Free The Language of the Dead by Stephen Kelly

there, then brought her fingers to her lips. The whiskey glistened on her body. She looked at Wallace and asked, “Are you ready, David?”
    Then she put her wet fingers in her mouth.

SEVEN

    HARRY RIVERS WAS SITTING AT DICK WALTERS’S OLD DESK WHEN Lamb arrived at the nick on the following morning.
    Wallace hadn’t arrived yet, though he normally just made it under the wire. Eight or nine uniformed PCs, along with a uniformed sergeant named Bill Cashen, milled about the incident room waiting for Harding to begin his morning briefing.
    Lamb nodded at the men, then went to his small office and closed the door. He hung his jacket and hat on the coatrack in the corner and went to his desk. He would have to get used to working with Rivers again, though Harding had said that Rivers’s posting wasn’t necessarily permanent. Obviously, Rivers was on probation. In any case, he refused to allow Rivers to drag him back into the mud of the Somme, into the old discord and recriminations.
    On the way to the nick, he’d stopped at the newsagents and bought the latest issue of
Sporting Life
. He looked at the telephone. Severalraces were scheduled at Paulsgrove that day, and he had the four quid he’d won on the back of Winter’s Tail to work with. He reached for the phone, intending to make a call, then withdrew his hand.
    No.
    Someone rapped on his door. He opened it to find Wallace standing in the hall. Wallace’s suit was uncharacteristically rumpled and his shoes scuffed. A blood vessel had burst in his right eye, giving his gaze a vaguely supernatural appearance.
    Wallace had awakened that morning alarmed to find the sun slanting through the window and himself in a strange bed with his head aching. He became aware of Delilah sleeping on his arm, her left leg across his stomach, snoring. Only a few hours before, he and Delilah had devoured each other on the floor of her sitting room. He’d never known anything quite so exhilarating. After the second time, they’d drained the bottle of whiskey, then fallen asleep in her bed.
    He’d managed to extricate himself from Delilah’s grasp without waking her and walked to his flat, where he’d quickly bathed and shaved and downed a cup of tea. Miraculously, he’d made it to work on time. He hadn’t had a drink in seven hours and, despite his headache, believed himself sober. Even so, his heart quickened when he saw Lamb.
    â€œRough night, then, David?” Lamb asked.
    Wallace suddenly worried that his clothes smelled of whiskey; Lamb seemed able to detect things about him that he’d missed. “Nothing out of the ordinary.” He felt transparent as glass. He tried a smile, though he knew it wouldn’t work. “Showtime, guv,” he said. “Harding’s ready.”
    Harding stood at the front of the incident room; behind him, Larkin had taped several large photos of Will Blackwell’s dead body to a large chalkboard.
    Lamb wondered if Harding had noticed Wallace’s appearance and figured that the super must have noticed. Although Harding appeared, in manner, to be obtuse, he was nothing of the kind. He noticed
everything
. Lamb knew that Wallace held a low opinion of Hardingand therefore badly underestimated him. Lamb liked Wallace very much and considered him to be an excellent detective. He’d already decided that he would do whatever was in his power to keep Wallace out of the war. But Wallace depended in part on charm to make his way, and Harding despised charm.
    Rivers still sat at Walters’s old desk; Wallace took his place at his desk. Lamb settled himself against the room’s back wall and folded his arms.
    â€œNow then,” Harding said, “as I’m sure you’re all aware, we’ve rather a brutal bit of business to attend to in Quimby. The macabre nature of the thing is bound to attract press attention. I’ll handle that aspect so that you men can stick