Today, there was no mistaking the flight path for Manchester Airport. In the sky were the vapour trails of six or seven jet airliners, each one white and distinct. One of the greatest fears of the emergency services was that an airliner would one day fall out of the sky as it was passing over the high ground of the Dark Peak. There were enough wrecks lying on the remote moors already for everyone to be aware of the difficulties involved in a rescue plan.
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They parked their vehicles in the lay-by nearest to Irontongue Hill. It wasn’t the one where Nick Eastern had keen found, but further up, almost at the highest point of the Snake Pass. Cooper pulled his Toyota in behind the MDP’s Ford and the Scientific Support van. He was pleased to see that the SO CO they had sent was Liz Petty. She was conscientious, but she was also fitter than some of the other scenes of crime staff and would have no problem with the hike across the moor to the crash site.
‘What a beautiful day for a brisk walk,’ said Sergeant Caudwell cheerfully. ‘How long will it take us?’
‘About three-quarters of an hour, if we keep up a steady pace.’
‘No slacking then, eh?’
‘Will you be all right?’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’m like a camel. I may not look pretty, but I can keep going for hours.’
In the cold, bright morning, the walk to the top of Irontongue Hill was exhilarating. The sky was blue and cloudless, and the moors looked unsullied, their tracts of untouched snow glittering temptingly. The only patterns on the landscape were those caused by the different textures of light falling on the northern slopes, by the shadows in a sudden dip, or the bright highlights of a rocky summit. Further south, in the limestone areas of the White Peak, the drystone walls carved up the landscape into containable sections, forcing the snow into some kind of order, with here and there a line of trees breaking through. But on the empty Dark Peak moorland, the snow had its own way. It had Ailed every cranny, sculpting the world to a shape of its own creation.
These cold, bright days were good. But Cooper knew how quickly the weather could change. If cloud descended on the tops, they could be in the middle of a snowstorm before they got halfway back across the moor.
They crunched over the frozen heather into an easterly wind that picked up small swirls of powdery snow and blew them around like miniature blizzards before dropping them again, as if fussily rearranging the landscape to get the best reflection from the sun. In the deeper areas, the snow had been formed
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into whipped cream shapes or had keen left draped in midair over a gully, like the scalloped edges of a tablecloth. Below it, a stream ran under a thin skin of ice.
Cooper could sec that somebody had been this way already, but not today. A fine dusting of snow had blown into their footprints. There was a distant cackle of black grouse, and a human voice somewhere far away, over the other side of the summit.
They stopped for a breather when they reached the trig point on Irontonguc Hill, where a cairn marked the summit. The bare rock face dropped away from them on one side, back down to the Snake. Across a narrow valley was the next outcrop of rock, High Shelf, where the wreckage of the American Superfortress lay.
‘What a job you’ve got/ said Caudwell. ‘And you say you’re short-staffed!’
Liz Petty had hardly said a word all the way. But now she put her case down and took in the view.
‘Days like this make up for the poor wages,’ she said. Cooper smiled at her.
‘Don’t. You’ll have me in tears,’ said Caudwell.
Beyond High Shelf was a distant view down into Glossop. The hills fell away from the edge of the Dark Peak to a hollow in which the town sat, surrounded by the remains of the textile mills that had once been its main industry. At least Glossop seemed to have grown out of its landscape, like one of those complex eco-systems that formed of their own accord in a pool of stagnant water, (riven time.
But then, out past Glossop, Cooper could sec nothing but a prcv wall where the world seemed to come to an end. It reminded
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him of a scene from a horror novel he had once read, in which a small American town had been cut off from the rest of the country by an alien fog where vast monsters lurked. But he knew that, beneath the grimy blanket he could see in the distance, there were no monsters, only the city of Manchester.
On a warm summer’s day, the white tower blocks of the city centre could look like the battlements of a fairy-talc city or a shimmering mirage lying in the plain. But not today. This
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morning, the uncompromisingly clear winter light exposed every atom of the pollution that hung over the city, every swirl of smoke from a factory chimney, every wisp of exhaust from the traffic choking the streets. With no warm thcrmals to lift it clear of the city, the smog had gathered and thickened, and now it lay like a huge grey rat coiled on its nest. Cooper shuddered. It would he a salutary experience for many a city dweller to take a trip up to High Shelf on a day like this and get a bird’s-eye view of their city. They would hardly dare to breathe again.
Liz Petty turned away from the view and looked up at him thoughtfully.
‘It’s hard to imagine how they could have crashed here/ she said. ‘It’s so ironic somehow.’
‘At night, in low cloud, it would he a different place altogether,’ said Cooper. ‘It would have been a far more dangerous place.’
Cooper pictured Lancaster SU-V coming low across the valley from the south, the rumble of its engines muffled by the blanket of cloud, the crew peering hopelessly from the cockpit windows or from their Perspex gun turrets. Hr imagined the bomb aimer, Rill Mee, lying in his position in the nose turret, looking down and catching a glimpse of the ground rising towards them. Perhaps Mcc would have tapped urgently on the feet of the pilot above him, gesturing upwards as he mouthed: ‘Climb! Climb!’ And McTeague would surely then have heaved back on the controls and Lancaster SU-V would have begun to gain height.
At the rear of the aircraft, young Dick Abbott wouldn’t have known what was happening, until he had suddenly been thrown forward in his harness towards the Perspex bubble as the aircraft climbed. He would have found himself hanging helplessly, almost upside down, with his view tilted so that he could see the hillside winking through a patch of cloud. And he might have heard the frightened voices shouting in his headphones.
But by then it was already too late. The stark face of Irontongue Hill would have been directly in front of them. Maybe the crew had seen it coming towards them a second before the impact, a huge black shape hurtling out of the cloud where there should have been only sky. But it had been too late by then. Far too late.
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28
1_)C1 Tailbv looked around the conference room. He frowned.
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Dianc Fry had noticed that he was doing a lot of frowning these days. He had never been a barrel of laughs, but his last tew weeks at E Division were proving to be a burden on him.
‘We don’t seem to sec much of DC Cooper at these meetings/ said Tailby.
‘Everybody is so busy/ said Hitchcns. ‘There are so many actions. So many interviews to do.’
‘I know that. Is Cooper all right? He wasn’t injured in the incident last night?’
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‘No, he’s fine. He reported for duty as normal this morning, and hc’sgone out with Sergeant Caudwcll. The MDP asked to visit the site of the aircraft wreck.’
‘He’s with Sergeant Caudwell? You’ve thrown him to the
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dogs then?’
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‘I wouldn’t say that exactly, sir/ said Hitchens.
‘When things get difficult, there’s a temptation to look around for a sacrifice/ said Tailby.
Fry blinked. She had never heard their old DCI ^ct so philosophical before. Perhaps he wanted to put on a display of wisdom in his final davs before he handed over to Kcssen. so that the contrast
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would be all
the greater.
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‘I’m told Sergeant Caudwell asked for a scenes of crime officer as well. What is she hoping to find?’
‘I’ve no idea/ said Hitchcns.
I ailby frowned. ‘I’m happy that we’re cooperating. But there comes a point when cooperation has to be mutual.’
‘V‘
Yes, sir.
‘All right/ said Tailby. ‘Well, here we are — it’s Monday morning, and we’ve had some major developments in this enquiry over the weekend. We have a confirmed identity for the victim: our so-called Snowman is Sergeant Nick Easton, an investigator with the Royal Air Force Police. And I gather we’ve managed to
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piece together some of his movements, with the help of the MDP officers who have keen sent to Edendale.’
‘US Fry and her team came in yesterday to follow that line of enquiry urgently,’ said Hitchens.
‘Excellent. I’m sure all the overtime will he fully justified, Paul.’
‘Yes, sir. I’ll let DS Fry tell you what she managed to achieve
‘V V C”
for the money.’
Fry shuffled in her seat as the two DCls stared at her, one smiling, one frowning. Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They
O’5 v
would never agree on anything.
‘For a start,’ said Fry, ‘we know Sergeant Easton visited the air museum at Lcadenhall on Sunday 6th lanuarv, hctween
VJ V ‘
twenty-four and thirty-six hours before he was killed. He was enquiring about a volunteer there, Graham Kemp, who is well known as an aviation memorabilia collector.’
‘This is the brother of Edward Kemp, 1 gather,’ said Tailby. ‘A gentleman we now have in custodv again.’
&v O
‘Yes, sir. We have his brother’s address, and we’re hoping to pick him up this morning. Of course, we’ve already been interviewing a number of Edward Kemp s associates in connection with the double assault last Monday night. It’s worth bearing in mind that this incident happened within an hour or two of Easton’s death.’
‘UK. And from the aircraft museum …’
‘We know Nick Easton stayed at a hotel near Chesterfield that night, then he visited Edendale the following dav, Monday. He called at the home of a family called Lukasx in Woodland Crescent and spoke briefly to Mrs Grace Lukasz. It’s odd that Mr Andrew Lukasz disappeared a matter of hours before Easton arrived.’
‘Andrew?’
‘Grace Lukasz’s son. He lives in London, but had been visiting his parents. You might recall that we got the father and mother in to try to identify our Snowman because their son had disappeared rather suddenly.’
‘And he hasn’t turned up since? He’s not back home in London?’
‘Apparently not. The Metropolitan Police called at his home
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early this morning and talked to his neighbours, and apparently there’s keen no sign of him (or about ten days, which would tie in with his arrival in Edendale. His wife is American, and she’s been away at a family funeral in Wisconsin, but we’re trying to make contact with her. Even more interestingly, his employers say Andrew Lukasz was on leave but that he should have been back at work today. He didn’t turn up.’
‘What was Sergeant Easton’s interest in the Lukasz family?’ said Tailby. ‘Do we have any idea?’
‘We don’t really know. And nor does Peter Lukasx. But he says that Andrew had argued with his grandfather. There was some
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disagreement over a cigarette case that had belonged to Zygjnunt Lukasz’s cousin, Klemens Wach, who was killed in an aircraft wreck during the Second World War. Apparently, Zygmunt expressed outrage that this item might have been looted from the wreck.’
‘In other words, a piece of aviation memorabilia?’
‘It looks like it. sir,’ said Frv.
‘‘ V
‘Go on.
‘We don’t know where Easton went after he left the Lukasx home. According to the MDP, he was using a black Ford Focus, but we haven’t been able to locate it. And he wasn’t booked into accommodation in this area for that night, as far as we can tell. DC Murfin checked everywhere yesterday, which meant a lot of phone calls and visits. I have to say, sir, that we simply don’t have the staff for an enquiry as complex as this.’
‘Point taken, Fry,’ said Tailby. ‘Have we made any progress on the time line for the morning Easton’s body was found?’
‘We’ve narrowed it down to a window of about half an hour, when his body could have been left at the side of the A 57. But we’ve been unable to find any sighting^ of four-wheel drive vehicles on the road after it was closed because of the snow. There arc so few houses on that stretch of road. The Snake Inn was our best bet, but the staff have been interviewed and it seems they saw and heard nothing but the snowploughs.’
‘What about Edward Kemp’s vehicle? A four-wheel drive, isn’t it?’
‘An Isuzu Trooper, yes. The rolls of plastic found in the back
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did have traces of blond, hut the blood matched that of one of the assault victims. We think the baseball bats or other weapons that were used in the assault were hidden in the plastic rolls afterwards. Unfortunately, the weapons arc now missing. However, we do have some possible traces from the plastic, if we can get approval for samples to go to the lab …’
‘Yes, of course. Do it.’
‘Also, the bayonet that was used in the assault on DC Cooper. We might get a DNA trace from the handle/
‘Obviously.’
‘My main concern at the moment is that we’ve not yet been given details of the enquiry that Sergeant Easton was working on,’ said Fry. ‘We need that information urgently.’
‘The Ministry of Defence Police have promised us a meeting tomorrow morning, when full details will be shared as far as possible,’ said Tailby. ‘Hut at this stage, it seems clear that there’s a connection involving aviation memorabilia. The Leadenhall Aircraft Museum, this collector, Graham Kemp, and an item that is known to have been in the possession of Andrew Lukasz. That’s a very positive line of enquiry you’ve developed, Try/
‘The most interesting point is that Easton called at the Lukasx home shortly after Andrew disappeared,’ said Fry. ‘Obviously, we’ll be interviewing both the Kemp brothers. But, if you asked me at this moment, I’d say the person I’d be most interested in talking to about the murder of Nick Easton was Andrew Lukasz.’
o
‘And, in what has now become our traditional manner, the person we most want to speak to is missing,’ said Tailb.
‘Yes, sir.’
Tailby spoke stiffly to DC! Kessen, who nodded. He had said nothing during the meeting. Fry feared that he was going to be out of his depth once Tailby departed.
‘You’re right, Fry,’ said Tailby. ‘There’s a lot of work involved in this Easton enquiry, not to mention the assault on a police officer. We’ll have to try to pull in some more assistance. But, Paul, do make sure you use the expertise of the MDP officers while they’re here, too.’
‘May I remind you we also have a missing baby, sir?’ said Hitchens.
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‘Don’t I know it? The papers say hope is fading for Baby Chloc. Is that right? Arc our hopes fading?’
‘If somebody has her, they’re not coming forward/ said Fry. ‘We’re interviewing Eddie Kcmp again after this meeting, both about the assault on DC Cooper and about the baby, since he was Marie Tennent’s last-known boyfriend. But we’ve already checked his house and talked to his wife. I don’t think he’s been involved with Marie tor some time, and it seems unlikelv he’ll have any information about the baby.’
‘Bad news, then.’
‘The bones of the other baby we found don’t make the situation look good. If we can get DNA from the remains, we can confirm whether it was an earlier child of Marie Tennent’s. But the clothes found with the bones were almost certainly left by her Marie’s m
other identified them. It seems Marie might have gone up to the wreck to leave the clothes as some sort of memorial to the dead child.’
Tailby looked at her, horrified. ‘That’s rather macabre, Fry.’
‘It’s speculation, of course,’ said Fry. ‘But why else should Marie Tcnncnt have gone up to the aircraft wreck on Irontonguc Hill that day?’
The wreckage of Sugar Uncle Victor began a hundred yards below the trig point, on the windward side of Irontonguc. Between the larger sections, the ground was covered in molten (raiments o( metal, slivers of glass and strands of torn rubber. A few tufts of ragged wool clung to an undercarriage axle where sheep had rubbed their itchy backs against it, glad to find something hard and solid in the expanse of soft peat. There were shreds of tyre still left, hanging from the huge hub of a wheel.
Close to the main wreckage, there were poppies on wreaths or attached to small makeshift crosses. Some of the crosses were wooden, but others seemed to have been made out of bits of melted tubing from the aircraft itself, tied together with wire. Parts of the metal on the undercarriage and fuselage were still uncorroded, even after so long. On the other hand, the poppies had faded completely to white, their original blood-red bleached by the sun and rain.
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‘One survivor and five fatalities, not including the pilot,’ said Cooper, his eyes following the tail of a small aircraft as it headed towards Glossop.
Jane Caudwcll seemed hardly to have heard him. The snow had spattered her boots and the legs of her trousers where she had stamped her feet in the snow. She was dressed in black - a totally impractical colour on the snowcovered peat moors. Bright colours were what you should be wearing, especially if the weather turned bad and the mountain rescue teams turned out to try to locate you. They could spot bright clothes. But black amounted to camouflage.
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