“It sounds as if Ned Horton gave him little choice but to obey,” Lamb said, hoping that this would comfort her.
“That’s what I told John. But he never believed it. He believed he’d taken the coward’s way out and regretted it for the rest of his life.” Tears welled again in Sylvia Markham’s eyes. “He was never the same man after that.”
THIRTY
LAMB HEADED BACK TO WINSTEAD, HIS ANKLE SMARTING AS HE worked the clutch. He was furious at Ned Horton but told himself that he must not expend undue energy on Horton until he’d cleared up the rest of the mess facing him. The information that Mrs. Markham had given him made him feel for the first time that his inquiries were finally moving forward. Although he was becoming more certain that he was correct in his theory about Ruth Aisquith’s frequent early-morning visits to the village cemetery, he remained stumped on who had shot Aisquith and why. If the other portion of his guess was correct—that Lawrence Tigue might have been supplying Aisquith with some sort of forged documents—then Lawrence likely hadn’t been Aisquith’s killer, given that Lawrence had something to lose from Aisquith’s death. Unless, of course, Aisquith had double-crossed Lawrence in some way.
He parked at the school but did not go into the incident room. Instead, he walked up the High Street toward Lawrence Tigue’s cottage, where he found the constable he’d assigned to watch the house sheltering in a spot just across from and slightly down the street from Tigue’s place. When the man noticed Lamb approaching, he straightened to attention.
Lamb smiled. “At ease,” he said. “Any sign of our man?”
“None, sir.”
Lamb pulled his packet of Player’s from his coat pocket and offered one to the constable, who, surprised, took one. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
Lamb lit the constable’s cigarette and then his own. He took a long drag and, as he exhaled, eyed Tigue’s empty cottage. He again chastised himself for not paying more attention to the Tigues. He smiled at the young constable and said, “Keep on it, then. We’ll get you some relief soon enough.”
He then returned to the school, where he found Vera waiting for him by the Wolseley.
“I couldn’t find Lilly,” Vera said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry yourself about it,” Lamb told her. “We’ve still time to straighten things out.” He felt as if he was trying to assure himself, as much as Vera, of the truth of this notion.
“I’d like for you to drive me back to Winchester,” he said. “I’m afraid the little drive over to Lower Promise has left my ankle the worse for wear.”
Vera smiled briefly at this, then slid behind the wheel of the Wolseley.
On the drive to Winchester, Lamb remained mostly silent. He did not feel it necessary to fill Vera in on all that he learned that day. There would be time for that as events continued to spool out. Instead, he smoked and attempted to clear his mind of rubbish—of the useless emotions surrounding his failure to adequately recognize the importance of the Tigues and his anger at the way Ned Horton had handled the cases in Winstead twenty years earlier. He closed his eyes and willed himself to relax and was surprised to find, when they arrived at the nick, Vera gently nudging him awake.
He sent Vera to the pub across the street from the nick to pick up cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and tea for the both of them—neither had yet eaten lunch—then went immediately to his office, where he began to fill out the forms necessary to obtain a warrant to search Lawrence Tigue’s premises on the grounds that he believed that Lawrence had been producing counterfeit documents on the printing press in his garage. This was a long shot, based on his theory about who might have been conspiring with Ruth Aisquith and why. But he believed they’d collected enough circumstantial evidence of Lawrence’s apparent participation in such an operation to convince a magistrate to issue the warrant.
While Lamb was working, Evers, the man at the front desk, put through a telephone call to Lamb from Wallace, who reported that Algernon Tigue was not in his rooms. Wallace had asked around the school but no one he’d spoken to knew where Algernon had gone.
“Maybe they’ve run together,” Wallace offered.
“It’s possible,” Lamb said. He told Wallace to take over the job of watching Lawrence’s cottage from the constable.
When Lamb finished the warrant application, he called a magistrate he knew well and explained the circumstances to the man, who said he would sign the document. Lamb gave the papers to a uniformed constable with instructions to deliver them to the magistrate and return with the signed warrant. By then, Vera had returned with the sandwiches and tea; Lamb took his into his office and ate alone. As he was gulping the last of the weak tea, Rivers, freshly returned from London, appeared at his door.
“Ruth Aisquith isn’t her real name,” Rivers announced. “It’s Maureen Tigue, and she seems to be mixed up with the Irish. She also might have killed the real Ruth Aisquith and stolen that woman’s identity.”
Lamb sat at his desk for a couple of seconds in silence, trying to digest what Rivers had just said. The information stunned him—and, yet, too, it seemed to confirm the scenario that he’d been building in his mind. Working the case had been like unraveling a tangled ball of string, strand by strand; now Rivers seemed to have loosened a primary knot.
Rivers removed his hat, sat in one of the chairs facing Lamb’s desk, and told Lamb the story of his visit to London.
After he’d seen Ruth Aisquith’s file and become convinced that the woman whose photo was attached to the file was not the woman who was shot in the cemetery, he and Captain Willis had gone to the file room, where they’d examined the files of the handful of women who had claimed and been denied immunity from conscription on the basis of conscience and at some point afterward gone to prison. All had lost their appeals and had subsequently been ordered to report for duty. When they’d refused to report, they’d been convicted of noncompliance and fined. All had refused to pay the fine and been sent to prison for an initial term of three months, pending a second hearing before the tribunal.
“That’s how it works,” Rivers told Lamb. “All of them followed the same path of staunch refusal leading to jail. Less than a hundred women have applied for conchi status since the conscription act went into effect. Of those, roughly three in ten were excused from the call-up. The rest, save these seven, gave up the nut at some point in the process to avoid jail. Most men follow the same path; only the hard cases go to prison.”
He’d only sorted through three of the seven files when he noticed the name Maureen Tigue on the fourth, he told Lamb. The surname had caught his eye. He opened the file and found attached to it a photo of the woman they’d found shot to death in the cemetery.
“According to her file, Maureen Tigue objected on the grounds that conscription is coercive, undemocratic. Ruth Aisquith had objected on the same grounds. In both cases the tribunal called that bollocks. Aisquith landed in prison four days after Maureen Tigue, in April. Slightly more than two months later—roughly seven weeks ago—Aisquith died in prison of a sudden heart attack, although she was only thirty-four and had no history of heart trouble. The coroner ruled it death by cardiac arrest; the report was in her file.
“Two days later, Maureen Tigue requested a second hearing in front of the tribunal on the grounds that she was willing to forego her application for immunity and would answer the call-up. That hearing was granted and three weeks later she left prison and was assigned to report for duty at the POW camp project in Winstead. But she appears to have arrived at the prison camp bearing the identity of Ruth Aisquith, rather than Maureen Tigue. She must have paid off someone on the prison end to provide her with Aisquith’s identity and background. Walton might also have been paid to look the other way. I think it’s likely that she was working for the IRA and that they were paying the freight. She was arrested in 1938 for agitating on behalf of Irish Republicanism. She was swept up in what was thought at the time to be a plot to bomb a police station in Cornwall, thou
gh nothing much seemed to have come of it. She then seemed to have gone underground until she filed for conscientious objector status. Her file listed her mother as Martha Tigue of Four Corners, in Cornwall. The file says the mother is deceased and that she has no siblings. It also lists her father as ‘unknown.’”
Rivers paused and leaned forward a bit in his chair. “I worked a poisoning five years ago in Warwickshire—wife killed her husband for running around on her,” he continued. “She put cyanide in his ale and he died of cardiac arrest. She almost got away with it but the police surgeon up there was thorough and found evidence of the cyanide, enough to put down a bloody elephant. The only thing I can’t figure is why, once Martha Tigue was out, she went to the prison camp.”
“I believe that someone—likely Lawrence Tigue—was providing her with something, some sort of fake documents he produced on his printing press. Identity cards, maybe, or ration tickets of some kind,” Lamb said. “That’s why we found so much cash on her. She was leaving the cash for Tigue, and he was leaving whatever it was he printed for her. She would come to the cemetery very early in the morning, when no one was about, ostensibly to visit her late grandmother, but actually to pick up whatever Tigue had left for her and leave the money in the same spot. We found a likely drop spot in a corner of the cemetery today. Tigue probably made his drops and pick-ups in the dead of night. If your theory about the Irish is right, then maybe Maureen Tigue was passing these documents to the IRA in some way—and maybe with the help of someone else at the camp.”
Lamb recounted Miss Wheatley’s story of having seen Lawrence Tigue meet someone on the previous night in the lay-by by the O’Hare house and of how the two had argued.
“What you’ve found fits with what Miss Wheatley claims was the substance of this meeting Tigue had with this man,” Lamb said. “That they were discussing some sort of deal that had come to an end with Tigue believing that he’d been cheated of something he’d been promised. If the dead woman is related to the Tigues—given her actual surname—then she probably knew that Lawrence Tigue had a printing business and could prove useful if the price was right. It’s possible they knew each other quite well. Then this project comes up in Winstead and she hears of it in some way, and sees a way to help ‘the cause,’ and here she is.”
“So the mystery man Tigue met by the road might be Taney, then?”
“That’s my best guess. His trucks come in and out of the place every day, hauling away the rubbish and the rubble. I saw one of them the first time I spoke with him at the camp. Maybe the drivers take a few documents away with them, too. And you’re right—Walton might also be getting a cut. He runs an incredibly shoddy operation out there, and this would explain the shoddiness. Also, I found out today that Olivia Tigue—Lawrence and Algernon’s mother—had relatives who lived in Cornwall, near a village called Four Corners.”
Lamb took another couple of minutes to fill Rivers in on the information he’d learned that day in his interviews with Ned Horton and Sylvia Markham, and his brief inspection of Horton’s files on the O’Hare case.
“So who killed Maureen Tigue, then? If she was the golden goose for Taney, Tigue, and Walton?”
“I don’t know,” Lamb said. “Maybe she double-crossed one of them. If she did kill Ruth Aisquith to steal her identity, then she had bloody ice water in her veins.”
“What about the vicar?”
“I might have been wrong about the vicar.” Lamb hated to admit it.
“So which of the three—Tigue, Taney, or Walton—is colder even than she?”
“Lawrence Tigue has done a runner.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the type.”
An image of the seeming spiritless and weak-willed visage of Hawley Crippen flashed through Lamb’s mind.
“But you know as well as I do, Harry,” he said. “They never do.”
THIRTY-ONE
ALTHOUGH THE CONSTABLE LAMB HAD DISPATCHED TO THE magistrate with the warrant to search Lawrence Tigue’s cottage had not yet returned, Lamb was anxious to get back to Winstead. In addition to searching Lawrence’s cottage, he wanted now to speak again with Taney and Captain Walton at the prison camp—to confront them with the fresh evidence Rivers had uncovered in London. He ordered a second constable to deliver the warrant to Winstead as soon as it was signed and delivered. In the meantime, he, Rivers, and Vera prepared to return to the village posthaste. But even with this, Lamb first wanted to call Inspector Fulton, the detective from Cornwall who had investigated the disappearance of Tim Gordon.
Lamb hoped that Fulton still was on the force and was in to take his call. His luck had not been running too well throughout most of the inquiry, he thought, and yet, it seemed to have changed today. The duty sergeant in the Cornwall County Constabulary answered his call. Lamb identified himself and asked for Fulton, whose Christian name he didn’t know.
“Just a minute and I’ll put you through, sir,” the man said. Lamb looked at Rivers, who was sitting on the edge of Lamb’s desk, and winked. A bit of luck.
A few seconds later, a man with a tired-sounding baritone voice answered. “DI Fulton.” Lamb again identified himself and explained the reason for his call. He told Fulton that they had found a small skeleton with a clubfoot buried in the basement of the former Tigue farm, and that he believed that this body belonged to Tim Gordon.
Fulton sighed. The news seemed to sadden rather than surprise or anger him. “Bloody hell,” he said resignedly. “I once had suspicions that the Tigues were mixed up in Tim’s death, but I never had the proof.”
“Why did you suspect the Tigues?” Lamb asked.
“They’d been up here, visiting Olivia Tigue’s sister, Martha. Martha was Olivia’s older sister; she ran the family farm on which the both of them had grown up. At the time, it hadn’t been that long since Olivia had moved from Four Corners to Winstead, to begin her own farm. But they had returned for a visit—Olivia and her two sons—at the time when Tim disappeared. Tim lived with his parents on a farm very close to Martha Tigue’s, and Lawrence and Algernon Tigue had known the boy and his family during the time they and their mother had lived here, with Martha. They returned to Winstead on the very day on which Tim disappeared—very abruptly, I thought. I discovered that Martha had lent them her motorcar, though they had come to Four Corners by bus. Then Olivia Tigue returned with the motorcar almost immediately—and then returned again to Winstead by bus just as quickly. The whole thing struck me as suspicious. My theory at the time was that, if the Tigues had been involved, they might have brought Tim’s body back to Winstead in Martha Tigue’s motorcar and disposed of it there. Now it looks as if that’s exactly what they did.”
“You came here to interrogate them?”
“Yes, but I got nothing. Olivia Tigue was very much like her sister; both of them could be hard as stone.”
“And Ned Horton intervened on behalf of the Tigues? He was a DI down here then.”
“Yes, Horton. He vouched for them—for Olivia and the boys. Spun me a tale of how they’d been wrongly suspected of various crimes about the village in the past; said that the local people were unfairly suspicious of them because they were outsiders and had an unusual living arrangement, with Olivia the head of the farm and no man about the place. I thought Horton a bit of an odd duck, to be truthful. The nervous type.”
“Did Martha Tigue have a daughter—a girl named Maureen?”
“She did—and the girl was a bit of trouble, besides. Ran away from home a lot. By the time she was sixteen she had developed a reputation as a bit of available goods. A couple of years later, she got herself involved in an Irish plot to blow up the nick here—got caught up in a sting. It turned out that the plot had never really gotten past the talking stages, and that she was involved only on the fringes, though she went to jail for a couple of years. That was fifteen years ago, at least.”
“Do you know what became of her?”
“As I recall, she left Four Corners after she got ou
t of jail. I assumed that she went to Ireland, given her affinity for the Republicans.”
“We’ve had a killing down here that I believe might be related in some way to the Tigue brothers. The victim was a woman, a former conscientious objector who gave up her opposition to the draft and was conscripted into a work crew that is building a prisoner-of-war camp down here. It appears that she somehow managed to steal the identity of another conchi, a woman named Ruth Aisquith, who died in June. But we’ve discovered that the woman actually was Maureen Tigue. Now Tim Gordon’s remains appeared to have been uncovered in the foundation of the old Tigue place along with the bodies of a pair of twin five-year-old boys who were said to have disappeared from Winstead more than twenty years ago.”
“Five-year-old twins? You mean the O’Hare boys?”
“You know the case, then?”
“Oh, yes; I was a DC at the time here. That story made its way out here, most definitely. Of course, the O’Hare matter occurred the summer after I came to Winstead. But I remember hearing rumors in the village while I was there that Sean O’Hare had taken up with Olivia Tigue and that Sean’s wife—whose name I’ve forgotten—knew about it but didn’t care. And I was quite ready to believe that, given my experience with Sean O’Hare and the rumors I’d heard regarding him and both the Tigue sisters, Martha and Olivia.”
“You knew Sean O’Hare previously, then?” Lamb asked, frankly surprised. “Already knew of him when you came to Winstead on that first occasion?”
“Yes. Sean O’Hare had spent some time in Four Corners ten or twelve years before all that mess broke in Winstead. This would have been more than thirty years ago; I was a mere PC then. While he was here he developed a reputation as a bit of trouble—a drinker, a brawler, and a charmer of the local females. It was common knowledge in the village that all three of the children born of the Tigue sisters, Martha and Olivia, were bastards. Neither of them ever married. Although it was a scandal, neither of the sisters seemed really to care much about what the rest of Four Corners thought of them. After their father died, they took up running the family farm as a kind of team and made a fair go of it besides, all the while raising their three bastard children together, just as they ran the farm, with nary a grown man about the place. Rumor had it that Sean O’Hare was the father of at least the first child, Maureen, if not indeed all three. Martha Tigue, for one, never took pains to hide her interest in Sean, nor he in her. But Sean was the roving type and he left Four Corners eventually.”
The Wages of Desire Page 24