Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  The driver looked up, and saw that the streambed was full of clothes. There were shirts and trousers draped across the stones, and socks and jockey shorts with water bubbling over them as if somebody had decided to do their washing the primitive way. A blue and red striped tie hung from a clump of dead heather. A shoe had filled with water and sunk to the bottom, where its laces waved in the current like strands of seaweed.

  Then the driver remembered the unidentified body found near here, the man who’d been hit by the snowplough. There had been an overnight bag with the body, but it had been empty of clothes.

  ‘Have you called in yet?’ he shouted to his partner.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do it again, then.’

  Cooper had decided to walk to Dam Street. The house where Marie Tennent had lived was no more than half a mile from divisional headquarters, just across town in the tangle of backstreets near one of the old silk mills. It hardly seemed worth getting a car out, not when the streets were still clogged with crawling vehicles and pedestrians slithering around in the roadway because the pavements hadn’t been cleared yet. Besides, there were few enough places to park in the Dam Street area, even without the snow. The millworkers’ houses had been built long before anybody needed either garages or streets wide enough to park cars on.

  The silk mill itself had recently been converted into a heritage centre. The old three-storey stone building had become derelict and for years had been in danger of demolition, but now a new café and shop had been built. Cooper wondered what on earth had possessed the designers to build the extension out of red brick when the old mill and all the other buildings around it were stone. The Peak District was stone country. Brick felt like an alien substance.

  On the corner of Dam Street, a man in a hooded parka was walking a Doberman tightly held on a chain. He eyed Cooper suspiciously, hauling back on the dog’s lead as if trying to give the impression it would attack at the slightest provocation.

  Cooper let him pass and walked on until he located Marie Tennent’s house. It was at the end of a terrace, with a tiny front garden and a view to the side over the millpond at the back of the heritage centre. Between the house and the one next door was a high stone wall that effectively prevented any communication with the neighbours. It seemed peculiarly quiet at this end of the street. Part of the effect was perhaps caused by the stretch of water, which was covered by a thin skin of ice. Cooper looked at the houses on the opposite side of the street. Their windows and doors were boarded up. They were either awaiting renovation or demolition.

  First he knocked on the neighbour’s door, but got no reply. He’d decided to try again after he checked out number 10 when there was a voice behind him.

  ‘Yeah?’

  It was the man with the Doberman, and he was fiddling with the chain as if he were about to let the dog loose. The dog didn’t look particularly interested, but Cooper didn’t feel like taking a chance. He showed his ID.

  ‘Do you live here, sir?’

  ‘I suppose so. What do you want?’

  ‘I’m making some enquiries about your next-door neighbour, Marie Tennent.’

  ‘Scottish lass?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think she’s Scottish.’

  ‘Her name’s Tennent.’

  ‘That’s it. Like the lager. What’s she done, then? Sit!’

  The Doberman sat with a sigh of relief. On closer inspection, the dog looked worn out, as if it had been pounding the streets for too long. In fact, it looked like some of the Edendale coppers used to when they’d done a quick shift changeover and had been on duty eighteen hours out of twenty-four.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s had an accident,’ said Cooper.

  ‘That’s copper’s talk, isn’t it? You don’t know how to say what you mean, you lot. Dead, is she?’

  ‘Yes. Did you know her well?’

  ‘Hardly at all. Kept herself to herself, she did.’

  ‘Perhaps she was frightened of dogs.’

  The man watched Cooper walk to the door of number 10 and open it with the key he’d been given by the agents. Cooper glanced back for a second. Two strings of saliva had run out of the Doberman’s mouth and were dripping on to the pavement. The muscles in its shoulders and haunches had tensed. He was glad when the door opened at the first attempt, letting him into the cold interior of Marie Tennent’s home.

  The first thing he saw in the hallway was the green message light flashing on an answering machine. He pressed the button and got a Scots voice. Not Highland, more urban Scots – maybe Glasgow or Edinburgh, he was never sure of the difference. It was a woman, middle-aged, who didn’t bother to identify herself. There was no phone number given either for the return call.

  ‘Marie, give me a ring when you can. Let me know how you’re going on, so I don’t worry about you.’

  There were bills piled up on a table and yellow Post-it notes stuck to the bottom of the mirror. There was a red coat hanging on a hook behind the door, a pair of shoes under the table, and a box of books on the floor that had been delivered by the postman but not opened.

  Cooper paused, trying to assimilate the immediate impressions of the house. There was something in the atmosphere that didn’t seem quite right. In an apparently empty house, an unexplained noise was immediately noticeable. But it wasn’t a noise that he’d heard. He moved his head from side to side, sniffing carefully for gas or the smell of burning, or for the odour of something dead and decomposing. But there were none of the smells that would normally have set his alarm bells ringing. There was a faint, elusive scent in the hallway, but it evaded his senses after the first whiff, before he could identify it. He wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from. It could simply be a lingering squirt of air freshener or a suggestion of recently used disinfectant.

  The hallway was cold, but no colder than any other house that had been standing empty for a couple of days. He supposed there was no central heating in these cottages. Or, if there was, it would be on a timer, to save electricity. If that was the case, then this was a time of day when Marie would not have expected to be at home, and that might have meant she had a job to go to.

  Cooper stood completely still and listened. Somewhere, a clock was ticking. It was one of the worst sounds you could ever hear – the ticking of a clock in an empty house after its owner had died. It was a reminder that the world would carry on just the same after you’d gone, that the second hand wouldn’t even hesitate in its movement as you passed from living to dying. Tick, you were there. Tick, you were gone. As if you’d never mattered. It was a sound that struck straight to some primal fear in the guts – the knowledge that time was steadily counting you down to your own death.

  Your clock ought to stop when you died. Cooper knew it was one of those irrational things, something that welled up from a deep superstition. But he wanted to climb up on a kitchen chair and take the battery out of the clock or remove its counterweight, to bring its hands to a halt. He wanted to demand silent respect in the presence of death. But he didn’t do it. Instead, he allowed the ticking to follow him around the house as he moved from room to room. He permitted it to mock him with its sound, like the chuckle of a malevolent mechanical toy.

  The first door off the hallway opened on to a sitting room. Cooper walked straight to the fireplace and checked the items on the mantelpiece. A recent gas bill had been shoved behind a cracked Chinese willow-pattern bowl, and there was a Somerfield’s checkout receipt with it. He turned to the fold-out mahogany dining table in the corner. There was a glass vase containing a dried flower arrangement standing on a raffia mat. But there was no suicide note.

  The room also contained a desk, which was packed with bank and credit-card statements, letters and old photographs. Cooper carefully separated some of the more recent letters to study them for the names of Marie Tennent’s closest contacts. He took a few moments to make a note of some names and addresses. None of them was local, and none sounded like a boyf
riend. One was called John and seemed to be a relative of some kind who was at university in Glasgow.

  Then he saw that some paper had been burned in an otherwise unused grate behind the gas fire. He crouched to look at it, already beginning to speculate why Marie would have written a suicide note, then burned it – or whether somebody else might have burned it for her. But when he got a closer look, he could see that it wasn’t a suicide note at all. It was a letter which said Marie Tennent, of 10 Dam Street, Edendale, was a confirmed finalist for a £250,000 cash prize. She was invited to state how she would like to receive the money, and the letter gave suggestions as to how she might spend it – a brand new car, a Caribbean holiday, a dream home in the country. Cooper poked the letter, and the blackened parts crumbled into dust. If you were already feeling desperate enough, the cynical irony of that bit of junk mail might be the thing to push you over the edge.

  Cooper lifted all the cushions on the sofa and the two armchairs. He found three ballpoint pens, a handful of small coins and a dog’s squeaky toy in the shape of a bone. Did Marie have a dog somewhere? But she’d been living in the cottage for only eighteen months, according to the agent. The dog could have belonged to a previous tenant. There were no dog hairs on the furniture or the carpet that he could see. There was a small damp patch on the wallpaper on the outside wall, but that looked more like poor maintenance. The windows hadn’t been cleaned for some time, either. The view of the boarded-up houses across the street was grey and smeared, spattered with small gobbets of dirty snow and dry streaks of bird droppings.

  Cooper worked his way back through the hallway and checked the cupboard under the stairs, where he found the controls for the central heating system. The heating was set to go off at 9 a.m. and come back on at 3 p.m. The more meticulous suicides would have turned the central heating off to save unnecessary electricity, knowing that nobody would be home that afternoon to need it. For others, the more impulsive or self-absorbed, it would never have crossed their minds. He didn’t know enough about Marie Tennent yet to be able to say which type she was.

  When he reached the kitchen, he finally recognized the smell. It was so distinctive that he couldn’t believe that it hadn’t registered with him immediately. It was composed of wet nappies and plastic bottles, warm milk and sterilizing fluid, washing powder and soiled liners. It was the smell of a baby in the house.

  13

  Cooper banged on the door of number 8, then tried the next house, and the one beyond that. He got no answer at any of them. Even the man with the Doberman seemed to have disappeared, or was refusing to answer his door.

  After he’d called in for assistance, Cooper went back into Marie Tennent’s home and walked quickly through all the rooms again. He was sweating now from a surge of panic at the thought that there might be a baby lying somewhere in the house. How long could a baby survive if it was left on its own? He had no idea. He had a vague feeling that a baby’s demands for food and attention were pretty constant, but it was only an impression gained at a safe distance from watching his sister-in-law Kate when his two nieces had been very young. Josie and Amy had cried when they were hungry, or when their nappies needed changing. If there had been a baby left alone in this house, it would surely be crying by now. Long before now. The neighbours would have heard it, wouldn’t they? Of course they would. And they would have reported that, even if they hadn’t bothered to report the fact that they hadn’t seen the baby’s mother for a while.

  The thought made Cooper feel a little better as he opened cupboards and wardrobes. But then he looked at the walls of the house and realized how thick they were. These were stone cottages, a hundred and fifty years old, built for millworkers at a time when houses were intended to last several lifetimes. They had solid walls, not those timber and plasterboard things you could put your fist through. Without the door or a window open, he could hear nothing from outside the house. He knew it was possible that a baby could have cried and cried in here, and not have been heard. It was possible that it could have cried itself to death.

  He pulled aside some clutter at the back of the cupboard under the stairs – a vacuum cleaner, a roll of carpet, cardboard boxes, an abandoned glass-topped coffee table. Each time he moved something out of the way, he expected to see a small bundle in a corner. But there was nothing.

  ‘Ben?’

  For once, he was glad to hear Diane Fry’s voice. ‘Through here,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you came.’

  Fry paused in the doorway, gazing round the room, but without seeming to look at Cooper at all. She walked round the sofa, stopped at the window and rubbed her finger through the grime on one of the panes. ‘Do people never clean their own windows round here?’

  ‘It depends whether you want to see out,’ said Cooper.

  ‘You’re being enigmatic again, Ben. It doesn’t suit you. Where have you looked?’

  ‘Everywhere, but not properly.’

  ‘You take down here then, and I’ll do upstairs. Take it steady, be thorough. There’s no need to panic.’

  ‘Yes, OK.’

  Fry headed for the stairs. Cooper felt some of the weight lift from him.

  ‘Diane?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘I had to – I’m paid to look after you now.’

  Back in Marie Tennent’s kitchen, Cooper decided to look in the automatic washer. Like everybody, he’d read newspaper stories of children getting trapped in washing machines. But this one was half-full of underwear. Nearby, several nappies were drying on a rack near a radiator.

  Then there was the refrigerator. It contained fruit juice and yoghurt, grated carrot and frozen oven chips, some of them well past their best-before dates. A mouldy piece of cheese and a half-used tin of marrowfat peas occupied the top shelf. In the cupboards, there were lots of pans and cooking utensils, but little food. What there was seemed to consist mostly of pasta and lentils, baked beans and cheap white wine. There was no sign of any dog food, or of feeding bowls, so it looked as though the odds were against a dog. There were more notes stuck to a cork board – phone numbers and shopping reminders. No suicide note.

  He opened the back door and found himself looking into a small garden, with a washing line draped across a paved area. The line was encased in frozen snow, like insulation round an electric cable. Cooper couldn’t see what else there was in the garden, because of the unswept snow, but he imagined a few bare flower borders around a patch of grass. Birds had been scratching at the snow, and in one corner there was a little brown heap where a neighbourhood cat had thought it was burying its faeces, only to find the heat melting the snow around them. Similar gardens ran off to the left, separated by low walls and fences. None of the houses overlooked Marie’s garden. The view straight ahead was of the rear wall of the mill, where the windows were few and tiny, dark squares in the snow plastered to the stone. There was a coal bunker against the wall of Marie’s house. As Cooper lifted the lid, a layer of snow slid back and piled against the wall. Nothing inside.

  That left only one place to hide something – the green wheelie bin pushed against the wall near a gate that must lead on to a tiny back alley under the shadow of the mill. To reach it, he had to cross the garden, unsure where the path might be under the snow. There was a padlock on the gate, and it was secure. From here, the mill wall seemed to tower above him like a fortress, blank and forbidding. Of course, this was the northern side. All the windows were on the southern wall, to provide light for the millworkers who’d overseen the looms. It was interesting to note that they would have had light for their work, but none on their homes – the shadow of the mill saw to that.

  As soon as he touched the wheelie bin, Cooper could tell there was something inside. An empty bin was so light on its wheels and so tall that it could be tilted with one finger when it came time for it to be retrieved from wherever the binmen had left it. This one had weight in the bottom. It bumped against the sides a little as he pulle
d the bin away from the wall to allow room to open the lid. He pushed the snow aside from the lid, staring for a moment at the High Peak Borough Council label that had been stuck to the green plastic. It gave dates for refuse collection arrangements over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

  When the lid came open, Cooper winced at the smell that rose towards him. Something wrapped in a Somerfield’s supermarket carrier bag rolled around in the bottom as he tipped the bin. Half an inch of dark liquid moved with it, gathering into a corner and revealing all sorts of dried debris stuck to the bottom. Cooper looked back at the house, wondering whether to call Fry down from upstairs. But instead he removed his woollen gloves and put them in his right pocket. From the left, he took a packet which contained a different pair of gloves. Latex and sterile. With a stretch, he managed to reach down into the wheelie bin and hooked a couple of fingers through the handles of the carrier bag. The handles had been tied together to seal the bag, tightly enough for it to take him more than a few seconds to get them open.

  Despite the smell, he was smiling by the time he could see what was inside the bag.

  Cooper re-entered the house and went upstairs to find Diane Fry. There was only one bedroom and a bathroom on the first floor. Although Marie had a double bed, there were pillows on only one side.

  ‘Anything?’ said Fry.

  ‘A few days ago, Marie Tennent roasted a leg of lamb, but never ate any of it,’ he said. ‘I’d say she left it in the fridge until it started going off, then chucked it in the bin. It could mean something.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Fry.

  ‘You don’t normally cook an entire leg of lamb for yourself when you live on your own. Or so I imagine.’

  ‘Right. You think she might have been expecting a visitor who never came?’

  ‘It seems the bins are emptied here on a Monday normally. The collections were out of routine at the New Year, but they should have been back to normal this week. The lamb was the only thing in the bin. That means she threw it out after the binmen came on Monday at the earliest.’