Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  ‘We’ll have to send divers into the reservoir to look for the remains,’ said Cooper. ‘We might have to drain it.’

  ‘Not much point in that,’ said Malkin. ‘They drained the reservoir thirty-five years ago.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘It was old and leaking by then, so they emptied it to put a concrete lining on the bottom. It’s been drained twice more since, for maintenance. You don’t just let a reservoir alone for sixty years, you know – it’d be so full of holes it wouldn’t hold a drop of water. And what would be the good of that?’

  Cooper wondered whether he’d been spun a complete yarn. But Malkin wasn’t laughing. His face was almost grey, and he made no attempt to wipe away the moisture that was settling on his cheeks as the mist gathered around them.

  ‘Mr Malkin, are you telling me the truth?’ said Cooper. ‘Or was that some childish fantasy you had at the time?’

  ‘Every word I’m telling you is true. But time passes, and things change. A body doesn’t stay a body for ever, not in water, not with fish and things nibbling away at it. By the time they drained the reservoir, there would only have been a few bits of bone and some rags buried in the mud on the bottom. Have you ever seen a reservoir when it’s emptied? The mud is three feet deep on the bottom. Disgusting the smell is, too.’

  ‘Yes, I remember the year there was a drought and all the reservoirs started to dry up. You could smell them for miles.’

  ‘It was worse than that. It was foul enough to knock your head off. They scooped the mud out and tipped it into lorries. Nobody bothered to sift through it to find any bodies – they wanted to get it away as quick as they could. It all got tipped into a landfill site, over where Bents Quarry used to be. Later they put some top soil over it, and levelled it off. It grassed over nicely in a year or two – it makes a decent bit of grazing now. In fact, it’s the pasture Rod Whittaker uses for his sheep.’

  Malkin pointed back across the moor towards Hollow Shaw Farm, where Cooper could make out a scatter of white shapes among the remaining patches of snow.

  ‘That’s where your missing pilot is,’ said Malkin. ‘He’s helping to feed those ewes.’

  Cooper gazed at the sheep. One of the animals lifted its head and stared back at him. Its jaws were rotating steadily, and it had a look of sullen insolence on its black face. Cooper felt an irrational surge of anger. It had been such a long way to come, only to end with a field full of sheep.

  ‘There’s something I’ve often wondered since then,’ said Malkin. ‘What do you think the folk of Manchester would have said, if they’d known what was in their drinking water?’

  Finally, the first patrol car bounced up the potholed road from Harrop. It had its headlights on as it climbed into the mist. George Malkin put his coat on, and walked with Cooper towards the car.

  ‘The Morrissey woman – did you trust her?’ said Malkin.

  ‘Of course. I know some of her facts were wrong,’ said Cooper. ‘Frank Baine gave her false information.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant at all. She’s known since Tuesday night how her grandfather died. She came here to ask me about the medal, so I told her.’

  Cooper stopped suddenly. ‘The medal?’

  ‘I picked it up on the moor the night of the crash. It was in a little leather pouch, but with all the excitement about the money and the man on the ice, I forgot about it until later. Then I found it even had the airman’s name and address on a label stitched inside the pouch.’

  ‘So you sent her the medal.’

  ‘I sent it back because I’d bottled the whole thing up long enough. It was when I finally knew that Florence was dying, and I needed to get it off my chest, I suppose. But I didn’t put my name on the letter – I just said I was one of those boys who saw Danny McTeague walking away from the crash.’

  Cooper’s face twisted, as a remembered taste came to his mouth. It was that bitter, metallic taste, like blood seeping from his saliva glands, a bitterness that jerked a spasm from his throat. Alison Morrissey had been to Hollow Shaw after he’d let Malkin’s name drop on Tuesday, and since then she’d known everything. The following morning she’d been on a flight back to Toronto. Had she been as single-minded as she claimed? Had she been concerned only with her own obsession, even as she kissed him outside the Cavendish Hotel? Alison Morrissey had failed to mention that she’d been kissing him goodbye. But Diane Fry had been watching, and she had known. No doubt she thought she’d been right about Morrissey all along.

  ‘It was all for Florence, you know,’ said Malkin. ‘She was the one real treasure that I had in my life, not the money. I carried the guilt with me so long that I grew not to trust anybody, in case they found out my secret. But Florence was the one person I never felt like that about. I trusted her and loved her, and I did what I could for her.’

  A PC opened the door of the patrol car and Malkin ducked his head obediently to get in. But he paused and turned back towards Cooper.

  ‘It means a lot if there’s somebody you can trust,’ he said. ‘Even if they make a mistake now and then, you know they’re genuine about what they do. Somebody like that is rare. If you’re a clever lad, you’ll find somebody like that and hold on to them, if you can.’

  Cooper stared at George Malkin wordlessly. Now it was really raining, and the sky was hidden somewhere behind grey clouds. Cooper was glad not to be able to see the sky. He was glad not to be able to see the scornful faces of the sheep. He was particularly glad not to be able to see the tongue-shaped buttress of black rock on the hill, with its reptilian curl and its ridges and crevices. Irontongue had destroyed too many lives. He couldn’t have tolerated its eternal derision.

  ‘By the way,’ said Malkin, ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting the knife.’

  He pulled a blade from his pocket and held it out to Cooper. It was very sharp and stained with blood.

  ‘My God. Hold on, I need to get a bag for it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Malkin. ‘It’s sheep blood. I used it for skinning dead lambs. It’s a messy job, but it had to be done. I couldn’t see the orphans being left without any mothers.’

  After Malkin had been driven away, Cooper stood and listened for a moment to the rain dripping through the mist on to the peat moor. The sound was somehow reassuring. It was a totally natural cadence, a reminder that the world all around him continued as normal, no matter what happened in his own life. The moisture still condensed in the chilly air as it always had, and the rain drops still smacked against the wet ground, just as they would if he ceased to exist in this moment, if he were to vanish into a little pool of slush like a melted snowman. The rain was one of nature’s primeval forces, oblivious to all human obsessions. The world that Ben Cooper moved in hardly impinged on it.

  In the end, the secret of getting through life was to achieve the right perspective. At moments like these, all his own concerns seemed trivial. Back in Edendale, there were difficulties to face, pain to be dealt with, hard things to explain and a lot of work to be done to achieve any kind of reconciliation and forgiveness. But for as long as he could stand here listening to the rain on the moor, those problems and anxieties were so small in the scale of things that they could easily be overcome. They could even be washed away in the rain. Out here, life was simple and painless.

  Cooper nodded to himself. Then he pulled up his collar and turned away from Hollow Shaw Farm. And the sound of the rain on the peat moor slowly faded behind him as he walked back to the car.

  THE END

  Author’s note:

  The origins of BLOOD ON THE TONGUE might be regarded as luck or coincidence - except that’s exactly how the creative process works!

  I was out walking in the Peak District one day, on my own, with a thick mist coming down on the hills above the Snake Pass. I suddenly found I was walking through a mass of aircraft wreckage scattered across hundreds of yards of peat moor.

  I was aware of the many air crashes that have occurred on these hills
, particularly during the Second World War. Bad weather and primitive navigational instruments made it was all too easy to go off course and encounter an unforgiving rock face. But I didn’t realise until then how much of the wreckage might still be left. Seeing it made me think about the people who died in those crashes. I soon discovered that many of the airmen weren’t British, but other nationalities, including a large number of Poles.

  Soon afterwards, I was on a street in nearby Chesterfield, when I turned back to look at a sign on a door I’d just passed. It said ‘Dom Kombatanta’ - the Polish ex-servicemen’s club. It dawned on me that many of the Poles who came to Britain during the war stayed on, rather than return to Poland. What’s more, they were still among us, raising families, following Polish customs, speaking their own language. Indeed, Derbyshire had its own thriving Polish community, decades before the recent influx of migrants from Eastern Europe.

  So that was when I knew I had a story. I found myself writing about two subjects I’d known nothing about until then - not only the Polish community, but Second World War aircraft, specifically Lancaster bombers.

  There are very few Lancasters left in existence, and only five of them in the UK. One is based at the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre at East Kirkby. I happened to be doing a signing for DANCING WITH THE VIRGINS at a bookshop in Lincoln one Saturday, and I noticed the aviation heritage centre was having an open day. Since I was close by, I thought I might just have time to call in after my signing.

  I was therefore a last-minute visitor to the open day. As I arrived, I was sold the very last ticket for the raffle, just before it was drawn. Amazingly, my ticket was pulled out as the winner. Astonishingly, the prize turned out to be a ride on their prime exhibit - the Lancaster bomber NX611 ‘Just Jane’. This gave me the unexpected opportunity to sit in all the positions occupied by the crew of my fictional Lancaster at the time of their crash on Irontongue Hill in 1945. There’s even a photograph of me sitting at the controls of the aircraft.

  But the biggest impression was made on me by the rear gunner’s position. It was cramped, isolated, yet terribly exposed. And Sergeant Dick Abbott came into my mind. Just eighteen years old, but already the father of a child. Known by the crew as Lofty because he was only five feet six. Dick Abbott, the rear gunner of Sugar Uncle Victor, whose haunted look in a photograph made him look as if he was already a ghost…

  For a writer, each of those experiences was a gift. Coming so close together, they look uncannily as though I was being steered! I hope you enjoy the book.

  Stephen Booth

  If you enjoyed BLACK DOG, why not try more novels in the Cooper & Fry series? Links indicate Kindle editions currently available in the USA:

  1. BLACK DOG

  2. DANCING WITH THE VIRGINS

  3. BLOOD ON THE TONGUE

  4. BLIND TO THE BONES

  5. ONE LAST BREATH

  6. THE DEAD PLACE

  7. SCARED TO LIVE

  8. DYING TO SIN

  9. THE KILL CALL

  10. LOST RIVER

  11. THE DEVIL’S EDGE

  12. DEAD AND BURIED (2012)

  There’s also a Ben Cooper novella:

  CLAWS

  And a standalone crime novel by the same author:

  TOP HARD

  The most recent title in the Cooper & Fry series is THE DEVIL’S EDGE:

  In his most gripping case yet, newly promoted Detective Sergeant Ben Cooper investigates a series of lethal home invasions in the Peak District. During the latest attack, a woman has died in an affluent village nestling close under the long gritstone escarpment known as the Devil’s Edge. Despite seething enmities between neighbours in the village of Riddings, the major lines of enquiry seem to lead to the nearby city of Sheffield. But before Cooper and his team can crack the case, the panic spreading throughout the area results in an incident that devastates the Cooper family. And the only person available to step into the breach is Ben’s old rival, Detective Sergeant Diane Fry…

  Here’s a sample to give you a taste:

  THE DEVIL’S EDGE

  Stephen Booth

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tuesday

  A shadow moved across the hall. It was only a flicker of movement, a blur in the light, a motion as tiny and quick as an insect’s.

  Zoe Barron stopped and turned, her heart already thumping. She wasn’t sure whether she’d seen anything at all. It had happened in a second, that flick from dark to light, and back again. Just one blink of an eye. She might have imagined the effect from a glint of moonlight off the terracotta tiles. Or perhaps there was only a moth, trapped inside and fluttering its wings as it tried desperately to escape.

  In the summer, the house was often full of small, flying things that crept in through the windows and hung from the walls. The children said their delicate, translucent wings made them look like tiny angels. But for Zoe, they were more like miniature demons with their bug eyes and waving antennae. It made her shudder to think of them flitting silently around her bedroom at night, waiting their chance to land on her face.

  It was one of the drawbacks of living in the countryside. Too much of the outside world intruding. Too many things it was impossible to keep out.

  Still uncertain, Zoe looked along the hallway towards the kitchen, and noticed a thin slice of darkness where the utility room door stood open an inch. The house was so quiet that she could hear the hum of a freezer, the tick of the boiler, a murmur from the TV in one of the children’s bedrooms. She listened for a moment, holding her breath. She wondered if a stray cat or a fox had crept in through the back door and was crouching now in the kitchen, knowing she was there in the darkness, its hearing far better than hers. Green eyes glowing, claws unsheathed, an animal waiting to pounce.

  But now she was letting her imagine run away with her. She shouldn’t allow irrational fears to fill her mind, when there were so many real ones to be concerned about. With a shake of her head at her own foolishness, Zoe stepped through the kitchen door, and saw what had caused the movement of the shadows. A breath of wind was swaying the ceiling light on its cord.

  So a window must have been left open somewhere - probably by one of the workmen, trying to reduce the smell of paint. They’d already been in the house too long, three days past the scheduled completion of this part of the job, and they were trying their best not to cause any more complaints. They’d left so much building material outside that it was always in the way. She dreaded one of the huge timbers falling over in the night. Sometimes, when the wind was strong, she lay awake listening for the crash.

  But leaving a window open all night - that would earn them an earful tomorrow anyway. It wasn’t something you did, even here in a village like Riddings. It was a lesson she and Jake learned when they lived in Sheffield, and one she would never forget. Rural Derbyshire hadn’t proved to be the safe, crime-free place she hoped.

  Zoe tutted quietly, reassuring herself with the sound. A window left open? It didn’t seem much, really. But that peculiar man who lived in the old cottage on Chapel Close would stop her car in the village and lecture her about it endlessly if he ever found out. He was always hanging around the lanes watching what other people did.

  Gamble, that was his name. Barry Gamble. She’d warned the girls to stay away from him if they saw him. You never knew with people like that. You could never be sure where the danger might come from. Greed and envy and malice - they were all around her, like a plague. As if she and Jake could be held responsible for other people’s mistakes, the wrong decisions they had made in their lives.

  Zoe realised she was clutching the wine bottle in her hand so hard that her knuckles were white. An idea ran through her head of using the bottle as a weapon. It was full, and so heavy she could do some damage, if necessary. Except now her finger prints would be all over it.

  She laughed at her own nervousness. She was feeling much too tense. She’d been in this state for days, maybe weeks. If Jake saw her right now, he wo
uld tease her and tell her she was just imagining things. He would say there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Relax, chill out, don’t upset the children. Everything’s fine.

  But, of course, it wasn’t true. Everyone knew there was plenty to worry about. Everyone here in Riddings, and in all the other villages scattered along this eastern fringe of the Peak District. It was in the papers, and on TV. No one was safe.

  Still Zoe hesitated, feeling a sudden urge to turn round and run back to the sitting room to find Jake and hold on to him for safety. But instead she switched on the light and took a step further into the kitchen.

  She saw the body of a moth now. It lay dead on the floor, its wings torn, its fragile body crushed to powder. It was a big one, too - faint black markings still discernible on its flattened wings. Was it big enough to have blundered into the light and set it swinging? A moth was so insubstantial. But desperate creatures thrashed around in panic when they were dying. It was always frightening to watch.

  But there was something strange about the moth. Zoe crouched to look more closely. Her stomach lurched as she made it out. Another pattern was visible in the smear of powder - a section of ridge, like the sole of a boot, as if someone had trodden on the dead insect, squashing it onto the tiles.

  Zoe straightened up again quickly, looking around, shifting her grip on the bottle, trying to fight the rising panic.

  “Jake?” she said.

  A faint crunch on the gravel outside. Was that what she’d heard that, or not? A footstep too heavy for a fox. The wrong sound for a falling timber.

  This was definitely wrong. The only person who might legitimately be outside the house at this time of night was Jake, and she’d left him in the sitting room, sprawled on the couch and clutching a beer. If he’d gone out to the garage for some reason, he would have told her. If he’d gone to the front door, he would have passed her in the hall.