Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (48 page)

'And you haven't seen Marie Tennent since then?'

'No. There was no reason to.'

'Wasn't the baby a reason?'

Now Kemp looked a little less comfortable. Fry watched him squirm. 'I didn't know anything about a baby,' he said.

'Are you sure?'

'Sure.'

'Marie never contacted you to tell you about it? I would have thought she would be expecting some maintenance. If you were living with her until six months ago, we take it you're the father.'

'Is there any proof?' said Kemp.

Fry stared at him. 'I'm sure you know that we haven't been able to find the baby.'

'No, well …'

'Did she tell you she'd had a baby previously?'

'No.'

In the absence of any evidence otherwise, Fry changed tack. 'Mr Kemp, why did you break your bail?'

'All I did was go to spend a bit of time with my brother,' he said. 'Vicky was fed up with me for getting in trouble again. To be honest, that's why she kicked me out the first time. So I cleared out for a day or two to let things calm down. I was still in town, though – I was staying with our Graham.'

'All right. Now I need to ask you about an assault on a police officer last night.'

Kemp shook his head. 'As for that,' he said, 'you definitely have no proof.'

29

Cooper could see Alison Morrissey waiting for him by his car. He could see her from a long way off, as soon as the track levelled out on the last quarter of a mile across the peat moor. Her yellow coat stood out against his red Toyota like a splash of mustard.

'Your friend doesn't deter easily, does she?' said Jane Caudwell. She nudged Cooper and dimpled at him. 'Do you want me to set Nash on her again?'

PC Nash sniggered behind them. Liz Petty had been very quiet since they'd set off back from the crash site.

Cooper was embarrassed. He hoped his flush wasn't noticeable in the cold. All the way across the moor, he alternately wished Morrissey would go away, then hoped she wouldn't.

'Funny how she knows which is your car,' said Caudwell.

Cooper turned and glanced at Liz. She glowered at him. It wasn't any better for her – she had to walk with Nash. His stride was twice the length of hers, but he was holding back deliberately so that they were shoulder to shoulder on the narrow path.

When they reached the cars, he found Alison Morrissey pale and shivering with the cold. She had her hands tucked under her armpits and her chin shoved into the collar of her coat to minimize the amount of exposed skin. Strands of her hair had escaped from her hat and were hanging in her eyes.

'Are you mad? You'll freeze to death,' said Cooper. 'Where's your car?'

'I haven't got one. Frank dropped me off.'

He noticed that she mumbled her words because her lips were so numb. There was hardly any colour to her lips at all.

'That was stupid,' he said. 'When is he coming back for you?'

'I told him not to. I thought you would give me a lift back to Edendale, Ben.'

'I can't do that.'

'Think of it as part of your service to the public, right?'

Liz Petty got into her van and drove away first, without looking back. As Caudwell and Nash changed out of their walking boots, Caudwell said something over the bonnet of their car, and Nash sniggered again.

'You're determined to get me in trouble, aren't you?' said Cooper. 'You can see I'm on duty.'

'You're worried what your colleagues will say. But they don't really care, do they? Not those two.'

It wasn't Caudwell and Nash that Cooper was worried about it. He knew they would take the first opportunity to tell Diane Fry – if Liz Petty didn't get there first.

'You're making it difficult for me to help you.'

'Oh, is that what you're trying to do?' said Morrissey.

She was so pale that she looked very vulnerable. But a thought sneaked into Cooper's mind. He wondered whether her shivering was a little overdone, for effect. Caudwell and Nash drove past them. Nash played a little tune on the horn of their car, and Caudwell waved from the passenger seat, smiling graciously, like the Queen. They disappeared down the A57 towards the Snake Inn.

'They can't see us now,' said Morrissey. Her pale lips parted slightly, so that he could see her perfect teeth and the tip of her tongue. He felt her breath on his face and realized he was standing much too close to her.

'Damn it, Alison,' he said. 'You'd better get in.'

'Thanks, Ben.'

He unlocked the Toyota to let her in and threw his boots and cagoule in the back. He slammed the tailgate a little too hard, and she looked at him reproachfully through the back window.

'Is there a heater in here?' she said, as he opened the driver's door. 'I've lost all the feeling in my legs.'

'Why did you come?' he said. 'Did you know that we'd be up here this morning?'

'Frank did.'

'How?'

'A lot of people know Frank. I think the pilot phoned him last night to get the exact location of the crash site.'

'Damnation.'

'When he told me this morning, I asked him to bring me,' said Morrissey. 'I wanted to know what you were doing.'

'I can't tell you that.'

Cooper wasn't sure what he was so angry about. He turned the heater up full and revved the engine before he pulled out into the road. He was determined he wasn't going to speak to Alison on the way back into Edendale. She was deliberately putting him in a difficult position. But he knew she wouldn't be able to last all the way to into town without asking questions. They drove in an uneasy silence for a few moments. When Morrissey spoke, it wasn't the question he'd expected.

'Don't you find your job frustrating?' she said. 'All this grubbing around for evidence. A lot of it must be futile. A waste of time and effort, I guess.'

Cooper was taken by surprise at how she had thrust straight to what he'd been thinking himself. It made it impossible for him to refuse to respond.

'Yes, it's very frustrating at times,' he said.

'So why do you carry on with it?'

'Why not?'

'That's no answer, Ben. You're a man who has to have a reason for doing things. You have to believe that it's the right thing to do. So why do you carry on?'

Cooper frowned. He had never been able to explain it to himself, but now the words started to come when someone else asked him.

'Sometimes, just occasionally, I feel that I've done something worthwhile,' he said.

'And is that enough? Just occasionally?'

'Oh, yes,' said Cooper.

They passed the Snake Inn, where the staff had neither heard nor seen any cars on the night that Nick Easton had been killed, only the snowploughs. They passed the lay-by where the plough crew had found Easton's body. But Cooper wasn't thinking about Easton, or even Marie Tennent. Alison Morrissey knew exactly when to keep quiet. It was a skill that would make her useful as a police interviewer.

'You see,' he said, 'when it happens, when I feel as though I've done something worthwhile, it's like the world suddenly settles into place and looks as it ought to do for once, the way it was created, before we messed it up and made it cruel and dirty. It's hard to explain. It's not that anything in particular happens to the world, of course, not so that you would notice. It's something that happens to me. But whatever it is, it feels … real.'

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her nodding. Still she said nothing. They were on the long descent into the Derwent Valley. Glittering ribbons of water stretched ahead and alongside them as they drove into the long arms of Ladybower Reservoir.

'It's a sensation that isn't like anything else I've ever known. I suppose it's like taking a powerful drug. It gives me a buzz, makes me feel alive. It's good, for a while.'

She nodded again, and he felt her watching him. He was glad that she said nothing. He needed another moment to finish the thought, to get the words out that were suddenly jostling among themselves somewhere in his subconscious, waiting to be let out.

'But it's like any other drug,' he said. 'It does something to your mind. It leaves you always craving more. It leaves you willing to do anything, anything at all, to get that feeling again.'

They were soon through Bamford and approaching Edendale. Morrissey had left him alone with his thoughts. He was starting to feel embarrassed again that she was able to get him to say such things, yet he was glad he'd articulated it to himself. It had made a kind of sense of his own feelings that he'd never been able to grasp before.

'I'll drop you at your hotel,' said Cooper. 'Please don't do anything like that again.'

'OK,' said Morrissey. 'I'm grateful for the lift.' She sounded meek now, no longer provocative. 'I wanted the chance to say I'm sorry for getting annoyed with you yesterday. You're right to be sceptical about what people tell you. So I apologize.'

'That's all right. I've seen the faxes anyway.'

'Good. There's just one thing I'd like you to do for me, Ben.'

'No,' he said.

'Please,' she said. 'You know these people won't talk to me. I want you to go and see Walter Rowland again.'

'Why should I do that?'

'There's something that my grandmother told my mother, and my mother passed on to me. It was one of the allegations that were thrown at my grandfather at the time. But even Frank Baine doesn't seem to know anything about it. So I want you to ask Walter Rowland.'

'About what?' said Cooper.

'I want you to ask him what he knows about the missing money.'

*    *    *    *

As Cooper tried to warm himself up back at West Street, two images stayed with him. One was the powerful impression he'd had of the dead and dying airman. The other was an image of the bright red poppy on its wooden cross, which remained imprinted on his memory as if it had been burned there by the electric brightness of the snow. Sergeant Dick Abbott, 24th August 1926 to 7th January 1945. Who would take the trouble to remember Dick Abbott?

During that afternoon, Cooper tracked down the old inquest reports for the five airmen in the county archives at Derby and had them faxed to him. Of course, the verdicts on Klemens Wach, Dick Abbott and the other airmen had all been recorded as accidental deaths. There was some technical evidence given by an RAF accident investigator, who'd referred to the fact that the Lancaster was well off course and over high ground in low cloud – that fatal combination. But there was also the suggestion of human error. Either the navigator had given the pilot the wrong course, or the pilot had ignored his instructions. Nobody could know, except those who had been involved. The navigator had died in the crash, and the pilot himself had gone missing.

The RAF's own investigation had placed the blame for the loss of the aircraft on the pilot. The pilot was always in charge, no matter what his rank. But no one seemed to have troubled to ask what the flight engineer might have known about SU-V's last few minutes. He was best placed to have noticed whether the navigator had got his calculations wrong, or whether the pilot had been incapable. But the flight engineer had been Zygmunt Lukasz, and the navigator had been his cousin Klemens.

The archivist had also sent him a copy of a report from the Accidents Investigation Branch of the Air Ministry. It had been signed in black fountain pen by someone called C.I. (Accidents), and it gave the results of a detailed examination of the main parts of the aircraft. No structural cause had been discovered. The report also covered weather conditions, the pilot's history and the airframe's history. The documents were useless to him. They told him nothing about the human lives involved.

But someone had known the background of Sergeant Dick Abbott. Alison Morrissey had mentioned finding out that another member of the crew of Sugar Uncle Victor had a young child, as well as Danny McTeague. That had been Dick Abbott, hadn't it? So where had Morrissey got her information from?

Cooper dialed a number in Edendale.

'Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner,' said Frank Baine. 'He was from Glasgow. He worked in a steel foundry before he joined up in the RAF.'

'He was married, with a child?'

'That's right, he was. Only two members of the crew of SU-V were fathers – Abbott and McTeague. Abbott was very young himself – eighteen. Maybe he had to get married because of the baby, I don't know.'

'Did you manage to trace his family?'

'Abbott's? Well, I went through the squadron historical society. They tried to contact the wife for me, but it seems she re-married and emigrated. I never took it any further than that.'

'I see. I suppose you know about these people who collect bits of aircraft wrecks. I've heard them called vultures.'

'Yes, I know all about them. Some folk think it's desecration, that the wrecks are memorials to the men who died.'

'I imagine relatives must feel strongly about that.'

'Naturally.'

'Alison Morrissey, for a start?'