Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  ‘National?’ Fry frowned. ‘Railway police, you mean, sir? No? Not the National Crime Squad? Special Branch?’

  ‘The military wing,’ said Hitchens. ‘Ministry of Defence Police. We’ve got two officers from the MDP arriving here today. They think they might know our Snowman. They think he might be one of theirs.’

  ‘One of theirs? A missing serviceman?’

  ‘The name of their missing person is Nick Easton. And when I say he’s one of theirs, I mean one of theirs. He was an RAF special investigator. They’ll be here in about an hour’s time, so they’re not messing about on this one. You’ll be working with a Sergeant Jane Caudwell.’

  Ben Cooper and Alison Morrissey split the bill between them and left the pub. For a few minutes, they walked in silence, until they found themselves on the river bank. In this one short stretch of river there were hundreds of birds on the water, calling and diving, splashing and arguing, cocking their heads at a few people on the paths. An old couple were discussing the difference between coots and moorhens. Two children argued over the last bit of bread, and tried to throw it to the furthest duck. Dogs became hysterical at the flapping of wings.

  Near the weir, the water became shallower, and you could lean over and stare at the bottom, looking for fish. Rafts of dead willow leaves floated on the surface, swirling gently in aimless circles, clinging together in a dark scum as they touched the banks. Then, suddenly, a couple of feet away, the water roared over the weir. The meltwater was pouring off the hills, raising the level of the river. The water bounced so hard off the rocky bottom that it rose up again in white spurts inside the cascade. Then it foamed away towards the bridge, splashing over an old tree trunk that had lodged on the edge.

  ‘It wasn’t only my father who was a hero,’ said Morrissey. ‘Klemens Wach had an admirable service record, too. When he arrived in Nottinghamshire, he was already one of the heroes of Poland, the ones who aren’t forgotten, even now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Wach was transferred to Leadenhall from 305 Squadron, the famous Polish unit.’

  ‘Was he?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Sure. It’s in the file. They’re a legendary squadron in Poland, apparently.’

  ‘Right.’

  They passed two bikers, a couple in their thirties, who sat on a bench sipping tea from paper cups, their helmets on the wooden slats next to them and their boots outstretched as they watched the ducks foraging for food. They sat without speaking, lifting their heads only to stare with amazement at a white-haired man in a black overcoat who attempted to hand them a religious pamphlet.

  ‘How long are you staying in the area?’ said Cooper.

  ‘As long as necessary.’

  ‘Have you no job to go back to in Toronto?’

  ‘I’m a high-school teacher. But I took a sabbatical,’ she said, with a small smile.

  ‘Lucky you. And no family?’

  ‘Only my mother and a brother a few years older than me. They support what I’m doing all the way. My mother and I, we’re very alike. We think the same way on this. We have to know how the final chapter ends. We just have to, Ben.’

  ‘So your grandmother was left alone in 1945 with a small baby she must have had to bring up on her own.’

  ‘Not for long. She found another man. In fact, my mother’s maiden name was Rees. She took the name of her stepfather, Kenneth Rees.’

  ‘Your grandmother re-married?’

  ‘How could she? Her husband hadn’t ever been declared dead. She didn’t actually consider him to be dead. But she needed a man to support her, to help her raise my mother. That’s the way it was back then. And Kenneth Rees was a good man. He never questioned it, my mother says. I remember him very well, though he died fifteen years ago.’

  Irritatingly, Cooper found himself longing for a way he could ask Alison for a photograph of Kenneth Rees. He had an urge to compare one to the photos of Danny McTeague.

  ‘Where was Rees from?’

  ‘Newcastle upon Tyne. He was a structural engineer who came to Canada to build bridges.’

  ‘Would he have been about the same age as your real grandfather?’

  ‘About.’

  ‘I suppose your grandmother had known him for a while? Or did she meet him after your grandfather went missing?’

  Cooper found he was walking on his own. Alison Morrissey was no longer alongside him. He turned and saw that she’d stopped a few feet behind him. Her lips were apart, and her breath came in angry spurts. She had shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat again in the way that he’d last seen outside Walter Rowland’s house. Her posture was angry, but defensive. Stubborn, yet awfully vulnerable.

  ‘You think Kenneth Rees was my real grandfather using a different name,’ she said. ‘Why should he have married my grandmother – they were already married. He couldn’t let anybody know who he was, because he was a deserter. He would have been sent to prison.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Kenneth Rees was a Geordie engineer. He had red hair. He was only five foot eight. His accent was impossible to understand.’

  ‘You say he’s dead now?’

  ‘Yes, but I can have his details faxed to you, if you want. A photograph, too.’

  Cooper desperately wanted to say it wouldn’t be necessary, but he knew he needed to see the evidence himself, for his own peace of mind. Alison simply nodded, understanding his lack of response. ‘I’ll phone my mother and get her to do it later today,’ she said. ‘So you’ll have them first thing Monday morning. Is that soon enough for you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you have e-mail?’

  ‘A fax will be fine.’

  Morrissey looked across the road at the hotel. She seemed disappointed, but she had proved herself to be resilient so far, and he knew it would pass. He certainly hoped it would pass.

  ‘Thanks for the lunch,’ she said.

  ‘You paid for it yourself,’ said Cooper. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘So you didn’t.’

  Cooper watched Morrissey pass the iron railings outside the bank and go back into the hotel. He knew there was something wrong about what she’d told him. And it wasn’t just his wild suspicion about the Geordie, Kenneth Rees. Alison Morrissey’s story wasn’t the whole truth.

  22

  Fry was waiting for Cooper outside his flat in Welbeck Street, her arms folded as she leaned on her car parked at the kerb. Mrs Shelley’s curtain next door was twitching anxiously.

  ‘Diane? Another visit?’

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said.

  ‘It’s my day off.’

  ‘You haven’t been answering my calls again,’ she said. ‘I need you.’

  Cooper saw a blond head in the passenger seat of Fry’s car.

  ‘But you’ve got Gavin,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I know I’ve got bloody Gavin. But I need you.’ She hustled Cooper towards the car. ‘Gavin, get in the back,’ she said.

  Murfin stumbled out, and a shower of plastic wrappers fell around his feet on to the snow. Cooper could have booked him for a litter offence. ‘Hi, Ben. Charged any window cleaners recently?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Fry. ‘And get in the back.’

  Cooper hesitated at the passenger door. ‘There’s some sort of sticky mess on the seat,’ he said.

  ‘You two,’ said Fry, losing patience. ‘You two are both going to be a sticky mess on the floor in a minute. Now, will you –’

  ‘I know. Get in the car. What’s so important? Have we got another body or something?’

  For a trained response driver, Fry wasn’t coping well in the snow today. She accelerated too hard and braked too suddenly. Now and then, Cooper could feel the wheels start to slide a little and braced himself for a collision with the kerb or a car coming in the opposite direction. But she always seemed to correct the steering just in time. At the top of the High Street, she turned left at the lights into Clappergate, away fro
m the pedestrianized shopping area. They passed the front of the railway station and the spire of All Saints parish church, where someone had built a snowman in the churchyard. It had been made to look like the vicar, with a black T-shirt and a circle of white cardboard for a dog collar, and marbles to create glittering eyes.

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Back to West Street first,’ said Fry.

  ‘We’re going the wrong way.’

  ‘I’m avoiding the hill.’

  ‘Yes – if you drive like this on the straight, you’d never make it up the hill, would you?’

  ‘There are three things you need to know,’ said Fry, without smiling. ‘One, we have an identification on the Snowman, who turns out to be an RAF investigator called Nick Easton.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Second, we’ve had a couple of goons from the Ministry of Defence Police at West Street this morning. It was the MDP who’d been trying to trace Easton at the air museum.’

  Cooper thought that was quite enough to take in at once. But it sounded as though there was even more. ‘And what’s the third thing I need to know?’ he said.

  ‘The third thing you need to know,’ said Fry, ‘is that, if you don’t like my driving, you can get out and walk.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  Fry turned up past the High Peak College campus. Though it was uphill here, it was a gentle, winding incline, unlike the precipitous approach to the West Street divisional headquarters.

  ‘Your mate’s still missing,’ said Gavin Murfin from the back seat, as if trying to cheer Cooper up.

  ‘What mate?’

  ‘Eddie Kemp. I checked his record. He’s got quite a bit of form, hasn’t he?’

  They reached the top of the hill and worked their way through the back roads towards West Street. At least Fry had learned to find her way around the town now. It was no longer foreign territory to her, as it had seemed to be for a long time after she transferred from the West Midlands. Some officers at West Street had called her ‘the Bitch from the Black Country’ in the early days. Cooper hadn’t heard that title for a while. He hoped Fry herself had never heard it.

  Sergeant Jane Caudwell and PC Steve Nash had driven up from the Ministry of Defence Police headquarters in Essex. Fry had taken an instant dislike to Caudwell. She couldn’t explain what it was about her – whether it was the dimples in her cheeks when she smiled, or the muscles that bulged in her broad shoulders when she took off her coat. Her sidekick, Nash, Fry managed to forget within moments. He sat in the background, saying nothing, not even ‘hello’. DCI Tailby had come in for the meeting as well as DI Hitchens.

  ‘Nick Easton was an investigator with the RAF Police,’ said Sergeant Caudwell. ‘We’re arranging for his wife to make a formal identification, but we don’t think there’s any doubt. He’s very well known. They called him ‘Magic Nick’ Easton, because of his speciality.’

  A photograph was passed round showing an RAF policeman in a blue uniform. It was clear to Fry that he and the Snowman were one and the same person. The attached personal details included a description of his tattoo.

  ‘A speciality?’ said Tailby, who looked even more unhappy today. But he always looked unhappy when his Sundays were disturbed.

  ‘He was a children’s entertainer in his spare time,’ said Caudwell. ‘His party tricks were very popular with the kiddies, I’m told. The top brass loved him – lots of opportunities for good PR, establishing friendly relations with the local community and all that.’

  Paul Hitchens appeared to be on the verge of making a joke, but he looked at Caudwell and Nash and changed his mind.

  ‘What case had Easton been working on?’ asked Tailby.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that at the moment,’ said Caudwell.

  Tailby stiffened and drew himself up to a greater height. He was several inches taller than Caudwell and two levels higher in seniority, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.

  ‘I think we’re going to have to know, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Not for the time being.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Sergeant. We have to be able to share information.’

  Caudwell shook her head. The two stared at each other for a moment. Fry noticed that Caudwell hardly seemed to blink. Maybe she’d had her eyes stitched open to make her more frightening.

  ‘I’ll have to have a word with your chief,’ said Tailby. ‘This needs sorting out a higher level. We need access to information.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Caudwell. ‘It may not be something we want to share. But that’s not my decision. In any case, we don’t know what Easton was doing in your area. We last heard of him in Nottinghamshire.’

  ‘At the aircraft museum at Leadenhall,’ said Fry.

  Caudwell looked at her for the first time. She smiled, and her dimples made white holes in her cheeks. In the background, Nash was smiling, too. But he had no dimples, only a brutal haircut and eyes that strayed a little too close together.

  ‘Ah,’ said Caudwell. ‘I see you know a little already.’

  ‘I presume it was your people who’d been to Leadenhall before us.’

  ‘Since Nick Easton failed to keep in contact, we’ve been trying to trace his movements.’ Caudwell turned back to the senior officers. ‘What progress have you made on the cause of death?’ she said.

  ‘A small, sharp knife or scalpel, something of that kind,’ said Hitchens. ‘And we don’t know that he was actually killed in this area. We think he was already dead when he was left by the side of the road, and we don’t yet know where his body had been brought from.’

  ‘Forensics?’

  ‘Apart from the fatal wound, there were no traces on the body that couldn’t be accounted for at the scene. There were some dirt stains on his suit that contained engine oil, and that’s our only hope of identifying the vehicle he was carried in. It seems likely that his body was wrapped in something that left no traces – a plastic sheet, something of that nature. We found a bag, but it had been emptied. The snowplough had obliterated any traces of tyre marks.’

  ‘Presumably Easton had a car?’ said Tailby.

  ‘A black Ford Focus.’ Caudwell gave the registration number.

  ‘We’ll have all the car parks and usual dumping spots checked. And we’ll ask Nottinghamshire to do the same.’

  ‘There is one other place we think he visited after Leadenhall,’ said Fry. ‘We have a possible witness here in Edendale who says a man answering Easton’s description visited her house on Monday.’

  Caudwell leaned forward with interest. ‘Name?’

  ‘Mrs Grace Lukasz.’

  The MDP sergeant smiled so broadly that even the dimples disappeared into the creases under her eyes. ‘You have no idea’, she said, ‘how much that helps.’

  Caudwell produced a sheet of paper, which she handed to DCI Tailby. He glanced at it and passed it to Hitchens.

  ‘You might like to check whether the other names on that list mean anything, too,’ said Caudwell. ‘Then perhaps we can have another meeting, and we’ll talk about sharing information.’

  Fry watched Caudwell and Nash leave to check themselves into a local hotel.

  ‘Can I see the list, please, sir?’ she said.

  Hitchens gave it to her, and Fry looked through the names. The list felt like a direct challenge, and she had an overwhelming desire to find out as much information as she could about all the people on it before she met Caudwell again. She could see the MDP were a problem, without a doubt. Anyone who was allocated to work with them would be on difficult ground. It would be like throwing someone to the wolves.

  Cooper had been trying to persuade Fry that Alison Morrissey’s story was connected to the Snowman enquiry, and yet when the evidence was presented to him, it came as a surprise. Subconsciously, perhaps, he’d been convinced that the connections he was making were imaginary, that he’d been making them up because he wanted a reason
to continue the McTeague investigation. But Fry had no reason for making these things up.

  ‘So what do you say to that, Ben?’ she asked.

  ‘It was after Easton’s visit that Zygmunt Lukasz started his journal.’

  ‘Journal? What’s this?’

  ‘According to his son, Zygmunt is writing his account of the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Diane, don’t you think it’s time we conceded the possibility that the two things are connected?’ he said.

  Fry stared at him for a moment. ‘What are you saying, Ben? Do you think Alison Morrissey might have been involved in the death of Nick Easton?’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant. She wasn’t even in the country at the time. She arrived after Easton was found.’

  ‘Are you sure? Have you confirmed the time of her flight from Canada? Have you checked she was on the passenger list?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s about time you did, then.’

  Cooper stayed silent.

  ‘It shouldn’t be a problem,’ said Fry. ‘As long as you don’t feel any personal involvement, that is. And I’m sure you don’t feel that, do you, Ben? It wouldn’t be like you at all. Not a competent and dedicated detective like yourself.’

  Cooper felt himself flush. It was a habit he hated in himself, a ridiculous thing for someone approaching thirty years of age. Diane Fry had the uncanny knack of doing it to him. But, of course, it was usually because she was right.

  ‘The connection is there,’ he said. ‘The link is the Lukasz family. Sergeant Caudwell knew the name – and I bet it’s on the list she gave us.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I think Nick Easton was looking for Andrew Lukasz, though, not Zygmunt.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cooper. ‘But it seems more than a coincidence that Andrew disappeared the day before Easton arrived. And something upset Zygmunt. His family have been worried about him. They say he’s stopped speaking English. Personally, I think he’s being damned awkward. But then, he hasn’t got long left to live, they say.’

  ‘Is his son very close to him?’