Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  And now the division had not just one body, not even two bodies – but maybe three, if the missing baby didn’t turn up soon. One body was bad, and two was unlucky. Three would be a catastrophe. In fact, three was a whole mad rush of bodies. Chief Superintendent Jepson felt he could see them toppling towards him like a set of skittles, or like mummies tumbling out of their coffins and landing at his feet, grinning up at him from their wrappings. It seemed as though there were bodies littering the landscape everywhere. They were worse than the abandoned cars, worse than the police officers with sprained backs laid out flat on their settees at home, who ought to have been dead but weren’t.

  Intelligence-led policing methods ought to enable him to direct a solitary officer to the right addresses with a sheaf of arrest warrants in his hand. But intelligence had grown tired of doing all the leading and had trotted off in the opposite direction, where it would no doubt get lost on the moors in the dark and fall over a cliff.

  ‘So who have we got available?’ he said, opening his eyes just enough to examine the expression on DI Hitchens’ face. The Chief was seeking enough evidence of insolence from the DI to justify losing his temper. But, as usual, Hitchens knew how to tread the line.

  ‘The underwater section is at full strength,’ said the DI. ‘Otherwise, we have three traffic wardens. After all, there’s not much else for them to do – the snow is covering up all the yellow lines.’

  Jepson let out a sound more like a whimper than a sigh. ‘That isn’t funny,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you know yourself, Chief, that we’ve been talking about putting the division on emergency-only response.’

  ‘I never thought it would seriously come to this. But a double assault, two bodies and a missing baby, on top of everything else …’

  ‘And there’s the ambulance, of course,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘What ambulance?’

  ‘I’m surprised the press boys haven’t been on to this one yet. It’s the sort of story they love. They’re bound to see it as another opportunity to bash the police – I can see the headlines now in the Eden Valley Times.’

  ‘What ambulance?’ said Jepson.

  ‘Maybe it’s a bit too early for the reporters, though. I expect we’ll be inundated with them later on. Oh, and uniformed section say a couple of photographers turned up at the scene, so I suppose we can look forward to some pictures on the front pages, too.’

  ‘What ambulance?’

  ‘Sorry, Chief. I mean the ambulance that ran into one of our traffic cars on Buxton Road. There wasn’t a lot of damage to the vehicles, mind you. It was just a shunt, really. A buckled boot on the Vauxhall and a cracked radiator on the ambulance.’

  Jepson closed his eyes again. ‘Tell me there wasn’t a patient in the back of the ambulance.’

  ‘There wasn’t a patient in the back of the ambulance, Chief.’

  The Chief Superintendent’s eyes popped open in amazement. ‘There wasn’t?’

  ‘Actually, there was. I was lying.’

  ‘Oh Jesus. But hold on – a buckled boot? The ambulance went into the back of our vehicle? So it wasn’t our driver’s fault. That’s some consolation. He had to brake a bit suddenly, perhaps?’

  ‘You might say that,’ said Hitchens. ‘I suppose.’

  Jepson ran a hand across his chest, feeling for movement under his shirt. He held it over the spot where he thought his heart ought to be. His fingers flickered, as if tapping out a beat. It was an irregular beat, more syncopation than rhythm. There was a faint answering flutter. He was still alive.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that the driver of the damaged milk tanker might tell a different story when it comes to court.’

  ‘I think you can tell me the rest later.’ The Chief Superintendent looked at Diane Fry, who was standing by impatiently. ‘This woman they found, the suicide case –’

  But Hitchens hadn’t finished. ‘They haven’t managed to get the tanker out of the ditch yet,’ he said. ‘There’s milk all over the road. Frozen solid it is, too, like a giant slab of vanilla ice cream. I’m told it looks delicious.’

  Fry stirred restlessly at the DI’s interruption. ‘You mean Marie Tennent, the woman on Irontongue Hill, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jepson. ‘What can you tell us about that, Fry?’

  ‘It’s an unusual way to choose to commit suicide,’ she said. ‘But perfectly effective, if that’s what she did. There was no way she would have survived the night. She wasn’t dressed for it, for a start. And she seems to have made no attempt to save herself. As far as we can tell, she simply lay down and froze to death.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be my choice of a way to die,’ said Jepson, as if he’d already spent some time weighing up his personal options.

  ‘Marie Tennent was aged twenty-eight. She’d been working as a shop assistant until the baby was near. Her GP confirms she was in a nervous state about the baby, even before it was born. Who knows what goes through the mind of a woman in that state? Maybe she found the responsibility too much and couldn’t face it.’

  ‘She didn’t leave a note?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a problem. The coroner won’t bring in a suicide verdict without a note, or at least some conclusive evidence from her family or close friends about her state of mind. And this Marie Tennent has no husband, I suppose?’

  Fry didn’t even bother to answer that question. ‘The main problem is the baby,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to find it dead somewhere. The question then will be whether it died before the mother or after.’

  Jepson sighed. ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’

  ‘No neighbours came forward to report Marie missing. She has no family locally, but we’ve traced her mother in Scotland. She says the baby’s name is Chloe, and she’s only six weeks old.’

  The baby’s fate would be causing concern everywhere. In the morning the newspapers would be asking: ‘Have you seen Baby Chloe?’ The publicity would be their best hope of an early result.

  ‘And there’s no husband?’ said Jepson. ‘No fiancé? A boyfriend maybe?’

  ‘Not that we can find so far.’

  ‘There must be someone, Fry. I mean, nine months ago, there must have been someone.’

  Fry shrugged. ‘It was probably another case of a Saturday night out in Sheffield.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘That’s what some women tell the Child Support Agency when they ask who the father was. They say they don’t know, that it was just a night out in Sheffield.’

  ‘Jesus. A Saturday night out in Sheffield? In my day, all that meant was that you woke up next morning with a hangover. Or a bit of vomit on your shoes, at worst.’

  ‘With respect, sir, you were a man.’

  Jepson smiled tiredly. ‘So I was, Fry, so I was. You must have been looking at my medical records. But don’t they have a “morning-after” pill these days?’

  Fry laughed. ‘Yes. And they’ve had condoms for decades, and lots of other methods of contraception too. I suppose I don’t have to mention that the man could have exercised some responsibility …’

  ‘All right, all right. Did Social Services have no reports of any potential problems with this woman?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And we weren’t involved anywhere along the line? There was no information received from neighbours worried about her welfare? No anonymous tip-offs about babies that had suddenly gone missing? Please tell me there weren’t any reports that we never got round to following up.’

  ‘I haven’t checked yet, sir.’

  ‘Better do it sooner rather than later, Fry, before someone goes to the press with that as well. Two dead bodies are enough. That’s all we need right now.’

  ‘The patient in the ambulance died, by the way,’ said Hitchens.

  The Chief Superintendent was so still and pale for a few moments that Fry began to wonder whether she ought to start cardiac massage. Then Jepson
stirred. When he spoke, it was clear he’d decided to ignore the ambulance.

  ‘Thank God we got rid of the Canadian woman. The last thing we need is that sort of distraction.’

  ‘But Marie Tennent,’ said Fry, ‘we need to find out who she left the baby with. And how do we know for certain she left it with anyone?’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘And where’s the damn father?’ said Jepson.

  ‘Marie’s mother might give us some clues,’ said Fry. ‘She’s arriving tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Diane, you’ve got another case here,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Thank you. I was so hoping you’d say that.’

  ‘Use available resources where they’re needed most,’ said Jepson, like man repeating a mantra.

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’ asked Fry. She looked at the DI.

  ‘It means you get half a traffic warden,’ said Hitchens.

  Jepson tried breathing deeply through his nose, filling his lungs with oxygen until his head became pleasantly light.

  ‘You can tell me about the ambulance now,’ he said.

  On the television monitor, a street scene appeared. Cooper recognized it as Fargate, with the antique shops in the Buttercross area in the background. Two figures were visible, waiting to cross the road. There was no snow on the ground. The display gave the date as 8th January, and the time was 01:48.

  One of the figures in the CCTV footage was a tall, slim, white youth of about eighteen with a prominent nose and an aggressive haircut. He was followed across Fargate by an Asian of the same age, less tall and wearing a heavily padded jacket that made it impossible to judge his build. They walked with a kind of overly casual swagger that suggested they’d been fuelled by alcohol to an artificially heightened bravado.

  When they reached the antique shops in the Buttercross, one of the youths tapped the other on the arm as they came up behind a third figure, someone heavier and slower. The two youths broke into a run over the last few yards and pounced on their victim, fists flying. What they intended wasn’t clear – whether it was an attempted mugging, or merely a moment of casual violence. But their attack didn’t last long. They were near the corner of one of the shops, where Cooper knew there was an alleyway leading up towards the Underbank area. And suddenly there were more figures appearing from the alley, and the two youths were in the middle of a melee.

  Cooper cursed the lighting that threw too many shadows on faces and washed out the colours of clothes. It was impossible to be sure how many newcomers were involved in the attack, but there were at least three. The white youth pulled something from his coat that looked like a knife, and a weapon that might have been a baseball bat was swung at him. Cooper saw one youth go down, then the other, and a boot connected with someone’s ribs so hard you could almost hear the thud on the videotape.

  The fracas was over quickly. It was going to be very difficult to sort out who did what, even if anybody could be identified. Cooper knew Eddie Kemp, but he couldn’t be sure that he was among the group that had been lurking in the shadows.

  He’d almost stopped the tape when he saw a group appear further up the road, walking away from the camera. There were four of them, probably all male, and it was possible they had cut through one of the alleyways to avoid passing in the direct line of the CCTV surveillance. There were cars parked by the roadside, but the group had disappeared from view before they could be seen approaching a particular vehicle.

  Cooper re-wound the tape. At accelerated speed, the group backed down the street, and the two youths stood up and drew back. When he ran the tape forward again, he confirmed what he’d glimpsed the first time. There was a second when one of the men walking away turned to look back over his shoulder at the youths, and his face was partially exposed to the light from a street lamp. The picture would be grainy, but the frame was good enough to be usable in court. Eddie Kemp would have a lot of talking to do to get out of this one.

  The air cadets found the wreckage easily. There was no mistaking it once it appeared out of the snow. For a while they poked around the scattered pieces. There was probably more under the snow, but the smaller fragments would not re-appear until the thaw. The cadets were growing colder and more unhappy as they watched Flight Sergeant Josh Mason clamber over the undercarriage and sit astride an engine casing. He waved his arms like a rodeo cowboy.

  ‘Watch me ride this bugger!’

  ‘Can’t we go back now?’ said Sharon Thompson.

  ‘Don’t you want to look at it, now we’re here? It’s a Lancaster bomber. You won’t see one of these very often. Do you know how many pounds of bombs these babies carried?’

  Mason tugged at the wing section, lifting it an inch or two from the ground, revealing a dark cavity between mounds of peat, and a trickle of gritty sand. Then he stopped and braced himself against the weight, his cagoule flapping suddenly in a spiral of wind.

  ‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘I think they missed one of the crew!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There are bones under here. It’s a skeleton! A dead body.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft.’

  ‘It’s a missing airman from 1945.’

  The cadets laughed uneasily. They knew Mason had found nothing more than the remains of a sick sheep or abandoned lamb that had crawled under the wing section to die.

  With a grunt, Mason heaved up the wing. Peat dribbled from the underside of the metal in dark, wet gobbets. Reluctantly, the others moved closer, prepared to humour him for a minute or two longer as he play-acted over a dead sheep.

  The bones lay in a hollow where the wing section had protected them from the weather and the attention of scavengers. They appeared to be almost intact – the skull still attached to a fragile neck, the thin bones of the limbs still jointed in the proper places, and tatters of skin still hanging from the ribcage and the lower legs. But the cadets could see that the body was too small to be a sheep. And it wasn’t curly grey wool they could see clinging to the decomposed skin of the skull but something man-made and far more shocking. It was something that cried out to them from the dark peat.

  With a jerk, Mason let go of the wing. There was a thud and a scatter of wet snow across their boots as it slammed back into place, plunging the tiny skeleton again into darkness. The cadets gasped in horror, shuffled backwards, and shook their heads to clear the image. Then they stared up at Josh Mason, as if he alone were responsible for putting the picture in their minds.

  But they’d all looked at the bones under the wing. And they’d all seen the white knitted jacket and the ridiculous pink bonnet. They’d seen quite enough to know that the flaps of the bonnet were designed to cover the tiny ears of a human baby.

  15

  Today there seemed to Cooper to be even more books in Lawrence Daley’s shop, if that were possible. Could they have been secretly breeding overnight? Or was it only a different arrangement that made the stacks look dangerously unstable?

  ‘It seems to me these book are just taking up space,’ said Cooper when Lawrence emerged from the back of the shop. ‘You said yourself you don’t have enough room to get new stock in.’

  ‘That’s not the point at all.’ Lawrence sighed and wiped his forehead with a sleeve. He sat down on a wobbly pile of ageing volumes. Near the top were Observations in the Field from the Lower Derwent Valley and A Comprehensive Record of Bird Migration in Western Derbyshire 1925–1930. Lawrence had a coating of brown dust on the lenses of his glasses, which must have made the books all around him look mustier than ever.

  ‘So what is the point, then?’ said Cooper.

  ‘The point is that the old books are the ones my customers expect to see in the shop. They come for the character of the place, don’t you see? The ambience. They like to touch the books and soak up the feel and the spirit of them. Do you think that customer yesterday would have come in here at all if I were selling Harry Potters instead of this stuff?’

  ‘No, but …’

&nbs
p; ‘It’s all about targeting. Finding your niche. You’ve got to identify the needs of your own unique marketplace and cater for its specific requirements.’

  ‘You’ve been reading magazine articles,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes, there was a feature in last week’s issue of The Bookseller about the survival of independents,’ said Lawrence. ‘Basically, it said I had to identify my niche market or die. Unfortunately, it seems the people who constitute my niche market don’t actually want to buy books. They just want to browse among dusty old tomes, with handwritten prices that say “three shillings and sixpence”. It’s part of the visitor experience.’

  Cooper picked up one of the booklets published by the Edendale Historical Society. It was called ‘Folk Customs of the Eden Valley’. ‘Marketing strategies, eh? We get those sort of articles in the Police Gazette, too,’ he said.

  ‘Oh? And what are customers in your niche market looking for, pray?’

  ‘Pretty much the same, I suppose – image and no substance.’

  Lawrence laughed. ‘Do you want a coffee? That’s something else I provide free, along with the ambience.’

  ‘Yes, as long as it comes with a bit of information on the side.’

  The bookseller rolled his eyes. ‘Well, fancy that – a policeman wanting information. You’re sure a chocolate digestive wouldn’t do instead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I could stretch to a jammy dodger, if you smile at me nicely, young man.’

  ‘White with no sugar, thanks,’ said Cooper.

  Lawrence passed him a roll of adhesive labels and a ballpoint pen. ‘Make yourself useful then, while I put the kettle on.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You can price up some of these books.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Lawrence … I don’t know the first thing about the price of antiquarian books.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, put what you like. It’s bound to be more accurate than three shillings and sixpence, isn’t it?’

  Lawrence trotted through into the back of the shop in a sudden waft of body spray. Cooper caught a glimpse of a tiny kitchen area. He looked at the labels and the nearest pile of books. He shrugged. Then he began to stick labels on the covers of the books, adding handwritten prices. He varied the amount between £1 and £5, according to the size and thickness of the volume. Cooper had a vague idea that the age and rarity of the book ought to count towards the price, too, but it was too complicated for him. He hoped that some poverty-stricken book-lover might benefit one day by discovering a terrific bargain in the Natural History section of Eden Valley Books. Perhaps he could suggest to Lawrence that it would be a selling point. He could put a sign in the window – Books priced by Ben Cooper. Don’t miss this sensational opportunity while stocks last! On the other hand, putting anything at all in the bare windows of Eden Valley Books might spoil the ambience.