The Wages of Desire (38 page)

Lamb wasted no time in pressing his advantages, repeating what he'd told Taney when he'd outwitted and arrested him on the road near the prison site. He pushed the packet of forged ration coupons toward Taney.

“You've allowed yourself to fall into a very deep and dark pit, Mr. Taney,” he said. “Forgery and the IRA. Your only way to avoid the gallows is to cooperate.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Taney said. He managed to say it with some conviction in his voice, though he did not look Lamb in the eye as he spoke and indeed had failed to meet Lamb's eyes even once since Lamb had entered the room.

“My men found these on the side of the road near where you crashed your lorry as you were trying to escape the farm earlier this evening. I'm certain we'll find your fingerprints on them.”

Lamb looked directly at Taney—stared through him until Taney finally, reluctantly, met his gaze. “The longer you stall the more tightly the noose tightens around your neck,” Lamb said icily. “I know about Maureen Tigue's background, including her connections to the Irish. You've been incredibly stupid, but my guess is that you found her to be worth the risk. The money was only a kind of icing on the real treat. But she played you, of course—used you. And now she's dead and none of this can hurt her, while you and Lawrence Tigue are left to swing. And you know as well as I that, even if by some miracle you managed to walk out of this nick tonight a free man, the Irish wouldn't waste a minute in hunting you down. You know far too much. So you can help me or you literally can go to hell, Mr. Taney. The choice is up to you.”

Tears began to well in Taney's eyes. “I've a wife and two bloody children,” he said. He was cracking.

“You should have thought of them while you were at it with Maureen Tigue,” Lamb said bluntly. He leaned across the table a bit, closer to Taney. “I believe her death surprised you—shocked you, even. But once it occurred you knew that the operation had to end. You had thought you were in clover—the money
and
Maureen Tigue. Then the whole thing crashed in, with the Irish breathing down your neck. I think it was only then that you realized how bloody stupid you'd been, how thoroughly she'd seduced you. You were the big man at the prison camp; everybody said so, even Walton. But in fact you were on your knees to
her
, and all for the most common of reasons. Was your plan to run away with her—to leave your blessed wife and children to fend for themselves? Is that what she promised you? That you could have her all to yourself?”

Taney banged his fist on the table. “No! It wasn't like that!”

Lamb trained his eyes on Taney like a spotlight on a man cowering in a dark corner. “How was it then?” he asked.

Taney's lawyer leaned in close to Taney and whispered something that Lamb could not hear. But Taney literally pushed the man away and said, “No,” and Lamb understood from the look of defeat that crossed Taney's face that he now must be patient and allow Taney to talk.

The time was ten minutes after eleven
P.M.
, and under the cover of the late hour and the darkness, several people in Winstead had begun to stir.

Gerald Wimberly stood in the living room of the vicarage, preparing to walk down the path to Doris White's cottage and kill her. He expected to dispatch her quickly.

Wilhemina stood near him, her arms crossed. As Gerald prepared to leave, he said to her, “They won't be able to do anything to us, so long as we vouch for each other. You must remember that.”

He was just turning for the front door when it opened, abruptly, and Doris stepped into the foyer. In her pudgy hands, she held aloft Gerald's Webley Mark VI pistol, which she pointed at his chest. He and Wilhemina both immediately noticed the eccentric nick in the gun's barrel.

“My God,” Wilhemina said.

Doris wore her best green dress and had made up her face.

“But you said you got rid of the pistol,” Wilhemina said to Gerald, her voice frantic.

“I did,” Gerald said evenly. He'd fixed his eyes on Doris. Her sudden appearance and the sight of her holding the pistol he thought he'd buried forever stunned and enraged him. But he recovered quickly from his shock and fury—forced himself to put aside those emotions for the moment so that he could focus on what he might do to extract himself from the situation while doing as little damage to himself as possible. His first job would be to disarm Doris. Then he could act in the way that best suited him. He'd always found it easy to seduce and control Doris. He told himself that he must leave himself open to whatever opportunity presented itself and then move without hesitation.

Doris smiled. “You don't look surprised to see me, Gerald,” she said.

“I'm not in the least surprised. I see what you are doing.” He flipped his head in Wilhemina's direction. “You want to kill her so that she can't bother us any longer. But as I told you, killing her would be too messy. Lamb would be sure to come after us if we left a body behind. Better to do things the way we've planned and make a clean getaway.”

“Shut up, Gerald,” Doris said, stunning him anew. She raised the barrel of the pistol so that it was aimed at his face. “You do so love the sound of your own voice.”

“How could you have been so stupid, Gerald!” Wilhemina shouted.

“Shut up, damn you!” Gerald snapped at Wilhemina—though he did not take his eyes from Doris. He'd quickly formulated a plan. First, he would attempt to convince Doris to give him the gun. If that failed, he would encourage Doris to shoot Wilhemina, then, in the confusion of the moment, wrest the gun from Doris and shoot her. He would tell the police—truthfully—that Doris had broken into their home and shot Wilhemina. Doris had done so, he would say, because she was jealous of Wilhemina, which also was true. He would admit to Lamb that he and Doris had had an affair, but that it had ended three years ago—another truth. He would say that, after Doris had shot Wilhemina, he had been forced to shoot Doris in self-defense. No one would be left to dispute that story. It was not the escape he had planned, but it would have to do.

“Give me the gun, my love,” he said. “Then we can get away.”

Doris smiled again. “I'm in charge now, Gerald,” she said, confidently meeting his gaze. “There's been a change of plan—and unless you want me to shoot you, you'll do as I ask.”

A sick feeling—a feeling he despised—filled Gerald. He felt trapped and feeble, like an animal in a snare. And he was so much more than that—so much finer. His intellect was superior to those of Wilhemina and Doris. It struck him as impossible that either of them, but especially the fat little odious hedgehog, might have outwitted him. But she had done, and this realization only increased the rage he felt. He regretted not having killed Doris long ago. Even so, he managed to remain outwardly calm.

“Of course, my dear,” he said to Doris. He gestured again toward Wilhemina. “You're right—go ahead and kill her. That way we can be rid of her. I should have seen that.”

“You bastard!” Wilhemina screamed. She turned toward Doris, frantic. “He was on his way to kill
you
!” she shouted. “He's poisoned the wine!”

“Don't listen to her, my love,” Gerald said quietly.

“He never intended to run away with you!” Wilhemina said. “His plan was to kill you and then type a note on your typewriter that would say you killed yourself because you were guilty of killing the Aisquith woman. He was going to write that you were jealous of her!”

Gerald moved toward Wilhemina, intending to silence her. He raised his hand to strike her.

“Stop, Gerald!” Doris said.

Gerald turned back to Doris. “Kill her,” he hissed. “It's the only way.”

Wilhemina wailed, then began to cry and quiver uncontrollably.

“Shoot her!” Gerald urged. “Then we can go.”

“I told you to shut up, Gerald,” Doris said calmly. “Sit on the sofa.”

Doris's command hit Gerald like a slap on the face. Even so, he complied. Doris moved a step closer to Wilhemina. Wilhemina's rising sense of terror had begun to twist and disfigure the features of her reddened, tear-stained face. “Please!” she said to Doris.

Doris leveled the pistol at Wilhemina's chest. “Please,” Wilhemina repeated. “I'll do anything you ask!”

“Did Gerald seduce her?”

Wilhemina shook her head. “No.”

“Then, why?”

Wilhemina looked at Gerald. She hated him with every ounce of her being now—hated what he'd done to their marriage and to her. “Because I wanted to create a mess for him,” she said. “Gerald bloody Wimberly, vicar of Saint Michael's. I wanted to create a mess that he couldn't explain away.” Staring at Gerald, she raised her chin slightly in defiance. “And I did.”

“Stupid cow,” Gerald said.

Doris turned the pistol on Gerald again. “I told you to be quiet, Gerald,” she said. She had been worried that Gerald had seduced the woman who came to the cemetery in the mornings. Doris had seen the woman numerous times from within the church as she cleaned the chapel. She had not, at first, seen the woman on the morning Wilhemina had shot her, but she had heard the shot from the chapel and gone to the cemetery before Gerald had arrived and found Wilhemina standing over the body.

Now, Doris gazed upon a terrified Wilhemina and found that she enjoyed the idea that Wilhemina was frightened of her. Queerly, too, though—for she wouldn't have thought feeling such an emotion toward her hated rival possible—she pitied Wilhemina. She even found that she admired the way in which Wilhemina had stood up to Gerald—that Wilhemina had “created a mess” for him, as she put it.

Doris turned back to Gerald and aimed the gun at him. “Find some rope,” she commanded.

When Taney finished talking, he slumped in his chair as if he'd just been shot. His confession had exhausted him.

Much of what Taney had said fit with what Lamb had deduced from the other evidence he'd gathered. Lawrence Tigue produced the forged gas ration coupons on his printing press and, in the night, left them buried beneath the blackberry bush in the rear corner of Saint Michael's Cemetery, near the grave of Mary Forrest. Under the guise of visiting that grave, which she had said was her grandmother's, Maureen Tigue came to the cemetery very early in the morning, when no one was about, took the coupons, and left cash for Lawrence to later retrieve. The drivers of Taney's trucks took the coupons to Southampton, where they were handed over to an IRA operative. All were well paid for their efforts. Taney told Lamb that Walton was weak and allowed him to take control of the camp but that the captain was not in on the scheme and had no knowledge of it.

Despite this information, Taney's narrative brought Lamb no closer to understanding who had killed Maureen Tigue and why. Taney had suggested that the killer might have been Lawrence Tigue. He told Lamb that Maureen had spent two weeks at the Tigue farm in Winstead during the summer of 1921—two years after the disappearance of the O'Hares—when she and Lawrence were eighteen and Algernon fourteen. That summer, Lawrence had made a romantic advance toward Maureen, Taney claimed, but Maureen not only had rejected Lawrence but humiliated him by beginning a sexual relationship with Algernon that the two cruelly flaunted in Lawrence's face. “That's why he killed her, I think,” Taney told Lamb. “I think he had hated her from that summer on.”

Lamb asked Taney if Maureen Tigue had said anything to him about the fate of Tim Gordon or the O'Hare twins. Taney insisted that she hadn't—that he'd never heard of Gordon, knew next to nothing about the O'Hare case, and never had met Algernon Tigue. He had been as surprised as anyone by the discovery of the bodies in the foundation of the farmhouse, he said.

Taney also said that Lawrence Tigue had requested of Maureen that, once the counterfeit ration ticket operation was finished, the IRA would spirit him out of the country, to the Republic, where Lawrence hoped to dissolve into the Irish landscape and begin a new life, and that the Irish had agreed to this request. “But Maureen's killing ended that deal, as it ended the operation,” Taney said.