Blood on the Tongue

36

Typically, the Peak District weather had changed completely within forty-eight hours. Once the thaw had begun, it had accelerated so fast that the last traces of snow were almost gone by Thursday, apart from a few frozen streaks in the deep gullies on the moors. Water cascaded off the hills and the rivers were swollen, threatening to burst their banks.

Cooper drove out of Edendale on dark, wet roads, remembering how different the Snake Pass had looked on the day he'd gone up to the wreckage of Sugar Uncle Victor with Sergeant Caudwell. The snow had still been pristine then, and the reflection of the sun off the hillsides had been so bright it had hurt his eyes.

Now, in the yard behind Eden Valley Books, there would be water running off the gun turret and the engine casings in rivulets, dripping and crackling as the snow melted. The body of Andrew Lukasz had long since been removed, though not without difficulty. His limbs had been folded to get him into the turret, and rigor mortis had made the pathologist wonder whether his arms would have to be dislocated to get him out. But they'd managed. And when they turned the body over, they'd seen the blood that had soaked into the seat, and the injury to the back of Andrew's head.

Cooper felt sorry for Lawrence Daley. His partners had made sure he was implicated in the death of Andrew Lukasz. With no Lawrence to testify against them, it was going to be very difficult proving whether it had been deliberate or an accident when Andrew had ended up at the foot of the fire-escape stairs. It might be true that they'd simply opened the door to show him the yard. There had been ice for days, and snow had fallen by then. So did Andrew just lose his footing? Or had it been the only way that Baine and his friends could prevent him from meeting Nick Easton next day?

When he'd visited the bookshop with Fry to look at the upstairs room, Cooper had even stood at the top of the fire escape himself and looked down into the yard. Andrew Lukasz's body had already been there, waiting for the snow to clear enough so that it could be removed. Yes, poor Lawrence. He had never really known what he was getting himself involved in.

Now, with all the interviews completed, the work was going on to build a case against Frank Baine and the Kemps, and the MDP were still pursuing their own enquiry. The one thing they were still looking for was Sergeant Easton's black Ford Focus.

Alison Morrissey was back in Canada, and Baby Chloe had been taken into care. The baby had come to no harm while she was under Mrs Shelley's protection, kept out of the way of Eddie Kemp's threats. And Marie Tennent had been wrongly judged from the start. The only thing she'd cared about was keeping the baby safe. No, there had been two things she cared about. She had also remembered the dead.

But it seemed to Cooper there was one person left whose fate everyone had forgotten about. This whole business hadn't started with Nick Easton or Marie Tennent, or any of them. It had started with Pilot Officer Danny McTeague.

On Irontongue Hill, water was scouring the moors in every direction, carving channels through the bare peat, sculpting it into castles and mounds, dragging small stones into heaps and gathering in dark pools in the hollows. Further down the hill, the streams had turned brown with peat, bursting with far more meltwater than they could cope with. They were no longer picturesque.

Yet George Malkin's house at Harrop still had snow on the roof. Normally, that was a sign of good insulation, which prevented the heat from rising. But in Malkin's case, Cooper knew there wasn't enough warmth in Hollow Shaw Farm to melt the snow.

Malkin had been right about the grass in the field near his house. Even now, as the snow began to wear thin, the grass looked a brighter green than any other grazing in Derbyshire. The black-faced ewes lifted their heads and watched Cooper as he parked the Toyota and walked up the path to the house. Some of the animals nodded their heads, as if to say they'd known this would happen. If they hadn't been sheep, they might have looked wise. But their constantly rotating jaws and unblinking eyes were only derisive.

'How was the rabbit?' said Malkin, when Cooper entered the house.

'It was a life saver.'

'Ah, grand.'

In Malkin's sitting room, a small drift of snow lay on the window ledge where the blizzard had driven it through the twisted window frame. The snow showed no sign of thawing, even now. The crystals glittered against the stained wood. Cooper didn't want to be inside this house today.

'Mr Malkin, would you come outside with me for a minute?'

'If you like.'

They walked a few yards up the slope of the hill, to where Irontongue was just visible in the distance, with the hump of Blackbrook Reservoir in between, its dam wall emerging from the snow.

'The night before last, I was up there in the dark,' said Cooper. 'I wouldn't normally go up on the mountain in the dark, but that night I did.'

'I heard about that,' said Malkin.

'Well, when you're up there at night like that, in the snow, you're desperate for any signs of life, you know. For a long time, there was only one thing I could see anywhere — a light. It was the light from your window. I knew it was yours. You don't bother drawing your curtains.'

'I didn't know you were up there,' said Malkin. 'What did you expect me to do?'

'Nothing,' said Cooper. 'But if I'd been lost and didn't know which way to go, I would certainly have headed for your house. It was the one light for miles. It was like a symbol of safety.'

'If you say so.'

'I remember thinking that I would never have set off towards the other side of the reservoir and down to the water board road, which you can't even see from up there. You wouldn't even know it existed. You'd have to be blind or stupid to set off in that direction.'

Malkin seemed to catch on to the drift of what Cooper was saying. 'Or drunk?' he said.

'Pilot Officer McTeague was not drunk,' said Cooper.

The air felt damp, and Cooper could see that the cloud was lowering rapidly. He pulled his collar up and shivered.

'I checked the Accident Investigator's report myself,' he said. 'The whisky on board Lancaster SU-V was a gift for the station commander at RAF Branton. The Wing Commander at Leadenhall had a black market supply, and he wanted to share it with his old friend in Lancashire.'

'Is that right?'

'Mr Malkin, I don't think you can possibly have seen or heard Pilot Officer McTeague walking down the road singing "Show Me the Way to Go Home".'

'Well, I might have been mistaken,' said Malkin. 'The memory plays tricks after all this time.'

'I think there are things you remember all too well.'

Malkin stared across the moor for a moment or two. Banks of mist were beginning to move across in front of Irontongue Hill, and soon they wouldn't be able to see it at all from Hollow Shaw.

'Would you like to tell me about it?' said Cooper.

Malkin stood quite still and rigid. 'You have to understand something,' he said. 'Ted and I had heard our mother and father and some of their friends talking about counterfeit bank notes that were supposed to have been printed by the Germans to upset our economy.'

Cooper frowned. 'What has this got to do with anything?'

'Listen to me. When I first went up to the crash with Ted, we heard two of the airmen talking to each other. They were talking in a foreign language. So we knew they were German.'

'No, it would have been the two Poles you heard,' said Cooper. 'It was Zygmunt Lukasz and Klemens Wach. They were speaking Polish.'

'I know that now,' said Malkin, already starting to get irritated. 'That's why we stayed away from the crew, you see. Not that we would have known what to do if we'd found anyone injured. We were going to find a phone and call the police, but then we saw the bags that had been thrown clear of the wreckage. Ted stopped to take a look inside. And we found the money.'

Malkin paused. He looked across the moor towards the side of Blackbrook Reservoir and opened a field gate in the dry-stone wall before he continued.

'Ted said there were millions of pounds. It took us days to count the notes, but there wasn't that much. We could barely carry the bags between us. I was only little, remember, and I soon got tired. We planned to hide them before we called the police. We reckoned everyone would think the bags had been thrown into the reservoir in the crash, because there were plenty of other bits of the aircraft lying all around the edge of the water.'

'I understand all that,' said Cooper. 'So what went wrong?'

Malkin still stared at the reservoir. 'We saw the light,' he said. 'Out on the ice.'

'A light?'

'It was way out in the darkness, and we knew it was in a place no human being could possibly be. It was as if the light was floating in mid-air. You get daft ideas at times like that, but the first thing we thought of was the spirits that are supposed to be on the moor. We thought of ghosts. Even Ted was a bit scared, I think.'

Malkin seemed almost to be reverting back to his childhood as he spoke. Cooper could picture him as the excited, terrified little boy, in awe of his older bother. It wasn't all that hard to imagine how the young George Malkin must have felt. There had been times in his own past when Cooper had become almost sick with excitement at some adventure that Matt had got him into.

'And then we heard a voice calling for help,' said Malkin. 'It was weak, and there was a funny echo to it. We stood and watched the light moving, and we knew it must be one of the crew from the crashed plane. But we didn't think he could be alive at first. We thought it was his ghost, just a light and a voice. He was calling for help in English, but we weren't fooled. We'd heard them speaking in their own language, so we knew they were German.'

Cooper closed his eyes. 'They were Polish,' he said.

But Malkin didn't hear him. He was far away, re-living a moment that was permanently etched in his memory. Fifty-seven years had done nothing to weaken his recollection. He was talking now as if it didn't matter whether Cooper were there or not.

'Then Ted said the airman must be near the edge of the reservoir. He said the dam wall was behind him, because we could hear the echo when he shouted. So we watched the light for a little while longer. I've never felt so cold in my life, but part of that was the fear. I knew if we waited much longer, I wouldn't be able to carry the bag any further. I started to look round for somewhere to hide it, but there was nowhere near. There was only snow. And then Ted said: "He's on the ice."'

'The reservoir was frozen over, wasn't it?' said Cooper.

'At that far side, it was. The airman was walking across the ice, following the dam wall.' Malkin paused. 'I was worrying about the money. The man on the ice was the one thing that seemed to stand between the money and us. He would know it was missing. I said we should put the bags back, but Ted told me not to be stupid. I said the airman would reach the water board road, that he'd be able to walk to the phone box half a mile away. But Ted said: "He won't reach the road."'

Cooper opened his mouth to ask a question, but changed his mind. It would be a mistake to interrupt now. The story was approaching a conclusion. He could feel it in Malkin's increasing tension, see it in the lines around his mouth, a tightening rictus of fear. Cooper could tell he'd memorised every word that had been spoken as the two brothers stood clutching the leather bags, listening to a voice calling for help.

'And then we both heard it — the cracking,' said Malkin. 'It was clear in the night air, and it sounded so loud. It was like the sound of two pieces of metal being tapped against each other, and a little crunch of something breaking. Then the light disappeared. One second it was there, then it was gone. There was no shout or cry from him, not even a splash of water. Maybe a reflection of the flames on a piece of ice as it tilted on the surface. But then the ice fell back, and he was gone.'

Cooper shuddered, imagining the shock of icy water closing over his head. McTeague would have been dressed in heavy flying boots and a parachute harness. Trapped under a layer of ice, he would have been dead within seconds.

Now Irontongue had disappeared in the mist, which was rapidly approaching across the moor, racing towards Hollow Shaw, turning the air heavy with the expectation of rain. Cooper could feel the dampness on the back of his neck.

'I didn't understand what had happened,' said Malkin. 'Not until later. When we went up and looked at the reservoir next morning, I saw it was only on the east side that the water was frozen enough to walk on. It had a covering of snow, so it wouldn't have felt any different to a piece of level ground to a man in the dark. It's bloody hard work walking across that moor at any time, let alone in snow and in the dark. There are cloughs everywhere to get across.'

'He must already have been exhausted by the time he got to the reservoir,' said Cooper.

'Aye. He would never have suspected. But on the other side, near the weir, the water was still moving and the ice was thin, not enough to carry a man's weight. By the morning, there was barely a crack on the surface where he'd fallen in. You know, that bloke had been over Germany, got back home and walked away from a crashed plane. Then he put his life in the hands of two young boys. And we let him die.'

Cooper knew that his own imagination couldn't match what Malkin was going through. The man had been over the events of that night too many times.

'I always thought he would come back and haunt us out here, on the moor,' said Malkin. 'At nights, he does come back. But only in my nightmares.'

Cooper stared towards the reservoir, where it lay in a hollow between the snow-covered hills. He nodded, thinking not of Malkin nor even of Danny McTeague, but of Zygmunt Lukasz.

'No forgiving. No forgetting,' he said.

And suddenly, Malkin snapped. His face reddened and the veins stood out in his forehead, twisting his face into an unrecognizable expression.

'Do you think I want to remember this?' he said. 'Don't you think I've re-lived it often enough already since the night it happened? How many times do you think I've had the nightmare in that time? How many?'

'I don't know,' said Cooper.

'How many nights in fifty-seven years?' said Malkin. 'Work it out for yourself, clever lad.'

George Malkin turned and began to walk back towards the farm. Cooper felt for his radio. Should he call in? But it was ridiculous — this was surely an accidental death, fifty-seven years old. The witness had been an eight-year-old boy. After all that had happened recently, everyone would think he'd finally gone mad if he made a drama out of it. Then he saw that Malkin wasn't heading for the house, but towards the big shed where Rod Whittaker kept his lorry. Malkin slid back the doors and disappeared inside.

'Mr Malkin?' called Cooper. He began to feel foolish standing in the field. He started to run towards the shed as he heard a diesel engine rumble into life. Cooper peered inside. The DAF wasn't there, but the big Renault tractor was, along with all its implements lined up against the wall — a hay baler, a harrow, a snowplough blade. George Malkin was sitting high up in the cab of the tractor.

'Mr Malkin!' shouted Cooper. 'Do you help Rod Whittaker with his contracting business, too?'

'Nay, I don't have an HGV licence,' Malkin called back.

'You can drive this tractor, though.'

Cooper saw Malkin put the tractor into gear. He dodged round to the side and pulled himself up on to the step to clamber through the passenger door.

'You said Rod Whittaker is contracted by the council. His contract includes clearing the snow sometimes, I bet. It's much cheaper for the council to pay farmers and local contractors to do it, rather than buy expensive snowploughs of their own.'

'Aye,' said Malkin, as the tractor began to move.

'So you could take this tractor out with the snowplough attachment, when it's needed to clear the roads around here?'

'I suppose I could.'

The tractor bumped across the yard and headed for the open gate on to the moor. Cooper remembered his visit to the Snake Inn, where the staff had said that one of the snowplough crews had stopped to fill their flasks on the morning Nick Easton's body had been found. But only one crew. They said the crews that came over the Pass from the north weren't council workers — they were on contract, so it was in their own interests to get the job done quicker. And one of them had been a big tractor with a snowplough. Very early on the job, it was. It would have come over from somewhere near Glossop, they said. It could easily have come from Harrop.

'You could get as far as the Snake Inn, couldn't you?' said Cooper over the roar of the engine. 'Nobody would think twice about a snowplough on the road after it had been closed to traffic. The staff at the inn didn't. They never saw or heard any other vehicles — just the snowploughs coming down the Pass, and then, later on, another one coming up. The one that found Nick Easton's body. And I think one of those that came down left him there.'

Blackbrook Reservoir appeared ahead of them in the mist. Malkin swung the wheel and reversed through the wet peat towards a padlocked gate.

'Stop,' said Cooper.

'Don't worry. I'm stopping.'

Malkin kept the engine running while he climbed down and swung open the gate. Cooper stood clear of the tractor's wheels, noticing that the padlock on the gate had been cut.

'You helped Frank Baine get rid of the body,' said Cooper. 'Did Baine have some kind of hold over you?'

'No, that's not right,' said Malkin.

He backed the tractor towards the edge of the reservoir, where a concrete slipway ran down into the water. Then Malkin fiddled with something at the back of the vehicle, and Cooper saw he had hold of a thick chain with a massive hook on one end. He watched in amazement as Malkin waded into the freezing water and was soon up to his waist. He bent and attached the hook to something under the surface. When he returned to the tractor, Malkin was soaked and white with cold.

'Frank Baine came here a couple of weeks ago,' he said. 'He'd worked out that I had the money. I sold a lot of other stuff to Lawrence Daley, and Baine is no fool. He asked Daley where it came from, and put two and two together.' Malkin climbed back into the tractor cab. 'Baine said the white fivers were worth a lot. He said they were collectors' items, that people would pay good money for them, proper money. He offered to sell them for me — in exchange for a cut of the profits, of course. We worked out there was over a hundred thousand pounds' worth. That was enough to send Florence to America for treatment.'

'It must have seemed like a miracle,' said Cooper.

'Aye, after all that time, the miracle I'd been praying for. You wouldn't reckon me to be a man that prayed, would you? But that's what I'd been doing, and I thought Baine had brought my miracle.' Malkin shook his head. 'Then the RAF policeman came. Of course, it was all too late by then. And everything I did after that was pointless.'

He put the tractor into gear, and the chain tightened. Cooper stood on the edge of the reservoir and looked down. The surface was black and oily with the mud that had been churned up by all the meltwater running into it, full of dark brown peat. Anything could have been lurking down there.

But as the tractor began to edge forward, it was something metallic and shiny that began to emerge from the water. Bit by bit, recognizable objects became visible. A bumper, a number plate and a back window. Eventually, the car stood on the concrete slipway, water streaming out of it, mud sliding slowly down its windscreen.

'Get your fingerprint kit on that,' said Malkin.

'It's Nick Easton's Ford Focus.'

'Clever lad.'

This time, Cooper called in. George Malkin waited while he did it. He wasn't looking at Cooper, but gazing at Hollow Shaw Farm, as if he might be seeing it for the last time. It was the house he'd lived in all his life, the place that had held his secrets.

Cooper shook his head as he looked at the dripping car.

'So you thought Nick Easton had come to take the money from you?'

'Of course he had,' said Malkin. 'Just when I thought I had that fortune in my grasp again, he came to snatch it away. I couldn't let him do that.'

'So you killed him.'

'It was blind panic. I don't think I really knew what I was doing.' Malkin's voice became a little unsteady. 'Once he was dead, I didn't seem to be able to think straight at all. I don't have any idea what I did for the next few hours, until I realized it was the middle of the night, and by then the snow had started. Rod had already put the snowplough blade on the tractor in case he was needed for road clearing, so I got the body in the back and took it down the Snake.'

'And there were no cars on the road,' said Cooper.

'You had that right. Nobody bothered about seeing a snowplough. But do you know what? I emptied the bloke's pockets before I tipped him out, and it was only when I found his keys that it dawned on me he'd have a car. How's that for stupid? I found the car parked just past the farm. I didn't see it on the way out, or I might have thought of putting him into the reservoir with it. At the time, all I wanted was to get him as far away as possible. Like I say, I wasn't thinking straight.'

Cooper frowned. 'But how did Nick Easton know you had the money? Who told him?'

Then Malkin laughed his coarse, gravelly laugh. The noise sounded alien in the damp stillness of the moor.

'I did,' he said. 'I told him myself.'

'I don't understand.'

'Years ago, it was. I'd known the bank notes were worthless for a long time. But they were on my conscience and I couldn't rest easy thinking that Florence might find them one day. It seemed to me that, if I owned up to the money, I might get the airman off my conscience too — that he wouldn't appear in my nightmares any more. So I got the number for the RAF Police, and I rang them. I gave them my name and address and told them I knew where the money from the crashed Lancaster was.'

'They would have had no idea what you were talking about.'

'Of course not,' said Malkin. 'Everyone had forgotten about it, but for me.'

'So what did they do?'

'Not a thing. They thanked me for the information and said somebody might get in touch with me. But nobody ever did. Well, they had better things to do, I suppose. They didn't care about what had happened all those years ago, and why should they? I suppose they just put a note in a file somewhere about this old idiot at Harrop, and then they left me with my nightmares.'

'Until Andrew Lukasz told Sergeant Easton the story. And Easton must have dug out the old files before he came to Edendale.'

'Aye.'

For a few moments, Cooper watched the ripples that were still disturbing the surface of the water, breaking sluggishly on the concrete slipway.

'You could hide anything in that reservoir,' he said. 'And it might never come to the surface. Danny McTeague's body never did.'

Malkin's face contorted again. 'Oh yes,' he said.

Cooper misunderstood him at first. He thought Malkin was agreeing with him. But there was something about the tone of the man's voice, an abruptness that choked the words in his throat.

'Mr Malkin?'

'He came to the surface when the ice began to melt,' said Malkin. 'Four days later.'

'You saw him?'

'Not at first. The ice gradually began to get thinner — so thin that we could see through it when we stood at the top of the reservoir wall. On the third day, we saw him. He was floating on his back, staring up at us, with his face squashed up against the ice. It was like he was pulling faces at us, sticking out his tongue to say that he'd got the better of us, after all.'

'So what did you do about the body? Didn't you tell your father?'

Malkin laughed. 'Not bloody likely. He'd have beaten us black and blue with his belt and locked us in the coal shed for telling lies. And then he would have told the police. We thought we'd be put in prison for murder. Because we believed we had murdered him, see. It was our fault he died.'

'But if the body had been left there, it would have been found eventually.'

'Nobody found it, because we sent it back down to the bottom. There was a little rowing boat that was kept by the reservoir. We took it and filled it with stones, and we took our dad's fishing net from his shed. He noticed it was gone one day, but he blamed some gypsies who'd been hanging around.'

Cooper was starting to feel wet and uncomfortable. He almost wished he could see Irontongue Hill. At least the black buttress of rock would have been something solid and familiar. Yet together, Irontongue and the Malkin boys had been the end of Danny McTeague.

'We tied the ends of the net to the airman's body,' said Malkin. 'We tied it to his flying suit, his parachute harness, wherever we could. Then we filled it with stones and we threw it over the side. We didn't think he was going to sink at first, then his face stopped staring at us, and the stones pulled him down to the bottom, and all that was left were some bubbles. I kept looking, in case he came back up. I kept looking for months, even when the summer came. I spent so much time sitting staring at this reservoir that my dad thought I was turning peculiar. But the dead airman never came back up.'

'We'll have to send divers into the reservoir to look for the remains,' said Cooper. 'We might have to drain it.'

'Not much point in that,' said Malkin. 'They drained the reservoir thirty-five years ago.'

'But…'

'It was old and leaking by then, so they emptied it to put a concrete lining on the bottom. It's been drained twice more since, for maintenance. You don't just let a reservoir alone for sixty years, you know — it'd be so full of holes it wouldn't hold a drop of water. And what would be the good of that?'

Cooper wondered whether he'd been spun a complete yarn. But Malkin wasn't laughing. His face was almost grey, and he made no attempt to wipe away the moisture that was settling on his cheeks as the mist gathered around them.

'Mr Malkin, are you telling me the truth?' said Cooper. 'Or was that some childish fantasy you had at the time?'

'Every word I'm telling you is true. But time passes, and things change. A body doesn't stay a body for ever, not in water, not with fish and things nibbling away at it. By the time they drained the reservoir, there would only have been a few bits of bone and some rags buried in the mud on the bottom. Have you ever seen a reservoir when it's emptied? The mud is three feet deep on the bottom. Disgusting the smell is, too.'

'Yes, I remember the year there was a drought and all the reservoirs started to dry up. You could smell them for miles.'

'It was worse than that. It was foul enough to knock your head off. They scooped the mud out and tipped it into lorries. Nobody bothered to sift through it to find any bodies — they wanted to get it away as quick as they could. It all got tipped into a landfill site, over where Bents Quarry used to be. Later they put some top soil over it, and levelled it off. It grassed over nicely in a year or two — it makes a decent bit of grazing now. In fact, it's the pasture Rod Whittaker uses for his sheep.'

Malkin pointed back across the moor towards Hollow Shaw Farm, where Cooper could make out a scatter of white shapes among the remaining patches of snow.

'That's where your missing pilot is,' said Malkin. 'He's helping to feed those ewes.'

Cooper gazed at the sheep. One of the animals lifted its head and stared back at him. Its jaws were rotating steadily, and it had a look of sullen insolence on its black face. Cooper felt an irrational surge of anger. It had been such a long way to come, only to end with a field full of sheep.

'There's something I've often wondered since then,' said Malkin. 'What do you think the folk of Manchester would have said, if they'd known what was in their drinking water?'

Finally, the first patrol car bounced up the potholed road from Harrop. It had its headlights on as it climbed into the mist. George Malkin put his coat on, and walked with Cooper towards the car.

'The Morrissey woman — did you trust her?' said Malkin.

'Of course. I know some of her facts were wrong,' said Cooper. 'Frank Baine gave her false information.'

'That's not what I meant at all. She's known since Tuesday night how her grandfather died. She came here to ask me about the medal, so I told her.'

Cooper stopped suddenly. 'The medal?'

'I picked it up on the moor the night of the crash. It was in a little leather pouch, but with all the excitement about the money and the man on the ice, I forgot about it until later. Then I found it even had the airman's name and address on a label stitched inside the pouch.'

'So you sent her the medal.'

'I sent it back because I'd bottled the whole thing up long enough. It was when I finally knew that Florence was dying, and I needed to get it off my chest, I suppose. But I didn't put my name on the letter — I just said I was one of those boys who saw Danny McTeague walking away from the crash.'

Cooper's face twisted, as a remembered taste came to his mouth. It was that bitter, metallic taste, like blood seeping from his saliva glands, a bitterness that jerked a spasm from his throat. Alison Morrissey had been to Hollow Shaw after he'd let Malkin's name drop on Tuesday, and since then she'd known everything. The following morning she'd been on a flight back to Toronto. Had she been as single-minded as she claimed? Had she been concerned only with her own obsession, even as she kissed him outside the Cavendish Hotel? Alison Morrissey had failed to mention that she'd been kissing him goodbye. But Diane Fry had been watching, and she had known. No doubt she thought she'd been right about Morrissey all along.

'It was all for Florence, you know,' said Malkin. 'She was the one real treasure that I had in my life, not the money. I carried the guilt with me so long that I grew not to trust anybody, in case they found out my secret. But Florence was the one person I never felt like that about. I trusted her and loved her, and I did what I could for her.'

A PC opened the door of the patrol car and Malkin ducked his head obediently to get in. But he paused and turned back towards Cooper.

'It means a lot if there's somebody you can trust,' he said. 'Even if they make a mistake now and then, you know they're genuine about what they do. Somebody like that is rare. If you're a clever lad, you'll find somebody like that and hold on to them, if you can.'

Cooper stared at George Malkin wordlessly. Now it was really raining, and the sky was hidden somewhere behind grey clouds. Cooper was glad not to be able to see the sky. He was glad not to be able to see the scornful faces of the sheep. He was particularly glad not to be able to see the tongue-shaped buttress of black rock on the hill, with its reptilian curl and its ridges and crevices. Irontongue had destroyed too many lives. He couldn't have tolerated its eternal derision.

'By the way,' said Malkin, 'I suppose you'll be wanting the knife.'

He pulled a blade from his pocket and held it out to Cooper. It was very sharp and stained with blood.

'My God. Hold on, I need to get a bag for it.'

'Don't worry,' said Malkin. 'It's sheep blood. I used it for skinning dead lambs. It's a messy job, but it had to be done. I couldn't see the orphans being left without any mothers.'

After Malkin had been driven away, Cooper stood and listened for a moment to the rain dripping through the mist on to the peat moor. The sound was somehow reassuring. It was a totally natural cadence, a reminder that the world all around him continued as normal, no matter what happened in his own life. The moisture still condensed in the chilly air as it always had, and the rain drops still smacked against the wet ground, just as they would if he ceased to exist in this moment, if he were to vanish into a little pool of slush like a melted snowman. The rain was one of nature's primeval forces, oblivious to all human obsessions. The world that Ben Cooper moved in hardly impinged on it.

In the end, the secret of getting through life was to achieve the right perspective. At moments like these, all his own concerns seemed trivial. Back in Edendale, there were difficulties to face, pain to be dealt with, hard things to explain and a lot of work to be done to achieve any kind of reconciliation and forgiveness. But for as long as he could stand here listening to the rain on the moor, those problems and anxieties were so small in the scale of things that they could easily be overcome. They could even be washed away in the rain. Out here, life was simple and painless.

Cooper nodded to himself. Then he pulled up his collar and turned away from Hollow Shaw Farm. And the sound of the rain on the peat moor slowly faded behind him as he walked back to the car.

Ben Cooper amp; Diane Fry