Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry)

by Stephen Booth

  ‘Yes,’ said Cooper. ‘You did help George Malkin – didn’t you, Lawrence?’

  The wind was really getting up now. Cooper heard an answering moan from the rocks behind him and felt a spatter of frozen snow on the back of his neck where it was blowing off the top of the drifts. There was a pain in his ears, but it was nothing to what Marie Tennent must have felt as she lay out in the snow the night she died. Where his hand had been plunged into the snow, it looked red and raw. He rubbed it on a dry part of his trousers and thrust it back into his glove. But the glove had got snow on the inside, too, and it didn’t help.

  ‘I know you weren’t involved in Nick Easton’s murder. And Marie’s death wasn’t your fault. But you have to tell us where the baby is, Lawrence.’

  Was that the noise of a helicopter, that dull thudding in his ears? Or was it his own heart struggling to push the blood through his veins? If he could convince Lawrence that rescue was on its way, perhaps he would decide not to die. Perhaps he would rouse himself and they could share their body heat to survive together.

  Cooper held his breath in his hands to prevent it from drifting away, afraid it might take his life with it. But Lawrence wasn’t going to rouse himself. There was no warmth left in his body to share. Cooper lay over him, covering both their bodies with the cagoule, leaving only his head and his feet free. He needed to be able to hear the helicopter so that he could signal their position. He didn’t know whether he was going to be able to do that in the dark, but somehow he would have to. All he had was his torch, and the moor was a big place. If anyone was thinking properly, they would have thermal imaging equipment on board to locate their body heat. If there was any body heat left by then.

  That was definitely the sound of a helicopter.

  ‘I think they’re here, Lawrence,’ he said.

  Cooper put his hand to Lawrence’s face to attract his attention. His fingers touched something hard and cold, an incongruous blemish on Lawrence’s cheek. It was a single tear, slowly freezing to the skin.

  35

  Fry pulled out of the divisional headquarters car park and fell in behind the lights of a patrol car on its way down West Street. Dawn was creeping over the roofs of Edendale. Beside her, Cooper looked pale and exhausted. He should have been at home in bed, but had refused to stay away.

  ‘We should have insisted on looking in all the rooms while we were there,’ he said.

  ‘How could we? We had no search warrant. We had no grounds for making an arrest. Not then.’

  ‘There were more rooms above that floor he showed us. That’s where he lives – in the attic rooms. They would be the old servants’ bedrooms.’

  ‘We’ll soon find out.’

  Fry could tell Cooper was uneasy. He fidgeted with his seat belt like a restless child. But at least her car would stay clean. She had left Gavin Murfin behind this morning.

  ‘I should have known there was something wrong about Frank Baine,’ said Cooper. ‘There were so many gaps in what he told Alison Morrissey. He didn’t mention George Malkin to her, and he didn’t let her see the books about the aircraft wrecks. Walter Rowland might have been willing to talk to her, but Baine discouraged him.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Fry.

  ‘And of course, Baine told Alison that Sergeant Dick Abbott’s family had left the country. But Marie Tennent was right here in Edendale. They ought to have been able to meet. It would have meant a lot to both of them.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘There could have been some kind of reconciliation,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes, Ben.’

  Fry drove through the roundabout and up Hulley Road towards the traffic lights. She was following the patrol car because she wasn’t sure how to get into Nick i’ th’ Tor to reach Eden Valley Books.

  ‘I should have known he was manipulating Alison. She was determined enough that he couldn’t have stopped her coming over. But Baine was with her all the time, making sure he knew what she was doing, pushing her in the direction he wanted her to go, keeping her away from the truth. Of course, he’d been to see everyone himself before Alison ever arrived here, and he’d alienated them all, scared them off talking to her. Baine only started getting worried when he realized I was talking to the wrong people.’

  Fry glanced at him. ‘When he realized you weren’t going to do what you were told.’

  But Cooper ignored her. ‘He saw me at the Lukaszes’, then at Walter Rowland’s. And he knew that I’d been to the bookshop itself.’

  ‘Several times,’ said Fry. ‘Little did he know that you were just buying books.’

  ‘Books on aircraft wrecks. Lawrence would have told him that.’ Cooper paused. ‘It was Frank Baine who tried to put me out of action that night, wasn’t it? Not Eddie Kemp.’

  ‘Yes, we think so. We’re still waiting for DNA results.’

  The patrol car turned into a narrow entrance off Eyre Street, and Fry turned after it. They bumped over cobbles and had to slow to a crawl as they entered the network of passages between Eyre Street and the market square. They pulled up near the bridge over the river, where a police officer was stopping people from walking further up than Larkin’s bakery.

  ‘I’ll have to explain it all to Alison later today,’ said Cooper.

  Fry switched off the engine and sat for a moment looking at the bookshop, listening to the roar of the River Eden under the bridge. She didn’t know what to say to him.

  Outside Eden Valley Books, two police motorcyclists were unbuckling the straps of their crash helmets. When they were bare headed, the officers hardly looked any different. They both had bald domes as smooth and white as their helmets.

  Cooper pushed open the front door and walked among the shelves of books. The shop seemed dead without Lawrence’s presence. Cooper felt as though he was walking through a set for a TV costume drama. In the little kitchen area at the back, he found a window open. A few lumps of snow had dropped inside and scattered on the draining board. A small heap of it lay on the base of an upturned coffee mug.

  While Fry took a call on her radio, Cooper went upstairs and walked slowly through the upper rooms. The shop was so quiet that he was reluctant to open each door that he came to, for fear of what he might find behind it. On the second floor, the biggest room was the one that he and Fry had seen, where the aviation memorabilia was displayed. A second room had been converted into a kind of study, where a couple of computers sat humming quietly to themselves. No wonder so many books had been piled on the landing and in the corridor – they must once have occupied these rooms.

  Between a couple of stacks of books, Cooper found what he’d expected – a door that was a step up from the floor, a door that opened to reveal not a room but another flight of stairs, narrow and uncarpeted. The top floor of the building was Lawrence’s living quarters. There was an untidy sitting room, a bathroom and a large bedroom with a vast iron bedstead. Cooper was looking for signs of Marie Tennent’s presence when he heard a noise over his head. The sound of rats in a house was distinctive. They made so much noise on bare floorboards that they sounded as though they were wearing hobnailed boots. And there was that faint, dragging scrape that went with the footsteps – a sound that conjured up a clear picture of a scaly tail slithering across the floor in the dust.

  Fry stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching him, not speaking. He saw her shudder when she heard the scurrying in the ceiling.

  ‘We’ve just had a call from the hospital,’ she said.

  ‘Lawrence?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Cooper sat down suddenly on the bed, which sagged and gave a protesting squeak.

  ‘You did your best, Ben,’ said Fry. ‘Nobody could have done any more.’

  ‘I could have done it sooner. I found Lawrence’s bookmark in one of Marie’s books almost a week ago. I knew she’d been here. Marie read all sorts of books, not only Danielle Steel. They were there in her house, on her shelves. She spent money that she coul
dn’t afford, just to buy more books. Lawrence Daley was her type really, not Eddie Kemp. She was following her mother’s advice and doing better for herself. When Marie told her mother that the baby’s father ran his own business, she didn’t mean he was a window cleaner, for God’s sake.’

  ‘There’s nothing more we could have done, Ben.’

  ‘No, there is,’ said Cooper. ‘We could have found the baby.’

  Fry had to stand aside as he brushed past her. He went down the first flight of narrow stairs and into the big room where Lawrence’s aviation memorabilia was displayed. The Irving suit and the flying helmets and the personal possessions of long-dead airmen looked particularly ghoulish now that their owner was himself dead. Cooper was starting to feel stifled by the atmosphere. He pushed open the outside door and stood at the top of the fire escape, allowing the cold air to blow into the room and stir the cobwebs. Below him, the yard was still untouched, its unidentifiable shapes covered by yesterday’s fresh snow.

  The back alley was full of police vehicles with their engines rumbling. There was a ripping sound and a loud snap as a member of the task force levered the padlock off the yard gates with a crowbar. But then the team found they had difficulty pushing the gates open against the weight of the snow. The more they cursed and heaved, the more the snow built up and compacted, so that they might as well have been pushing against a brick wall.

  ‘Shovels,’ called a sergeant. ‘We’ll have to dig a space clear.’

  Cooper went down the fire escape. The steps were treacherously slippery, and his hands left imprints in the snow frozen to the top of the rail. Under the snow was a layer of ice, so that he felt as though his knuckles were scraping against sandpaper.

  He stopped at the bottom and looked around the yard. Last week’s snow had lingered here because no sun ever reached the yard, at any time of day. The backs of buildings were all around it, and they were too high to allow any sun through at this time of year. There was a pink glow behind the buildings in the east as the sun rose, but it only made their outlines darker, their shadows longer, so that they almost seemed to meet here in this yard, like old men leaning towards each other to whisper their secrets. They might have been saying: ‘Have you seen Baby Chloe?’

  Black cast-iron drainpipes formed an intricate spider’s web on the back walls of the buildings, and a large part of Edendale’s starling population was clustered on the edges of the guttering, chattering at the sunrise over the rooftops.

  Cooper followed the paw prints of the cat that had walked through the fresh snow in the yard. It had crossed the tracks of the birds, but hadn’t paused – presumably the birds were long gone by the time it arrived. Starlings weren’t very bright, but they knew enough to make themselves scarce when there was a cat around. The prints went almost the full width of the yard, then veered away towards one of the snow-covered mounds. Cooper scraped some snow off it. It was a wheel, and part of an undercarriage leg. He caught a whiff of an acidic smell. There was a yellow stain at the base of the wheel, and a spattering of small, melted holes in the surface of the snow, where the cat had marked its territory. Then the animal had walked towards the next object and had circled it for a while, before leaping to the top and from there on to the wall and way into the adjoining yard.

  It was easy to see what the object was. The barrels of two rusted Vickers machine guns poked through the snow from a domed shape like a giant helmet. It was a gun turret. Cooper touched the end of one of the barrels, and found it moved slightly on its pivot, dislodging a few inches of snow that slid slowly from the Perspex hood. Through the hole he’d made in the snow, he could see the gunner’s seat and something dark thrown over it.

  Behind him, members of the task force were backing a Land Rover through the gates and unloading shovels to clear the snow. The vehicle’s exhaust fumes began to fill the yard, and the reek of them overlaid the cool, clean smell of the snow.

  Cooper couldn’t wait for the orderly progression of the search. He wanted to know what was inside the gun turret, what items had been left behind in the confines of the same kind of prison in which Sergeant Dick Abbott had died on board Sugar Uncle Victor. Maybe there was another Irving jacket like the one he’d seen in the upstairs room. Perhaps there was a parachute harness, a flying helmet, or some other personal piece of equipment that he could hold in his hands, hoping it would tell him the story of the man who’d lived and fought, and perhaps died, in this cramped space.

  The area he’d cleared wasn’t quite wide enough for him to see inside properly. Cooper wiped his hand across the Perspex of the turret, so that another patch of snow broke away and landed on his boots, with a faint swish and a crunch. He had trouble for a moment because of the water that streaked and blurred on the Perspex. But soon it pooled and ran away down the curved surface, and began to drip quietly into the snow.

  The sound of the dripping water seemed to absorb Cooper’s concentration, so that the noise of the officers behind him and the revving Land Rover engine retreated from him and became no more than distant intrusions on the edge of his hearing. He had to drag his attention away from the dripping sound and back to the blurred window he’d made in the Perspex.

  It was only then that he saw the eyes.

  Grace Lukasz took the wafer in her mouth and closed her eyes as she sipped the wine. The body of Christ lay on her tongue, His blood dampened her lips. Christ had given His life, a voluntary sacrifice. But Grace also knew the Old Testament story of the Scapegoat, which had been forced to take the sins of the tribe on itself and had been driven into the wilderness. Not all sacrificial victims were willing.

  Andrew had always been hot-headed, stubborn, a chip off the old block, the old people said. He was more like Zygmunt than Peter. He had the same stubborn jaw, the same blue eyes, the same capacity for single-mindedness. But Andrew was different in one important matter – his desire was for money. She’d understood that, at least. She understood that it was Andrew that Zygmunt meant when he talked about vultures. Peter had been forced to choose between them – and he’d chosen Zygmunt, choosing his origins rather than his future.

  Grace would have to make herself feel glad. There was no other way of facing it. It was the time of forgiveness, for reconciliation. The sacrifice had been made, and now there would be peace in the family. This morning, Peter had looked content. Not happy, perhaps, but less haunted. She had always been the one accused of living in the past. But there was no one like these Polish families for that, no one like these old men clinging to their wartime memories, their gnarled hands grasping so tightly at remembrance of the time when they were needed so badly, a time when they had a role in life. A time when they had an enemy to fight.

  Grace knew that Detective Constable Cooper was sitting at the back of the church. He hadn’t come forward to the altar for communion, but had stayed in his seat watching. He looked like a boy who could be helped by faith, if he could only let God into his life. He was about the same age as Andrew, too. She felt the beginnings of a tear fill the corner of her eye. She felt for a tissue in the pocket of her skirt. The young people these days knew nothing except their own concerns. They hadn’t learned the value of perspective. They cared only for their own short-term personal interest. They didn’t know that a small sacrifice could be for the greater good.

  She eased her wheelchair away from the end of the pew and turned it in the aisle. The squeak of the wheels on the strip of carpet in the aisle sounded too loud. Members of the congregation turned to watch her as she propelled herself to the side door and wheeled down the ramp into the churchyard.

  Cooper was conscious of the faces turned in his direction as people watched her leave. He waited until the attention of the congregation had settled back on to the priest, then he slipped out, closing the door behind him as quietly as he could. He was glad to be out of the church and back in the cold air. It had a purer, cleaner feel to it that was closer to his own idea of something sacred. He saw that Grace Lukasz hadn’t gone f
ar. Her wheelchair was on the path between the gravestones, close to where the giant figure of the black Madonna and child was built into the outside wall of the church.

  Mrs Lukasz didn’t look around, but had heard him approaching. ‘Will you take me back to the bungalow? Peter was going to come for me, but he’ll be a while yet.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Cooper had handled a wheelchair before. He helped Grace Lukasz to position herself next to the passenger door of his car and held the chair steady while she manoeuvred herself in. He could see that her legs were almost useless. She had to lift them in after her. When she was settled, he folded the wheelchair into the back of the Toyota.

  ‘I suppose you’re wondering,’ she said. ‘It was a car accident. Andrew was driving.’

  ‘Before he went to London?’

  ‘Yes. We’d been very close until then. But after the accident, he couldn’t live with the guilt. He couldn’t bear to look at me in the wheelchair, day after day. So it was me who drove him away, you see.’

  Cooper couldn’t think what to say to that. Guilt, like other emotions, was hardly ever logical.

  ‘But you can’t separate yourself from your family for ever,’ said Grace. ‘He came back, in the end.’

  ‘Why did he come back?’

  ‘Andrew was starting to feel isolated in London. Isolated from his family, isolated from the community he grew up in. After a year or two, he started to regret cutting himself off.’

  ‘Did he tell you this?’

  ‘Yes, when he arrived. Do you know, he remembered all the stories that Zygmunt used to tell about the RAF, about the Lancaster crash. And of course, about his cousin Klemens, who died.’

  Cooper got into the driving seat and fastened his seat belt. ‘We think Andrew had started to collect Second World War aircraft memorabilia,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but I bet he was looking for things with a Polish connection. The links are very strong, you know. The way our children are raised, they can’t break the links so easily.’