The Wages of Desire Read Online Free

nodded. “Very well, then, gentlemen,” he said. “Thank you for your service. You may go home now.”
    â€œIf you need assistance I hope you’ll call on us,” Tigue said.
    â€œI will, sir, thank you.”
    Lamb turned from the two men and, limping slightly on his tender left ankle, pushed open the gate to the cemetery.

FOUR

    LAMB AND THE OTHERS FOUND THE POLICE SURGEON, ANTHONY Winston-Sheed, leaning casually against the rear fence of the cemetery and looking at the sky in a contemplative manner, a cigarette smoldering between the fingers of his left hand.
    A woman’s body lay on the ground to the doctor’s left, in front of a weathered headstone. About fifteen meters further to the left of where the doctor stood, a gate in the rear fence opened onto a dirt-and-gravel footpath that came from around the rear of the church and led toward the center of Winstead. On the other side of this path lay a wood. About ten meters to the left of Lamb and his troop, as they crossed the cemetery in Winston-Sheed’s direction, a freshly dug open grave yawned.
    â€œHello, gentlemen,” Winston-Sheed said when Lamb and the others reached him.
    Lamb nodded. “Doctor.”
    Winston-Sheed handed Lamb a small brown leather shoulder bag. “She was wearing this,” he said. “I think you’ll find its contents interesting.”
    â€œThank you,” Lamb said. He took the bag and found within it, among other items, a large sum of cash rolled into a kind of tube and secured with a rubber band. He removed the wad from the bag and held it up to the sun for a better look.
    â€œHow much?” Rivers asked.
    â€œFifty at least, I’d say,” Winston-Sheed said.
    Impressed, Wallace whistled. “If the killer was after money he bloody well bollixed it, then,” he said.
    â€œMaybe the vicar’s approach interrupted him,” Larkin mused.
    Lamb handed the bag to Wallace, with a request to search its other contents for something that would identify the woman who lay at their feet. He then knelt next to the body to examine it closely.
    The dead woman lay facedown next to the grave of a woman named Mary Forrest, who, Lamb noted, had parted the veil in 1927. Fresh foxgloves and daisies lay scattered between the body and the grave. Lamb wondered if the dead woman had known Mary Forrest and had meant to lay the flowers at Mary’s grave. The woman was dressed in denim overalls and thick-soled hobnailed leather work boots—an outfit Lamb recognized as the type the government issued to the small army of citizens it had conscripted into the war effort. A bullet wound the size of a tea saucer oozed, blackish-red, just beneath her right shoulder blade. Blood and bits of body tissue stained her hair and shoulders and the weathered gravestone of Mary Forrest—some of it sticking to the moss that had grown in the stone’s cracks and fissures.
    â€œPreliminarily, it appears that she was shot in the back with a high-caliber weapon at point-blank range,” Winston-Sheed said. He nodded toward the path on the other side of the fence. “The bullet exited her chest and is out there beyond this fence somewhere, I should imagine.”
    â€œYou don’t like the vicar’s story,” Rivers said to Lamb. Neither did he.
    Lamb peered at the woman, nearly squinting, as if he hoped that something about the nature of her killing that he couldn’t quite yet see might come into sudden focus. “I don’t know,” he said. “When he called the nick, he said nothing to Wallace about having heard the shot. And he had fifteen minutes between the time he called Built and when Built arrived.” Beside the fact that the vicar, by his own admission, was up and about at the time of killing, and the girl had been killed in the church cemetery, next to the vicarage—two facts that put the vicar very much in the picture regardless of who found the