Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  Then Cooper laughed to himself. He was thinking all these things as if he were intending to investigate the fifty-seven-year-old mystery, which was ridiculous. The Chief had already sent the Canadian woman packing, and quite rightly. There was certainly no time to be spared on pointless sidelines, by himself or anyone else. He had more than enough to do. So what use would it be for him to know where Morrissey was staying? Why should he need to visit Walter Rowland? No reason at all.

  Thinking he’d finished the chapter on Sugar Uncle Victor, Cooper turned the page. He found himself looking at photographs of the wreckage taken shortly after the crash. Sections of broken fuselage lay in the snow, being examined by policemen and servicemen in long overcoats. The letters SU-V were clearly visible on the airframe in one shot. There was no sign of Irontongue Hill in the background, but the photographer had provided a distant glimpse over the moors to a glitter of water on Blackbrook Reservoir, which established the location beyond doubt.

  Then, with the next series of photos, the story suddenly took on a human dimension. The first picture was a ‘team line-up’ of the Lancaster crew – seven young men dressed in Irving suits and flying boots, with their fur collars turned up and the wires from their headsets dangling round their shoulders. They were standing in front of the fuselage of an aircraft, which was probably Uncle Victor himself. The sun was low and falling directly on the men, making their eyes narrow and their faces pale, like miners who had just emerged from underground into the light. They were managing smiles for the camera, though they looked exhausted.

  Cooper thought the comparison to miners wasn’t a bad one, because working in dangerous conditions forged a bond between men that was hard to break. These young airmen had flown thousands of miles in cramped and difficult conditions night after night, heading into hostile territory, with no idea whether they would make it back to base. And not one of them looked older than his early twenties.

  There was a picture of the ground crew and armourers getting the aircraft ready for its mission. This was definitely Uncle Victor, judging from the pawnbroker’s sign painted on the nose of the Lancaster – ‘Uncle’ being the common euphemism in those days for a pawnbroker. He noticed that the ground crew barely seemed to have a standard uniform – they wore leather jerkins, sea-boot socks, gumboots, battledress, oilskins, tunics, scarves, mittens, gloves, balaclavas.

  On the facing page was the most atmospheric picture of all. It had been taken inside the aircraft, and it was grainy and spattered with white specks where there had been dust on the negative. The curved interior structure of the aircraft could be seen, and the lettering on an Elsan chemical toilet. In the foreground, a young airman was half-turned towards the camera. His sergeant’s stripes were clearly visible on his arm, and he wore a leather flying helmet and the straps of a parachute harness over his uniform, so he must have been preparing for take-off.

  But the airman was surely no more than a boy. There was no caption to say who he was, and it was difficult to identify him as one of the men on the facing page. The photographs must have been taken at a different time, because this young man had a faint moustache, while the only airman in the group photograph with a moustache was identified as the pilot, Danny McTeague. This wasn’t McTeague. This young man had a prominent nose and a narrow face, and a small lock of dark hair that had escaped from under his flying helmet on to his forehead. Cooper decided he must be Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner. He’d been eighteen years old, and the crew had called him Lofty because he was only five foot six inches tall.

  Cooper stared at the photo for a long time, forgetting to read about the many other aircraft that had come to grief in the Dark Peak. He felt as if the young airman were somehow communicating with him across the distance of more than five decades. It didn’t seem all that long ago that he too had been the same age as this airman. Cooper could sense himself slipping into the young man’s place in the aircraft. He could feel the straps of the parachute over his shoulders and the rough uniform against his skin, hear the roaring of the four Merlin engines and feel the vibration of the primitive machine that would hurtle him into the air. He was eighteen years old, and he was frightened.

  Cooper was hardly aware of the vehicle recovery crew negotiating their truck into Beeley Street with lights flashing and diesel engine throbbing. His attention was taken up by trying to analyse his feelings about the photograph, so that he was hardly aware, even, of Gavin Murfin tapping on the window, unable to open the door because of the leaking trays he was balancing.

  When Murfin was back in the car, it immediately began to fill with smells of curry and boiled rice. The steam from the trays fogged the windows, so that Beeley Street and Eddie Kemp’s Isuzu gradually vanished in a fog.

  ‘Here’s your naan bread,’ said Murfin. ‘Dip in, if you want.’

  But the naan bread sat in his lap unopened, the grease gradually soaking through the paper on to his coat.

  Cooper finally realized that it was the look in the young man’s eyes that was completely different from the group picture. It was a look which made him unrecognizable from the line-up of smiling heroes. It was the blank, empty stare of a man who had no idea whether he would be coming back to his home base that night. The young man’s stare spoke of resignation at the prospect of sudden death as a German night-fighter raked Uncle Victor with machine-gun fire, or the Lancaster’s engines failed and they were forced to ditch in the icy North Sea. According to the text, Lancasters were notoriously difficult to escape from when they were in the water.

  In fact, that haunted look and the grey, grainy quality of the photograph made the airman appear almost as though he wasn’t there at all. He might have been no more than a faded image superimposed on the interior of the aircraft, the result of an accidental double exposure on the film.

  To Ben Cooper, it seemed that the photographer had captured a moment of presentiment and foreboding, a glimpse into the darkness of the near future. Sergeant Dick Abbott, only eighteen years old, looked as if he were already a ghost.

  9

  Back at West Street, Cooper dug through the paper that had been collecting on his desk until he found the file produced by the Local Intelligence Officer for the meeting with Alison Morrissey. It didn’t have anything like the amount of detail about the crash and the Lancaster’s crew that was in the book from Lawrence’s shop. But the LIO’s file did have one advantage – it had the names of the two boys who reported seeing the missing airman walking down the Blackbrook Reservoir road that night.

  Cooper had remembered that point, because Morrissey had complained during the meeting that she was unable to track them down since their names weren’t given in the reports. It hadn’t seemed wise to admit that he had the information in front of him. The Chief Superintendent would certainly not have approved of too apparent a willingness to assist. But it meant the LIO had done a good job collecting the information. Either that, or Alison Morrissey’s research was badly flawed.

  ‘Do you know Harrop, Gavin?’ he said.

  Murfin sniffed. ‘Godawful place. Back of the moon that is, Ben. That’s not where you’re thinking of moving to, is it?’

  ‘No. I don’t think I’ve ever been there.’

  ‘It’s up the top of the Snake Pass somewhere, on the way to Glossop.’

  ‘It must be over the other side of Irontongue Hill.’

  ‘That’s it. I bet they were cut off up there today all right. There’s no bus service in Harrop. No bus route, so no priority for the snowplough. Somebody will dig them out tomorrow, maybe.’

  The names of the boys were Edward and George Malkin, aged twelve and eight, of Hollow Shaw Farm, Harrop. From what Gavin said, Harrop sounded the sort of village where families might stay in one place, generation after generation of them sometimes. Cooper found a telephone directory. Sure enough, there was a G. Malkin still listed at Hollow Shaw Farm. There seemed a good chance that this was the same George Malkin, then aged eight, now sixty-five.

&nbs
p; ‘Knocking off, Ben?’ said Murfin. ‘Fancy a pint?’

  ‘I’d love to, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘But I’ve got things to do. Places to look at.’

  ‘Ah, the pleasures of house-hunting. It kind of ruins your social life, like.’

  Cooper drove westwards out of Edendale. He climbed the Snake Pass and descended again almost into Glossop before he turned north and skirted the outlying expanses of peat moor around Irontongue Hill. The buttress of rock on top of the hill was a familiar sight to him, as it was prominently visible on a good day from the A57. The rock was certainly tongue-shaped when you looked at it from this direction, with ridges and crevices furrowing its dark surface. It wasn’t a human tongue, though. There was something reptilian about its length and the suggestion of a curl at the tip. And it was colder and harder than iron, too – it was the dark rock that millstones had been made out of, the sort of rock that the weather barely seemed touch, even over centuries. The wind and rain had merely smoothed its edges, where the tongue lay on the broken teeth of volcanic debris.

  Tonight, Irontongue was visible even in the dark. It uncoiled from the snow-covered slopes to poke at the sky, with dribbles of white lying in its cracks.

  Cooper found that Harrop was barely big enough to be called a village, yet the roads were clear enough of snow for the Toyota to have no problems. Above Harrop there was a scatter of farms and homesteads with those austere Dark Peak names – Slack House, Whiterakes, Red Mires, Mount Famine and Stubbins. They clung to the edges of the mountain like burrs on the fur of a sleeping dog.

  The lane up to Hollow Shaw Farm passed a single modern bungalow and an isolated row of stone cottages. Past the bungalow, the lane was no longer tarmacked. After the cottages, it ceased to have any surface at all. Cooper hadn’t seen any street lights for the last few miles. He had to slow the Toyota to a crawl and swing the steering wheel from side to side to avoid the worst of the potholes, but in the total darkness he couldn’t see some of the holes until he was almost in them. It was sudden death for suspension systems up here. This was the sort of lane that delivery drivers and salesmen would avoid like the plague, the kind of track that people needed a good reason to live at the end of. As he climbed to Hollow Shaw, Cooper wondered what George Malkin’s reason might be.

  He parked in front of the old farmhouse and got out. A few yards away, a man was leaning on a wall. It was so quiet here that Cooper could hear rustling from the field on the other side of the wall, and the faint snorting of a flock of sheep. Somewhere in that direction must be Blackbrook Reservoir. He knew it wasn’t a large reservoir like those in the flooded valleys, where the vast stretches of Ladybower and Derwent attracted the tourists. Blackbrook was small and self-contained, just enough at one time to supply drinking water for the eastern fringes of Manchester.

  ‘Mr Malkin?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Aye. That’ll be me.’

  Cooper made his way across the garden to where the man stood. Malkin was wearing a pair of blue overalls and a black anorak, and a cap like a lumberjack’s, with woollen ear-flaps. Cooper thought at first that he was bundled up with sweaters round his waist, but when Malkin moved he saw that the man was actually pear-shaped, with wide hips like someone who hadn’t ever got enough exercise. Cooper introduced himself.

  ‘I wonder if you could spare a few minutes, Mr Malkin? Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘You’d better come in the house.’

  This was one farmhouse that had never been converted to the standards of modern living. There was no double glazing and no central heating – a spiral of smoke from the chimney testified that there was still at least one coal fire inside. The last modernization had been in the 1960s by the look of the front door panelled with frosted glass and the blue linoleum visible in the hallway.

  Malkin took off his anorak and cap. His skin was weathered and he looked like someone old before his time. George Malkin had been eight years old when the Lancaster crashed, so he could only recently have started drawing his pension.

  ‘Excuse the mess,’ said Malkin. ‘I don’t get a lot of visitors.’

  Cooper shivered. There was an unrelenting coldness in the house. Partly, it was the sort of chill that came from years of inadequate heating and a Pennine dampness that had soaked into the stone walls. And now the winds that spiralled down off Kinder and moaned through the empty fields had found their way into Malkin’s house for the winter. The draught had crept under the back door and slithered through gaps in the frames of the sash windows, wrapping itself round the furniture and draping the walls in invisible folds. The chill seemed to Cooper like a solid thing. It moved of its own accord, butting against his neck as he walked across the room, and hanging in front of him in every doorway, like a wet curtain.

  ‘It’s none too warm today,’ said Malkin, watching Cooper turning himself slowly in front of the fire in an effort to absorb some warmth from the flames.

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘This old house takes a bit of heating in the winter. But I suppose I’ve got used to it. I grew up here, you see, and lived here all my life. I’ve never known any different. They reckon your blood gets thinner – to compensate, like.’

  There was no escape from the chill anywhere. Even when Cooper stood directly in front of the coal fire, there was only warmth on one side. The cold still fastened to his back like a parasite, draining his body heat and sucking at his kidneys. Its presence was part of the house, an icy phantom that would need exorcizing with central heating, double glazing and a good damp-proof course.

  ‘You certainly get a bit of weather up here. Do you get snowed in much?’

  ‘Oh, aye. It’s the first place that gets filled in when it snows. It comes down the valley there, you see, and the hills funnel it right into Harrop. When there’s a bit of wind behind it, there are some grand drifts to be seen down here. You should have been here in the winter of 78. That was a winter and a half, if you like. We lost our car for days on end. A Ford Escort it was, as I recall. When we finally dug it out, the engine compartment was solid with frozen snow. Aye, there were people walking along the toppings of the stone walls out the front here, because the lane was so deep in snow the walls were the only solid surface you could see for miles.’

  ‘Actually, I do remember it,’ said Cooper. He had, after all, been six years old at the time, and he’d missed school for a few days. Probably he hadn’t been let out in the snow at all, but had watched it from his bedroom window with his nose pressed to the cold glass, drawing patterns on the frost on the inside. Perhaps his parents had finally allowed him to go out when most of the snow had gone. He remembered being pelted by his brother Matt with snowballs that felt as hard as mahogany when they hit him, but which melted into cold, wet slush inside the hood of his anorak and ran down the back of his neck. There hadn’t been snow like that since then, as far as he could remember. Not real snow.

  ‘Come on through to the room,’ said Malkin. ‘Get yourself warm.’

  What Malkin called ‘the room’ was a kind of sitting room, dominated by a large oak table. Its legs only stood on a carpet at one end. At the other, the carpet had been rolled back to expose the bare floorboards, which looked as though they were still drying out from recent damp. Because the boards were old, there were large gaps between them. Where Cooper stood, he could feel icy draughts rising around him as if he were standing on top of an open chest freezer. A bottle of milk and an unsliced loaf of bread stood on the window ledge alongside some steel cutlery, and several weeks’ worth of old newspapers were stacked near an old armchair under a standard lamp. An oil painting on the wall showed a herd of brown cattle against a sombre winter landscape. The mountains behind the cows looked more Switzerland than Derbyshire. Real peaks.

  ‘Fancy anybody remembering the Lancaster crash,’ said Malkin. ‘A long time ago, that was.’

  ‘Fifty-seven years,’ said Cooper, trying to find a patch of carpet to stand on.

  ‘I was only eight years old then.
’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten, though, have you?’

  ‘No, of course I haven’t forgotten. It made a big impression on me. Those things do, when you’re that age. I’m getting so as I can’t remember what I did five minutes ago, but I remember that plane crash as clearly as if I was there now.’

  ‘You’re not all that old,’ said Cooper. ‘Sixty-five? It’s nothing these days. Retirement age, that’s all.’

  ‘Retirement? They retired me a few years back. These days, you’re useless long before you get to sixty-five.’

  A mantelpiece supported ornaments, knick-knacks and assorted junk, and there was a television set standing on what might have been a Victorian aspidistra stand. In an alcove, an electric socket had been pulled out of the skirting board and the wires had been left hanging.

  ‘You were a farmer, weren’t you?’ said Cooper.

  Malkin laughed. He had a rattling laugh, with phlegm shifting noisily in his throat. ‘Farmworker. Hired labour, that’s all. Shepherd I was, and a good ‘un, too. But it doesn’t matter how good you are at your trade when it comes down to cutting costs. It’s the hired labour that goes first. Sixty-five? Maybe. But it’s not a matter of how many years you’ve lived. It’s carrying on doing something useful that stops you being old. The minute you stop being useful, you might as well be dead.’

  Malkin’s middle-aged spread and the roundness of his belly were emphasized by the tightness of a hand-knitted green sweater that must have been a size too small even when it was made. Of course, farmers weren’t as physically active as they used to be. They could spend days sitting in the heated cab of a tractor or combine harvester, hours punching buttons on feed mixers or filling in endless paperwork. Just like coppers, in fact. A modern farmer didn’t toss bales of hay or carry stranded sheep on his back any more than a bobby was expected to pound the beat or pursue a suspect on foot. Modern methods made for a different shape of man – a man with a body moulded to the shape of padded seats and computer workstations.