Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (61 page)

'If you say so.'

'I remember thinking that I would never have set off towards the other side of the reservoir and down to the water board road, which you can't even see from up there. You wouldn't even know it existed. You'd have to be blind or stupid to set off in that direction.'

Malkin seemed to catch on to the drift of what Cooper was saying. 'Or drunk?' he said.

'Pilot Officer McTeague was not drunk,' said Cooper.

The air felt damp, and Cooper could see that the cloud was lowering rapidly. He pulled his collar up and shivered.

'I checked the Accident Investigator's report myself,' he said. 'The whisky on board Lancaster SU-V was a gift for the station commander at RAF Branton. The Wing Commander at Leadenhall had a black market supply, and he wanted to share it with his old friend in Lancashire.'

'Is that right?'

'Mr Malkin, I don't think you can possibly have seen or heard Pilot Officer McTeague walking down the road singing "Show Me the Way to Go Home".'

'Well, I might have been mistaken,' said Malkin. 'The memory plays tricks after all this time.'

'I think there are things you remember all too well.'

Malkin stared across the moor for a moment or two. Banks of mist were beginning to move across in front of Irontongue Hill, and soon they wouldn't be able to see it at all from Hollow Shaw.

'Would you like to tell me about it?' said Cooper.

Malkin stood quite still and rigid. 'You have to understand something,' he said. 'Ted and I had heard our mother and father and some of their friends talking about counterfeit bank notes that were supposed to have been printed by the Germans to upset our economy.'

Cooper frowned. 'What has this got to do with anything?'

'Listen to me. When I first went up to the crash with Ted, we heard two of the airmen talking to each other. They were talking in a foreign language. So we knew they were German.'

'No, it would have been the two Poles you heard,' said Cooper. 'It was Zygmunt Lukasz and Klemens Wach. They were speaking Polish.'

'I know that
now
,' said Malkin, already starting to get irritated. 'That's why we stayed away from the crew, you see. Not that we would have known what to do if we'd found anyone injured. We were going to find a phone and call the police, but then we saw the bags that had been thrown clear of the wreckage. Ted stopped to take a look inside. And we found the money.'

Malkin paused. He looked across the moor towards the side of Blackbrook Reservoir and opened a field gate in the dry-stone wall before he continued.

'Ted said there were millions of pounds. It took us days to count the notes, but there wasn't that much. We could barely carry the bags between us. I was only little, remember, and I soon got tired. We planned to hide them before we called the police. We reckoned everyone would think the bags had been thrown into the reservoir in the crash, because there were plenty of other bits of the aircraft lying all around the edge of the water.'

'I understand all that,' said Cooper. 'So what went wrong?'

Malkin still stared at the reservoir. 'We saw the light,' he said. 'Out on the ice.'

'A light?'

'It was way out in the darkness, and we knew it was in a place no human being could possibly be. It was as if the light was floating in mid-air. You get daft ideas at times like that, but the first thing we thought of was the spirits that are supposed to be on the moor. We thought of ghosts. Even Ted was a bit scared, I think.'

Malkin seemed almost to be reverting back to his childhood as he spoke. Cooper could picture him as the excited, terrified little boy, in awe of his older bother. It wasn't all that hard to imagine how the young George Malkin must have felt. There had been times in his own past when Cooper had become almost sick with excitement at some adventure that Matt had got him into.

'And then we heard a voice calling for help,' said Malkin. 'It was weak, and there was a funny echo to it. We stood and watched the light moving, and we knew it must be one of the crew from the crashed plane. But we didn't think he could be alive at first. We thought it was his ghost, just a light and a voice. He was calling for help in English, but we weren't fooled. We'd heard them speaking in their own language, so we knew they were German.'

Cooper closed his eyes. 'They were Polish,' he said.

But Malkin didn't hear him. He was far away, re-living a moment that was permanently etched in his memory. Fifty-seven years had done nothing to weaken his recollection. He was talking now as if it didn't matter whether Cooper were there or not.

'Then Ted said the airman must be near the edge of the reservoir. He said the dam wall was behind him, because we could hear the echo when he shouted. So we watched the light for a little while longer. I've never felt so cold in my life, but part of that was the fear. I knew if we waited much longer, I wouldn't be able to carry the bag any further. I started to look round for somewhere to hide it, but there was nowhere near. There was only snow. And then Ted said: "He's on the ice."'

'The reservoir was frozen over, wasn't it?' said Cooper.

'At that far side, it was. The airman was walking across the ice, following the dam wall.' Malkin paused. 'I was worrying about the money. The man on the ice was the one thing that seemed to stand between the money and us. He would know it was missing. I said we should put the bags back, but Ted told me not to be stupid. I said the airman would reach the water board road, that he'd be able to walk to the phone box half a mile away. But Ted said: "He won't reach the road."'

Cooper opened his mouth to ask a question, but changed his mind. It would be a mistake to interrupt now. The story was approaching a conclusion. He could feel it in Malkin's increasing tension, see it in the lines around his mouth, a tightening rictus of fear. Cooper could tell he'd memorised every word that had been spoken as the two brothers stood clutching the leather bags, listening to a voice calling for help.

'And then we both heard it – the cracking,' said Malkin. 'It was clear in the night air, and it sounded so loud. It was like the sound of two pieces of metal being tapped against each other, and a little crunch of something breaking. Then the light disappeared. One second it was there, then it was gone. There was no shout or cry from him, not even a splash of water. Maybe a reflection of the flames on a piece of ice as it tilted on the surface. But then the ice fell back, and he was gone.'

Cooper shuddered, imagining the shock of icy water closing over his head. McTeague would have been dressed in heavy flying boots and a parachute harness. Trapped under a layer of ice, he would have been dead within seconds.

Now Irontongue had disappeared in the mist, which was rapidly approaching across the moor, racing towards Hollow Shaw, turning the air heavy with the expectation of rain. Cooper could feel the dampness on the back of his neck.

'I didn't understand what had happened,' said Malkin. 'Not until later. When we went up and looked at the reservoir next morning, I saw it was only on the east side that the water was frozen enough to walk on. It had a covering of snow, so it wouldn't have felt any different to a piece of level ground to a man in the dark. It's bloody hard work walking across that moor at any time, let alone in snow and in the dark. There are cloughs everywhere to get across.'

'He must already have been exhausted by the time he got to the reservoir,' said Cooper.

'Aye. He would never have suspected. But on the other side, near the weir, the water was still moving and the ice was thin, not enough to carry a man's weight. By the morning, there was barely a crack on the surface where he'd fallen in. You know, that bloke had been over Germany, got back home and walked away from a crashed plane. Then he put his life in the hands of two young boys. And we let him die.'

Cooper knew that his own imagination couldn't match what Malkin was going through. The man had been over the events of that night too many times.

'I always thought he would come back and haunt us out here, on the moor,' said Malkin. 'At nights, he does come back. But only in my nightmares.'

Cooper stared towards the reservoir, where it lay in a hollow between the snow-covered hills. He nodded, thinking not of Malkin nor even of Danny McTeague, but of Zygmunt Lukasz.

'No forgiving. No forgetting,' he said.

And suddenly, Malkin snapped. His face reddened and the veins stood out in his forehead, twisting his face into an unrecognizable expression.

'Do you think I
want
to remember this?' he said. 'Don't you think I've re-lived it often enough already since the night it happened? How many times do you think I've had the nightmare in that time? How many?'

'I don't know,' said Cooper.

'How many nights in fifty-seven years?' said Malkin. 'Work it out for yourself, clever lad.'

*    *    *    *

George Malkin turned and began to walk back towards the farm. Cooper felt for his radio. Should he call in? But it was ridiculous – this was surely an accidental death, fifty-seven years old. The witness had been an eight-year-old boy. After all that had happened recently, everyone would think he'd finally gone mad if he made a drama out of it. Then he saw that Malkin wasn't heading for the house, but towards the big shed where Rod Whittaker kept his lorry. Malkin slid back the doors and disappeared inside.

'Mr Malkin?' called Cooper. He began to feel foolish standing in the field. He started to run towards the shed as he heard a diesel engine rumble into life. Cooper peered inside. The DAF wasn't there, but the big Renault tractor was, along with all its implements lined up against the wall – a hay baler, a harrow, a snowplough blade. George Malkin was sitting high up in the cab of the tractor.

'Mr Malkin!' shouted Cooper. 'Do you help Rod Whittaker with his contracting business, too?'

'Nay, I don't have an HGV licence,' Malkin called back.

'You can drive this tractor, though.'

Cooper saw Malkin put the tractor into gear. He dodged round to the side and pulled himself up on to the step to clamber through the passenger door.

'You said Rod Whittaker is contracted by the council. His contract includes clearing the snow sometimes, I bet. It's much cheaper for the council to pay farmers and local contractors to do it, rather than buy expensive snowploughs of their own.'

'Aye,' said Malkin, as the tractor began to move.

'So you could take this tractor out with the snowplough attachment, when it's needed to clear the roads around here?'

'I suppose I could.'

The tractor bumped across the yard and headed for the open gate on to the moor. Cooper remembered his visit to the Snake Inn, where the staff had said that one of the snowplough crews had stopped to fill their flasks on the morning Nick Easton's body had been found. But only one crew. They said the crews that came over the Pass from the north weren't council workers – they were on contract, so it was in their own interests to get the job done quicker. And one of them had been a big tractor with a snowplough. Very early on the job, it was. It would have come over from somewhere near Glossop, they said. It could easily have come from Harrop.

'You could get as far as the Snake Inn, couldn't you?' said Cooper over the roar of the engine. 'Nobody would think twice about a snowplough on the road after it had been closed to traffic. The staff at the inn didn't. They never saw or heard any other vehicles – just the snowploughs coming down the Pass, and then, later on, another one coming up. The one that found Nick Easton's body. And I think one of those that came down left him there.'

Blackbrook Reservoir appeared ahead of them in the mist. Malkin swung the wheel and reversed through the wet peat towards a padlocked gate.

'Stop,' said Cooper.

'Don't worry. I'm stopping.'

Malkin kept the engine running while he climbed down and swung open the gate. Cooper stood clear of the tractor's wheels, noticing that the padlock on the gate had been cut.

'You helped Frank Baine get rid of the body,' said Cooper. 'Did Baine have some kind of hold over you?'

'No, that's not right,' said Malkin.

He backed the tractor towards the edge of the reservoir, where a concrete slipway ran down into the water. Then Malkin fiddled with something at the back of the vehicle, and Cooper saw he had hold of a thick chain with a massive hook on one end. He watched in amazement as Malkin waded into the freezing water and was soon up to his waist. He bent and attached the hook to something under the surface. When he returned to the tractor, Malkin was soaked and white with cold.

'Frank Baine came here a couple of weeks ago,' he said. 'He'd worked out that I had the money. I sold a lot of other stuff to Lawrence Daley, and Baine is no fool. He asked Daley where it came from, and put two and two together.' Malkin climbed back into the tractor cab. 'Baine said the white fivers were worth a lot. He said they were collectors' items, that people would pay good money for them, proper money. He offered to sell them for me – in exchange for a cut of the profits, of course. We worked out there was over a hundred thousand pounds' worth. That was enough to send Florence to America for treatment.'

'It must have seemed like a miracle,' said Cooper.