The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  Lamb could scarcely believe what he was hearing. “You’re saying that Maureen, Lawrence, and Algernon Tigue all are bastards?”

  “Absolutely. As I said, that’s common knowledge in Four Corners. That’s why I say that when, a year after Tim Gordon disappeared and the matter involving the O’Hares hit the press, I thought to myself, ‘Well, well. Sean O’Hare again, is it?’ When I discovered during the previous year, during my visit there, that Sean had landed in Winstead, it suddenly made some sense to me as to why Olivia Tigue had left the family place in Four Corners and struck out on her own. She and her sister had been making a pretty fair go of the farm here, as I said. And then for reasons that weren’t clear to anyone, Olivia suddenly up and left it all behind to go to Winstead.”

  “What about motive?” Lamb asked Fulton. “Why would any of the Tigues want to kill Tim Gordon?”

  “Well, that was just it. At first, I wasn’t certain about motive. I checked the boy’s parents first, of course, but they had alibis; they’d gone into Four Corners to shop for food and supplies for the farm that morning and had left the boy at home, alone, believing him safe there. They were seen in the village several times throughout the morning. Of course, one of them might have doubled back and killed the boy, but I could find no proof of that, or a reason why either of them would want to do so. Both of them struck me as genuinely broken up by the boy’s death. Indeed, it was the boy’s mother who first named one of the Tigues as a possible culprit, though I’d already had my eye on them in any case, thanks in part to Maureen’s penchant for troublemaking and that they lived on the next farm over. Then, when I went to the Tigue place on the following day and discovered that Olivia and her sons had hightailed it on the previous afternoon, and that a witness had seen them drive away in Martha Tigue’s motorcar, I decided that I had better take a little ride out to Winstead.”

  “Which of the Tigues did Tim’s mother name as the one she suspected?”

  “Algernon. She despised the boy—told me she’d been relieved when Olivia had left and taken him and Lawrence to Winstead—which is one reason why I took her suspicions with a grain of salt.”

  “Did she tell you why she despised Algernon?”

  “She considered him evil—and that was just the word she used, too. Evil. Over the previous year she had found two of her ewes with their throats cut and had suspected Algernon.”

  “Did she say why she considered Algernon to be evil?”

  “Well, she was foggy on that point, which is another reason why I hedged my bets a bit on her accusations. To her it was a matter of merely knowing Algernon, of what he was like. She said as much to me. ‘Once you know him, you’ll understand.’ Words to that effect. But she had no actual proof that Algernon Tigue had cut the throats of her ewes, or any evidence that he’d ever done anything to her or her family in the past. It was more of an intuition, apparently. When I eventually came to Winstead and spoke to the local constable, Markham, he told me much the same thing. That he believed Algernon Tigue to possess a kind of evil streak and that he suspected that Algernon had hung up several cats in the village square during the previous summer, but that he’d never been able to get the goods on the boy, in part because Ned Horton had warned him off.”

  “What else can you tell me about Horton’s actions at the time? Did you suspect that he was putting you off the Tigues as well?”

  “Not at first. I took his word on the matter of the Tigues. Even so, I did wonder a bit about his relationship with them. He seemed protective of them. I eventually came to believe that Horton might have been at it with Olivia Tigue—or wanted to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. I could have believed that they were at it; people slide down that slope all the time. It’s the most common thing in the world. It was just a feeling I had. She was one of those women who had something about her, you know? But she also was hard as rock, as I said. I could get nothing out of her. She never flinched.”

  “What can you tell me about Tim Gordon, other than that he had a clubfoot? We’re trying to definitively identify the body we’ve found as being his.”

  Fulton spent a couple of minutes describing Tim Gordon—his height, weight, hair color, the type of clothing he was wearing at the time of his disappearance, and other distinguishing characteristics. Fulton had never forgotten the case, or its particulars.

  “One other thing you should know, Lamb,” Fulton said. “I came to believe that Tim was taken in broad daylight from the lane just next to the farm on which he lived with his parents. His mother said that she had just bought him a set of toy soldiers for his birthday two days earlier, and that he had left the house with those. But I never found them.”

  “Toy soldiers?”

  “Yes,” Fulton said. “A Britain’s set. Generals and field marshals.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE LATE-AFTERNOON AUGUST SUN STILL WAS HIGH AND BRIGHT in the sky as they drove down the rutted farm road toward the prison camp tent village, with Vera at the wheel. Wallace remained in Winstead, keeping an eye on Lawrence Tigue’s cottage.

  The camp workers had finished their duties for the day and were in the mess eating their evening meal. Lamb met with Larkin and Harding, who were overseeing the removal of the unearthed remains to the morgue. Lamb brought the two up to date on the latest developments.

  Lamb said that he suspected that Captain Walton and, perhaps, George Taney might have had a hand in whatever operation Maureen Tigue had been running out of the camp under the alias of Ruth Aisquith—Walton because of his obviously lax management of the camp, and Taney because of the powerful and central role he played in the camp’s operations. Lamb had found it suspicious that Taney had agreed to give Maureen such generous leave on the morning of her death, and he now thought that perhaps Taney had granted that leave because Maureen’s ability to move about Winstead freely also profited him. Lamb suspected, too, that the mystery man Lawrence Tigue had met in the lay-by on the previous night—a man Miss Wheatley had described as tall and who had arrived at the meeting on foot, a man who had angered Lawrence Tigue by bluntly telling Tigue that “they” no longer intended to honor the “deal” they had made with Tigue—also might have been George Taney. But even with that said, he still possessed no proof that Walton or Taney knew for certain that “Ruth Aisquith” actually was Maureen Tigue. He intended to interview both men again—to press and discomfort them this time and to see what that produced. He thought that his doing so might crack Walton, though he was less sure of Taney.

  He was about to head first to Walton’s tent when, about twenty meters away, one of George Taney’s work lorries suddenly started and began to move through the otherwise silent camp up the rutted dirt lane, toward the main road that passed through Winstead. Lamb had just enough time to glimpse Taney at the wheel. As the truck fell into the road’s well-worn ruts, it sped up and began to bounce up the rough trail at a rate of speed that obviously was too fast for comfort. Harding, Vera, and Rivers also had noticed the sound of the truck starting in the post-work stillness and had turned toward it.

  “It’s Taney,” Lamb said. “He’s running.”

  Lamb turned to Harding. “Pin down Walton, please, sir,” he said. “We can’t let him go anywhere for the moment.”

  Harding nodded and, in the next instant, turned to Rivers and said, “Take my car and get after him; it’s much faster than Lamb’s old thing.” The super gestured to a pair of uniformed constables to get a move on and follow Rivers. “Take these two with you,” he said to Rivers, who immediately made for Harding’s big black Buick saloon, along with the two constables, whom Harding instructed to “look sharp,” at his heels.

  Lamb began to limp toward his Wolseley. Taney was just turning right onto the main road, heading away from Winstead. Vera stood by the car with a quizzical look on her face. Having seen Taney’s truck pass on the road, she was, only now, gaining a notion of what was occurring.

  Lamb knew that he cou
ld not work the clutch as he must to keep up with the speeding Taney and Rivers; his ankle still was too sore from his brief jaunt to Lower Promise. He opened the passenger door. “Hop in,” he said to Vera, who slid behind the wheel. As Lamb eased into the Wolseley, Rivers and the constables sped past him in Harding’s car. “Follow Harry,” Lamb said.

  Vera started the car, put it in gear, and stomped on the accelerator; the aging Wolseley lurched and she and Lamb were off, bumping and rocking along the dirt access road. She followed Harding’s car onto the main road leading out of Winstead. Once on the macadam surface, Rivers sped up in pursuit of Taney. Vera seemed to hesitate for only a second—she had no experience driving a car at breakneck speed down a narrow, country road—then stepped on the accelerator. The Wolseley lurched like a horse that had just had its haunches smacked. Lamb felt his stomach turn a notch; instinctively, he grabbed the dash to steady himself.

  Vera shifted into a higher gear and they soon were on Rivers’s tail. Although Taney had a head start, the lorry he was driving was slower and heavier than the police cars, and he seemed to struggle to pitch the graceless vehicle through the narrow curves at high speed. On three occasions, its wheels lifted slightly from the ground as Taney attempted to swing it through a tight curve. Rivers followed closely, the saloon’s bells ringing furiously. He closed in and nearly rammed the lorry several times. Vera fell in behind this drama at what seemed to Lamb as too close a distance. But Vera was doing what he’d asked her to do.

  As they reached a portion of the road in which it straightened and was bounded on either side by meadow, Rivers gassed the saloon and pulled into the oncoming lane, next to the lorry. He blared his horn, then threw the nose of Harding’s car toward the driver’s side, forcing it suddenly to the left and nearly off the road. “Bloody Christ, Harry,” Lamb said under his breath.

  Lamb expected Taney to take a retaliatory swipe at Rivers, but Rivers was too quick. Before Taney could get himself straightened again, Rivers nosed the saloon toward the lorry a second time—like a small, quick animal attacking a larger, slower one. This time Taney could not keep his left tires from running off the road and onto the grassy shoulder. He tried to swing the lorry back onto the road, but Rivers was on him a third time and the lorry surged to the left, off the road. Its left tires slid into a drainage ditch, where it came to an abrupt halt, half in and half out of the ditch and listing sickly to port.

  Rivers pulled Harding’s car to the side of the road about fifteen meters beyond Taney’s mired truck; Vera pulled the Wolseley to a stop in front of Rivers. Lamb opened the glove box of the Wolseley and removed from it a Webley Mark VI pistol along with a box of .455-caliber cartridges. Lamb had worn—and used—the pistol during his time on the Somme; he kept it in the glove box for what he termed “emergencies.” Although he had faced several situations in which he had pulled the gun from the glove box in the line of duty as a policeman, circumstances never had forced him to fire it. He slid the gun into the pocket of his jacket.

  Rivers and the constables had exited the saloon and were crouched and moving toward the truck when a pistol shot rang out; the bullet struck the passenger side of Harding’s car. Rivers and the constables dropped to shelter on the ground.

  Lamb pushed Vera down behind the front seat. “Stay down and don’t move,” he instructed her.

  “What was that?” Vera said, alarmed.

  “Taney has a gun.”

  Lamb crawled over Vera and opened the driver’s side door.

  “Where are you going?” Vera said.

  “Stay here,” Lamb answered. “And don’t raise your head over this seat.”

  A few meters up the road, Rivers and the constables sheltered in the lee of Harding’s sedan. Once free of the Wolseley, Lamb moved forward to join them. Crouched and huddled near Harry Rivers, the both of them under enemy fire, Lamb could not fend off memories of the time the two of them had spent in the trenches of northern France nearly twenty-five years earlier.

  “Is everybody all right?” Lamb asked.

  The constables nodded and Rivers said, “Yes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “As far as I can tell he’s still on the passenger side of the truck—though I haven’t seen a bloody damned thing since he took a shot at us,” Rivers said. He looked at Lamb and smiled, slightly, as if the situation didn’t concern him overly much. Lamb understood Rivers’s forced nonchalance as a signal that he was ready for action. He thought that the sound of a bullet whizzing toward them must have recalled in Rivers, too, memories of the Somme.

  Lamb sat on the road with his back against the front driver’s side tire of Harding’s car as he loaded the Webley’s six-round cylinder with cartridges. He then moved past Rivers and the constables to the rear edge of the saloon. The front of Taney’s mired lorry, its engine still running, was only ten meters away. He was formulating a plan of action that was based on the tactics he’d learned as a lieutenant of infantry—tactics he’d employed often in the trenches with Harry Rivers along as his second in command. Before he acted, though, he had to ascertain Taney’s exact position on the other side of the truck. The possibility existed that Taney might have moved into the meadow and taken up a position there, preparing to run.

  Rivers understood. “Don’t get your bleeding head shot off,” he said.

  “I don’t intend to,” Lamb said.

  Ignoring her father’s instructions, Vera exited the Wolseley and crouched behind it, ten yards or so away from the others. She felt safer sheltering behind the bulk of the car; more significantly, though, she was worried about her father.

  Lamb pressed his right shoulder against the big Buick. “You’re wasting your time, Taney,” he yelled. “The longer you resist, the worse it will be for you.” He hoped that Taney would give away his position.

  “Sod you!” Taney yelled.

  “All right, then,” Lamb whispered to himself. He calculated that Taney was sheltering by the lorry’s passenger-side door. He glanced back at Rivers, who nodded that he understood what Lamb was preparing to do.

  “Throw down your weapon and give yourself up,” Lamb yelled. “I know what you and Maureen Tigue were on about.” This latter statement still was based mostly on a guess—though, Lamb thought, a good guess, one worth betting on.

  “Go to hell.”

  Lamb wanted to take Taney alive. With Maureen Tigue dead, Taney and Lawrence Tigue were his only sources of information about the operation he now was certain that Maureen had been running out of the camp, and therefore they were the only links to the criminal operatives who likely were at its other end. Lamb wanted to identify those men and crush the operation. Also, Taney might know who killed Maureen Tigue and why. Indeed, perhaps Taney himself had killed her.

  Lamb moved back to Rivers and the others. “He’s against the lorry, by the door,” Lamb said to Rivers. “If he doesn’t move into the meadow, we’ve got him.” He handed Rivers the pistol. “I’ll go behind the lorry and flank him.” He nodded toward the rear of Harding’s saloon. “Position yourself there and be ready to move once I get his attention and turn him toward the rear of the truck.”

  Rivers looked at the pistol. He thought Lamb too old for the heroics he understood the chief inspector to be contemplating. “We could wait for help; I could get on the radio,” Rivers said.

  “He just put a bullet into Harding’s car,” Lamb reminded him. “I can’t risk waiting.”

  “Why don’t you take the gun and I’ll flank him,” Rivers said. He smiled, slightly. “I’m younger than you. You’re too bloody old.”

  “Only by a couple of years,” Lamb said. “Besides, you know the rules, Harry. Never ask someone to do what you aren’t prepared to do. Remember?” He spoke before Rivers could object again. “If you have to shoot do your best to wound him, please. He’s no use to us dead.” He put his hand on Rivers’s shoulder. “Now let’s go before he figures out what the bloody hell we’re up to and we lose our chance.”

 
; Lamb turned to the two uniformed constables. He realized that he didn’t know either of their names. They seemed to him impossibly young, clearly replacements for the experienced men who had gone into the war. “You two go with DI Rivers and be ready to move when he does. Follow his orders exactly. If all goes well, the three of you will take Taney down.”

  “Right,” one of the constables said. The other merely nodded.

  “Now, take off your shoes,” Lamb said.

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Take off your shoes so he can’t hear you moving.”

  The constables complied. Lamb and Rivers also removed their shoes. With that, the four of them moved in their stocking feet to the rear of Harding’s saloon. Lamb decided to check a final time to ensure that Taney hadn’t moved. “It’s better that you give it up, Taney!” he yelled. “We have more men on the way. You can’t hold out here like this for long.”

  They waited for Taney to reply, but he remained silent, which worried Lamb and Rivers.

  “What do you think?” Rivers said.

  “He’s done talking, obviously.”

  “He might have moved.” Rivers didn’t like that they no longer knew Taney’s location for certain.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Lamb said. Crouching, he moved quickly and quietly to the lorry and along its driver’s side toward its rear; Rivers moved around the rear of the saloon, followed by the constables.