The Wages of Desire

by Stephen Kelly

  Now, Lamb and Rivers moved very quickly, as they had on the Somme. The two of them had specialized in nighttime surveillance missions across No Man’s Land to positions close to the German trenches. Sometimes they merely lay in the cold mud and gained, from keen and silent observance, strategic information about the enemy’s positions that was not obtainable in daylight. Other times their job had required them—and the men under their command—to slip into the German trenches and quietly kill whomever they encountered in the course of gaining the intelligence they sought.

  On one of these missions, the man who had been Harry Rivers’s best friend since boyhood—the man Rivers had gone to war with, Eric Parker—had been killed and for many years Rivers had held Lamb responsible for Parker’s death. Lamb had been too careless in his deployment of Parker that night, Rivers had believed at the time. Rivers had nursed that grievance against Lamb even up until the previous summer, when he’d found himself transferred from Warwickshire to Hampshire to help fill the drain of men from the Hampshire force that partly had resulted from the fact that the Germans had so relentlessly been attacking southern England from the air that summer.

  Since then, though, Rivers had begun to rethink his enmity toward Lamb—and the self-imposed damage to his own soul that had resulted from his long-nursed hostility—and begun to allow himself to respect Lamb as a police detective. He even had found himself softening toward Lamb as a man and a colleague, though a part of him continued to resist this easing of a trait that had for so long defined him. Now, Rivers found himself worried that Lamb’s age and some silly secret notion that Lamb might hold of his own indestructibility might lead Lamb to do something stupid, giving Taney an opening to wound or kill Lamb. But Lamb already was on the move.

  Lamb moved along the side of Taney’s truck. Surprise was crucial in the maneuver he was about to undertake—but so was knowledge of the enemy’s position. His heart pounding, he willed himself to continue, like a man plunging into water he knows will be freezing. He moved quickly around the rear of the lorry and into the ditch in which it was mired. On this cue, Rivers yelled, “Taney!” Lamb was relieved to see Taney facing toward the front of the truck and crouched against the driver’s side door as he rounded the lorry’s rear corner. The maneuver had begun. Now everything moved with alarming speed, and from here out Lamb and Rivers acted entirely from instinct and their memories of how they had operated in the trenches.

  “Taney!”’ Lamb yelled. That was Rivers’s signal to move. Lamb quickly jumped back into cover behind the truck. Confused and alarmed by the voices vying for his attention, Taney rapidly turned around to face Lamb, thrusting out his pistol and preparing to fire. In that instant, Rivers moved around the nose of the truck and stuck the barrel of Lamb’s revolver against the back of Taney’s head. “Move and I’ll blow your bloody fucking brains out,” he said. “Drop the gun.”

  Stunned, Taney did as Rivers commanded. “Take him,” Rivers said to the constables. The pair moved around Rivers and subdued Taney, pushing him to the ground face first, as Rivers retrieved Taney’s pistol—yet another .455-caliber Webley. One of the men pulled Taney’s hands behind his back while the other put handcuffs on Taney’s wrists.

  “We’ve got him,” Rivers yelled.

  Lamb appeared from around the back of the truck. “Good,” he said. He realized that he was breathing so heavily that he nearly was hyperventilating. He sat against the rear bumper of the lorry, removed his hat, and tried to catch his breath.

  The constables pulled Taney to his feet. They and Rivers brought him around to Lamb, who stood and met Taney’s angry gaze. Doing his best to pretend nonchalance—for his heart still was pounding—Lamb shook his head, as might a disappointed prefect who was facing a wayward student. “Consorting with the IRA, Mr. Taney,” he said. “You’ll hang for that, of course, unless you become a bit more cooperative.” Again, Lamb was betting that his guess was correct.

  Taney said nothing, though Lamb was certain he saw genuine fear flare in Taney’s hard, intimidating eyes.

  “Take him to the nick,” Lamb said. “I’ll see you back there as soon as I can.”

  The constables hustled Taney to the rear seat of Harding’s car. Rivers held back for a hitch. He handed Lamb back his pistol and said, “Are you all right?”

  “Of course not,” Lamb said. “I haven’t had to do something that bloody stupid in years.” He straightened his back and took a deep breath. “I can’t get my heart to stop pounding.”

  Rivers smiled. “Well, I suppose you did all right, all the same.”

  Lamb rubbed the back of his neck and tried to relax. “I’m alive, at any rate.” He suddenly remembered Vera. He went around the truck to the Wolseley, where he found her waiting, worried and expectant.

  She moved toward him. “Are you all right, Dad?”

  “Yes.” He laid the loaded pistol on the roof of the car and willed himself to be calm.

  “What happened?”

  “We arrested Taney.”

  “Yes, but how did you get the gun away from him?”

  Lamb smiled, more to reassure Vera that he was unhurt than because he felt like smiling. “An old trick,” he said. “One that Taney fortunately didn’t know.” He nodded at the Wolseley. He wanted to get back to the nick and to interrogate Taney immediately. They had no time to waste. He put his hand on Vera’s shoulder.

  “I’ll tell you about it on the way back to Winchester,” he said. He picked up the Webley, opened the chamber, and began to remove the bullets one by one. As he did, he noticed that his hand was shaking.

  THIRTY-THREE

  LAMB PUT ONE OF THE CONSTABLES TO WORK SEARCHING THE lorry and the stretch of road between the prison and the place where Rivers had run Taney off the road, while the other constable assisted Rivers in taking Taney to Winchester. Lamb guessed that Taney might have tried to dispose of evidence as he fled the camp. He told the constable to do the best he could in the fading light and that he should look especially for a bundle of documents. Once finished, the man was to hoof it back to the prison camp and report in from there.

  Lamb and Vera drove to the camp to pick up Harding, and they returned to the nick, leaving Larkin and a half-dozen uniformed men to secure the camp and ensure that no one else attempted to flee. In order to keep Taney tied down for the moment, Lamb charged him with attempted murder for having taken a potshot at them from the ditch. Despite Taney’s outward coolness, Lamb was sure that Taney was frightened. If Taney and Maureen and Lawrence Tigue had been conspiring with the IRA, then Taney could face hanging for treason. Lamb intended to use that as leverage in his interrogation.

  On the way to the nick, Taney had demanded a solicitor, whose arrival Lamb had to await before he could begin to interrogate Taney. While he waited, Lamb got himself and Vera yet another pair of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and cups of weak tea from the pub across the street. Lamb ate his meager meal at his desk as he discussed with Harding his strategy for breaking Taney. Lamb said that he intended to proceed as if they possessed evidence that Taney and Maureen and Lawrence Tigue had treated with Irish Republicans—and that he already had planted this seed in Taney’s mind when he arrested him.

  Harding reported that he had interrogated Walton and that the captain had been cooperative and claimed to have no knowledge of any counterfeiting scheme that might have been ongoing under his nose. Walton had consented to a quick search of his tent, in which Harding had found nothing. Walton had agreed to come in for questioning, and Harding had sent him ahead with a uniformed man. Indeed, Walton was downstairs under the watch of that same constable at that moment, waiting to speak to Lamb. But George Taney was Lamb’s main concern for the moment.

  While Lamb and Harding conversed, the constable Lamb had set to the search of Taney’s lorry and the roadside arrived at the nick. The man indeed had found a bundle of papers in the weedy roadside grass less than a hundred meters from the entrance to the prison camp site. He laid the bundle on Lamb’s de
sk. “Ration tickets for petrol, sir,” he said. “There’s two hundred of them in that packet alone—at least four hundred pounds’ worth.”

  The chief inspector and the superintendent examined the forged coupons. The IRA could sell such documents on the black market for many times their normal value, thereby turning a huge profit on whatever they had invested in paying off Taney, Lawrence Tigue, and anyone else who was involved in the scheme, which likely included whoever in the prison system had assisted Maureen Tigue in gaining possession of Ruth Aisquith’s identity. The Irish also might be using the tickets to suck up as much of the available petrol as they dared, thereby hobbling the British war effort.

  Tigue’s forgeries were quite good—very clean, crisp, and official looking. They didn’t need to be perfect to be serviceable in the general economy; ration coupons for everything ranging from cheese and cigarettes to socks and sweets had become so common since the war began that people hardly noticed them. The only people who closely examined ration tickets were those whose job it was to spot forgeries.

  Ten minutes later, Lamb seated himself at a table in the interrogation room across from Taney, who remained in handcuffs, and Taney’s solicitor, who came from Southampton. The lawyer was a short, thick, balding, and middle-aged man arrayed in a funereal dark suit who did not bother to introduce himself when Lamb entered. His voice was deep and gravelly and possessed of a Cockney inflection that he managed to camouflage only partially—a vigorous voice, Lamb thought, that didn’t match his unimposing physical presence.

  “My client would feel less indisposed with the handcuffs off,” the lawyer said.

  Lamb motioned for Rivers, who had entered the room with him, to remove the cuffs.

  Lamb dropped the stack of forged ration coupons onto the table with a thud. As he did so he once again saw Taney’s eyes flare with surprise—and fear. Despite himself, Taney’s solicitor also could not quite hide his surprise at the sudden appearance of the coupons.

  Taney massaged his wrists. Lamb thought Taney was doing his best to seem unconcerned. He was a man who was used to being in control and, indeed, Lamb had spent some time wondering why a man such as Taney—or the man he thought Taney to be—had allowed himself to enter into such a risky situation as the one he’d seemed to have entered with Maureen and Lawrence Tigue. The promise of money almost certainly had been part of it; the IRA probably had paid very well. But there was something else, Lamb thought—something that had gone straight to one of Taney’s weaknesses and convinced him to not merely let down his guard but also to cede control and take an enormous risk. He believed that Maureen Tigue had given Taney not only a cut of her operation’s profits but something else besides. Ultimately, sexual seduction always amounted to a play for power, and Maureen Tigue had possessed assets—relative youth and beauty—that might have allowed her to gain control of Taney, despite Taney’s bluff exterior.

  Lamb wasted no time in pressing his advantages, repeating what he’d told Taney when he’d outwitted and arrested him on the road near the prison site. He pushed the packet of forged ration coupons toward Taney.

  “You’ve allowed yourself to fall into a very deep and dark pit, Mr. Taney,” he said. “Forgery and the IRA. Your only way to avoid the gallows is to cooperate.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Taney said. He managed to say it with some conviction in his voice, though he did not look Lamb in the eye as he spoke and indeed had failed to meet Lamb’s eyes even once since Lamb had entered the room.

  “My men found these on the side of the road near where you crashed your lorry as you were trying to escape the farm earlier this evening. I’m certain we’ll find your fingerprints on them.”

  Lamb looked directly at Taney—stared through him until Taney finally, reluctantly, met his gaze. “The longer you stall the more tightly the noose tightens around your neck,” Lamb said icily. “I know about Maureen Tigue’s background, including her connections to the Irish. You’ve been incredibly stupid, but my guess is that you found her to be worth the risk. The money was only a kind of icing on the real treat. But she played you, of course—used you. And now she’s dead and none of this can hurt her, while you and Lawrence Tigue are left to swing. And you know as well as I that, even if by some miracle you managed to walk out of this nick tonight a free man, the Irish wouldn’t waste a minute in hunting you down. You know far too much. So you can help me or you literally can go to hell, Mr. Taney. The choice is up to you.”

  Tears began to well in Taney’s eyes. “I’ve a wife and two bloody children,” he said. He was cracking.

  “You should have thought of them while you were at it with Maureen Tigue,” Lamb said bluntly. He leaned across the table a bit, closer to Taney. “I believe her death surprised you—shocked you, even. But once it occurred you knew that the operation had to end. You had thought you were in clover—the money and Maureen Tigue. Then the whole thing crashed in, with the Irish breathing down your neck. I think it was only then that you realized how bloody stupid you’d been, how thoroughly she’d seduced you. You were the big man at the prison camp; everybody said so, even Walton. But in fact you were on your knees to her, and all for the most common of reasons. Was your plan to run away with her—to leave your blessed wife and children to fend for themselves? Is that what she promised you? That you could have her all to yourself?”

  Taney banged his fist on the table. “No! It wasn’t like that!”

  Lamb trained his eyes on Taney like a spotlight on a man cowering in a dark corner. “How was it then?” he asked.

  Taney’s lawyer leaned in close to Taney and whispered something that Lamb could not hear. But Taney literally pushed the man away and said, “No,” and Lamb understood from the look of defeat that crossed Taney’s face that he now must be patient and allow Taney to talk.

  The time was ten minutes after eleven P.M., and under the cover of the late hour and the darkness, several people in Winstead had begun to stir.

  Gerald Wimberly stood in the living room of the vicarage, preparing to walk down the path to Doris White’s cottage and kill her. He expected to dispatch her quickly.

  Wilhemina stood near him, her arms crossed. As Gerald prepared to leave, he said to her, “They won’t be able to do anything to us, so long as we vouch for each other. You must remember that.”

  He was just turning for the front door when it opened, abruptly, and Doris stepped into the foyer. In her pudgy hands, she held aloft Gerald’s Webley Mark VI pistol, which she pointed at his chest. He and Wilhemina both immediately noticed the eccentric nick in the gun’s barrel.

  “My God,” Wilhemina said.

  Doris wore her best green dress and had made up her face.

  “But you said you got rid of the pistol,” Wilhemina said to Gerald, her voice frantic.

  “I did,” Gerald said evenly. He’d fixed his eyes on Doris. Her sudden appearance and the sight of her holding the pistol he thought he’d buried forever stunned and enraged him. But he recovered quickly from his shock and fury—forced himself to put aside those emotions for the moment so that he could focus on what he might do to extract himself from the situation while doing as little damage to himself as possible. His first job would be to disarm Doris. Then he could act in the way that best suited him. He’d always found it easy to seduce and control Doris. He told himself that he must leave himself open to whatever opportunity presented itself and then move without hesitation.

  Doris smiled. “You don’t look surprised to see me, Gerald,” she said.

  “I’m not in the least surprised. I see what you are doing.” He flipped his head in Wilhemina’s direction. “You want to kill her so that she can’t bother us any longer. But as I told you, killing her would be too messy. Lamb would be sure to come after us if we left a body behind. Better to do things the way we’ve planned and make a clean getaway.”

  “Shut up, Gerald,” Doris said, stunning him anew. She raised the barrel of the pistol so that it was aimed a
t his face. “You do so love the sound of your own voice.”

  “How could you have been so stupid, Gerald!” Wilhemina shouted.

  “Shut up, damn you!” Gerald snapped at Wilhemina—though he did not take his eyes from Doris. He’d quickly formulated a plan. First, he would attempt to convince Doris to give him the gun. If that failed, he would encourage Doris to shoot Wilhemina, then, in the confusion of the moment, wrest the gun from Doris and shoot her. He would tell the police—truthfully—that Doris had broken into their home and shot Wilhemina. Doris had done so, he would say, because she was jealous of Wilhemina, which also was true. He would admit to Lamb that he and Doris had had an affair, but that it had ended three years ago—another truth. He would say that, after Doris had shot Wilhemina, he had been forced to shoot Doris in self-defense. No one would be left to dispute that story. It was not the escape he had planned, but it would have to do.

  “Give me the gun, my love,” he said. “Then we can get away.”

  Doris smiled again. “I’m in charge now, Gerald,” she said, confidently meeting his gaze. “There’s been a change of plan—and unless you want me to shoot you, you’ll do as I ask.”

  A sick feeling—a feeling he despised—filled Gerald. He felt trapped and feeble, like an animal in a snare. And he was so much more than that—so much finer. His intellect was superior to those of Wilhemina and Doris. It struck him as impossible that either of them, but especially the fat little odious hedgehog, might have outwitted him. But she had done, and this realization only increased the rage he felt. He regretted not having killed Doris long ago. Even so, he managed to remain outwardly calm.

  “Of course, my dear,” he said to Doris. He gestured again toward Wilhemina. “You’re right—go ahead and kill her. That way we can be rid of her. I should have seen that.”