Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

‘Unless they were just lucky.’

  ‘There’s not much we can do about luck, Ben.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ said Cooper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can get lucky ourselves.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  But Cooper believed in luck. He believed that, if you worked hard enough and long enough at something, then eventually luck would start to operate in your favour.

  What Cooper failed to realize was that he’d already been given the most important piece of luck he would get that week.

  After the enquiry teams had been hastily assembled, Cooper walked back from the incident room with Diane Fry and Gavin Murfin. The only sound between them was Murfin humming to himself. Cooper listened, trying to identify the tune. It sounded like an old Eagles song, ‘New Kid in Town’.

  ‘Well, a new broom sweeps clean,’ said Murfin as he reached his desk and began to hunt through his drawers. ‘So my old mum used to say, like.’

  Cooper saw that Fry couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She was pale and held herself rigidly, as if she were freezing cold. And it was cold in the incident room, too. You could have broken up the air with an ice axe.

  ‘Always the optimist, aren’t you, Ben?’ she said. ‘You talked about getting lucky. Well, take a look around you. We’re at rock bottom for resources and we have an unidentified body on top of all our other enquiries. We have a new DCI, the Chief Super is cracking up, and Gavin here is our number one asset. Even the weather is against us. Does it look as though we’re likely to get lucky?’

  ‘Well, you never know.’

  ‘Do you think we could persuade Mr Tailby to stay on?’ said Murfin.

  ‘I don’t think it would take much to persuade him,’ said Cooper. ‘He’s not really all that keen on the HQ job.’

  ‘He’s even less keen on the new DCI.’

  ‘Mr Kessen will settle down, Gavin.’

  ‘It could take time, I reckon. I don’t know, Ben – they call some of us old coppers dinosaurs. But it’s like a proper Jurassic Park on the top corridor sometimes.’

  ‘So why did you bring up Eddie Kemp? Trying to score some points with the new DCI? Kemp has nothing to do with it, has he? What have you got against him?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t clean my windows properly,’ said Murfin. ‘Well, I don’t know. Kemp and his mates might have been cruising for victims. Got the taste for it with the other two, then picked some poor bugger up at the roadside out of town.’

  ‘I talked to Kemp’s wife,’ said Cooper. ‘According to her, he didn’t come home at all that night,’ said Cooper. ‘He went to the pub at eight o’clock and she knew nothing until she got a call next morning to tell her he was in custody. She also says the Isuzu was gone all night. According to her story, somebody brought it back early next morning and put the keys through the door.’

  ‘One of Kemp’s associates, presumably, since he was in custody at the time,’ said Fry.

  ‘Presumably. But we ought to check.’

  ‘Does Mrs Kemp know her husband’s friends?’

  ‘Knows them, but doesn’t want to, I’d say.’

  ‘No names supplied?’

  ‘No. She’s not happy, but she’s not giving evidence against her husband. The two victims might be more help when we can get full statements from them, but I doubt it. They’re part of the Devonshire Estate gang – they think talking to the police is like committing suicide. So all we have against Eddie Kemp is the identification of the old couple who looked out of the window and say they recognized him as part of the group. You know how reliable witness identifications are in those circumstances. Eddie himself says if he hit anybody, he was acting in self-defence.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’s identified the other three?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Somebody is going to have to enquire into his associates.’

  ‘God knows who,’ said Fry. ‘And God knows when.’

  ‘I bet it’ll be me,’ said Cooper. ‘I seem to have got Kemp’s car on my list.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Murfin, ‘did you realize that the new DCI’s name is Oliver?’ He held up the rubber lobster of the same name.

  ‘Are you telling us it’s a coincidence, Gavin?’

  Fry had been tapping her fingers on her desk. Now she seemed to make a decision, shake her head and was suddenly her proper self.

  ‘You’d better go and take a look at his car, then, Ben,’ she said. ‘And take Gavin with you.’

  ‘I’m on missing persons,’ said Murfin.

  ‘Let the allocator know where you’re up to, then you’ll have to leave it for an hour or two. Ben can’t go to see Kemp on his own. He’s doing enough solos as it is.’

  Murfin left, grumbling all the way. With a spasm of concern, Cooper watched Fry as she stared out of the window for a while, the muscles at the side of her mouth tight with tension. She fiddled at a strand of her fair hair in an uncharacteristically uncertain gesture. Her hand was pale and slender, with tendons that he could have traced with his finger.

  ‘A new broom sweeps clean?’ she said. ‘I’ll stick a broom up his arse.’

  Cooper nodded. He didn’t think she was talking about Gavin Murfin.

  8

  The Buttercross area of Old Edendale had its own personality, its own picturesque gloss, which had been carefully polished and maintained over the years for the benefit of visitors. It was here that the town’s antique shops clustered, some of them stuffed with gleaming mahogany furniture and brassware, but others dim and dusty, with nothing in their windows but a few coloured bottles and a Queen Victoria diamond jubilee biscuit tin.

  There were shops here that Cooper had never seen open, not in all his life spent in and around Edendale. Today, as usual, the ‘closed’ signs hung on their doors, with no indication of when their owners would be available to do business. Maybe they only appeared on special occasions, such as bank holiday weekends, when tourists thronged the Buttercross with money to spend. Maybe they dealers sold enough bottles and biscuit tins on those days to see them through the rest of the year. On the other hand, maybe they all had proper jobs to do.

  The Buttercross certainly lived up to the tourist brochure image this afternoon. The lying snow and the weathered stone and mullioned windows of the buildings hit just the right Dickensian note to set off the antique furniture. Sadly, there were no tourists in January to appreciate it.

  Between two of the shops, a narrow street lurched suddenly uphill. There were steel handrails set into high limestone walls on either side for pedestrians, but no pavements to separate them from any cars that might scrape their way round the corner. The walls had been the traditional dry stone when they were first built. But now they were held together by mortar, and they had periwinkles growing out of their cracks – forlorn green strands encased in frozen snow.

  Gavin Murfin swayed against the side of Cooper’s Toyota as they bumped over the cobbles, took a sharp turn and then made another steep climb to emerge into the Underbank area. The streets here were even narrower, and the doors of the houses had tiny knockers shaped like owls or foxes, with their numbers picked out in coloured tiles set into the stonework. Further up the hill, a set of three-storey Regency houses stood near a youth hostel. Several of the houses had been converted into flats, but one at the far end looked empty and uncared for. A broken window on the first floor had been left unrepaired.

  Beeley Street was hardly more than an alley, with an unmade surface just wide enough for one vehicle to pass. Cooper and Murfin walked up the street and crossed a patch of snow-covered grass.

  ‘Well, that’s Eddie Kemp’s car,’ said Murfin. ‘I’ve seen it many a time at West Street.’

  It was a silver Isuzu Trooper with a set of ladders clipped to its roof rack, and it was parked on a raised concrete platform in front of Kemp’s house, with its headlights looking down the street towards the Buttercross. The council binmen had left a new plastic refuse sack wedged behind a downspout near the front door.
They wouldn’t be coming up here again with their wagon soon, though, unless the snow cleared.

  Eddie Kemp himself emerged from the house when they knocked.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I’ve answered all the questions I’m going to.’

  ‘Is this your car, sir?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Are you deaf? I just said I’ve answered all the questions I’m going to.’

  ‘It won’t take a minute to check with the DVLC if you’re the registered owner.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’ said Kemp.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Is there something wrong with it? Would you like us to have a look while we’re here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a nice motor,’ said Murfin cheerfully. ‘It looks really useful, like.’

  ‘Well, you know damn well it’s mine anyway,’ said Kemp. ‘All you coppers know. I park it up at your place regularly when I’m doing the windows.’

  ‘Four-wheel drive, isn’t it?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Good in snow?’

  ‘It has to be.’

  ‘Were you driving this car on Monday night, sir?’

  ‘It was parked here.’

  ‘From what time?’

  ‘Has somebody said they saw me in it?’

  ‘That isn’t an answer.’

  Murfin leaned against the concrete platform. ‘You ought to answer DC Cooper,’ he said. ‘If he gets annoyed, he stops calling you “sir”. That can be very nasty.’

  Cooper stepped up on to the platform and looked at the tyres of the Isuzu. They wouldn’t tell him anything at all, but Kemp didn’t know that.

  ‘What time do you finish work, sir?’ he said.

  ‘When it starts going dark.’

  ‘About quarter past four, then, at the moment. Did you come straight home from work on Monday night?’

  ‘I’ve got a wife and a kid,’ said Kemp. ‘They expect to see me occasionally.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a “yes”, shall I?’

  ‘You can take it as what the hell you like. What are you looking for?’

  Murfin pointed down the street towards the Buttercross. ‘I had a girlfriend who lived around here once. I seem to recall there was a little Indian takeaway on the corner, near the hairdresser’s. Is it still there?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Kemp.

  ‘What time does it open?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’

  There was mud on the tyres of the Isuzu and small stones embedded in the tread. Streaks of brown grit ran along the sides of the vehicle. Cooper worked round the back and looked in through the tailgate.

  ‘What time did you go out again on Monday, sir?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I went to the pub for a bit,’ said Kemp. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Which pub?’

  ‘The Vine. I told them all this yesterday.’

  ‘Is that where you met your mates?’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of mates,’ said Kemp.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And some of them drink at the Vine.’

  ‘Do they serve food at this pub?’ said Murfin.

  Kemp came up on to the platform and stood next to Cooper, though it was more in an effort to get away from Murfin than a desire for companionship. Kemp was an inch or two shorter than Cooper, but he was powerfully built. They both looked through the tailgate at the contents of the Isuzu. There were buckets, sponges, plastic trays of cloths and wash leathers. There were also two rolls of stiff blue plastic sheeting, each about four feet long, with mud stains on their outer surfaces.

  ‘What do you use the plastic sheets for?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Standing the ladders on, so they don’t make marks on anybody’s fancy paving, and such.’

  ‘What time did you get home from the pub on Monday?’

  ‘When it shut. I said all this.’

  ‘Did you go out in the car again?’

  Kemp said nothing. Cooper could see fresh grazes on his knuckles when he leaned on the car. He was also standing quite close now, and the freezing cold air did wonders for clearing the sinuses and sharpening the sense of smell. Cooper thought of the people who claimed to be able to see auras. Was it possible to smell auras, as well as to see them? If he could see Eddie Kemp’s aura, it would be a sort of bilious green, shot through with yellow streaks, like pea soup flavoured with cinnamon.

  ‘Did you decide to drive up the A57 with your mates?’ said Cooper.

  Kemp still said nothing.

  ‘Which of your mates were with you? The same ones you met in the Vine? Did you find more than two victims that night? Did something go wrong?’

  Kemp began to walk back to his house.

  ‘Can you recommend a good chippie then?’ said Murfin as he passed.

  ‘We’re going to have to take your car away to have a look at it, sir,’ Cooper called after him.

  Kemp put a hand in his pocket, turned and threw a set of keys on to the concrete platform.

  ‘Give it a wash, then, while you’re at it,’ he said, and slammed the front door.

  Ben Cooper and Gavin Murfin sat in Cooper’s Toyota to wait for the vehicle recovery team to arrive. It was cold, and it was starting to get dark already. Cooper kept the engine running so that they could have the heater on, and wondered what he could do with his time while he waited. He looked at Murfin, but as soon as he’d felt the warmth from the heater, Murfin had put his head back on his seat and closed his eyes. His mouth hung open slightly. Not much hope of conversation, then.

  Cooper tried the radio. There was a sociological discussion programme on Radio Four, a phone-in on Radio Sheffield, and pop hits of the 1980s on Peak 107. He poked around among his cassettes and found nothing he hadn’t listened to already in the last few days. Then he remembered the books he’d bought from Lawrence Daley, which were still somewhere deep in his poacher’s pocket.

  He switched on the courtesy light and flicked through the contents pages of the two books. He quickly found the chapter about the crash of Lancaster SU-V, Sugar Uncle Victor. It was one of many aircraft that had fallen victim to primitive navigation equipment and treacherous weather conditions over the Peak District. Some of them were aircraft the Germans hadn’t been able to shoot down, but which the hills of the Dark Peak had claimed.

  Ironically, Mk III Avro Lancaster W5013 had been built locally, by Metropolitan Vickers at their factory in Bamford. So it had started life only a few miles from where it had finished its days. From a recent photograph of the wreckage, he could see there were still several of the larger pieces left – part of the tail, a wing section, and engine casings minus their propellers.

  Like Frank Baine, the author of these books had done plenty of research, and the details of SU-V’s crew were comprehensive. As Baine said, there had been seven men on board the Lancaster – four British RAF men, two Poles and the Canadian pilot, Danny McTeague.

  Of the British crew, the bomb aimer and rear gunner, Sergeants Bill Mee and Dick Abbott, had been found dead some distance from the aircraft. The text described them as ‘severely mutilated’, but Cooper recognized the euphemism. The phrase was still used today, in official statements to the press on the victims of serious road accidents or suicides on the railway line. It meant their bodies had been dismembered. The wireless operator, Sergeant Harry Gregory, and the mid-upper gunner, Sergeant Alec Hamilton, had been trapped inside the wreckage and had died in the fire that consumed the central section of the fuselage. Burned beyond recognition, they had been identified by the uniforms under their flying suits, and by the contents of their pockets, after their bodies had been taken to the RAF mortuary at Buxton.

  Cooper put the book down for a moment. He wondered whether Alison Morrissey had considered the possibility that one of the bodies had been wrongly identified. Perhaps, after all, her grandfather had died in the crash. All this time, it might have been some other member of the crew they should have been looking
for. And he wondered about Pilot Officer Zygmunt Lukasz, the flight engineer, who’d survived and was now seventy-eight years old.

  Gavin Murfin stirred and grunted in his seat. His eyes opened.

  ‘Where are we?’ he said.

  ‘Underbank,’ said Cooper. ‘We’re waiting for the recovery crew.’

  ‘There’s a good Indian takeaway around here somewhere,’ said Murfin. Then he snorted, and his head fell back again.

  Weather conditions and primitive equipment – Cooper supposed that was the standard explanation for many of these incidents. Otherwise, the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor seemed inexplicable – the aircraft was flying much too low, and it was off course. But it was hinted in the book that the reason it was off course was that the skipper had apparently ignored the navigator’s instructions. So was it another example of a pilot caught in the trap between high ground and low cloud, finding mountains suddenly in front of him when he thought he was approaching his home airfield in Nottinghamshire? Or had something else gone wrong?

  One of the eye witnesses quoted in the account of the fate of Sugar Uncle Victor was the former RAF mountain rescue man, Walter Rowland, who had also been mentioned by Alison Morrissey. Like Zygmunt Lukasz, he’d been unwilling to talk to her. Unwilling, or unable? Rowland was described as being eighteen years old at the time of the crash. After all that time, memories faded. But sometimes there were memories which were too clear for anyone to want them reviving.

  ‘No sign yet?’ mumbled Murfin.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It’s no good, Ben. I’m having curry-flavoured dreams. I’m going to have to go and see if that Indian is open.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll still be here when you get back.’

  ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘Some naan bread.’

  ‘Is that all? You can’t live on that.’

  ‘I wasn’t intending to,’ said Cooper.

  Murfin slipped out of the car, and Cooper watched him stumble down the street, clinging precariously to the steel handrail to stay on his feet. If he made it back up with a set of foil trays and a bag of naan bread intact, it would be a miracle.

  Cooper looked at his mobile phone. He was trying to remember whether Frank Baine had said where Alison Morrissey was staying, but he couldn’t recall. There weren’t all that many hotels in Edendale, and he could easily give Baine a call in the morning to find out. He might also ask the journalist for Walter Rowland’s address.