Blood on the Tongue

2

Detective Sergeant Diane Fry knew she was going to die buried under an avalanche one day — an avalanche of pointless paperwork. It would be a tragic accident, resulting from the collapse of a single unstable box file under the weight of witness statements piled on top of it. The landslide would carry away her desk and swivel chair and smash them against the wall of the CID room like matchsticks. It would take days for the rescue teams to locate her body. When they did, she would be crushed beyond recognition, her bones flattened in the same way that the reports on her desk were even now pressing down on her brain.

The piles of paper reminded her of something. She turned her head and looked out of the window, squinting to see past the condensation that streaked the panes. Oh yes. Snow. Outside, the stuff was piled as high and as white as the paperwork. She couldn't decide which was worse.

Then she felt the touch of warm air. It came from the noisy fan heater that she'd stolen from the scenes of crime department that morning before the SOCOs arrived for work. The paperwork was just about preferable. At least it meant she could stay in the warmth for a while. Only masochists and obsessives chose to wander the streets of Edendale on a morning like this. Ben Cooper, for example. No doubt Cooper was somewhere out there even now, conducting a one-man crusade to clean up crime, despite the icicles hanging off his ears.

Soon, scenes of crime officers would be scouring the building for their missing heater. Eventually, she would have to give it up, unless she could find somewhere to hide it when she heard them coming. You could always tell when the SOCOs were coming by the sound of their grumbling. But the heater was the only source of warmth in the room. Fry put a hand to the radiator on the wall. It was warm, but only faintly. It felt like a body that hadn't quite cooled but had already gone into rigor mortis. No need to call in the pathologist for a verdict on that one. Dead for two hours, at least.

She sniffed. A whiff of sausages and tomato sauce trickled down the room and settled on a burglary file that lay open on her desk. It was the sort of smell that was responsible for turning the walls that strange shade of green and for killing the flies whose bodies had lain grilling for months inside the covers of the fluorescent lights.

'Gavin,' she said.

'Mmm?'

'Where are you?'

'Mmm-mmph-mm.'

'I know you're there somewhere — I can smell you.'

A head appeared above a desk. It had sandy hair, a pink face, and dabs of tomato sauce on its lower lip. DC Gavin Murfin was the current bane of Diane Fry's life — less temperamental than Cooper, but far more prone to dripping curry sauce on the floor of her car. Murfin was overweight, too, and a man in his forties really ought to think about what he was doing to his heart.

'I was having some breakfast, like,' he said.

'Can't you do it in the canteen, Gavin?'

'No.'

Fry sighed. 'Oh, I forgot — '

'We don't have a canteen any more. We have to make our own arrangements. It says so on all the noticeboards. Twenty-two years I've been stationed here, and now they take the canteen away.'

'So where did you get the sausage bap?'

'The baker's on West Street,' said Murfin. 'You should have said if you wanted one.'

'Not likely. Do you realize how much cholesterol there is in that thing? Enough to turn your arteries solid. In another five minutes, you'll be dead.'

'Aye, with a bit of luck.'

The smell of fried meat was doing strange things to Fry's stomach. It was clenching and twitching in revulsion, as if food were something alien and disgusting to it.

'There's garlic in that sausage, too,' she said.

'Yes, it's their special.'

Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens opened the door and seemed to be about to speak to Fry. He paused, came in, and looked around. He sniffed.

'Tomato sauce? Garlic sausage?'

'Mmm,' said Murfin, wiping his mouth with a sheet from a message pad. 'Breakfast, sir.'

'Mind you don't drop any on those files, that's all, Gavin. Last time you did that, the CPS thought we were sending them real bloodstains, just to make a point that we had sweated blood over the case.'

Fry looked at Murfin. He was smiling. He was happy. She'd noticed that food did that for some people. Also DI Hitchens was looking a little less smartly dressed these days, a little heavier around the waist. It was four or five months since Hitchens had set up home with his girlfriend, the nurse. It was depressingly predictable how soon a man let himself go once he got a whiff of domestic life.

'I only wanted to tell you Ben Cooper has called in,' said the DI.

'Oh, don't tell me,' said Fry. 'He's joining the sick brigade.' She looked at the empty desks in front of her. With leave, courses, abstractions and sickness, the CID office was starting to look like the home stand at Edendale Football Club. 'What is it with Ben? Foot and Mouth? Bubonic plague?'

'No. To be honest, I don't remember Ben ever having a day off sick in his life.'

'He can't get into work because of the snow, then. Well, it's his own fault for living in the back of beyond.'

'That's why he bought that four-wheel drive jeep thing,' said Hitchens. 'It gets him through where other people get stuck, he says.'

'So what's the problem?' said Fry impatiently.

'No problem. He's made an arrest on the way in.'

'What?'

'He collared one of the double assault suspects. Apparently, Cooper came into town early and called in for the morning bulletins on the way. He was intending to stop for a coffee and found Kemp in the Starlight Cafe, so he made the arrest. Good work, eh? That's the way to start the day.'

'That's Ben, all right,' said Murfin. 'Never off duty, that lad. He can't even forget the job when he's having breakfast. Personally, it'd give me indigestion.'

'It isn't being conscientious that gives you indigestion, Gavin,' said Fry.

'Watch it. You'll upset Oliver.'

Oliver was the rubber lobster that sat on Murfin's desk. At a push of a button, it sang extracts from old pop songs with a vaguely nautical theme. 'Sailing', 'Octopus's Garden', 'Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay'. One day, Fry was going to make it into lobster paste and feed it to Murfin in a sandwich.

'Look at that weather,' said Hitchens. 'Just what we need.'

Fry stared out of the window again. The wind was blowing little flurries of snow off the neighbouring roofs. They hit the panes with wet splatters, then slid down the glass, smearing the grime on the outside. She couldn't remember it ever snowing back home in Birmingham, not really. At least, it never seemed to have stuck when it landed. It certainly hadn't built up in knee-high drifts. Maybe it had been something to do with the heat rising from the great sprawl of dual carriageways and high-rise flats she'd worked in, the comforting warmth of civilization. Her previous service in the West Midlands was a memory that she almost cherished now, whenever she looked out at the primitive arctic waste she'd condemned herself to. She'd left Birmingham without a farewell to her colleagues. She might as well have said: 'I'm going out now. I may be some time.'

'Well, there's one thing to be said in its favour,' said DI Hitchens. 'At least the snow will keep the crime rate down.'

And somewhere under the mountains of paper, Diane Fry's telephone rang.

Inside Grace Lukasz's bungalow on the outskirts of Edendale, the central heating was turned up full in every room. Ever since the accident, Grace had been unable to bear the cold. Now, even in summer, she insisted on keeping the windows and doors closed, in case there was a draught. These days, her immobility meant that she felt the chill more than most, and she couldn't tolerate discomfort. She saw no reason why she should.

This morning Grace had been up and about early, as usual. She'd gone immediately to adjust the thermostat in the cupboard in the hallway, and had spent her time gazing with some satisfaction at the outside world beyond her windows, where her neighbours in Woodland Crescent were turning white with cold as they scraped the ice from their cars or slid and stumbled on the slippery pavements. Once, a woman from across the road had fallen flat on her back on her driveway, her handbag and her shopping flying everywhere. It had made Grace laugh, for a while.

But now the stuffy heat in the bungalow caused her husband to frown and turn pink in the face the moment he arrived home from his night duty at the hospital, and it had spoiled Grace's mood. Peter stamped his feet on the mat and threw his overcoat on the stand. Grace wanted to ask him her question straight away, right there by the door, but he wouldn't meet her eye, and he brushed past her chair to get to the lounge door. With sharp tugs of her wrists, she backed and turned in the hallway, her left-hand wheel leaving one more scuff mark on the skirting board. Peter had left the door open for her from habit and she followed right behind him, glaring at his back, angry with him for walking away from her. He should know, after all this time, how much it infuriated her.

'Did you phone the police?' she said, more sharply now than she'd intended to speak to him.

'No, I didn't.'

Grace glowered at her husband. But she said nothing, making the effort to keep her thoughts to herself. She knew him well enough to see that no purpose would be served by pressing him too hard. He would only say she was nagging him, and he would set his face in the opposite direction, just to demonstrate that he was his own man, that he couldn't be bullied by his wife. Sometimes he could be so stubborn. He was like an obstinate old dog that had to be coaxed with a bone.

'Well, I don't suppose it would make any difference,' she said.

'No.'

Grace watched him wander off towards the sofa, tugging his tie loose. Within a few minutes he would have the TV remote control in his hand and his mind would be distracted by some inane quiz show. Peter always claimed that he needed to turn off his mind when he got home from a night at the hospital, that his brain was exhausted by the stress of his work. But it was never acknowledged that she might need to turn off from the things that had plagued her mind all day. No matter what she did, there was far too much time for brooding. She'd been used to looking forward to Peter's return home as something to occupy her mind, but these days it never seemed to work.

Peter had brought with him an odour of cold and damp from outside. The smell was on his coat and in his hair, and there had been snow on the shoes that he had left on the wet doormat. For the past few hours, the only thing Grace had been able to smell was the scorching of dust on the radiators, the invisible dust that gathered behind them where she couldn't reach to clean. A few minutes before he came home, she'd sprayed the rooms with air freshener. But still he had brought in this unpleasant cold smell, and the world outside had entered the bungalow with him.

'You know it wouldn't make any difference,' he said. 'You're expecting too much, Grace. You're getting things all out of proportion again.'

'Oh, of course.'

She swung the wheelchair towards the centre of the room and lowered her head to rub at her limp legs. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, waiting for a sign that he was weakening. Although he was stubborn, he was susceptible to the right tactics, like any man.

Peter threw himself on the sofa and dug the remote from under a cushion. The set came on with a sizzle of static. There was news on — leading with a report on the effects of the bad weather across the country. Shots of children sledging and making snowmen were interspersed with clips showing lines of stranded cars, airport lounges packed with frustrated holidaymakers, railway travellers staring morosely at information boards, and snowploughs piling up snow twelve feet high by the side of a road in Scotland.

'Where's Dad?' asked Peter.

'He's with his photographs again,' she said.

'It's been a bad night, Grace. We had two young men brought in who'd taken a terrible beating with baseball bats.'

'I'm sorry.'

They sat for a few moments in silence. Grace could tell from the angle of her husband's head that he wasn't taking in the news on the TV any more than she was herself. She waited, aware of the power of silence, calming her breathing until she could hear the ticking of the radiators and the sound of a car engine on the crescent. There was a faint rustling of feathers from the far corner, where their blue and green parrot stirred in its cage, perhaps sensing the atmosphere in the room. It turned a black eye on the couple, then snapped at its bars with a sudden, angry click of its beak.

'If you must know,' said Peter, 'I think he's gone back.'

Grace felt her shoulders go rigid. 'Gone back where?' she said, though she knew perfectly well what he meant.

'Where do you think? To London.'

'To her?'

'Yes, to his wife. She has a name.'

'Andrew said she's in America, at a cousin's funeral.' Grace slapped one of her knees as if it had offended her by its inactivity. 'I've tried to phone him again, Peter. He's not answering.'

'We'll just have to wait until we hear from him, Grace. What else can we do?'

Grace manoeuvred alongside one of the armchairs, feeling the wheels slip into well-used grooves in the pile of the carpet. Peter made no move to help her, and he didn't even look to see how she was coping. She was glad he didn't do that any more. Once, she'd lost her temper at his clumsiness and had pushed him roughly away. He had said nothing, but she knew he had been shocked and hurt by her violence. Her legs might be useless, but her hands and wrists were strong.

'It doesn't make any sense,' she said. 'Why should he arrive out of the blue like that and then disappear again so suddenly, without a word?'

'There are a lot of things Andrew never got round to telling us about his life.'

'In a day? He didn't have time. A day isn't enough to make up for five missing years.'

'Grace, he has an entirely separate life of his own. You can't dwell on the past for ever.'

She'd heard this too often. It had become his mantra, as if it might become true if he repeated it often enough. Grace knew it wasn't true. If you had no present and no future, where was there to live but the past?

'But he's our son,' she said. 'My baby.'

'I know, I know.'

Grace knew she was reaching him. She lowered her voice to a whisper. 'My dear Piotr…'

But she heard Peter sigh and watched him finger a button on the remote. A weather forecast was on the other channel. An attractive young woman stood in front of a map scattered with fluffy white clouds that seemed to be dropping white blobs all over northern England. In a moment, Grace would have to go back to the kitchen to make her husband a pot of tea, or his routine would be upset and he'd sulk for the rest of the day.

'There's a lot more snow on the way,' he said.

The moment had passed. Grace lifted her hands to her face and sniffed the faint coating of oil on her fingers. The oil and the dark smudges on her hands were the constant signs of her reliance on machinery, of her enforced seclusion from the rest of humanity. She was a great believer in turning your disadvantages into something positive. But sometimes the positive was hard to find.

'Oh, wonderful,' she said. 'That's just what we want. More snow. More excuses for not finding him. Everyone will say they're too busy with other problems. Then they'll say it's too late, that we'll have to accept the fact he's gone.'

Grace stared at the icon of the Madonna in the alcove above the TV set. Tonight, she would pray again for their son. And she would force Peter to pray too.

'It causes a lot of problems, does snow,' said Peter. 'More than people think.'

But on the TV screen, the weather girl smiled out at them cheerfully, as if she thought snow was absolutely the best thing she could imagine in the whole world.

The Derbyshire County Council snowplough was brand new. It was a yellow Seddon Atkinson, with a bright steel blade, and its automatic hoppers could spray grit at passing cars like machine-gun fire. That morning, its crew was working to clear the main Snake Pass route to Glossop and the borders of Greater Manchester, battling through ever deeper drifts of snow as they climbed away from Ladybower Reservoir, with the River Ashop below them and the Roman road above them, skirting the lower slopes of Bleaklow and Irontongue Hill.

Trevor Bradley was the driver's mate this morning. He didn't like snowplough work, and he certainly didn't like getting up in the middle of the night to do it. Even worse, they had been sent to the Snake Pass, which was as desolate a spot as you could find yourself in, when every other bugger was still at home in his bed. They'd left the last houses far behind already, and on these long, unlit stretches of road there was nothing to be seen but their own headlights and endless banks of snow in front and on both sides. Bradley was glad when the driver had stopped for a few minutes at the isolated Snake Inn, where the owners had filled their vacuum flasks with coffee and given them hot pork pies from the microwave. The snowplough men were popular at the Snake, because on days like this they made all the difference between customers getting through to the inn and no one getting in or out at all.

A few minutes after re-starting, the snowplough had reached the stretch of road through Lady Clough and the Snake Plantations. Here, the hill became steeper and the headlights fell on even deeper drifts, where the wind had brought the snow down from the moors and blown it round the edge of the woods, sculpting it into strange and unlikely shapes.

Just past the last car park, before the end of the woods, Bradley thought he felt the impact of something solid that dragged along the road surface for a few yards under the blade of the plough. Then he saw a dark shape that was briefly revealed in a shower of snow as the blade lifted it and pushed it into the banking. It was followed by the impression of a man's face hovering near his window for a second, then falling away again. It had been a very white face, quite unreal, and could only have been a trick of the snow and the poor light.

'We hit something, Jack,' he said, sucking the last of the warm jelly from the pork pie off his fingers.

'No kidding?'

Jack stopped the engine, and they both got down. The driver seemed to be more worried about damage to the equipment than anything else. He'd told Trevor that people dumped loads of builder's rubbish in the lay-bys, and stuff like breeze-block and broken bricks could easily chip the blade. The plough was the latest investment by the highways department, and he was conscious of his responsibility for its pristine condition.

Meanwhile, Bradley poked around a bit by the side of the road, scraped some snow away with his gloved hands, and finally lifted a blue overnight bag out of the drift. The bag was empty. He could tell by the weight of it.

'That's careless,' he said.

He pushed a bit more snow aside. It looked as though the clothes had spilled out of the bag on to the roadside, because there was a shoe lying in the snow. It had a smart black leather toe, with a pattern printed on the upper. It wasn't a shoe anybody would have been walking in, of course, so it must have come from the luggage. Probably it had been some of the clothes that he'd seen in the headlights — a white shirt, perhaps, crumpled into the illusion of a human face as it was tossed out of the bag by the impact of the plough blade.

Bradley bent down and tried to pick the shoe up, but felt some resistance, as if it were heavier than it ought to be. Maybe it was frozen to the ground. He brushed a bit more snow clear, and then he noticed the sock. It had a green and blue Argyll design, the sort of sock he'd seen some of the bosses wearing back at the council offices. He touched it as he wiped away the frozen snow. It was definitely a sock for an office worker, not for wearing with a work boot. Your feet would be frozen solid out here in the snow, if you wore fancy socks like that.

He realized his mind was wandering a bit. It was a long minute before he finally accepted what his fingers were telling him. There was an ankle in that Argyll sock, and a foot in the shoe. A man lay under the snowdrift.

Bradley straightened up and looked back at his driver, who was still inspecting the plough. The blade was bright and sharp and shiny, and it weighed half a ton. Last winter, with one much like it, they'd removed the entire front wing of a Volkswagen Beetle before they even noticed it abandoned in a snowdrift. Bradley remembered how the blade had ripped the metal of the car clean away, like a carving knife going through a well-cooked chicken. In fact, the Beetle had been a trendy bright yellow, not unlike a supermarket chicken. For a few moments they'd both stared at the lump of metal caught on the blade without recognizing what it was, until the wind had caught it and the wing had flapped off down the road, trailing its headlight cables like severed tendons.

Now, Trevor Bradley recalled his impression of the thing that had bumped and dragged along the road under the plough blade a couple of minutes ago. He remembered the glimpse of something that had waved momentarily from the midst of a spray of snow. It was an object which his brain hadn't registered at the time, and which he only now identified as having been a human arm. Then there had been the face. The arm and the face had been all that he'd seen of the body as they flailed over the edge of the blade and were jerked back into the darkness.

He gulped suddenly, and decided that he didn't even want to imagine the damage the snowplough could have done to the rest of the body.

Bradley opened his mouth to call to his driver.

'Jack!'

But his voice came out too faintly on the cold air, and it was drowned by the noise of a jet airliner that passed low in the cloud as it manoeuvred for the approach to Manchester Airport. The rumble of the aircraft vibrated the windscreen on the snowplough and set Trevor Bradley's limbs trembling, too. His stomach decided that, as long as his mouth was open, he might as well be sick.

The noise of the airliner gradually receded as it descended behind the shoulder of Irontongue Hill. It was an Air Canada Boeing 767, and it was at the end of a seven-hour flight from Toronto.