‘But if the body had been left there, it would have been found eventually.’
‘Nobody found it, because we sent it back down to the bottom.
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There was a little rowing boat that was kept by the reservoir. We took it and tilled it with stones, and we took our dad’s fishing net from his shed. He noticed it was gone one day, hut he blamed some gypsies who’d been hanging around.’
Cooper was starting to feel wet and uncomfortable. He almost wished he could see Irontongue Hill. At least the black buttress of rock would have been something solid and familiar. Yet together, Irontonguc and the Malkin boys had been the end of Danny McTcague.
‘We tied the ends of the net to the airman’s body,’ said Malkin. ‘We tied it to his flying suit, his parachute harness, wherever we could. Then we filled it with stones and we threw it over the side. We didn’t think he was going to sink at first, then his face stopped staring at us, and the stones pulled him down to the bottom, and all that was left were some bubbles. 1 kept looking, in case he came back up. I kept looking for months, even when the summer came. I spent so much time sitting staring at this reservoir that my dad thought 1 was turning peculiar. But the dead airman never came back up.’
‘We’ll have to send divers into the reservoir to look for the remains,’ said Cooper. ‘We might have to drain it.’
‘Not much point in that,’ said Malkin. ‘They drained the reservoir thirty-five years ago.’
‘But…’
‘It was old and leaking by then, so they emptied it to put a concrete lining on the bottom. It’s been drained twice more since, for maintenance. You don’t just let a reservoir alone for sixty years, you know — it’d be so full of holes it wouldn’t hold a drop of water. And what would be the good of that?’
Cooper wondered whether he had been spun a complete yarn. But Malkin wasn’t laughing. His face was almost grey, and he made no attempt to wipe away the moisture that was settling on his checks as the mist gathered around them.
‘Mr Malkin, are you telling me the truth?’ said Cooper. ‘Orwas that some childish fantasy you had at the time?’
‘Every word I’m telling you is true. But time passes, and things change. A body doesn’t stay a body for ever, not in water, not with fish and things nibbling away at it. By the time they drained
421
the reservoir, there would only have keen a few bits of hone and some rags buried in the mud on the bottom. Have you ever seen a reservoir when it’s emptied? The mud is three teet deep on the bottom. Disgusting the smell is, too.’
‘Yes, I remember the year there was a drought and all the reservoirs started to dry up. You could smell them for miles.’
‘It was worse than that. It was foul enough to knock your head
OV
off. They scooped the mud out and tipped it into lorries. Nobody bothered to sift through it to rind any bodies they wanted to get it away as quick as they could. It all got tipped into a landfill site, over where Rents Quarry used to be. Later they put some top soil over it, and levelled it off. It grassed over nicely in a year or two it makes a decent bit of grazing now. In fact, it’s the pasture Rod Whittaker uses for his sheep.’
Malkin pointed back across the moor towards Hollow Shaw Farm, where Cooper could make out a scatter of white shapes among the remaining patches of snow.
‘That’s where your missing pilot is,’ said Malkin. ‘He’s helping to teed those ewes.’
Cooper gaxed at the sheep. One of the animals lifted its head and stared back at him. Its jaws were rotating steadily, and it had a look of sullen insolence on its black face. Cooper felt an irrational surge of anger. It had been such a long way to come, only to end with a field full of sheep.
‘There’s something I’ve often wondered since then,’ said Malkin. ‘What do you think the folk of Manchester would have said, if they’d known what was in their drinking water?’
Finally, the first patrol car bounced up the potholed road from Harrop. It had its headlights on as it climbed into the mist. George Malkin put his coat on, and walked with Cooper towards the car. ‘The Morrissev woman did you trust her?’ said Malkin.
./v
‘ Of course. I know some of her facts were w rong,’ said Cooper. ‘Frank Rainc gave her false information.’
‘That’s not what I meant at all. She’s known since Tuesday night how her grandfather died. She came here to ask me about the medal, so I told her.’
Cooper stopped suddenly. ‘The medal?’
422
‘I picked it up on the moor the night of the crash. It was in a little leather pouch, but with all the excitement ahout the money and the man on the ice, I forgot ahout it until later. Then I found it even had the airman’s name and address on a lahel stitched inside the pouch.
‘Sojoti sent her the medal.’
‘I sent it hack hccause I’d hottlcd the whole thing up long enough. It was when I finally knew that Florence was dying, and I needed to get it off my chest, I suppose. But I didn’t put my name on the letter — I just said 1 was one of those hoys who saw Danny McTcague walking away from the crash.’
Cooper’s face twisted, as a remcmhcrcd taste came to his mouth. It was that hitter, metallic taste, like hlood seeping from his saliva glands, a hittemess that jerked a spasm from his
throat. Alison Morrissev had been to Hollow Shaw after he had
^
let Malkin’s name drop on Tuesday, and since then she had known everything. The following morning she had been on a flight hack to Toronto. Had she been as single-minded as she had claimed? Had she been concerned only with her own ohsession, even as she had kissed him outside the Cavendish Hotel? Alison Morrissev
v
had failed to mention that she had been kissing him goodbye. But Diane Fry had been watching, and she had known. No doubt she thought she had been right about Morrissev all along.
‘It was all for Florence, you know,’ said Malkin. ‘She was the one real treasure that I had in my life, not the monev. 1 carried the guilt with me so long that I grew not to trust anybodv, in case they found out my secret. But Florence was the one person I never felt like that about. 1 trusted her and loved her, and I did what I could for her.’
A PC opened the door of the patrol car and Malkin ducked his head obediently to get in. Rut he paused and turned back towards Cooper.
‘It means a lot if there’s somebodv you can trust,’ he said. ‘Even if they make a mistake now and then, you know they’re genuine about what they do. Somebody like that is rare. If you re a clever lad, you’ll find somebody like that and hold on to them, if you can.’
Cooper stared at George Malkin wordlessly. Now it was really raining, and the sky was hidden somewhere behind grey clouds.
423
Cooper was jjlacl not to be able to sec the sky. He was glad not to he able to see the scornful laces of the sheep. He was particularly ^lacl not to he able to see the tongue-shaped buttress of black rock on the hill, with its reptilian curl and its ridges and crevices. Irontongue had destroyed too many lives. He couldn’t have tolerated its eternal derision.
‘By the way/ said Malkin, ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting the knife.’
He pulled a blade from his pocket and held it out to Cooper. It was very sharp and stained with blood.
‘My God. Hold on, I need to get a bag for it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Malkin. ‘It’s sheep blood. I used it for skinning dead lambs. It’s a messy job, but it had to be done. I couldn’t see the orphans being left without any mothers.’
After Malkin had been driven away, Ben Cooper stood and listened for a moment to the rain dripping through the mist on to the peat moor. The sound was somehow reassuring. It was a totallv natural cadence, a reminder that the world all around him continued as normal, no matter what happened in his own life. I he moisture still condensed in the chilly air as it always had, and the rain drops still smacked against the wet ground, just as they would if he ceased to e
xist in this moment, if he were to vanish into a little pool of slush like a melted snowman. The rain was one of nature’s primeval forces, oblivious to all human obsessions. The world that Ben Cooper moved in hardly impinged on it.
In the end, the secret of getting through life was to achieve the right perspective. At moments like these, all his own concerns seemed trivial. Back in Edendale, there were difhculties to face, pain to be dealt with, hard things to explain and a lot of work to be done to achieve any kind of reconciliation and forgiveness. But for as long as he could stand here listening to the rain on the moor, those problems and anxieties were so small in the scale of things that they could easilv
C”v v
be overcome; they could even be washed away in the rain. Out here, life was simple and painless.
Cooper nodded to himself. Then he pulled up his collar and turned away from Hollow Shaw Farm. And the sound of the rain on the peat moor slowly faded behind him as he walked back to the car.
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Document ID: 264fb691-7315-4653-a2c0-a351ed861324
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 29.7.2011
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Blood on the tongue bcadf-3 Page 48
