The Wages of Desire (8 page)

Wallace lingered for a moment by the car with Vera. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the bonnet. He'd begun smoking a year earlier, as a substitute for drinking, which he'd sworn off, partly to save his job and—he'd eventually come to understand—probably his life. In hindsight, he was able to see how close he'd been to falling into a kind of abyss. Despite the effort he'd put into hiding his drinking—and the success he'd believed he'd had in that—he hadn't fooled Lamb, who'd picked up on his distress.

Then he'd bollixed an assignment and found himself in Superintendent Harding's doghouse. Lamb had pulled his arse from that sling and, in the process, presented him with a kind of ultimatum grounded in common sense. Lamb had made it clear that if he slipped too deeply into a bottle he would lose his job, and if he lost his job, he would find himself in the thick of the war. And it was Lamb who'd backed his application for deferment from conscription on the grounds that he was needed for police work. He was glad to have kicked drink and, yet, at the same time mourned the fact that being sober seemed to have drained him of some of the swagger and charm he'd long depended on to see him through. He couldn't help but feel that, over the past year, he'd somehow become softer.

As he leaned against the car, smoking, he wondered about the deferment. Earlier, Built had made a point of bringing up the death of Nate Goodson, Winstead's former bobby, making obvious reference to Wallace's protection from combat duty. Now, he'd found out that Ruth Aisquith had been a conchi. None of it seemed to him just, or fair, or to make any sense. At that moment, the world seemed to him to contain two basic types of people: those who did their duty by the country and those who didn't. Some who didn't had excuses for taking a pass, including himself, though his excuse was beginning to seem less and less legitimate as the war continued. He didn't agree with conscientious objection. The threat from Germany was too real to merely object and turn away from it, as if the bloody war didn't interest you. And yet, for some reason, Ruth Aisquith seemed to have had a change of heart—as he now seemed to be having. Or maybe she'd just discovered that she didn't much fancy prison.

In the spring of 1940, his first cousin—the youngest son of his mother's oldest sister—had been killed in France while waiting to be taken off at Dunkirk. Alan had been killed on the beach, waiting his turn to get aboard one of the transports home, by a pilot in a lone Messerschmitt who had shown up briefly one morning and strafed the beach a single time. Alan had been supremely unlucky—one of those who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and his death had crushed the boy's mother. He'd sent his condolences to his aunt, of course, but what bloody good were condolences? Wallace wondered if Nate Goodson had met a fate similar to Alan's—if his death had been freakish and spectacularly unlucky.

He knew that some of those who had qualified for an occupational deferment from conscription declined the pass and enlisted. He admired their courage and questioned his own. In the beginning, he had told himself that he could not go into the service because he struggled with drink; he now sometimes worried that going into the war might reignite his problems with liquor. And yet he had never been able to fully dismiss from his mind the idea that his unwillingness to enlist and take his chances with the others amounted to cowardice, purely and simply, and that his concerns about drink were nothing more than a cover for that cravenness. Although he understood and accepted, in an intellectual fashion, the argument that the country needed its policemen to remain on duty at home, he had once or twice in recent months considered quitting the police force to join the army, though he'd always drawn back in the end. Now, with his latest deferment due to expire in little more than a month, Wallace had begun debating with himself anew about whether he should make the leap—to make himself available for combat, for probable death or mutilation.

He leaned against the car for a moment, deep in thought, silently finishing his smoke.

Vera moved next to him and asked for a cigarette. Earlier, when her father had ordered Wallace to interview the two women in the field, she had been surprised to feel a twinge of jealousy that the women were soon to become the temporary possessors of Wallace's full attention, while she once again stayed behind with the car.

Wallace turned to her, frankly surprised, and smiled. “Since when do you smoke?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don't know. A while.” She returned his smile. “I'm of age, you know.”

He wondered if Lamb knew that his daughter smoked and if giving Vera a cigarette was out of line. He didn't want to be caught corrupting the chief inspector's daughter.

“My father won't mind,” Vera said, as if she'd read his thoughts.

“All right, then.” Wallace fished a cigarette from the packet and lit it for her. She took her first puff like a pro and blew the smoke into the air in front of them.

“You've done this before, then,” Wallace said.

“Did you think I was lying?”

“I suppose not.” He smiled again.

“You were thinking that, because I'm the chief inspector's daughter, I couldn't possibly smoke. Is that it?”

That was it exactly—or, at least partially. He thought that, in some way, it might be hard to be Lamb's daughter. Lamb was one of those men whose favor other people sought. Besides that, he possessed an uncanny ability to root out other people's secrets.

“No,” Wallace said. He smoked his cigarette down to where he could no longer hold it then dropped it into the grass and trod on it. “Well, back to work,” he said.

“Can I go with you?” Vera asked. “I get bored just hanging about the car. I wouldn't mind seeing a little detective work—seeing how it's done.”

Wallace glanced across the field, to where Lamb was interviewing Taney. Earlier, Lamb had cuffed him behind the ears for flirting with Vera. He looked at Vera, who was leaning against the bonnet, as he had been, casually smoking. Something about the cigarette made her seem older. She was a good-looking girl; her curves were easy to discern even beneath the ill-fitting, baggy uniform. And she had something else, too—confidence and wit. She was nineteen; he was twenty-five. It wasn't much of a difference, really, when one thought about it. Plenty of girls went off and got bloody well married at nineteen.

“Sure,” he said and made a little gesture with his head, inviting her to fall in with him.

Vera dropped her cigarette in the grass and said, “Splendid.”

“How are you liking the job, then?” he asked Vera as they walked into the field. “Aside from the boredom, I mean.”

“It's not bad—though I know why my father has gotten me the job. He's trying to keep me from being conscripted, which is lovely of him, but it makes me feel guilty.”

The words pierced Wallace. “Why do you feel guilty?”

“I don't know—nepotism and all that. Not everyone has a father who can set it up for them to stay out of it. It's obviously not fair. Besides nobody likes someone whose relative has paved the way. They resent it, and I don't blame them. I'd resent it, too. Anyway, it's not permanent.”

Wallace looked at her. “I don't resent you.”

Vera smiled at him. “Yes, but I didn't take
your
job.”

“True.”

They walked for a few seconds without speaking. Then Wallace said, “I know what you mean about the guilt, though. I feel it myself at times, with the deferral. I think, why should I be protected?”

He hadn't quite meant to say it in a way that sounded as if he were complaining. Indeed, he found himself surprised to find that he mentioned his guilt at all. He doubted that Vera wanted to hear his grievances.

“Well, you're a policeman and needed here,” Vera said in a forthright way that made Wallace believe that she was sincere, which made him feel grateful. “Not everyone can go off to war. If they did, the country would collapse.”

“Yes, but when you're a man my age, people wonder. They want to know:
Why are you here and my Johnny isn't?
” He looked at her. “It's especially bad with women, by the way. They hate that their husband or son or sweetheart has gone away while you're still here drinking tea and reading the Sunday papers.”

“Well, I'm not that way,” Vera said simply.

The women in the field left off from their labor as Wallace and Vera neared them. Wallace wondered where the other women in the camp were and guessed that they must be employed indoors at domestic labor, cooking and cleaning. Walton had said that Ruth Aisquith and the other women were members of the Land Army. Wallace didn't know much about the Land Army, though he'd thought that the girls who joined it did farm work. The women had been clearing away underbrush that a bulldozer had churned up, which, he thought, probably was close enough to qualify as farm work. Both wore denim coveralls, brown leather boots, and thick cotton gloves. The taller of the two wore a yellow bandanna on her head. She held a cigarette firmly in her lips and squinted at Wallace and Vera through a haze of drifting smoke. The other woman was shorter and heavier.

“Good morning, ladies,” Wallace said. “I'm Detective Sergeant David Wallace of the Hampshire police.” He nodded toward Vera. “This is Auxiliary Constable Lamb,” he said, endowing her with an official rank that he made up on the spot. “We were wondering if we might have a word.”

The taller woman removed the cigarette from her mouth. “About what?” she said.

She was, Wallace thought, in her mid to late twenties. She was slender—skinny really—with curly, disheveled, shoulder-length brown hair that had tiny bits of hay stuck in it. The smaller woman had straight, silky brown hair, cut short at the ears, and large green eyes. Wallace noticed the smaller woman glance at him, and then quickly look away. He concluded from the taller one's question that neither of them knew the fate of Ruth Aisquith. He thought that there was nothing for it but to plunge in.

“I've some bad news, I'm afraid. Ruth Aisquith was found dead this morning in Winstead.”

Both women appeared to freeze; neither of them spoke for several seconds. The smaller one looked at Wallace with an expression on her face that seemed to say that she hoped that the news he'd just delivered to them was part of some bizarre joke. “What do you mean that she's dead?” she asked quietly.

“She died this morning,” Wallace said. Something in the disbelieving way the smaller woman looked at him—almost as if she were a child for whom the fact of death still was alien—pierced Wallace and he decided that he must be gentle with her. “Can you tell me your name please, miss?” he asked her.

But the taller woman answered. “Her name is Nora Bancroft; I'm Marlene Suggs—Corporal Suggs, Women's Land Army, officially. How did she die—Ruth?”

“I'm afraid that she was shot.”

“Oh, no,” Nora whispered. She drew her arms tightly about herself; Marlene put her arm around Nora and said, “There now.” Nora put her face in her hands and began to cry. The two women stood together for a minute, saying nothing, while Nora cried. Marlene squeezed Nora. “There, there,” she repeated. She coaxed Nora into revealing her face and pushed a moist strand of Nora's brown hair from her forehead. Vera stood by watching, transfixed but uncomfortable. Nora seemed to have cared for Ruth Aisquith, she thought.

“I wonder if you're up to answering a few questions?” Wallace asked.

Nora wiped her eyes with her right hand, leaving a vague muddy streak on her forehead.

Marlene looked across the road to the place, about a hundred meters distant, where Lamb was standing with George Taney. “All right,” she said.

“Did Miss Aisquith have any family in Winstead or any personal relationships with anyone there?” Wallace asked.

“If she did, she never mentioned them to us,” Marlene said. She looked at Nora. “Then again, she didn't talk much to me and Nora, did she Nora?”

“No,” Nora whispered.

“I always thought she considered us not quite good enough,” Marlene said. “She had a haughtiness to her. Spent a lot of her time reading books.” She shook her head. “Nah—me and Nora weren't up to her level, or so she thought.”

“It sounds as if you didn't like her much, miss,” Wallace said.

“Well, I had nothing against her, mind. I hardly knew her. But I'm not one to go begging attention from one who's got it in her mind that she's better than me.”

“Did you know that Miss Aisquith had gone out this morning?” Wallace asked.

“We knew,” Marlene said.

“Was it unusual for her to go out so early in the morning?”

“She went out in the morning to visit her grandmother's grave in Winstead. She went several times a week. Taney allowed it. She came back in time to help serve breakfast; that was one of her jobs here.”

“Did she ever fail to return for breakfast?”

“Not that I remember,” Marlene said.

“How about you, Miss Bancroft?”

Nora shook her head and sniffled. “No.”

“Do you know if she ever visited anyone while she was in the village?”

“As I said, if she did, she said nothing to us about it.”

“Did she ever mention the name Mary Forrest?”

“No, who is that?”

Wallace smiled. “It's not important,” he said. “What about the other women in the camp—did she have friendly relationships with any of them, or perhaps some of the men?”

“Not that I could see. Some of the men try it on with us, of course, but we're not allowed to fraternize.”

“Where was she found?” Nora asked.

“In the cemetery.”

“Was it bad?”

“I'm afraid it was, yes.”

Nora put her hand to her mouth.

“Did Miss Aisquith mention anything to either of you about someone she might have had a disagreement or row with?”