Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Jepson. ‘But can we move forward to January 1945?’

  ‘You need to know what sort of a man my grandfather was,’ said Morrissey.

  Cooper watched her eyes harden with a momentary anger as she spoke. Her age might have taken him by surprise, but he certainly hadn’t expected her to be so attractive. She had that style and confidence that made a woman stand out from the crowd. He was enjoying her display of assurance and pride. He was surprised that Jepson hadn’t softened to her more by now – he usually had a weakness for an attractive young woman himself. But the Chief must have hardened his heart, and once he did that, there was no way he would back down. This meeting could have only one possible outcome. Cooper was already beginning to feel sympathy for the Canadian woman. Jepson would let her go through her paces, but in the end, she was going to be disappointed.

  ‘This is a photograph of my grandfather,’ said Morrissey. She slid a picture across the table to the Chief Superintendent, then one to Cooper. She’d hardly looked at him so far, except for a quick glance of appraisal when they’d been introduced. He had the impression that she was a woman who knew exactly what she aimed to achieve, and who was most likely to be able to help her. Now, she fixed her gaze on Chief Superintendent Jepson again.

  ‘That photograph was taken when he was promoted to the rank of Pilot Officer on joining 223 Squadron,’ she said. ‘Because of his service, he was a year or two older than most of his crew. That’s why they called him “Granddad”.’

  The photo was something that the LIO hadn’t been able to produce for the files. Yet surely it must have been readily available, if it was an official RAF shot. Morrissey had been better organized, or had better help. Cooper glanced at Frank Baine. He’d heard of Baine vaguely. He recollected having seen a television programme the journalist had featured in, which had been commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain. The only thing Cooper remembered clearly from the programme was the fact that some of the Lancaster bombers used by the RAF during the Second World War had been built at a factory in Bamford, only a few miles from Edendale. Of course, the factory was long since gone, as were all the Lancasters it had produced. A woman who appeared on the programme had spoken of working on the aircraft as a girl, and of being told by an officious foreman in a bowler hat that if she made any mistakes she would be responsible for allowing the Germans to win the war.

  ‘I want you to look at the photograph,’ said Morrissey, ‘because you will be able to see how proud my grandfather was of his uniform.’

  Pilot Officer McTeague was immaculate in his RAF uniform, with his peaked cap, brand new hoops on his sleeve, and a medal on a ribbon pinned to his breast pocket. He stood almost to attention, with his arms at his side. His tie was perfectly straight, and there were sharp creases in his trouser legs. The uniform would have been blue, of course, though the photo was black and white. Probably the original print had been sepia – this looked like a computer-enhanced copy. It had brought out the features of McTeague’s face – a small, dark moustache, a proud smile, and a direct gaze at the camera from a pair of clear eyes. He was a good-looking man, who must have turned the heads of a few girls in uniform. And, yes, there was a definite resemblance in his eyes to the granddaughter who sat across the table from Cooper now.

  ‘He’s wearing his Distinguished Service Order, as you can see,’ said Morrissey.

  Jepson put his copy of the photograph down on his file. ‘January 1945,’ he said.

  Morrissey nodded. ‘On 7th January 1945, my grandfather was at the controls of Lancaster bomber SU-V,’ she said. ‘The crew called their aircraft Sugar Uncle Victor.’

  It was Frank Baine who took up the story. This was his expertise, his specialist field of knowledge. Baine had shaved his head, a fashion that had ousted the comb-over as a means of hiding the beginnings of baldness. As soon as he began to talk, Cooper saw why Alison Morrissey had brought Baine along. He hardly needed to refer to any notes to deliver the facts of what had happened on 7th January 1945. The facts as far as they were known, anyway.

  ‘Lancaster SU-V had suffered damage to the outer starboard engine from an attack by a German night-fighter during a bombing raid on Berlin,’ he said. ‘The engine had been replaced with a new one, and the crew were on a flight to test the new engine. It was routine – they were due to fly from their base at RAF Leadenhall in Nottinghamshire to RAF Branton in Lancashire. It was a distance of no more than a hundred miles. This crew had flown several operations over Germany and had returned safely. But something went wrong over Derbyshire. SU-V crashed on Irontongue Hill, ten miles from here. There were seven people on board. Five of them died in the impact.’

  Cooper found the crew list in front of him. Seven names. Only one of them was familiar so far – that of the pilot, Daniel McTeague. ‘Hang on a moment,’ he said. ‘Which crew members were killed?’

  ‘First of all, the wireless operator, Sergeant Harry Gregory,’ said Baine.

  ‘Yes.’ Cooper put a small cross next to his name on the list.

  ‘The bomb aimer, Bill Mee, the mid-upper gunner, Alec Hamilton, and the rear gunner, Dick Abbott, who were all British RAF sergeants.’

  ‘And one more?’

  ‘One of the Poles,’ said Baine. ‘The navigator. Pilot Officer Klemens Wach.’

  ‘Apart from McTeague, that leaves just one who survived,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘The last one then is the flight engineer. I’m not quite sure how to pronounce it …’

  ‘It’s Lukasz,’ said Baine. ‘Like goulash. The other survivor was Pilot Officer Zygmunt Lukasz.’

  Grace Lukasz noticed that Zygmunt showed no interest now in attending Dom Kombatanta, the Polish ex-servicemen’s club. She was glad about that. These days, the old soldiers and airmen seemed to talk of nothing else but war and death, as if the lives they’d lived over nearly six decades since 1945 had been telescoped into a fortnight’s leave from operational duties. She’d heard one former paratrooper who’d drunk too much vodka in the club one night say that he’d never been so alive as when he was facing death. And that’s what they were doing now, too – the old servicemen were standing by to climb on board for their last journey, their final venture into the unknown. This time, their transport would be a hearse.

  At one time, Zygmunt and his friends had taken an interest in British politics. They’d discussed endlessly what they thought was an amazing apathy on the part of the British themselves, who hardly seemed to want to bother voting, let alone listening to what the politicians had to say.

  ‘They haven’t been the same since Winston Churchill,’ Zygmunt had said one day.

  ‘Dad, that was nearly sixty years ago,’ said Peter.

  ‘That’s what I mean!’ said Zygmunt. ‘It’s been downhill ever since.’

  But that had been in the days when he would still speak English.

  The old man had a knack of making Grace feel foreign. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which she’d never quite got used to since marrying Peter. Before, her name had been Woodward, and she’d never even considered her national identity. She was British, and that meant you didn’t have to think about it. But suddenly one day, her name was Lukasz, and people treated her differently, as if she’d been re-born as a foreigner. Even people she’d known all her life and had been to school with seemed to imagine she might have forgotten how to speak English.

  And then, after the accident six years ago, Grace had found herself being glad to feel foreign. Now, when she went into a shop and people fell suddenly silent, she was able to believe that it was because they’d heard only her name and mentally labelled her as some kind of East European asylum seeker. There were plenty of asylum seekers now, in the guest houses in Buxton Road.

  Grace had read stories in the newspapers recently about groups of East European women and children visiting shops in local villages supposedly asking for directions and distracting the shopkeepers while th
eir children stole from the shelves. She had no doubt it was true. Most of these people were gypsies anyway, and Edendale had suffered its share of gypsy problems for many years. One year, a tribe of them had parked their lorries and caravans in a field next to Queen’s Park. From the corner of the Crescent, she’d been able to see their washing lines and their children playing in the hedge bottoms. She’d watched their dogs running wild and their rubbish piling up day by day in the corner of the field. It had been like watching the coming of winter and the dying of the landscape, like waiting and waiting for the first day of spring, when the sun eventually came out and it seemed possible to make things look neat and respectable again. She’d experienced the same sense of impotence, the same impatience, as she waited for an irritation to be gone from her life.

  But finally, one morning, the gypsies had departed before dawn, leaving a sea of mud in the field and litter of all kinds strewn down the banking towards the road. What did it matter to her where the gypsies went when they moved on? What did it matter to her where the snow went? The snow was absorbed back into the earth somehow, that was all that mattered. There was a cleansing rhythm to nature that she found comforting.

  Grace turned back to the room. Her eye immediately fell on the Lukasz family photograph in the alcove near the door. Herself and Peter, Zygmunt and Krystyna, with the grandchildren at their knees. She had once, before they were married, tried to persuade Peter to change their surname. She thought it would be best for their future children. A good alternative would have been Lucas, she’d said. It would only have been a change in spelling really - the pronunciation was almost the same. Peter had said no. He had said it in a tone of voice she hadn’t heard from him until then, a tone that made her hesitate, then decide not to argue. He’d never given her a reason, and she hadn’t asked, in the end.

  She looked at the face of the old man, Zygmunt, at the proud tilt of his head and the direct stare. Peter was becoming more and more like his father with age. Sometimes, if she watched him carefully, she saw a different look in her husband’s eyes when the old man called him ‘Piotr’. It was a look that she’d never been able to bring to his eyes, even in their most intimate moments. No matter how many times she whispered his name, she could never bring the same look of pride. The meaning wasn’t there for him in ‘Peter’ in the way it was when he heard his Polish name. For a moment, she wished she could do it by calling him ‘Piotr’ herself. But she knew it was too late to change a habit now.

  Grace went quickly to the window when she heard the sound of a car. A Ford had pulled up at her kerb beyond their hedge. She could see a man with fair hair in the driver’s seat. It wasn’t Andrew. A woman got out on the passenger side. She met Grace’s eyes for a moment. Then she turned away and walked to a house two doors down, while the driver waved and drove off. Grace let go of the breath she’d been holding. It wasn’t her either. Not yet.

  Frank Baine waited to be sure he still had their attention. Alison Morrissey had her gaze fixed on Chief Superintendent Jepson. She seemed to be trying to will the Chief to listen, though Cooper knew Jepson well enough to see that his brain had switched off already. Probably he’d decided in advance the amount of time he was prepared to give. Cooper wondered how fast the clock was ticking down.

  ‘Former Pilot Officer Zygmunt Lukasz is the sole surviving crew member of Sugar Uncle Victor,’ said Baine. ‘Lukasz was one of the youngest of the crew, but even he is seventy-eight now. As it happens, he lives here, in Edendale.’

  ‘No doubt you’ll be visiting him,’ said Jepson, as if suggesting there was no time like the present.

  ‘We have been in contact with the Lukasz family,’ said Baine. ‘It would be fair to say that they’re not keen to co-operate.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Jepson.

  ‘On the day of the crash, the skipper had filed a visual flight record with flight control, as was normal practice,’ said Baine. ‘He’d been briefed on broken clouds at two thousand feet and poor visibility. But somehow he went off course and found himself over the Peak District. He discovered the fact too late, when he nosed the aircraft down through the overcast to establish his position. Directly in front of him was Irontongue Hill. He never stood a chance of avoiding it.’

  ‘Five men died in the crash. There were two who survived.’

  ‘Yes, the seventh was the pilot, my grandfather,’ said Alison Morrissey. ‘After the crash, he was never found.’

  Cooper was ready for this. It was the whole point of the meeting, after all. The rest was just preamble. ‘He was listed as having deserted,’ he said. ‘In the air accident enquiry, he was also blamed for the crash.’

  Morrissey turned on him suddenly. ‘He was the pilot. He was in command of the aircraft. Since there was no evidence given of enemy action or mechanical fault, he was bound to take the blame. He was branded guilty by default. And there’s absolutely no evidence that my grandfather deserted. Absolutely none.’

  ‘But he was seen leaving the area,’ said Cooper.

  ‘No – he was not.’

  Chief Superintendent Jepson stirred slightly, his interest piqued by the suddenly raised voices. He studied the report that had been prepared for him by the Local Intelligence Officer. ‘According to my information, two young boys were spoken to, who said they’d seen an airman walking down the Blackbrook Reservoir road, from Irontongue Hill towards Glossop. That seems fairly conclusive.’

  ‘Their statement was crucial. I’d like to find them now to talk to them, but the boys aren’t named in the reports I have.’

  ‘That might be unfortunate from your point of view, Miss Morrissey, but they were only children, after all. Twelve years old, and eight. Why should they lie about something like that?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Also, it appears that a man in uniform was reported to have been seen heading away from the area later that day. In fact, he was picked up by a lorry driver on the A6 near Chinley. That was a perfectly normal thing for a driver to do at that time.’

  ‘The man was never positively identified as Pilot Officer McTeague,’ said Morrissey.

  ‘We used to do it until quite recently, in fact. But not for a few years.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Give lifts to servicemen. They would stand at the roadside with their kitbags and a sign saying where they were going, and motorists would stop for them. You could see what they were by their haircuts, because all the other young men of their age had long hair then, I can remember picking a few soldiers up myself on the M6 roundabout near Preston, in the days when I was serving with the Lancashire force. These days, though, you can’t trust anybody. You never know who might have got hold of an army uniform or a bit of equipment. Let them into your car and you could be mugged in a minute, or worse. I would advise members of the public against it, for their own safety.’

  Alison Morrissey stared at the Chief Superintendent, and Cooper saw her redden slightly. The extra colour made her look even more attractive, but Jepson didn’t seem to have noticed. He’d gone into public-meeting mode, as if he were addressing members of the Chamber of Commerce or a police liaison committee.

  ‘That man was never positively identified as my grandfather,’ repeated Morrissey.

  ‘Yes, I see that,’ said Jepson, looking at his report.

  ‘And how did he get to the A6? Let’s consider that for a moment. I’ve studied the maps of the area, and the place this man was picked up was over ten miles from the scene of the crash. Is my grandfather supposed to have walked all that way? And why didn’t anybody else see him earlier?’

  ‘It was dark,’ pointed out Cooper.

  The Canadian woman caught his eye. He had the feeling that, in different circumstances, she might have smiled.

  Jepson nodded at Cooper gratefully. ‘Of course it was. It was seven o’clock in the morning when the lorry driver picked him up. It’s still dark at that time in January round these parts. Ben knows, you see. He’s a local lad. There’s nothing like
a bit of local knowledge. It’s better than any number of bits of paper you can produce, Miss Morrissey.’

  The Chief Superintendent pushed the report aside, as if he didn’t need it any more, and beamed at Morrissey. Cooper recognized it as his politician’s smile, the one he normally only used for visiting members of the Police Authority when he was hoping they would go away and leave him in peace.

  ‘The lorry driver couldn’t even say that it was an airman’s uniform this person was wearing,’ said Morrissey, starting to sound a little desperate.

  Jepson pulled the report back towards him. He glanced at the first page, then at Cooper, who mouthed three words at him silently.

  ‘It was dark,’ said Jepson hesitantly. ‘Yes, of course it was – it was dark, as we’ve already established. Miss Morrissey, we can’t expect a lorry driver to have noticed details of a serviceman’s uniform in the dark. There were no street lights at that time, you know. There was –’

  ‘– a war on,’ said Morrissey. ‘Yes, I know.’

  Jepson steepled his fingers and looked round the meeting with some satisfaction, as if the point were proved. ‘Did you have any more information you wished to produce, Miss Morrissey? Any new information?’

  ‘My grandfather didn’t desert,’ said Morrissey quietly.

  ‘With respect,’ said Jepson, getting into his stride as he saw the home stretch appear, ‘I don’t think there’s anything you’ve told us that could be considered new. There is no reason to believe that anything happened to your grandfather other than that he left the scene of the crash before the rescue teams arrived, he hitched a lift from a lorry driver on the A6 and …’