Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (6 page)

In church they had all joined in the singing. Some of the men smelled of vodka, and even some of the women were flushed too. But they all tried to sing, nevertheless. The Poles never seemed to have good singing voices, but they made up for it with enthusiasm. Even Zygmunt, in his croaky voice, had joined in with his favourite
Koledy
, the Christmas carols that followed Mass.

There had, of course, been the conversation – the catching up on the latest news. All their Polish acquaintances loved a bit of gossip. It was futile to try to keep the intrusion out of their lives. Grace was glad of the snow as an excuse for keeping to the house, because she didn't know what to say when their friends asked after Andrew.

She watched Peter stroke the firm leaves of the cactus and touch the tip of his finger to the points of the three-inch long spikes. He pressed on them until the spikes looked as though they would pierce his skin like nails.

'There was a phone call earlier,' he said.

'Yes?'

'It was that man, Frank Baine.'

Grace froze. Irrationally, she wanted to reach out and grab the pot the cactus was in, to hurl it against the wall and smash it. She wanted to fling it through the glass on to the flags in the back garden. She wanted to crush its ugly, vicious spikes and watch the fluid spurt from its swollen body. But she couldn't even reach that high.

'She's arrived then, has she?' said Grace.

'She flew into Manchester this morning.'

'Are you going to tell him?'

Peter shook his head. 'Let him rest a while longer,' he said. 'He needs his rest.'

Grace recalled the extra place that had been set at the
Wigilia
dinner. For an unexpected guest, Krystyna had said. The old lady never tired of explaining that it was the tradition, that it meant they could provide hospitality for any wanderer who might be travelling along the road that night, for any stranger who might knock at the door, whoever that person might seem to be. For at
Wigilia
, the stranger could be Jesus himself. Grace wanted to laugh out loud at the idea of Jesus wandering along Woodland Crescent, Edendale, on Christmas Eve and deciding to ring the bell at number 37. Surely he had better things to do, just as her parents had told her Santa Claus had at Christmas.

But Grace had said nothing. It had been Zygmunt who'd shaken his head and smiled at his sister's words. Then, in his quiet, barely audible voice, speaking in Polish, he'd insisted the extra place was set for those who were absent, for members of the family who had died. What he meant, of course, was that this place was for his cousin Klemens. It had been set at
Wigilia
when Zygmunt had first become the head of his own household, and every year since.

But Grace knew this year had been the last time. Next
Wigilia
, the extra place would no longer be for the absent Klemens. It would be for Zygmunt.

*    *    *    *

It might have been more than the cold that made Alison Morrissey shiver and pull her coat closer around her shoulders. In fact, the sun was already rising over Stanage Edge and Bamford Moor. In another hour it would have eased some of the chill from the air and melted away the mist that clung to the black rampart of Irontongue Hill. Morrissey looked as though the sun would bring her no warmth, as though it would take much more than a dose of winter sunlight to do that.

She was looking across a few yards of rough grass to a snow-covered peat moor and an eruption of bare rock. The wind was scraping across the moor from a more distant mountain to the north.

'The rock there is Irontongue,' said Frank Baine. 'In the distance is Bleaklow.'

'This place certainly looks bleak in the snow.'

'Even without the snow, it's still bleak.'

It was Irontongue Hill that took her attention. Baine had already told her that it got its name from the eruption of black rock on its summit, an uncompromising slab of millstone grit thrown up by ancient volcanic activity.

Morrissey turned away. The valley below them looked vast and mysterious in the darkness. It lay like a rumpled sheet tugged into peaks and valleys by a restless sleeper. But gradually the lights of scattered villages and farms were vanishing into the grey wash of dawn. The shadows of the hills deepened and began to spread dark fingers across a patchwork of fields, groping and fumbling among the yards of stone farmhouses and the gardens of invisible hamlets.

'I didn't anticipate it would be so cold in England,' she said. 'I didn't bring the right clothes.'

'None of your clothes would have been the right ones,' said Baine. 'The weather changes by the minute in these parts. This snow could be gone completely tomorrow.'

'Let's hope so. I've got to see the site. That's very important to me.'

'I understand that,' said Baine.

'The Lukasz family,' she said, 'will they agree to talk to me?'

'No,' said Baine.

'I could persuade them,' she said. 'If only I could get a chance to meet them, face to face, they would see I was human, like them. We all want the same thing.'

'I'm not sure about that.'

'But we do. We all want the truth. Don't we?'

They both stared ahead through the windscreen as they waited for it to clear. The hills in front of them were white and completely smooth, like marble slabs. Morrissey shivered.

'The Poles think they know what the truth is,' said Baine. 'I'm sorry.'

He used his sidelights as he drove on down the A57. Halfway down, Morrissey looked back. Her hand felt in her coat pocket for the little autofocus camera that she hadn't used. Postcards with photographs taken from this spot always seemed to face the other way, to frame a view of the valley bathed in sunlight. They never pictured Irontongue.

Shortly before the Snake Inn, they had to stop behind a line of cars that were waiting for a policeman in a fluorescent yellow jacket to wave them on. The other side of the road was blocked by two patrol cars with their lights flashing, and a snowplough was standing idle, with more cars pulled in close behind it.

'There, you see,' said Baine. 'I told you there must have been an accident. Somebody's run into the snowplough.'

Morrissey stared at the scene as they went by. She couldn't see any damage, or even figure out what the snowplough had collided with. Maybe they'd already towed the other vehicle away. Yet there were people standing by the side of the road, and a woman in a sort of white boiler suit crouching in a snowdrift.

'Downhill all the way now,' said Baine. 'We'll soon be in Edendale.'

He turned on the radio. The sound of the eight o'clock news filled the car, speaking clearly of families going about their ordinary domestic routines, arguing over the use of the bathroom and the last cup of coffee in the pot, rushing to find the right shoes and cursing as they remembered, one by one, all the things they had to do that day. Morrissey closed her eyes.

'Have a doze, if you like,' said Baine.

'Frank,' she said, 'whenever I close my eyes, that's when the pictures come. The pictures of dead men.'

Baine nodded. 'Someone once said that memories are photographs on the wrong side of your eyes.'

'All my life, I've never been quite sure where memory ends and imagination begins. These days, I can't always say which side of my eyes the dead men are.'

She opened her eyes again. A black, unmarked van with tinted rear windows was passing them slowly, going up the hill. Morrissey twisted in her seat to watch the policeman direct it into the side of the road. A blonde woman wearing a black coat and a red scarf stared at her until she turned away, and they drove on into Edendale.

4

Diane Fry hated these spells of standing around doing nothing. There were plenty of people who were better at that sort of thing than she was. It had been marginally better back at West Street, where at least she might have been able to hang on to the SOCOs' fan heater for a little while longer. But out here there was nothing to keep her warm, apart from the long, red scarf she'd bought from Gap at Meadowhall for the winter. There was no shelter, nor even any physical activity to prevent her body from seizing up. She would rather have been the officer directing the traffic – at least he got to wave his arms a bit. But it wasn't the thing for a new detective sergeant to be doing.

Instead, she spent her time going through some discreet exercises, rising up on her toes, stretching her tendons, practising her breathing, feeling for the centres of energy in her body, keeping her circulation moving in her extremities to combat the cold. She became so absorbed in what she was doing that she almost forgot she wasn't alone. Almost.

'No blood,' said DI Paul Hitchens. He folded his arms across his chest as he leaned casually on the wheel arch of the snowplough, whose blade had been hastily covered by a sheet of blue plastic. Hitchens looked relaxed, and he spoke as if he were commenting on the weather. No blood today then, just snow. How boring. But Fry knew the comment wasn't addressed to her. Hitchens had a more appreciative audience.

DC Gavin Murfin had been talking to the county council driver and his mate, who were now sitting in the back of a patrol car. Murfin was wearing a pair of unsuitable fur-covered boots that came up to his knees, like the bottom half of a yeti costume. He stamped his feet on an area of compacted snow as he came round the back of the plough and wheezed faintly in the cold air.

'Blood? Not a drop,' he said cheerfully.

Fry frowned at Murfin as he fumbled among his clothes for a pocket to put his notebook away in. He was wearing so many sweaters that he looked like the original Michelin Man, with layers of rubber wobbling around his middle. Yet his face was flushed with cold. Somewhere in his pockets, she suspected, there might be a secret supply of food – something to keep him going for an hour or two, until he could find the nearest Indian takeaway for a beef buryani to stink her car out again.

'You know, I really hate it when there's no blood,' said Hitchens.

The pathologist, Juliana Van Doon, was suited up and working in the area cleared of snow, while an officer video'd the scene. Mrs Van Doon had the dead man's clothes open across his abdomen to examine a gaping wound. In her white suit, she looked like a badly designed snowman. Fry sighed. A snowman and the Michelin Man. There must be something wrong with her brain today. The cold weather was giving her hallucinations.

'Blood really makes a body, I always think,' said Hitchens. 'It gives it that bit of excitement. A certain
je ne sais quoi
. A subtle edge of implied violence, perhaps. The bitter-sweet taste of mortality. Do you know what I mean, Gavin?'

'Oh, sure,' said Murfin. 'It means you know the bloke's a definite stiff 'un, like.'

Fry thought Murfin's voice sounded slightly muffled, as if he'd smuggled something into his mouth without her noticing. She thought she heard the rustle of a chocolate wrapper in his pocket. She looked longingly towards her car. There were things for her to be doing back at West Street. There were
always
things for her to be doing at the moment. Life went on in all its predictable messy ways in Edendale, as it did in every town in Derbyshire, as it no doubt did in every town and city in the country. There were plenty of crimes that went by without being investigated, let alone cleared up. The paperwork was everywhere to prove it – cases that had been allocated crime numbers for insurance claims, and then filed. Everyone was crying out for more police time to be spent on solving crime, as if the world depended on it.

But here, at the foot of the Snake Pass, Fry felt as though she were standing on the edge of the world. On either side of the A57 there was a white wall a couple of feet deep where the snow lay untouched and unnaturally smooth, so that the edges of the road merged seamlessly into the surrounding moorland. The tarmacked surface of the A57 was normally the only sign of civilization this far out of Edendale, and Fry found its disappearance unsettling. It seemed to be telling her she might never get out.

Mrs Van Doon turned for a second to stare at the police officers standing in the road. Their voices carried loud and clear to where she was working. She shook her head and concentrated again on her job.

'You'd think if someone had been cut almost in half by a snowplough, they would bleed a bit,' said Hitchens.

'Yes, you'd think so,' said Murfin. 'A bit.'

'If only out of a desire to be artistically satisfying in their final moments.'

Hitchens caught Fry's eye and nodded at her, as if she'd said something intelligent. She knew he sensed her antipathy to Murfin and her irritation at the way the DI was encouraging him. But Hitchens smiled, like a man who had all the time in the world at his disposal and had chosen to spend part of it right here, in this isolated, snow-covered spot, with a handful of fellow police officers, two distraught council workmen, and a body with no blood.

'Mind you, it's probably a clue,' he said.

Fry watched the pathologist taking a temperature and examining the corpse's skin for lividity. The dead man was dressed in a dark suit that bore the marks of the snowplough blade where it had gouged into him and tossed him on to the roadside verge like a sack of rubbish. The blue overnight bag that had been found with him stood a few feet away. He could almost have been a passenger stranded at a snowbound airport, sleeping uncomfortably on the floor of the terminal as he waited for a flight that would never leave.