Blood on the tongue bcadf-3

by Stephen Booth

  ‘We need some clothes/ said DI Paul Kitchens. ‘Otherwise, all we have are the hare tacts.’

  There were photos of the Snowman pinned to a board behind the two DCIs. There was no hope of an identification yet. One idea being considered was the production of an artist’s impression of the dead man, to be reproduced in the papers and on the local television news, and for officers to show to drivers at checkpoints on the A57. Motorists had already been stopped, but nobody could recall seeing a man walking along the roadside with a blue bag, or a vehicle parked in the lay-by where the Snowman’s body had been found. A picture might make all the difference to their memories.

  Dianc Fry thought DCI Kcssen looked as though he hadn’t yet adjusted to the sense of humour in E Division. According to the grapevine, he had not been popular in D Division. The theory was that when the new Detective Superintendent arrived, it would be someone who could keep him from causing too much trouble.

  ‘So our task for today is to find some clothes,’ said Hitchens. ‘And I’m in charge of the shopping expedition.’

  DI I litchcns looked in his element when he was the centre of attention. He stepped up to a map pinned to the wall and tapped it with a ruler. He was pointing to an area to the west o! the lay-by on the A57 where the Snowman had been found. A search of the lay-by itself had recovered plenty of assorted debris from under the snow, but nothing that might have been the contents of the blue bag — unless the Snowman had been in the habit of wearing hub caps and cushion covers.

  ‘Here’s the place to start,’ said Hitchens. ‘Right below the road here is an abandoned quarry. It’s well within reach of the lay-by and a favourite spot for fly-tippers. This is what you might call the Knightsbridge boutique of our shopping trip. It could have exactly what we want - but it’s difficult to get into.’

  Fry didn’t see many officers laughing at the joke. Even DCI Tailby frowned. Since Hitchens had moved in with his new

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  girlfriend to a modern house in Dronficld, he had definitely gone upmarket. It sounded as though he had been dragged off to London at some point to learn what shopping was all about. An inspector’s salary was a nice step up from a mere sergeant’s.

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  ‘If the bag was emptied in situ, chances are the contents will be somewhere down here, in the quarry,’ said Hitchens. ‘Unfortunately, when the quarry was abandoned, the owners spared no effort in blocking it off to stop people getting in. I hey piled rocks up in the entrance like they were building the pyramids of Gi/a, and the sides are sheer. I suppose they must have been worried about somebody stealing their leftover millstones.’

  Hitchens twirled his ruler happily, as though he were conducting a tune. The two DCIs sat stony-faced at their table.

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  refusing to sing.

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  ‘The net result is that there’s no vav we can get into that quarry without the use of heavy machinery,’ said Hitchens. ‘And that would take time not to mention money. Since we have neither, we’re falling back on a bit of good old-fashioned improvisation. To put it bluntly, we’ve decided to use a man with a long rope and a careless disregard for his personal safety.’ Hitchens smiled. ‘Now all we need is a volunteer. Don’t all shout at once.’

  Nobody moved. Nobody so much as let his chair creak.

  T have some photographs to encourage you,’ said Hitchens.

  He picked up a large print of a photo taken from the fence at the edge of the lay-by, looking down into the quarry. The sides were almost smooth, except for patches where the stone was crumbling away. There was snow at the bottom, but it looked a long way otf. It covered large, uneven shapes, like a white dust sheet thrown over a room lull of modern furniture. They all knew there were rocks littering the floor of the quarry under that snow, guaranteed to break a few ankles.

  ‘No one?’ said Hitchens. ‘Then I suppose I’ll have to nominate a volunteer.’

  Peter Lukas/ had reacted so angrily to the presence of the two people on his doorstep that Ben Cooper had begun to think he

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  would have to intervene to prevent a breach of the peace, or an outright assault. Until that moment, Lukasz had seemed an ordinary, reasonable man — but he had changed into a snarling guard dog. He had pursued Alison Morrisscy and Frank Baine from his propertv, seen them right down the driveway, then had come back in and slammed the door after them.

  Breathing hard, Lukasz had answered Cooper’s questions with a distracted air, and terse replies. He knew nothing, and he hadn’t seen the man that his wife was talking about, he said.

  Cooper got ready to move on. He would have to call on the neighbours, to sec if they, too, had been visited by the Snowman but had not noticed a resemblance to the description given out on the local news. Maybe one of the neighbours had bought some double glazing from him, which would be a stroke of luck indeed. There was also the third witness, who hadn’t been home when he called. And no doubt there would be other jobs waiting for him back at West Street.

  But Cooper was reluctant to leave too quickly. He tried to stretch out the process of changing back into his shoes, while squinting through the glass door to sec if anyone was hanging around outside.

  Then he noticed that Lukasz hadn’t disappeared back into the conservatory but had turned towards another room next to it. As he opened the door, Cooper caught sight of a third person, seated at a table. It was an old man, with thin, white hair receding from his forehead and brushed back over his ears.

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  He had vire-rimmed glasses worn on the bridge of a Roman

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  nose, and he was wearing a heavy brown sweater that made his shoulders look out of proportion to his body. The old man looked up as Peter entered, and Cooper saw his eyes. They were pale blue and distant, like glimpses of the sky through broken cloud.

  It was only a second or two before the door closed again. But Ben Cooper had been given his first glimpse of Zygmunt I.ukasz.

  DI Hitchens folded his arms and looked around the room, which had gone horribly quiet. No volunteers came forward for the

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  privilege of being lowered into the quarry. There were officers here who were likely to have a panic attack if they thought the stairs were too steep. There were others whose technical capabilities fell short of inadequate. There was Gavin Murtin, for a start. Give him a rope, and he would try to eat it.

  DI Hitchens ga/cd at Murfin briefly, and passed on. Then he stopped, and looked round the room again with a frown.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘There’s somebody missing.’

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  Den Cooper had never quite got used to the sensation of stepping backwards into space. That second before his boot connected with the rock face was like no other experience. It went through his mind every time that he might never touch around again or rather, that he would hit it only once more, down at the bottom.

  But the soles of his boots landed gentlv on the gritstone surface. The rope in his hands vibrated, and the harness tightened round his body. He let out more rope until he was leaning well back, gaining stability by pressing his weight into the rock. Then he adjusted his grip and bent his torso forward. The angle had to be just right. Too narrow an angle and his feet would slide off the

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  smooth surface and he would smack into the wall face-first.

  Cooper looked up at the edge of the quarry, and saw two members of the Buxton Mountain Rescue Team peering down at him, their faces already too small and out of proportion against the sky. ” ‘OK, Ben?”

  ‘Fine.’

  To his right, one of the scenes of crime officers, Li/, Petty, back-pedalled to the edge and took her first step backwards. She was bundled up in her blue overalls and a yellow waterproof jacket, with a red helmet pulled low over her eyes.

  Cooper had been initiated in the pleasures of abseiling by his Iriends in the MRT, and he knew it was a lot easier than it seemed to a spectat
or up top. For one thing^ you didn’t have to look all the way down as they did. Your eyes were on your rope, on where your feet were going, and on the rock face in front of you. Once you had turned your back on that di/’ying drop and braced yourself for the first step into nothing, it was easy.p>

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  He paused to manoeuvre around a gritstone outcrop. Li/, came alongside him, and she turned to smile. It was the conspiratorial smile shared by rock climbers. Li/’s face was flushed with cold

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  and excitement, and her eyes shone with pleasure from under her helmet.

  ‘Going clown?’ she said.

  Cooper felt his foot slip off the rock. He put out his lelt hand to steady himself and stop his weight making the rope swing. He twisted his torso slightly to look down at his brake hand as he fed the rope through the figure eight of the descender. The gristone was hard and bruising to the fingers; yet in some places it was crumblv and unsafe, its stability undermined by decades of quarrying.

  They moved on a bit further. The officers at the top kept calling down to ask if they were OK, as if somehow they might get lost on the way down. Cooper promised he would be sure to let them know if the rope broke. They laughed, but not much.

  A few yards from the bottom, Li/ paused. Cooper watched her wrap the rope round her thigh with three loops. This freed her brake hand, and she reached into the pocket of her jacket for her digital camera to take an establishing shot of the quarry floor. They didn’t know what to expect down there. Probably it was a futile effort. But there had been too many instances when small items of forensic evidence had been overlooked until it was too late.

  Li/ was lighter than Cooper, and had perfected that effortless rhythm that allowed her to float down in easy steps. She had already undipped her belay and removed her harness by the time he touched bottom. She shouted up to a colleague at thetop, and her case was lowered down to her.

  ‘Right,’ said Liz, as Cooper undipped his straps. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’

  The floor of the quarry was littered with lumps of gritstone blasted away from the walls. To the cast, a vast stack had been heaped up to block access to the site. Li/. Petty took some shots of the quarry floor. Then she crouched by a large rock, opening her case and unfolding a tight stack of evidence bags.

  ‘We’re looking for clothes, right? Well dressed? Casual, or what?’

  ‘Yes, well dressed.’

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  ‘We can discount the donkey jacket, then.’

  Cooper leaned over her shoulder. She was pointing to a dark, sodden mass on the ground. It reeked of mould, and patches of the fabric were turning green with mildew. There were rips in the leather patches on the shoulders.

  ‘It’s been there too long, anyway.’

  ‘Pity. It could probably have told you a lot about the owner. What he had for breakfast, for a start. Those encrusted stains have survived well.’

  Much of the debris and rubble from the quarrying operations had simply been left in place, and there were still lethal shards of buried metal and invisible holes to fall into. Cautiously, they picked their way among the stones, glad of the boots that protected their feet from the sharp edges and the sudden shifting of the ground that could turn an ankle.

  Cooper pointed up to the edge of the quarry. ‘If the clothes were thrown over the side oi the quarry, it would have been from up there somewhere.’

  Liz tried to push her helmet back from her eyes, but it soon slipped forward again as she bent to clamber over a boulder that must have weighed a couple of tons. Now and then, she stopped to examine something more closely. Cooper waited patiently each time, holding out little hope that the grubby-coloured scraps of material lying among the debris had belonged to the Snowman.

  ‘This is more like it.’

  She was taking photographs again, maneuvering for different angles to identify the exact spot, then going for a close-up.

  ‘What have you got?’

  Li/, held up a blue garment, her tweezers gripping a corner of fabric. ‘Knickers. They’re quite recent. A bit damp, but no more lhan lyin^ in the snow would cause.’

  Cooper considered the scrap of material. ‘If those are out of the Snowman’s bag, it casts a new light on the enquiry.’

  ‘It tells you something about his sexual inclinations, perhaps.’

  ‘I was thinking more of a woman accompanying him. We had assumed we were looking for male clothing.’

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  Li/ chose a paper bag as a temporary container for her rind. The blue pants would have to be allowed to dry out naturally in the air, rather than sealed in airtight plastic that would encourage the proliferation of microorganisms.

  There were shouts from on top of the cliff again. Cooper turned, gave them a thumbs-up and pointed at the bag.

  ‘DI Hitchens says this quarry is a Knightsbridge boutique,’ he said.

  Liz held up the bag and studied the underwear critically. ‘It you ask me,’ she said. ‘We’re in an Age Concern charity shop.’

  Diane Frv found herself feeling a little guilty about Ben Cooper’s

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  allocation in his absence to the quarry job. But she reassured herself by reflecting that, if he had actually been at the meeting, he would certainly have volunteered anvwav. He was that sort of man. No sense at all.

  But to help him out she went to have a look at what he had on his desk, in case there was anything urgent that needed to be dealt with. The first file she1 noticed was the one on Eddie Kemp, the window cleaner. Since Kemp had been arrested, there had been a positive snowstorm of calls, accusing him of every offence in the book. According to the callers, he had been getting up to everything from flashing to stalking, from social security fraud to child abuse. And there were at least three calls naming him as the killer of the man found on the Snake Pass.

  The information had been copied to the incident room, but the reports were lacking in convincing details like names, places and times. An absence of detail was usually the giveaway for malicious calls. Eddie Kemp wasn’t top of the popularity stakes among his neighbours, by the look of it. So it might come as a shock to some of them to find out that he had already been bailed and was back at home. What the police really needed was reliable intelligence on his associates, and witnesses to the assault or the events just before it.

  But there was one useful piece of information that had come through. One of the rolls of blue plastic sheeting from Kcmp’s car had revealed the impression of two objects shaped like baseball bats, and traces of both human blood and sweat had

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  been obtained (rum the plastic. DNA analysis could provide a match it the division was willing to pay (or samples to he sent to the Forensic Science Service laboratory. So progress on that had become a budgetary decision.

  Fry wrote a note tor Ben Cooper to read when he eventually returned to his desk. There were other enquiries piling up tor him, too, and most of the Hies had messages attached to them phone calls from the Crown Prosecution Service, officers in other departments or other sections, and even the victims of crimes themselves, wondering what was happening to their case, desperate to contact the person they naively thought was busy investigating it. But they would all have to wait. She just hoped that Cooper was wearing a safety harness. The last thing they needed was another casualty.

  Fry’s phone rang again. It had that tone which usually meant a call she didn’t want to answer. This time it was the control room informing her that the search of the quarry had been abandoned. The mountain rescue team had pulled out to respond to an emergency call, and had since located a body on nearby Irontongue Hill. Police officers at the quarry had been diverted to attend. Control were letting her know as a courtesy, because DC Cooper was one of the officers at the scene.

  Fry rested her head in her hands and stared across the room at her remaining staff.

  ‘OoA-wcc, 6a6y … oon-wr/ M/bn’t you Vet me (ai% you on a jea cruiie.’

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nbsp; ‘Gavin,’ she said. ‘Shut that bloody lobster up, or I’ll throw it out of the window.’

  Marie Tcnncnt was barely recognizable as human at first. By the time Ben Cooper arrived at the scene, someone had scraped some of the ice from her, so that now she at least looked like a pile of wet clothes abandoned on the hillside. The frozen snow clung to her in small lumps. Cooper had tried to brush a patch clear near her pocket, but the crystals were attached firmly to the fibres of her coat.

  He stood around with the other police officers and members uf the mountain rescue team, who were stamping their feet

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  as they waited for the doctor to come and certify that the woman was indeed dead, rather than cryogenically frozen and in a state of suspended animation. One of the rescue team was a middle-aged Peak Park Ranger, who had seen his fair share of bodies. He made a joke about the doctor needing to borrow an ice pick before he could use his rectal thermometer, and everyone laughed uneasily.

  Liz Petty had walked to the site with him, though she wouldn’t be of any use just yet. She was still wearing her helmet, and her eyes were bright with speculation as she looked up at Cooper.

  ‘Mrs Snowman, by any chance?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Give me a shout it I can help, when you’re sure she’s dead.’

  That morning, the pilot of a small plane had finally seen Marie Tennent’s outline against the peat as the snow had begun to slip from her shoulders. It was none too soon — the snow had come again since then, and Marie might have stayed undiscovered for another few days by the look of the sky in the north.

  Cooper found Liz was still standing next to him, watching him deep in thought.

  ‘It could be suicide, I suppose,’ she said.