Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (44 page)

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After Cooper had been examined at West Street that night, Fry made him sit in the CID room and do nothing for a while. She even got somebody to make him a cup of tea, for the shock. Cooper knew there would be activity going on down in the town – the passageway where he'd been attacked would be sealed off, witnesses would be sought with the usual futility. Later, he would have to make a full statement. It was something he wasn't looking forward to.

Cooper could see a pile of faxes waiting for him on his desk. Curious, he picked them up. They had come from Toronto, marked for his personal attention. There was a head-and-shoulders photograph of a man with wiry hair and a square jaw, and another of him standing next to a woman slightly taller than himself. The man was named as Kenneth Rees, Alison Morrissey's stepfather. Despite the poor quality of the reproduction on the fax machine, there was no doubt this man wasn't Danny McTeague. Fleetingly, Cooper considered the idea that there was no real proof it was Kenneth Rees either.

He put the faxes down to study in the morning. There had been something else about his conversation with Alison Morrissey earlier that day that had been nagging at him, and he needed to check it. It had been a small thing, but it had undermined his faith in the accuracy of her information.

Cooper found the file that the Local Intelligence Officer had put together for the Chief. According to the information on Klemens Wach, he'd done his initial training with the RAF at Blackpool at the same time as his cousin Zygmunt, and they had both been posted to the Operational Training Unit at Lymm, in Cheshire. At Lymm, they'd gone through a very British system of assembling air crews – hundreds of men had simply been put into a large room together and encouraged to mingle until they formed their own crews with the right combination of skills. It sounded a bit like the way football teams had been chosen at school – you always had to have a good goalscorer and a goalkeeper, and a couple of big lads in defence. But inevitably, there would be somebody left till the end, the boy who nobody really wanted. Cooper wondered who had been left to the last among the airmen. Might it have been Zygmunt Lukasz or Klemens Wach? It must have been even more difficult when different nationalities were involved. There were fewer natural bonds to bring them together.

But the crew had been formed, and had been sent to their first operational posting – a Lancaster squadron at RAF Leadenhall, where they remained until that fatal crash in January 1945.

According to the LIO's note, the information on the airmen's service history came from the official RAF records. So Klemens Wach had only one operational posting, which meant he could never have served with the famous 305 Squadron, as Alison Morrissey had claimed. Morrissey had got it wrong. Until then, Cooper had been assuming that her research was meticulous, with the help of Frank Baine. But now he was having doubts. There was a weakness in her research. He wondered what other information of hers might be inaccurate.

But of course there was more than one inaccuracy. There had been a major gap. Morrissey hadn't known the identity of the Malkin brothers, even though the information had been readily available. Walter Rowland, for one, would have been able to tell her. Thinking back to his conversation with the old man, Cooper recollected that he hadn't seemed to have any great objection to talking to Alison Morrissey. He wondered who had persuaded Rowland not to.

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 'Well, the bayonet isn't some old military memento, anyway,' said Fry. 'So the chances are it didn't come from one of your old soldiers.'

Cooper looked across the office at her. She was holding up a latex evidence bag for him to see. There were still streaks of skin, dried blood and organ tissue along the sides of the long blade of the bayonet. The sight made Cooper wince and clench his stomach, as she'd surely known it would.

'Airmen,' said Cooper. 'They're old airmen. They wouldn't have had much use for bayonets.'

'Who knows what they might have collected? But this one's quite new, the sort they sell openly in some shops, along with air rifles and hunting knives. The handle is a good surface. We might get some prints from it, or even enough traces of sweat from his hands to get a DNA sample, if he ever handled it without gloves. It could mean we've got Eddie Kemp tied up this time.'

'I don't think so,' said Cooper.

Fry lowered the bag. 'What do you mean?'

'I don't think it was him.'

'Ben, we arrested Kemp at the scene.'

'He was in the vicinity. But I don't think it was him who attacked me.'

Fry put down the bag and sat back in her chair. 'I hope you're joking.'

'He was some distance away from me, I'm sure. I don't think it was Kemp who barged into me. The person who did that ran off in the other direction, not towards Eyre Street. Besides, I would have recognized the smell.'

'He was certainly ripe when we processed him. The custody sergeant recognized him before we got him through the door. He said to thank you for sending "Homer" back.'

'That's what I mean.'

Fry sighed. 'Prints or DNA will settle it one way or the other.'

'I expect so.'

'If it wasn't Kemp, who else would have known you were there? Could somebody have recognized you?'

'Well …'

'Yes, of course, how silly of me,' said Fry. 'Everybody knows you round here, don't they? I don't suppose you've ever considered doing undercover work, Ben?'

'I didn't see him. Not clearly.'

'If we don't get a match from the bayonet, we're back to square one with Kemp – even for the double assault. The CPS think the witness evidence is insufficient.'

'I know.'

'It would have been nice, Ben, to have been able to charge somebody.'

'Well, I'm sorry – I'm only telling you the truth.'

She sighed. 'I suppose it'll be in your statement.'

'Of course.'

Fry sat at her desk. The mountain of paper on it was rising and becoming unstable. Cooper could see that a couple of buff files in the middle were sliding free under the weight of those on top. It would be best to be out of the office when the avalanche started.

'Well, I'm glad you're not injured, anyway,' said Fry.

'Thanks.'

'Because there's a special job for you tomorrow morning.'

'Oh?'

'You're to meet Sergeant Caudwell. You'll be going on a trip together.'

'Frankly, I'd rather be attacked with a bayonet in a dark alley.'

'Tough. I hope your stomach's feeling strong in the morning, Ben.'

'Why?' said Cooper suspiciously.

Fry smiled at him, though her expression lacked the confidence she was trying to convey. 'I've just talked to Sergeant Caudwell again,' she said. 'We've thought of a way of keeping you safe and off the streets.'

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In his flat above the bookshop in Nick i' th' Tor, Lawrence Daley had heard the sound of voices echoing in the alleyways outside. He assumed it was a group of drunks leaving one of the pubs around the market square, although it was a bit early in the evening for them to be causing trouble. Usually, that happened later on, when Edendale's two night clubs closed.

Lawrence went to one of the windows. But instead of looking out of the front of the building on to Nick i' th' Tor, he went to the back, where his bedroom overlooked a snow-covered yard and gates that led out on to a back alley. There was frost forming on the window, slowly covering the glass in delicate patterns. The sky was clear tonight, and a crescent moon threw some light on the shapes in the yard. Lawrence shuddered, picturing human figures moving among the shapes, hearing the scuffling of their feet in the snow and the sound of their muttered curses in the darkness. But the yard was as secure as he could make it. The gates were firmly closed, and there was broken glass set into the concrete along the top of the back wall. For now, the yard was too full of snow to open the gates. According to the weather forecast, it would be the end of the week before it thawed. He'd been watching the forecasts every day. Several times a day.

Satisfied for now, Lawrence went back to the book that he'd been reading in front of the TV. On the floor above, he heard the noise of scurrying feet on bare boards, the faint scratching of claws on the wooden joists that ran across his ceiling. He didn't think the feet were those of the mice that lived in the shop downstairs, which sometimes darted out from among the bookshelves and startled his customers. The feet that scratched above his head belonged to something bigger and less quick, something that dragged a tail behind it along the boards.

Lawrence supposed it was possible that squirrels had found their way under the eaves to live in his attic for the winter. But he thought it much more likely that rats had moved into his life. And now they were thriving.

27

Ben Cooper hung on to the back of a seat as his view of the ground tilted and wreckage rushed past below him. Directly underneath the helicopter, the scene looked like the aftermath of a hurricane that had passed through a scrap-metal yard. Fragments of aircraft fuselage glinted in the light reflected from the snow. There should be part of a tail fin still protruding from the peat and the snow somewhere up the slope to the west. But Cooper had lost sight of where the horizon ought to be, and he felt his stomach lurch as his sense of balance was disrupted.

During his five years in Derbyshire CID, he'd never been called on to take to the air in a helicopter before, and he wasn't sure it was something he was cut out for. He was a feet-on-the-ground man, no question. Half an hour this Monday morning had convinced him of it.

The passengers braced themselves as the pilot pulled back on the controls and banked to avoid the sudden upward rush of bare, black gritstone that the maps called Irontongue. The rocks were jagged and unforgiving, full of crevices that held streaks of frozen snow. Even rock climbers stayed away from the face of Irontongue. Its surface was too treacherous for all but the most experienced and best equipped.

The helicopter flew over the site again, banked, turned and came back to allow its passengers a good view of the remnants of the crashed aircraft. In the sharp morning light, the shadow of the rotor blades swept across the hill and over the wreckage.

'No, that's not the one,' said Cooper. 'That was a US Air Force Superfortress. Thirteen men died in that one.'

He looked back down at the ground. Broken scraps of the aircraft seemed to have started digging themselves into the peat, like burrowing animals anxious to escape the wind and snow, but never quite making it to safety below ground.

'There were so many during the war,' he said. 'The Peak District is littered with them.'

In fact, there had been so many that aircraft wrecks had entered local folklore. Even today, there were tales of a ghostly plane that had been heard, and even seen, over parts of the Dark Peak. Witnesses had been convinced that the aircraft must surely have crashed into the hillside because it was flying so low. No wreckage could ever be found, but it didn't stop the stories.

There was also said to be a German bomber that lay somewhere on the remote northern moors after being shot down during a raid on Manchester. German-made cartridge cases had been picked up in the area, but no one had ever seen signs of wreckage there, either. Cooper wondered if that was one animal that had reached its burrow, ploughing through the peat at a hundred miles an hour as it fell from the sky. A few years ago, archaeologists digging in a peat bog in Cheshire had found the body of an Iron Age man, petrified and almost complete. Would the peat here have preserved the bodies of the Luftwaffe crew too, with their skin dry and leathery and their eyes hardened like bullets?

'Although I don't think this one crashed during the war. It was 1948 – that Superfortress down there was from an American photographic unit. The crew had recorded the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll and filmed the Russian positions in East Germany during the Berlin Airlift.'

'But Derbyshire finished them off.'

Cooper lifted an eyebrow at the grim pleasure in Sergeant Caudwell's voice. He stared out of the helicopter window, surprised at the extent of the debris strewn across the moorland. On the way to the site, Cooper had found himself filling in the time by telling Jane Caudwell the story of the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor and the disappearance of Pilot Officer Danny McTeague. Before he'd finished, her eyes had closed.

'I'm surprised nobody clears the wrecks away,' said Caudwell. 'Aren't they offensive to the tidy minds of our bureaucrats?'

'Not here. In the Peak District they let them stay. They're memorials, after all. They're official war graves. I always think it's funny how that can be, though. I mean – the bodies aren't still down there, are they?'

'We hope not, dear.'

They levelled out again and flew northwards, passing over acres of white, peat-flecked ground, rolling oceans of it that swelled in waves towards the fringes of the Dark Peak. It was barely more than a minute before they located another scatter of wreckage.

'That's the one. Sugar Uncle Victor.'

Caudwell gave a chuckle. 'Sounds like a naughty relative, doesn't it?'