Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  Finally, he realized why his thoughts were running on so fast. He was babbling to himself to cover the silence in the house. He’d never known a silent house in his life. He had a foreboding of how depressing, how desperate, even how frightening it would be to come home every night to a dark and empty house. Every evening, the post would still be lying on the doormat where it had fallen in the morning. A single unwashed coffee mug would be in the sink where he’d left it after breakfast because he’d been in a rush to get to work again. The house would have that feel of having gone along in its own world without him all day, that his presence in it was unnecessary, maybe even unwelcome. That wasn’t what you would call a home.

  The first taste of loneliness was sour and unexpected, a burst of metallic bitterness on the back of his tongue. He remembered once breaking a tooth playing rugby at school, when he’d got a boot in the face attempting a foolhardy tackle. The sudden gush of blood in his mouth had given him a moment of cold panic and made him feel nauseous. He’d felt the taste of his own life trickling between his teeth and mingling with his saliva. Loneliness was like that taste. Just like the bitterness of the blood on his tongue.

  The sound of every little movement made by the cat was reassuring. The touch of its claws on the tiles in the conservatory, the rustling as it changed position in its basket, even the faint snore when it was sleeping. These were now the sounds he listened for. Without them, the house would have been dead and hostile. Like a narrow crack of light entering his brain, he thought he had an inkling for the first time of why Diane Fry spent so much time at work.

  The cat had moved up on him silently and sat watching him from the arm of a chair. When Cooper stroked its fur, he felt the sharp sting of static electricity, and the animal flinched away from his hand. The air was very dry. There would be another frost tonight.

  21

  Every morning when Fry opened the door of her car she had to vacuum bits of polystyrene carton and fragments of greasy paper off the floor. She also had to spray air freshener inside until it was so thick she was forced to open the windows to prevent herself from suffocating. Sunday morning was no exception. The traces of Gavin Murfin lingered all weekend. She was sure Murfin used food as a means of avoiding talking to her when they were in the car. Ben Cooper at least had some conversation. He didn’t have to buy a singing lobster to do his talking for him.

  This Sunday morning, Fry finished cleaning out her car to find that her mobile was ringing and ringing. It was DI Hitchens.

  ‘Diane, you’d better get into the office right away,’ he said. ‘Before the shit hits the fan.’

  The Cavendish wasn’t exactly the newest hotel in Edendale. There was the Holiday Inn on the roundabout at the end of the relief road, and the Travel Lodge in Eyre Street. And now there was the recent conversion of the old Conservative Club, with its portraits of Margaret Thatcher and John Major still hanging on the wall in the bar as historical souvenirs, like the heads of stags that had been shot and stuffed. But the Cavendish was the hotel that had ‘character’, according to the tourist brochures. It was the one where a waiter would bring you a copy of The Times as you relaxed in a leather armchair in the residents’ lounge. It was the one where the Rotary Club held its charity dinners at £80 a head. In front of the hotel, there were iron railings painted green and topped with spikes. In most towns such ironwork had disappeared long ago, ripped up during the Second World War to make weapons. Somehow they’d escaped this fate in Edendale.

  Cooper found Alison Morrissey waiting for him on the steps of the Cavendish. The morning was cold, but not unpleasant. It felt as though there could be rain at any time, which would at least wash away the snow still lying in the gutters and on the hillsides rising out of the town.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure you would. I didn’t think they would let you.’

  ‘I’m off duty today. I can do what I like.’

  ‘You can probably guess what I’m going to say.’

  ‘Yes. But the reason I came is that I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding.’

  ‘Misunderstanding? I’ve had to accept that the Derbyshire police weren’t going to offer any assistance. I hadn’t realized you would actively try to interfere and obstruct me.’

  ‘That isn’t the case,’ said Cooper.

  ‘No? You visited the Lukasz family before I could get to them. And then you went to see Mr Rowland. Don’t try to tell me it’s a coincidence. You’re trying to thwart me. Your chiefs don’t want me to talk to these people. They’d like me to get so frustrated that I give up and go back home. They’ve sent you to hinder me, to make sure that happens.’

  Cooper felt himself shuffling his feet with embarrassment and tried to pretend that he was stamping them against the cold.

  ‘I’ve had no instructions to do anything like that,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ Alison hesitated. ‘But you’re the man to do it, aren’t you? You talk the same language as these people. Every time you get there before I do, you make me seem so much more of an alien. They hear my accent and they shut up, like I’m a foreign spy. You’d think it was still wartime as far as they’re concerned. Careless talk costs lives. They’re still carrying the motto with them. Don’t they know we were on their side?’

  ‘It isn’t like that,’ said Cooper. ‘They’re naturally reticent people. You have to work a bit harder to get them to talk to you.’

  ‘Yeah? It seems to me they’re still living in the war. Suspicious isn’t the word.’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But you’re the one obsessed with the war. It’s been over a very long time. Long before you and I were born.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Alison. ‘It isn’t over for me. It won’t be over until I find out what happened to my grandfather.’

  They looked at each other for a moment. Where they stood, on the corner near the Cavendish Hotel, there was an icy wind blowing round the stone walls. He saw Morrissey shiver. But then her mood changed suddenly, and she smiled.

  ‘Well, you have to let me buy you a drink, at least. No argument,’ she said. ‘Where can we go – is there somewhere near?’

  They went into the Wheatsheaf, where, to Cooper’s surprise, Alison Morrissey asked for a pint of cider. Cooper realized that he didn’t have to drive home any more when he was in town, and he ordered a pint of Derbyshire Drop. It was one of the strong local beers, its label a tribute to the original name for the unique semi-precious mineral Blue John, which attracted so many tourists to the Peak District.

  ‘I’ve asked for the Sunday lunch menu, too,’ said Morrissey. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘I can’t let you pay for me,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not going to be stuffy, are you? Didn’t you say you were off duty today?’

  ‘Even so, I have to be careful.’

  ‘I see. You sound like a man treading a line. Well, I can relate to that. It’s exactly what I’m doing myself.’

  Morrissey chose a vegetable bake, while Cooper settled for a lasagne. He felt ridiculously nervous. When the food was served, he couldn’t quite think what order he should do things – where to put his napkin, what part of his meal to load on to his fork first, when to order coffee.

  ‘What did you mean about “treading a line”?’ said Cooper.

  Morrissey raised an eyebrow. ‘The line between two worlds, the line between the right and the wrong thing to do, the line between the past and present. Choose which you prefer. I’m treading them all.’

  ‘And the line between rationality and obsession, perhaps?’

  She looked at him, nursing her cider. Her cheeks were already turning pink from the alcohol and the warmth of the pub. Then, gradually, she began to talk. Cooper could feel her relaxing as the words trickled out.

  ‘Yes, you’re right – it has become an obsession,’ she said. ‘It became an obsession after I saw the report on the crash of Lancaster SU-V, and the list of names of the dead.
From that moment, those men were no longer the crew of an RAF bomber – they were people. They had lives, they had wives and children. It was the fact that Dick Abbott had also been father of a young child that was the real trigger. Abbott was barely more than a boy himself. It set off something inside me, some urge, an instinct that has been driving me on to find out what exactly happened.’

  ‘An instinct? Not curiosity?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t understand what else to call it. But I had to know what happened. I had to know the truth, and in a way it was on behalf of that other fatherless child, as much as for myself. I wondered about Zygmunt Lukasz, too, and the family he might have. I can’t explain why those British and Polish children mean anything to me at all. I know, in my logical moments, that the pictures of those children that I’ve been carrying in my head are nothing like the reality. I know they’ll be well into middle age by now. But I found I was starting to live in some kind of parallel universe, where everyone was still as they were in 1945. So I made no attempt to explain it to anyone, not even to my mother. I was aware of the fact that I couldn’t justify it, too afraid of the reasonable arguments that could be put to me, which I couldn’t counter, but which would only make my determination stronger. Some people already call me obsessed, like you. I didn’t want to give them an opportunity to call me mad.’

  ‘I’ll take the word back if it makes you feel better.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It helps if you understand how determined I am.’

  ‘It’s so far in the past, though …’

  ‘Yes, I know. It was such an alien time. It makes you appreciate peace. Do you know, it took me a long time to understand that an aircraft falling out of the sky was an everyday occurrence in wartime Britain.’

  ‘And more than fifty aircraft have been wrecked in the Dark Peak area alone since the start of the Second World War.’

  Morrissey looked at him in surprise. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I found a book,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a secondhand bookshop we have here in town. Eden Valley Books.’

  ‘That’s interesting. I’d like to see it some time. Yes, I could hardly believe the figures when Frank Baine told me. I mean, on the map, the Peak District looks so small. It’s no more than a few dozen miles across, locked in between the big cities. And the hills aren’t even all that high. I mean, these summits are three thousand feet at the highest. We’re not exactly talking the Rockies here, are we, Ben? Why was this area the graveyard for so many aircraft and airmen?’

  ‘Some were damaged by enemy action, some suffered mechanical failure, or iced up and broke apart in mid-air. Other crashes were the result of pilot error or faulty navigation. If they found themselves over high ground in poor weather conditions, they were in trouble.’

  ‘You really have done your research. Don’t let it become an obsession.’

  A group of men in their thirties came into the pub, let loose by their wives for Sunday lunchtime. They were talking noisily, joking about someone who’d lost money through his ignorance when buying a secondhand car. They wore sweatshirts, and denim jeans with the waistbands rolling over from the pressure of their stomachs, and they made a fuss of choosing the specialist guest beers as if they were ordering cases of vintage wine.

  ‘Then I had another problem,’ said Morrissey. ‘I had to consider whether to contact the relatives of the other airmen. Would they want to know the information I had? I had to try to put myself in their position. I was worried that I would be opening up old wounds. Just because those wounds are fifty-seven years old doesn’t necessarily make them any less painful. I know that.’

  Cooper tried to keep his eyes on hers, to encourage her to carry on talking. Often, that was all people needed, an air of attentiveness. But gazing into her eyes began to make him feel too disorientated after a while, and he had to look away.

  ‘At first, it seemed an impossible task that I’d set myself,’ she said. ‘My imagination failed at the hurdle of putting myself in other people’s shoes.’

  ‘If you’ve never had that sort of experience yourself …’

  ‘No. It wasn’t that. It was because these were people who blamed my grandfather for their relatives’ deaths. In the end, I decided that there was only one approach to take. I had to assume that the relatives, like me, would be happy to know what had really happened.’

  She was talking constantly, barely pausing to eat, hardly waiting for him to nod or shake his head in response. It was as if she didn’t want him to get a word in, as if she were afraid he might try to change the subject before she’d finished explaining herself. Cooper began to feel he was unduly honoured by the fact that she’d chosen him to explain it to. He wondered if anybody else had been given this privilege. Frank Baine, probably.

  ‘You see, to me it felt as though I’d been reading a book but had been forced to put it down before the final chapter, and had never been able to finish it. It was a sense of frustration that drove me, I think. I knew finishing the last page would be a bitter-sweet experience. But it was an experience I had to go through with. Do you understand, Ben?’

  The fact that she’d called him Ben so naturally seemed to mark an important moment in their meeting. Cooper had interviewed enough people to know that unburdening herself of her thoughts had made Morrissey feel closer to him and had put him in the role of a friend. He had no problem with that.

  ‘I think I understand.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Did you realize that last Monday was the anniversary of the crash?’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘I don’t know why – but it seemed important I should come over here now.’

  ‘Do you happen to have the medal with you?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Yes. And the package it came in, too.’ Morrissey placed the medal on the table. ‘My grandfather kept it on him all the time when he was flying. It was a kind of lucky charm.’

  Cooper used a dessert spoon to tip the medal towards the light from the pub window, so that he could see the shine from its metal surface.

  Morrissey watched him with a smile. ‘If you’re looking for fingerprints, I have to tell you that the first thing my mother did was give it a good clean. She said it was dirty. Tarnished. She used metal polish on it.’

  ‘Great.’ Cooper could smell the polish. But there were pitted areas of corrosion on the metal, and damp stains on the faded ribbon. There were darker stains, too – small specks that could have been blood. The medal had arrived in an ancient leather pouch, which had crumbled and split until it was practically useless. On the inside were the remains of decayed stitching, where a label might once have been attached. The pouch had been wrapped in brown paper folded over several times and sealed with parcel tape, and the Canadian address was written in capital letters with a black felt-tipped pen.

  ‘No note?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the address is correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder how the sender knew your mother’s address.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Morrissey.

  Cooper looked up from the package. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s what we’ve been wondering for months, ever since the medal arrived?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It has to be someone who either had access to my grandfather’s service records, or who was close enough to him for my grandfather to have given them his home address. Perhaps he wrote it down for them, so that they could stay in touch after the war was over.’

  ‘You mean one of the members of his crew?’

  ‘And since it was mailed from Edendale …’

  ‘You concluded that it came from the surviving crew member, Zygmunt Lukasz.’

  ‘Who else? When Frank Baine told us Lukasz still lived in Edendale, it seemed a pretty logical conclusion. Who else could my grandfather have known in this area?’

  Cooper passed back the medal
and the package. ‘Families of the other crew members would have received their possessions from the RAF after the crash. Any one of them might have had your grandfather’s home address among their belongings.’

  ‘None of them lives anywhere near here.’

  ‘You’re certain, then, that Zygmunt Lukasz is involved in some way?’

  ‘Either that,’ said Morrissey, ‘or my grandfather is still alive and living in Edendale.’

  The atmosphere in the CID room was icy. Gavin Murfin was already there, and he looked green, as if he’d finally eaten too many chicken tikka masalas. He saw Diane Fry come in and looked away.

  ‘What’s up with Gavin?’ she asked Hitchens. ‘Why does he look so sick?’

  ‘He’s been chasing down missing persons to match the Snowman, hasn’t he? And he finally got around to circulating the description nationally.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He did it properly, too. Sent details to all forces. All forces.’

  Murfin definitely looked to be in a state of shock. His hair was standing on end, as if he’d pushed greasy fingers through it in his agitation.

  ‘One of the forces had a match?’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes, and they’re on their way right now.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Do you think so, Diane?’

  ‘If somebody can spare the manpower to give us some back-up, that’s great, surely? Well done, Gavin.’ Fry looked at their faces, and saw how uneasy Hitchens was. ‘It’s not the RUC, is it? Don’t tell me it’s the Ulster troubles after all this time?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Hitchens. ‘It’s nothing so straightforward as a terrorist execution.’

  ‘Who, then? Who’ve we stirred up? A neighbouring force?’

  ‘No. A national force.’