Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (16 page)

'You were a farmer, weren't you?' said Cooper.

Malkin laughed. He had a rattling laugh, with phlegm shifting noisily in his throat. 'Farmworker. Hired labour, that's all. Shepherd I was, and a good 'un, too. But it doesn't matter how good you are at your trade when it comes down to cutting costs. It's the hired labour that goes first. Sixty-five? Maybe. But it's not a matter of how many years you've lived. It's carrying on doing something useful that stops you being old. The minute you stop being useful, you might as well be dead.'

Malkin's middle-aged spread and the roundness of his belly were emphasized by the tightness of a hand-knitted green sweater that must have been a size too small even when it was made. Of course, farmers weren't as physically active as they used to be. They could spend days sitting in the heated cab of a tractor or combine harvester, hours punching buttons on feed mixers or filling in endless paperwork. Just like coppers, in fact. A modern farmer didn't toss bales of hay or carry stranded sheep on his back any more than a bobby was expected to pound the beat or pursue a suspect on foot. Modern methods made for a different shape of man – a man with a body moulded to the shape of padded seats and computer workstations.

'I wondered if you kept any souvenirs from the crash,' said Cooper.

'Souvenirs?' said Malkin.

'From the aircraft itself?'

'We picked up a few bits and pieces, me and Ted. There's not much left now, though.'

'Ted's your brother, is that right?'

'Aye. He was four years older than me. I followed him round like a dog, the way kids do. I must have been a right nuisance to him sometimes.'

'Where is he now?'

'Long gone,' said Malkin.

Near the fire, a wooden rack was draped with washing left to dry. There was presumably no spin drier in the house, and if left outside on the line, any garment would soon freeze to the consistency of cardboard.

'Let me get the box,' said Malkin. 'Stay by the fire and keep yourself warm.'

'Thanks.'

While Cooper waited, he worried about the drying clothes. They seemed to be a little too near to the fire. Wisps of steam and a warm, foetid smell rose from the lines of damp socks and white Y-fronts. Cooper thought that in another few minutes there would be singe marks on the cotton. Across the room, he could see a short passage into what might have been a kitchen or an old-fashioned scullery. There was an earthenware sink with an enamel drainer and a cold tap, a geyser on the wall for hot water, a cupboard with a flap that let down to create a work surface.

When George Malkin came back with a little wooden box, the first item he produced from it was a photograph. They were always the most treasured items among anyone's collections of mementos, those little snapshots taken on box brownies.

This photo – a tiny black-and-white snap with a wide border – dated from 1945. One corner was turned over, and when Cooper straightened it out he discovered a cobweb of lines formed by dust ingrained into the creases in the paper. The photo showed a section of the crashed Lancaster shortly after the accident, when it had become a focus of attention for sightseers. The wreckage was almost unrecognizable: bits of ripped and crumpled metal, trailing strands of wire, scattered with dark soil thrown up from the peat moor by the impact.

In the background, two men in trilbys could be seen peering into a section of fuselage through holes torn in its side. But in the foreground was another figure – a small boy. He was only about ten years old, but with that curious look about his face of far greater age and knowingness, a look that seemed a peculiarity of old photographs, as if children in those days had grown up long before they should have done. People often said that modern youngsters grew up too soon. But their knowledge these days was mostly about sex and drugs, a streetwise awareness that set them apart from their parents and the older generations. Children growing up in the war years were wise about other things. For a start, they knew all about death.

The boy was dressed in knee-length shorts and a pullover with a white V-neck collar and elasticated cuffs. His socks had crumpled around his ankles, and his heavy boots were laced up tight. A lock of hair fell over his forehead, but at the sides it was cut short and his ears stood out from his head. He was staring directly at the camera with an intense look, striking a self-conscious pose, his left hand raised to rest on one of the huge engines that protruded from the debris. The engine was still intact, and each of the curved propeller blades was taller than the boy. It seemed incredible that souvenir hunters would later cut away those propellers from the engine and remove all trace of them from the moor. It must have taken at least two men to carry one blade, and they would have struggled over the rough ground and the steep slopes to get it back to the road. What motivated them to go to such trouble? And where were the propeller blades and the other aircraft parts now?

'Who is this boy?' asked Cooper.

'Who do you think?' said Malkin.

Cooper looked from the photograph to the man across the table. Though the hair was grey now, and no longer fell over his forehead, the style was much the same as it had been in 1945, and so were the protruding ears. And the direct stare was the same, too – then, as now, it was the stare of someone who had grown too old too soon.

'So you walked up to Irontongue to look at the crash?'

'It was a great bit of excitement in those days. There was no telly, of course. These days they wouldn't shift themselves away from the goggle box or their computers, would they? My dad was too busy to bother with us, but we went up with our Uncle Norman, who lived just outside Glossop. I talked about it at school for months afterwards. I was a real centre of attention for a while.'

'Did you come away with any souvenirs yourself?'

'Well, of course. Everybody did. Only a few mementos, you know. We used to swap them with other lads - the American stuff was what we wanted most, unless we could get hold of something from a German plane. There were plenty of bits and pieces lying around then. But I got rid of nearly everything.'

'Did you happen to find any medals?'

'Medals?' Malkin looked surprised. 'Medals would have been worth something, I reckon. But they would have been on the bodies, probably, wouldn't they?'

'Probably. What did you take, then?'

Malkin pulled the box towards him and poked through its contents. 'There are some newspaper cuttings here, if you want to see them.'

'I've seen most of them already, I think.'

'Fair enough.' He continued to fumble. 'I think it's here somewhere. Ah yes. This is the only thing I've kept.' He produced a round metal object with a blackened casing. Cooper had expected some unidentifiable part of the aircraft superstructure, but this seemed more familiar.

'It looks like a watch,' he said.

'Yes, it is.' Malkin slid the cover away. The blackened face wasn't metal after all, but glass fused by intense heat. Underneath, the face of the timepiece was pretty well intact, though the metal frame had buckled slightly and there was a scorch mark below the figure twelve. The hands had stopped a fraction short of ten to eleven.

'Ten forty-nine,' he said. 'That was the exact time the Lancaster crashed.'

'You mean one of the crew was wearing this watch when the aircraft crashed?'

'I expect so. I found it lying in the peat, half-buried. I didn't show it to my uncle or anyone, just shoved it in my pocket and took it away with me. I only ever showed it to Ted and to my pals at school. Do you think it would be worth much?'

'It was from the body of a dead man,' said Cooper.

'That was what gave it a bit of excitement,' he said. 'Don't you see? The most exciting things are the ones you know are wrong.'

Cooper looked back at the photograph of the eight-year-old boy, while Malkin continued to finger the broken watch. The knowing expression on the boy's face as he leaned against the wrecked propeller gave him an uncomfortable feeling.

Malkin noticed his expression as he stared at the photo. 'Oh, yes,' he said. 'I already had it in my pocket when my uncle took that snap.'

Cooper put the picture back carefully in the box. 'It
was
you and your brother who saw the airman?' he said. 'The one who disappeared?'

'Yes, you're right. Who told you that?'

'It's in the reports. Did the police interview you?'

'Aye, a bobby came here the day after the crash. We'd told our dad about seeing the airman, and he reported it to the local police station. Everybody round here was talking about it by then.'

'Tell me where you saw the airman, Mr Malkin. What did he look like?'

'Nay, I can't tell you that – it was dark. He was in a flying suit, that's all I know, with his leather helmet and all. He had a torch, and we saw him going along the road that runs round the reservoir and off down the hill. It comes out near the old toll cottage on the Crowden road.'

'Can you show me?'

'I'll point you to it,' said Malkin.

They went back outside and walked back along the wall towards Cooper's car. The sheep munched and snorted quietly in the field.

'Look at that,' said Malkin, waving a hand at the field as if it had been bright daylight rather than the true darkness of the countryside. 'Good, rich land, that is. The best grazing for miles. It used to be a quarry years ago, but they filled it in. Now these Swaledales are prized for miles around for their meat. They produce the tastiest lamb chops in Derbyshire, my mate Rod says. If you like, I'll get you a couple.'

'Thanks. This reservoir road …'

Malkin pointed into the darkness. 'Over yonder. Can you see the line of the wall, with a bit of a gate and a hawthorn bush?'

'Just about,' said Cooper, though all he could distinguish was the general direction the other man was pointing in.

'That's where the water board road runs. It has a locked gate on it now, but it was only a bit of a dirt track in those days, just made for the maintenance men to get up to the reservoir. I bet that airman was glad to find it, though. He would have had to hike across the snow from Irontongue, and it must have taken him an hour in the dark, I bet. Ted and me, we went along the reservoir wall to get up near the crash – we could see the fire burning from the house. I suppose we wouldn't ever have seen the airman if he hadn't been waving a torch around all over the place. Aye, but we heard him.'

'Heard him? Was he shouting?'

'Singing,' said Malkin.

Cooper stared at him. He couldn't see anything of Malkin's face at all under the cap and the ear-flaps, but from his voice he didn't sound as though he were joking.

'
Singing
? Singing what, Mr Malkin?'

'As I recall, it was "Show Me the Way to Go Home".'

10

Next morning, Cooper was on duty early again. As soon as he arrived, he went to check out the morning's action forms for the Snowman enquiry. With no one in yet to allocate the jobs, he might get away with picking out something interesting. He could say he thought he ought to get on with it, since he was in early. That was something the snow could be thanked for – everybody was arriving at work after him these days. The only people in the station were those on the late shift, who would be going home soon, and the deskbound personnel didn't start until nine.

'Keen, Ben?'

Diane Fry was unwinding her red scarf from her neck, pulling her hair out from under a high collar and shaking it like a dog emerging from water. When she took her coat off, she looked half the size. Cooper's mother would have said she was too thin, that she needed a layer of fat to keep out the winter cold.

'I thought I might as well make a start,' he said. 'There's no time to lose, is there? Considering the shortage of manpower we keep hearing about.'

'Take a gold star. But actually, you're not alone. Even the Chief Super is in. And I just saw DI Hitchens on his way up to the top floor.'

There wasn't really much among the actions to be done. Not surprising, really, since the Snowman had still not been identified. But one form stood out. It related to a woman who'd phoned in last night when she heard about the body on the news. Most of the phone calls had been discounted, or the details filed for later reference. But this one had sounded to the operator as if it might be worth following up and it had been passed on to the incident room. The woman claimed to have seen a man who answered the description of the Snowman, right down to the smart clothes and polished shoes, though minus the blue overnight bag.

Cooper also thought the woman sounded worth talking to. Her name was Lukasz.

He showed the form to Fry. 'Look at this,' he said. 'This call came from a woman called Mrs Grace Lukasz, Woodland Crescent, Edendale.'

'So?'

'Lukasz …' he said. Then he remembered that Fry knew nothing about Alison Morrissey, Pilot Officer Danny McTeague, or the crew of Sugar Uncle Victor. 'Well, it was a name mentioned in the meeting with the Chief yesterday.'

'What? Oh, the Canadian woman. What on earth was all that about, then? Some old wartime story, people have been saying. Why does she think she has the right to waste our time?'