The Wages of Desire (35 page)

Rivers paused and leaned forward a bit in his chair. “I worked a poisoning five years ago in Warwickshire—wife killed her husband for running around on her,” he continued. “She put cyanide in his ale and he died of cardiac arrest. She almost got away with it but the police surgeon up there was thorough and found evidence of the cyanide, enough to put down a bloody elephant. The only thing I can't figure is why, once Martha Tigue was out, she went to the prison camp.”

“I believe that someone—likely Lawrence Tigue—was providing her with something, some sort of fake documents he produced on his printing press. Identity cards, maybe, or ration tickets of some kind,” Lamb said. “That's why we found so much cash on her. She was leaving the cash for Tigue, and he was leaving whatever it was he printed for her. She would come to the cemetery very early in the morning, when no one was about, ostensibly to visit her late grandmother, but actually to pick up whatever Tigue had left for her and leave the money in the same spot. We found a likely drop spot in a corner of the cemetery today. Tigue probably made his drops and pick-ups in the dead of night. If your theory about the Irish is right, then maybe Maureen Tigue was passing these documents to the IRA in some way—and maybe with the help of someone else at the camp.”

Lamb recounted Miss Wheatley's story of having seen Lawrence Tigue meet someone on the previous night in the lay-by by the O'Hare house and of how the two had argued.

“What you've found fits with what Miss Wheatley claims was the substance of this meeting Tigue had with this man,” Lamb said. “That they were discussing some sort of deal that had come to an end with Tigue believing that he'd been cheated of something he'd been promised. If the dead woman is related to the Tigues—given her actual surname—then she probably knew that Lawrence Tigue had a printing business and could prove useful if the price was right. It's possible they knew each other quite well. Then this project comes up in Winstead and she hears of it in some way, and sees a way to help ‘the cause,' and here she is.”

“So the mystery man Tigue met by the road might be Taney, then?”

“That's my best guess. His trucks come in and out of the place every day, hauling away the rubbish and the rubble. I saw one of them the first time I spoke with him at the camp. Maybe the drivers take a few documents away with them, too. And you're right—Walton might also be getting a cut. He runs an incredibly shoddy operation out there, and this would explain the shoddiness. Also, I found out today that Olivia Tigue—Lawrence and Algernon's mother—had relatives who lived in Cornwall, near a village called Four Corners.”

Lamb took another couple of minutes to fill Rivers in on the information he'd learned that day in his interviews with Ned Horton and Sylvia Markham, and his brief inspection of Horton's files on the O'Hare case.

“So who killed Maureen Tigue, then? If she was the golden goose for Taney, Tigue, and Walton?”

“I don't know,” Lamb said. “Maybe she double-crossed one of them. If she did kill Ruth Aisquith to steal her identity, then she had bloody ice water in her veins.”

“What about the vicar?”

“I might have been wrong about the vicar.” Lamb hated to admit it.

“So which of the three—Tigue, Taney, or Walton—is colder even than she?”

“Lawrence Tigue has done a runner.”

“He doesn't strike me as the type.”

An image of the seeming spiritless and weak-willed visage of Hawley Crippen flashed through Lamb's mind.

“But you know as well as I do, Harry,” he said. “They never do.”

THIRTY-ONE

ALTHOUGH THE CONSTABLE LAMB HAD DISPATCHED TO THE
magistrate with the warrant to search Lawrence Tigue's cottage had not yet returned, Lamb was anxious to get back to Winstead. In addition to searching Lawrence's cottage, he wanted now to speak again with Taney and Captain Walton at the prison camp—to confront them with the fresh evidence Rivers had uncovered in London. He ordered a second constable to deliver the warrant to Winstead as soon as it was signed and delivered. In the meantime, he, Rivers, and Vera prepared to return to the village posthaste. But even with this, Lamb first wanted to call Inspector Fulton, the detective from Cornwall who had investigated the disappearance of Tim Gordon.

Lamb hoped that Fulton still was on the force and was in to take his call. His luck had not been running too well throughout most of the inquiry, he thought, and yet, it seemed to have changed today. The duty sergeant in the Cornwall County Constabulary answered his call. Lamb identified himself and asked for Fulton, whose Christian name he didn't know.

“Just a minute and I'll put you through, sir,” the man said. Lamb looked at Rivers, who was sitting on the edge of Lamb's desk, and winked. A bit of luck.

A few seconds later, a man with a tired-sounding baritone voice answered. “DI Fulton.” Lamb again identified himself and explained the reason for his call. He told Fulton that they had found a small skeleton with a clubfoot buried in the basement of the former Tigue farm, and that he believed that this body belonged to Tim Gordon.

Fulton sighed. The news seemed to sadden rather than surprise or anger him. “Bloody hell,” he said resignedly. “I once had suspicions that the Tigues were mixed up in Tim's death, but I never had the proof.”

“Why did you suspect the Tigues?” Lamb asked.

“They'd been up here, visiting Olivia Tigue's sister, Martha. Martha was Olivia's older sister; she ran the family farm on which the both of them had grown up. At the time, it hadn't been that long since Olivia had moved from Four Corners to Winstead, to begin her own farm. But they had returned for a visit—Olivia and her two sons—at the time when Tim disappeared. Tim lived with his parents on a farm very close to Martha Tigue's, and Lawrence and Algernon Tigue had known the boy and his family during the time they and their mother had lived here, with Martha. They returned to Winstead on the very day on which Tim disappeared—very abruptly, I thought. I discovered that Martha had lent them her motorcar, though they had come to Four Corners by bus. Then Olivia Tigue returned with the motorcar almost immediately—and then returned again to Winstead by bus just as quickly. The whole thing struck me as suspicious. My theory at the time was that, if the Tigues had been involved, they might have brought Tim's body back to Winstead in Martha Tigue's motorcar and disposed of it there. Now it looks as if that's exactly what they did.”

“You came here to interrogate them?”

“Yes, but I got nothing. Olivia Tigue was very much like her sister; both of them could be hard as stone.”

“And Ned Horton intervened on behalf of the Tigues? He was a DI down here then.”

“Yes, Horton. He vouched for them—for Olivia and the boys. Spun me a tale of how they'd been wrongly suspected of various crimes about the village in the past; said that the local people were unfairly suspicious of them because they were outsiders and had an unusual living arrangement, with Olivia the head of the farm and no man about the place. I thought Horton a bit of an odd duck, to be truthful. The nervous type.”

“Did Martha Tigue have a daughter—a girl named Maureen?”

“She did—and the girl was a bit of trouble, besides. Ran away from home a lot. By the time she was sixteen she had developed a reputation as a bit of available goods. A couple of years later, she got herself involved in an Irish plot to blow up the nick here—got caught up in a sting. It turned out that the plot had never really gotten past the talking stages, and that she was involved only on the fringes, though she went to jail for a couple of years. That was fifteen years ago, at least.”

“Do you know what became of her?”

“As I recall, she left Four Corners after she got out of jail. I assumed that she went to Ireland, given her affinity for the Republicans.”

“We've had a killing down here that I believe might be related in some way to the Tigue brothers. The victim was a woman, a former conscientious objector who gave up her opposition to the draft and was conscripted into a work crew that is building a prisoner-of-war camp down here. It appears that she somehow managed to steal the identity of another conchi, a woman named Ruth Aisquith, who died in June. But we've discovered that the woman actually was Maureen Tigue. Now Tim Gordon's remains appeared to have been uncovered in the foundation of the old Tigue place along with the bodies of a pair of twin five-year-old boys who were said to have disappeared from Winstead more than twenty years ago.”

“Five-year-old twins? You mean the O'Hare boys?”

“You know the case, then?”

“Oh, yes; I was a DC at the time here. That story made its way out here, most definitely. Of course, the O'Hare matter occurred the summer after I came to Winstead. But I remember hearing rumors in the village while I was there that Sean O'Hare had taken up with Olivia Tigue and that Sean's wife—whose name I've forgotten—knew about it but didn't care. And I was quite ready to believe that, given my experience with Sean O'Hare and the rumors I'd heard regarding him and both the Tigue sisters, Martha and Olivia.”

“You knew Sean O'Hare previously, then?” Lamb asked, frankly surprised. “Already knew of him when you came to Winstead on that first occasion?”

“Yes. Sean O'Hare had spent some time in Four Corners ten or twelve years before all that mess broke in Winstead. This would have been more than thirty years ago; I was a mere PC then. While he was here he developed a reputation as a bit of trouble—a drinker, a brawler, and a charmer of the local females. It was common knowledge in the village that all three of the children born of the Tigue sisters, Martha and Olivia, were bastards. Neither of them ever married. Although it was a scandal, neither of the sisters seemed really to care much about what the rest of Four Corners thought of them. After their father died, they took up running the family farm as a kind of team and made a fair go of it besides, all the while raising their three bastard children together, just as they ran the farm, with nary a grown man about the place. Rumor had it that Sean O'Hare was the father of at least the first child, Maureen, if not indeed all three. Martha Tigue, for one, never took pains to hide her interest in Sean, nor he in her. But Sean was the roving type and he left Four Corners eventually.”

Lamb could scarcely believe what he was hearing. “You're saying that Maureen, Lawrence, and Algernon Tigue all are bastards?”

“Absolutely. As I said, that's common knowledge in Four Corners. That's why I say that when, a year after Tim Gordon disappeared and the matter involving the O'Hares hit the press, I thought to myself, ‘Well, well. Sean O'Hare again, is it?' When I discovered during the previous year, during my visit there, that Sean had landed in Winstead, it suddenly made some sense to me as to why Olivia Tigue had left the family place in Four Corners and struck out on her own. She and her sister had been making a pretty fair go of the farm here, as I said. And then for reasons that weren't clear to anyone, Olivia suddenly up and left it all behind to go to Winstead.”

“What about motive?” Lamb asked Fulton. “Why would any of the Tigues want to kill Tim Gordon?”

“Well, that was just it. At first, I wasn't certain about motive. I checked the boy's parents first, of course, but they had alibis; they'd gone into Four Corners to shop for food and supplies for the farm that morning and had left the boy at home, alone, believing him safe there. They were seen in the village several times throughout the morning. Of course, one of them might have doubled back and killed the boy, but I could find no proof of that, or a reason why either of them would want to do so. Both of them struck me as genuinely broken up by the boy's death. Indeed, it was the boy's mother who first named one of the Tigues as a possible culprit, though I'd already had my eye on them in any case, thanks in part to Maureen's penchant for troublemaking and that they lived on the next farm over. Then, when I went to the Tigue place on the following day and discovered that Olivia and her sons had hightailed it on the previous afternoon, and that a witness had seen them drive away in Martha Tigue's motorcar, I decided that I had better take a little ride out to Winstead.”

“Which of the Tigues did Tim's mother name as the one she suspected?”

“Algernon. She despised the boy—told me she'd been relieved when Olivia had left and taken him and Lawrence to Winstead—which is one reason why I took her suspicions with a grain of salt.”

“Did she tell you why she despised Algernon?”

“She considered him evil—and that was just the word she used, too.
Evil.
Over the previous year she had found two of her ewes with their throats cut and had suspected Algernon.”

“Did she say why she considered Algernon to be evil?”

“Well, she was foggy on that point, which is another reason why I hedged my bets a bit on her accusations. To her it was a matter of merely knowing Algernon, of what he was like. She said as much to me. ‘Once you know him, you'll understand.' Words to that effect. But she had no actual proof that Algernon Tigue had cut the throats of her ewes, or any evidence that he'd ever done anything to her or her family in the past. It was more of an intuition, apparently. When I eventually came to Winstead and spoke to the local constable, Markham, he told me much the same thing. That he believed Algernon Tigue to possess a kind of evil streak and that he suspected that Algernon had hung up several cats in the village square during the previous summer, but that he'd never been able to get the goods on the boy, in part because Ned Horton had warned him off.”