Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  She’d certainly been a contrast to DCI Kessen, who made an appearance in the main news bulletin, appealing to the public for information about the whereabouts of Marie Tennent’s baby. ‘We’re very concerned for the safety of this child,’ he said. In fact, he said it three times, and still failed to get any sincerity into his voice.

  When the next item came on the TV – a funny piece about a quaint rural tradition in North Yorkshire – Cooper continued staring at the screen for a while without seeing it.

  There was so much happening in his life at the moment that it seemed inconceivable he should be developing an interest in something fifty-seven years old. But the signs were there of the beginnings of a fascination. They always included a desire to find out everything there was to know about a subject, and a tendency to be thinking about it even when he was supposed to be on duty.

  He was lucky that he’d survived this long in the job when his mind was so prone to flights of imagination. Imagination was a trait that didn’t always fit with routine police work. Up to now, his supervisors had given him plenty of leeway on the strength of his reputation. And, of course, because of who he was. He was Sergeant Joe Cooper’s son. Who wouldn’t find it understandable if he seemed to be a little distracted occasionally? But now, more than ever, Cooper was aware that he ought to watch his step.

  He turned off the TV and looked at his watch. The man he most wanted to talk to at this moment was Walter Rowland, the former member of the RAF rescue team who’d been at the scene of the Lancaster crash. Aside from Zygmunt Lukasz, Rowland was the only surviving witness he knew of. But it had been a long day and he was exhausted. Maybe tomorrow he would find a chance to contact Rowland. Probably it would be a waste of time. It all happened a long time ago, after all, and Rowland was an old man by now – no doubt he would have forgotten the whole thing.

  Because he’d turned off the TV, Cooper missed the news bulletin later that night, when it was announced that human remains had been found at the site of an old aircraft wreck on Irontongue Hill.

  Ever since he’d retired, Walter Rowland liked to listen to the radio in his workshop. The sound of the voices soothed him as he worked, helped him to forget the increasing pain that would knot his hands into claws for days. The news readers’ talk of events going on in and around Derbyshire was somehow reassuring. It made him feel that he was well off where he was, lucky to be out of the constant mad whirl of car crashes and house fires and endless incomprehensible arguments about subjects he would never have to understand. But tonight, what he heard on the radio made him pause on his lathe. He stared at a curl of wood as it hung from the chair leg, ready to fall. He’d forgotten what he was supposed to be doing.

  Rowland had been just eighteen years old when the RAF Lancaster crashed on Irontongue Hill. He’d enlisted twelve months before the war ended, and had never seen any action. Instead, he’d been recruited into the RAF mountain rescue unit based at Harpur Hill. Then he’d seen a bit of action all right, and plenty of dead and injured men, too. But the bodies had all been from his own side – British and American airmen, or Canadians, Australians and Poles. They hadn’t been killed by enemy action, but had died on the hills of the Peak District. A lot of them had flown unwarily into the deadly embrace of the Dark Peak, into that old trap that lay between low cloud and high ground.

  They didn’t say much on the radio news late that evening. But he heard the newsreader mention human remains and an aircraft wreck on Irontongue Hill. The words were enough to take Rowland back over half a century, to a scene of carnage and a burning aircraft on a snow-covered hill. There had been human remains then, all right. There had been pieces everywhere, and men charred like burnt steaks in the wreckage.

  He thought about the possibility that there might, after all, have been another body the rescue team hadn’t found, a fatally injured crew member who’d been overlooked. But then Rowland remembered how thorough the search of the wreckage had been, not only by the rescue teams and the local police, but also later by the RAF recovery squad. And he recalled how many of the fragments of the aircraft had disappeared over the years, scavenged by souvenir collectors or tugged loose by curious walkers and left to be scattered by the ferocious gales that blasted those moors in winter.

  Rowland brushed the wood shavings off his overalls with the backs of his hands.

  ‘No way,’ he said to the chair leg sitting on his workbench. ‘No way on this earth.’

  He’d lost interest in the chair. The smooth surface and delicate turns seemed irrelevant now, an old man’s preoccupation, no more than a means of keeping himself occupied and away from his memories. His hands weren’t as good as they used to be now, anyway. The arthritis had progressed too far, and the pain was so great that it was impossible to keep his grip on the wood. He knew he’d suffer for the rest of the week now, as a result of the short time he’d spent working on the chair. Some folk would tell him to stop, to give in and accept that he was wasting his effort. Aye, and the day that he gave in would be the day that he died.

  Rowland opened the back door of the workshop and coughed out a mouthful of sawdust on to the side of the path, staining a patch of snow. Then he lifted his head slowly and spoke to the night sky, as if the cold air might somehow carry his voice to the place on Irontongue Hill where the wreckage of Lancaster SU-V lay.

  ‘All of them that died in that crash, we got out,’ he said. ‘And the one that should have died – that bastard walked away.’

  16

  The tiny bones looked pathetic on the slab. Dark peat had dried and crumbled away from the skeleton, to be carefully swept into an evidence bag. Some of the bones were crushed or were freshly broken where Flight Sergeant Josh Mason had dropped the wing of Sugar Uncle Victor on them.

  ‘If it weren’t for the skull, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d found a dead lamb,’ said the pathologist, Julian van Doon. ‘At this age, they’re barely formed.’

  ‘What age?’ said Fry.

  ‘Mmm. Two weeks, perhaps. We’ll ask a forensic anthropologist to take closer look. The only injuries I can see are definitely postmortem.’

  ‘Blasted air cadets.’

  ‘It’s hardly their fault.’ The pathologist used a small steel instrument to remove a live insect that had been hibernating in the corner of the jaw. It went into another bag. ‘I see from the newspapers you’ve been searching for a small child. “Have you seen Baby Chloe?”’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Fry.

  ‘Well, I don’t know the sex of this child. But there’s one thing for sure – it isn’t Baby Chloe. This baby has been dead for years.’

  Fry nodded. She looked at the evidence bags containing the pink bonnet and the knitted white jacket found with the bones.

  ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘the clothes it was wearing are brand new.’

  By Friday morning, DC Gavin Murfin had still not come up with a match for the Snowman on the missing persons databases and was showing signs of giving up. There were the usual missing husbands and sons on the list. There were the middle-aged men who’d succumbed to their midlife crises and walked out on the boring wife, and the teenagers who’d suffered their midlife crisis early and walked out on the real world. And plenty more besides.

  The trouble was that none of them sounded like the owner of the expensive suit and the brogues. Strangest of all, a house to house in Woodland Crescent had established that the man Grace Lukasz described had called at no other addresses except hers.

  ‘We’re going to get Mrs Lukasz in to make a formal statement,’ said Fry when she came back from talking to their senior officers. ‘There must be a clue there somewhere to who this man was, and what he wanted in Woodland Crescent.’

  The Snowman enquiry and the hunt for Eddie Kemp’s associates in the double assault were taking up a lot of the resources that E Division had available. And they still had a missing baby to find, and nothing was more important than that. Meanwhile, undetected crimes and unresolved e
nquiries were piling up. The Crown Prosecution Service was kicking up a fuss about the delay in producing files for court cases, which they had to postpone.

  Cooper had more actions on the Snowman enquiry that morning. There were several more visits in Edendale, and a drive out to the Snake Inn to talk to the staff once more.

  ‘By the way, I think Eddie Kemp is going to find himself called in for questioning again,’ said Fry.

  ‘Did Forensics get something from his car?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Nothing definite yet. But we badly need to be questioning somebody. Who’s going to make the decision, I’m not sure. It might be Mr Tailby, or it might be Mr Kessen. Talk about too many chiefs and not enough Indians.’

  ‘Are we going to get any help, or what?’

  ‘God, I hope so. But as for who’s going to organize that …’

  ‘I get the picture.’

  Fry watched him sifting through the files on his desk. ‘Have you found anywhere to live yet, then, Ben?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes. I went to see a place last night. A flat on Welbeck Street, close to town. It belongs to Lawrence Daley’s aunt.’

  ‘Whose aunt?’

  ‘Lawrence Daley. He owns Eden Valley Books. You remember, where Marie Tennent bought her books?’

  ‘Oh, yes. So you did some private business while you were there, did you, Ben?’

  ‘Well, not really.’

  ‘And you bought some books as well, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘It didn’t take me two minutes.’

  ‘Better make up for it with some interviews. There are plenty to be done.’

  ‘You know there’s still the Marie Tennent file outstanding?’ he said.

  ‘Mrs Van Doon won’t be getting round to her yet, so the inquest won’t open for a few days. It’s a matter of priorities. We have to move on with the Snowman. We have to get an identification. The woman can wait.’

  ‘That was a false alarm about the remains, then. It wasn’t Baby Chloe?’

  ‘No, this one was long dead.’

  ‘Poor beggar. What do you think? An unwanted child? Teenage mum?’

  ‘Never mind teenage – they have them by the time they’re ten.’

  ‘The clothes, though …’

  ‘Forensics will tell us more,’ said Fry. ‘But they were new. It got out on the news bulletins last night, and we’ve been coping with phone calls about missing babies ever since.’

  ‘Nothing from the person who actually has Baby Chloe, I suppose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If the clothes turn out to belong to Marie’s baby …’

  ‘OK, we’re still very concerned about Chloe. Officers visited all the neighbours last night, when they got home. No one knows anything about the baby. They’re going to take another look round the Tennent house today, just in case, and Marie’s mother is coming in this morning. She lives in Falkirk and says she hasn’t seen her daughter since not long after Chloe was born. Marie was due to go up to Scotland to visit her in the spring, but in the meantime they only communicated by phone, says Mum. We might get some more out of her when she arrives.’

  ‘Marie did have a baby then?’

  ‘Why, what did you think, Ben?’

  ‘She might have been looking after somebody else’s baby. She might have been babysitting for a friend. She might have been working as an unregistered childminder. She might have been one of those women who are so desperate for a baby they take somebody else’s. There are lots of possibilities.’

  ‘Not according to Grandma. Anyway, if you spent less time in bookshops and more time reading the files, Ben, you’d know that Marie’s GP has removed any doubts on that score.’

  But Cooper hadn’t really been in any doubt. The impression from Marie Tennent’s house had been quite clear. Marie had been a mother, and her baby was somewhere they hadn’t looked yet.

  ‘What about the garden?’ he said.

  Fry sighed. Despite what she’d said, Cooper knew she was thinking the same as he was.

  ‘The uniforms are being issued with spades,’ she said.

  Mrs Lorna Tennent was brought back to West Street after identifying her daughter in the mortuary at the hospital. She was made tea and settled in an interview room. She cried for a while until her eyes were red and swollen, and then she talked about her daughter and about the baby, little Chloe.

  ‘Of course, I came down to be with her when the baby was born,’ she said. ‘I stayed with her for a week, but I had my job to go back to in Falkirk.’

  ‘Did she seem all right?’ asked Fry. ‘Able to cope with the baby?’

  ‘She was taken up with Chloe completely. But Marie wasn’t very practical. I wanted her to come back with me to Scotland, so I could help her to look after the little thing. But she wouldn’t do it. She wanted to be on her own with her baby, and she didn’t want Granny being in the way. She hardly even seemed to want the little jacket I knitted for her.’

  ‘A jacket? What colour?’

  ‘White.’

  ‘Would you be able to identify it?’

  ‘Of course. Have you found it?’

  ‘We might have.’

  Mrs Tennent nodded sadly. ‘Marie didn’t want Chloe wearing it. She thought I was interfering. You’re right, she wasn’t really up to coping properly, but she wouldn’t take any help. Of course, it’s always a bit difficult with a first baby.’

  Fry paused. ‘But Mrs Tennent, it wasn’t Marie’s first baby, was it?’

  The woman stared at her, then her tears began again as she understood what Fry was saying. ‘I always wondered,’ she said. ‘Marie told me nothing, but I could guess. She managed to make excuses for not seeing me for months, and when I did see her, she looked ill.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Over two years ago. She’d come to live down here because she fell in love with the area. We used to visit Edendale every year when she was younger.’ Mrs Tennent paused. ‘I suppose she had an abortion, did she? She wouldn’t want to tell me, because we’re Catholics, you see. Marie was brought up a Catholic.’

  ‘No, we don’t think Marie had an abortion,’ said Fry. ‘She’d given birth before.’

  ‘But …’

  Fry showed her a cutting from that morning’s newspaper. ‘We think this could have been Marie’s first baby. This was also where the jacket was found which I’ll ask you to identify.’

  Mrs Tennent read the article twice. ‘Do you know how the baby died?’

  ‘Not yet. In fact, we may never know.’

  ‘Marie told me she had a new job in a clothes shop and was too busy to come to see me, or to let me come and see her.’ Mrs Tennent sighed unsteadily. ‘I should have followed my instincts, and I might have been able to do something. I suppose nobody knew she’d had that baby at all?’

  ‘It seems possible, I’m afraid.’

  But, like Fry, Mrs Tennent was following a line of logic. ‘Poor little Chloe,’ she said. ‘It’s terrible to think of all the things that might have happened to her. Marie wouldn’t have done anything deliberately to hurt her, though. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘Her doctor says she was suffering from some anxiety about the baby, even before it was born.’

  ‘I know, I know. But that’s not the same as wanting to hurt her, is it? I thought she would get on better once she’d got rid of the old boyfriend – if you could call him a boyfriend. He was married, of course. He went back to his wife after a few months, but not until after he’d knocked our Marie about a bit. She always had poor taste in men.’

  Fry sat forward with more interest. ‘Who was this boyfriend?’

  Mrs Tennent had looked ready to start crying again, but she scowled at the question.

  ‘I told and told her she could do a lot better for herself. Marie said he ran his own business. But after all, he was only a window cleaner.’

  The number of potential interviewees had been mounting steadily, without a matching increase in the number of
staff for the enquiry teams, although a trickle of officers had been seconded from other divisions. Cooper had been knocking on doors fruitlessly with a file full of interview forms in his hand, when he’d found himself within half a mile of Underbank. It occurred to him to wonder whether Eddie Kemp’s car had been returned. Kemp would find it impossible to do his work without it.

  Rather than attempt the steep, cobbled street from the Buttercross itself, which hadn’t been cleared of snow, Cooper chose to approach the Underbank area from the opposite direction. He worked his way to Eddie Kemp’s street, and noted that the Isuzu wasn’t on its concrete apron.

  Now he was nearly half an hour ahead of schedule. Next on his list of tasks was a visit to the Snake Inn, where he was supposed to take statements from the staff and try to jog their memories about vehicles that might have passed the inn after the Pass had been closed because of the heavy snow on Monday night. Half an hour in a cosy pub with a blazing fire and a pint of beer sounded attractive. Then his mobile phone rang. It was Diane Fry.

  ‘Ben – I know you’re busy, but I need you to meet me at Eddie Kemp’s house in Beeley Street in half an hour.’

  ‘Half an hour?’

  ‘Can you make that?’

  ‘Of course, but –’

  ‘We’ve just had Marie Tennent’s mother in,’ said Fry. ‘Guess who used to be Marie’s boyfriend until he went back to his wife?’

  ‘Not Eddie?’

  ‘Yes. That sounds like a desperate woman to me.’