Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (58 page)

'Where's the baby, Lawrence? Where's Baby Chloe?'

There was still no reply. After a few minutes, the noise gradually began to recede. It didn't exactly move away. There was no direction he could have said it had headed in. It simply became more subdued, a little quieter and more muffled, until eventually the cloud had swallowed it completely.

Cooper had the ridiculous idea that the clouds might have been troubled by indigestion that had now grumbled its way out into the open, perhaps in a sulphurous outbreak of gas into the atmosphere somewhere over Glossop. But maybe the sound had been thunder, after all. Or maybe it had been an airliner somewhere in the overcast, flying blind towards Manchester Airport, its engines booming inside the banks of cloud. Or then, maybe he'd imagined the whole thing.

'We need to find Chloe, Lawrence. We have to be sure she's safe.'

Cooper moved to bring his other leg under his body. It was icy cold and hardly felt part of him any more. Now there was only the sound of the wind scraping its way across the moors, and the faint settling of the snow as it drifted past his ears.

He felt discouraged at the prospect of trying to get a response from Lawrence. But he had to keep him from falling asleep. He found himself casting around desperately for something to say.

'I know you wanted to keep the bookshop going, Lawrence. Did anybody ever buy any of those books that I priced up? No, I don't suppose they did, though there must have been some bargains among them. And coming to the shop helped me to find the flat. I didn't think you were very keen on me taking it at first. By the way, I suppose it's too much to ask – but could you have a word with your aunt about the noise of the dog? It barks too much when it's out in the yard. It wakes me up in the mornings.'

Cooper blinked his eyes. The wind was making them water, and the unending whiteness was playing havoc with his colour perception.

'Diane Fry will get help to us soon,' he said. 'She's good at things like that, very efficient. That's why she made sergeant instead of me, I expect. Who wants to be a sergeant, anyway? Who wants a management job shoving paper and dealing with other people's problems?'

He blinked again. Instead of Lawrence's blue jacket, he was seeing red. Cooper had met colour-blind people who were unable to distinguish between blue and red. But he knew he wasn't colour blind – proper colour perception was one of the physical requirements for joining the police force.
Candidates unable to distinguish principal colours and those who suffer from pronounced squints are unacceptable. It was in the recruitment literature. Anybody could read it on the website.

'You could do with someone like Diane to run the shop,' he said. 'Someone efficient, someone a bit ruthless who would throw out all those old books no one will ever buy that are cluttering the place up. You could turn the business round completely. We can rely on Diane. She'll have help here soon. Very soon.'

Red, white and blue. Cooper used the back of his glove to rub his eyes. The colours had to be imaginary. But he was seeing both red and blue in the snow. Red, white and blue. Very patriotic. He fumbled for his torch and switched it on. The blue was Lawrence's jacket, the white was the snow. And the red was the blood. As it trickled from Lawrence's body, it was diluting itself from dark arterial red and spreading for a few inches until it thickened and froze, staining the snow pink, like strawberry ice cream.

'Lawrence, where are you injured? Did you say it was your chest? Have you fallen on something?'

Carefully, with numb fingers, he tried to feel under Lawrence's body. He touched metal, a sharp splinter of torn steel.

Cooper stared at Lawrence's white face, remembering the Irving flying jacket in that upstairs room at the bookshop. An Irving suit was exactly what he needed now to stop the steady leaching away of Lawrence's body heat as the blood seeped from his wounds. Without their Irving suits, airmen would have died of exposure in a Lancaster bomber on a winter bombing run over Germany. Rear gunners like Sergeant Dick Abbott had suffered frostbite despite their heated suits. Zygmunt Lukasz had lost two fingers trying to staunch the blood pouring from his cousin's wounds as they lay in the snow waiting for rescue. Even now, Cooper could clearly picture the two Polish airmen in their RAF uniforms, lying no more than a few feet from where they were now. Red, white and blue.

In the far distance, he could see a single light. Its rectangular shape blinked through the swirling snow like a beacon as it floated in the blackness over the snowfield. He thought for a moment of the bright star in the east that the Wise Men had followed. But this light was in the north, and it was not a star. Cooper realized it was the uncurtained bedroom window of a retired farmworker, where a man might even now be counting his regrets.

A little way to the west, there was a dark shape in the snow. That was the stone wall of the dam and the cold expanse of Blackbrook Reservoir. Cooper pictured Pilot Officer Danny McTeague, staggering from the wreckage of his Lancaster bomber and about to set off across the moor to find help. In another few minutes, it would be completely dark, as it was when McTeague walked away from Sugar Uncle Victor. And then he wouldn't be able to see the reservoir – only the light.

'At least you helped George Malkin, Lawrence,' said Cooper. 'His souvenirs produced a bit of money for him, didn't they?'

Still Lawrence didn't answer. But Cooper stared at his face as if he'd spoken. It was as if Lawrence had just said something perceptive that Cooper hadn't thought of before.

'Yes,' said Cooper. 'You did help George Malkin – didn't you, Lawrence?'

The wind was really getting up now. Cooper heard an answering moan from the rocks behind him and felt a spatter of frozen snow on the back of his neck where it was blowing off the top of the drifts. There was a pain in his ears, but it was nothing to what Marie Tennent must have felt as she lay out in the snow the night she died. Where his hand had been plunged into the snow, it looked red and raw. He rubbed it on a dry part of his trousers and thrust it back into his glove. But the glove had got snow on the inside, too, and it didn't help.

'I know you weren't involved in Nick Easton's murder. And Marie's death wasn't your fault. But you have to tell us where the baby is, Lawrence.'

Was that the noise of a helicopter, that dull thudding in his ears? Or was it his own heart struggling to push the blood through his veins? If he could convince Lawrence that rescue was on its way, perhaps he would decide not to die. Perhaps he would rouse himself and they could share their body heat to survive together.

Cooper held his breath in his hands to prevent it from drifting away, afraid it might take his life with it. But Lawrence wasn't going to rouse himself. There was no warmth left in his body to share. Cooper lay over him, covering both their bodies with the cagoule, leaving only his head and his feet free. He needed to be able to hear the helicopter so that he could signal their position. He didn't know whether he was going to be able to do that in the dark, but somehow he would have to. All he had was his torch, and the moor was a big place. If anyone was thinking properly, they would have thermal imaging equipment on board to locate their body heat. If there was any body heat left by then.

That was definitely the sound of a helicopter.

'I think they're here, Lawrence,' he said.

Cooper put his hand to Lawrence's face to attract his attention. His fingers touched something hard and cold, an incongruous blemish on Lawrence's cheek. It was a single tear, slowly freezing to the skin.

35

Fry pulled out of the divisional headquarters car park and fell in behind the lights of a patrol car on its way down West Street. Dawn was creeping over the roofs of Edendale. Beside her, Cooper looked pale and exhausted. He should have been at home in bed, but had refused to stay away.

'We should have insisted on looking in all the rooms while we were there,' he said.

'How could we? We had no search warrant. We had no grounds for making an arrest. Not then.'

'There were more rooms above that floor he showed us. That's where he lives – in the attic rooms. They would be the old servants' bedrooms.'

'We'll soon find out.'

Fry could tell Cooper was uneasy. He fidgeted with his seat belt like a restless child. But at least her car would stay clean. She had left Gavin Murfin behind this morning.

'I should have known there was something wrong about Frank Baine,' said Cooper. 'There were so many gaps in what he told Alison Morrissey. He didn't mention George Malkin to her, and he didn't let her see the books about the aircraft wrecks. Walter Rowland might have been willing to talk to her, but Baine discouraged him.'

'Yes, I suppose so,' said Fry.

'And of course, Baine told Alison that Sergeant Dick Abbott's family had left the country. But Marie Tennent was right here in Edendale. They ought to have been able to meet. It would have meant a lot to both of them.'

'I expect so.'

'There could have been some kind of reconciliation,' said Cooper.

'Yes, Ben.'

Fry drove through the roundabout and up Hulley Road towards the traffic lights. She was following the patrol car because she wasn't sure how to get into Nick i' th' Tor to reach Eden Valley Books.

'I should have known he was manipulating Alison. She was determined enough that he couldn't have stopped her coming over. But Baine was with her all the time, making sure he knew what she was doing, pushing her in the direction he wanted her to go, keeping her away from the truth. Of course, he'd been to see everyone himself before Alison ever arrived here, and he'd alienated them all, scared them off talking to her. Baine only started getting worried when he realized I was talking to the wrong people.'

Fry glanced at him. 'When he realized you weren't going to do what you were told.'

But Cooper ignored her. 'He saw me at the Lukaszes', then at Walter Rowland's. And he knew that I'd been to the bookshop itself.'

'Several times,' said Fry. 'Little did he know that you were just buying books.'

'Books on aircraft wrecks. Lawrence would have told him that.' Cooper paused. 'It was Frank Baine who tried to put me out of action that night, wasn't it? Not Eddie Kemp.'

'Yes, we think so. We're still waiting for DNA results.'

The patrol car turned into a narrow entrance off Eyre Street, and Fry turned after it. They bumped over cobbles and had to slow to a crawl as they entered the network of passages between Eyre Street and the market square. They pulled up near the bridge over the river, where a police officer was stopping people from walking further up than Larkin's bakery.

'I'll have to explain it all to Alison later today,' said Cooper.

Fry switched off the engine and sat for a moment looking at the bookshop, listening to the roar of the River Eden under the bridge. She didn't know what to say to him.

*    *    *    *

Outside Eden Valley Books, two police motorcyclists were unbuckling the straps of their crash helmets. When they were bare headed, the officers hardly looked any different. They both had bald domes as smooth and white as their helmets.

Cooper pushed open the front door and walked among the shelves of books. The shop seemed dead without Lawrence's presence. Cooper felt as though he was walking through a set for a TV costume drama. In the little kitchen area at the back, he found a window open. A few lumps of snow had dropped inside and scattered on the draining board. A small heap of it lay on the base of an upturned coffee mug.

While Fry took a call on her radio, Cooper went upstairs and walked slowly through the upper rooms. The shop was so quiet that he was reluctant to open each door that he came to, for fear of what he might find behind it. On the second floor, the biggest room was the one that he and Fry had seen, where the aviation memorabilia was displayed. A second room had been converted into a kind of study, where a couple of computers sat humming quietly to themselves. No wonder so many books had been piled on the landing and in the corridor – they must once have occupied these rooms.

Between a couple of stacks of books, Cooper found what he'd expected – a door that was a step up from the floor, a door that opened to reveal not a room but another flight of stairs, narrow and uncarpeted. The top floor of the building was Lawrence's living quarters. There was an untidy sitting room, a bathroom and a large bedroom with a vast iron bedstead. Cooper was looking for signs of Marie Tennent's presence when he heard a noise over his head. The sound of rats in a house was distinctive. They made so much noise on bare floorboards that they sounded as though they were wearing hobnailed boots. And there was that faint, dragging scrape that went with the footsteps – a sound that conjured up a clear picture of a scaly tail slithering across the floor in the dust.

Fry stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching him, not speaking. He saw her shudder when she heard the scurrying in the ceiling.

'We've just had a call from the hospital,' she said.

'Lawrence?'

'I'm afraid so.'

Cooper sat down suddenly on the bed, which sagged and gave a protesting squeak.

'You did your best, Ben,' said Fry. 'Nobody could have done any more.'