Blood on the tongue bcadf-3

by Stephen Booth

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  available. Walter Rowland, for one, would have keen able to tell her. Thinking back to his conversation with the old man, Cooper recollected that he hadn’t seemed to have any great objection to talking to Alison Morrisscy. He wondered who had persuaded Rowland not to.

  ‘Well, the bayonet isn’t some old military memento, anyway,’ said Diane Fry. ‘So the chances are it didn’t come from one of your old soldiers.’

  Ben Cooper looked across the office at her. Fry was holding up a latex evidence bag for him to see. There were still streaks of skin, dried blood and organ tissue along the sides of the long blade of the bayonet. The sight made Cooper wince and clench his stomach, as she had surelv known it would.

  ‘Airmen,’ said Cooper. ‘They’re old airmen. They wouldn’t have had much use for bayonets.’

  ‘Who knows what they might have collected? But this one’s quite new, the sort they sell openly in some shops, along with air rifles and hunting knives. The handle is a good surface. We might get some prints from it, or even enough traces of sweat from his hands to get a DNA sample, if he ever handled it without gloves. It could mean we’ve got Eddie Kemp tied up this time.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Cooper.

  Fry lowered the bag. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t think it was him.’

  ‘Ben, we arrested Kemp at the scene.’

  ‘He was in the vicinitv. But I don’t think it was him who

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  attacked me.’

  Fry put down the bag and sat back in her chair. ‘I hope you’re joking.’

  ‘He was some distance away from me, I’m sure. I don’t think it was Kemp who barged into me. The person who did that ran of! in the other direction, not towards Eyre Street. Besides, I would have recognized the smell.’

  ‘He was certainly ripe when we processed him. The custody sergeant recognized him before we got him through the door. Fie said to thank you for sending “Homer” back.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

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  Fry sighed. ‘Prints or DNA will settle it one way or the other.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘If it wasn’t Kcmp, who else would have known you were there? Could somebody have recognized you?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Yes, of course, how silly of me,’ said Fry. ‘Everybody knows you round here, don’t they? I don’t suppose you’ve ever considered doing undercover work, Ben?’

  ‘I didn’t sec him. Not clearly.’

  ‘If we don’t get a match from the bayonet, we’re back to square one with Kemp - even for the double assault. The GPS think the witness evidence is insufficient.’

  “I know.’

  ‘It would have been nice, Ben, to have been able to charge somebody.’

  ‘Well. I’m sorrv I m only telling you the truth.’

  ‘V V O V

  She sighed. ‘I suppose it’ll be in your statement.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Fry sat at her desk. The mountain of paper on it was rising and becoming unstable. Cooper could sec that a couple of buff files in the middle were sliding free under the weight of those on top. It would be best to be out of the office when the avalanche started.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re not injured, anyway,’ said Fry.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Because there’s a special job for you tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You’re to meet Sergeant Caudwell. You’ll be going on a trip together.’

  ‘Franklv, I’d rather be attacked with a bayonet in a dark alley.’

  ‘Tough. I hope your stomach’s feeling strong in the moming, Ben.’

  ‘Why?’ said Cooper suspiciously.

  Fry smiled at him, though her expression lacked the confidence she was trying to convey. ‘I’ve just talked to Sergeant Caudwell again,’ she said. ‘We’ve thought of a way of keeping you safe and off the streets.’

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  In his Hat above the bookshop in Nick i’ th’ Tor, Lawrence Daley had heard the sound of voices echoing in the alleyways outside. He assumed it was a group of drunks leaving one of the pubs around the market square, although it was a bit early in the evening for them to be causing trouble. Usually, that happened later on, when Edendale’s two night clubs closed.

  Lawrence went to one of the window s. But instead of looking out of the front of the building on to Nick i’ th’ Tor, he went to the back, where his bedroom overlooked a snowcovered yard and gates that led out on to a back alley. There was frost forming on the window, slowly covering the glass in delicate patterns. The sky was clear tonight, and a crescent moon threw some light on the shapes in the yard. Lawrence shuddered, picturing human figures moving among the shapes, hearing the scuffling of their feet in the snow and the sound of their muttered curses in the darkness. But the yard was as secure as he could make it. The gates were firmly closed, and there was broken glass set into the concrete along the top of the back wall. For now, the yard was too full of snow to open the gates. According to the weather forecast, it would be the end of the week before it thawed. He had been watching the forecasts every dav. Several

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  times a dav.

  Satisfied for now, Lawrence went back to the book that he had been reading in front of the TV. On the floor above, he heard the noise of scurrying feet on bare boards, the faint scratching of claws on the wooden joists that ran across his ceiling. He didn’t think the feet were those of the mice that lived in the shop downstairs, which sometimes darted out from among the bookshelves and startled his customers. The feet that scratched above his head belonged to something bigger and less quick, something that dragged a tail behind it along the boards.

  Lawrence supposed it was possible that squirrels had found their way under the caves to live in his attic for the winter. But he thought it much more likely that rats had moved into his life. And now they were thriving.

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  -Den Cooper hung on to the hack oi a seat as his view of the ground tilted and wreckage rushed past below him. Directly underneath the helicopter, the scene looked like the aftermath of a hurricane that had passed through a scrap-metal yard. Fragments of aircraft fuselage glinted in the light reflected from the snow. There should be part of a tail hn still protruding from the peat and the snow somewhere up the slope to the west. But Cooper had lost sight of where the horizon ought to he, and he felt his stomach lurch as his sense of balance was disrupted.

  During his five years in Derbyshire CID, he had never been called on to take to the air in a helicopter before, and he wasn’t sure it was something he was cut out for. He was a feet-on-the-ground man, no question. Half an hour this Monday morning had convinced him of it.

  The passengers braced themselves as the pilot pulled back on the controls and banked to avoid the sudden upward rush of bare, black gritstone that the maps called Irontonguc. The rocks were jagged and unforgiving, full of crevices that held streaks of frozen snow. Even rock climbers staved awav from the face of

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  Irontongue. Its surface was too treacherous for all but the most

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  experienced and best equipped.

  The helicopter flew over the site again, banked, turned and came back to allow its passengers a good view of the remnants of the crashed aircraft. In the sharp morning light, the shadow of the rotor blades swept across the hill and over the wreckage.

  ‘No, that’s not the one,’ said Cooper. ‘That was a US Air Force Superfortress. Thirteen men died in that one.’

  He looked back down at the ground. Broken scraps of the aircraft seemed to have started dicing themselves into the peat, like burrowing animals anxious to escape the wind and snow, but never quite making it to safety below ground.

  ‘There were so many during the war,’ he said. ‘The Peak District is littered with them.’

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  In fact, there had kee
n so many that aircraft wrecks had entered local folklore. Even today, there were tales of a ghostly plane that had keen heard, and even seen, over parts of the Dark Peak. Witnesses had keen convinced that the aircraft must surely have crashed into the hillside because it was flying so low. No wreckage could ever he found, but it didn’t stop the stories.

  There was also said to be a German bomber that lay somewhere on the remote northern moors alter being shot down during a raid on Manchester. German-made cartridge cases had been picked up in the area, but no one had ever seen signs of wreckage there, either. Cooper wondered it that was one animal that had reached its burrow, ploughing through the peat at a hundred miles an hour as it fell from the sky. A few years ago, archaeologists digging in a peat bog in Cheshire had found the bodv of an Iron Age man, petrified and almost complete. Would the peat here have preserved the bodies of the Luftwaffe crew too, with their skin drv and leathery and their eves hardened

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  like bullets?

  ‘Although I don’t think this one crashed during the war. It w as 1948 that Superfortress down there w as from an American photographic unit. The crew had recorded the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll and filmed the Russian positions in East Germanv during the Berlin Airlift.’

  ‘But Derbyshire finished them off.’

  Cooper lifted an eyebrow at the grim pleasure in Sergeant Caudwell’s voice. He stared out of the helicopter window, surprised at the extent of the debris strewn across the moorland. On the way to the site, Cooper had found himself filling in the time by telling Jane Caudwell the story of the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor and the disappearance of Pilot Officer Danny McTeague. Before he had finished, her eves had closed.

  ‘I m surprised nobody clears the wrecks away, said Caudwell. ‘Aren’t they offensive to the tidy minds of our bureaucrats?’

  ‘Not here. In the Peak District they let them stav. They’re memorials, after all. They’re official war graves. I always think it’s funny how that can be, though. I mean - the bodies aren’t still down there, are they?’

  ‘We hope not, dear.’

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  They levelled out again and flew northwards, passing over acres of white, peat-flecked ground, rolling oceans of it that swelled in waves towards the fringes of the Dark Peak. It was barely more than a minute before they located another scatter of wreckage.

  ‘That’s the one. Sugar Uncle Victor.’

  Caudwell gave a chuckle. ‘Sounds like a naughty relative, doesn’t it?’

  As the helicopter banked, she hardly used her hands to brace herself, preferring to let her weight roll and wallow in the scat, at times pushing against Cooper’s side like a heavy piece of loose cargo. Her colleague PC Steve Nash had barely acknowledged his presence since they had climbed aboard, and he wasn’t sure whether it was indifference or whether Nash was silently terrified of the flight and dealing with it in his own way. Cooper was determined not to take it personally, anyway.

  Below them, the remains of the Lancaster bomber’s wings lay in tatters on the moor. Little of the fuselage was left, but there was a ragged line of burnt-out engines and undercarriage parts, and a single wheel still standing upright. Smaller fragments were scattered for several hundred ieet through a series of water channels and ^roughs. Around the wreckage, the wind had scraped the dark peat bare. Against the snow, it looked like a pool of dried blood in which the broken body of the aircraft lay.

  ‘They must have taken some of the parts away after the crash,’ said Caudwcll.

  ‘It depends who you mean by “they”,’ said Cooper. ‘There was no official salvage team. But there have been unofficial ones since. Apparently, there are two kinds of visitors to these wrecks the aviation archaeologists, who want to preserve the remains, and the others, who have their own interests.’

  ‘The vultures?’

  ‘Some people call them that.’ Cooper thought he detected a note of irony. ‘The more valuable parts of the Lancaster have been removed over the years. I suppose things like the radio equipment would have been the first to go, followed by anything

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  that was movable, anything that could be sold as scrap or might be considered a souvenir or collector’s item.’

  ‘Local people?’

  ‘At first. For a long time, they would have been the only ones who knew the location of these wrecks. The others have arrived more recently.’

  Who was it that had said the Home Guard men sent to watch over the wrecked plane had not been too keen on their task? Cooper couldn’t blame them, not in the dead of winter on the Dark Peak moors. Staying alive was enough for a man to concentrate on if he found himself out here, particularly at night and as ill-equipped as they would have been in those days, with hobnailed boots and heavy service greatcoats. He could picture the Home Guard sneaking off to some sheltered spot to huddle together around a camp fire made of salvaged spars from the aircraft they were supposed to be guarding. They would have stood no chance of preventing local people from liberating items of value. It had been wartime, after all. It was every man for himself when it came to survival. But Danny McTeague had taken it further than that.

  Caudwell was looking straight ahead, over the shoulder of the pilot, unmoved by the snowcovered landscape passing below them. She seemed to be watching for bad weather coming from the north, or maybe for the next outcrop of high ground appearing in front of them, just as the rocks of Irontongue Hill had appeared in front of Pilot Officer Danny McTeague in the linal seconds.

  The low sun misted the valley and gleamed yellow on the icy water of a small drinking hole made by a farmer for his livestock. There were cattle huddled below a wall, nervous of stepping on to the concrete lip of the drinking hole because they could feel their hooves slipping on the frozen surface.

  Now there was more snow coming. The air had been bitterly cold, but now the chill had eased and there was a dampness about it, an impending heaviness that came from the dark clouds gathering over the Eastern Edges before they dropped their load on the higher hills to the west.

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  Cooper found himself gazing up at Sergeant Caudwcll as the

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  helicopter banked. She yawned and stretched, almost pushing him off his seat. Her dark hair was scraped up inside a fake fur hat like a Russian commissar’s. He felt unreasonably uncomfortable with Caudwcll. Though on the surface she maintained the normal

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  courtesies, there was a restrained hostility about her. It wasn’t the overt edginess he had grown used to from others, but something deeper that he felt he ought not to rouse.

  ‘Have you seen what you wanted?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to get down there. I need to get a closer look at the

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  Lancaster wreck.’

  ‘There’s nowhere to set down safely here, said the pilot.

  ‘We’re going to have to walk up then, I suppose,’ said Caudwell. ‘Detective Constable Cooper, could you arrange for a scenes of crime officer to accompany us, please?’

  Cooper stared at her. ‘I don’t know what you’re hoping to rind. We carried out a forensic examination on Friday, after the remains of the baby were found. Rut they were old bones.’

  ‘Not as old as the crew of the Lancaster, eh?’

  Every police officer knew that there was nothing worse than going over cold ground, sifting through old bones. And there weren’t many bones much colder than these. Wouldn’t it have been better to let those fliers rest in peace, rather than raking over their graves and stirring up their ghosts?

  ‘I think it’s crazy,’ said Cooper.

  Caudwell smiled at him again, and her cheeks dimpled. Every time the MDP sergeant smiled, Cooper felt as though he was about to be swallowed up and spat out by a giant rodent, an enormous hamster in a fur hat.

  ‘No doubt you’re right, dear,’ said Caudwcll. ‘Sometimes it seems the whole world’s gone crazy, doesn’t it?’

  More hillsides and more miles of snow pa
ssed below them as the helicopter made its turn to head back to base. At first, the shape created by the spread of the wreckage had made Cooper think of a crucifixion. Hut he knew he had it wrong. This had

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  nothing to do with Christianity there was no message of death and resurrection, the forgiveness of sins. It was something more pagan that he was thinking of. Not a resurrection, only a celebration of death.

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  A few weeks ago, Cooper had keen reading about the Danish invaders who had occupied Derbyshire and neighbouring counties tor a white. Their army had made a point of executing defeated Saxon kings in the most gruesome way. Their chests had been cut open and their ribcages spread on either side like wings, to expose their hearts. It was a symbolic act, a celebratory sacrince to their Norse pods. The act was called a ‘Blood Eagle’. It

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  was uncomfortably like the process involved in a postmortem examination the cutting open of the sternum, the spreading of the ribcage, the removal of heart and lungs and other internal organs. Cooper had never been able to escape the notion that every autopsy was a ritual sacrince, a ceremony dedicating the victim to the new god of science.

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  Rut the memory had made the shape of the wreckage clear to him. It wasn’t shaped like a crucifixion at all — it was a blood eagle.

  On the way up to the Snake Pass, Ben Cooper had to put on his sunglasses as they climbed higher and the snowcovered slopes on either side daxzlcd him with their reflected glare. In the valley, the snow hadn’t lingered so long on the banks of dead bracken, though it still showed through the copses of bare trees, like the exposed lining of a threadbare overcoat. The plantations of conifers further up the valley were different. In the sunlight, the lines of spruces glowed orange against the blue sheen of the snow.

  Then, on the higher slopes, there was no bracken, only coarse grass with frozen snow clinging to its stems. Looking southwards, into the sun, the moor looked like an ocean, all its waves and swells solidifying as they reached the shore.