Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (22 page)

Fry nodded. 'Yeah, it's worth a try. I can't see that we're going to turn up much else in here.'

'When I've finished with Social Services and the hospital, I'll call at the bookshop and have a word with Lawrence.'

'I've got a meeting this afternoon. Let me know how you get on.'

They cleared up the books and put Marie's junk mail back on the hall table.

'What about this box?' said Fry, pushing at the carton near the door with her foot.

'More books.'

'Have you had look at it?'

'Not yet.' Cooper pulled out a penknife and cut the tape. 'I think they call this Chick Lit, don't they?' he said, opening the box to reveal books with bright pink and yellow covers, the sort of book no man would ever willingly be seen reading. 'Looks like they're from a book club.'

'Is there a delivery date on the box?' said Fry.

Cooper inspected the delivery company's label. 'Monday.'

'The day she went walkabout.'

'She signed for the delivery herself. But she never opened the box.'

'No.'

'If it were me,' said Cooper, 'I would have opened it straight away, to see what I'd got.'

'But if she wasn't intending to read them, why should she bother?' said Fry.

'Good point. But she must have been intending to read them when she ordered them.'

'Right. So something happened between her placing the order for the books and getting the delivery. Something changed her view of things. Her books had suddenly become an irrelevance.'

Cooper flicked through the pages of one of the books and turned to the back cover. According to the blurb, it was a hilarious, sexy account of a thirty-something woman's search for Mr Right and her disastrous encounters with a series of Mr Wrongs. The cover showed discarded underwear among a scatter of wedding confetti and a bride's bouquet.

'There's always the possibility,' said Cooper, 'that they were all too relevant.'

When they'd finished, they locked Marie's front door on the way out.

'If only she'd made it a bit easier for us,' said Fry. 'If the binmen left a note, why couldn't she?'

Cooper looked at the boarded-up windows of the other houses, at the high wall to the side of Marie's garden, and finally at the dark expanse of stagnant water that shut off the end of the street like an icy wall.

'A note?' he said. 'Who to?'

*    *    *    *

After they'd spoken to the staff at the estate agent's, Fry called in and reported their failure to locate the missing baby. While she was using the radio, Cooper irritated her by standing outside the estate agent's office to look in their display windows. It was on the corner, with one window looking on to Fargate that was full of photographs of houses, with their prices and details alongside. Fry could never understand what it was about these windows that seemed to distract so many people. Maybe it was the fascination of seeing the price of properties that other people lived in, of weighing up the unattainable and working out the mortgage that would be involved if they were ever to achieve their dream. It was another form of living out a fantasy, much like reading Danielle Steel novels.

She watched Cooper become absorbed in something towards the bottom corner of the display.

'What are you looking at?' she said, when she finished her call.

'Mm? Oh, they've got some properties to rent, look.'

'So? Why are you interested?'

'I told you a while ago, didn't I? I'm going to move out of Bridge End Farm. It's just a matter of finding somewhere to live that I can afford.'

'You're really going to do it, then?'

'Of course.'

'I never thought you would, Ben.'

'Why not?'

Fry shrugged. 'You're too much of the home boy. Too much of a man for having his family round him, all cosy and smug at night.'

'You mean "snug".'

'Do I?'

Cooper bent to peer at the properties lower down, at the cheaper end of the display. It was funny how estate agents' windows were designed so that rich people didn't have to bother bending to look at suitable houses.

'No, I didn't think you would ever move out,' said Fry. 'Not until you had a wife of your own to settle down with and have kids. Then you'd be looking for one of those little executive semis over there. Something like that one –' She pointed to the other side of the window. The houses displayed there were made of stone, but were newly built. The one she was indicating was a rectangular box with a garage door that seemed to dominate its frontage. It had a bare patch of soil at the front, and no doubt a barbecue patio at the back. The house to the left of it looked identical. And the one to the right did, too. And so, she was sure, would the one behind it, and the one across the road, and all the others that spread across the hillsides in the new residential developments south of the town. She'd seen those developments, and they had a comforting anonymity. They were a bit of the city dropped into the uneasy quirkiness of Edendale, like the advance paratroopers of an urban invasion.

'It's conveniently close to schools, shops and other amenities,' she said. 'And only a few minutes' drive from the A6 for those wishing to commute to the cities of Manchester or Derby.'

'And nobody knows the name of their next-door neighbour, I expect,' said Cooper.

'Maybe. Is that necessary in your world?'

'I suppose it is.'

'All right. So what's special about this flat, then?'

'Nothing special really. But it's right here in town. It isn't too big. And the rent's reasonable.'

'You haven't got any money put aside to buy something, then?'

'No way. It's what I can afford on a police salary or nothing.'

Fry thought of her own flat in Grosvenor Avenue, in the land of student bedsits and laundrettes, Asian greengrocers and Irish theme pubs. 'A cheap rent just means something really grotty that nobody else wants,' she said.

Cooper sighed. 'I suppose so,' he said. 'The perfect place to live seems very hard to find.'

'Impossible. Most people have the sense to give up trying.'

'Yes, you're right.'

Fry walked to the car. She'd wasted enough time humouring Ben Cooper. Her efforts to understand the members of her team were over for the day, as far as Cooper was concerned. But when she opened the driver's door, he still hadn't moved away from the estate agent's window.

'For heaven's sake, are you coming?'

'Diane?' he said.

'What now?'

'If it's so hard to find the perfect place to live – how difficult do you think it is to find the perfect place to die?'

14

High above Irontongue Hill, another Boeing 767 left its white track across the lightening sky as it approached Manchester. It was a few minutes late, and it was waiting for clearance behind a shuttle from Paris. Much lower in the sky, a small plane banked and turned and came in slowly, as if someone in the cabin might be taking photographs.

On the hillside below, four people turned to watch the smaller aircraft as they heard its engine. They lifted their heads into the wind, squinting their eyes against the brightness of the sky and the hard flecks of snow driven into their faces from the higher ground.

'It's a Piper Warrior. A Type 18,' said Corporal Sharon Thompson. Her plump cheeks were bright pink from the cold, and her hair was pulled back tight under her beret and the hood of her cagoule. 'It's probably from Netherthorpe Airfield.'

Flight Sergeant Josh Mason glanced at the underside of the aircraft as it drew away from them.

'Don't talk crap,' he said. 'Any idiot can see it isn't a Type 18. Haven't you done your aircraft recognition?'

Thompson went a shade pinker, but her expression became stubborn. 'Come on, Flight. We've got a long way to go yet. We don't want to be out here all day. It'll be dark before we get back.'

'Well, as matter of fact, we're nearly there.'

The cadets scrambled through a snow-filled gully and up the slope on the other side. They slipped and slid until they were near the top and were able to clutch at bits of dead grass to pull themselves the last few inches.

'There you go,' said Mason proudly. 'The trig point. The Lancaster should be a hundred yards north north-west, just over that next rise.'

The cadets groaned. 'Why do we have to do this, Flight?' said Cadet Derron Peace. He brushed snow off the knees of his fatigue trousers where he'd slipped into a snowdrift.

'We're supposed to be on a navigation exercise,' said Thompson. 'If the skipper finds out …'

'Well, he won't find out, will he?' said Mason.

'It's foolhardy to take people out on the moors in this weather. We're not properly equipped.'

'All right, stay here then.' Mason began to walk away through the snow towards the next rise.

'But you're the one with the map and compass,' said Thompson.

The cadets looked at each other and began to follow him. The cabin windows of the Piper caught a flash of sunlight as the aircraft banked and turned over the hill ahead of them, the note of its engine dropping to an ominous grumble as the sound bounced off the rocky outcrop called Irontongue.

*    *    *    *

Chief Superintendent Jepson closed his eyes in pain. For a moment, he thought he might be having a heart attack. It was a fear that crossed his mind often these days, ever since his doctor had told him he had high blood pressure and needed to lose weight. Every time he felt a spasm of discomfort or a touch of cramp, he thought he was having a heart attack. He would sit back in his chair and breathe slowly, and reach for the aspirin to thin his blood, before it was too late. But it had never been a proper heart attack, not yet. Usually it was just the effects of one more bit of stress piled on to him by one of his junior officers, eager to tell the Chief superintendent about the latest disaster in E Division, careless of the damage they might be doing to his cardiovascular system.

And the news this morning was so typical. For fifty-one weeks of the year his resources were stretched, but not so stretched that they couldn't cope. In fact, they coped so well that Constabulary HQ in Ripley used it as a reason to fend off his demands for more officers. They always pointed out that E Division saw less major crime than any of the other letters of the alphabet from A to D. But they also said that he was managing the division brilliantly, that he was an example to the other commanders of the way intelligence-led policing should work, that his intelligence and information were so good that the question of how many officers he had on duty at any one time had become academic. It was supposed to make him feel better.

And then came the one week in the year when the whole system collapsed. The one week when traffic ground to a halt in snowdrifts on every road out of town and his officers were tied up trying to move abandoned vehicles. It was the week when half his available manpower seemed to have fallen over on the ice and broken their collarbones, or sprained their backs shovelling snow from their driveways, while the other half had phoned in sick with the 'flu. The same week when some idiot rammed a patrol car into a stone wall on Harpur Hill, and an even bigger idiot got his dog van nicked and burned out by two teenage burglars he was supposed to be arresting. Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary was asking questions about how the administration budget was being spent. And the Police Complaints Authority had received yet another allegation of racial abuse from one of those thieving gypsy bastards camped on the council golf course.

And now the division had not just one body, not even two bodies – but maybe three, if the missing baby didn't turn up soon. One body was bad, and two was unlucky. Three would be a catastrophe. In fact, three was a whole mad rush of bodies. Chief Superintendent Jepson felt he could see them toppling towards him like a set of skittles, or like mummies tumbling out of their coffins and landing at his feet, grinning up at him from their wrappings. It seemed as though there were bodies littering the landscape everywhere. They were worse than the abandoned cars, worse than the police officers with sprained backs laid out flat on their settees at home, who ought to have been dead but weren't.

Intelligence-led policing methods ought to enable him to direct a solitary officer to the right addresses with a sheaf of arrest warrants in his hand. But intelligence had grown tired of doing all the leading and had trotted off in the opposite direction, where it would no doubt get lost on the moors in the dark and fall over a cliff.

'So who
have
we got available?' he said, opening his eyes just enough to examine the expression on DI Hitchens' face. The Chief was seeking enough evidence of insolence from the DI to justify losing his temper. But, as usual, Hitchens knew how to tread the line.

'The underwater section is at full strength,' said the DI. 'Otherwise, we have three traffic wardens. After all, there's not much else for them to do – the snow is covering up all the yellow lines.'

Jepson let out a sound more like a whimper than a sigh. 'That isn't funny,' he said.