Blood on the Tongue

35

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

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

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

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

'We'll soon find out.'

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

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

'Yes, I suppose so,' said Fry.

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

'I expect so.'

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

'Yes, Ben.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Lawrence?'

'I'm afraid so.'

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

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

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

'There's nothing more we could have done, Ben.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was only then that he saw the eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Of course.'

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

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

'Before he went to London?'

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

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

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

'Why did he come back?'

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

'Did he tell you this?'

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

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

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

'That's how he came across the cigarette case, then. He bought it from the website that Frank Baine and Lawrence Daley ran. He was a customer of theirs.'

'That's how it started,' said Grace. 'But it became his means of reconciliation.'

Cooper put the car into gear and drove towards Woodland Crescent. 'I don't really understand.'

'I managed to get it out of Peter and Zygmunt in the end,' said Grace. 'I think they're both ashamed. Peter certainly is. Zygmunt — well, I don't know about Zygmunt.'

'But reconciliation…?'

'The way Andrew was feeling, I think that when he heard Zygmunt didn't have long to live, he knew it was time to be reconciled. He made his own enquiries into where these souvenirs or memorabilia came from, and who was involved. That's how he made contact with Lawrence Daley, here in Edendale. Daley trusted him, and Andrew worked out that there was far more to the business than the memorabilia. He contacted the RAF Police and told them the story.'

'He was getting on to dangerous ground,' said Cooper. 'Didn't he realize that?'

'I suppose so. But he's single-minded, you know. Stubborn, like his father and his grandfather. He had his mind set on oplatek. It was the time for reconciliation. He had to come here and show his grandfather that he was doing something about the people Zygmunt called vultures. Andrew thought his grandfather would be proud of him.'

They turned the corner into Woodland Crescent. Cooper had slowed down, because he wanted to hear what Grace Lukasz had to say before she reached the bungalow.

'But it wasn't enough for Zygmunt,' she said. 'I think he mocked Andrew for simply passing the information to the police, which was what he intended. I think Zygmunt said he should have found out names. He asked Andrew where his courage was.'

Cooper pulled up to the kerb and put the handbrake on. He sat for a moment, saying nothing. As he hoped, Grace kept on talking. It was as if communion had prompted her to thoughts of confession. But surely it was somebody else's sins she was talking about, somebody else's need for forgiveness.

'It was seeing the cigarette case that made Zygmunt so angry,' she said. 'They argued terribly. I couldn't make it all out, but I'm sure that's what it was. Then Andrew walked out.'

'Did you know where he'd gone?'

Grace shook her head. 'All I know is that he went off to prove himself to his grandfather, to show that he was worthy of forgiveness. He decided not to wait to speak to the policeman. And that's all I know.'

'I see.'

She turned her head wearily to look at Cooper. 'Andrew got himself into trouble, didn't he?'

'Let's go inside.'

But still Grace didn't move. 'There was another thing that Zygmunt always talked about too much,' she said. 'Sacrifice.'

At Grace's direction, Cooper opened the side gate and pushed her wheelchair down the passage past the garage to the back of the bungalow. He could see Zygmunt Lukasz in the conservatory. The lighting was strange inside because of the covering of snow on the glass roof, which gave a blue cast to the sunlight. But it seemed to Cooper that the old man was praying.

Zygmunt was seated in front of a tall candle that burned strongly in the enclosed space. His white hair shone with an unlikely purity in the snow-filtered light, as if it had recently been washed with bleach. The rest of his family were visible behind him in the house. There was Peter, and Richard and Krystyna, and even the youngest child, Alice. Cooper began to feel embarrassed, and he wanted to slip back round the corner before they saw him. But Grace Lukasz banged on the glass without hesitation, and her husband came to the door, staring at Cooper.

'I wasn't expecting you to be ready to come home so soon,' he said to Grace.

'I'd had enough. And Detective Constable Cooper wants to speak to you.'

'I'm sorry to bother you, sir.'

'You'd better come in.'

Krystyna was in the kitchen cutting carrots and parsnips with a small knife. There was a chicken soaking in cold water. In the sitting room, Peter Lukasz had automatically picked up the television remote and was fingering the buttons. 'What is it you want?' he said.

'I wonder if you've heard from your son yet?'

'No. But we will soon.'

Cooper shook his head. It was strange standing here in the Lukasz's home again. Over a week ago, he'd arrested Eddie Kemp in the Starlight Cafe. He'd never even heard of the Lukasz family then, but Kemp had just been involved in killing their son. There had been blood on the streets that dawn, in the snow. Now there was blood on Irontongue Hill.

'Mr Lukasz,' he said, 'I need you to come to the mortuary again to make an identification.'

Each of the Lukasz family stopped what they were doing. Grace spun her wheelchair to face him, Peter put down the television remote, Krystyna paused with her knife in mid-air. Cooper turned and looked into the conservatory. Zygmunt had fixed him with his pale blue, knowing eyes. The old man raised his head, tensing his jaw as if facing a challenge. The dog was beside his chair, with a thin, pink biscuit in its mouth that it had been dragging around the floor. The biscuit was dirty, but a design was visible on it — a picture of a nativity scene. Cooper recognized it as a version of the oplatek wafer.

'Forgiveness for the animals?' he asked.

Then Zygmunt Lukasz spoke in English for the first time in Ben Cooper's hearing.

'Of course,' he said. 'There were animals in the stable when Jesus was born.'

'So there were,' said Cooper. 'And animals are much easier to forgive.'

Cooper had never yet been next door to the house that Mrs Shelley lived in. He had only ever met her at number 8, in his own flat. Of course, number 10 looked identical from the outside, apart from the fact there was only the one bell.

'She's a bit vague,' he said. 'She might not understand what we're telling her first.'

'It's lucky she knows who you are, then,' said Fry.

'I'm not sure about that. She might not associate me with the police. She thinks of me as the young man who looks after the cat.'

'Promotion at last, Ben.'

Cooper turned to look at her, irritated by the jibe. But he saw from her face that she regretted having said it.

'If it's all right with you, I want to go to the Cavendish Hotel and see Alison Morrissey after this,' he said.

Now Fry couldn't meet his eyes at all. 'She's gone,' she said. 'She caught a flight back to Toronto this morning.'

'What?'

'I'm sorry, Ben. We agreed it was for the best.'

'Who's we?'

'I talked to her yesterday, after we arrested Frank Baine. I watched you take her back to the hotel. And I think she's already said goodbye.'

Cooper felt his mouth hanging open and a surge of anger flooding through him. But before he could demand an explanation, the door of number 10 opened and Mrs Shelley stood looking at them, a puzzled frown on her face.

'Can I help you?'

They could hear the Jack Russell terrier barking from the back of the house. Even in the hallway, the noise was deafening. Cooper was glad of the thick stone walls that stopped sound travelling between the two houses. He was reminded of the walls in the row of cottages where Marie Tennent lived. They were just as thick as these walls — thick enough, he remembered thinking, that her neighbours would not have heard a baby crying.

Seeing Cooper speechless, Fry took the lead. 'Mrs Shelley, we need to speak to you about Lawrence Daley.'

'Lawrence?' Mrs Shelley said, as if repeating the name might bring some meaning to the sound of it. 'Lawrence?'

'Your nephew.'

'Has there been an accident? Has there been a fire at the shop? I always warned him that he was working in a death trap. All those books — it only needed some thoughtless person to drop a cigarette end or a match, and the whole lot would go up, I told him.'

'Nothing like that, Mrs Shelley. Could we come in for a moment? It would be better than standing on the doorstep.'

'Oh, yes. Would you like some tea?'

'It might be an idea to put the kettle on, but we'll do it.'

'Why on earth would you do that? I'm quite capable of putting the kettle on.'

'I think this might be a bit of a shock for you.'

Mrs Shelley stared at them, her mouth moving slightly as she tried to puzzle out what they was saying. In a moment, Cooper expected her to ask him about the cat.

'He can't be dead,' she said. 'That isn't possible. Not both of them.'

'Both of them?' said Fry. 'Both of who?'

'I'll make that tea,' said Cooper.

He was glad to find that the dog, Jasper, was outside the back door rather than in the kitchen. His yapping sounded peevish and demanding. Cooper was getting used to being in other people's kitchens. Marie Tennent's, full of nappies and bottles of sterilizing fluid. Walter Rowland's, sparse and utilitarian. Lawrence's little cubbyhole at the bookshop. Even his own kitchen next door at number 8, which he hadn't yet got used to.

And it ought really to have been the kitchen at number 8 that Mrs Shelley's reminded him of — they were the same layout, with a similar view out on to the overgrown gardens. But of all the kitchens he'd been in, it was Marie Tennent's he was reminded of. It didn't take him long to find out why.

Down at the end of the room, in the alcove that was occupied in his own flat by a new chest freezer, there was an incongruous piece of furniture. It didn't belong in a kitchen at all. But it went with the smells, which he now realized were what had put him in mind of Marie Tennent's house in the first place. The smells had transported him instantly to Dam Street, as if he'd opened a door and stepped back into Marie's hallway on that day nearly a week ago. It was a trick of the memory, a sense of deja vu. Except that here he had in front of him the one item that had been so obviously missing from any room in Marie Tennent's home.

'What am I going to do with her?' said Mrs Shelley plaintively, coming into the kitchen behind him. 'Jasper is so jealous of the attention she's getting — that's why he never stops barking. And if Lawrence is dead, he won't be coming back for her, will he?'

'No, Mrs Shelley. And I don't think her mother will be, either.'

Cooper stood looking down into the cot. The baby's eyes were open, but she lay with her hands curled into fists and her face flushed bright red. She was lying very still indeed. Then the pupils of her eyes moved, as if she were trying to see something a long way off, and her forehead creased in puzzlement.

Finally, she seemed to become aware of Cooper's face. And Baby Chloe smiled.