Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (20 page)

This morning, someone had stolen a scramble bike from a trailer parked in a farmyard outside Edendale. A patrol car driving up the A57 saw a rider in a lay-by next to the woods above the inn and stopped to question him. But he rode off as soon as he saw them, and they gave chase. The police crew were in a Range Rover, but they knew they wouldn't have much hope of catching the biker if he went off-road. A hundred yards away was an open gateway leading on to one of the paths favoured by scramblers.

The motorbike slid across the gateway and ploughed through a snowdrift, scattering a white spray against the stone wall. The Ranger Rover skidded as the driver braked, but he kept control and turned into the gateway to follow the bike up the track.

The track rose steeply and started to get narrower.

'We'd better call it off,' said the passenger.

'Just round this next bend, we'll be able to see where he goes,' said the driver. 'Anyway, he'll be struggling if the snow gets any deeper.'

'Watch out!' shouted the passenger.

The bend had been too sharp and too sudden for the Ranger Rover. The driver skidded again, but this time failed to control the vehicle. It went off the track and slid a couple of yards into a streambed, ending up with its bumper and front wheels in the water.

The driver turned off the engine. 'Damn and blast,' he said.

'The garage won't be pleased,' said his passenger. 'It had a new radiator only last week.'

'Call in,' said the driver.

He opened his door and stepped into a couple of inches of freezing cold water. The streambed was full of uneven stones, and he had difficulty keeping his balance as he tried to get to the side against the force of the water. He reached out a hand to grasp the branch of a birch sapling growing out of the bank and found himself clutching something else – an item of clothing. It was a shirt – a blue shirt, with a thin white stripe and white cuffs. He could see the label inside the collar and recognized that it was from a well-known manufacturer, not one of the cheap Portuguese things that he bought himself from the bargain shops in Edendale.

The driver looked up, and saw that the streambed was full of clothes. There were shirts and trousers draped across the stones, and socks and jockey shorts with water bubbling over them as if somebody had decided to do their washing the primitive way. A blue and red striped tie hung from a clump of dead heather. A shoe had filled with water and sunk to the bottom, where its laces waved in the current like strands of seaweed.

Then the driver remembered the unidentified body found near here, the man who'd been hit by the snowplough. There had been an overnight bag with the body, but it had been empty of clothes.

'Have you called in yet?' he shouted to his partner.

'Yes.'

'Do it again, then.'

*    *    *    *

Cooper had decided to walk to Dam Street. The house where Marie Tennent had lived was no more than half a mile from divisional headquarters, just across town in the tangle of backstreets near one of the old silk mills. It hardly seemed worth getting a car out, not when the streets were still clogged with crawling vehicles and pedestrians slithering around in the roadway because the pavements hadn't been cleared yet. Besides, there were few enough places to park in the Dam Street area, even without the snow. The millworkers' houses had been built long before anybody needed either garages or streets wide enough to park cars on.

The silk mill itself had recently been converted into a heritage centre. The old three-storey stone building had become derelict and for years had been in danger of demolition, but now a new café and shop had been built. Cooper wondered what on earth had possessed the designers to build the extension out of red brick when the old mill and all the other buildings around it were stone. The Peak District was stone country. Brick felt like an alien substance.

On the corner of Dam Street, a man in a hooded parka was walking a Doberman tightly held on a chain. He eyed Cooper suspiciously, hauling back on the dog's lead as if trying to give the impression it would attack at the slightest provocation.

Cooper let him pass and walked on until he located Marie Tennent's house. It was at the end of a terrace, with a tiny front garden and a view to the side over the millpond at the back of the heritage centre. Between the house and the one next door was a high stone wall that effectively prevented any communication with the neighbours. It seemed peculiarly quiet at this end of the street. Part of the effect was perhaps caused by the stretch of water, which was covered by a thin skin of ice. Cooper looked at the houses on the opposite side of the street. Their windows and doors were boarded up. They were either awaiting renovation or demolition.

First he knocked on the neighbour's door, but got no reply. He'd decided to try again after he checked out number 10 when there was a voice behind him.

'Yeah?'

It was the man with the Doberman, and he was fiddling with the chain as if he were about to let the dog loose. The dog didn't look particularly interested, but Cooper didn't feel like taking a chance. He showed his ID.

'Do you live here, sir?'

'I suppose so. What do you want?'

'I'm making some enquiries about your next-door neighbour, Marie Tennent.'

'Scottish lass?'

'I don't know.'

'I think she's Scottish.'

'Her name's Tennent.'

'That's it. Like the lager. What's she done, then? Sit!'

The Doberman sat with a sigh of relief. On closer inspection, the dog looked worn out, as if it had been pounding the streets for too long. In fact, it looked like some of the Edendale coppers used to when they'd done a quick shift changeover and had been on duty eighteen hours out of twenty-four.

'I'm afraid she's had an accident,' said Cooper.

'That's copper's talk, isn't it? You don't know how to say what you mean, you lot. Dead, is she?'

'Yes. Did you know her well?'

'Hardly at all. Kept herself to herself, she did.'

'Perhaps she was frightened of dogs.'

The man watched Cooper walk to the door of number 10 and open it with the key he'd been given by the agents. Cooper glanced back for a second. Two strings of saliva had run out of the Doberman's mouth and were dripping on to the pavement. The muscles in its shoulders and haunches had tensed. He was glad when the door opened at the first attempt, letting him into the cold interior of Marie Tennent's home.

The first thing he saw in the hallway was the green message light flashing on an answering machine. He pressed the button and got a Scots voice. Not Highland, more urban Scots – maybe Glasgow or Edinburgh, he was never sure of the difference. It was a woman, middle-aged, who didn't bother to identify herself. There was no phone number given either for the return call.

'Marie, give me a ring when you can. Let me know how you're going on, so I don't worry about you.'

There were bills piled up on a table and yellow Post-it notes stuck to the bottom of the mirror. There was a red coat hanging on a hook behind the door, a pair of shoes under the table, and a box of books on the floor that had been delivered by the postman but not opened.

Cooper paused, trying to assimilate the immediate impressions of the house. There was something in the atmosphere that didn't seem quite right. In an apparently empty house, an unexplained noise was immediately noticeable. But it wasn't a noise that he'd heard. He moved his head from side to side, sniffing carefully for gas or the smell of burning, or for the odour of something dead and decomposing. But there were none of the smells that would normally have set his alarm bells ringing. There was a faint, elusive scent in the hallway, but it evaded his senses after the first whiff, before he could identify it. He wasn't sure which direction it was coming from. It could simply be a lingering squirt of air freshener or a suggestion of recently used disinfectant.

The hallway was cold, but no colder than any other house that had been standing empty for a couple of days. He supposed there was no central heating in these cottages. Or, if there was, it would be on a timer, to save electricity. If that was the case, then this was a time of day when Marie would not have expected to be at home, and that might have meant she had a job to go to.

Cooper stood completely still and listened. Somewhere, a clock was ticking. It was one of the worst sounds you could ever hear – the ticking of a clock in an empty house after its owner had died. It was a reminder that the world would carry on just the same after you'd gone, that the second hand wouldn't even hesitate in its movement as you passed from living to dying. Tick, you were there. Tick, you were gone. As if you'd never mattered. It was a sound that struck straight to some primal fear in the guts – the knowledge that time was steadily counting you down to your own death.

Your clock ought to stop when you died. Cooper knew it was one of those irrational things, something that welled up from a deep superstition. But he wanted to climb up on a kitchen chair and take the battery out of the clock or remove its counterweight, to bring its hands to a halt. He wanted to demand silent respect in the presence of death. But he didn't do it. Instead, he allowed the ticking to follow him around the house as he moved from room to room. He permitted it to mock him with its sound, like the chuckle of a malevolent mechanical toy.

The first door off the hallway opened on to a sitting room. Cooper walked straight to the fireplace and checked the items on the mantelpiece. A recent gas bill had been shoved behind a cracked Chinese willow-pattern bowl, and there was a Somerfield's checkout receipt with it. He turned to the fold-out mahogany dining table in the corner. There was a glass vase containing a dried flower arrangement standing on a raffia mat. But there was no suicide note.

The room also contained a desk, which was packed with bank and credit-card statements, letters and old photographs. Cooper carefully separated some of the more recent letters to study them for the names of Marie Tennent's closest contacts. He took a few moments to make a note of some names and addresses. None of them was local, and none sounded like a boyfriend. One was called John and seemed to be a relative of some kind who was at university in Glasgow.

Then he saw that some paper had been burned in an otherwise unused grate behind the gas fire. He crouched to look at it, already beginning to speculate why Marie would have written a suicide note, then burned it – or whether somebody else might have burned it for her. But when he got a closer look, he could see that it wasn't a suicide note at all. It was a letter which said Marie Tennent, of 10 Dam Street, Edendale, was a confirmed finalist for a £250,000 cash prize. She was invited to state how she would like to receive the money, and the letter gave suggestions as to how she might spend it – a brand new car, a Caribbean holiday, a dream home in the country. Cooper poked the letter, and the blackened parts crumbled into dust. If you were already feeling desperate enough, the cynical irony of that bit of junk mail might be the thing to push you over the edge.

Cooper lifted all the cushions on the sofa and the two armchairs. He found three ballpoint pens, a handful of small coins and a dog's squeaky toy in the shape of a bone. Did Marie have a dog somewhere? But she'd been living in the cottage for only eighteen months, according to the agent. The dog could have belonged to a previous tenant. There were no dog hairs on the furniture or the carpet that he could see. There was a small damp patch on the wallpaper on the outside wall, but that looked more like poor maintenance. The windows hadn't been cleaned for some time, either. The view of the boarded-up houses across the street was grey and smeared, spattered with small gobbets of dirty snow and dry streaks of bird droppings.

Cooper worked his way back through the hallway and checked the cupboard under the stairs, where he found the controls for the central heating system. The heating was set to go off at 9 a.m. and come back on at 3 p.m. The more meticulous suicides would have turned the central heating off to save unnecessary electricity, knowing that nobody would be home that afternoon to need it. For others, the more impulsive or self-absorbed, it would never have crossed their minds. He didn't know enough about Marie Tennent yet to be able to say which type she was.

When he reached the kitchen, he finally recognized the smell. It was so distinctive that he couldn't believe that it hadn't registered with him immediately. It was composed of wet nappies and plastic bottles, warm milk and sterilizing fluid, washing powder and soiled liners. It was the smell of a baby in the house.

13

Cooper banged on the door of number 8, then tried the next house, and the one beyond that. He got no answer at any of them. Even the man with the Doberman seemed to have disappeared, or was refusing to answer his door.

After he'd called in for assistance, Cooper went back into Marie Tennent's home and walked quickly through all the rooms again. He was sweating now from a surge of panic at the thought that there might be a baby lying somewhere in the house. How long could a baby survive if it was left on its own? He had no idea. He had a vague feeling that a baby's demands for food and attention were pretty constant, but it was only an impression gained at a safe distance from watching his sister-in-law Kate when his two nieces had been very young. Josie and Amy had cried when they were hungry, or when their nappies needed changing. If there had been a baby left alone in this house, it would surely be crying by now. Long before now. The neighbours would have heard it, wouldn't they? Of course they would. And they would have reported
that
, even if they hadn't bothered to report the fact that they hadn't seen the baby's mother for a while.