Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  ‘And what?’ said Morrissey.

  Jepson flicked the report over uncertainly. ‘Well, presumably he somehow managed to get out of the country and back to his home in Canada.’

  ‘And how easy would that be for a deserter?’ said Morrissey. ‘Especially as there was a war on?’

  The Chief Superintendent looked to be about to shrug his shoulders, then changed his mind at the last minute. He’d been told in senior management training sessions that it was a gesture that gave out the wrong message.

  ‘Please. My problem is that, without being able to trace the two boys who saw my grandfather, my only possible sources of information in the area are Zygmunt Lukasz and a man called Walter Rowland, who was a member of the RAF mountain rescue team called out to the crash. Frank has contacted them, but both are refusing to speak to me.’

  ‘Miss Morrissey, I’m sorry, but I really can’t do anything for you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not that you can’t – you won’t,’ said Morrissey.

  ‘If you wish. But the fact is, I don’t have resources to spare even to advise you on your mission.’

  Cooper could see that Alison Morrissey didn’t like the word ‘mission’. Her jaw tensed, and her expression became obstinate. But she began to fiddle with the catch of her briefcase, as if she were about to put her papers away.

  He took the opportunity to ask a question. ‘Miss Morrissey, what exactly do you think happened to your grandfather?’

  Morrissey met his eye, surprised for a moment, and pushed her hair behind her ear with a quick flick of the hand. ‘I think he was injured,’ she said. ‘Probably dazed or concussed, so that he didn’t know what he was doing or where he was. Possibly he couldn’t even remember the crash. I think he took off his flying gear and left it by the side of the road because it was too heavy for him to carry. I think he reached a house somewhere nearby, perhaps a farmhouse, and the people took him in.’

  ‘Took him in?’

  ‘Looked after him and gave him somewhere to stay.’

  ‘Knowing who he was? They must have heard later that there had been an air crash. Why would they keep him? Why not hand him over to the authorities? If he was injured, they would at least get medical treatment for him.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ said Morrissey stubbornly. ‘I do know that the man who hitched a lift on the A6 was not my grandfather. I believe that man was an army deserter who’d gone absent without leave from the transport depot at Stockport. He was a man named Fuller. The police arrested him later at his parents’ house in Stoke-on-Trent.’

  ‘But your grandfather?’ asked Cooper. ‘What makes you think he stayed in this area? It seems very unlikely.’

  ‘This is what makes me think so,’ said Morrissey. She pulled a plastic wallet from her briefcase. Cooper could see that it contained a medal on a red-and-gold ribbon. The medal was perfectly polished, and it gleamed in the fluorescent lights, flashing in their eyes as if sending a message across the decades.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a Royal Canadian Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross,’ said Morrissey. She turned the medal over in her hands. ‘It arrived at my grandmother’s old home in Ottawa one day during the summer. There was a note with it, too. It was addressed to my mother, and it just said: “Remember your father, Pilot Officer Danny McTeague.”’

  Cooper leaned closer to look at the medal. ‘This is your grandfather’s medal? But where did it come from?’

  ‘All we know,’ said Morrissey, ‘is that it was posted here, in Edendale.’

  6

  The body from the Snake Pass had arrived in the mortuary at Edendale General Hospital, where it would be kept on ice, at least until it could be identified and somebody claimed it. When Fry had driven up to the mortuary, she’d left DC Murfin in the car, where he was no doubt adding to the pile of toffee wrappers on her floor.

  Inside the mortuary, it was warmer than out on the street. The air smelled better, too – it was full of disinfectants and scented aerosols to suppress the odours of body fluids and abdominal organs.

  ‘We don’t get many of these now,’ said Mrs Van Doon. ‘People carry all sorts of identification with them these days, don’t they? But if not, we can usually match up their fingerprints or dentition, or their DNA. No luck your end so far, I take it? Nothing we can match him to?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Fry. ‘We’re putting appeals out, of course. But at present his description doesn’t match the details of any missing person we know of.’

  ‘So maybe no one’s noticed he’s missing yet.’

  ‘There seem to be a lot of people who go around not noticing things,’ said Fry.

  The pathologist gave her a brief, quizzical look. ‘He doesn’t look like the average missing person to me,’ she said. ‘He’s too clean and well dressed, for a start. Those shoes he was wearing are expensive.’

  ‘I know. His shoes and the rest of his belongings are our best hope. They’re distinctive.’

  ‘He wasn’t a hiker, not wearing those on his feet. The snow has ruined them.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t a hiker.’

  ‘A stranded motorist, perhaps? Trying to walk back to civilization from an abandoned car?’

  ‘That’s possible. All the cars found so far have been matched up with living owners, but there are a few side roads the snowploughs haven’t reached yet.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced of that, either.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘Look at him. Look at his clothes. You pointed out yourself how expensive they are. Would he really set off walking in the snow dressed like that? With no coat? Why didn’t he stay where he was until he was found? It’s not exactly the Antarctic – somebody would have come across him within twenty-four hours at the most. And why didn’t he phone for help? For God’s sake, every schoolkid has a mobile phone these days. I can’t believe a man like this didn’t have one.’

  ‘You’re right, I suppose. I should restrict myself to the physical evidence and let you deal with the psychology.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Fry, noting the pathologist’s defeated air.

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘And another thing. Are we supposing that he set off walking down the road and that the first people who came along were some opportunist muggers who just happened to be driving over the Snake Pass in a blizzard?’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly say.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no.’

  Fry glanced at the body. It had been cleaned and covered up. But the face of the man was still visible. He was aged about thirty, she supposed, a little thick about the neck but otherwise in reasonable shape. His hair was dark, cut short and tidy, with a few flecks of grey at the temples. The stubble growing on his cheeks looked wrong. He was a man who would normally have been close-shaved. She looked at his hands. They were strong, but free of callouses, and the nails were trimmed.

  ‘What about the injuries?’ she said.

  ‘There is one major ventral wound to the abdomen, which opened up the abdominal cavity and the lateral muscles and almost severed his left arm above the elbow.’

  ‘That was the blade of the snowplough, presumably?’

  ‘All I know is that it was a sharp metal object about ten feet wide and weighing approximately half a ton,’ said Mrs Van Doon.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘There are a number of abrasions on the head, face, back and legs, probably caused by the body being dragged along the road surface for a short distance. There’s plenty of bruising, and he also has two cracked ribs on the right side of his chest from a fall.’

  ‘A fall?’

  ‘All right, look. From the position in which he was found, I’d say that particular damage might have been caused by him being dropped by the snowplough on to some small rocks by the side of the road. He was found lying half on the rocks, and half off. A few inches to either side and he would have had a much e
asier landing – on snow or soft ground.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it made much difference to him by then.’

  ‘Not a bit. All the injuries I’ve mentioned were suffered postmortem.’

  ‘After he was dead.’

  ‘That’s usually what postmortem means. Otherwise, it would come as a bit of a shock to my customers when I remove their internal organs.’

  ‘The one million pound question, then …’ said Fry.

  ‘What did kill him, you mean?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll need to do some more tests,’ said the pathologist. ‘Contrary to your inspector’s impression, I do actually have the services of a modern laboratory to call on.’

  ‘But …?’

  ‘I need to study the configuration of the major wound more closely before I can be certain of anything.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean by that.’

  ‘Circumstantial evidence,’ said Mrs Van Doon. She pointed at one of the plastic bags containing the victim’s clothes. ‘Your inspector was also wrong when he said there was no blood. There was blood. Not much, but some. It wasn’t noticeable at the scene because it had been absorbed by his clothing. He was wearing a thermal vest, a shirt and cotton sweater. A small amount of blood had penetrated the layers of clothing to stain the inner lining of his suit jacket, which is why it wasn’t visible. It was lucky that he’d been dead for some time when the snowplough hit him. If there had been a lot of bleeding from the major wound, I might not have noticed anything.’

  Fry was listening carefully, trying to work out the direction of the pathologist’s thinking. ‘Do you mean you think there is an earlier wound which has been masked by the later one?’

  ‘Exactly. At least, that is one theory I’ll be exploring. The edge of the snowplough blade is regular in shape. I’m told it’s a new one, which is useful. But there’s an irregularity in the shape of the wound which matches the position of the bloodstain on the clothing. We need to do some matching. And I need to go deeper into the tissues to tell you more.’

  ‘Deeper? A knife?’

  ‘Possibly. My conclusions will be in my report.’

  ‘So he was stabbed, then dumped from a vehicle.’

  ‘If that’s the case, then it helps your time frame, too, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But he was already dead some time before he was found …’

  ‘Yes, but if he was dumped from a vehicle, when was he dumped? My impression from the scene was that the body would have been in full view of passing traffic, if it hadn’t been for the snow. But then, I suppose there was no traffic on that road after the snow had fallen.’

  Fry thought carefully about what she was saying. ‘If somebody dumped him, it has to have been when it was already snowing heavily enough to have discouraged drivers from attempting the Snake Pass, so that there was no one passing to be a witness. Probably the snow-warning lights at the bottom of the road were already on, so drivers were turning back. We can check what time they were switched on. But it also has to have been before the road became completely impassable. In a heavy fall of snow, that can’t have been more than a half-hour window of opportunity. And we have to be looking for a four-wheel drive vehicle of some kind. No one in his right mind would have risked it otherwise. They could have found themselves stranded up there with a dead body in the boot. That narrows it down a lot. Thank you.’

  Mrs Van Doon brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead and smiled tiredly. ‘You can deduce so much from a small amount of blood,’ she said. ‘I agree with your inspector on that, at least. Blood does make a body rather more satisfactory.’

  Ben Cooper escorted the visitors back down the stairs and along the corridor towards reception. Alison Morrissey walked quickly, looking straight ahead, but Frank Baine tended to linger, glancing curiously into the offices they passed. Cooper was eyeing the slim black briefcase that Morrissey carried. He would have loved to get hold of all the files that he’d glimpsed in there, and to immerse himself in the details of the story whose surface they had barely scratched during the meeting. The LIO’s briefing had been good, but it didn’t tell him anything about the human dimensions of the tragedy, which he could see were what drove Alison Morrissey.

  As soon as the thought crossed his mind that Morrissey might let him read the files if he asked her, Cooper dismissed the notion as mere escapism. There was more than enough for him to do right now. Just because something interested him, it didn’t mean it was his job to look into it.

  As Cooper held open the security door for the visitors to leave, Morrissey turned to look at him. Her gaze was direct and disconcerting. He felt as though she were seeing him fully, reading everything about him from his face and his manner, in a way that people rarely did. Cooper self-consciously straightened his shoulders and felt the beginnings of a flush rising in his neck.

  ‘And what did you think?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you want to know what happened?’

  ‘It’s not my job to take a view on the subject,’ said Cooper. ‘I just do what I’m told.’

  She stared at him, with a small, sceptical smile. He hadn’t been sure before, but now he could see that her eyes were pale grey. Cooper felt uncomfortable, unable to move from his position until Morrissey and Baine had passed through the door. But Baine was hanging back, watching them patiently. Morrissey held her gaze for a moment longer.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she said.

  Cooper felt as though he’d been summed up and found wanting. He watched Morrissey walk briskly across the reception area, looking like a smart business executive with her black suit and briefcase. Frank Baine stopped in the doorway.

  ‘Take my business card,’ he said. ‘In case I can help.’

  Cooper took the card almost absent-mindedly. ‘Thanks.’

  Then Baine leaned towards him, nodding slyly towards the disappearing figure.

  ‘And remember – there’s no stopping a woman when her passion is roused,’ he said.

  Eden Valley Books was in Nick i’ th’ Tor, one of the cobbled passages running between Edendale market square and the Eyre Street area. The bookshop was a high, narrow building that looked as though it had been jammed between two much wider ones as an afterthought, or a mere space-filler – something to use up all the leftover oddments of stone when the builders had finished work on the Yorkshire Bank next door. But it was three storeys high, with books on the first two floors, and from the tiny windows set into the gabled roof, it looked as though there were attic rooms, too. Cooper recalled there was even a cellar that ran under the street, full of more books.

  There were bookshops in Edendale that were more modern, but Cooper had browsed in Eden Valley Books many times, and he was hopeful he’d find what he wanted here, even during the half-hour he could spare during his lunch break. The owner, Lawrence Daley, seemed to specialize in gathering together obscure books on esoteric subjects.

  The concept of a window display hadn’t reached Eden Valley Books yet. All Cooper could see through the streaked glass were the ends of some wooden bookshelves plastered with fliers advertising local events which had taken place several months ago. A concert by a folk group, a psychic evening at the community centre, an autumn fair in aid of the Cats Protection League.

  The snow in Nick i’ th’ Tor was rapidly turning to slush, and water ran down the cobbles into the square. The front door of the bookshop was narrow, and it stuck in the frame when he tried to open it, so that he had to lean his weight against it before it gave way. It reminded him more of a defensive bastion than of an entrance – especially when a warning bell jangled above his head, causing a nervous stirring somewhere inside the shop.

  Immediately, Cooper was surrounded by books. They were crammed on to shelves right in the doorway, so that he couldn’t get past without brushing against them. Further in, the tiny rooms had been stuffed with books from floor to ceiling. They were piled on the floor and on the bare wooden stairs, and no doubt they filled the uppe
r rooms as well. On a table, Cooper saw a set of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories and a 1935 almanac with board covers mottled with mould. There was an overwhelmingly musty smell of old paper – paper that had soaked up the damp from many decades spent in unheated stone houses on wet hillsides.

  ‘Hello?’ called Cooper.

  Lawrence Daley wore a silk waistcoat with a fancy pattern that was none too clean, and his brown corduroy trousers had become baggy at the knees from hours of crouching to reach the lower shelves. On occasions, Cooper had seen Lawrence wearing a bow tie. But today he had an open-necked check shirt, with his sleeves rolled back over pale forearms. His hair was uncombed, and he looked dusty and sweaty, as if it were the height of summer outside with the temperature in the eighties, rather than creeping up from zero towards another snowfall.

  ‘I’ve been trying to sort out the Natural History section,’ said Lawrence when he saw Cooper appear round the stacks. ‘Some of these books have been here since Granny’s day. They’re still priced in shillings, look. A customer brought one to me yesterday and insisted on paying fifteen pence for it. I couldn’t argue, because that was what the price on the label converted at in new money.’

  ‘Are you throwing them out?’ asked Cooper, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell and the cloud of dust that hung in the air.

  ‘Throwing them out? Are you kidding? I can’t throw them out. They just need re-pricing.’

  ‘But if they’ve been here since your grandmother ran the shop …’

  ‘I know, I know. They’re not exactly fast sellers. But if that were all I was interested in, I’d stack the place to the ceiling with Harry Potters, like everyone else does. It’s Detective Constable Cooper, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ben Cooper, yes. I wondered if you had any books on aircraft wrecks. There are so many wrecks around this area – there must be something published about them.’

  ‘If you go right to the back and through the curtain on the left, then down a few steps, you might find something halfway up the shelves,’ said Lawrence.