The Language of the Dead

by Stephen Kelly

  “Yes. She worked there in the summers, helping the orphans—disadvantaged children. She was quite proud of that; I thought it quite noble of her. But she was like that—generous.” He shook his head and looked away again.

  “Did she ever mention a boy she knew from the estate named Peter?”

  “Once or twice. She thought he might be in love with her. She laughed about it some, but I think it troubled her.”

  “Had she spoken to you recently of any trouble she might have been having with Peter?”

  “No.”

  Lamb showed Graham the drawing of the spider. “Did she ever show you this?”

  Graham studied the drawing for a few seconds. “No. What is it?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m sure that this boy, Peter, drew it and believe that he gave it to her in the hope of communicating something to her, perhaps even to frighten her.”

  Graham shook his head. “I don’t know, Chief Inspector. I’m sorry.”

  “Had she ever shown you anything else that she’d received from Peter?”

  “No.”

  “What time did Emily leave you last night?”

  “I suppose it was close to eight.”

  “What did you do once she left?”

  “I came back here and slept.”

  That would be easy enough to check. He found Graham’s reaction to Emily’s death convincing. He now took a shot in the dark. “Did Emily ever mention to you a man by the name of Will Blackwell?”

  Graham shook his head. “No.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” Lamb said. “Thank you for your time.”

  He stood; Graham and Wallace did the same. Graham nodded. “You’re welcome, Chief Inspector,” he said. “I wonder if you’ll please let me know if you find out anything.”

  Lamb smiled but promised nothing.

  Before he left, Lamb checked Graham’s alibi with Bruegel. Except for the time that he claimed to have met Emily at the pub, Charles Graham had been present and accounted for all the previous evening. That said, men were known to go absent without leave or to creep away for a bit and ask their comrades to cover for them.

  “It might have been easy for him to have slipped away for a couple of hours in the middle of the night among all the confusion and upset from the German attack,” Wallace said as they drove off the base.

  “Yes, but what was his motive?”

  “He didn’t want to be tied down to a wife and child.”

  “But he claims he didn’t know about the child.”

  Wallace shrugged. “He’s lying.”

  Lamb shook his head. “He doesn’t strike me as the type.”

  “Why, because he’s an RAF bloke? They haven’t charmed you, too, have they, sir?” Wallace smiled. He thought of how, a few hours ago, Lamb had been chewing him out and threatening to tie his arse in a sling. Now they were chatting away. Lamb was very hard to figure. But he was no bastard. He would rather work for Lamb than anyone else he’d ever known who outranked him. He half considered asking Lamb what Rivers was on about. Perhaps he could be Lamb’s ally in that, though he didn’t want to seem as if he was kissing arse.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, sir?” Wallace asked.

  “That depends on the question.”

  “What has Rivers got against you?”

  Lamb took a couple of seconds to consider the question. He didn’t want to jaw on about Rivers.

  “It goes back to the war,” Lamb said. “He holds me responsible for the death of the man who was his best mate.”

  Wallace knew he was risking Lamb’s ire in seeking more, though he sensed Lamb was willing to talk. “Were you—responsible, I mean?”

  Lamb glanced at Wallace. “Yes, I was, in the sense that I was the man’s commanding officer and ordered him to perform the duty that led to his death.”

  “But that doesn’t count, does it? Someone must give the orders in war.”

  “It’s a long story,” Lamb said, though it wasn’t, really.

  Wallace took the hint and ended his interrogation.

  When they returned to the constabulary, Evers, the duty sergeant at the desk, told Lamb to report to Harding immediately. “Guv’s orders.” Evers shrugged, as if in sympathy.

  Harding stood as Lamb entered his office. He seemed in a great rush.

  “Rivers found them—both of them—in bloody Portsmouth, just as you said,” Harding said. “Abbott and the bloody niece. They’ve been holed up in a doss house down there flushing the uncle’s money down the loo at the bloody track.” Harding clapped his right hand on Lamb’s shoulder. “Nice work, Tom. Larkin told me about the prints on the tin box.” The super’s irritation of the morning seemed to have disappeared utterly. He smiled. “We’ve broken the bloody thing open.”

  Lamb wasn’t as certain of that. If Abbott and Lydia Blackwell had been holed up in Portsmouth, then they couldn’t have killed Emily Fordham. He believed that the connections between the two killings were too numerous to be dismissed as coincidence. Still, he was eager to talk to Abbott and Lydia Blackwell.

  Lamb found Rivers in the incident room receiving congratulations on the arrest from Wallace. Lamb approached and offered Rivers his hand. To Lamb’s surprise, Rivers took it with what seemed genuine civility.

  “Good work,” Lamb said.

  “They’d blown fifty quid already; the niece admitted that much,” Rivers said. “All they had left was two bloody pound. I think she’s ready to talk; she feels as if Abbott has double-crossed her.”

  “All right,” Lamb said. “We’ll talk to her first. Then we’ll put the screws to him.”

  Rivers thought of how he had been in Hampshire only a few days and already was on the verge of cracking a murder inquiry. As much as he disliked admitting it, part of his success was down to Lamb. Even so, he’d done the actual work. Lamb merely had pointed him down the right path, which, after all, was Lamb’s job. His cock-up in Warwickshire was starting to feel like a bad, distant dream.

  At noon, Vera called Southampton and Portsmouth.

  The telephone lines remained open, the saboteurs and fifth columnists at bay. That done, she set out on another lunchtime stroll up the hill to clear her mind. She hoped that she might encounter Peter again and perhaps speak to him. She’d spent part of the morning examining the drawing that Peter had dropped on the hill the previous evening. She found its detail and artistry exquisite, despite the disturbing nature of its subject. In the meantime, the events of the previous evening had vexed her; she seemed to have glimpsed Arthur as he really was—callous and frightened. She had hated the way in which he’d tried to bully her and to bully Peter.

  She ascended Manscome Hill along the sheep trail, by the wood that marked the western edge of Brookings. The day was hot but overcast, the first cloudy day they’d had in more than a week. She walked to the place where she’d first encountered Peter and stopped. She looked around but saw no sign of him. She sat in the grass by the path and waited. The meadow was dotted with thistle and wildflower and alive in the midday heat with grasshoppers, darting birds, and butterflies.

  A large blue butterfly alighted on a clover blossom near her. She did not know butterflies, really, and so did not know that the creature was called an Adonis Blue. She found it beautiful; its delicate wings were indigo and edged in concentric rings of black and white. She’d never really taken the time to closely examine a butterfly. She could easily see how their prettiness and grace might catch the fancy of a boy like Peter—or of a boy like the one she imagined Peter to be. She wondered what motivated him, what his thoughts consisted of. She thought that he must be lonely and frightened.

  She moved to touch the butterfly with the tip of her finger, but it sensed her movement and flew away.

  She sat in the meadow for twenty minutes, but Peter did not show. The clouds parted and moved to the south, toward the Solent, opening the sky again to the Germans. Disappointed that Peter had not shown himself, she began to walk down the p
ath toward Quimby.

  As she neared the place where the path ended near the cottage, she saw lying in the path, about twenty meters ahead, a sheet of paper like the one Peter had left on the hill on the previous night. She knew immediately what it was. She looked around but still saw no sign of Peter.

  She jogged to the paper and picked it up; it was a stout sheet of watercolor paper on which Peter had quickly sketched, in pencil and pastel, the same type of blue butterfly she’d seen on the flower. She recognized the color of its wings and their black and white bands. Peter had been watching her.

  Despite the haste with which he’d obviously drawn it, the sketch breathed life, animation. The butterfly seemed poised to rise from the page and, she thought, to possess a soul. Beneath the drawing, Peter had written something; the letters were rendered in pencil, in a crude hand, like that of a very small child who was just learning to write:

  tommss ded

  She had no idea what the words meant. She called toward the wood. “Peter. Come out. I won’t hurt you. I want to meet you.” She held his drawing above her head, as if it were a flag of truce. “Your drawings are beautiful. But I don’t know what sort of butterfly this is. Can you tell me, please?”

  She stood on the path and waited for several minutes before she gave up and returned to her post. From the wood, Peter watched her leave.

  When she returned to the Parish Council room, Vera found Arthur waiting for her by the hand-cranked siren. Her heart dropped. She had hoped he’d stay away, though she’d known he wouldn’t.

  “I’ve come to apologize,” he said. He stood between her and the stair that led to the door of the Council room. She didn’t want to speak with him. She clutched Peter’s drawing in her right hand.

  “You’ve no need to apologize,” she said.

  “But I’ve upset you.” His voice had the pleading tone that, she now believed, Arthur used to manipulate her emotionally.

  “You haven’t upset me. I’m fine.”

  “But I can tell that you’re upset. That you hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you, Arthur.”

  “You do. I can tell.” He was being childish now. That, too, was manipulative—and pitiful.

  “I can’t talk about this now, Arthur. I’m on duty.”

  “You see,” he said. “You could talk to me if you wanted, but you don’t. Because I’ve upset you.”

  “Please, Arthur.”

  “It’s Peter; you like him. I sometimes think you like him more than you like me. Is that one of his drawings?” He made a move to take the drawing from her, but she yanked it away.

  Arthur laughed slightly—a laugh that contained a sarcastic, derisive edge. “And here I thought you might even have loved me,” he said.

  “Please, Arthur. I must go back to work. I’m on duty.”

  She tried to move around him, to ascend the stairs, but he blocked her way.

  “I see,” Arthur said. “Because he draws the beautiful pictures, is that it?” He held aloft the stub of his right arm; his eyes narrowed in a menacing way. “Not all of us can draw, can we, Vera?”

  She hated his implication that she disliked him because of his arm. That was the most manipulative of all. He used his arm, deployed it. It had made no difference to her.

  “Your arm has nothing to do with it and never has,” she said.

  He hit the railing of the stair with his fist. “Bollocks!” he said. “I know what you want. You want to be rid of me. You’d rather spend your time with a bleeding idiot who draws spiders.”

  “That’s not true. And it’s not fair.”

  He held his stump aloft again, his eyes aflame. “No, this isn’t bloody fair. You’re a liar, Vera, a liar. And you’re a whore. Well, I’ll tell you something. He hasn’t got one, has he? Or if he does, he doesn’t know what to do with it.”

  A whore. She would rather that he had struck her in the face. She had given herself to him because she trusted and pitied him. She saw the true extent of her mistake and no longer even wanted to be in his presence.

  “Get out!” she yelled, pointing toward the street. “Get the bloody hell out!”

  Arthur took a step toward her, as if he meant to strike her. Vera drew back from him, frightened.

  He smiled a crooked, contemptuous smile. “You’re bloody pathetic,” he said. “You and your idiot eunuch.” He pointed at her, jabbing. “I better not catch the two of you together, or I’ll make both of you regret it.”

  “Get out!” She moved as if to turn the siren crank, to awaken the village.

  Arthur backed away from the stair. He began to cry. “I hate you!” he yelled. Then he ran into the street and toward his father’s farm.

  Vera ran up the stairs to the Council room, slammed the door, and locked it, her heart beating furiously. She burst into tears and kicked the door in a gesture of shock, sorrow, and anger.

  SEVENTEEN

  ALBERT GILLEY HAD FOUND IT RATHER EASY TO TRACK DOWN George Abbott and therefore to point Rivers in the right direction. Abbott and Lydia had been hanging around the track since the day after Blackwell’s killing, flashing cash and losing badly, Gilley told Rivers. They were staying in a doss house near the track.

  A bleary-eyed Lydia had answered Rivers’s knock on the door of their room, simple as that. She’d seemed genuinely surprised to see Rivers. Abbott was snoring in bed.

  A few hours later, in an interview room in Winchester, Lamb began his interrogation of Lydia by reminding her that people who were convicted of murder were hanged and that, if she had not killed her uncle, the only way for her to avoid the gallows was to tell the truth. In response, she retched up her story in a flood of repressed emotion and bitter tears.

  She hadn’t expected her uncle to be killed—she truly hadn’t. The plan had been for Abbott to set Will to work on his hedges that morning, and for her and Abbott to take a bit of Will’s money and go to Paulsgrove. It was supposed to have been a lark, a one-off thing, though she hadn’t been convinced that they could do it all in a single day and still return to Quimby before Will came home for his tea. She’d never been to the racetrack or any sort of gambling establishment. But Abbott—she called him George—told her they could do it easily and that Will never would know they’d been gone. And they had done it. They’d bet on a few races and lost most of the thirty pounds they’d stolen from Will’s box, then gotten back to Quimby on time. But then Will had failed to show for his tea.

  She had known Abbott most of her life, but they hadn’t begun “relations,” as she called it, until about fourteen months earlier. She was lonely, had always been lonely, and had never had much. Abbott had things—a farm and house of his own, sheep, a phonograph, and other possessions. And he had helped Will—given him work—when no one else would. Then, about two months after she and Abbott had begun their “relations,” the boy ran away from Lord Pembroke’s estate and Will brought the boy home… .

  The words stunned Lamb.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Which boy?”

  “His name were Thomas,” Lydia said. “I don’t know his surname.”

  Lamb signaled to the constable who stood by the door. The man came to the table and Lamb whispered something to him. The constable nodded and left the room. Lamb turned back to Lydia.

  “You say that Will brought the boy, Thomas, home?”

  “Yes, sir.” She felt vaguely irritated with Lamb; she was trying to tell him the truth about what had happened on the day her uncle died, and yet he was interrupting her with irrelevant questions about Thomas.

  “What do you mean when you say that Will brought Thomas home?”

  “Just that. The boy had run away from Brookings—he was one of the orphan boys who stay there summers. And he ran away and ended up on the hill, where Will found him, hiding. He were hungry and scared. The boy took to Will; he told Will he didn’t want to go back to Brookings. He’d had some trouble there with someone.”

  “Donald Fordham?” Lamb asked.

&nbs
p; “I don’t know, sir,” Lydia said. “I didn’t talk to the boy, really. Shortly after he found the boy, Will hiked over to Brookings and, an hour later, returned with Lord Pembroke in Lord Pembroke’s motorcar and Lord Pembroke took the boy back to Brookings.”

  The constable returned with the snapshot of the boy they’d found in Emily Fordham’s wallet. Lamb placed it on the table. “Is this Thomas?”

  Lydia looked at the photo. “Yes, sir, that is the boy.”

  “Do you know a woman named Emily Fordham, Miss Blackwell?”

  Lydia looked genuinely confused. “No. I’ve never heard of no one named Emily Fordham, sir.” Lamb was getting far off the track, she thought. She was trying to tell him about Will’s money. She didn’t want George to go to the gallows; she loved George. Lamb had said to tell the truth, and she was doing that. Better that she should tell the truth than that Lamb should believe that George had killed her uncle.

  “You said when we spoke the first time that Peter Wilkins sometimes came over from Lord Pembroke’s estate to sit with Will while Will worked,” Lamb said. “Do you know if Peter Wilkins showed Will where Thomas was hiding on the hill?”

  Lamb considered the question another shot in the dark. He was beginning to arrange in his mind a scenario in which the killings had occurred and why, though he hadn’t a bloody scrap of evidence yet to support such a scenario.

  “Peter Wilkins, sir?” Lydia thought the question strange. Peter Wilkins was deaf and dumb as a mule. He didn’t even speak, only grunted.

  “Yes, Peter Wilkins,” Lamb said. “Is it possible that he led your uncle to where Thomas was hiding?”

  Lydia shook her head. “I don’t know, sir.” Her patience finally ran out. “But I’m trying to tell you about the money. I don’t want George to hang. He didn’t do it.”

  Seeing that Lydia seemed to know little about Thomas, Lamb returned to the question of Will Blackwell’s money. “Yes, please tell me about the money.”

  “Lord Pembroke gave it to him. A hundred and seventy-five pound. For finding Thomas.”

  For a second time, Lamb found himself stunned by what Lydia Blackwell had told him. “And what did your uncle do with this money?” he asked.