‘It’s nothing to do with that at all,’ said Fry.
‘He’s in the RAF, though?’ Malkin said. ‘He looks like he’s in uniform in that photo. I can make out the blue, and the cap.’
‘Yes, but you might have seen him in civilian clothes,’ said Fry.
Malkin shrugged. ‘Like I said – without my glasses …’
‘Has anybody been here from the RAF recently? Or phoned you, maybe?’
‘Not that I know of,’ said Malkin. ‘But I don’t always answer the phone.’
‘Your name was on a list of people Sergeant Easton was planning to visit. Can you think of any reason why that should be?’
‘No.’
‘Does the name Lukasz mean anything to you?’
Malkin seemed to tense a little. Before he could answer, a ewe in a nearby pen went down on its knees and began bellowing. Malkin turned towards it.
‘It’s all right,’ said Cooper. ‘Carry on.’ And Malkin nodded at him, accepting his help without question as he handed over a spare pair of overalls.
Fry watched in amazement as Cooper took off his waxed coat and pulled the overalls over his clothes. She almost missed Malkin’s next sentence.
‘Lukasz. It rings a bell, that name. Something to do with the RAF, is it?’
‘You tell me,’ said Fry.
Out of the corner of her eye, she was aware that Cooper had climbed into the pen with the noisy ewe. The bellowing continued. It was the full-throated roar of childbirth. Fry couldn’t shut out the noise, but she was trying to ignore what Cooper was doing as he bent down at the rear end of the sheep. Whatever it was, it made the sheep’s eyes roll and its scream become even louder.
‘Ben, what the hell are you doing?’
‘There’s a foot turned back,’ said Cooper. ‘Have you got a bit of baler band, sir?’
‘Aye, on the pen side,’ said Malkin.
Fry watched Cooper take a length of what looked like bright blue string, dip it in soapy water and fold it into a loop.
Cooper bent down again. Fry still didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but she was quite sure it wasn’t a usual occupation for a detective conducting an interview.
‘Ah, here we come,’ said Cooper, his voice strained with exertion.
There was a squelching sound, the sudden splash of fluids emptying into the straw, and the ewe fell silent. But then was there another noise. It was only a faint coughing, like the sound of a tiny child with something caught in its throat. It was followed by a sneeze. And Fry suddenly found she was desperate to see what was happening in there.
Malkin turned back towards her. ‘The only thing I can think of is that he might have been an old airman. Polish, maybe, with that name? You should try old Walter Rowland. He used to be in the RAF. But that’s years and years ago.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Fry impatiently.
‘Here, don’t you want to know this? I thought you had to ask some questions.’
She could hear Cooper rustling in the straw, muttering to the sheep, crooning like some demented goatherd.
‘It’s a ewe lamb,’ he said.
‘Aye, that’s good,’ said Malkin, without looking round. ‘Single, is it?’
‘I’ll tell you in a minute.’
Fry couldn’t see anything except for Ben Cooper’s back in the blue overalls. She tried to edge towards the pen, but Malkin was in her way.
‘Any road,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what else I can tell you. What else do you want to know? I don’t understand what all this business is about the RAF.’
‘Oh, shush!’ she said.
Now a distinct high-pitched squeak came from somewhere in the wet straw. Fry leaned over to get a glimpse of something dark and wet, which hadn’t been there a few seconds before. It was a creature with tiny, thin legs splayed in the straw and a head that was too big for its body. She watched in amazement as it began to struggle to its feet, wobbling dangerously, with its ears folded on to its head as it tried to get its balance. Although its eyes could hardly focus, its mouth was puckered and it was trying to move forward towards its mother. It had been in the world for only thirty seconds.
‘Good, strong lamb,’ said Cooper. ‘We’ll just get her suckling.’
‘Where?’ said Fry.
‘From her mother’s teats, where else?’
‘It’s too small. It won’t be able to reach,’ she said. ‘Will it?’
‘Don’t you believe it.’
Within a few moments, the lamb had reached up and found a teat and was butting strongly with its head at its mother’s belly. The ewe curved its neck and sniffed and licked at the lamb, which wagged its tail like a puppy.
‘Look at it,’ said Fry.
‘A new life coming into the world,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s always a bit of a special moment.’
‘I can never see it often enough,’ said Malkin, and they exchanged a meaningful look that Fry couldn’t interpret, but which excluded her from its meaning.
‘Have we finished?’ Cooper asked her, unbuttoning his overall.
‘Er, yeah,’ she said, though she barely felt able to drag herself away from the lambing pen.
‘If Mr Malkin remembers anything, I’m sure he’ll contact us.’
Fry took the hint and presented Malkin with her Derbyshire Constabulary business card. Malkin took it between his thumb and forefinger, so as not to stain it. The card was white and shiny and pristine, and it looked as out of place in the lambing shed as if it had been an alien artefact from Mars.
Fry walked back to the car while Cooper asked to wash his hands. Malkin tapped him on the shoulder before he left. ‘You’re not a bad lad,’ he said. ‘I reckon you live on your own, am I right?’
‘How on earth can you tell?’
Malkin gave him a sly wink. ‘Like they say, it takes one to spot one. Have you got a good-sized pocket inside that coat? I bet you have.’
‘Yes.’
‘Stick this in it then. It’s very fresh – you’ll just have to clean it.’
He pushed a parcel wrapped in newspaper into Cooper’s hand. Cooper felt at it for long enough to be sure that it wasn’t a couple of kilos of crack cocaine or an illegal weapon he was being handed.
‘I don’t think I can take it,’ he said.
‘Don’t be daft, lad. There’s no harm in it. But don’t tell your sergeant, eh? She wouldn’t understand.’
Malkin winked at him again. Cooper was aware of Fry waiting for him outside, but he was also conscious of the need to preserve this man’s goodwill if he was going to get at his memories.
‘I can only take it if I pay you something for it, Mr Malkin,’ he said.
‘Well, if you must. Fifty pence will do.’
Cooper dug out a fifty-pence piece. Living was proving cheap, so far. And he even knew how to prepare and cook rabbit. He and Miranda would have a good supper from it.
‘That’s all open and above board then,’ said Malkin, and winked again.
When the two detectives had gone, George Malkin went straight back to the sheep. He had to spread iodine on the navels of the newest lambs to stop them getting infections through their cords. And at the far end of the shed, there was another job he had to do, which he’d postponed when the police arrived. The woman sergeant wouldn’t have liked it much, and he’d been reluctant to let them see what was in his pocket, the thing that he’d gone to fetch from the house when they arrived.
Malkin enjoyed looking after the ewes. He was glad to be of use, happy to be working at his old job again for a short while. He’d lambed hundreds of sheep in his time, and there was no need for anyone to tell him what to do. He could work alone, with his own thoughts for company. His help during the day meant that Rod Whittaker could go off to work on his driving job and take over in the shed when he came home in the evening.
He felt sorry for Rod, struggling to make a go of it. Farming was in the lad’s blood, but he had no money to go into it properly, and little hope of making e
nough profit from his sheep to earn a living. Trying to get into farming was no life for a man now. Rod would be a lorry driver for the rest of his days, forced into earning his living some other way. Every morning, when he set off for work, he looked tired and bleary-eyed from a night dozing uncomfortably in the lambing shed.
Shortly before the police arrived, one lamb had been born dead. Across the aisle, another ewe had produced two and was rejecting the second, refusing to allow it to feed. The tiny lamb was bleating, but its mother repeatedly butted it away in favour of its larger, stronger sibling, which was sucking vigorously at the teats.
Neither the dead lamb nor the rejected one was unusual, and Malkin knew exactly what he had to do. The fleece had to be skinned from the dead lamb and tied round the body of the rejected one, to give it the right smell for the bereaved ewe to accept it as her own. It was the old way, but the best one. The sheep were stupid – they never knew that they’d been fooled.
24
Fry sat rigid and silent in the passenger seat of the Toyota on the way back from Harrop. Cooper wanted to tell her that she had some straw sticking to her hair, but he daren’t say anything. They were almost in Edendale before he felt her start to relax a little. It seemed to be the street lamps that did it, and the appearance of houses and petrol stations, with more light from their security systems and forecourts.
‘We could try the Lukaszes, Diane,’ said Cooper. ‘Or do you want to wait until morning?’
Fry shook herself. ‘Let’s do it now. It could be too late in the morning.’
‘OK.’
When they drove down Woodland Crescent, they found the Lukasz bungalow in darkness, and the BMW missing from the drive. Cooper rang the bell anyway.
‘No luck,’ he said.
‘Damn. It’ll have to be the morning then. I suppose we ought to have known that some people have better things to do on a Sunday evening.’
‘Hold on, what time is it?’ said Cooper. ‘Five o’clock? I know where they’ll be.’
‘You do?’
‘Their oplatek dinner was due to start an hour ago. They’ll all be down at the Dom Kombatanta.’
The Polish community seemed to be fond of their events. While they waited, Cooper read the notices inside the entrance to the club. There was an Easter dinner in April, followed by something called the Katyn Day of Remembrance, which was celebrated by a Mass and wreath laying. Then 3rd May was Polish Constitution Day, with another Mass and a parade of standards. Cooper wondered if Zygmunt would be on parade for that day, with other members of the ex-servicemen’s organization, the Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantow w W Brytanii.
They’d found someone working in the kitchen and asked them to take a message to Peter Lukasz, being reluctant to interrupt the event they could hear taking place through some double doors in the main hall.
‘That’s Peter Lukasz. Not Zygmunt Lukasz.’
Then Cooper noticed the final event on the spring calendar – the annual general meeting of the SPK itself, to be held at Dom Kombatanta. A poor turnout seemed almost to be accepted. The time of the AGM was set for 4 p.m., but underneath it was stated: If there is no quorum, the AGM will begin at 4.30 p.m. in any case. It gave Cooper a picture of the SPK – former soldiers and airmen, bent old warriors proud of the medals pinned to the breast pockets of their suits, some of them wearing their paratroopers’ berets and their white eagle badges. But there were so few of them that they could no longer guarantee a quorum for a meeting once a year, acknowledging that death and illness would have intervened during the past twelve months.
He’d seen them before, or old men just like them, lining up at the cenotaph every Remembrance Day. But their numbers were dwindling each year, as if it were only the fading memories of their sacrifice that had sustained them until now. Some of those taking part in the parade last year had looked so fragile and translucent that they could have been an illusion, anyway. Perhaps they existed only because of the public’s belief in them, like Tinkerbell or Santa Claus.
‘Peter says why don’t you go through,’ said the woman from the kitchen.
Fry was still reluctant. ‘Oh, but …’
‘He says you’re quite welcome tonight.’
Fry walked into the hall. Cooper hesitated in the doorway before following her. It was a strange feeling that he experienced, as if he were about to step into a foreign country. No – not a foreign country, but some kind of parallel universe where it was still England, but the people in it weren’t English.
On the surface, the surroundings were familiar. It was a plain hall with a wooden floor and a stage, with a small bar to one side. The pumps and optics behind the bar looked like thousands of others, but the lettering on the bottles didn’t make any sense. In the middle of the room were tables covered in white tablecloths and laden with cutlery and floral centrepieces. It could have been the Edendale old folk’s Christmas party. It could have been the tennis club dinner, or a gathering of the Caledonian Society for Burns Night. The people sitting at the tables looked and sounded like any group of Derbyshire folk enjoying themselves – except that these people were speaking a language Cooper didn’t understand. Their voices were raised, yet he couldn’t make out the meaning of a single word. There were a lot of children here, too. Their presence gave a different atmosphere.
Then there were the smells. Food was being served – but it wasn’t microwaved beef and Yorkshire puddings, nor even boiled ham and baked potatoes. The smells were too spicey, a combination of rich meats and strong herbs. Even the alcohol in some of the glasses looked the wrong colour. Cooper wanted to turn round and walk out, then come back in again, to see if the confusion cleared. The inconsistencies were too disorientating, the noise and the smells too redolent of a strange land.
He could see Zygmunt Lukasz and several other old men at a table. He watched them drinking glasses of clear liquid. Poles, like Russians, drank vodka, didn’t they? The old men were knocking it back in one go, with a sharp flick of the wrist to toss the vodka to the back of the throat. And then they put down their glasses and attacked their starters – something that was decorated with small pieces of potato and cucumber, but smelled of fish.
Out of curiosity, Cooper picked up a copy of the menu from the bar. The starter was sledzie w smietanie. A helpful translation informed him that it was herrings in cream. His stomach gave a small lurch. He was sure that wasn’t what he’d smelled being prepared earlier. Maybe it had been the pierogi or the bigos that were on the menu for later. It hardly mattered. It would still be a frozen meal for one that awaited him when he got back to Welbeck Street.
‘We’re probably one of the most traditional Polish communities left in this country,’ said Peter Lukasz, watching him read the menu. ‘How long that will last, I don’t know. A lot of it is down to the old people, of course. Like my father and my aunt Krystyna. Will you have a drink?’
Fry shook her head. ‘That’s not what we’re here for.’
But Cooper was starting to feel he deserved a little freedom.
‘Is there beer?’ he asked Lukasz.
‘Zagloba Okocim.’
‘I don’t know what it is, but that’ll be fine.’
The shelves behind the bar were full of vodka bottles, row upon row of them. Some of them were alarming colours, like a row of urine samples from people with virulent kidney diseases. He studied the labels. They were flavoured vodkas. He saw lemon, orange, pineapple, peach, cherry, melon and pepper. There was a pale green one that appeared to have a blade of grass floating in the bottle.
Lukasz was holding a tiny shot glass with a thick bottom and an eagle engraved on its side. Cooper noticed he was sipping his drink, not tossing it back in one go as the old men had done.
‘What are you drinking yourself?’ he asked.
‘Krupnik,’ said Lukasz. ‘Polish honey vodka. Do you know, you have to pay nearly twenty pounds a bottle for it here, even when you can find it at all. Back home, it would cost about fifty pence.�
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Cooper nodded. He was more interested in the fact that Lukasz had said ‘back home’ than in the information about honey vodka.
‘Back home in Poland?’ he said.
‘Of course.’
Lukasz took another sip of his krupnik. Cooper knew perfectly well that Peter Lukasz had been born in Edendale and had lived in the town all his life.
Lukasz led them through into a small lounge bar. Cooper sat where he could watch Zygmunt and the other old men in the main hall. Several of them wore blazers, with their medals displayed on their breast pockets. It occurred to Cooper that any one of them could have been an eighty-year-old Danny McTeague. He could have changed his identity. He could have been living a different life for fifty-seven years. But why would he send his medal to his wife after all this time? Did he want someone to come and find him? Was he seeking some kind of closure, as Zygmunt Lukasz was?
The other old men seemed to look to Zygmunt whenever he spoke. Women fussed around him, and children stood nearby and smiled at him. His pale blue eyes responded to everything with the same expression – a kind of calm pride.
‘We need to talk to you about a man called Easton, Mr Lukasz,’ said Cooper.
‘Oh?’ The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him, but it was difficult to tell. Some people were better at hiding their reactions than others. They could be in turmoil inside, while calm on the exterior. ‘What did you want to ask me?’
‘It’s a pity you failed to identify him when you came to the mortuary on Friday.’
‘Ah, this is your dead person.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And why do you think I should have been able to identify him? At that time, you had some idea that he might have been my son.’
Cooper was conscious of the fact that he was a stranger here, an outsider. He had the feeling that people were watching him out of the corners of their eyes. He and Fry were guests here at the moment, but it wouldn’t take much to transform them into the common enemy.
‘We believe Nick Easton was the man who visited you on 7th January,’ said Fry. ‘Last Monday.’
Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) Page 29