Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (27 page)

'Yes. That sounds like a desperate woman to me.'

'Maybe he's got hidden qualities.'

'Yeah, she probably liked him for the size of his squeegee.'

'Do you think he might have the baby? I hope so.'

'Do you? He wouldn't be my idea of the perfect father.'

'No,' said Cooper. 'But it's better than some of the alternatives.' He looked at the street where he'd parked. Eddie Kemp's house was just round the corner. 'Half an hour you said, Diane?'

'I've got to show my face at a meeting first, so I can't make it any sooner. Is that OK?'

'No problem at all.'

When Cooper finished the call, he checked an address in his notebook and turned the car round. The former RAF mountain rescue man, Walter Rowland, lived only a couple of streets down from Eddie Kemp, in a terrace of houses that hung over the antique shops in the Buttercross like a line of birds perched among the trees.

Rowland's front door was one of two narrow entrances which shared a wooden portico carved with stylized flower designs. A stone mounting block found at one of the former coaching inns in town now stood outside the cottages among the remains of some frost-blackened petunias. On the end of the row stood a modern Gospel Hall, and further up, on the corner of Harrington Street, was another church that Cooper didn't recognize.

He looked up at Rowland's cottage. The first-floor windows had tiny glass panes, so grubby and dark that it was obvious neither Eddie Kemp nor any of his window-cleaner colleagues had called this way recently with their ladders and chamois leathers. The putty was crumbling away from the window frames, and the lintels were badly worn where the weather had eaten deep chunks out of the soft golden sandstone. From outside, it looked as though only the ground floor was occupied. The lower windows were stuffed with cheaper versions of the brass in the nearby antique shops, along with pot plants and porcelain figurines in front of the net curtains. These objects were the traditional barricades against the prying eyes of the tourists who passed by in the street during the summer, only inches from the private lives of those who lived here all year round.

*    *    *    *

Walter Rowland was in his mid-seventies and looked like a man who'd been accustomed to doing things with his hands, but no longer could. He had deformed fingers, in which the tendons twitched occasionally, their movement clearly visible under the skin, like the strings of a puppet. Cooper found the movement distracted his eye from Rowland's face and the sound of his voice.

'Yes, you can come in,' said Rowland. 'I don't know what you want, but I don't get much company.'

The cottage was a traditional two up and two down, clean and neat. On the ground floor there was a combined sitting- and dining-room looking on to the street, and a kitchen at the back. Rowland led Cooper through the front room, which was dominated by a pine table and black iron fireplace with an incongruous gas fire that pumped out enough heat to wipe out memories of the cold outside.

In the kitchen, Cooper saw an open back door, which didn't lead directly to the outside but into a small workshop that had been built on to the house. He saw a wooden work bench, with a gleaming lathe and tools hanging neatly in racks. There were old wood shavings on the floor and several half-finished objects on a table.

Rowland closed the door to the workshop. He did it awkwardly, not using his hands, but leaning into it with his elbow and shoulder. Then, without even bothering to ask whether his visitor wanted a cup of tea, he switched on an electric kettle that stood next to the sink under the back window. Cooper noticed that the skin of the old man's face was translucent, like his hands. You could see the veins in his temples and the light from the window shining through his ears.

'Of course I remember the crashed Lancaster,' said Rowland. 'I remember all the crashes I went to, every body or injured airman I helped to carry off the mountains. That's not the sort of thing you forget. And the Lancaster was the worst of them all.'

'Do you remember the fuss about the Canadian pilot who went missing?'

'That one walked away,' said Rowland. 'The pilot. McTeague. Murder, that was, pure and simple. That man left four of his crew dead, and another one dying, and he walked away. He didn't care about them, did he?'

'Maybe it was shock. People behave in strange ways in those circumstances. He might not even have known where he was, or what had happened.'

Rowland sniffed. 'I'll give you that. Sometimes we had men that would wake up in hospital and not know why they were there, let alone remember anything about a crash. Yes, it happens. But I reckon this one was different.'

'But why?'

Rowland walked back into the front room and sat at the table. Cooper followed, wincing at how slowly and painfully the old man walked.

'He'll be dead by now, I expect,' said Rowland.

'I don't know.'

'There's no good comes of talking ill of the dead. I wouldn't want people to talk ill of me, when I'm dead. It won't be long now, so it's something I think of, I suppose.'

'Apart from McTeague, there was only one survivor from that crash,' said Cooper.

'And has
he
said anything?'

'No.'

'Loyalty, that is. The skipper could do no wrong. That was the way they were.'

'Yes,' said Cooper. 'You're right, they were like that.'

'I always thought they would find him pretty quick afterwards,' said Rowland. 'But they reckon he made it down to the road and hitched a lift. Dumped his flying gear somewhere and legged it.'

'There was a lorry driver who said he picked a serviceman up on the A6 a couple of hours later and took him to Derby,' said Cooper. 'He never spoke much on the journey, he said. If it was McTeague, they never established how he got from Harrop to the A6.'

'Folk round here picked servicemen up all the time,' said Rowland. 'That was how the lads got home when they were on leave, and back to their bases again. Everybody did it. Nobody would think of asking any questions.'

'I realize that. And it was only because the lorry driver was local that he heard about the missing airman when he got back home from his trip. But McTeague was a deserter. They would have looked for him.'

'A deserter? Aye, maybe. But he was one among hundreds,' said Rowland. 'Blokes went AWOL all the time, but they kept that sort of thing as quiet as they could. It was bad for morale, you know. They couldn't have the public thinking their brave boys were too scared to fight.'

'It was a different time altogether, wasn't it?' said Cooper. 'A foreign country.'

Rowland nodded, recognizing the reference. 'The past is always like that, even if you lived through it.'

Cooper stayed silent for a moment, letting the old man's memories drift slowly into his head. He knew what distant memories were like – a vast sea that seemed to approach with the tide, but then merely touched the shore and withdrew again, leaving just a trace of its passing, a damp boundary along the shoreline.

'McTeague,' said Rowland thoughtfully. 'He told his crew he was going for help, but saved his own skin. Now, if
he
had been the one that died and the others survived, then it would have been justice. There was no excuse for what he did. None. I just hope those four dead men were on his conscience for the rest of his life.'

'Perhaps they were.'

Cooper controlled a smile. It hadn't taken much for the old man to break his own rule about not speaking ill of the dead.

'Two of the crew were Poles, weren't they?' said Rowland.

'Yes, that's right.'

'Brave lads, those. A bit clannish, maybe, but they fought well. They hated the Germans with a venom. They hated the Russians too, mind. Good haters all round, the Polish blokes. They had their beliefs, and they stuck to them – you couldn't have convinced them to do anything else. You never heard of any of
them
deserting.'

'They were fighting for something more immediate – they wanted to get back to their homes and families in Poland. That must concentrate the mind.'

'But they didn't go back to their homes, a lot of them,' said Rowland. 'They stayed on here. That was because of the Russians. They didn't fancy Communist Poland.'

'And because they married English girls and settled down.'

'Aye, that's right. Can't blame them, I suppose. I recall the local girls seemed to like them. They were a bit glamorous, mysterious – romantic, too. Well, the lasses like that sort of thing, don't they?'

'I suppose the British servicemen must have resented it sometimes?'

'Maybe so. But the Poles were better than the bloody Yanks, anyway. If I had to choose, give me the Polish lads any time. I was glad they were on our side, though. I wouldn't like to have them against me.'

'No,' said Cooper. 'I doubt they'd soon forget a grudge.'

Rowland stared silently past his shoulder. The old man's hands moved slowly towards each other on the table, as if they could bring comfort to each other by touching. Cooper heard the electric kettle steaming in the kitchen, then a click as it switched off. Rowland didn't move.

'You know nothing about it, do you?' he said. 'You weren't there, like I was. You didn't have to pick up the bits. And there were lots of bits, you know. The Polish chap – Zygmunt, they called him. We managed to save him, but there was his cousin that died.'

'Klemens Wach,' said Cooper.

'Aye. Have you to talked to old Zygmunt?'

'Not yet.'

'He won't tell you much. No, not him. He wouldn't tell you that, when we found him, he was holding on to his cousin like a mother holding a baby. He won't tell you that his cousin's arm had been cut off at the shoulder, and that Zygmunt was trying to hold it on, with the blood spurting everywhere in the snow. His flying suit was covered in it. When we found them, we thought for sure that we had two dead ones together, but he was alive, just. It was his cousin's blood that he was soaked in. You might get the impression that I think badly of McTeague. But imagine how old Zygmunt feels. And they say he's never talked about it all these years. A thing like that eats at man. He won't have forgotten, or forgiven. Take my word for it – the one wish of his life would have been to find McTeague. It stands to reason. I would have done the same, too.'

Cooper nodded. 'Mr Rowland, has anybody else been to talk to you about this?'

'Like who?'

'I was thinking of a Canadian woman called Alison Morrissey.'

'Ah,' said Rowland.

'Has she been?'

'No, but there was a bloke called Baine. A journalist. He's been here, and he mentioned the Canadian. He said she's related to Pilot Officer McTeague.'

'She's his granddaughter.'

'I don't know what he thinks I might tell her,' said Rowland. 'I couldn't tell her any more than I've told you. And I don't suppose that's what she wants to hear, is it?'

'No, I don't think it is.'

'Well, then. I'm not going to lie to the woman. So what's the point of her coming here? She won't like what I have to tell her. I told that to Baine. And do you know what he said?'

'I can't imagine.'

'He said that perhaps my memory was faulty anyway. Can you credit that? Perhaps my memory was faulty. I didn't reckon much to that. Did he mean he wanted me to lie?'

'You can only remember what you saw and heard,' said Cooper.

Rowland watched him, his mouth moving silently in the automatic grimace of habitual pain.

'Do you think I should talk to her?' he said. 'Is that what you're here for?'

'It's entirely up to you,' said Cooper. 'It has nothing to do with me at all.'

'Aye?'

Rowland tried to rest his hands in his lap, but didn't seem to find the position any more comfortable. He moved restlessly in his chair. He appeared to be saying it was almost time for Cooper to go.

'There must have been a lot of people up there after the crash,' said Cooper. 'Members of the mountain rescue team, local police, RAF investigators …'

'All of those. And the Home Guard,' said Rowland. 'You remember the Home Guard?'

'Mr Rowland, I don't remember any of it.'

'Aye – too young, aren't you? Everybody's too young these days. The Home Guard were blokes who were too old or not fit enough to join up. And there were some that were in the reserved occupations – farmers and miners and such. It was Home Guard men who were set to watch over the wreck, but they were none too keen on their task.'

'Would any of them still be around?' said Cooper.

'Nay, long gone. We're going back fifty-seven years, you know. There's only a few of us left, the ones like me, that were only lads at the time. The rest are pushing up daisies. There's only me that remembers the crash, and the Pole, Zygmunt. And George Malkin.'

'Do you know Malkin?'

'Oh yes, I remember both the Malkin boys. They were kids back then – lived on a farm the other side of Blackbrook Reservoir, just across the moor. I remember seeing them hanging about on Irontongue Hill – we had to chase them away from the wreck a time or two. Their dad came and took them home eventually. But they were both that sort of lad – inquisitive, adventurous.'