Blood on the Tongue

25

Alison Morrissey stood in the cobbled alleyway of Nick i' th' Tor outside Eden Valley Books. She banged on the door, ignoring the sign in the window, and kept banging until Lawrence Daley appeared in the gloom inside and drew back the bolts.

'The shop is closed,' he said. 'I never open on Sunday.'

'Not for anybody?' said Morrissey.

Lawrence peered at her carefully, wiping a finger over the lenses of his glasses.

'I don't sell books on a Sunday,' he said. 'I work six days a week selling books. Sunday is my day off from selling books.'

'My name is Alison Morrissey. I'm the granddaughter of the pilot of the crashed Lancaster on Irontongue Hill.'

'I know who you are,' said Lawrence. 'I saw you on the television news. You were in the papers, too.'

'That's good,' said Morrissey. 'Can I come in?'

Lawrence still hesitated, as if a great deal depended on making the right decision. Then, reluctantly, he pulled open the door of the shop.

Morrissey stamped her feet free of snow as she stood in the narrow passage near the counter. There was no light in the shop except from the open door to the stairs, and Lawrence made no move to find the light switch.

'What is it you want?' he said.

Morrissey kept her hands in the pockets of her coat as she looked around the shop, raising her eyebrows at the shelves and piles of books that gradually became visible as her eyes adjusted.

'If you know who I am, perhaps you know why I've come,' she said.

'I don't know anything about aircraft wrecks,' said Lawrence. 'I sell books on them sometimes, but I don't think I've got any in at the moment. I sold my last copies a few days ago. You're wasting your time.'

'I don't think so.'

Morrissey took her hand out of her pocket. Carefully, she unwrapped the package she'd shown to Cooper. The medal caught the light from the stairs and glittered, so that Lawrence could be in no doubt what it was.

'This is the reason I'm here,' she said.

Lawrence took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, whether from tiredness or some sudden emotion, it was impossible to tell in the darkness. 'It's nothing to do with me,' he said.

'Would the police agree with you, I wonder?'

'There's nothing illegal here.'

'You wouldn't mind the police coming, then.'

'As it happens, I know one of the local detectives very well.'

'Detective Cooper, perhaps? He mentioned your shop to me. And he's very interested in this medal.'

Lawrence's shoulders seemed to slump a little. 'This is very unfair,' he said.

Morrissey thrust the medal at him like an amulet that would ward off evil. 'Do you think it's fair to me? Fair to my family? Fair to the memory of my grandfather?'

Finally, Lawrence gave in.

'You'd better come upstairs,' he said.

Before he led Alison Morrissey towards the stairs, Lawrence took a last look outside, into the dark alley. He wondered who else might be out there, waiting to disrupt his life.

Back at West Street, Fry found the file on Marie Tennent still lying on Ben Cooper's desk. It was only four days since Marie had been found on Irontongue Hill, yet it might as well have been weeks. Fry knew there had been search parties in Dam Street, where Marie had lived. Posters and newspaper appeals were everywhere, calling for information on the whereabouts of Baby Chloe. But Fry had been so absorbed in other things that she'd lost touch with what had been going on today.

In the Tennent file, there was a report from a sergeant in the uniformed section to say that they had gone over Marie's house again, and had cleared the snow from the back garden, but there was no indication of recent digging in the frozen ground. There was no sign of a baby. They had gradually been extending their search, and should by now have searched the millpond. The area of hillside where Marie had been found had also been painstakingly picked over.

And Fry saw that, as far as Marie herself was concerned, they were still waiting for a postmortem result before the inquest could be opened.

Then Fry saw the faxes on Cooper's desk. They'd come on a machine that used the old fax rolls, and the sheets were curling up into thick coils. It took only a glance to see that they'd come from Canada and were connected with Alison Morrissey. There was a yellow message form stuck to the top sheet, too. 'Please phone Alison,' it said. Fry tried the phone number it gave, and a voice said: 'Good evening, the Cavendish Hotel.'

'Do you have a Miss Alison Morrissey staying there?' asked Fry.

'Yes, we do. Would you like me to see if she's in the hotel?'

'No, it doesn't matter.'

She put the phone down. It seemed to Fry that there was no doubt where Ben Cooper's attention was at the moment. He'd been told by the Chief Superintendent himself that there was no possibility of helping Alison Morrissey in her hopeless quest. But for Cooper, anything that was hopeless seemed to represent a challenge. Fry recalled the woman she'd seen on TV, the same woman who'd been chatting to Cooper at Underbank the other day. 'Phone Alison', the message said. So there was another attraction for Cooper, too.

Fry placed the message carefully back on the roll of faxes. She would have to think seriously about what she was going to do about it.

Turning her attention back to the Tennent file, she saw that it had been kept up to date with the inclusion of copies of reports on the baby's remains. She scanned through the SOCO's report, then a statement from one of the officers who attended the scene after the air cadets' discovery of the remains. It was a thorough and detailed account of the scene, written by a young female officer who'd put a lot of effort in, even when it might seem there was no point. She'd spent some time looking for evidence of recent visitors to the aircraft wreck, despite the fact that the remains were so old. Reading between the lines, it seemed to Fry that the officer had been affected by the sight of the bones and the new baby clothes and had sought for something else to concentrate her attention on.

Curiously, one of her observations related to poppies. Not real poppies, but the red plastic or paper ones sold during the weeks before Remembrance Day every year to raise money for ex-servicemen. During November, many people wore them pinned to their coats. Entire wreaths of them were laid at war memorials up and down the country. And it seemed that remembrance poppies were left at the site of the Lancaster crash, too. Fry supposed the wreckage was itself a memorial, in a way. According to the report, someone had left a poppy there very recently, despite the fact that it was January and Remembrance Day was long since past.

It seemed unimportant. But Fry knew that such details, observed at the right time, could turn out to be surprisingly valuable later on. She marked the line about the poppies with a red pen and was finishing the report when her telephone rang.

She walked back to her own desk, carrying the Tennent file. The switchboard operator apologized, saying that she'd been told DS Fry was in the station and wondered if she could deal with a call that had just come in.

'Who is it?' said Fry.

'Sergeant Caudwell, from the Ministry of Defence Police.'

'OK, put her on.'

For a moment, Fry pictured Caudwell and Nash sharing a hotel with Alison Morrissey, but recalled that the MDP officers had been sent somewhere cheaper and more basic, probably the Travelodge.

'Ah, still on duty, I see,' said Caudwell when she got through to Fry. 'That's lucky.'

'What can I do for you?' said Fry.

'Well, I soon got bored in this hotel we've found, and there didn't seem to be anything else to do in Edendale, so I asked them to send up the local newspapers. I found some interesting reading.'

'They've covered the story of the unidentified body extensively,' said Fry. 'A lot of speculation as usual, I'm afraid.'

'Oh, yes. But not only that. There was the woman who froze to death.'

Fry looked down at the file still in her hand. 'Marie Tennent. But — '

'And a missing baby, and all that. Rather worrying for you, I imagine. And now there are the remains of a child, found at the site of an aircraft wreck. The papers don't say, but it seems to me you might be linking the two incidents.'

'Yes, we're sure the dead baby was Marie Tennent's.'

'I see.' Caudwell paused for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had a different tone. Fry could picture her smiling. 'DS Fry, I'm going to ask you a favour. I'd be very grateful if you could send me over a copy of your file on Marie Tennent.'

'Why would you want that?'

'Just following a line of thought,' said Caudwell airily. When Fry hesitated, she added: 'The aircraft wreck. You realize that's Ministry of Defence property? We have an interest. We're entitled to full consultation. Strictly speaking, we should have been informed before any action was taken at the site. But I'm sure we don't need to argue about that.'

'I'll send a copy over to your hotel as soon as I can,' said Fry.

'Thank you very much. An hour would be fine.'

Fry replaced the phone and read carefully through the Tennent file again. She frowned at the line she'd marked about poppies, then shrugged her shoulders. At least it should keep Sergeant Caudwell quiet for a while.

It had only been a day since he moved out of Bridge End Farm, yet Cooper found it was the most difficult time of all. After he dropped Diane Fry off at West Street, he'd walked through the town to the Old School nursing home. He'd promised he would visit his mother nearly every day, and that was what he was trying to do, even if she didn't know that he'd been.

At the end of the visit, it was hard to tear himself away. He ought to remember that he had his own home to go back to now. But all he actually had was an unfamiliar door in Welbeck Street and a dark, empty flat. Only the presence of a fat, idle cat in the conservatory made the idea tolerable.

On his way back through town from the nursing home, Cooper found himself standing in Clappergate, on the pedestrianized area near the corner of High Street. This was a spot he normally tried to avoid. Usually, he walked further up the hill and came into Clappergate from Back Lane or through the shopping precinct. That way he didn't have to see the flowerbed where council gardeners planted daffodils to grow in the spring. It meant he didn't have to see the plaque on the wooden bench next to the flowerbed.

But today, he had other things on his mind, and the street looked different in the snow. The flowerbed was partly hidden by a layer of frozen snow into which passers-by had thrust empty bottles and McDonald's cartons, spontaneously creating a piece of modern art. That was how Cooper had found himself right by the bench, staring at the memorial plaque as if it had dropped out of the sky in front of him, like a fallen meteorite. He realized he must be only a few yards from the door of the Vine Inn and the place where the blood had settled and stained the stone setts.

The plaque looked shiny and clean today, but he'd been told it was sometimes vandalized and sprayed by graffiti artists with red paint. The paint was as difficult to remove from the plaque as the blood had been to clean from the setts. The inscription on the plaque read: In memory of Sergeant Joseph Cooper of the Derbyshire Constabulary, who died in the course of his duty near here. It was followed by the date — that day in November, a little over two years ago, when Sergeant Cooper had been kicked to death by a group of youths who'd objected to him attempting to make an arrest.

Cooper thought his father would actually have been satisfied with this way of dying. He would not have wanted to be one of those old men who faded slowly away in retirement, deprived of any role in life. Cooper was certain that his father must have had a deep dread of retirement. He could not have tolerated the prospect of ceasing to have any importance, of disappearing and no one even noticing he'd gone. This way, Sergeant Joe Cooper would be remembered for ever as he was when he died, because the plaque accorded him a place in posterity. His death had given him immortality.

Ben turned away from the plaque and faced back towards High Street. Four women were walking towards him on the pavement. They moved slowly and straddle-legged like cowboys, their hats pulled low over their eyes, their arms hanging by their thighs, weighted down by shopping bags bursting with booty. On the pavement in front of the women were long shadows thrown by the light spilling out of the windows of Marks and Spencer. They had been to the January sales at the stores on Clappergate that opened on a Sunday. Now they were heading to the bus station for their journey home to the Devonshire Estate or the stone terraces of Underbank.

He didn't want to be among these people. Not because they were strangers, but because they might actually recognize who he was and feel sorry for him when they saw him standing gazing at the plaque. He decided to cut through one of the lanes that ran up to Hollowgate and under the town hall clock tower into the market square. He could walk across the square and through the passages at Nick i' th' Tor to get to the traffic lights at Fargate.

The market square was almost deserted as Cooper crossed it. A scatter of pigeons wandered around the square, forlornly searching for any scraps still left from the previous day's market. A man in a yellow cagoule stood staring at the war memorial in the middle of the square, as if he had nowhere else to go. Perhaps he didn't. Edendale had its share of the homeless, and some of them would fail to survive this winter.

Cooper reached the entrance to Nimble John's Gate, where a little footbridge crossed the river before dividing left and right into Nick i' th' Tor and Rock Terrace. The setts had been re-laid near the bridge, but the passages were tilted at uneasy angles where they negotiated the steep slope across the river. The snow lay deep against the walls on either side, and no one had ever thought to provide street lighting for the passages, which were in deep darkness between the tall buildings. Below him, the River Eden was loud and roaring where it squeezed into a narrow channel between the banks. Crossing the bridge, the sound of the water was almost deafening.

He hesitated on the corner of Nick i' th' Tor, thinking he'd seen a movement ahead. But it was only the melted snow turning to water and dripping from the guttering at the back of the old cinema. The drips were creating ripples on the puddles that already lay among the cobblestones. The only light in the passage was from the street lamps behind him in the market square, reflected in the puddles and on the grey pillows of dirty snow. Cooper had never before worried about walking through the streets of Edendale, though he knew many a woman would automatically run through a mental checklist before she went anywhere at night — was her handbag safe, was the street well lit, would it be safer to take a taxi, could she run properly in these shoes?

He turned at a sound. Down at the far end of the passage, he saw a familiar figure pass in front of the lights in the market square. It was a man wearing a long overcoat, like an army greatcoat. Eddie Kemp? As if hearing his name, the figure paused in the entrance of the alley and turned his head. For a moment, Cooper almost caught his eye. He saw a woollen cap outlined against the lights. He was so sure, he could almost catch the smell.

As the figure moved on, Cooper took a step forward, then stopped. He remembered the mistake he'd made when he arrested Eddie Kemp the first time, in Hollowgate. It was wrong to assume that Kemp was on his own and would be an easy arrest. He took out his radio and reported in to Control to ask for support. Then he walked carefully down to the end of the alley and eased his way round the corner. There was no longer any sign of Kemp.

Cooper looked at the doorways on either side of the alley entrance. There weren't many shops here any more — Woolworth's and W. H. Smiths had moved into the shopping centre on Clappergate. Now, the businesses in the market square were mostly banks and building societies, estate agents and pubs. The butcher's shop, Ferris's, was starting to look like a relic, some kind of folk museum. He carefully checked the doorways of Barclays Bank and the Nationwide Building Society. Nothing. He jumped as the town hall clock began to strike seven. It sounded far too loud in the empty square, its clangs reverberating off the tall buildings. The pigeons took off and clattered together for a few seconds as they circled the square before landing again and resuming their search for food.

Cooper paused for a moment and waited for the clock to finish striking. He listened for footsteps, but he heard only the engine of a bus, which pulled into High Street and stopped. He saw the three women clambering on with their shopping bags.

Next to Barclays Bank was the Red Lion pub. The lights were on, but it had only just opened and he could see no customers inside. Nevertheless, he went in to have a look in the darker corners. Large video screens were showing MTV. The barmaid shook her head when he asked after a man in a greatcoat and a cap with fur ear-flaps.

So Kemp must have walked on into High Street. From there, he could have gone in several directions — over the river into Eyre Street, down on to the relief road, or back along the river walk towards the network of passages. Beyond them was Buxton Road and then the Buttercross, which was Eddie Kemp's way home. On his own, Cooper had to make a choice. It would be quicker to return the way he'd come, back up Nick i' th' Tor.

But after the lights of the square, the passage seemed even darker. The shops here didn't bother leaving their lights burning at night, as the big stores did. The Italian restaurant didn't open on Sundays in January, and it was in darkness. Halfway up he passed Larkin's, the bakers, which was always busy during the day. But now its windows were empty. The coffee shops and the gift shop looked faintly ridiculous in the snow. Icicles hanging from the guttering had started to thaw, and drips of icy water landed on his shoulders and splashed his neck when he walked too close to the buildings. By the morning, the water would be frozen again if the sky stayed clear.

Ahead of him, Cooper heard the noise of the river again. It sounded almost as if a dam had burst up the hill, as if thousands of gallons of water were roaring towards him down the passage. The cobbles and the walls on either side were wet enough to suggest that it had happened before, and that any second he might get swept away and washed up in the market square.

Further up, on the corner of Rock Terrace, he could see Eden Valley Books, nestling into the tall buildings around it. Starlight glittered faintly on the roof, and a light was visible in a window on the second floor. Here was someone else who didn't bother closing curtains. But up there were only the pigeons and a view of the back of the town hall clock tower. Lawrence Daley must have a good vantage point over the roofs of Edendale. He must be able to look down into all the yards and closes, passages and alleys between here and the market square. He must be able to look down on the River Eden where it passed below the bridge.

As Cooper looked up at the lighted window, a shape passed across it, then a second. The first, he was sure, was Lawrence Daley himself. But the second figure was female. Cooper couldn't quite believe who he thought it was. Then she turned towards the window to look out, and he was certain.

Cooper heard a cough. Eddie Kemp? Did he really have a delicate respiratory system?

Then his radio came to life. 'Ben, we're in Eyre Street. Which way did he go?'

'Diane? I think he's in one of the alleys between you and the market square. Somewhere near the bookshop.'

'Which ways shall we cover?'

'He'll come out either on to Eyre Street or up Rock Terrace on to Buxton Road. I'm at the market square end of Nick i' th' Tor.'

'OK.'

Slowly, Cooper began to move forward again. It was steep here, and the setts were slippery if he walked too near the walls. He passed Larkin's and one of the coffee shops and was almost at the bridge. Even if there had been footsteps, he wouldn't have heard them now because of the noise of the river under the bridge.

Where a broken remnant of stone wall concealed a delivery door to one of the shops, there was a sudden a movement, and a dark shape on the edge of his vision. Before Cooper could turn towards it, he felt himself pushed heavily, and he fell hard against the door. Along with the sudden jolt of pain from the impact, he heard a thud of something hitting the door alongside him. Then there were feet clattering on the setts as someone ran off down the alley.

Cooper tried to push himself away from the door to run after them, but found he was unable to move. There was a strange tightness in his right side, and he couldn't force his body away from the door. It was as if he'd lost all the strength down his right side. There was no real pain, except from his shoulder where it had collided with the door. He tried to raise his right arm above his head. It wouldn't move all the way, but was held back by the tightness in his side, so that his arm hung ridiculously in mid-air. He felt like a man patting an invisible small boy on the head.

Feeling ridiculously embarrassed, he lowered his arm again. Then he concentrated on each part of his body in turn, wondering if there was a serious, major pain somewhere that he'd missed. Perhaps his brain had suppressed it, and the agony would hit him in a moment. Perhaps he was in a state of shock. He'd heard of badly injured people who carried on moving for several minutes before their wounds overwhelmed them and they collapsed.

Cooper clearly remembered an impact. And he knew, too, that he'd heard a faint crunching of flesh and bone. Now his body refused to allow him to move to pursue his assailant. Something was definitely wrong.

He bent his head to look down at his side. Blood was soaking through the lining of his coat. A thick drop of it trickled from the hem and landed in the snow, splashing on the frozen surface. The blood was very dark, so dark that it was almost purple.

As the adrenalin drained away from his limbs and icy water dripped on him from the guttering, Ben Cooper began to feel very cold.