself.” She looked at him. “Thank you for the blanket.”
/>   “I’ll tell the officer at the checkpoint that you’re here,” Wallace said.

  “Thank you,” Emily said. But as she spoke, she was looking at the airfield and not at Wallace.

  A half hour later, Sergeant Cashen and a trio of fresh constables arrived to relieve Wallace and his men. Wallace told Cashen about Emily. She remained sitting by the road, the blanket lying, still folded, on the ground next to her.

  He hoped her lover boy hadn’t been killed in the raid. She was, he thought, too young to cry over someone’s grave.

  TEN

  LAMB WOKE ALONE. HE HEARD MARJORIE PUTTERING ABOUT downstairs in the kitchen and hoped she’d made coffee.

  He washed, shaved, and dressed. On his way downstairs, he stopped at Vera’s room. He wasn’t certain why he stopped, other than that he missed Vera. Her bed, with its pale green cotton blanket, was neatly made, as always, though she hadn’t slept in it since taking the job in Quimby. Certificates on the wall honored her school accomplishments: one for being crowned champion of her primary school spelling bee in her fifth year, one for having completed a swimming and life-saving course, and one for having earned the runner-up spot in the junior girls division of the 1939 Hampshire cross-country championships.

  He thought of the nursery rhyme from which he’d taken his nickname for her, “Doodle Doo.”

  Doodle Doodle Doo,

  The Princess lost her shoe;

  Her Highness hopped—

  The fiddler stopped,

  Not knowing what to do.

  The rhyme had been one of Vera’s favorites when she was a toddler. As Lamb read it to her, she’d acted out the parts of the princess searching for her shoe, her highness hopping, and the fiddler stopping. As the fiddler, she always came to an abrupt halt and looked around the room with a baroque look of confusion on her little face, which always made Lamb laugh.

  He saw on Vera’s vanity the accoutrements of her young womanhood that she’d left behind—several hairbrushes, a jewelry box, some odds and ends related to makeup, the small dark blue bottle of perfume he and Marjorie had given her the previous Christmas. It had a French name he couldn’t remember; Marjorie had picked it out. He hadn’t thought much of it at the time but now realized that young women wore perfume for one reason.

  He left the room, closing the door behind him.

  He was surprised to find that Marjorie was not in the kitchen, though she’d indeed made coffee. The morning edition of the Mail was on the table, its front page given over to stories detailing yet another German raid on the Blenheim factory on the previous night. Lamb glanced at it. Once again, the Germans had bollixed the raid, dropping more bombs around the factory than on it. But in the process they’d killed fourteen people, innocents whose houses and farms had inconveniently been in the path of the errant bombs.

  The paper also contained a story on Will Blackwell’s murder that included prominent mention of the rumor that he practiced witchcraft. The story quoted Harding as saying that the police were inquiring into the black-magic angle, but downplaying it.

  Lamb looked out the kitchen window to the rear yard, where Marjorie kept a small flower and vegetable garden. The sky was blue, the weather clear, sunny, and unseasonably hot, which meant that the Germans surely would come again that day and probably that night. The summer was fast shaping up as the driest and hottest on record. They’d had no rain in two weeks and none was forecast for the following three days.

  Marjorie was standing by her small rose garden, her arms wrapped about herself, as if she were cold. He poured two cups of coffee—adding a drop of milk to Marjorie’s—and carried them outside. He came up behind Marjorie and kissed her on the back of the neck. “Good morning,” he said and handed her the coffee. He dispensed with “cheers.”

  He handed Marjorie the warm cup. “Thank you,” she said; she allowed Lamb to draw her in close to him and they stood together for a minute, not speaking. When the war had begun, he and Marjorie had tried to persuade Vera to take a “safe” war job, perhaps as a typist or telephone operator. But she had resisted this advice, declaring her intention to do her part.

  “They bombed the Blenheim factory again last night,” Marjorie said after a moment.

  “Yes. But they bollixed it.”

  “That’s what frightens me.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s all down to chance; there’s no guarantee that any of that will bleed into the countryside.” Marjorie looked away. “Damn her muleheadedness,” she said.

  “She’s determined to do what she will do and we must let her.” He pulled Marjorie closer. “We can’t protect her—not entirely. She must learn to protect herself.”

  Marjorie emitted a sigh of resignation and shook her head.

  “Let’s have breakfast,” Lamb said. He took her by the arm and led her back inside.

  At the nick, Lamb found Harding sequestered in his office, speaking on the phone. Neither Rivers, nor Wallace, nor Larkin had arrived—though on his desk, Lamb found Larkin’s report on the murder weapons. Larkin had found two sets of fingerprints on the handles of the pitchfork and scythe—Blackwell’s and Abbott’s. Neither matched the thumbprint he’d found on the drawing. He’d found no usable print on the makeshift altar.

  His phone rang. “Lamb.”

  “Morning, guv,” Albert Gilley said.

  “Hello, Albert.”

  “Your Mr. Abbott’s into it for at least two hundred, total, with a couple of different blokes, both of whom are losing their patience.”

  Lamb whistled, impressed. Two hundred was more than a year’s wages for a man like Abbott. “Thank you, Albert,” he said.

  “Anything else, guv? There’s a nice-looking filly in the second, name of Summer Wind. Five to one.”

  “I’ll pass today, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself. Give my best to the missus.”

  On the previous night, Wallace had made it to The Fallen Diva just before final call. Delilah was waiting for him. He’d downed a pint and then they’d gone back to her little house and devoured each other, as they had the previous night. This time, though, Wallace had curbed his drinking. When, finally, he’d fallen asleep next to Delilah, he’d done so sober.

  He’d also brought with him a razor, soap, and fresh clothing, which he’d stuffed into a kit bag. He’d therefore felt confident and on top of his game when he’d awakened. But Delilah was lying with her back to him, softly crying. He put his arms around her; she grasped his right hand to her breast and held it. Her skin was warm and moist. He asked her what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” she said without turning to look at him. “I just cry sometimes. I don’t know why.”

  He’d held her for some minutes. The smell of liquor lingered on her breath. He felt a slight pity for her and realized that he did not know her surname. He told himself he would ask her later. He’d then washed and shaved and gone on his way, managing to arrive at the nick only a few minutes after Lamb.

  Rivers had arrived next, followed shortly by Cashen and Larkin. Lamb conducted a quick meeting in which he reiterated their duties for the day. He told them he would join them in Quimby after speaking with Lord Jeffrey Pembroke. He briefly told them the stories of the murder of Agnes Clemmons and its similarities to Blackwell’s killing, and of the tale of Blackwell having seen the black dog on Manscome Hill.

  “It’s likely our killer has read the book,” Lamb said.

  After the meeting, he briefly took Rivers and Wallace aside and told them that he had a source in Paulsgrove who’d said that Abbott was deeply in debt to a pair of Portsmouth bookies.

  “You’ll be in charge in Quimby in my absence,” he told Rivers. “Check Abbott’s cottage first. If he’s not there, then I’ll probably send you to Portsmouth.”

  “But he could be bloody anywhere,” Rivers said, barely masking the impertinence in his tone.

  “All the same, I want the lead checked,” Lamb said evenly to Rivers. “If you’re unwilling to go, then I’ll
send someone else and you can stay here and answer some of the many telephone calls I expect we’ll get today in response to the newspaper story.”

  Rivers nodded and grumbled his assent.

  Wallace wondered what Rivers was on about. He’d sensed the tension between Rivers and Lamb from the beginning; then Rivers had made the crack about “backing the wrong horse.” But Rivers seemed to be the one who was making the wrong bet, challenging Lamb.

  Brookings sat perched above the Solent between Quimby on its northwest side and the village of Lipscombe on its northeast.

  Lamb found the main house to be much like other fine old manor houses he’d seen—large, elegant, and decrepit-looking. To the left of the house he saw the large gardens in which the boys who stayed at Brookings in the summers worked. All these, save one, which sprouted a variety of low green vegetables, lay fallow because the war had kept the boys away.

  Hatton, the aging butler who’d answered Lamb’s call of the previous day, showed Lamb into an echoing foyer. Hatton was just as Lamb had imagined, with a deeply lined, ancient face than nonetheless retained a kind of ageless haughtiness. He was dressed in black and sported wide gray sideburns. Although Pembroke was reputed to be a man of modern ideas, he apparently retained an old-fashioned taste in household staff, Lamb thought. “I’ll tell Mr. Parkinson that you are here, sir,” Hatton said.

  Two minutes later, a small, wiry man dressed in a well-cut blue suit and red tie appeared. Leonard Parkinson walked toward Lamb with such speed that Lamb at first feared that Parkinson might ram him. When still a good seven strides away, Parkinson thrust out his hand.