The Wages of Desire Read Free

dead woman. The men who had stationed themselves at the gate seemed at least to have had the good sense to bar anyone from entering the cemetery, Lamb thought as Vera pulled the Wolseley to a stop by the fence. An hour earlier, Wallace had taken a call at the nick in Winchester from the vicar of Saint Michael’s Church, one Gerald Wimberly, who’d reported that he’d discovered a woman’s body in the cemetery when he’d returned to the vicarage from his morning constitutional. The woman had a large bullet wound in her back, Wimberly had told Wallace, who immediately had passed the message to Lamb.
    From the spot at which Vera had stopped the Wolseley, neither she nor Lamb could see the body. Lamb turned to her and said, “I want you to stay by the car, please.”
    Vera smiled. “Meaning that I can’t see the body, then?”
    Lamb returned her smile. He had gray eyes and short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He possessed a penetrating and sometimes remorseless intelligence that was softened by the genuine warmth he felt toward most people, except those he knew for certain had willfully and maliciously perpetrated an injury toward another, and particularly those who had purposely done harm to someone who was weaker than they. With such people he could be merciless.
    â€œThere’s no reason for you to see the body, really,” he said. “In any case, the fewer people who enter the scene at the moment, the better.”
    Vera touched her father’s arm. “I understand, Dad,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
    Don’t worry? Lamb thought. She’s seen right through me. “If you get bored, you can help the uniformed men chase the gawkers away,” he said. He tugged gently at her billowing left sleeve. “You’ve the uniform for it now, you know.”
    â€œI think I’ll just watch for a bit,” she said. “Learn a few things before I start throwing my weight about.”
    â€œNot a bad idea. See you in a bit, then.”
    Lamb exited the car and walked toward the cemetery gate. “Get those children off the fence, please,” he said to one of the three uniformed constables who, with Sergeant Wallace, had followed Vera and him to the village in a separate car. Detective Inspector Harry Rivers and Cyril Larkin, the forensics man, had come in a third car. Lamb joined Wallace and Rivers by the gate, where they showed the two men who were guarding it their warrant cards and introduced themselves.
    â€œThank you for securing the scene,” Lamb said to the pair. “Do you know if any of the onlookers entered the cemetery before you arrived?”
    The thinner man stepped forward.
    â€œWe’re sure no one got in, Chief Inspector,” he said. He offered Lamb his hand. “My name is Lawrence Tigue. I am chairman of the parish civic council.” Lamb reckoned that Tigue was in his late thirties or early forties, while the one in the Home Guard uniform clearly was a few decades older, beefy and red-faced, with black grit beneath the nails of his calloused hands.
    â€œTigue” rang a bell in Lamb’s memory. Two weeks earlier, the Hampshire Mail had run a story detailing how the government was constructing a prisoner-of-war camp for Italians on a long-fallow farm near Winstead. Lamb had recognized the village’s name as soon as Wallace had reported to him the vicar’s story of finding the body in the cemetery of Saint Michael’s Church. He recalled that, twenty years earlier, Winstead had been the scene of a disquieting suicide of a woman named Claire O’Hare—an incident that the Mail had been quick to remind its readers of in its story about the construction of the prison camp. At the time of the O’Hare incident, Lamb had been a uniformed constable assigned to Winchester and so had had nothing to do with the case. But, prompted by the story in the Mail , he recalled its basic details.