The Language of the Dead (14 page)

On the previous night, Wallace had made it to The Fallen Diva just before final call. Delilah was waiting for him. He'd downed a pint and then they'd gone back to her little house and devoured each other, as they had the previous night. This time, though, Wallace had curbed his drinking. When, finally, he'd fallen asleep next to Delilah, he'd done so sober.

He'd also brought with him a razor, soap, and fresh clothing, which he'd stuffed into a kit bag. He'd therefore felt confident and on top of his game when he'd awakened. But Delilah was lying with her back to him, softly crying. He put his arms around her; she grasped his right hand to her breast and held it. Her skin was warm and moist. He asked her what was wrong.

“Nothing,” she said without turning to look at him. “I just cry sometimes. I don't know why.”

He'd held her for some minutes. The smell of liquor lingered on her breath. He felt a slight pity for her and realized that he did not
know her surname. He told himself he would ask her later. He'd then washed and shaved and gone on his way, managing to arrive at the nick only a few minutes after Lamb.

Rivers had arrived next, followed shortly by Cashen and Larkin. Lamb conducted a quick meeting in which he reiterated their duties for the day. He told them he would join them in Quimby after speaking with Lord Jeffrey Pembroke. He briefly told them the stories of the murder of Agnes Clemmons and its similarities to Blackwell's killing, and of the tale of Blackwell having seen the black dog on Manscome Hill.

“It's likely our killer has read the book,” Lamb said.

After the meeting, he briefly took Rivers and Wallace aside and told them that he had a source in Paulsgrove who'd said that Abbott was deeply in debt to a pair of Portsmouth bookies.

“You'll be in charge in Quimby in my absence,” he told Rivers. “Check Abbott's cottage first. If he's not there, then I'll probably send you to Portsmouth.”

“But he could be bloody anywhere,” Rivers said, barely masking the impertinence in his tone.

“All the same, I want the lead checked,” Lamb said evenly to Rivers. “If you're unwilling to go, then I'll send someone else and you can stay here and answer some of the many telephone calls I expect we'll get today in response to the newspaper story.”

Rivers nodded and grumbled his assent.

Wallace wondered what Rivers was on about. He'd sensed the tension between Rivers and Lamb from the beginning; then Rivers had made the crack about “backing the wrong horse.” But Rivers seemed to be the one who was making the wrong bet, challenging Lamb.

Brookings sat perched above the Solent between Quimby on its northwest side and the village of Lipscombe on its northeast.

Lamb found the main house to be much like other fine old manor houses he'd seen—large, elegant, and decrepit-looking. To the left of
the house he saw the large gardens in which the boys who stayed at Brookings in the summers worked. All these, save one, which sprouted a variety of low green vegetables, lay fallow because the war had kept the boys away.

Hatton, the aging butler who'd answered Lamb's call of the previous day, showed Lamb into an echoing foyer. Hatton was just as Lamb had imagined, with a deeply lined, ancient face than nonetheless retained a kind of ageless haughtiness. He was dressed in black and sported wide gray sideburns. Although Pembroke was reputed to be a man of modern ideas, he apparently retained an old-fashioned taste in household staff, Lamb thought. “I'll tell Mr. Parkinson that you are here, sir,” Hatton said.

Two minutes later, a small, wiry man dressed in a well-cut blue suit and red tie appeared. Leonard Parkinson walked toward Lamb with such speed that Lamb at first feared that Parkinson might ram him. When still a good seven strides away, Parkinson thrust out his hand.

“Chief Inspector!” he said. “So very good to meet you! Leonard Parkinson!”

Lamb had the feeling of fending off a friendly though slightly frantic terrier. Although Parkinson could not have been more than five feet, four inches tall, he possessed the grip of a stevedore.
Here
was Pembroke indulging in the modern, Lamb thought. Parkinson possessed the glad-handing openness of an American on the make. The people from whom Pembroke had sought to distance himself likely saw Parkinson as a kind of thumb in the eye.

“Lord Pembroke is eager to meet you,” Parkinson said. “He finds this business with Mr. Blackwell absolutely a horror and is willing to help in any way he can.” He gestured toward the back of the house. “Lord Pembroke is waiting for you in his wildflower garden.”

Parkinson led the way through French doors at the rear of the house that gave onto a slate terrace fronting wide marble stairs that descended to a trim lawn about twenty meters wide and a hundred meters long that sloped toward bluffs above the sea. The central feature of this manicured space was a circular fountain perhaps ten feet in
diameter that was topped by a bronze mermaid perched upon a rock. Either side of the lawn was bordered by a trimmed box hedge roughly five feet high; along the hedge, spaced every twenty or so feet, were marble benches at the ends of which sat cherubs strumming lyres.

Lamb followed Parkinson along the hedge until they reached a place in which the hedge opened, through an arch, onto one of the most singular and striking private gardens Lamb had ever seen. The garden was roughly fifty meters long and thirty wide; in nearly every square inch, wildflowers grew among delicate-looking bushes that sprouted a profusion of many-colored blossoms. The space was absolutely alive with bees and butterflies flitting among the blooms. A narrow, S-shaped flagstone path led through the blooms to an oval-shaped patch of lawn at the center of the garden; at the center of this green space, Jeffrey Pembroke sat at a black wrought-iron table that was set upon a circular patio of smooth stone, reading a book, a white canvas hat atop his head. At the center of the stone terrace was a sapphire tile mosaic of a butterfly with wings four feet wide. Pembroke was dressed in the Bloomsbury style: a pair of khaki cotton trousers, a green open-necked cotton shirt, and open-toed leather sandals. Pembroke seemed so lost in his reading that he failed to notice their arrival.

Parkinson cleared his throat. “Inspector Lamb has arrived, Jeffrey,” he said.

Lamb was surprised to hear Parkinson refer to Pembroke by his Christian name rather than his title. Pembroke looked up from his book—Lamb could not quite read the title—in a way that suggested that someone had just tapped his shoulder to awaken him. He took a second to focus on Lamb and then grew animated. He stood and offered his hand in greeting. “Welcome, Chief Inspector,” he said. “How nice of you to come.”

Pembroke possessed a high forehead, thinning sandy hair, a long aristocratic nose, and elegant fingers. He was long-armed and long-legged. “I see that you've already made a friend, Chief Inspector,” Pembroke said. “Have a look at your shoulder.”

Lamb found a tiny butterfly perched on his left shoulder. Its indigo wings moved once—almost as if it were acknowledging Lamb's
sudden awareness of its existence—then became still. He found it beautiful.

“The Large Blue,” Pembroke said. “Rather a strange name, given its size, I know. I'm afraid it's becoming quite rare. But we've managed to attract a few around here, mainly by constructing the right kind of habitat. I'm not certain you realize how lucky you are, Chief Inspector.” He smiled. “I know lepidopterists who gladly would trade their first-born children for the chance to experience what you are now experiencing.”

Despite its beauty and apparent rarity, Lamb hoped the butterfly didn't decide it liked his shoulder. He didn't want to swat it away, given its supposed rarity and Pembroke's clear affection for it. He settled for blowing the tiniest of breaths at the thing, which caused it to rise and return to the surrounding forest of flowers.

Pembroke gestured for Lamb to sit.

“Are you a collector, my lord?” Lamb asked.

“No. Were I a collector, I would have had my net on the thing, rare or no. True collectors, despite their protestations to the contrary, are never conservationists. They'd take the last grain of sand in the world for their collections if the need and opportunity presented itself. I enjoy butterflies simply for their presence in the world and their beauty. I find them calming, don't you?”

“I suppose so,” Lamb said.

“It's something to do with that rather self-possessed knack for stillness they possess, I suspect. And by the way, you needn't worry with the ‘my lord' business. I'm not
that
impressed with myself, despite appearances to the contrary.”

The remark caught Lamb off guard—it suggested that Pembroke had successfully read him even as he was reading Pembroke.

Pembroke turned to Parkinson. “Could you fetch us some tea, please, Leonard?”

Parkinson nodded and smiled. “Right away,” he said and disappeared through the arched portal in the hedge.

Pembroke sat back in his chair and tented his fingers. “Now then, Chief Inspector,” he said. “How can I assist your inquiries?”

“I read the chapter in your book on Will Blackwell's boyhood encounter with the black dog and the subsequent whisperings about his practicing witchcraft. Also, the manner of his murder very much mirrors that of Agnes Clemmons, the milkmaid, even down to the use of the pitchfork and scythe. I was hoping that you might provide a bit of perspective on that. How likely is it that these superstitions have persisted in the rural places?”

“You're right, of course. Blackwell's murder is similar to that of Agnes Clemmons, though in the earlier case the victim's connection to witchcraft existed only in the killer's head. I've uncovered no evidence—nor did the police at the time—that Clemmons practiced witchcraft.”

“Does it appear likely to you that someone might have killed Blackwell because they believed him to be a witch?”

“It's a possibility, I suppose, though a much more remote one today than it would have been when Miss Clemmons met her end. Still, Blackwell's killing had several obvious hallmarks of the vanquishing of a witch.”

“Do you mean the cross gouged into his forehead?”

“No—that's rather too obvious, actually. Even someone who knew nothing of witchcraft but was motivated by religious fervor might have gouged the sign of the Lord into what he considered an evil body. No—the cross is rather too much like the vampire stories. I'm speaking of the pitchfork in the neck. If our man did kill Blackwell because he believed him a witch, he might have run the pitchfork into Blackwell's neck for a couple of reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Some occult legends say that the blood of a vanquished witch must be drained away and the body firmly secured to the killing spot, lest the spirit of the witch rise again. The pitchfork in the neck would accomplish both of those.”

“What do you think of the notion that someone who is not in the least mad or motivated by religious fervor—but wanted it to appear that way—might have convincingly pulled this off?” Lamb asked.

“Well, they obviously would need to know at least a little something about the lore of witchcraft, which they could achieve, of course, with a little reading. I would have to ask, in turn, whether someone who was out to kill Mr. Blackwell for more prosaic motives would have thought to bother with so many macabre touches. I'll leave it to you to decide whether someone motivated to kill for commonplace reasons would have gone to the trouble this killer obviously has. If you are asking for my opinion, I'd say the crime points to someone with a very diseased mind—although his disease might not be readily apparent.” Pembroke leaned back in his chair again. “Might I be allowed to play the role of amateur psychologist?” he asked.

“Please do.”

“Well, if the killer is mad, his lunacy could nonetheless be hidden from the general run of humanity. But for that to be so, the man would have to enjoy little intercourse with the rest of the world, given that such a deep disturbance of the mind couldn't be entirely cloaked. Given that, if your killer is a madman, I would guess that he is a loner or hermit, someone who exists without spending too much time in the general hustle and bustle of life. I don't believe, for example, that he'd likely be a publican—just to take an example—or an estate agent.” Pembroke smiled. “Or a police detective.”

Lamb nodded and returned a smile of lower wattage. “Yes,” he said. “I believe you're right.”

“Just a thought,” Pembroke said. “I doubt if it's of much help in the end.”

“On the contrary,” Lamb said. “It's quite helpful. Such a man could very well be a farmer—someone who might live and prosper, if he so chose, having little contact with the larger world, as Blackwell himself apparently did.”

A maid arrived with the tea. Pembroke thanked her; she bowed slightly and departed silently. Pembroke prepared a cup to Lamb's specifications—no milk and one cube of sugar. The sugar bowl and creamer were full and the tea was something flavored and scented that Lamb had never before tasted.