The Language of the Dead (2 page)

DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR THOMAS LAMB SAT DOWN WITH HIS
wife, Marjorie, to a tea consisting of weak coffee, two poached eggs each, and dry toast. Although they had a half-full tin of marmalade in the larder, they were rationing it—one day with and one without. Today was a “dry” day. Lamb raised his coffee to his wife.

“Cheers,” he said, smiling. He had begun raising his cup and offering “cheers” at their evening meal three or four days earlier, as a kind of joke in defiance of the war's scarcities. Slightly more than ten months had passed since the war had begun and, in that time, nearly everything of any worth had shrunken and diminished—food, laughter, comfort, security. But even as he said it, Lamb wondered if Marjorie was becoming tired of his little attempt at levity. Even irony had begun to wear a bit thin as the war dragged on; the too-obvious joshing seemed to contain a whiff of defeat, of whistling in the dark.

Marjorie raised her cup and smiled slightly. “Cheers,” she said.

Lamb had close-cropped brown hair that was graying prematurely at the temples and a generous smile that softened a buried intensity that shone in his eyes. He wanted a fag but long ago had stopped smoking at table because the smoke bedeviled his wife. It drifted into her nostrils and made her sneeze and into her eyes and made them water. And the smell of the bloody things permeated everything. Lamb reckoned he did not own a single tie, shirt, coat, or pair of trousers that did not reek of cigarettes. A week earlier, he'd decided that he would give the damned things up. They were ruining his lungs and threatening to send him to an early grave.

As of yet, though, he'd had little success in quitting. He still smoked more than a packet a day—and that even as fags had become a matter of patriotism. One should not hoard boots, blankets, or food; all were needed on the front lines. The same was true of petrol. Now the government was making noise about bloody fags. Still and all, Lamb knew from his service in the first war the importance of cigarettes and liquor to frontline soldiers. Rum and fags allowed the average man to keep on despite the hellishness. Two days earlier he'd bought a tin of butterscotch drops and was attempting to train himself to pop one into his mouth each time he wanted a cigarette. Now, as he finished his coffee, he fished the tin from his pocket and denied himself what he really wanted.

He unfolded the evening edition of the
Hampshire Mail
with slight trepidation. Evenings, he normally checked the day's turf results, except on those days when he felt certain that he'd lost. That morning he'd put two pounds on a horse called Winter's Tail in the fourth race at Paulsgrove, in Portsmouth, and almost immediately a bad feeling about the bet had surged through him. Such instinctual feelings came to him now and again, he didn't know from where, and often too bloody late, he thought. He found that he couldn't quite bring himself to check the race result. He
knew
he'd lost. Two bloody quid down the drain. He and Marjorie couldn't afford it—not really. Although he didn't believe in luck, necessarily, he couldn't help feeling that his luck was running poorly at the moment.

He turned instead to the usual spate of grim war news. Less than a month earlier, the Germans had defeated France and backed the British Expeditionary Force against the Channel, at Dunkirk. Then the Germans had stopped, an uncharacteristic pause that had allowed the British to evacuate more than three hundred thousand men from France. Still, the British Army was a broken one. Then, three weeks earlier, the Germans had begun bombing southern England almost daily. The reason for this bombardment was the planned German invasion of Britain from France. If the Germans could gain control of the skies above the Channel, they then would send men and arms across to invade—to crush Britain in the same way they'd crushed France and most of the rest of Western Europe.

On four of the past eight nights, the Luftwaffe had attacked the Blenheim aircraft factory—which made bombers and lay about twenty-five miles to the southeast—though without much success. Neither side had quite yet figured out how to effectively maneuver airplanes in the dark and so the German bombers often missed the mark, and sometimes widely. Around the bomber factory they'd seemed to have blown up as much farmland and pasture as legitimate targets of war. This was partly due to the fact that the German fighters, the Messerschmitts, which escorted and protected the stodgy bombers, lacked the fuel capacity to stick around for the show once the German armada hit Britain. So they would turn and leave the bombers exposed as sitting ducks to the much faster British fighters, the Spitfires and Hurricanes. Consequently, more than a few German bombers each night turned for home and dropped their payloads willy-nilly, on all and sundry. The press had taken to calling this “tipping and running.”

A month earlier, the Lambs' eighteen-year-old daughter, Vera, had taken a job in the village of Quimby as its only full-time air-raid warden and civil-defense employee. With the German bombers arriving daily, even the tiniest hamlets along the coast had begun to maintain some manner of full-time civil defense presence. Quimby lay along the route the German raiders normally followed across the Channel from France to the port city of Southampton, which also had
become a principal German target. Lamb and Marjorie worried that the village could become a prime target on which frightened, failed, or merely confused German pilots might unload their payloads before scarpering back to France.

Lamb closed the paper. He knew that Marjorie had read about the previous night's bombing in Bristol and that the story likely had called up in her the same anxieties as it had in him. Even so, neither spoke of it; they'd already exhausted the subject of what they called “Vera's decision.”

The telephone in the front hall rang. Lamb went into the hall and picked up the receiver.

“Lamb.”

It was Wallace. “Got a body, guv; an old man, past seventy. Pretty brutal, sounds like. Someone ran a pitchfork through his neck.”

“Where is it?”

Wallace hesitated a hitch. He knew about Vera Lamb's civil defense posting. “Quimby. The body was found on a hill above the village.”

The news surprised Lamb. Here he'd been worried about stray Germans unloading their bombs on Quimby. He hadn't counted on a bloody maniac with a pitchfork roaming the place.

“Who called it in?”

“Local bobby. I've rung Harding and the doctor and rounded up Larkin and am heading there now.”

“Do we know the old man's name?”

“William Blackwell. A farmhand. The bobby says he's pretty certain the pitchfork belonged to Blackwell himself. A farmer named Abbott had hired the old man to trim a hedgerow along the edge of his property. Blackwell lived with his niece in the village proper, apparently, and when he failed to show for his tea, the niece went looking for him and sought out Abbott, who took her to the hedge, where they found the old man. Abbott tried to remove the pitchfork from the old man's neck, after which the niece went to pieces.”

“All right, David. We'll have to move the body out of there before it gets too bloody dark. I'll see you there in forty minutes or so.”

“There's something else, guv. Whoever killed the old man also carved a cross into his forehead, then ran a scythe through his chest.”

Bleeding hell
, Lamb thought. “A cross?” he asked. “Was this man Blackwell religious, do we know?”

“Not that I know—though, according to the bobby, some in the village considered him to be a witch.”

“A witch?”

“Yes, sir. So the bobby says.”

“But aren't witches female?”

“I don't know, sir. Maybe the old boy was one of these witches who used a pitchfork rather than a broom.” As soon as he said it, Wallace realized that the joke had not come off as he'd hoped. He counseled himself not to overdo things. He believed that Lamb had not detected any hint of the fact that, less than an hour earlier, he'd been sitting in a pub feeling elevated.

Lamb returned to the table. “I'm afraid I have to go out,” he said to Marjorie. “Someone has killed an old man near Quimby.” He emphasized the
near
.

Years before, Marjorie had grown used to Lamb having to leave the house at odd hours. “What happened?” she asked.

Lamb always tried to spare Marjorie the gory details of the murders he investigated. “The usual thing, I'm afraid,” he said. “He probably quarreled with somebody.”

“All right,” Marjorie said. “If you see Vera, give her my love. And try not to stay too late.” She rose, kissed Lamb's cheek, then began to clear the dishes from the table.

Lamb picked up the
Mail
, grabbed his hat, and went to his aging black Wolseley, which he parked in the lane in front of the house. He was one of the few men of his rank who drove his own car. He preferred it that way: driving himself allowed him more freedom of movement. A month earlier, though, his Wolseley had developed the habit of failing to start faithfully; sometimes he had to give the bloody thing seven or eight cranks before it turned over. He wasn't sure what the problem was—he didn't understand motorcars. But he
hadn't found the time to turn the thing in to be checked. In truth, he was afraid they'd take the old car from him and he didn't want to lose it. He'd grown comfortable with it, despite its eccentricities. He understood that the entire business—becoming attached to a bloody car—was asinine. But there it was.

He settled behind the wheel and lit a cigarette. Given that he was about to go look at an old man with a pitchfork rammed through his throat and a scythe in his chest, a butterscotch wouldn't do. And he decided that he'd had enough of his own cowardice—he opened the paper to the turf results, where he discovered that his instincts had failed him: Winter's Tail had won the fourth race at Paulsgrove. Rather than being two quid lighter, he was four richer.

He pushed the starter and the ancient Wolseley sputtered to life on the first try.

He smiled slightly and thought,
Lucky indeed
.

LAMB PULLED THE WOLSELEY TO A STOP IN FRONT OF WILL BLACKWELL'S
stone cottage in Quimby. Several other dark motorcars belonging to the Hampshire police were parked by the cottage, as was the large, dark blue Buick saloon that belonged to the police surgeon, Anthony Winston-Sheed, and the van in which Blackwell's body would be transported to the hospital in Winchester.

A dozen or so villagers milled in groups by the cottage, talking quietly. Lamb felt their gaze turn toward him as he emerged from his car. He knew Quimby to be a former mill town in which many of the older residents still looked upon the police as mere extensions of the mill owners, though the owners had abandoned the place more than forty years earlier. He looked for Vera among the knots of people but did not see her.

A trio of small children—ragamuffins in torn clothing—sprinted past him, nearly bowling him over, then vanished in the twilight up a
footpath near the small centuries-old stone bridge that lay at the center of the village. The bridge conveyed Quimby's High Street across Mills Run, which tumbled into the village from the top of Manscome Hill.

A bobby approached Lamb at a trot. “Inspector Lamb?” the man asked. He stopped and saluted. He was fit-looking and fresh-faced, not more than twenty-two or so. Prime cannon fodder, Lamb thought—he couldn't help it. The bobby's face was flush.

“Constable Harris, sir. Sergeant Wallace asked me to meet you.”

Harris made a gesture in the direction of Blackwell's house. “This is the deceased's cottage, sir,” he continued. “His niece, Lydia Blackwell, is inside. They've lived here together for many years. Miss Blackwell is rather taken out, I'm afraid, as she has seen the deceased's body. She is lying down at the moment, on the order of Mr. Winston-Sheed, who looked in on her on his way to examine the deceased. Sergeant Wallace has instructed several uniformed constables to stand by the house and let no one in other than yourself and other officials of the law. He has asked me to guide you to the scene of the crime. I'm afraid it's up the hill a bit.” He hesitated again, then said: “Unless, of course, you'd rather talk to Miss Blackwell first.”

Harris's brisk thoroughness impressed Lamb, though he found Harris's reference to Will Blackwell as “the deceased” irritating. He wondered if Harris always spoke as if he were giving evidence at an inquest.

“No, no,” he said. “Lead on, please, Harris.”

Harris saluted again and gestured toward the path by the bridge. “Right this way, sir.”

As Lamb turned toward the hill, he heard Vera call him. “Dad!”

He turned to see her approaching along the High Street from the western end of the village, where she kept her daily vigil in the Quimby Parish Council hall, watching for any sign of a German invasion. She was dressed in the denim overalls and soft service cap the government issued to members of the Local Defense Volunteers.