Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (50 page)

'She would have sat down to recover,' said Fry. 'Maybe even passed out from the pain?'

'Possibly.' The pathologist paused. 'Of course, I'm estimating the time of death, too. This person didn't die quickly, you know. In fact, she would have taken a long time to die.'

Fry didn't want to think about that too closely. She had one more thing to ask Mrs Van Doon.

'Could the injuries have been self-inflicted?'

'No way.'

Next, Fry rang Mrs Lorna Tennent, who'd gone back to Falkirk. Mrs Tennent was surprised at the question.

'Yes, of course,' she said. 'Dick Abbott was my first husband's father. We used to come down to Derbyshire to leave a poppy regularly every year when Marie was younger, but we stopped when I got divorced. I had no idea Marie still felt she had to keep it up. No idea.'

Fry put down the phone. She wanted to tell Cooper the news immediately, but she didn't know where he'd gone. Probably he was off seeing Alison Morrissey again, purely out of bloody-mindedness. He was going to have to wait, then. There was no way Fry was going to interfere with his social life. At the moment, Ben Cooper was thinking only of himself.

30

Tonight, the Gospel Hall was in use. Through a side window, Cooper glimpsed members of the congregation sitting on wooden chairs on a quarry-tiled floor. The sound of an electric organ reached him, and then voices singing a hymn.

On his first visit to Walter Rowland, Cooper hadn't recognized the other church, the one on the corner of Harrington Street. Now he saw that it was Our Lady of Czestochowa, the church attended by the Lukasz family and other members of the Polish community. It was distinguished by the representation of the Black Madonna over the door. And there was the little school alongside it, too – the Saturday school where Richard and Alice Lukasz studied for their Polish O-levels. Halfway down the street from here was the Dom Kombatanta, the club of the SPK, the Polish ex-servicemen's organization.

Cooper knocked on Rowland's door, but found it off the latch. He pushed it open a few inches.

'Mr Rowland?'

A tired voice answered him. A voice drowning in pain, barely managing to stay above the surface of despair.

'Aye. Through here.'

Walter Rowland was in his front room, and at least he had some heating in his house. The old man would long since have been dead if he'd lived in Hollow Shaw.

Rowland was sitting in a curious position. He had his hands resting on the table in front of him, palms upward, as if he were expecting coins to drop from the ceiling and it was important that he should catch them. Cooper was reminded of a yogi sitting in a lotus position, with his hands held on his knees. What was it a yogi expected to receive when he meditated like that? Some kind of inner peace? But inner peace surely wasn't what this old man was expecting. Rowland's hands weren't relaxed at all. His fingers were curled in towards the palms like claws, and their flesh was dry and shrivelled, so that the joints of the fingers stood out in bony ridges. Those hands spoke so clearly of calmly accepted suffering and pain that Cooper revised his religious image from the meditating yogi. All that was missing from these hands were the nails pinning them to the wood.

Rowland noticed Cooper looking at his hands. 'It's not so good today,' he said, apologetically. He looked pale, and his eyes had sunk further into their sockets. 'If you want a cup of tea, you'll have to put the kettle on yourself.'

'Have you got anybody to help you?' asked Cooper, as he walked through into the kitchen.

'How do you mean?'

'If you're ill and can't look after yourself, you surely have some kind of home help, don't you?'

Rowland said nothing. Cooper plugged in the electric kettle and found two mugs with pictures of the Houses of Parliament on them. He noticed that there was a dent a couple of inches wide in the back door, and the wood was crushed. He wondered if the old man had fallen while trying to do some job in the kitchen.

Cooper glanced through into the front room. Rowland was staring at his hands. His fingers were as brown and as knotted as the pine table they lay on.

'Have you tried Social Services? Or talked to your GP?' said Cooper.

The old man shook his head.

'They could send you a home help,' said Cooper. 'At your age, you must qualify. It would make things easier for you. I mean, how do you manage to cook yourself a meal?'

Rowland just smiled. 'You'll find some tea in the top cupboard,' he said.

While he was finding the tea, Cooper looked through the kitchen cupboards, trying to slide the doors open as quietly as he could. There were plenty of tins of all descriptions – steak puddings and hot dogs, new potatoes and mushy peas, peaches and pineapple chunks. He wondered if Rowland were capable of operating a tin opener. A small fridge stood in the corner, and he could hear its coolant gurgling in the pipes at the back. He found some milk in it and checked the use-by date on the plastic bottle, remembering the sour taste of the tea at George Malkin's house. That taste had stayed with him for days afterwards. But Rowland's milk was OK for a day or so yet. Could that mean somebody did a bit of shopping for the old man occasionally? That was something, at least. Cooper wondered how he could ask Rowland the question, and whether he would get an answer.

He carried the two mugs of tea back through from the kitchen.

'What are the neighbours like? Will they fetch some shopping for you?'

Rowland didn't answer. He looked at his mug on the table. Cooper knew he was being told as clearly as he could be that it was none of his business.

'Don't worry about me,' said Rowland. 'I've got a routine to my day. I've got the telly, there. And when there's no more sex and violence on, I know it's time to go to bed.'

Cooper sat down opposite him. The television muttered in the corner, and he didn't bother asking Rowland to switch it off.

'We were talking about the Lancaster crash the other day,' he said. 'Do you remember?'

'Of course I remember. Sugar Uncle Victor. There aren't all that many things happen around here that I wouldn't remember.'

'You said then that Pilot Officer McTeague was different from airmen who were sometimes in shock after a crash.'

'Yes, I did.'

'I want to ask you again why McTeague was different.'

Rowland breathed slowly for a while. But Cooper could see he had less resistance today.

'I smelled him,' said Rowland.

'What?'

'When we realized there was at least one crew member missing, we looked in the wreckage as best we could. Some of it was on fire, and our sergeant shouted at us to stay away. But we couldn't have left someone in the burning plane, could we? I went to look in the cockpit. It had broken away from the fuselage, so the flames hadn't reached it. And when I stuck my head in there – well, I could smell the whisky. The fumes fair knocked me out.'

'Do you mean Pilot Officer McTeague was drunk?'

'By the stink of the cockpit, he must have been pissed as a snake. Other folks might have taken what he did for shock, like you say. But I've never doubted that he was drunk when he flew that plane into Irontongue Hill.'

'If he was, his crew would have known.'

'No doubt. But only Zygmunt Lukasz survived, didn't he? And he never said anything.'

'Not officially, anyway.'

'No.'

'Do you ever meet any of the Polish community in Edendale?'

'Community?' said Rowland, confused by the use of the word.

'They have their own church up the road,' said Cooper. 'And an ex-serviceman's club, where Zygmunt Lukasz is a member. They even have a school.'

'So they do,' said Rowland, faintly surprised. 'But I've never thought much about it really. They keep up their own way of life, do they, then? I'm not surprised – like I said, they have their own beliefs, and they stick to them.'

Rowland watched Cooper quizzically, until he began to fidget uneasily.

'I can't blame them for that,' said the old man. 'If I had to live in Poland for some reason, it wouldn't make me Polish, would it? No, I reckon I'd still be a Derbyshire lad until the end of my days.'

Rowland closed his eyes momentarily. A voice continued to mumble from the TV. It was a different voice now – a woman with a Scottish accent. Soothing and reassuring.

'Maybe I was wrong about McTeague,' said Rowland. 'But I can only remember what I saw and heard.'

'But you didn't see Pilot Officer McTeague, did you? You didn't hear him or smell him, either.'

'He'd already legged it by the time we got there.'

'Exactly.'

'I always thought they would find him sleeping it off,' said Rowland. 'I had half a mind to try to find him myself and knock the living daylights out of him. But I don't think anybody else even noticed. The fire got to the cockpit, and that was that. Nobody said a word.'

'Mr Rowland, why didn't you say anything about this at the time?'

'What makes you think I didn't?'

'Because it isn't mentioned in the inquest report. It isn't mentioned in the accident report, either.'

'Always believe everything you read in official reports, do you?'

'Well …'

'I can't imagine you do. You probably write enough of them yourself to know the drill. Some things you put in, some you leave out. Now, don't you?'

'I suppose so.'

'I told the officers about it, but they left it out of the reports. I was only a young RAF squaddie. I did what I was told. We didn't question things in those days.'

'There's one more thing I want to ask you about,' said Cooper. 'The money.'

'Ah,' said Rowland. 'The money.'

'There isn't any money mentioned in the accident reports.'

'No, there wouldn't be.'

'As far as I understand it, Lancaster SU-V was on a routine flight from its base at Leadenhall to RAF Branton in Lancashire. The aircraft had recently been through major repairs, including the replacement of a wing. Its crew were taking it on a test flight before it returned to normal operations.'

'Yes,' said Rowland. 'But when they set off on that routine flight, they were also asked to take the weekly wages to RAF Branton and three other RAF stations in Lancashire. It was safer than sending airmen armed with pickaxe handles to collect it from local banks – and some of those bases were in places where the nearest bank was a long way off.'

'I see. But the money never arrived. Because on the way there, the Lancaster crashed on Irontongue Hill.'

'And some bugger disappeared with the loot,' said Rowland. For a few seconds, there was a faint spark in his eyes. 'It was funny really. The RAF were going daft about it, but they daren't say anything publicly. Well, they didn't want crowds of folk wandering about on the mountain looking for the money. It was second nature with them anyway, to keep information to themselves. It was second nature to us all at that time. We never said anything, though some of us looked for the money ourselves when their backs were turned, I expect. There'd be one or two hoping to come across a few pound notes blowing about the moor.'

'It was never found?'

'Never. A couple of officers came out to the site. They got angry with us, but of course the rescue teams were more bothered about the human casualties. Some of us had been up there for hours and hours in the freezing cold, trying to piece the injured blokes together and get them off the mountain. We were in no mood to be harangued by some RAF brass with their posh accents and their Clark Gable moustaches. There were angry words, by all accounts. Some said that blows were struck, but no charges were ever brought, civil or military.'

'What happened in the end?'

'Two members of the Home Guard were suspected.'

'What? Dad's Army?'

'They were given the job of guarding the wreckage overnight. They were the only people who had the chance of removing the money, so the theory went.'

'This wasn't in the crash report.'

'Of course not. It was nothing to do with the crash. Do you think the RAF went round telling everybody there had been thousands of pounds in cash on board the plane?'

'Who were the two Home Guard men?'

'I can tell you their names if you want, but remember that they were men who were already too old for active service. They're long dead. Of course, the police ought to have been looking for somebody who suddenly got rich about that time. That amount of money would be like finding King Solomon's Mine for some poor bloody farmworker. They could hardly have spent it without anybody noticing. Not in wartime – think of rationing, for a start. But it was the two Home Guard blokes who took the blame. Walker and Sykes, they were called. They were questioned for days, but they were never charged. Without the money, they couldn't prove anything.'

'Did you know these men?' asked Cooper.

'Oh, aye,' said Rowland. 'Walker and Sykes were with the West Edendale company. One of them was the water board man that used to look after Blackbrook Reservoir. But his mate, now, he made a living working in the kitchens at the Snake Inn, as I recall. He didn't look quite English, you know. Too dark of complexion. He was one of those who always came under suspicion during the war. If you didn't fit in before the war, then you turned into a Nazi spy once it started. Aye, you were either one of us, or you were one of the enemy. That would be why he joined the Home Guard, I reckon – to show the local folk which side he was on.'