Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  Finally, Marie Tennent existed only as a speck like a grain of sand floating in an oily residue of memories. Then they, too, swirled away into a hole in the back of her brain, and were gone.

  For the fifth time, Cooper turned to peer towards the corner of Hollowgate and High Street. The traffic lights had changed to green, but a queue of traffic was stuck in the middle of the junction.

  ‘Where’s the car?’ he said, feeling for the radio in his pocket, wondering whether it was worth worsening the mood of the control-room operators at West Street with a complaint about somebody else’s slow response. ‘It should have been here by now.’

  Eddie Kemp was wearing black wellies, with woollen socks rolled over the top of them, and his overcoat was long enough to have come back into fashion two or three times since he first bought it from the army surplus store, probably around 1975. Cooper thought he looked warm and comfortable. And no doubt his feet were as dry.

  ‘We could flag down a taxi, I suppose,’ said Kemp. ‘Or we could catch a bus. Have you got the right fare on you?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Cooper.

  Down the road, traffic was still moving on High Street. Cars crawled through white flurries that drifted across their headlights. An old lady in fur-lined boots picked her way over the snow in the gutter. For a moment, Cooper thought of his own mother. He had promised himself he would talk to her tonight, and make sure that she understood he was serious about moving out of Bridge End Farm. He would call in to see her when he finally went off duty.

  ‘I’m not walking all the way up that hill,’ said Kemp. ‘It’s not safe in these conditions. I might slip and injure myself. Then I could sue you. I could take the police for thousands of pounds.’

  Cooper wished he could distance himself from Kemp’s powerful smell, but he daren’t loosen his grip or shift from his eight-o’clock escort position at his prisoner’s left elbow.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘We’re waiting for the car.’

  He was aware of customers coming out of the café now and then, the doorbell clanging behind them. No doubt each one stopped for a moment in the doorway, staring at the two men on the kerb. Cooper shifted his weight to maintain his grip. He felt the slush in his left shoe squelch as he put his foot down.

  ‘Maybe the car’s broken down,’ said Kemp. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t start. These cold mornings play hell with cheap batteries, you know.’

  ‘They’ll be here soon.’

  On the far side of Hollowgate, shopkeepers were clearing the snow from the pavement in front of their shops, shovelling it into ugly heaps in the gutter. The beauty of snow vanished as soon as it was touched by the first footstep or the first spray of grit from a highways wagon. By daylight, it would be tarnished beyond recognition.

  ‘I have to tell you I’ve got a delicate respiratory system,’ said Kemp. ‘Very susceptible to the cold and damp, it is. I might need medical attention if I’m kept outside in these conditions too long.’

  ‘If you don’t keep quiet, I’m going to get annoyed.’

  ‘Bloody hell, what are you going to do? Shove a snowball down my neck?’

  A pair of flashing blue lights lit up the front of the town hall in the market square, just past the High Street junction. Cooper and Kemp both looked towards the lights. It was an ambulance. The driver was struggling to make his way through the lines of crawling cars.

  ‘That’s clever,’ said Kemp. ‘Sending for the ambulance first, before you beat me up.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Cooper.

  ‘If you took the cuffs off for a bit, I could use my mobile to phone the missus. She could get the sledge out and hitch up the dogs. They’re only corgis, but it’d be quicker than this performance.’

  Behind them, somebody laughed. Cooper looked over his shoulder. Three men were standing in front of the window of the café, leaning on the plate glass, with their hands in the pockets of their anoraks and combat jackets. They wore heavy boots, a couple of them with steel toecaps, like the safety boots worn by builders in case they dropped bricks or scaffolding on their feet. Three pairs of eyes met Cooper’s, with challenging stares. Four white males, aged between twenty-five and forty-five. Could be in possession of baseball bats or similar weapons. Approach with caution.

  Finally, Cooper’s radio crackled.

  ‘Sorry, DC Cooper,’ said the voice of the controller. ‘Your response unit has been delayed by a gridlock situation on Hulley Road. They’ll be with you as soon as possible, but they say it could be five minutes yet.’

  One of the men leaning against the window began to form a snowball between his gloved fists, squeezing it into the shape of a hand grenade with short, hard slaps.

  ‘Damn,’ said Cooper.

  Kemp turned his head and smiled. ‘Do you reckon we could go back inside and have another cup of tea?’ he said. ‘Only I think it’s starting to snow again. We could freeze to death out here.’

  By morning, Marie Tennent’s body had stiffened into a foetal position and was covered in frost, like a supermarket chicken. Ice crystals had formed in the valves of her heart and in her blood vessels. Her fingers and toes and the exposed parts of her face had turned white and brittle from frostbite.

  Nothing had disturbed Marie’s body during the night – not even the mountain hare that had pattered across her legs and squatted on her shoulder to scratch at patches of its fur. The hare was still brown and ragged, instead of in its winter camouflage white. It defecated on Marie’s neck and left a scattering of fur, dead skin cells and dying fleas for the pathologist to find. For a long while afterwards, Marie lay waiting, just as she had waited in life.

  Later in the morning, a patrolling Peak Park Ranger almost found Marie, but he stopped short of the summit when he saw more snow coming towards him in the blue-grey clouds rolling across Bleaklow Moor. He turned back to the shelter of the briefing centre in the valley, retracing his own footsteps, failing to notice the smaller tracks that ended suddenly a few yards up the hill.

  When the fresh snowfall came, it quickly covered Marie’s body, gently smoothing her out and softening her outline. By the end of the afternoon, she was no more than a minor bump in the miles of unending whiteness that lay on the moors above the Eden Valley.

  That night, the temperature dropped to minus sixteen on the exposed snowfields. Now there was no hurry for Marie to be found. She would keep.

  2

  Detective Sergeant Diane Fry knew she was going to die buried under an avalanche one day – an avalanche of pointless paperwork. It would be a tragic accident, resulting from the collapse of a single unstable box file under the weight of witness statements piled on top of it. The landslide would carry away her desk and swivel chair and smash them against the wall of the CID room like matchsticks. It would take days for the rescue teams to locate her body. When they did, she would be crushed beyond recognition, her bones flattened in the same way that the reports on her desk were even now pressing down on her brain.

  The piles of paper reminded her of something. She turned her head and looked out of the window, squinting to see past the condensation that streaked the panes. Oh yes. Snow. Outside, the stuff was piled as high and as white as the paperwork. She couldn’t decide which was worse.

  Then she felt the touch of warm air. It came from the noisy fan heater that she’d stolen from the scenes of crime department that morning before the SOCOs arrived for work. The paperwork was just about preferable. At least it meant she could stay in the warmth for a while. Only masochists and obsessives chose to wander the streets of Edendale on a morning like this. Ben Cooper, for example. No doubt Cooper was somewhere out there even now, conducting a one-man crusade to clean up crime, despite the icicles hanging off his ears.

  Soon, scenes of crime officers would be scouring the building for their missing heater. Eventually, she would have to give it up, unless she could find somewhere to hide it when she heard them coming. You could always tell when the SOCOs were coming by the sound of their grumbl
ing. But the heater was the only source of warmth in the room. Fry put a hand to the radiator on the wall. It was warm, but only faintly. It felt like a body that hadn’t quite cooled but had already gone into rigor mortis. No need to call in the pathologist for a verdict on that one. Dead for two hours, at least.

  She sniffed. A whiff of sausages and tomato sauce trickled down the room and settled on a burglary file that lay open on her desk. It was the sort of smell that was responsible for turning the walls that strange shade of green and for killing the flies whose bodies had lain grilling for months inside the covers of the fluorescent lights.

  ‘Gavin,’ she said.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Mmm-mmph-mm.’

  ‘I know you’re there somewhere – I can smell you.’

  A head appeared above a desk. It had sandy hair, a pink face, and dabs of tomato sauce on its lower lip. DC Gavin Murfin was the current bane of Diane Fry’s life – less temperamental than Cooper, but far more prone to dripping curry sauce on the floor of her car. Murfin was overweight, too, and a man in his forties really ought to think about what he was doing to his heart.

  ‘I was having some breakfast, like,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t you do it in the canteen, Gavin?’

  ‘No.’

  Fry sighed. ‘Oh, I forgot –’

  ‘We don’t have a canteen any more. We have to make our own arrangements. It says so on all the noticeboards. Twenty-two years I’ve been stationed here, and now they take the canteen away.’

  ‘So where did you get the sausage bap?’

  ‘The baker’s on West Street,’ said Murfin. ‘You should have said if you wanted one.’

  ‘Not likely. Do you realize how much cholesterol there is in that thing? Enough to turn your arteries solid. In another five minutes, you’ll be dead.’

  ‘Aye, with a bit of luck.’

  The smell of fried meat was doing strange things to Fry’s stomach. It was clenching and twitching in revulsion, as if food were something alien and disgusting to it.

  ‘There’s garlic in that sausage, too,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it’s their special.’

  Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens opened the door and seemed to be about to speak to Fry. He paused, came in, and looked around. He sniffed.

  ‘Tomato sauce? Garlic sausage?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Murfin, wiping his mouth with a sheet from a message pad. ‘Breakfast, sir.’

  ‘Mind you don’t drop any on those files, that’s all, Gavin. Last time you did that, the CPS thought we were sending them real bloodstains, just to make a point that we had sweated blood over the case.’

  Fry looked at Murfin. He was smiling. He was happy. She’d noticed that food did that for some people. Also DI Hitchens was looking a little less smartly dressed these days, a little heavier around the waist. It was four or five months since Hitchens had set up home with his girlfriend, the nurse. It was depressingly predictable how soon a man let himself go once he got a whiff of domestic life.

  ‘I only wanted to tell you Ben Cooper has called in,’ said the DI.

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ said Fry. ‘He’s joining the sick brigade.’ She looked at the empty desks in front of her. With leave, courses, abstractions and sickness, the CID office was starting to look like the home stand at Edendale Football Club. ‘What is it with Ben? Foot and Mouth? Bubonic plague?’

  ‘No. To be honest, I don’t remember Ben ever having a day off sick in his life.’

  ‘He can’t get into work because of the snow, then. Well, it’s his own fault for living in the back of beyond.’

  ‘That’s why he bought that four-wheel drive jeep thing,’ said Hitchens. ‘It gets him through where other people get stuck, he says.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ said Fry impatiently.

  ‘No problem. He’s made an arrest on the way in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He collared one of the double assault suspects. Apparently, Cooper came into town early and called in for the morning bulletins on the way. He was intending to stop for a coffee and found Kemp in the Starlight Café, so he made the arrest. Good work, eh? That’s the way to start the day.’

  ‘That’s Ben, all right,’ said Murfin. ‘Never off duty, that lad. He can’t even forget the job when he’s having breakfast. Personally, it’d give me indigestion.’

  ‘It isn’t being conscientious that gives you indigestion, Gavin,’ said Fry.

  ‘Watch it. You’ll upset Oliver.’

  Oliver was the rubber lobster that sat on Murfin’s desk. At a push of a button, it sang extracts from old pop songs with a vaguely nautical theme. ‘Sailing’, ‘Octopus’s Garden’, ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’. One day, Fry was going to make it into lobster paste and feed it to Murfin in a sandwich.

  ‘Look at that weather,’ said Hitchens. ‘Just what we need.’

  Fry stared out of the window again. The wind was blowing little flurries of snow off the neighbouring roofs. They hit the panes with wet splatters, then slid down the glass, smearing the grime on the outside. She couldn’t remember it ever snowing back home in Birmingham, not really. At least, it never seemed to have stuck when it landed. It certainly hadn’t built up in knee-high drifts. Maybe it had been something to do with the heat rising from the great sprawl of dual carriageways and high-rise flats she’d worked in, the comforting warmth of civilization. Her previous service in the West Midlands was a memory that she almost cherished now, whenever she looked out at the primitive arctic waste she’d condemned herself to. She’d left Birmingham without a farewell to her colleagues. She might as well have said: ‘I’m going out now. I may be some time.’

  ‘Well, there’s one thing to be said in its favour,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘At least the snow will keep the crime rate down.’

  And somewhere under the mountains of paper, Diane Fry’s telephone rang.

  Inside Grace Lukasz’s bungalow on the outskirts of Edendale, the central heating was turned up full in every room. Ever since the accident, Grace had been unable to bear the cold. Now, even in summer, she insisted on keeping the windows and doors closed, in case there was a draught. These days, her immobility meant that she felt the chill more than most, and she couldn’t tolerate discomfort. She saw no reason why she should.

  This morning Grace had been up and about early, as usual. She’d gone immediately to adjust the thermostat in the cupboard in the hallway, and had spent her time gazing with some satisfaction at the outside world beyond her windows, where her neighbours in Woodland Crescent were turning white with cold as they scraped the ice from their cars or slid and stumbled on the slippery pavements. Once, a woman from across the road had fallen flat on her back on her driveway, her handbag and her shopping flying everywhere. It had made Grace laugh, for a while.

  But now the stuffy heat in the bungalow caused her husband to frown and turn pink in the face the moment he arrived home from his night duty at the hospital, and it had spoiled Grace’s mood. Peter stamped his feet on the mat and threw his overcoat on the stand. Grace wanted to ask him her question straight away, right there by the door, but he wouldn’t meet her eye, and he brushed past her chair to get to the lounge door. With sharp tugs of her wrists, she backed and turned in the hallway, her left-hand wheel leaving one more scuff mark on the skirting board. Peter had left the door open for her from habit and she followed right behind him, glaring at his back, angry with him for walking away from her. He should know, after all this time, how much it infuriated her.

  ‘Did you phone the police?’ she said, more sharply now than she’d intended to speak to him.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  Grace glowered at her husband. But she said nothing, making the effort to keep her thoughts to herself. She knew him well enough to see that no purpose would be served by pressing him too hard. He would only say she was nagging him, and he would set his face in the opposite direction, just to demonstrate that he was hi
s own man, that he couldn’t be bullied by his wife. Sometimes he could be so stubborn. He was like an obstinate old dog that had to be coaxed with a bone.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose it would make any difference,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  Grace watched him wander off towards the sofa, tugging his tie loose. Within a few minutes he would have the TV remote control in his hand and his mind would be distracted by some inane quiz show. Peter always claimed that he needed to turn off his mind when he got home from a night at the hospital, that his brain was exhausted by the stress of his work. But it was never acknowledged that she might need to turn off from the things that had plagued her mind all day. No matter what she did, there was far too much time for brooding. She’d been used to looking forward to Peter’s return home as something to occupy her mind, but these days it never seemed to work.

  Peter had brought with him an odour of cold and damp from outside. The smell was on his coat and in his hair, and there had been snow on the shoes that he had left on the wet doormat. For the past few hours, the only thing Grace had been able to smell was the scorching of dust on the radiators, the invisible dust that gathered behind them where she couldn’t reach to clean. A few minutes before he came home, she’d sprayed the rooms with air freshener. But still he had brought in this unpleasant cold smell, and the world outside had entered the bungalow with him.

  ‘You know it wouldn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘You’re expecting too much, Grace. You’re getting things all out of proportion again.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  She swung the wheelchair towards the centre of the room and lowered her head to rub at her limp legs. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, waiting for a sign that he was weakening. Although he was stubborn, he was susceptible to the right tactics, like any man.

  Peter threw himself on the sofa and dug the remote from under a cushion. The set came on with a sizzle of static. There was news on – leading with a report on the effects of the bad weather across the country. Shots of children sledging and making snowmen were interspersed with clips showing lines of stranded cars, airport lounges packed with frustrated holidaymakers, railway travellers staring morosely at information boards, and snowploughs piling up snow twelve feet high by the side of a road in Scotland.