‘Who exactly is this man?’
‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me that, sir.’
‘I’ve told you – I wasn’t even at home at the time. I was on duty at the hospital. My wife told me somebody had been, and she reported it to the police when she heard the appeals on the news. That’s all I know, I’m afraid. Grace was the only person who actually saw him. But you’ve interviewed her, so you know that.’
‘Mrs Lukasz didn’t tell us everything, though. She didn’t tell us why Easton came. Did she tell you, sir?’
Lukasz stared into his honey-flavoured vodka, and said nothing.
‘I suppose we should ask your wife again,’ said Cooper.
Lukasz sighed. ‘Grace gets easily upset.’
‘Then perhaps you’d better tell us yourself.’
‘Grace says he was asking for Mr Lukasz. She thought he meant my father, because he was the only one home. He became insistent, and Grace was frightened that he was going to force his way into the house. So she sent him away. Grace tends to feel rather vulnerable when there’s just my father and herself at home. And you have to realize, my father is terminally ill – we can’t have him being troubled by people asking him questions all the time. Not this Easton, not the Canadian woman – and not you. We’re trying to keep my father at home as long as feasible, but I’m afraid he’ll be going into the hospice soon. His pain needs constant management.’
‘Was it Easton’s visit that prompted your father to begin writing his account of the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor?’ said Cooper.
Lukasz looked surprised. ‘Why should you think that?’
‘The timing. And the fact that Nick Easton was an RAF investigator.’
Lukasz put his glass down suddenly. The bottom of it hit the table so hard that it almost shattered, and a splash of honey-flavoured vodka flew over the rim.
‘Royal Air Force?’ he said.
‘Yes, sir. Have you any idea why Easton should have been asking to see your father?’
‘I have no idea. None at all.’
Lukasz’s expression was hard to read. He was puzzled, certainly. But also, Cooper thought, he was relieved.
‘Have you heard from your son yet?’ asked Fry.
‘No?’
‘Have you any idea where he is?’
‘No.’
‘Can you tell us what Andrew was doing during his time here in Edendale?’
‘He said he had business up here.’
‘What sort of business?’
‘He didn’t tell us. To be honest, the conversation was more, er, family-orientated.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s got married since he’s been living in London. We weren’t invited to the wedding. We only met his future wife once, and Grace took against her immediately, I’m afraid.’
‘There was some bad feeling?’ asked Fry.
‘Yes.’
‘So had your son come to make peace?’ asked Cooper.
‘I just told you, he was here on business.’
‘It’s oplatek time,’ said Cooper. ‘Doesn’t that mean forgiveness and reconciliation?’
Lukasz smiled. ‘You pick things up quickly. But Andrew didn’t stay for oplatek. He disappeared again as suddenly as he came. He walked out last Sunday and we’ve haven’t heard from him since.’
‘Had there been an argument?’
‘He’d been talking to my father. I don’t know what about, but I know my father was angry. Grace heard him shouting in Polish. I wasn’t there at the time, because I was at the hospital. And now my father won’t tell me why he was arguing with Andrew.’ Lukasz turned and looked through the bar at the small group of old men enjoying their oplatek dinner. ‘You see, Detective Constable Cooper, it isn’t only you he won’t talk to.’
‘Mr Lukasz,’ said Fry. ‘What sort of business is your son Andrew in?’
‘He works for a medical supplies company.’
‘We’ll need you to come in and make a statement first thing in the morning, Mr Lukasz,’ said Fry. ‘Your wife, too. And I’m afraid we’re going to have to arrange for a translator so that we can interview your father.’
‘Is that really necessary?’
‘It’s beginning to look extremely necessary,’ said Fry.
The noise level had risen in the main hall, as if in expectation of forthcoming excitement. Sure enough, preparations were being made on the little stage. Cooper was reminded again of the old folk’s parties the police choir sometimes sang at. Usually, half their audience had fallen asleep by the time they got to the third song – food and a glass of sweet sherry saw to that. But this audience was only warming up. He wondered what form of entertainment was appropriate to the evening.
Lukasz followed his gaze. ‘There’s a nativity play,’ he said.
‘A what?’ said Cooper.
‘A nativity play. Surely …’
‘I know what a nativity play is. But it’s the middle of January.’
‘This is our oplatek dinner,’ said Lukasz. ‘It’s the time for the community. Not like Wigilia, which is for the family. The nativity play will be performed by the children from the Saturday school.’
‘You mean Sunday school,’ said Cooper, thinking he was getting the hang of it. Many of the Poles were good Catholics, and he’d seen the Church of Our Lady with its little school next door.
‘Saturday,’ said Lukasz. ‘On Saturday mornings, the children study Polish. This year, some of them will take their O-level. I took it myself. I got a Grade 2, and Dad was very proud. He said I spoke the language almost as well as they do back home. Now my youngest children, Richard and Alice, are learning at the Saturday school, too.’
‘We’d better be going,’ said Fry.
‘You could stay for the nativity play, if you want,’ said Lukasz. ‘You’re very welcome.’
‘No, thank you. Oh, one more thing – we need Andrew’s address in London.’
‘Of course.’
Cooper hesitated, finishing his beer. There was no detectable peach or melon or pepper flavour, no blade of grass lurking in the bottom of the glass. It was a bit disappointing really. Yet the aftertaste had an indefinable strangeness that he knew would stay with him for the rest of the night.
‘Mr Lukasz,’ he said, ‘before Nick Easton’s visit, had something else happened to upset your father?’
Lukasz nodded. ‘You’re right. My father has been outraged at the pillaging of the aircraft wrecks that has been going on for years. The final straw was when his cousin Klemens’ cigarette case turned up. It was an old silver case that Klemens had brought with him to Britain from Poland, and it had his initials engraved on it. My father was very angry about that. He wanted to know where it had come from, and who’d taken it from Klemens. He thinks that taking things from the wrecks is desecration, because they’re war graves that are being robbed. All his old hatred welled up again over that cigarette case. It was directed against the people he calls vultures.’
‘Vultures?’
‘Yes, vultures. Carrion feeders. My father says these people are picking over the remains of the dead, like vultures.’
‘Did your father see this cigarette case himself, or did someone tell him about it?’ asked Cooper.
‘Oh, he saw it, and held it in his own hand. He identified it beyond any doubt.’
‘Who showed it to him, Mr Lukasz?’
‘Well …’
‘Let me guess. Was it your son Andrew, perhaps?’ Cooper waited for the slight nod. ‘Do you think that might have been what they argued about last Sunday?’
Lukasz drained the last of his honey-flavoured vodka. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it was.’
Cooper felt the cold air hit him when they got outside the Dom Kombatanta and he found himself back in Harrington Street near Walter Rowland’s house.
‘We need to find Andrew Lukasz,’ said Cooper.
‘Put him on the list then,’ said Fry. ‘Baby Chloe, Eddie Kemp, Andrew Lukasz. I wonder i
f they’re all lurking in the same place somewhere. That would certainly need your famous bit of luck, wouldn’t it, Ben?’
‘It looks as though Nick Easton must have been asking questions of the wrong people.’
‘The vultures maybe? The ones the old man was so angry about for pillaging the aircraft wrecks?’
‘Maybe so,’ said Cooper. ‘The other person we need to talk to is Graham Kemp, Eddie’s brother. It sounds as if he’s the number one collector of aviation memorabilia. If anybody knows where items like Klemens Wach’s cigarette case came from, he will.’
‘Does he live in Edendale?’
‘Yes, according to the guy at Leadenhall.’
They reached the Toyota and waited for the heater to clear the beginnings of another frost from the windscreen. The sky was completely clear and full of stars. The gritting lorries would be out on the roads again tonight.
‘I wonder how close Graham Kemp is to his brother,’ said Fry. ‘I wonder if he might have been involved with Eddie in the double assault on Monday night.’
Cooper looked at her. ‘That would be a link.’
Fry rubbed her hands. ‘I think we have a couple of promising lines of enquiry to put to the meeting in the morning.’
‘It does give us the initiative,’ said Cooper. ‘Sergeant Caudwell will be impressed.’
‘All right, Ben. I admit that might be a factor.’
‘On the other hand,’ said Cooper, ‘what if someone thought Nick Easton himself was one of those vultures?’
‘What?’
‘If he was asking the wrong sort of questions, he could have given the wrong impression to someone who cared enough to be angry at the pillaging of the wreck sites.’
‘Like who?’
‘Only someone with a personal interest. Someone who had lost a close relative in a crashed aircraft. Someone who though it was a desecration, the robbing of a grave.’
‘Someone like Zygmunt Lukasz, you mean?’
‘Peter Lukasz was very calm on the outside,’ said Cooper. ‘And he attributed the hatred of the vultures to his father. But inside, I wonder if he shares the same feelings?’
Cooper put the Toyota in gear and drove down Harrington Street. They passed the Church of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Polish Saturday School, and the lighted windows of the Dom Kombatanta.
He supposed it was inevitable the oplatek traditions would die out with the old people. In the Lukasz family, Zygmunt and his sister Krystyna were the only ones left who’d been born in Poland. The others were more English in their ways, even Peter Lukasz – though when the old man was around he seemed to take on the same set of the shoulders, the same look about the eyes that Cooper had noticed in the photograph of the young Zygmunt and Klemens. Determination, a fighting spirit. A capacity for hatred.
Cooper felt himself on unfamiliar territory. Yet these people weren’t recent immigrants, like the asylum seekers from Iran and Albania. The Poles had lived in Derbyshire for nearly sixty years. He’d lived right alongside them all his life, yet he knew almost nothing about them.
As they drove back down into the town, he lifted his head and looked at the barrier of hills to the west of Edendale. They were bare and glittering in the starlight, ancient and unchanged since the geological upheavals that had left them there millions of years ago. But as he stared at the familiar hills, Cooper felt his perception of them shift and blur, until they were no longer merely hills. For the first time in his life, they’d begun to look like the walls of a prison.
25
Alison Morrissey stood in the cobbled alleyway of Nick i’ th’ Tor outside Eden Valley Books. She banged on the door, ignoring the sign in the window, and kept banging until Lawrence Daley appeared in the gloom inside and drew back the bolts.
‘The shop is closed,’ he said. ‘I never open on Sunday.’
‘Not for anybody?’ said Morrissey.
Lawrence peered at her carefully, wiping a finger over the lenses of his glasses.
‘I don’t sell books on a Sunday,’ he said. ‘I work six days a week selling books. Sunday is my day off from selling books.’
‘My name is Alison Morrissey. I’m the granddaughter of the pilot of the crashed Lancaster on Irontongue Hill.’
‘I know who you are,’ said Lawrence. ‘I saw you on the television news. You were in the papers, too.’
‘That’s good,’ said Morrissey. ‘Can I come in?’
Lawrence still hesitated, as if a great deal depended on making the right decision. Then, reluctantly, he pulled open the door of the shop.
Morrissey stamped her feet free of snow as she stood in the narrow passage near the counter. There was no light in the shop except from the open door to the stairs, and Lawrence made no move to find the light switch.
‘What is it you want?’ he said.
Morrissey kept her hands in the pockets of her coat as she looked around the shop, raising her eyebrows at the shelves and piles of books that gradually became visible as her eyes adjusted.
‘If you know who I am, perhaps you know why I’ve come,’ she said.
‘I don’t know anything about aircraft wrecks,’ said Lawrence. ‘I sell books on them sometimes, but I don’t think I’ve got any in at the moment. I sold my last copies a few days ago. You’re wasting your time.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Morrissey took her hand out of her pocket. Carefully, she unwrapped the package she’d shown to Cooper. The medal caught the light from the stairs and glittered, so that Lawrence could be in no doubt what it was.
‘This is the reason I’m here,’ she said.
Lawrence took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, whether from tiredness or some sudden emotion, it was impossible to tell in the darkness. ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ he said.
‘Would the police agree with you, I wonder?’
‘There’s nothing illegal here.’
‘You wouldn’t mind the police coming, then.’
‘As it happens, I know one of the local detectives very well.’
‘Detective Cooper, perhaps? He mentioned your shop to me. And he’s very interested in this medal.’
Lawrence’s shoulders seemed to slump a little. ‘This is very unfair,’ he said.
Morrissey thrust the medal at him like an amulet that would ward off evil. ‘Do you think it’s fair to me? Fair to my family? Fair to the memory of my grandfather?’
Finally, Lawrence gave in.
‘You’d better come upstairs,’ he said.
Before he led Alison Morrissey towards the stairs, Lawrence took a last look outside, into the dark alley. He wondered who else might be out there, waiting to disrupt his life.
Back at West Street, Fry found the file on Marie Tennent still lying on Ben Cooper’s desk. It was only four days since Marie had been found on Irontongue Hill, yet it might as well have been weeks. Fry knew there had been search parties in Dam Street, where Marie had lived. Posters and newspaper appeals were everywhere, calling for information on the whereabouts of Baby Chloe. But Fry had been so absorbed in other things that she’d lost touch with what had been going on today.
In the Tennent file, there was a report from a sergeant in the uniformed section to say that they had gone over Marie’s house again, and had cleared the snow from the back garden, but there was no indication of recent digging in the frozen ground. There was no sign of a baby. They had gradually been extending their search, and should by now have searched the millpond. The area of hillside where Marie had been found had also been painstakingly picked over.
And Fry saw that, as far as Marie herself was concerned, they were still waiting for a postmortem result before the inquest could be opened.
Then Fry saw the faxes on Cooper’s desk. They’d come on a machine that used the old fax rolls, and the sheets were curling up into thick coils. It took only a glance to see that they’d come from Canada and were connected with Alison Morrissey. There was a yellow message form stuck to the top sheet, t
oo. ‘Please phone Alison,’ it said. Fry tried the phone number it gave, and a voice said: ‘Good evening, the Cavendish Hotel.’
‘Do you have a Miss Alison Morrissey staying there?’ asked Fry.
‘Yes, we do. Would you like me to see if she’s in the hotel?’
‘No, it doesn’t matter.’
She put the phone down. It seemed to Fry that there was no doubt where Ben Cooper’s attention was at the moment. He’d been told by the Chief Superintendent himself that there was no possibility of helping Alison Morrissey in her hopeless quest. But for Cooper, anything that was hopeless seemed to represent a challenge. Fry recalled the woman she’d seen on TV, the same woman who’d been chatting to Cooper at Underbank the other day. ‘Phone Alison’, the message said. So there was another attraction for Cooper, too.
Fry placed the message carefully back on the roll of faxes. She would have to think seriously about what she was going to do about it.
Turning her attention back to the Tennent file, she saw that it had been kept up to date with the inclusion of copies of reports on the baby’s remains. She scanned through the SOCO’s report, then a statement from one of the officers who attended the scene after the air cadets’ discovery of the remains. It was a thorough and detailed account of the scene, written by a young female officer who’d put a lot of effort in, even when it might seem there was no point. She’d spent some time looking for evidence of recent visitors to the aircraft wreck, despite the fact that the remains were so old. Reading between the lines, it seemed to Fry that the officer had been affected by the sight of the bones and the new baby clothes and had sought for something else to concentrate her attention on.
Curiously, one of her observations related to poppies. Not real poppies, but the red plastic or paper ones sold during the weeks before Remembrance Day every year to raise money for ex-servicemen. During November, many people wore them pinned to their coats. Entire wreaths of them were laid at war memorials up and down the country. And it seemed that remembrance poppies were left at the site of the Lancaster crash, too. Fry supposed the wreckage was itself a memorial, in a way. According to the report, someone had left a poppy there very recently, despite the fact that it was January and Remembrance Day was long since past.
Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) Page 30
