Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  Morrissey listened to him carefully.

  ‘Where did Andrew Lukasz get this cigarette case?’

  ‘I expect he’d bought it from a collector in London. It must be a widespread hobby, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, worldwide. I found that on the bulletin board. There were a lot of US citizens and Canadians.’

  Cooper watched her drink her cider for a while. She looked up and met his eye, and smiled at him. Cooper smiled back.

  ‘Did you find out about the money?’ said Morrissey.

  ‘Yes, George Malkin still had it. He’s never done anything with it.’

  ‘Malkin?’

  ‘At Hollow Shaw Farm. He was only a boy at the time, of course.’

  Cooper stopped talking abruptly. He realized that Morrissey had never heard Malkin’s name until now. Of course, she’d said at the Chief Superintendent’s meeting that she was unable to trace the boys who’d seen her grandfather walk away from the crash. He searched for something else to say, before she started asking him questions.

  ‘Do you want dropping at the Cavendish Hotel?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, please. Ben, this George Malkin –’

  ‘How do you like it there? I don’t suppose Edendale’s hotels are up to Toronto standards.’

  ‘No, not really,’ said Morrissey, with a small smile.

  Cooper looked at his watch. Time was catching up on him. If he stayed any longer here, Fry would be paging him, wondering where he was, ready to give him another warning.

  ‘Don’t you think Zygmunt Lukasz could tell us so much about the crash?’ said Morrissey.

  Cooper shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he’s already said all he’s going to.’

  He wanted to add that it was George Malkin who remembered the crash best, but he’d already said enough.

  ‘I really have no more time to help you now,’ he said. ‘There was a meeting this morning. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I think there’s going to be some action. The chiefs will be wanting arrests for the death of the RAF policeman, and I think the Ministry of Defence Police have come up with all the information that we were waiting for.’

  ‘You’ll be busy, then,’ said Morrissey.

  ‘I expect to get called away at any moment.’

  ‘I want to say thank you for what you’ve done.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘But you tried hard, Ben. That’s more than anyone else did. You must have thought you were doing something that was worthwhile. That was what you said, wasn’t it? That you needed the feeling you’d done something worthwhile. That drug. You said it was the only thing that could give you the buzz and make you feel really alive.’

  Cooper looked at her, watched her push the lock of hair from her forehead, knowing he didn’t want to say goodbye to her, wanting to do something to keep the connection between them.

  ‘I didn’t say it was the only thing,’ he said.

  Fry sat in her car with Gavin Murfin and watched the front of the Cavendish Hotel. She felt no sense of surprise when Cooper’s Toyota pulled up with Alison Morrissey in the passenger seat.

  ‘Ben’s already talked to her, then,’ said Murfin, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t imagine they were talking about what we want to discuss,’ said Fry.

  They had a perfectly clear view as Alison Morrissey leaned across the seats of the Toyota and kissed Cooper on the lips. They saw her hand slip behind his head, and Cooper’s arm leave the steering wheel. The kiss seemed to Fry to last for a long time.

  ‘I think Ben’s a bit taken with her, like,’ said Murfin.

  Fry couldn’t have said what else happened for a moment or two. Her view was obscured by a kind of red veil that rippled in front of her eyes, blurring the shape of Cooper’s Toyota and its occupants. She took some deep breaths, and the veil gradually fell away. She found she was gripping the ends of her scarf so tightly that she was in danger of strangling herself.

  Murfin popped some chewing gum in his mouth and rustled the wrapper as if he were in the cinema watching a Hollywood film.

  ‘He’s never had much luck with women, hasn’t Ben,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should give him some tips.’

  Fry stared at him. ‘It isn’t a question of luck, Gavin. Some people have a deeply ingrained stupidity.’

  ‘Ben’s not stupid,’ protested Murfin. Then he thought about it. ‘A bit gullible, maybe. You can always tempt him with a lost cause.’

  ‘It comes of being a lost cause himself.’

  Fry watched the Toyota drive away and Morrissey go into the hotel. She signalled to the car on the opposite side of the road. ‘OK, let’s go.’

  Alison Morrissey and Frank Baine were standing in the reception area when Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin entered the hotel. Morrissey looked at them in surprise, then seemed to recognize what they were, if not who they were.

  Fry showed them her ID. Morrissey stood her ground, then turned to glare at Sergeant Caudwell and PC Nash, who came in close behind. But Frank Baine looked as though he would try to fade into the background of oak panelling and potted plants and disappear into the corridors of the hotel. It was PC Nash who moved the quickest. He evaded Baine’s attempt to headbutt him and snapped his handcuffs on to one wrist so that he could control him by the pressure on his arm. Then it was Sergeant Caudwell who read him his rights.

  34

  A week after the snow had arrived, it was still piled on the verges of the A57. Late that afternoon, as Cooper drove towards Harrop in the dusk, he could see the occasional side road that had still not been properly cleared. On the hillsides were farms or hamlets that the council snowploughs never reached. Farmers had to fight their way down to the road themselves with blades mounted on their tractors. And there would be more snow today – he could feel it in the air.

  When he was well above the valley, Cooper’s headlights caught a blue Vauxhall parked at the side of the road at an awkward angle. As he got nearer, he could see it had skidded into a snowdrift that had hidden a soft verge, now churned to mud. The driver was out of his car, staring at the nearside wheels.

  Cooper braked carefully and put his hazard lights on as he drew up in front of the Vauxhall. If Fry had been with him, she would have told him they weren’t a rescue service. If she’d recognized who the driver was, she would have said it was no time to be stopping to buy a book. But Cooper turned off the engine, pulled his waterproof from the back seat and climbed out, his feet splashing in the slush. He opened the boot and took out his snow shovel. Some people laughed, but it was essential equipment in the winter. It ought to be standard on every police vehicle.

  It was only when Cooper got out of the Toyota that Lawrence Daley recognized him. Lawrence didn’t seem glad to see him, and he wasn’t dressed for the weather either. He was in the same blue jacket he’d been wearing in the bookshop, pulled over a thin sweater and shirt. His denims were already wet and stiff below the knee and would take days to dry out. The bookseller was shivering with cold and misery.

  ‘What’s up then, Lawrence?’

  ‘I braked a bit too hard,’ he said. ‘My wheels went off the road, and now they just spin round when I rev the engine. I can’t get any grip.’

  He had the resigned air of the motorist for whom a car was a complete mystery once it stopped working. Cooper looked at the mud that had been splattered for several feet over the snow and into the road, and studied the deep ruts the car’s wheels had created for themselves.

  ‘You’ve dug yourself in a bit,’ he said. ‘Let me get behind and give you a push. But take it easy on the accelerator. Try not to make the wheels spin any more.’

  ‘I was going to wait for the RAC,’ said Lawrence.

  ‘Have you called them?’

  ‘I don’t have a mobile. I can’t bear the thought of the radiation frying my brain cells.’

  Cooper thought it was a bit late to be worrying about that. There was not much more harm that could come to Lawrence’s brain cells than had a
lready been caused by whisky and being surrounded by too many books. Or maybe it was living alone that had done it. He had let himself be embroiled in something that had been tempting for two reasons – the money, of course, but also the feeling that he’d been accepted as part of a group, a kind of family.

  ‘Do you realize the nearest phone box is about four miles back down the road? You’d have to walk almost to the Snake Inn.’

  Lawrence shrugged hopelessly. ‘I suppose I would have got round to flagging somebody down.’

  ‘Not everybody stops these days, Lawrence. They’ve heard too many stories of muggings and car-jackings to feel safe about picking up hitch-hikers.’

  Sometimes Cooper could understand Fry’s impatience with people like Lawrence Daley. Lawrence had made no attempt at all to flag the Toyota down when he heard it coming. If Cooper hadn’t recognized him, he might well have gone past. Would Lawrence have waved down another vehicle later on? Or would it have been too much of an indignity for him? Quite possibly he would have remained standing out here and frozen to death first, and become another Marie Tennent.

  ‘Where were you heading to, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, just to Glossop. I have a friend there. A fellow bookseller. Since you’ve closed my shop …’

  ‘That’s OK. As long as you weren’t thinking of leaving the area.’

  ‘No. Are you interviewing Frank Baine today?’

  ‘He’s being interviewed this afternoon. And some of the others, too. Eddie and Graham Kemp.’

  ‘The Kemps?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Eddie Kemp never tells the truth about anything.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Cooper. ‘Get in the car, and we’ll give it a try.’

  He leaned his weight on the boot of the Vauxhall, bracing himself to get a good grip on the road surface. Lawrence started the car and let off the handbrake. At first, it seemed as though the wheels weren’t going to get any purchase, but then the off-side rear wheel found a bit of clear road surface, and a second later the Vauxhall lurched forward out of the mud. Cooper lost his footing and fell on to his knee behind the back bumper. Lawrence drove the car a few feet on to the road and stopped.

  ‘Thanks!’ he called.

  Cooper got up. Beating the snow off his gloves, he began to walk past the Vauxhall towards his own car. He stopped at Lawrence’s open window. ‘Before you go any further, I suggest you clear your windscreen properly,’ he said. ‘And scrape the snow off your headlights. Because, if you run into my colleagues from Traffic, they’ll book you otherwise.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Lawrence.

  Cooper nodded, brushed off some more snow, and got into the Toyota. As he drove off, he looked into his rearview mirror. He could Lawrence Daley waving goodbye.

  The Ministry of Defence Police had taken their turn at interviewing Frank Baine on suspicion that he was the main contact for the servicemen the RAF Police had been keeping under surveillance. Fry could see that Baine was certainly a man with a lot of contacts, and very little evidence of income from journalism. According to Lawrence Daley, Baine had also been running the website and the internet bulletin board.

  A case against him for the murder of Nick Easton was going to be more difficult to construct. They had found no weapon, and they hadn’t been able to show that Eddie Kemp’s car had been used to convey Easton’s body to the Snake Pass. Besides, there was evidence that Eddie Kemp had been involved in the assault on the two youths near Underbank on Monday night – he was recognizable on the CCTV footage.

  Fry shook her head in exasperation. The two young drug dealers were refusing to talk to the police on principal. But enquiries around Underbank had established that residents were well aware of vigilante groups who’d taken it into their own hands to deter the drug gangs from the Devonshire Estate from moving in. Even the old man, Walter Rowland, had told an officer that there were people far more likely to recover his stolen property than the police. Sadly, he was almost certainly right.

  The Kemp brothers seemed to have built themselves quite a reputation around Underbank. They were unlucky that the old couple who’d identified Eddie that night had not been told whose side he was on.

  She looked at the bayonet that had been used to attack Ben Cooper. She was anxious for her own opportunity to question Frank Baine – and she was hopeful the forensic laboratory would give her a match from the bayonet to Baine’s DNA. That would clear up the assault on a police officer, at least. Meanwhile, she had both the Kemp brothers. And Eddie Kemp had some questions to answer about the death of Marie Tennent.

  It proved to be a long afternoon before Fry got Eddie Kemp on to the subject she most wanted to know about.

  ‘The baby,’ she said. ‘Marie’s baby.’

  ‘It wasn’t mine,’ said Kemp, ‘She told me the baby wasn’t mine.’

  ‘How did you feel about that, Mr Kemp?’

  ‘Feel?’

  ‘Were you angry with her?’

  Though they’d given him the required breaks from questioning, Kemp was starting to look tired. He was still trying to act relaxed, completely unconcerned, like a man with nothing to fear. But Fry thought she could see the weariness in his eyes, the first sign that he was being worn down.

  ‘Were you angry, Mr Kemp?’

  ‘It didn’t matter to me.’

  ‘No. Let’s think about that. If I remember rightly, a pregnancy takes nine months. If that baby wasn’t yours, it meant Marie had been seeing someone else while you were still living with her.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I think you might have been angry about that,’ said Fry. ‘I think you might have lost your temper.’

  ‘Well, any bloke might have done, in that situation.’

  ‘So you hit her, did you?’

  Kemp grimaced with irritation. ‘You seem to have me pegged as the violent type. I don’t know why.’

  ‘How many times did you hit her?’ asked Fry patiently.

  ‘Look, it was a bit of a blur, to be honest.’

  ‘Once? Twice? More than twice?’

  ‘I don’t recall.’

  ‘Where did you hit her? On the face, on the body, or where?’

  ‘On the body, I suppose.’

  ‘Did you hit her in the face, too?’

  ‘If I did, it was an accident.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I didn’t really hurt her,’ said Kemp.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I mean, if I hit her at all, I would just have slapped her a bit. She wouldn’t have more than a few little bruises. But she asked for it. She was far too full of herself.’

  Fry decided to change tack and come back to the assault later. His story would change in the details until eventually they would have the full account.

  ‘Did Marie tell you who the father of the baby was?’

  Kemp blinked a little, then leaned forward across the table.

  ‘Oh, yeah. But she didn’t need to – it wasn’t hard to guess.’

  ‘And who did she say it was?’

  Now Kemp wanted to talk. He wanted to be sure that she understood. Like so many others, he was convinced that everybody would think he’d done the right thing, if only he could explain it properly. Some of them talked for ever once they’d started, baffled by their failure to communicate.

  ‘Look, you have to understand something about Marie,’ said Kemp. ‘She thought she was cleverer than the rest of us, but she never had the education. She got obsessed with books. That house of hers was full of books before she’d finished.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Well, she thought she was going to better herself by reading. As if reading those novels she had was going to improve anybody’s education. What a load of crap! But she thought because she could talk about novels she was an intellectual. She was easily influenced like that, always wanting to please some bloke. So she was round at the bookshop all the time. She thought she was moving in better circles, just because he took an
interest in her. But he was after one thing from her, like everybody else.’

  ‘The bookshop?’

  ‘Eden Valley Books, of course. The ponce with the bow tie, Lawrence Daley. It was my fault she met him. And he’s no better than the rest of us, is he?’

  ‘Marie told you that Lawrence Daley was the father of her child?’ asked Fry.

  ‘That’s it. Daley. There’s only two things he’s interested in, when it comes down to it. And they’re the same things as the rest of us – sex and money. All the rest of the stuff is just airs and graces. Books? Rubbish. Sex and money. Yes, I could tell you a thing or two about that bookseller.’

  Two miles down the road, Cooper was still trying to thaw out his hands when he took the call on his mobile phone.

  ‘Ben, where are you?’

  ‘A57, near the Snake Inn. I’m on my way to Harrop to get a statement from George Malkin about the items he sold to Lawrence Daley.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better pull in.’

  Cooper tucked the Toyota into the first gateway that he came to. The driver of a Transit van sounded his horn as he pulled out to go past him.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘We’ve just interviewed Eddie Kemp again.’

  ‘Yeah. Get anything out of him?’

  ‘The name of the baby’s father.’

  ‘It wasn’t his?’

  ‘He says not. He says the father is Lawrence Daley.’

  Cooper was glad he was no longer driving. He turned around in his seat. Lawrence’s blue Vauxhall should have passed him by now. There was no road to turn off the Snake Pass until the Harrop road, the other side of Irontongue Hill.

  ‘I’ve not long seen him,’ said Cooper. ‘A couple of miles back, I helped to get his car back on to the road. He told me he was heading this way, but I think he might have turned round.’

  ‘I’m on my way. If you see him again, just keep contact.’

  Cooper manoeuvred the Toyota in the gateway with difficulty, forcing more traffic to swerve round him. Finally, he got back on the road heading east. He didn’t have to go far to find Lawrence’s Vauxhall. Only two miles back up the A57, it was parked in another lay-by, but on the opposite side of the road. This time, it had been taken off the carriageway deliberately and was parked neatly. There was no sign of Lawrence Daley.