The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  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.

  She moved away from the vicarage and back toward the cemetery. She knew Gerald—knew him better than anyone knew him, including Wilhemina. She knew that he set out each morning at exactly six fifteen to walk two miles around the environs of the village, and she was certain that he must have, on numerous occasions, seen the woman who visited the cemetery early in the morning and that he almost certainly had attempted to chat her up. He would not have been able to resist attempting to seduce the woman; his ego wouldn’t have allowed him to resist doing so. In the end, he was almost without a conscience.

  She knew that he’d lied to the police about the pistol and other things because he’d been left with no choice but to lie. And she knew that he would seek to rid himself of the gun as soon as he was able—as darkness fell. When, earlier that day, the police had fanned out in the village to take statements and a detective had arrived at her door and asked to speak with her, she had been careful to say nothing that might contradict the lies she knew that Gerald must tell. She had been guarded in her answers to the detective’s questions and had tried to think as Gerald would think. Now she was on her way to see if she’d correctly guessed Gerald’s next move—if she really knew him as well as she believed she did.

  She moved along the rear fence of the cemetery and around to a spot that was just outside it and near to the place where Lila Tutin’s grave lay open and waiting, a black rectangle in the moonlit grass. She sat on the ground behind a broom shrub about a meter from the fence, from where she could see the grave.

  She hoped that she had not left things until too late, though she doubted that Gerald would have risked moving too early in the night. He would wait until the village was long asleep. And indeed, fifteen minutes later, Gerald appeared at the cemetery gate, just as she suspected he would. From her hiding place, Doris watched him creep toward the open grave carrying a spade and a dark canvas sack with something heavy inside it that made the bag sag. He was dressed in black and used no torch. She did not have to see what the sack contained. She knew what it contained, just as she had known that Gerald would come to the cemetery. She had thought in the way Gerald would think and she had been right. She did know him best.

  He put the shovel and sack by the edge of the grave and eased himself into it. He grabbed the shovel and began to dig. He dug only for a minute—a small hole, obviously. He retrieved the bag and, clutching it, bent into the hole, out of sight. He then began working the earth with the shovel again. Two minutes later, he was finished. He put the shovel by the edge of the hole and lifted himself out. He stood by the hole for a few seconds, staring into it as he rubbed the soil from his hands. Then he picked up the shovel and left the cemetery, the gate creaking as he opened it.

  Once he’d disappeared into the shadow of the church, Doris emerged from behind the broom shrub and crept toward the grave.

  An hour later, Lawrence Tigue moved—also unseen and with determined stealth—up the path from the village. His target was the thick tangle of blackberry bramble that grew in the northwest corner of the cemetery, by the grave of Mary Forrest.

  Lawrence had impressed himself with how easily he’d kept his composure when Lamb had questioned him at the cemetery gate that morning. Throughout his life, people had considered him to lack backbone, but they were wrong. Even the woman whom he’d married had incorrectly concluded this about him, though he found that he hardly cared about that any longer. Even so, he felt himself sorely tried by recent events. He’d been on the verge of escaping, and now the entire bloody thing seemed to be crashing in on him. He was not yet sure what he would do to correct that, though he had begun to form the outline of a plan of action in his mind. At certain times during the difficult day that had just passed, he had felt as if he might cry—cry for himself and the injustices he’d endured. As he prepared to enter the cemetery he realized that his hands were shaking and, despite the cool dampness of the night, that he was sweating. He told himself that he must be cold and pitiless—calculating—as so many others had been cold and pitiless toward him.

  He came to the bramble and knelt before it. He reached into the thicket, the thorns snagging the sleeve of his shirt, and put his hand on the small mound of loose earth beneath the bush. The place seemed not to have been touched. He began to clear away the thin layer of dirt and detritus until he felt the canvas sack. He thought again of how, once he moved it must be for good and all. There could be no turning back.

  He grasped the sack and pulled it free from its hiding place.

  Lilly Martin ventured into the sleeping village, though she hesitated doing so at first because the murder of the strange woman in the cemetery that morning had spooked her. But she found that, even with the macabre events of that morning, she could not stand lying alone in bed, in her dark room, listening to the obscure, moody sounds the empty house emitted. The sounds frightened her more than thoughts of the dead woman lying in the cemetery. Mother had tried to convince her that she wouldn’t mind being alone in the house at night because she would spend most of the time sleeping. But she hated being alone in the empty house. Worse, she was beginning to believe that Mother was coming to prefer the long bus rides to and from her job in Southampton to being home. She couldn’t help but think that Mother, too, was seeking escape from the lonely house, just as she herself sought escape in wandering at night. And so she screwed up her courage and went out, resolving that she would go nowhere near the church or the cemetery.

  She decided that she would go to Miss Wheatley’s cottage, hoping that she might again catch the old hypocrite pilfering Lawrence Tigue’s eggs. She walked along the path she had trod the previous night and settled herself in the knee-high grass to the left of the trail, near Miss Wheatley’s cottage, from where she had a clear view of the dark, thatched-roof house. She settled in to wait for the old cow to move. As she did so, she noticed that the moist air carried on it the vague smell of something dead—probably some poor animal Miss Wheatley had shot, she thought.

  She had been waiting only ten minutes when she spied a dark figure emerge from the small wood that bisected the meadow, just down the trail from the cottage. The figure was coming from the direction of Mr. Tigue’s house, and at first she thought that she might have come too late to Miss Wheatley’s, that Miss Wheatley already had pilfered Tigue’s eggs and now was on her way home. But she soon could tell that the approaching person was not Miss Wheatley; the figure was too thin and moved too quickly. She crouched and watched the figure pass Miss Wheatley’s cottage and continue in the direction of the old O’Hare house. Even in the dark, she could tell by the figure’s silhouette and the way that it moved that it was Lawrence Tigue. He wore dark slacks and a dark shirt and carried what seemed to be a kit bag or satchel tucked under his right arm.

  Lilly glanced again at Miss Wheatley’s dark cottage; nothing seemed to be happening there. In a snap, she decided to move onto the trail and follow Mr. Tigue. She still considered Alba Tigue’s sudden departure from Winstead suspicious, no matter the excuses Mr. Tigue had offered.

  She followed him, keeping a safe distance, for a hundred or so meters down the trail, until they reached the long-abandoned house in which Sean and Claire O’Hare had lived with their twin sons and in which, tragically, Claire O’Hare had hung herself. The house lay about twenty meters from the road that entered the western end of Winstead. The high grasses, brambles, and young trees of the adjoining meadow had consumed the O’Hare pro
perty.

  Lilly had heard the story of the O’Hares in bits and pieces over the years. She knew some of the story, thanks to what other children in the village had told her—several macabre legends had grown up around Claire O’Hare’s suicide—while the rest had come from her father and mother, who had, when she was younger, answered her questions about the family’s fate in ways that, she now understood, had been designed to prevent frightening her. She knew for certain that Claire O’Hare had hung herself from an exposed roof beam in the house’s cramped sitting room. One of the local legends of the case said that Claire actually had been murdered and that police had discovered, clutched tightly in her right fist, a note that named her killer that was not in her writing, but that the police had hushed up this fact for reasons people could only speculate upon. But when she had asked her father about this legend, he had dismissed it as “ridiculous” and “impossible” and touched her face, encouraging her not to “dwell upon” such morbid considerations.

  To go along with the legends, the children of Winstead inevitably dared one another to enter the house at night; indeed, entering the house, even merely to step inside it, had become a kind of rite of passage for village children of a certain age, and the younger one was when taking the dare, the more respect one earned from their peers. Lilly had first taken the dare two years earlier, when she was ten, which was considered “old” to have done so. On that occasion she had entered the house through the back door, by the kitchen. The front door, as anyone who had tried to enter the house knew, was nailed shut and blocked by two decades’ worth of undergrowth and detritus. Lilly had run through the back door and into the hall that bisected the house, then turned around and run right back out again. As she had passed the parlor in which Claire O’Hare had committed suicide, Lilly had allowed herself a quick glance into the room as she passed it on a run, despite the assertion advanced by some village children that anyone who dared gaze upon the room would be turned to stone on the spot.

  Lilly watched Mr. Tigue leave the path and begin to make his way through the bramble and brush toward the rear of the O’Hare house. She followed through the growth in time to see Mr. Tigue move past a tire swing that hung from the branches of an ancient oak by a rotting length of rope—a swing the O’Hare twins had played on—toward the back door. By then Mr. Tigue had disappeared and Lilly reckoned that he must have entered the house. She looked toward the house and saw the faint glow of the light of an electric torch coming from the window of the parlor. She debated whether she should try to move closer to the window, to see what Mr. Tigue was doing, but could not bring herself to do so out of fear that Mr. Tigue might catch her out.

  The torch light suddenly snapped off and Lilly saw Tigue’s dark figure emerge from the rear door and head back toward the path, directly toward her; he had stayed inside the house for only a minute. Instinctively, she moved to the right, deeper into the brush. Tigue passed only meters away, close enough for her to hear his slightly labored breathing. She noticed that he no longer held the satchel he had been carrying.

  She let him go, squatting in the brush and realizing that she, too, was breathing quickly, heavily. She longed to enter the house to see if Tigue had left something there. And yet she was afraid—afraid of the O’Hare house and suddenly remembering that a woman had been murdered in the cemetery only that previous morning. She wondered if she possessed the necessary fiber to be a crime novelist, or whether she was nothing more than another run-of-the-mill frightened young girl. Sadness suddenly threatened to overwhelm her—a sadness she had tried so hard for so very long to keep at bay—and she began to cry, alone in the dark. The whole world, she thought, seemed to have become more sad and selfish and deceitful and crazy.

  Feeling defeated, she ran home to the dark, moody house and her lonely room.

  TEN

  LAMB AND HIS TEAM MET THE FOLLOWING MORNING AT THE NICK in Winchester. He lit a cigarette and called the meeting to order.

  Police Superintendent Anthony Harding stood next to Lamb, looking vaguely dissatisfied. Before the meeting, Lamb had briefed the super on the events of the previous day, and Harding had not been pleased by Lamb’s assertion that he didn’t trust the vicar of Winstead.

  “He found the body and had opportunity,” Lamb had told Harding. “And when he called here to report finding the body he told Wallace a different story than he told the Home Guard man who acts as the village constable and that he later told me. He told me that his hearing the shot alerted him to the trouble, but he said nothing of this to Wallace. He claimed that he forgot to mention the shot to Wallace because finding the body confounded him, but he didn’t seem in the least upset when I spoke to him. And he owns an infantry officer’s Webley but claims that it was stolen a week ago. On top of that, he never reported the theft.”

  “Yes, but what’s his motive?” Harding asked.

  “I’m working on that,” Lamb said.

  Harding sniffed and shook his head as if to show that he was less than awestruck by Lamb’s progress thus far.

  Wallace, Rivers, and Larkin also gathered for the briefing, along with Vera, who sat in a corner of the room in her ill-fitting uniform.

  Larkin began by reporting that the soles of Wilhemina and Gerald Wimberly’s shoes matched the plaster casts of the prints he’d taken at the cemetery and that he’d officially identified the slug they’d found at the scene as being a .455 caliber. Lawrence Tigue had voluntarily surrendered his .455-caliber Webley Mark VI to Rivers, and Larkin had sent it and the slug to Scotland Yard to be checked for ballistics.

  Rivers reported that the door-to-door canvass of Winstead had turned up no one who had seen Ruth Aisquith in the village on the previous morning, though several people said they had seen her about the village in the past.

  “The construction of the prison camp has meant there’s been more than the usual number of strange faces in Winstead of late,” Rivers said. “It’s been a bit of a boon to the shops and the pub. Everyone we spoke to claimed not to have known her. We also spoke to a woman named Doris White, who is the vicar’s housekeeper. She confirmed that Wimberly takes a regular walk in the mornings but said that she had not gone to work at the vicarage yesterday because of all the trouble, though she claimed to have popped up later in the morning to see for herself what was going on. As for Mary Forrest, she had a son, Roger, who left the village more than forty years ago, but no one we spoke to knew for certain if he’d ever married or had children, or even if he was still alive. No one had any familiarity at all with the name Aisquith.”

  Wallace took the floor to report on what he’d found in Ruth Aisquith’s personnel file, among the personal belongings she’d kept in the footlocker at the end of her cot, and his conversations with others at the prison camp.

  Ruth Aisquith had been born in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and was thirty-six and unmarried. The latter information, he said, seemed to nullify the notion that Roger Forrest might have been her father—and therefore that Mary Forrest might be her grandmother—“unless she lied about having never been married or changed her surname to Aisquith from Forrest for some reason.”

  She had been living in Haworth when she was conscripted into the fire service and refused service on the grounds that acceding to military conscription did not comport with her personal religious beliefs, though she was not a Quaker and her file did not list a specific religious affiliation. A military service tribunal heard her case and rejected it, after which she was ordered to report for duty with the Manchester fire brigade. She refused and was sent to prison in Manchester. A few months later she’d renounced her objection, enrolled for conscription, and asked that she be spared fire brigade work. This time she’d said that fire frightened her and that she doubted she would be much good at fighting it. The tribunal honored her request and sent her to work at the prison camp outside Winstead.

  “According to the file she has no living relatives,” Wallace said. “Before the war she made her living as a seamstress in H
aworth.” He paused, then added, “Funny thing, though. One of the women I spoke to at the camp said that she doubted that story—that Ruth didn’t strike her as the ‘seamstress type.’ Those were her words. She seems to have been hardworking but aloof. When she had leave, she usually went into Winstead; most people were under the impression that she went there to lay flowers at her grandmother’s grave, though if her grandmother is buried in the village we don’t yet know the woman’s name. None of the people at the camp had heard Ruth ever mention her grandmother’s name. At night she often sat in her bunk and read until lights out. Her personal effects included a few books and toiletries and the like, rather Spartan. No one would admit to disliking her because she was a conchi, though most of them said they didn’t agree with her. Men and women are kept segregated, and of the half-dozen or so men I was able to speak with, all claimed to have rarely seen her outside the camp mess.”

  “Obviously, we’ve got some work to do on her background,” Harding said.

  “Yes,” Lamb agreed. He then handed out the day’s assignments. Wallace was to return to the prison camp with a constable to finish taking statements from the male workers, while he, along with Vera, Rivers, and a trio of constables returned to Winstead. Lamb intended for him and Rivers to interview Wilhemina Wimberly and had devised a plan for doing so that he would discuss with Rivers in detail as they rode to the village. First, though, he wanted to attend the funeral of Lila Tutin, the woman for whom the empty grave in the cemetery was reserved. During the funeral, he intended to study Gerald Wimberly more closely.