The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  Doris stepped out of the darkness. “Do you like the candles?”

  “Very much.” He was uncertain what she was up to. Even so, he must remain patient—must not rush or upset her.

  “It was naughty of me, wasn’t it—to nick the candles?” She took another step toward him.

  “Very naughty.”

  She stepped fully into the candlelight and put the palms of her hands on Gerald’s chest. Internally, he recoiled. Outwardly, he smiled again.

  “You’re lying about Wilhemina’s shoes being in the bag,” she said, her voice suddenly husky. She playfully picked at a piece of lint on Gerald’s sweater, then looked directly into his eyes. “I will tell the police all I know unless you do as I say.”

  Gerald fought an urge to strike the badger’s hideous face. Instead, in a voice that made it sound as if he was merely playing a mischievous game, he said, “And what is it that you want?”

  She lifted her sticky, painted lips toward his. He found the sensation of her breath on his face ghastly.

  “For you to pretend that you love me,” she said.

  EIGHTEEN

  LAMB AND VERA ROSE EARLY, PAUSING ONLY LONG ENOUGH TO share with Marjorie a cup of coffee and a slice of toast with a bit of marmalade before heading to the nick. Lamb had awakened that morning still feeling a keen desire to learn as much as he could, as quickly as he could, about the O’Hare case. He intended to take at least a cursory look that morning at the dusty files of the case and hoped to track down and interview Ned Horton that day.

  Also, the story he’d read in the Hampshire Mail a few months earlier that had detailed the government’s intention to build the POW camp on the farm near Winstead had mentioned that the farm had been owned since 1917 by an estate agent from Winchester whose name Lamb could not recall. This man therefore had been Olivia Tigue’s landlord. He intended to put Vera to the job of finding the agent’s name, as the man might possess memories of the Tigues and the case. On the drive to the nick, Lamb filled Vera in on what he recalled of the O’Hare case, reasoning that the residents of Winstead would begin speaking about the case again and that one of them might say something to Vera or anyone else on the team—even in passing—that could prove valuable. He and Vera arrived at the nick to find that Rivers, too, had come in early; he was hunched over the typewriter at his desk, writing a report on the canvass of Winstead he’d led in the wake of the Aisquith killing.

  On the previous night, Lamb and Harding had decided that the inquiry team needed an incident room in Winstead, from which it could coordinate its various inquiries. Lamb had noticed the small stone school in the village and thought that it would do nicely, given that classes were out for the summer term. Lamb now sat by Rivers’s desk and explained to Rivers what he desired in Winstead. Rivers promised he would take a few constables to the village that morning and set up the incident room.

  Rivers also had a bit of news that surprised Lamb. “I made a telephone call yesterday,” he said. “The toy soldier—Grant—comes from a set manufactured by the W. Britain Limited toy company between 1900 and 1930 of field marshals and generals. Each set had six figurines, all generals, all made of cast lead.”

  In the rush of events Lamb had forgotten about the Grant figure. He was uncertain if the figure was significant, though it had been just odd enough—just enough out of place—to potentially be so. Lamb was glad to see that Rivers had been thinking along the same lines.

  “I had a set when I was a boy,” Rivers said. “Wellington, Napoleon, Edward IV, von Hindenburg, Johnny Burgoyne, and Grant. The man I talked to at Britain’s said that, after the last war, they replaced Edward IV in the set with Haig. Keeping up with the times.” Douglas Haig had led the British Army during most of the Great War.

  Lamb smiled. “Nice work, Harry,” he said.

  “We’ll see,” Rivers said. “It might mean bollocks.”

  “Maybe,” Lamb said.

  Lamb again consulted the newspaper file and found the story on the prison camp that had been in the Mail. The name of the man who had owned the farm was Oscar Strand, an estate agent in Winchester. Because Wallace had yet to come in, Lamb sat Vera at the detective sergeant’s desk and gave her the task of calling Strand and inquiring if he was free that day to speak to a policeman about his former tenants, the O’Hares. If he claimed to be busy, Vera was to push a bit and say that the matter was rather urgent. The story also contained the name of the younger O’Hare brother, Algernon, who, the paper reported, was the head of the mathematics department at the Everly School in Winchester. Algernon’s and Lawrence’s mother, Olivia Tigue, had died some years earlier, according to the story. Vera also was to call Algernon Tigue and arrange a time that day during which Lamb could speak to him.

  “If he’s seen this morning’s Mail—and my guess is that he has—he’ll understand why I want to speak with him,” Lamb said of Algernon Tigue.

  That morning’s paper had reported on its front page the discovery of a child’s skeleton in the foundation of the farmhouse near Winstead. Although Harding had made it clear to the press that the constabulary had not yet determined the identity of the child, the Mail once again had reminded its readers that Winstead had been the scene of Claire O’Hare’s suicide more than twenty years earlier. The paper also had reported that morning the discovery of a body that police said they had not yet identified—likely that of a tramp, and likely a case of suicide, the story said—in the wood near Saint Michael’s Church in Winstead on the previous day, though the editors had decided that this story merited only five paragraphs on page seven.

  Lamb went to his office, where he found the files of the O’Hare case lying on the floor next to his desk in three cardboard boxes, and closed the door. He believed that he must treat the case as if it was fresh. And to do that, he must go back to the beginning and reconstruct the day on which Claire O’Hare was found hanging from the end of a rope tied to a rafter in her parlor.

  He peeked into one of the boxes, which emitted a musty smell. The files seemed to be in relatively good order; Lamb had worried that a kind of volcanic mess of paper awaited him in the boxes. He also found on his desk a slip of paper, which Harding had placed there, on which was written Ned Horton’s telephone number and address. Lamb sat at his desk and dialed the number. After a couple of rings, a voice answered, gruffly: “Horton.”

  “Mr. Horton, this is Chief Inspector Tom Lamb.”

  “I expected that you—or someone like you—would call.”

  “So you saw the Mail this morning, then?”

  “I saw.”

  “We’re not sure yet who the body belongs to.”

  Horton said nothing.

  “I’d like to come by this morning and talk to you about the case,” Lamb said. He decided that he would wait to tell Horton that he believed that the tramp who’d died in the wood by the church was Albert Clemmons.

  “I’ll be home all day.”

  “How about ten?”

  “Ten will do.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Horton. I’ll see you at ten, then.”

  Horton emitted a grunt that sounded like “Right,” then hung up.

  Vera knocked on the door and Lamb bade her enter. She laid a slip of paper on his desk with Oscar Strand’s name, address, and telephone number on it and the notation that he was free that morning from ten to noon. She stood before her father in her baggy uniform, looking rather serious. He sensed the pride she felt in completing the assignment he’d given her.

  “Nice work,” Lamb said.

  “Thank you.”

  Lamb thought he had heard Wallace’s voice in the outer room. He checked his watch; if the detective sergeant hadn’t yet arrived, he was past due.

  “Is Wallace in yet?” he asked Vera.

  “He’s just arrived.”

  “Could you ask him to pop in and see me, please?” Lamb felt it slightly odd to be ordering around his daughter as if she were his secretary, but he thought it best that Vera stay busy durin
g the time she worked for him and that she and Harding and the rest of the team came away from her tenure with the nick feeling as if she’d at least earned her keep.

  “Of course,” Vera said.

  A minute later, Wallace stood in the doorway.

  “Come in,” Lamb said. He delivered to Wallace the same brief summation of the O’Hare case that he’d delivered to Vera, then handed Wallace the paper on which Vera had written the contact information for Oscar Strand and explained Strand’s relationship with the Tigues. “He might recall something useful about them and the O’Hare case,” Lamb said. “I’d like you to speak with him this morning, before you head out to the prison site.”

  Wallace took the paper. “Right,” he said.

  And steer clear of my daughter in the meantime, Lamb thought, though he merely nodded at Wallace in acknowledgment and watched the detective sergeant exit.

  Again alone in his office, Lamb picked up the first of the boxes containing the O’Hare files and began to go through it. The file turned out to be deeper than he had expected, given that Horton’s conclusion seemed to have been the obvious one—that Claire O’Hare had committed suicide and that her husband had abandoned her for parts unknown and taken their twin sons with him. He spent an hour sorting through the first two of the three boxes and found himself frustrated in his attempt to find Horton’s first official report on the case, which he hoped would contain a narrative of Horton’s initial call to the scene of Claire O’Hare’s suicide and his discovery that Sean O’Hare and the couple’s sons were gone. He found the absence of such a document troubling, though portions of old files sometimes went missing and were rearranged over time. Despite this missing piece, Lamb was able to cobble together a basic outline of the case through what the boxes contained—some of Horton’s handwritten notes, witness statements, later official reports, and a few clippings on the case from the Mail.

  An unnamed resident of Winstead had called the constable in the neighboring village of Lower Promise—Winstead had had no constable of its own at the time—to say that they suspected that some violence had been committed in the O’Hare cottage, though the file did not say what sort of violence the neighbor believed had occurred.

  The constable, a man named John Markham, arrived a half-hour later, at roughly eight P.M., to find the door to the O’Hare cottage open. He entered the house to find Claire O’Hare hanging, dead, from a rafter in the cottage’s parlor. He’d immediately gone to the pub to call the nick in Winchester and request a CID man, who turned out to be Ned Horton.

  Horton determined that Claire O’Hare had stood on a chair she’d taken from the kitchen, knotted one end of the belt of her yellow dressing gown around her neck and the other around the rafter, then stepped off the chair into oblivion. She wore only the dressing gown itself, which lay open on her dangling body. Horton had found a brief suicide note on the kitchen table in Claire’s handwriting that stated that she had killed herself in despair over her husband having abandoned her and taken their five-year-old twin sons with him. (In his search of the first two boxes, Lamb had not been able to find the note itself or a document that contained its exact wording, which also troubled him.) The cottage displayed no evidence of a struggle having taken place within it. The coroner had determined that Claire had hung herself at no earlier than noon of that day.

  Sean O’Hare and his sons seemed to have disappeared from Winstead at some point during that morning. Horton seemed never to have determined with any certainty to where Sean had fled with the boys, though the primary rumor around Winstead was that he had gone to County Wicklow, in Ireland, from where, it was said, his parents had immigrated during the previous century. He and Claire both were known to drink and to regularly row loudly and violently.

  The twins last had been seen at roughly ten fifteen on that same morning—Tuesday, August 17, 1919—by Albert Clemmons, who had been working in the front field of the Tigue farm. When questioned, Clemmons had told Horton that he’d seen the boys walking down the dirt road that led from the paved road toward the farmhouse, but that he had not seen them again that day. The twins often went to the Tigue farm because Olivia Tigue considered them to be neglected and often fed them. More than a dozen people in the village, along with Clemmons, testified that the boys often knocked on the doors of people whom they trusted and found to be kindly, seeking handouts of food. On the day they and their father disappeared, the boys were five years and ten months old and, according to Clemmons, wore matching tan cotton short trousers and white cotton socks; Jack wore a light blue cotton collared and buttoned shirt, while John wore a light green shirt of the same style. Sean, a sporadically employed carpenter and performer of odd jobs, was last seen on the evening before his disappearance by the men with whom he was working on a temporary road construction job near Winchester.

  Several people to whom Horton spoke had described Claire O’Hare as an exceedingly negligent mother and said that, long before the boys’ disappearance, she had faced general criticism in the village for failing to feed and bathe the boys properly and allowing them to wander too far from home without supervision at too young an age.

  Horton seemed to have suspected Clemmons of having done something with the boys primarily because of Clemmons’s previous conviction for pedophilia. Otherwise, Horton had found no connection between the boys and Clemmons—though Horton’s revelation of Clemmons’s conviction in Southampton two years earlier for having sexually toyed with a thirteen-year-old girl had ruined Clemmons’s reputation in the village, causing Clemmons to eventually leave Winstead.

  Olivia Tigue and her sons—Lawrence, who was sixteen at the time, and Algernon, who was thirteen—all claimed not to have seen the twins on the farm that day, and Horton seemed never to have seriously considered any of the Tigues as having any connection to the events surrounding the O’Hares.

  Lamb felt dissatisfied as he finished his perusal of the first two boxes of the files. He considered taking a cursory look at the contents of the third, hoping to find within it Horton’s original report and Claire O’Hare’s suicide note, but time would not allow it for the moment. The apparent source of his frustration and suspicions—retired DI Ned Horton—was waiting for him in Southampton.

  As he was about to leave, his phone rang. It was the police surgeon, Anthony Winston-Sheed.

  “Preliminarily, your tramp, Mr. Clemmons, didn’t die of natural causes, though I haven’t quite finished the autopsy yet,” the doctor said.

  “What did he die of, then?” Lamb asked.

  “A massive dose of arsenic, the kind of thing one finds in rat poison or common insecticides, and in a quantity far more than was necessary to send him to the hereafter. Either he was very determined to kill himself or someone else very much wanted him dead.”

  NINETEEN

  NED HORTON LIVED IN A SMALL COTTAGE ON THE EASTERN EDGE of Winchester. The cottage’s front yard featured a small, well-tended flower garden edged in stone, which was alive with a profusion of red roses, yellow carnations, and blue cornflowers.

  Vera stayed with the car as Lamb went to Horton’s door and knocked. The man who answered was of medium height, with a high, creased forehead, stubby pugilist’s nose, and thin, uncompromising lips, all of which were offset by a full head of brown hair that was long enough to touch the tops of his ears, softening his otherwise severe countenance. An unlit pipe protruded from the left corner of his mouth, and he had not shaved that morning. Seeing the way in which Horton had aged surprised Lamb for an instant; Horton had left the police force within a year of the O’Hare case, and Lamb hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years. The picture he’d kept in his mind of Horton was that of the man’s younger version.

  Horton stepped back from the door and invited Lamb into a cramped but neat sitting room that, Lamb thought, his own mother might have been proud to call her own. A lime-green couch sat in front of a mahogany coffee table, and facing these were two upholstered chairs of the same color. The linen curtains beh
ind the couch were of a contrasting light red that was almost pink. The table fairly gleamed, and Lamb detected in the room not a single speck of dust or stray cobweb. All that seemed to be missing were the lace doilies, Lamb thought. In the corner of the room was another highly polished table upon which sat a large wireless.

  “Can I get you something?” Horton asked. “I’ve a couple of bottles of ale if you fancy that.”

  Lamb smiled. “A bit early for me, thanks.”

  “Tea, then? I’ve a bit of milk and sugar both.”

  “Tea would be fine, thanks.”

  Lamb waited in the living room for Horton to return with the tea. He noticed as he sat on the sofa that, despite the sitting room’s neat and homey aspects, it contained no photographs. Horton never had married and had no children. Perhaps he preferred keeping his memories to himself, Lamb thought.

  Horton returned with a tray containing tea in a small red ceramic pot, two matching cups, milk, and sugar. He poured Lamb and himself each a cup, then sat in one of the upholstered chairs opposite Lamb. “What do you want to know, then?” he asked.

  “As much as you can remember,” Lamb said. “Why don’t we start at the beginning.”

  “You’ve seen the file?”

  “I had a look at it.”

  Horton sat back in his chair.

  “It was nine o’clock and bloody well nearly dark by the time I got to Winstead. I went alone at first, as there was no one else available in the nick at the time the call came in, and I didn’t really know what I would find out there. You never do in these bloody little villages—though, of course, once I saw what I had I called in forensics and the surgeon.”

  Lamb withdrew from the inner pocket of his jacket a notebook into which he had jotted the notes he’d taken that morning while perusing the files. “The village bobby from Lower Promise called you,” he said, glancing at the notebook. “A man named Markham.”