Blood on the Tongue

28

DCI Tailby looked around the conference room. He frowned. Fry had noticed that he was doing a lot of frowning these days. He'd never been a barrel of laughs, but his last few weeks at E Division were proving to be a burden on him.

'We don't seem to see much of DC Cooper at these meetings,' said Tailby.

'Everybody is so busy,' said Hitchens. 'There are so many actions. So many interviews to do.'

'I know that. Is Cooper all right? He wasn't injured in the incident last night?'

'No, he's fine. He reported for duty as normal this morning, and he's gone out with Sergeant Caudwell. The MDP asked to visit the site of the aircraft wreck.'

'He's with Sergeant Caudwell? You've thrown him to the dogs then?'

'I wouldn't say that exactly, sir,' said Hitchens.

'When things get difficult, there's a temptation to look around for a sacrifice,' said Tailby.

Fry blinked. She'd never heard their old DCI get so philosophical before. Perhaps he wanted to put on a display of wisdom in his final days before he handed over to Kessen, so that the contrast would be all the greater.

'I'm told Sergeant Caudwell asked for a scenes of crime officer as well. What is she hoping to find?'

'I've no idea,' said Hitchens.

Tailby frowned. 'I'm happy that we're co-operating. But there comes a point when co-operation has to be mutual.'

'Yes, sir.'

'All right,' said Tailby. 'Well, here we are — it's Monday morning, and we've had some major developments in this enquiry over the weekend. We have a confirmed identity for the victim: our so-called Snowman is Sergeant Nick Easton, an investigator with the Royal Air Force Police. And I gather we've managed to piece together some of his movements, with the help of the MDP officers who have been sent to Edendale.'

'DS Fry and her team came in yesterday to follow that line of enquiry urgently,' said Hitchens.

'Excellent. I'm sure all the overtime will be fully justified, Paul.'

'Yes, sir. I'll let DS Fry tell you what she managed to achieve for the money.'

Fry shuffled in her seat as the two DCIs stared at her, one smiling, one frowning. Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They would never agree on anything.

'For a start,' said Fry, 'we know Sergeant Easton visited the air museum at Leadenhall on Sunday 6th January, between twenty-four and thirty-six hours before he was killed. He was enquiring about a volunteer there, Graham Kemp, who is well known as an aviation memorabilia collector.'

'This is the brother of Edward Kemp, I gather,' said Tailby. 'A gentleman we now have in custody again.'

'Yes, sir. We have his brother's address, and we're hoping to pick him up this morning. Of course, we've already been interviewing a number of Edward Kemp's associates in connection with the double assault last Monday night. It's worth bearing in mind that this incident happened within an hour or two of Easton's death.'

'OK. And from the aircraft museum…'

'We know Nick Easton stayed at a hotel near Chesterfield that night, then he visited Edendale the following day, Monday. He called at the home of a family called Lukasz in Woodland Crescent and spoke briefly to Mrs Grace Lukasz. It's odd that Mr Andrew Lukasz disappeared a matter of hours before Easton arrived.'

'Andrew?'

'Grace Lukasz's son. He lives in London, but had been visiting his parents. You might recall that we got the father and mother in to try to identify our Snowman because their son had disappeared rather suddenly.'

'And he hasn't he turned up since? He's not back home in London?'

'Apparently not. The Metropolitan Police called at his home early this morning and talked to his neighbours, and apparently there's been no sign of him for about ten days, which would tie in with his arrival in Edendale. His wife is American, and she's been away at a family funeral in Wisconsin, but we're trying to make contact with her. Even more interestingly, his employers say Andrew Lukasz was on leave — but that he should have been back at work today. He didn't turn up.'

'What was Sergeant Easton's interest in the Lukasz family?' said Tailby. 'Do we have any idea?'

'We don't really know. And nor does Peter Lukasz. But he says that Andrew had argued with his grandfather. There was some disagreement over a cigarette case that had belonged to Zygmunt Lukasz's cousin, Klemens Wach, who was killed in an aircraft wreck during the Second World War. Apparently, Zygmunt expressed outrage that this item might have been looted from the wreck.'

'In other words, a piece of aviation memorabilia?'

'It looks like it, sir,' said Fry.

'Go on.'

'We don't know where Easton went after he left the Lukasz home. According to the MDP, he was using a black Ford Focus, but we haven't been able to locate it. And he wasn't booked into accommodation in this area for that night, as far as we can tell. DC Murfin checked everywhere yesterday, which meant a lot of phone calls and visits. I have to say, sir, that we simply don't have the staff for an enquiry as complex as this.'

'Point taken, Fry,' said Tailby. 'Have we made any progress on the timeline for the morning Easton's body was found?'

'We've narrowed it down to a window of about half an hour, when his body could have been left at the side of the A57. But we've been unable to find any sightings of four-wheel drive vehicles on the road after it was closed because of the snow. There are so few houses on that stretch of road. The Snake Inn was our best bet, but the staff have been interviewed and it seems they saw and heard nothing but the snowploughs.'

'What about Edward Kemp's vehicle? A four-wheel drive, isn't it?'

'An Isuzu Trooper, yes. The rolls of plastic found in the back did have traces of blood, but the blood matched that of one of the assault victims. We think the baseball bats or other weapons that were used in the assault were hidden in the plastic rolls afterwards. Unfortunately, the weapons are now missing. However, we do have some possible traces from the plastic, if we can get approval for samples to go to the lab…'

'Yes, of course. Do it.'

'Also, the bayonet that was used in the assault on DC Cooper. We might get a DNA trace from the handle.'

'Obviously.'

'My main concern at the moment is that we've not yet been given details of the enquiry that Sergeant Easton was working on,' said Fry. 'We need that information urgently.'

'The Ministry of Defence Police have promised us a meeting tomorrow morning, when full details will be shared as far as possible,' said Tailby. 'But at this stage, it seems clear that there's a connection involving aviation memorabilia. The Leadenhall Aircraft Museum, this collector, Graham Kemp, and an item that is known to have been in the possession of Andrew Lukasz. That's a very positive line of enquiry you've developed, Fry.'

'The most interesting point is that Easton called at the Lukasz home shortly after Andrew disappeared,' said Fry. 'Obviously, we'll be interviewing both the Kemp brothers. But, if you asked me at this moment, I'd say the person I'd be most interested in talking to about the murder of Nick Easton was Andrew Lukasz.'

'And, in what has now become our traditional manner, the person we most want to speak to is missing,' said Tailby.

'Yes, sir.'

Tailby spoke stiffly to DCI Kessen, who nodded. He'd said nothing during the meeting. Fry feared that he was going to be out of his depth once Tailby departed.

'You're right, Fry,' said Tailby. 'There's a lot of work involved in this Easton enquiry, not to mention the assault on a police officer. We'll have to try to pull in some more assistance. But, Paul, do make sure you use the expertise of the MDP officers while they're here, too.'

'May I remind you we also have a missing baby, sir?' said Hitchens.

'Don't I know it? The papers say hope is fading for Baby Chloe. Is that right? Are our hopes fading?'

'If somebody has her, they're not coming forward,' said Fry. 'We're interviewing Eddie Kemp again after this meeting, both about the assault on DC Cooper and about the baby, since he was Marie Tennent's last-known boyfriend. But we've already checked his house and talked to his wife. I don't think he's been involved with Marie for some time, and it seems unlikely he'll have any information about the baby.'

'Bad news, then.'

'The bones of the other baby we found don't make the situation look good. If we can get DNA from the remains, we can confirm whether it was an earlier child of Marie Tennent's. But the clothes found with the bones were almost certainly left by her — Marie's mother identified them. It seems Marie might have gone up to the wreck to leave the clothes as some sort of memorial to the dead child.'

Tailby looked at her, horrified. 'That's rather macabre, Fry.'

'It's speculation, of course,' said Fry. 'But why else should Marie Tennent have gone up to the aircraft wreck on Irontongue Hill that day?'

The wreckage of Sugar Uncle Victor began a hundred yards below the trig point, on the windward side of Irontongue. Between the larger sections, the ground was covered in molten fragments of metal, slivers of glass and strands of torn rubber. A few tufts of ragged wool clung to an undercarriage axle where sheep had rubbed their itchy backs against it, glad to find something hard and solid in the expanse of soft peat. There were shreds of tyre still left, hanging from the huge hub of a wheel.

Close to the main wreckage, there were poppies on wreaths or attached to small makeshift crosses. Some of the crosses were wooden, but others seemed to have been made out of bits of melted tubing from the aircraft itself, tied together with wire. Parts of the metal on the undercarriage and fuselage were still uncorroded, even after so long. On the other hand, the poppies had faded completely to white, their original blood-red bleached by the sun and rain.

'One survivor and five fatalities, not including the pilot,' said Cooper, his eyes following the tail of a small aircraft as it headed towards Glossop.

Jane Caudwell seemed hardly to have heard him. The snow had spattered her boots and the legs of her trousers where she'd stamped her feet in the snow. She was dressed in black — a totally impractical colour on the snow-covered peat moors. Bright colours were what you should be wearing, especially if the weather turned bad and the mountain rescue teams turned out to try to locate you. They could spot bright clothes. But black amounted to camouflage.

Caudwell took off her right glove, exposing a pale, plump hand with a gold ring on the middle finger. She held the hand up for Cooper's inspection, splaying the fingers into something that looked like an obscene gesture, multiplied several times over.

'Yes, five,' she said. 'But are you quite sure Pilot Officer McTeague was aboard this aircraft?'

' What?'

Caudwell smiled. 'Just a thought. By the way, I don't think it's a good idea for her to be up here, whoever she is.'

'Who?'

'Up there.'

Cooper turned and saw Alison Morrissey standing among the rocks nears the trig point. She had a camera in her hand, though at the moment she was making no effort to photograph the officers working on the wreck site. The hood of her cagoule was pulled up to protect her ears from the wind that whipped the snow off the surface of the Irontongue rocks. But Cooper thought he could see the expression in her eyes, a dark mingling of satisfaction and pain.

'I'd better go and speak to her,' he said.

'No,' said Caudwell. 'Let someone else do it.'

She gestured at PC Nash, who scowled as he lumbered up the slope, kicking his feet in the snow. Morrissey watched him approach her, as she might have observed the movements of a bit of interesting wildlife. When Nash was within a few yards of her, with his head down, struggling to keep his footing on a stretch of wet scree, she raised the camera and took his picture. Nash heard the click and looked up angrily. He charged the rest of the way, thrusting against the rocks with his arms.

Cooper took a couple of steps towards them but felt Caudwell's hand on his arm and stopped. Morrissey had stood her ground and was listening with amused attentiveness to what Nash was saying. She didn't seem to reply, and he began to wave his arms, indicating that she should move back down the hill. Still she didn't move.

Then Nash tried to snatch her camera. Morrissey resisted. Nash towered over her, but there was a stubbornness plain from her body language that told him she wasn't going to be bullied.

'No.' Cooper pulled away from Caudwell and began to run up the slope.

'For heaven's sake,' called Caudwell, 'what's the matter with you?'

Cooper kicked up the snow as he scrambled across the scree, using his hands against the rocks to push himself up. He looked up. Nash had hold of the camera, but the strap was still tight round Morrissey's shoulder and, when he tugged, it almost pulled her off balance. She slipped and flung out her arms to keep her balance. One of her hands hit the shoulder of his fluorescent jacket with a loud slap. Nash grabbed her arm.

'Let her go!'

PC Nash turned and looked at him. He wasn't smiling, but Cooper could sense that he was enjoying himself. Cooper felt at a complete disadvantage. He was standing down the slope from Nash, who loomed over him. For a moment, Cooper thought he'd engineered a situation that was impossible to get out of. Nash looked past his shoulder and let go of Morrissey's camera.

'Go back to the road, Alison,' said Cooper. 'Please.'

Finally, Morrissey turned and walked away from him, with one backward glance. Cooper and Nash then scrambled down the slope together.

Cooper took a deep lungful of air as he tried to calm himself. It was totally different from the air in the Lukasz bungalow or at Walter Rowland's house, or even at George Malkin's. This was clean and pure, straight off the top of the hill. It had even seemed a shame to walk through the virgin snow this morning. A single set of tracks was one thing — they were like a statement, emphasizing the untouched purity all around. But when several pairs of feet had trampled backwards and forwards and pressed the snow into slush, stained with dirt from their boots, it made the rest of the landscape look tarnished and seedy.

'So, these poppies,' said Caudwell. 'Who leaves them here?'

'I don't know,' said Cooper. 'Perhaps members of ex-servicemen's organizations who think the crew should be remembered. Or perhaps the local air cadets do it.'

'You think they come up here on Remembrance Day every year?'

'It's possible.'

'So what about this one?'

Cooper walked over to where she was standing. There was a single poppy on a wooden cross, tucked under the edge of the undercarriage. It was gradually emerging from a patch of thawing snow, and it was bright red, like a splash of arterial blood from a fresh wound.

'I think your officer was right. This doesn't look as though it's been here for two months.'

'There's been too much rain,' said Cooper. 'The colour would have been washed out of it, same as the others.'

'What was the date of the crash again?'

'January 7th, 1945.'

'The seventh was a week ago,' said Caudwell. 'The day Nick Easton was killed.'

'So?'

Caudwell gave him an exasperated look. 'Men don't know this,' she said. 'But anniversaries are very important to some people. Anniversaries of births, anniversaries of deaths. The day you first met the person you fell in love with. You know, dates that you never forget.'

'Yes, I do know,' said Cooper, thinking of the yearly visit with Matt to his father's grave, which would be an annual ritual until they became too old or infirm to make it to the cemetery. 'Relatives of one of the crew, then?'

Caudwell swapped her gloves for a pair of latex ones from a packet in her coat. 'Somebody who felt they had to leave the cross on the right day, whatever the weather.'

Cooper turned and looked down across the expanse of snow-covered moor to a spot which even now stood out from the rest of the area. It looked bare and brown, churned up by the boots of the men who had stood round a frozen body and made poor jokes about ice axes and thermometers.

To Cooper's surprise, Sergeant Caudwell spoke exactly what was in his thoughts.

'Marie Tennent,' she said.

Cooper stared at her. 'How do you know about Marie?'

'A combination of local knowledge, elementary detective work and inter-agency co-operation. I've read the file. We need to take the poppy.'

Liz Petty came over and took photographs of the poppy in position on its cross. Then she carefully eased the cross out of the ground. Cooper could see there was an inscription on the wood, written in white, as if it had been done in correction fluid.

'We found Marie Tennent's body a few hundred yards from here,' he said. 'She'd been there for days, in the snow. She's a presumed suicide. I don't think we've even had the postmortem results yet.'

'Don't tell me — you're short-staffed in the pathology department?'

Caudwell was peering at the wooden cross that Liz had placed in an evidence bag. 'What does the inscription say?' asked Cooper.

'It says: "Sergeant Dick Abbott — 24th August 1926 to 7th January 1945."'

'Abbott? He was the rear gunner. Tail-end Charlie.'

'It says something else,' said Caudwell. 'I don't know what this bit means…'

Cooper waited, thinking of Dick Abbott. The newspaper reports had said the rear gunner's body was severely mutilated. According to Walter Rowland, the rescue team had spent hours on the moor picking up the pieces of human bodies. The only consolation in Sergeant Abbott's case was that he might never have known what happened to him. From his rear turret, he wouldn't have seen Irontongue Hill at all. There might have been a second when he heard terrified voices on the intercom, then he would have felt the impact as Sugar Uncle Victor collided with the gritstone buttress and flipped over to shatter his turret on the rocks.

'Is it Latin? It might be the squadron motto or something,' said Cooper.

'Oh, no,' said Caudwell. 'I can read the words. I just don't know what they mean. It says: "Justice at last."'

The manager of the Wise Buys shop in Clappergate remembered Marie Tennent perfectly well.

'She was a good girl. Hard working. Brighter than most of the others,' she told Fry. 'I was sorry to lose her when she went. But the best of the young ones never stay long.'

Fry looked round the shop. Judging from the window displays, the main attraction of the stock was its price. The racks were filled with warm coats and colourful sweaters, trouser suits and matching scarf and hat sets. Spring fashions hadn't arrived yet.

'Did Marie tell you why she was leaving the job?' she asked.

'No. She just said she wanted to do something different. They get fed up after a while, you see. Dealing with the public isn't always easy.'

'I know,' said Fry.

'Oh, I expect you do.'

'But Marie didn't have another job to go to, as far as we know.'

'No, I didn't think she did. Personally, I thought there was probably a man. I expected to hear she was getting married before long.'

'Did she mention a particular man?'

'Not as such. Some girls talk about their boyfriends all the time, but Marie wasn't that type. She was more private. But I always wondered…'

'Yes?'

'Well, was there a baby, do you know?'

'Did she hint at that?'

'Not really. But there are little signs, aren't there? She became more absorbed in herself, as if she had other things to think about than joining in with the usual chat. She started to look a bit different, too. Being pregnant suits some, but Marie looked ill. Not anything you could really put your finger on — she was paler, more tired sometimes. She held herself differently. I've seen it before.'

'But you never asked her?' said Fry.

'It's not my place. She obviously didn't want to tell me, so I didn't pry.'

Fry watched a woman poke through a rack of dresses, find nothing that interested her and walk out of the shop.

'Did Marie ever mention her family?'

'Oh, yes, her mother in Scotland. She talked about her quite a lot. And she had a younger brother, I think.'

'Anybody else? Anybody in this area?'

The manager hesitated. 'Funny you should say that. Marie always said she was from Scotland. I mean, she spoke with a Scottish accent and everything, and that's where her mum lived. But I always thought she had some connection with Derbyshire. She talked sometimes as if she knew a bit about the history of this area.'

Fry turned to look at her. 'Anything in particular?'

'It's hard to remember. But I think it was something to do with the war.'

'Could it have been the RAF? A crashed Second World War bomber?'

The frown cleared from the manager's face. 'Yes, I believe you're right. It was a funny thing for a girl like Marie to be interested in. But she mentioned those aircraft wrecks often.'

There was a crack as a gunshot split the frigid air. Recognizing the sound without even having to think, Cooper dived to his left, rolling into the snowdrift behind the undercarriage, scrambling to take advantage of its cover. He looked around for Caudwell, but saw that she hadn't moved. She was still standing in the open, staring back over her shoulder at something beyond the wreckage.

Then Cooper heard a cackling and a drumming of wings as a brace of red pheasant panicked and burst up from the moor a hundred yards away. He caught a glimpse of the sunlight shimmering off their red backs like streams of blood in the air as they beat away towards the reservoir. And Cooper saw PC Nash laughing as he shoved what looked like a Glock pistol back into a holster under his jacket. So Carol Parry had been right — the MDP considered it necessary to be armed.

The natural sounds of the moor became audible again — the constant muttering of the wind as it nosed through the drifting snow, the barking of a dog and the clang of a bucket so muffled and distant that the world seemed to have slipped behind a thick curtain.

Caudwell turned back and watched Cooper picking himself up and brushing snow off his shoulders. She met his eye with a sardonic smile.

'Nash!' she called. 'Behave yourself. You're frightening the wildlife.'

Cooper sat in the snow for a few moments with his hands on his knees and watched Caudwell and Nash. He had to control his temper. He couldn't lose it — that was exactly what they wanted him to do. Probably exactly what Diane Fry wanted him to do, too.

Looking at the ground where he'd fallen, Cooper noticed a glint in the dark peat. Another piece of aluminium? He picked it up and brushed the black fibres from it, revealing a peculiar whiteness. He puzzled over the material it was made from. It seemed to be a broken section of a narrow shaft, surely too brittle to have been part of the airframe. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed it, seeking the familiar smell of scorched metal. But instead he got a scent that reminded him fleetingly of Sunday dinners — a joint of beef with mashed potatoes and carrots round the dining table with his parents on a damp November day. He shook his head to clear the intrusive memory. Perhaps what he held in his fingers was a fragment from the aircraft's radio apparatus. It was almost like bakelite, its broken ends grainy and hollow. But it was white…

He flung the object to the ground as if it had suddenly grown hot and burned his fingers. It lay on the peat, gleaming unmistakably now. He stared at it in horror. It was bone. Of course, it was more than likely a bit of a dead sheep, part of the carcase of a casualty from the flock across the hill that had been picked clean and dropped here by some scavenger. It didn't look as though it had been out in the weather for very long. But Cooper couldn't help associating it with what he'd just been thinking of. As he held it in his hand, it had seemed like part of one of the shattered bodies of the airmen who died in Uncle Victor.

'Ben — are you all right?'

Liz Petty was standing over him looking concerned, puzzled by his silence.

'Yes. Fine.'

But the truth was that Cooper had felt himself shift through time for a moment. He'd been picturing that young airman, Sergeant Dick Abbott, hurtling through the torn and splintered metal edges of the Lancaster's fuselage, his limbs ripping from his body as the impact hurled him into the darkness, where he would bleed to death in the snow.

Cooper had once seen a sheep that had been hit by a car on an unfenced moorland road above the Eden Valley. One of the animal's forelegs had been smashed so badly that bits of its femur lay sprinkled on the tarmac like pieces of a jigsaw. This was far worse than that. Men's bodies had been torn apart here, their bones had been shattered and their blood had soaked into the peat. People talked about men who had sacrificed their lives. But this was more than a sacrifice. He was standing on the site of a massacre.

Everyone had blamed Pilot Officer Danny McTeague for the crash of Lancaster SU-V, for the death of five men. Cooper wondered what Marie Tennent, or anyone else, might consider to be justice for such a crime.

Fry found Eddie Kemp in a more amenable mood. He looked like a man who was confident there was insufficient evidence against him. It was the sort of confidence that came to a man who had been questioned many times before without being charged, or who had appeared in court and been acquitted. Also, Fry couldn't detect the smell any more. Maybe the custody suite staff had scrubbed him up specially.

'Of course, my Vicky knew all about the thing with Marie,' said Kemp. 'Vicky had kicked me out at the time, so she couldn't really complain about what I did, could she?'

'I suppose not.'

'We sorted it all out, anyway. I went back to Vicky, and that was that.'

'When was this?'

'Last July.'

'About six months ago, then. Was the parting amicable?'

Kemp hesitated. 'Marie was bit upset, and she said some things she didn't mean. She told me I smelled. But it's a medical condition I have, so that wasn't fair, was it?'

'And you haven't seen Marie Tennent since then?'

'No. There was no reason to.'

'Wasn't the baby a reason?'

Now Kemp looked a little less comfortable. Fry watched him squirm. 'I didn't know anything about a baby,' he said.

'Are you sure?'

'Sure.'

'Marie never contacted you to tell you about it? I would have thought she would be expecting some maintenance. If you were living with her until six months ago, we take it you're the father.'

'Is there any proof?' said Kemp.

Fry stared at him. 'I'm sure you know that we haven't been able to find the baby.'

'No, well…'

'Did she tell you she'd had a baby previously?'

'No.'

In the absence of any evidence otherwise, Fry changed tack. 'Mr Kemp, why did you break your bail?'

'All I did was go to spend a bit of time with my brother,' he said. 'Vicky was fed up with me for getting in trouble again. To be honest, that's why she kicked me out the first time. So I cleared out for a day or two to let things calm down. I was still in town, though — I was staying with our Graham.'

'All right. Now I need to ask you about an assault on a police officer last night.'

Kemp shook his head. 'As for that,' he said, 'you definitely have no proof.'