Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (47 page)

'Let her go!'

PC Nash turned and looked at him. He wasn't smiling, but Cooper could sense that he was enjoying himself. Cooper felt at a complete disadvantage. He was standing down the slope from Nash, who loomed over him. For a moment, Cooper thought he'd engineered a situation that was impossible to get out of. Nash looked past his shoulder and let go of Morrissey's camera.

'Go back to the road, Alison,' said Cooper. 'Please.'

Finally, Morrissey turned and walked away from him, with one backward glance. Cooper and Nash then scrambled down the slope together.

*    *    *    *

Cooper took a deep lungful of air as he tried to calm himself. It was totally different from the air in the Lukasz bungalow or at Walter Rowland's house, or even at George Malkin's. This was clean and pure, straight off the top of the hill.
It had even seemed a shame to walk through the virgin snow this morning. A single set of tracks was one thing – they were like a statement, emphasizing the untouched purity all around. But when several pairs of feet had trampled backwards and forwards and pressed the snow into slush, stained with dirt from their boots, it made the rest of the landscape look tarnished and seedy.

'So, these poppies,' said Caudwell. 'Who leaves them here?'

'I don't know,' said Cooper. 'Perhaps members of ex-servicemen's organizations who think the crew should be remembered. Or perhaps the local air cadets do it.'

'You think they come up here on Remembrance Day every year?'

'It's possible.'

'So what about this one?'

Cooper walked over to where she was standing. There was a single poppy on a wooden cross, tucked under the edge of the undercarriage. It was gradually emerging from a patch of thawing snow, and it was bright red, like a splash of arterial blood from a fresh wound.

'I think your officer was right. This doesn't look as though it's been here for two months.'

'There's been too much rain,' said Cooper. 'The colour would have been washed out of it, same as the others.'

'What was the date of the crash again?'

'January 7th, 1945.'

'The seventh was a week ago,' said Caudwell. 'The day Nick Easton was killed.'

'So?'

Caudwell gave him an exasperated look. 'Men don't know this,' she said. 'But anniversaries are very important to some people. Anniversaries of births, anniversaries of deaths. The day you first met the person you fell in love with. You know, dates that you never forget.'

'Yes, I do know,' said Cooper, thinking of the yearly visit with Matt to his father's grave, which would be an annual ritual until they became too old or infirm to make it to the cemetery. 'Relatives of one of the crew, then?'

Caudwell swapped her gloves for a pair of latex ones from a packet in her coat. 'Somebody who felt they had to leave the cross on the right day, whatever the weather.'

Cooper turned and looked down across the expanse of snow-covered moor to a spot which even now stood out from the rest of the area. It looked bare and brown, churned up by the boots of the men who had stood round a frozen body and made poor jokes about ice axes and thermometers.

To Cooper's surprise, Sergeant Caudwell spoke exactly what was in his thoughts.

'Marie Tennent,' she said.

Cooper stared at her. 'How do you know about Marie?'

'A combination of local knowledge, elementary detective work and inter-agency co-operation. I've read the file. We need to take the poppy.'

Liz Petty came over and took photographs of the poppy in position on its cross. Then she carefully eased the cross out of the ground. Cooper could see there was an inscription on the wood, written in white, as if it had been done in correction fluid.

'We found Marie Tennent's body a few hundred yards from here,' he said. 'She'd been there for days, in the snow. She's a presumed suicide. I don't think we've even had the postmortem results yet.'

'Don't tell me – you're short-staffed in the pathology department?'

Caudwell was peering at the wooden cross that Liz had placed in an evidence bag. 'What does the inscription say?' asked Cooper.

'It says: "Sergeant Dick Abbott – 24th August 1926 to 7th January 1945."'

'Abbott? He was the rear gunner. Tail-end Charlie.'

'It says something else,' said Caudwell. 'I don't know what this bit means …'

Cooper waited, thinking of Dick Abbott. The newspaper reports had said the rear gunner's body was severely mutilated. According to Walter Rowland, the rescue team had spent hours on the moor picking up the pieces of human bodies. The only consolation in Sergeant Abbott's case was that he might never have known what happened to him. From his rear turret, he wouldn't have seen Irontongue Hill at all. There might have been a second when he heard terrified voices on the intercom, then he would have felt the impact as Sugar Uncle Victor collided with the gritstone buttress and flipped over to shatter his turret on the rocks.

'Is it Latin? It might be the squadron motto or something,' said Cooper.

'Oh, no,' said Caudwell. 'I can read the words. I just don't know what they mean. It says: "Justice at last."'

*    *    *    *

The manager of the Wise Buys shop in Clappergate remembered Marie Tennent perfectly well.

'She was a good girl. Hard working. Brighter than most of the others,' she told Fry. 'I was sorry to lose her when she went. But the best of the young ones never stay long.'

Fry looked round the shop. Judging from the window displays, the main attraction of the stock was its price. The racks were filled with warm coats and colourful sweaters, trouser suits and matching scarf and hat sets. Spring fashions hadn't arrived yet.

'Did Marie tell you why she was leaving the job?' she asked.

'No. She just said she wanted to do something different. They get fed up after a while, you see. Dealing with the public isn't always easy.'

'I know,' said Fry.

'Oh, I expect you do.'

'But Marie didn't have another job to go to, as far as we know.'

'No, I didn't think she did. Personally, I thought there was probably a man. I expected to hear she was getting married before long.'

'Did she mention a particular man?'

'Not as such. Some girls talk about their boyfriends all the time, but Marie wasn't that type. She was more private. But I always wondered …'

'Yes?'

'Well, was there a baby, do you know?'

'Did she hint at that?'

'Not really. But there are little signs, aren't there? She became more absorbed in herself, as if she had other things to think about than joining in with the usual chat. She started to look a bit different, too. Being pregnant suits some, but Marie looked ill. Not anything you could really put your finger on – she was paler, more tired sometimes. She held herself differently. I've seen it before.'

'But you never asked her?' said Fry.

'It's not my place. She obviously didn't want to tell me, so I didn't pry.'

Fry watched a woman poke through a rack of dresses, find nothing that interested her and walk out of the shop.

'Did Marie ever mention her family?'

'Oh, yes, her mother in Scotland. She talked about her quite a lot. And she had a younger brother, I think.'

'Anybody else? Anybody in this area?'

The manager hesitated. 'Funny you should say that. Marie always said she was from Scotland. I mean, she spoke with a Scottish accent and everything, and that's where her mum lived. But I always thought she had some connection with Derbyshire. She talked sometimes as if she knew a bit about the history of this area.'

Fry turned to look at her. 'Anything in particular?'

'It's hard to remember. But I think it was something to do with the war.'

'Could it have been the RAF? A crashed Second World War bomber?'

The frown cleared from the manager's face. 'Yes, I believe you're right. It was a funny thing for a girl like Marie to be interested in. But she mentioned those aircraft wrecks often.'

*    *    *    *

There was a crack as a gunshot split the frigid air. Recognizing the sound without even having to think, Cooper dived to his left, rolling into the snowdrift behind the undercarriage, scrambling to take advantage of its cover. He looked around for Caudwell, but saw that she hadn't moved. She was still standing in the open, staring back over her shoulder at something beyond the wreckage.

Then Cooper heard a cackling and a drumming of wings as a brace of red pheasant panicked and burst up from the moor a hundred yards away. He caught a glimpse of the sunlight shimmering off their red backs like streams of blood in the air as they beat away towards the reservoir. And Cooper saw PC Nash laughing as he shoved what looked like a Glock pistol back into a holster under his jacket. So Carol Parry had been right – the MDP considered it necessary to be armed.

The natural sounds of the moor became audible again – the constant muttering of the wind as it nosed through the drifting snow, the barking of a dog and the clang of a bucket so muffled and distant that the world seemed to have slipped behind a thick curtain.

Caudwell turned back and watched Cooper picking himself up and brushing snow off his shoulders. She met his eye with a sardonic smile.

'Nash!' she called. 'Behave yourself. You're frightening the wildlife.'

Cooper sat in the snow for a few moments with his hands on his knees and watched Caudwell and Nash. He had to control his temper. He couldn't lose it – that was exactly what they wanted him to do. Probably exactly what Diane Fry wanted him to do, too.

Looking at the ground where he'd fallen, Cooper noticed a glint in the dark peat. Another piece of aluminium? He picked it up and brushed the black fibres from it, revealing a peculiar whiteness. He puzzled over the material it was made from. It seemed to be a broken section of a narrow shaft, surely too brittle to have been part of the airframe. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed it, seeking the familiar smell of scorched metal. But instead he got a scent that reminded him fleetingly of Sunday dinners – a joint of beef with mashed potatoes and carrots round the dining table with his parents on a damp November day. He shook his head to clear the intrusive memory. Perhaps what he held in his fingers was a fragment from the aircraft's radio apparatus. It was almost like bakelite, its broken ends grainy and hollow. But it was white …

He flung the object to the ground as if it had suddenly grown hot and burned his fingers. It lay on the peat, gleaming unmistakably now. He stared at it in horror. It was bone. Of course, it was more than likely a bit of a dead sheep, part of the carcase of a casualty from the flock across the hill that had been picked clean and dropped here by some scavenger. It didn't look as though it had been out in the weather for very long. But Cooper couldn't help associating it with what he'd just been thinking of. As he held it in his hand, it had seemed like part of one of the shattered bodies of the airmen who died in Uncle Victor.

'Ben – are you all right?'

Liz Petty was standing over him looking concerned, puzzled by his silence.

'Yes. Fine.'

But the truth was that Cooper had felt himself shift through time for a moment. He'd been picturing that young airman, Sergeant Dick Abbott, hurtling through the torn and splintered metal edges of the Lancaster's fuselage, his limbs ripping from his body as the impact hurled him into the darkness, where he would bleed to death in the snow.

Cooper had once seen a sheep that had been hit by a car on an unfenced moorland road above the Eden Valley. One of the animal's forelegs had been smashed so badly that bits of its femur lay sprinkled on the tarmac like pieces of a jigsaw. This was far worse than that. Men's bodies had been torn apart here, their bones had been shattered and their blood had soaked into the peat. People talked about men who had sacrificed their lives. But this was more than a sacrifice. He was standing on the site of a massacre.

Everyone had blamed Pilot Officer Danny McTeague for the crash of Lancaster SU-V, for the death of five men. Cooper wondered what Marie Tennent, or anyone else, might consider to be justice for such a crime.

*    *    *    *

Fry found Eddie Kemp in a more amenable mood. He looked like a man who was confident there was insufficient evidence against him. It was the sort of confidence that came to a man who had been questioned many times before without being charged, or who had appeared in court and been acquitted. Also, Fry couldn't detect the smell any more. Maybe the custody suite staff had scrubbed him up specially.

'Of course, my Vicky knew all about the thing with Marie,' said Kemp. 'Vicky had kicked me out at the time, so she couldn't really complain about what I did, could she?'

'I suppose not.'

'We sorted it all out, anyway. I went back to Vicky, and that was that.'

'When was this?'

'Last July.'

'About six months ago, then. Was the parting amicable?'

Kemp hesitated. 'Marie was bit upset, and she said some things she didn't mean. She told me I smelled. But it's a medical condition I have, so that wasn't fair, was it?'