Blood on the tongue bcadf-3

by Stephen Booth

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  Den Cooper could see Alison Morrissey waiting for him by his car. He could sec her from a long way off, as soon as the track levelled out on the last quarter of a mile across the peat moor. Her yellow coat stood out against his red Toyota like a splash of mustard.

  ‘Your friend doesn’t deter easily, does she? said Jane Caudwcll. She nudged Cooper and dimpled at him. ‘Do you want me to set Nash on her again?’

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  PC Nash sniggered behind them. Li/, Petty had keen very quiet since they had set off hack from the crash site.

  Cooper was embarrassed. He hoped his flush wasn’t noticeable in the cold. All the way across the moor, he alternately wished Morrissey would go away, then hoped she wouldn’t.

  ‘Funny how she knows which is your car,’ said Caudwell.

  Cooper turned and glanced at Liz. She glowered at him. It wasn’t any better for her she had to walk with Nash. His stride was twice the length of hers, but he was holding back deliberately so that they were shoulder to shoulder on the narrow path.

  When they reached the cars, he found Alison Morrissey pale and shivering with the cold. She had her hands tucked under her

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  armpits and her chin shoved into the collar of her coat to minimize the amount of exposed skin. Strands of her hair had escaped from her hat and were hanging in her eyes.

  ‘Are you mad? You’ll freeze to death,’ said Cooper. ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘I haven’t got one. Frank dropped me off.’

  He noticed that she mumbled her words because her lips were so numb. There was hardly any colour to her lips at all.

  ‘That was stupid,’ he said. ‘When is he coming back (or you?’

  ‘I told him not to. I thought you would give me a lift back to Edcndale, Ben.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Think of it as part of your service to the public, right?’

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  Liz Petty got into her van ant) drove away first, without looking back. As Caudwe.ll and Nash changed out of their walking boots, Caudwell said something over the bonnet of their car, and Nash sniggered again.

  ‘You’re determined to get me in trouble, aren’t you?’ said Cooper. ‘You can see I’m on duty.’

  ‘You re worried what your colleagues will say. But they don’t really care, do they? Not those two.’

  It wasn’t Caudwell and Nash that Cooper was worried about. He knew they would take the first opportunity to tell Diane Frv - if Li/ Petty didn’t get there first.

  ‘You’re making it difficult for me to help you.’

  ‘Oh, is that what you’re trying to do?’ said Morrissey.

  She was so pale that she looked very vulnerable. But a thought sneaked into Cooper’s mind. He wondered whether her shivering was a little overdone, for effect. Caudwell and Nash drove past them. Nash played a little tune on the horn of their car, and Caudwell waved from the passenger seat, smiling graciously, like the Queen. They disappeared down the AS7 towards the Snake Inn.

  ‘They can’t see us now,’ said Morrissey. Her pale lips parted slightly, so that he could see her perfect teeth and the tip of her tongue. He felt her breath on his face and realized he was standing much too close to her.

  ‘Damn it, Alison,’ he said. ‘You’d better get in.’

  ‘Thanks, Ben.’

  He unlocked the Tovota to let her in and threw his boots and cagoule in the back. He slammed the tailgate a little too hard, and she looked at him reproachfully through the back window .

  ‘Is there a heater in here?’ she said, as he opened the driver’s door. ‘I’ve lost all the feeling in my legs.’

  ‘Why did you come?’ he said. ‘Did you know that we’d be up here this morning?’

  ‘Frank did.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘A lot of people know Frank. I think the pilot phoned him last night to get the exact location of the crash site.’

  ‘Damnation.’

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  ‘When he told me this morning. I asked him to bring me.’ said

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  Morrissey. ‘I wanted to know what you were doing.’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  Cooper wasn’t sure what he was so angry about. He turned the heater up full and revved the engine before he pulled out into the road. He was determined he wasn’t going to speak to Alison on the way back into Edcndale. She was deliberately putting him in a difficult position. Rut he knew she wouldn’t be able to last all the way into town without asking questions. They drove in an uneasy silence for a few moments. When Morrissey spoke, it wasn’t the question he had expected.

  ‘Don’tyou Hnd your job frustrating?’ she said. ‘AH this grubbing around for evidence. A lot of it must be futile. A waste of time and effort, I guess.’

  Cooper was taken by surprise at how she had thrust straight to what he had been thinking himself. It made it impossible for him to refuse to respond.

  ‘Yes, it’s very frustrating at times,’ he said.

  ‘So why do you carry on with it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s no answer, Ben. You’re a man who has to have a reason for doing things. You have to believe that it’s the right thing to do. So why do you carry on?’

  Cooper frowned. He had never been able to explain it to himself, but now the words started to come when someone else asked him.

  ‘Sometimes, just occasionally, I feel that I’ve done something worthwhile,’ he said.

  ‘And is that enough? Just occasionally?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Cooper.

  They passed the Snake Inn, where the staff had neither heard nor seen any cars on the night that Nick Easton had been killed, only the snowploughs. They passed the lay-by where the plough crew had found Easton’s body. Rut Cooper wasn’t thinking about Easton, or even Marie Tennent. Alison Morrissey knew exactly when to keep quiet. It was a skill that would make her useful as a police interviewer.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘when it happens, when I feel as though I’ve

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  done something worthwhile, it’s like the world suddenly settles

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  into place and loolť as it ought to do lor once, the way it was created, before we messed it up and made it cruel and dirty. It’s hard to explain. It’s not that anything in particular happens to the world, of course, not so that you would notice. It’s something that happens to me. But whatever it is, it feels … real.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her nodding. Still she said nothing. They were on the long descent into the Derwent Valley. Glittering ribbons of water stretched ahead and alongside them as they drove into the long arms of Ladybowcr Reservoir.

  ‘It’s a sensation that isn’t like anything else I’ve ever known. I suppose it’s like taking a powerful drug. It gives me a buzz, makes me feel alive. It’s good, for a while.’

  She nodded again, and he felt her watching him. He was glad that she said nothing. He needed another moment to Hnish the thought, to get the words out that were suddenly jostling among themselves somewhere in his subconscious, waiting to be let out.

  ‘Butit’slikeany other drug,’ he said. ‘It does something to your mind. It leaves you always craving more. It leaves you willing to do anything, anything at all, to get that feeling again.’

  They were soon through Bamford and approaching Edcndale. Morrissey had left him alone with his thoughts. He was starting to feel embarrassed again that she was able to get him to say such things, vet he was glad he had articulated it to himself. It had made

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  a kind of sense of his own feelings that he had never been able to grasp before.

  ‘I’ll drop you at your hotel,’ said Cooper. ‘Please don’t do anything like that again.’

  ‘OK,’ said Morrissey. ‘I’m grateful for the lift.’ She sounded meek now, no longer provocative. ‘I wanted the chance to say I’m sorry for getting annoyed with yo
u yesterday. You’re right to be sceptical about what people tell you. So I apologize.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ve seen the faxes anyway.’

  ‘Good. There’s just one thing I’d like you to do for me, Ben.’

  ‘No,’he said.

  ‘Please/ she said. ‘You know these people won’t talk to me. I want you to go and sec Walter Rowland again.’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

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  ‘There’s something that my grandmother told my mother, and my mother passed on to me. It was one of the allegations that were thrown at my grandfather at the time. But even Frank Baine

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  doesn’t seem to know anything about it. So I want you to ask Walter Rowland.

  ‘About what?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I want you to ask him what he knows about the missing money.’

  As Ben Cooper tried to warm himself up back at West Street, two images stayed with him. One was the powerful impression he’d had of the dead and dying airman. The other was an image of the

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  bright red poppy on its w ooden cross, which remained imprinted on his memory as if it had been burned there by the electric brightness of the snow. Sergeant Dick Abbott, 24th August 1926 to 7th January 1945. Who would take the trouble to remember Dick Abbott?

  During that afternoon, Cooper tracked down the old inquest reports for the five airmen in the county archives at Derby and had them faxed to him. Of course, the verdicts on Klemens Wach, Dick Abbott and the other airmen had all been recorded as accidental deaths. There was some technical evidence given by an RAF accident investigator, who had referred to the fact that the Lancaster was well off course and over high ground in low cloud —

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  that fatal combination. But there was also the suggestion of human error. Either the navigator had given the pilot the wrong^ course, or the pilot had ignored his instructions. Nobody could know, except those who had been involved. The navigator had died in the crash, and the pilot himself had gone missing.

  The RAF’s own investigation had placed the blame for the loss of the aircraft on the pilot. The pilot was always in charge, no matter what his rank. But no one seemed to have troubled to ask what the flight engineer might have known about SU-V’s last few minutes. He was best placed to have noticed whether the navigator had got his calculations wrong, or whether the pilot had been incapable. But the flight engineer had been Zygmunt Lukasx, and the navigator had been his cousin Klemens.

  The archivist had also sent him a copy of a report from the

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  Accidents Investigation Branch of the Air Ministry. It had been signed in black fountain pen by someone called C.I. (Accidents), and it gave the results of a detailed examination of the main

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  parts of the aircraft. No structural cause had been discovered. The report also covered weather conditions, the pilot’s history and the airframe’s history. The documents were useless to him. They told him nothing about the human lives involved.

  But someone had known the background of Sergeant Dick

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  Abbott. Alison Morrissey had mentioned finding out that another member of the crew of Sugar Uncle Victor had a young child, as well as Danny McTcaguc. That had been Dick Abbott, hadn’t it? So where had Morrissey got her information from?

  Cooper dialled a number in Edendale.

  ‘Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner,’ said Prank Baine. ‘He was from Glasgow. He worked in a steel foundry before he joined up in the RAF.’ ‘He was married, with a child?’

  ‘That’s right, he was. Only two members of the crew of SUV were fathers Abbott and McTeague. Abbott was very young himself — eighteen. Maybe he had to get married because of the baby, I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you manage to trace his family?’

  ‘ Abbott’s? Well, I went through the squadron historical society. They tried to contact the wife for me, but it seems she remarried and emigrated. I never took it any further than that.’

  ‘f see. 1 suppose you know about these people who collect bits of aircraft wrecks. I’ve heard them called vultures.’

  ‘Yes, I know all about them. Some folk think it’s desecration, that the WTecks are memorials to the men who died.’

  ‘I imagine relatives must feel strongly about that.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Alison Morrissey, for a start?’

  ‘Alison? I’m not sure about her,’ said Baine.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Baine sighed. ‘She always seems to be holding something back. Do you know what I mean? She’s told me the entire story, all about her mother and her grandfather, Danny McTeague. I’ve had the whole thing. Sometimes it seems she’s telling me far more than

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  I need to know, and that makes me wonder … Well, I have the impression she docs it so that I won’t ask her questions. She doesn’t like questions, though God knows she asks enough herself.’

  ‘Is she paying you?’ asked Cooper.

  For a moment, Baine hesitated. ‘Well, expenses really. Why do you ask?’

  ‘You seem to be doing a lot for her, to say that she’s a complete stranger and you don’t even trust her yourself. Dropping her of! near Irontongue Hill this morning was a bit stupid. It caused me a few problems.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but she’s very persuasive when there’s something she wants you to do.’

  ‘I know. I’ve found that, too.’

  Diane Fry had entered the office while Cooper was talking to Baine. He wasn’t sure whether she had heard him mention Alison Morrisscy. But there was something about the way she toyed w ith her scarf, stretching and twisting it tightly between her hands, which made him think she had.

  She walked up to his desk and lifted the pile of faxes. She held them in the air and waited for him to finish the call.

  ‘So what’s with the faxes?’ she said. ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘Oh, nothing important.’

  Before he could take them from her, she was reading the top sheet. ‘Who is Kenneth Rees? Should I know the name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s not very attractive, is he? Also, it seems that he lives in

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  Canada.’

  Cooper gritted his teeth. ‘He’s Alison’s mother’s stepfather.’

  ‘Ben, are you telling me that you’re having details of her family faxed to you at work?’

  ‘It’s to do with Pilot Officer Danny McTeague.’

  ‘Is it? Are you sure?’

  ‘I happened to suggest the possibility that he might have got back to Canada and taken on a new identity.’

  ‘Ah. Even you are sceptical, eh?’

  ‘It s not impossible to change your identity. Deserters did it often.’

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  ‘And I suppose you’re thinking that this Rccs character is really McTeague with a new identity, who remarried his wife after a decent interval of mourning tor his old self. Where on earth did

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  you get that idea from, Ben?’

  ‘He’s nothing like McTeague anyway,’ said Cooper. ‘Kenneth Rees was a mining engineer from Newcastle. He had red hair, and was only five foot eight inches tall. You sec, I checked.’

  ‘Don’t tell me - you read the idea in a novel. I read a novel myself once.’

  ‘I didn’t think you read novels, Dianc.’

  ‘I was sick at the time. It didn’t do anything to cure me.’

  ‘Right. Anyway, it looks as though McTeague never went back to his wife and baby. But the thing that worries me is that he kept telling his crew about his family back in Canada, and how he couldn’t wait to get back to them. He wouldn’t have deserted them, no matter what. He would have got in touch with them somehow and let them know he was alive, at least.’

  Fry put down the fax. Cooper was surprised that she was still listening to him. ft was the first time she had allowed him to tal
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  about McTeague for more than thirty seconds.

  ‘So what then?’ she said.

  ‘I’m convinced now that he never made it back to Canada. Maybe he suffered amnesia in the crash and forgot who he was. f suppose he could have taken on a new identity here and settled down in England.’

  ‘Ben, I think the authorities were quite keen on knowing who people were at that time. They were paranoid about German spies landing and all that.’

  ‘Right at the end of the war? I’m not so sure. We’d have to

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  ask somebody who was around at the time. But Hitler was beaten by then. The war had turned. It was Bomber Command and the American air force who were flattening German cities by then, not the other way round. The most the Germans could do to this part of the country was to fire of? a few V2 rockets and hope they reached Sheffield. And here, in the Peak District … well, I suspect there might have been people in this area who didn’t ask too many questions. Let’s face it, they’re still like that today. During the war, they were short of men, short of labour for the

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  farms. A lot of the farmers had to rely on German and Italian prisoners of war for their workforce. It’s possible an airman with a Canadian accent would have keen accepted on a farm somewhere, without any questions asked. They were strange times/ He could see Fry was starting to get restless now.

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  ‘It’s all speculation/ she said. ‘You could never find out one way or the other, unless McTeague were to turn up somewhere/

  ‘I suppose not/

  ‘And, Ben? Reading that novel didn’t do anything for me. It just made me feel sicker/

  Fry continued to tug at her scarf while Cooper told her about the visit to the crash site. He was economical with the details, but knew he had to tell her about Alison Morrisscy’s appearance. No doubt she would hear from Caudwell anyway. But it was the poppy and the cross she was most interested in.