He put the locket into his pocket and picked up the photograph. He found Wallace awaiting him in the hall.
“Anything useful?” Rivers asked.
“Nothing, save a diary,” Wallace said. “Though it had nothing in it. Just odds and bits about the weather and so on. Rather sad, actually.”
Rivers showed Wallace the photo and the locket.
“Mementos of happier days, then?” Wallace asked.
“Apparently. What do you think, then, Sergeant—about Abbott and the niece?”
Wallace agreed with Rivers that Lydia Blackwell seemed to be lying about her relationship with Abbott. But he didn’t want to undercut Lamb.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Rivers smiled crookedly and clasped a hand on Wallace’s shoulder, which surprised Wallace. “Loyalty, eh. That’s good. Still, you have to be careful with who you’re loyal to. Don’t want to back the wrong horse.”
Wallace glanced at Rivers’s hand on his shoulder. He wasn’t exactly sure what Rivers meant except that he seemed to be referring to Lamb. Wallace wondered what had transpired between them.
“I’m comfortable with my bet,” Wallace said.
Rivers widened his oblique smile a notch, but said nothing.
Lamb made a circuit of the house but found nothing save a small toolshed in the back. He tried the door but found the interior utterly dark and without a light; he decided to leave it for tomorrow. He returned to the cottage to find Wallace and Rivers descending the stairs. The trio rendezvoused in the kitchen and shared what they’d found, which, aside from the old photos, amounted to nothing.
They returned to the chairs in the sitting room.
“We won’t trouble you but for a few moments more, Miss Blackwell,” Lamb said. “Just a few more questions and then we’ll be on our way.”
He showed Lydia the framed photo Rivers had taken from Will’s room. “What can you tell me about this photograph?” he asked.
“That is Claire, Will’s late wife.”
Lamb was surprised to hear that Will had been married. Everything he’d heard and seen suggested that the old man always had been a bachelor.
“When did Will’s wife die?”
“Many years ago, sir. Before I was born. They had been married less than two years when she died.”
“And Will never remarried?”
“No, sir.”
“Did your uncle leave a will?”
Lydia’s eyes widened. “No, sir,” she said. “Will never would have done that.”
“Do you know, then, what will become of his property—this cottage, for instance, and anything else he might have owned or put away?”
Lydia twisted the handkerchief. “I suppose it will come to me, sir.”
Lamb stood. “Constable Harris will look in on you tomorrow morning to see if you require anything,” he said. “We also will return tomorrow and do a more thorough search of the house for evidence. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but hopefully we won’t be in your way for too long.”
Lydia nodded her assent and wiped her nose.
Outside the cottage, the faint sound of air-raid sirens some distance to the east impinged on the quiet. Lamb and Wallace had become used to distant sirens and understood that they had nothing to fear—at least for the moment—from such a far-off warning.
“It’s the bomber factory again, then, would you say?” Wallace said to Lamb.
“Probably,” Lamb said.
Lamb had considered saying something to Wallace about his performance that evening—praising it while, at the same time, hinting that he knew of Wallace’s drinking and was watching the situation. But at the moment this seemed to him not worth the trouble.
“Do we need to get under bloody cover?” Rivers asked. He looked at the sky. As had Lamb, Rivers had learned in the first war never to take a warning of danger for granted. Those who did normally ended up with their stupid, bleeding heads blown off.
“Not until the ground begins to shake,” Wallace said. He was joking—a joke Rivers didn’t seem to get. A bombing was nothing to joke about, of course, and, at first, almost no one had joked about the Germans. But most people did so now, at least occasionally. Oddly, at times joking seemed the only sane thing to do under the circumstances.
“Yeah,” Rivers said, eyeing Wallace with a hint of mistrust. “I see.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Wallace added. “If they do decide to come here, you’ll know.”
Lamb turned to Harris.
“Can you get me a copy of a book the title of which is something along the lines of Ghostly Legends of Hampshire?” Lamb asked. “It was written by Lord Pembroke, apparently. Do you know it?”
“Yes, sir. I think I know where I can get my hands on a copy.”
“Good man.”
Lamb, Wallace, and Rivers walked to Lamb’s Wolseley.
“I’ll arrange to conduct a search of the house tomorrow morning,” Lamb said. “After that’s done, we’ll begin a proper canvassing of the village.”
“What about Abbott?” Rivers asked.
“I haven’t forgotten about him,” Lamb said.
“He and the niece are up to something.”
“All right, then,” Lamb said, ignoring Rivers’s protestation. “We’ll see you tomorrow, David.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wallace was certain that he’d made it through the evening without Lamb catching on to him. Even so, he had cut it very close—too close—and decided that he must watch himself more carefully in the future.
SIX
PETER WILKINS SAT IN THE DECREPIT SUMMERHOUSE LEAFING THROUGH Walton’s Field Guide to Butterflies, the kerosene lamp burning beside him.
Adonis Blue, Brown Hairstreak, Duke of Burgundy, Scarce Copper, Sooty Copper, Brown Argus, Chalkhill Blue, Purple Hairstreak … Hesperiidae, Lycaenidae, Nymphalidae, Papilionidae, Pieridae … Skippers, Hairstreaks, Dukes, Emperors, Admirals, Browns, Swallowtails.
Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” spun on the wind-up Victrola. Its repetitive refrain soothed Peter.
You’re the top!
You’re the Coliseum.
You’re the top!
You’re the Louvre Museum.
But the other words, the words in his mind, intruded: I must! He stood quickly, popping up like a jack-in-the-box, then sat again, agitated.
White Letter Hairstreak, Scotch Argus, Queen of Spain Fritillary, Mountain Ringlet, Red Admiral, Small Heath.
Lord Pembroke had given him the Victrola and many records, but he did not like the other records. Lord Pembroke had given him Walton’s Field Guide to Butterflies.
You’re the top!
You’re an arrow collar.
You’re the top!
You’re a Coolidge dollar.
Now was the peak time of butterflies—the time of emerging and seeking. The estate was vast but he knew it intimately, every inch. He caught the butterflies in a net and pinned them to boards. When they crumbled, he replaced them. And he made drawings, like the drawings in Walton’s Field Guide to Butterflies. Sometimes, too, he drew beetles, grasshoppers, bees, wasps, and spiders. He killed them with poison, then sketched their dead bodies. But he liked butterflies best.
You’re a Waldorf salad! (He liked that one because it made him laugh, though tonight he didn’t laugh.)
The lamp cast its light on the book in the shape of a circle, a hole. The boys were in a hole.
Hermit, Wall Brown, Apollo… .
He stood. I must!
You’re the boats that glide
On the sleepy Zuider Zee,
You’re an old Dutch master,
You’re Lady Astor,
You’re broccoli!
He’d seen the crows eat Will’s eyes.
The words surged within his mind, like a wave that was not really something so singular as a wave at all, but the merest edge of an ocean, of all the oceans in the world.
At that same moment, Emily Fordham sat at the
desk in her bedroom and thought of what she must write to Lord Pembroke.
She wanted to be fair to Peter. But she understood that she could not put stock in anything Peter had tried to communicate to her. The spider and the rest of it probably was nonsense. Still, Peter’s recent behavior had concerned her enough that, two days earlier, she’d written to Donald. Peter’s flights of fancy—his fears and aspirations and dreams—were so unlike those of a normal boy.
She wished that Donald were there. He would know what to do. Donald had been Thomas’s leader on the estate the previous summer, when Thomas had run away. Donald had been glad that Lord Pembroke had forbade Thomas from returning to the estate once Thomas had surfaced. Donald had said that Thomas was a liar and schemer. But Peter had seemed to like Thomas.
She withdrew a sheet of paper from the drawer and began to write. When she was finished, she put the note in an envelope, addressed and sealed it.
She would post it tomorrow, on her way to see Charles.
Lamb pushed the starter on the Wolseley. Again, the thing responded on the first try.
He thought of how, a few hours before, he’d liked his luck. Now Harry Rivers was sitting next to him, quietly staring out the window at the dark environs of Quimby. Seeing Rivers emerge from the rear seat of Harding’s car had been like watching a specter rise from the grave.
Neither of them spoke as the Wolseley crossed the stone bridge over Mills Run and left the village. Thanks to the blackout, Lamb had to maneuver the old machine in near darkness along the narrow road, as the dim beam from his hooded headlights illuminated only the portion of the road directly ahead.
Twenty-two years earlier, nearly to the day, he and Rivers had sat next to each other in a forward trench preparing to head out, in the black of night, on a reconnaissance of the German positions that lay less than two hundred yards distant. Both had performed such raids several times before and, indeed, Lamb had developed a reputation for being quite skillful at the job, which required stealth and a sharp mind, and depended on Rivers to back and second him. Even then, Lamb entertained no idea that Rivers liked him, though he felt certain that Rivers at least respected him. Rivers’s enmity seemed to be grounded in the fact that Lamb wasn’t Martin Wells, the man whom he’d replaced as second lieutenant, commanding the squad of south London men that Wells had commanded. But Wells had had the unfortunate luck of getting himself killed in a raid very much like the one that Rivers and Lamb and a half dozen other hand-picked men were about to launch. Lamb often felt as if Rivers blamed him for Wells’s death—as if his place in the command pipeline somehow had hastened Wells to the grave. But the main point of contention between him and Rivers had been Private Eric Parker, a cocksure eye-winker and smoker of fags, and Rivers’s best friend. Rivers had talked Parker into joining the London Regiment and therefore (or so Lamb would eventually come to discover) felt duty-bound to protect Parker from the ravages of the war, an impossible task. For his part, Parker had felt no enmity toward Lamb and Lamb had come to see Parker as one of his best and most dependable men. But Parker had been killed and Rivers had held him—Lamb—responsible.
Rivers spoke first, his head turned to the window. “You’re married with a daughter.”
Lamb wondered how Rivers knew. Obviously he’d done some checking.
“Yes. You?”
“Married to the job.”
“That has advantages.”
“It does.”
They drove in silence for ten minutes, Lamb doing his best to concentrate on the road. But he hadn’t volunteered to drive Rivers to Winchester in order to fail to divine why Rivers suddenly had parachuted into Hampshire. He didn’t want a showdown with Rivers, merely an explanation.
“Why are you here, Harry?” Lamb asked.
Rivers shrugged. “I was transferred, wasn’t I?” He looked at Lamb. “War shortages in the south—that’s what they told me, anyway. And because I’m a good soldier, when they told me to move, I saluted and did my duty.”
Lamb knew those last words were meant to pierce him and, to a degree, they hit the mark. “But you haven’t answered my question,” he said.
“Haven’t I?”
“I assume you knew that I was here.”
“I knew. But I had no choice.” Rivers smiled his lopsided grin. “No reason to lie, after all. Fact is, I bollixed a case. I got a little impatient with the way things were going and pressed the matter; broke into a bloke’s house and got the goods. But it wasn’t allowed into evidence, so the bastard is a free man today.” He shrugged. “My ‘mistake,’” he added, in a tone that suggested that he hadn’t really considered it a mistake. “Then they suddenly needed men down south and the man I worked for up there saw his chance to be rid of me.”
“Does Harding know about your mistake?”
“He knows. But he decided he’d rather have an experienced man with a blemish than someone green. It also didn’t hurt that the man I worked for in Warwickshire is one of Harding’s old chums.” He smiled again—bitterly, Lamb thought. “Lucky for me, eh?”
“A second chance, then?” Lamb asked.
“You might say that.”
That seemed to end their initial skirmish. They drove the rest of the way to Winchester in silence, each wondering what the other was thinking.
Wallace walked alone through the blacked-out streets of Winchester to The Fallen Diva.
He arrived a little after nine and was pleasantly surprised to find the woman he’d seen earlier that day sitting alone at the same table, the same half-expectant look on her face. Her purse was on the table, along with a half pint of beer and an ashtray partially filled with stubbed-out cigarettes. As Wallace passed her, he caught the scent of her perfume and glanced at her; she met his eyes and then glanced away. He was thirsty and hungry—hungry for something he hadn’t had enough of in too long a time.
He went to the bar and ordered a pint. He told himself that he would limit himself to three beers. “Who’s the bird at the table?” he asked the man behind the bar.
“No idea. Never saw her before until three days ago. Just sits there, all alone.”
“Is she waiting for someone?”
“If she is, he hasn’t shown up.”
“Any blokes try it on with her?”
“One did last night. But he gave up.”
Wallace took his beer to the woman’s table. She looked up at him.
“May I join you?”
She smiled, faintly. “Suit yourself.”
Wallace offered his hand. “David Wallace,” he said. She shook his hand but said nothing. Wallace thought that she must be playing a game. But he didn’t mind a game now and again. He smiled. “So, you have no name, then?”
She didn’t answer. Her faint smile reappeared.
“Do I have to guess?” Wallace asked.
“If you like.”
He pretended to appraise her. “Let me see,” he said. “Green eyes, green dress.” He pulled his chair back from the table and looked beneath it. “Ha!” he said. “Green shoes! Your name is Miss Green.”
She laughed—a kind of twitter. “Not even close.”
“You have auburn hair. Miss Brown, then?”
“No.”
“Let’s see. I’m running out of colors. Miss Yellow?”
She laughed.
“Turquoise? No? I know—you’re French! Blanc. Miss Blanc! Hold on! You’re blushing. Miss Rose?”
He believed the game to be a test. She wanted to see not only if he was willing to play, but how well he played. Apparently, he’d done well. The bloke of the night before likely hadn’t.
“Very well,” she said. “I suppose I’ll have to tell you.”
“I’m all ears,” Wallace said. He tugged at his ears, pulling them out from his head.
She laughed again—snorted. She put her right hand over her mouth, as if the unfeminine sound mortified her.
“Seriously, my dear,” Wallace said, affecting an upper-class accent. “What is y
our name? Mother insists on knowing.”
She twittered again. “Delilah,” she said.
Wallace sipped his beer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Delilah what?”
“Just Delilah.”
Another game. Delilah intrigued him. He quietly appraised her plump body. She was voluptuous—that was the word. He reckoned she was maybe twenty-one. A good age. She had neither the look nor attitude of a virgin. Her modesty—the hand over the mouth and the rest of it—was affected, which added to her mystery.
She told him that she worked as a secretary in a firm of solicitors and was considering joining the WAAFs. He said that he was a copper, a sergeant. When she asked—as they always did—if he was stalking a killer, he told her as much about the Blackwell case as seemed prudent. She listened, rapt, as he described how they’d found Will Blackwell’s body.
“It all sounds so frightening,” she said.
Wallace shrugged. “I suppose. Though dead is dead, after all.” He smiled.
“Yes, but the way he died.” She looked at her beer, which she’d hardly touched. “Poor old man.”
“It’s possible he didn’t feel anything beyond a knock on the back of the head. The killer drove in the pitchfork while the old boy was unconscious. So the doc says.” He wondered if he was saying more than he should—if the beer was loosening his tongue. He must watch himself.
They talked for another half hour. Wallace tried to get more out of Delilah—who she was, really, and why she had come to The Fallen Diva to sit alone. But Delilah deflected his questions. At closing, she said “I must get home now.” She offered no explanation and Wallace asked for none. He wondered if he’d pressed her too hard for information.
She picked up her purse and stood. Wallace escorted her to the dark street. He’d had his three pints and felt within himself. He was prepared to go home, get a decent night’s sleep, and appear in the nick on the following morning ready to go, like a loyal dog. Except that he didn’t want to go home. Not yet.
The night had grown cool enough for a sweater, though Delilah had none. Wallace removed his coat and put it around her shoulders. To his surprise, she kissed him quickly on the cheek and said “Thank you, David. You’re very charming.” She drew Wallace’s jacket around herself and added, “I’d ask you to walk me home but I’m afraid it’s a bit of a distance. It’s fifteen minutes, at least.”
The Language of the Dead Page 5