Blood on the Tongue

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 post-mortem.'

'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 enquiries 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.'

'Maybe he's got hidden qualities.'

'Yeah, she probably liked him for the size of his squeegee.'

'Do you think he might have the baby? I hope so.'

'Do you? He wouldn't be my idea of the perfect father.'

'No,' said Cooper. 'But it's better than some of the alternatives.' He looked at the street where he'd parked. Eddie Kemp's house was just round the corner. 'Half an hour you said, Diane?'

'I've got to show my face at a meeting first, so I can't make it any sooner. Is that OK?'

'No problem at all.'

When Cooper finished the call, he checked an address in his notebook and turned the car round. The former RAF mountain rescue man, Walter Rowland, lived only a couple of streets down from Eddie Kemp, in a terrace of houses that hung over the antique shops in the Buttercross like a line of birds perched among the trees.

Rowland's front door was one of two narrow entrances which shared a wooden portico carved with stylized flower designs. A stone mounting block found at one of the former coaching inns in town now stood outside the cottages among the remains of some frost-blackened petunias. On the end of the row stood a modern Gospel Hall, and further up, on the corner of Harrington Street, was another church that Cooper didn't recognize.

He looked up at Rowland's cottage. The first-floor windows had tiny glass panes, so grubby and dark that it was obvious neither Eddie Kemp nor any of his window-cleaner colleagues had called this way recently with their ladders and chamois leathers. The putty was crumbling away from the window frames, and the lintels were badly worn where the weather had eaten deep chunks out of the soft golden sandstone. From outside, it looked as though only the ground floor was occupied. The lower windows were stuffed with cheaper versions of the brass in the nearby antique shops, along with pot plants and porcelain figurines in front of the net curtains. These objects were the traditional barricades against the prying eyes of the tourists who passed by in the street during the summer, only inches from the private lives of those who lived here all year round.

Walter Rowland was in his mid-seventies and looked like a man who'd been accustomed to doing things with his hands, but no longer could. He had deformed fingers, in which the tendons twitched occasionally, their movement clearly visible under the skin, like the strings of a puppet. Cooper found the movement distracted his eye from Rowland's face and the sound of his voice.

'Yes, you can come in,' said Rowland. 'I don't know what you want, but I don't get much company.'

The cottage was a traditional two up and two down, clean and neat. On the ground floor there was a combined sitting- and dining-room looking on to the street, and a kitchen at the back. Rowland led Cooper through the front room, which was dominated by a pine table and black iron fireplace with an incongruous gas fire that pumped out enough heat to wipe out memories of the cold outside.

In the kitchen, Cooper saw an open back door, which didn't lead directly to the outside but into a small workshop that had been built on to the house. He saw a wooden work bench, with a gleaming lathe and tools hanging neatly in racks. There were old wood shavings on the floor and several half-finished objects on a table.

Rowland closed the door to the workshop. He did it awkwardly, not using his hands, but leaning into it with his elbow and shoulder. Then, without even bothering to ask whether his visitor wanted a cup of tea, he switched on an electric kettle that stood next to the sink under the back window. Cooper noticed that the skin of the old man's face was translucent, like his hands. You could see the veins in his temples and the light from the window shining through his ears.

'Of course I remember the crashed Lancaster,' said Rowland. 'I remember all the crashes I went to, every body or injured airman I helped to carry off the mountains. That's not the sort of thing you forget. And the Lancaster was the worst of them all.'

'Do you remember the fuss about the Canadian pilot who went missing?'

'That one walked away,' said Rowland. 'The pilot. McTeague. Murder, that was, pure and simple. That man left four of his crew dead, and another one dying, and he walked away. He didn't care about them, did he?'

'Maybe it was shock. People behave in strange ways in those circumstances. He might not even have known where he was, or what had happened.'

Rowland sniffed. 'I'll give you that. Sometimes we had men that would wake up in hospital and not know why they were there, let alone remember anything about a crash. Yes, it happens. But I reckon this one was different.'

'But why?'

Rowland walked back into the front room and sat at the table. Cooper followed, wincing at how slowly and painfully the old man walked.

'He'll be dead by now, I expect,' said Rowland.

'I don't know.'

'There's no good comes of talking ill of the dead. I wouldn't want people to talk ill of me, when I'm dead. It won't be long now, so it's something I think of, I suppose.'

'Apart from McTeague, there was only one survivor from that crash,' said Cooper.

'And has he said anything?'

'No.'

'Loyalty, that is. The skipper could do no wrong. That was the way they were.'

'Yes,' said Cooper. 'You're right, they were like that.'

'I always thought they would find him pretty quick afterwards,' said Rowland. 'But they reckon he made it down to the road and hitched a lift. Dumped his flying gear somewhere and legged it.'

'There was a lorry driver who said he picked a serviceman up on the A6 a couple of hours later and took him to Derby,' said Cooper. 'He never spoke much on the journey, he said. If it was McTeague, they never established how he got from Harrop to the A6.'

'Folk round here picked servicemen up all the time,' said Rowland. 'That was how the lads got home when they were on leave, and back to their bases again. Everybody did it. Nobody would think of asking any questions.'

'I realize that. And it was only because the lorry driver was local that he heard about the missing airman when he got back home from his trip. But McTeague was a deserter. They would have looked for him.'

'A deserter? Aye, maybe. But he was one among hundreds,' said Rowland. 'Blokes went AWOL all the time, but they kept that sort of thing as quiet as they could. It was bad for morale, you know. They couldn't have the public thinking their brave boys were too scared to fight.'

'It was a different time altogether, wasn't it?' said Cooper. 'A foreign country.'

Rowland nodded, recognizing the reference. 'The past is always like that, even if you lived through it.'

Cooper stayed silent for a moment, letting the old man's memories drift slowly into his head. He knew what distant memories were like — a vast sea that seemed to approach with the tide, but then merely touched the shore and withdrew again, leaving just a trace of its passing, a damp boundary along the shoreline.

'McTeague,' said Rowland thoughtfully. 'He told his crew he was going for help, but saved his own skin. Now, if he had been the one that died and the others survived, then it would have been justice. There was no excuse for what he did. None. I just hope those four dead men were on his conscience for the rest of his life.'

'Perhaps they were.'

Cooper controlled a smile. It hadn't taken much for the old man to break his own rule about not speaking ill of the dead.

'Two of the crew were Poles, weren't they?' said Rowland.

'Yes, that's right.'

'Brave lads, those. A bit clannish, maybe, but they fought well. They hated the Germans with a venom. They hated the Russians too, mind. Good haters all round, the Polish blokes. They had their beliefs, and they stuck to them — you couldn't have convinced them to do anything else. You never heard of any of them deserting.'

'They were fighting for something more immediate — they wanted to get back to their homes and families in Poland. That must concentrate the mind.'

'But they didn't go back to their homes, a lot of them,' said Rowland. 'They stayed on here. That was because of the Russians. They didn't fancy Communist Poland.'

'And because they married English girls and settled down.'

'Aye, that's right. Can't blame them, I suppose. I recall the local girls seemed to like them. They were a bit glamorous, mysterious — romantic, too. Well, the lasses like that sort of thing, don't they?'

'I suppose the British servicemen must have resented it sometimes?'

'Maybe so. But the Poles were better than the bloody Yanks, anyway. If I had to choose, give me the Polish lads any time. I was glad they were on our side, though. I wouldn't like to have them against me.'

'No,' said Cooper. 'I doubt they'd soon forget a grudge.'

Rowland stared silently past his shoulder. The old man's hands moved slowly towards each other on the table, as if they could bring comfort to each other by touching. Cooper heard the electric kettle steaming in the kitchen, then a click as it switched off. Rowland didn't move.

'You know nothing about it, do you?' he said. 'You weren't there, like I was. You didn't have to pick up the bits. And there were lots of bits, you know. The Polish chap — Zygmunt, they called him. We managed to save him, but there was his cousin that died.'

'Klemens Wach,' said Cooper.

'Aye. Have you to talked to old Zygmunt?'

'Not yet.'

'He won't tell you much. No, not him. He wouldn't tell you that, when we found him, he was holding on to his cousin like a mother holding a baby. He won't tell you that his cousin's arm had been cut off at the shoulder, and that Zygmunt was trying to hold it on, with the blood spurting everywhere in the snow. His flying suit was covered in it. When we found them, we thought for sure that we had two dead ones together, but he was alive, just. It was his cousin's blood that he was soaked in. You might get the impression that I think badly of McTeague. But imagine how old Zygmunt feels. And they say he's never talked about it all these years. A thing like that eats at man. He won't have forgotten, or forgiven. Take my word for it — the one wish of his life would have been to find McTeague. It stands to reason. I would have done the same, too.'

Cooper nodded. 'Mr Rowland, has anybody else been to talk to you about this?'

'Like who?'

'I was thinking of a Canadian woman called Alison Morrissey.'

'Ah,' said Rowland.

'Has she been?'

'No, but there was a bloke called Baine. A journalist. He's been here, and he mentioned the Canadian. He said she's related to Pilot Officer McTeague.'

'She's his granddaughter.'

'I don't know what he thinks I might tell her,' said Rowland. 'I couldn't tell her any more than I've told you. And I don't suppose that's what she wants to hear, is it?'

'No, I don't think it is.'

'Well, then. I'm not going to lie to the woman. So what's the point of her coming here? She won't like what I have to tell her. I told that to Baine. And do you know what he said?'

'I can't imagine.'

'He said that perhaps my memory was faulty anyway. Can you credit that? Perhaps my memory was faulty. I didn't reckon much to that. Did he mean he wanted me to lie?'

'You can only remember what you saw and heard,' said Cooper.

Rowland watched him, his mouth moving silently in the automatic grimace of habitual pain.

'Do you think I should talk to her?' he said. 'Is that what you're here for?'

'It's entirely up to you,' said Cooper. 'It has nothing to do with me at all.'

'Aye?'

Rowland tried to rest his hands in his lap, but didn't seem to find the position any more comfortable. He moved restlessly in his chair. He appeared to be saying it was almost time for Cooper to go.

'There must have been a lot of people up there after the crash,' said Cooper. 'Members of the mountain rescue team, local police, RAF investigators…'

'All of those. And the Home Guard,' said Rowland. 'You remember the Home Guard?'

'Mr Rowland, I don't remember any of it.'

'Aye — too young, aren't you? Everybody's too young these days. The Home Guard were blokes who were too old or not fit enough to join up. And there were some that were in the reserved occupations — farmers and miners and such. It was Home Guard men who were set to watch over the wreck, but they were none too keen on their task.'

'Would any of them still be around?' said Cooper.

'Nay, long gone. We're going back fifty-seven years, you know. There's only a few of us left, the ones like me, that were only lads at the time. The rest are pushing up daisies. There's only me that remembers the crash, and the Pole, Zygmunt. And George Malkin.'

'Do you know Malkin?'

'Oh yes, I remember both the Malkin boys. They were kids back then — lived on a farm the other side of Blackbrook Reservoir, just across the moor. I remember seeing them hanging about on Irontongue Hill — we had to chase them away from the wreck a time or two. Their dad came and took them home eventually. But they were both that sort of lad — inquisitive, adventurous.'

'An aircraft crash must have been quite an adventure if you were a child.'

'Yes, the Malkin boys,' said Rowland, 'they used to get everywhere. Their dad had taught them to be independent, and it would never have occurred to them that they couldn't look after themselves. It's something the kids don't learn these days, independence.' Rowland shook his head. 'If you ask me, they're ruining a whole generation.'

Cooper's questions seemed to have sparked Rowland's memories. His eyes had developed a familiar distant stare, the look of a man recalling a time when he'd been needed by his country, instead of being discarded.

'Those Poles,' he said. 'Do you know what they called Britain when they came here? I mean the ones that came over from France to carry on fighting when the Germans invaded?'

Cooper shook his head. 'No idea.'

'They knew there was nowhere else for them to move on to after Britain,' said Rowland. 'There was nowhere left for them to go to carry on fighting against Hitler. So they called us "Last Hope Island".'