Blood on the Tongue

9

Back at West Street, Cooper dug through the paper that had been collecting on his desk until he found the file produced by the Local Intelligence Officer for the meeting with Alison Morrissey. It didn't have anything like the amount of detail about the crash and the Lancaster's crew that was in the book from Lawrence's shop. But the LIO's file did have one advantage — it had the names of the two boys who reported seeing the missing airman walking down the Blackbrook Reservoir road that night.

Cooper had remembered that point, because Morrissey had complained during the meeting that she was unable to track them down since their names weren't given in the reports. It hadn't seemed wise to admit that he had the information in front of him. The Chief Superintendent would certainly not have approved of too apparent a willingness to assist. But it meant the LIO had done a good job collecting the information. Either that, or Alison Morrissey's research was badly flawed.

'Do you know Harrop, Gavin?' he said.

Murfin sniffed. 'Godawful place. Back of the moon that is, Ben. That's not where you're thinking of moving to, is it?'

'No. I don't think I've ever been there.'

'It's up the top of the Snake Pass somewhere, on the way to Glossop.'

'It must be over the other side of Irontongue Hill.'

'That's it. I bet they were cut off up there today all right. There's no bus service in Harrop. No bus route, so no priority for the snowplough. Somebody will dig them out tomorrow, maybe.'

The names of the boys were Edward and George Malkin, aged twelve and eight, of Hollow Shaw Farm, Harrop. From what Gavin said, Harrop sounded the sort of village where families might stay in one place, generation after generation of them sometimes. Cooper found a telephone directory. Sure enough, there was a G. Malkin still listed at Hollow Shaw Farm. There seemed a good chance that this was the same George Malkin, then aged eight, now sixty-five.

'Knocking off, Ben?' said Murfin. 'Fancy a pint?'

'I'd love to, Gavin,' said Cooper. 'But I've got things to do. Places to look at.'

'Ah, the pleasures of house-hunting. It kind of ruins your social life, like.'

Cooper drove westwards out of Edendale. He climbed the Snake Pass and descended again almost into Glossop before he turned north and skirted the outlying expanses of peat moor around Irontongue Hill. The buttress of rock on top of the hill was a familiar sight to him, as it was prominently visible on a good day from the A57. The rock was certainly tongue-shaped when you looked at it from this direction, with ridges and crevices furrowing its dark surface. It wasn't a human tongue, though. There was something reptilian about its length and the suggestion of a curl at the tip. And it was colder and harder than iron, too — it was the dark rock that millstones had been made out of, the sort of rock that the weather barely seemed touch, even over centuries. The wind and rain had merely smoothed its edges, where the tongue lay on the broken teeth of volcanic debris.

Tonight, Irontongue was visible even in the dark. It uncoiled from the snow-covered slopes to poke at the sky, with dribbles of white lying in its cracks.

Cooper found that Harrop was barely big enough to be called a village, yet the roads were clear enough of snow for the Toyota to have no problems. Above Harrop there was a scatter of farms and homesteads with those austere Dark Peak names — Slack House, Whiterakes, Red Mires, Mount Famine and Stubbins. They clung to the edges of the mountain like burrs on the fur of a sleeping dog.

The lane up to Hollow Shaw Farm passed a single modern bungalow and an isolated row of stone cottages. Past the bungalow, the lane was no longer tarmacked. After the cottages, it ceased to have any surface at all. Cooper hadn't seen any street lights for the last few miles. He had to slow the Toyota to a crawl and swing the steering wheel from side to side to avoid the worst of the potholes, but in the total darkness he couldn't see some of the holes until he was almost in them. It was sudden death for suspension systems up here. This was the sort of lane that delivery drivers and salesmen would avoid like the plague, the kind of track that people needed a good reason to live at the end of. As he climbed to Hollow Shaw, Cooper wondered what George Malkin's reason might be.

He parked in front of the old farmhouse and got out. A few yards away, a man was leaning on a wall. It was so quiet here that Cooper could hear rustling from the field on the other side of the wall, and the faint snorting of a flock of sheep. Somewhere in that direction must be Blackbrook Reservoir. He knew it wasn't a large reservoir like those in the flooded valleys, where the vast stretches of Ladybower and Derwent attracted the tourists. Blackbrook was small and self-contained, just enough at one time to supply drinking water for the eastern fringes of Manchester.

'Mr Malkin?' said Cooper.

'Aye. That'll be me.'

Cooper made his way across the garden to where the man stood. Malkin was wearing a pair of blue overalls and a black anorak, and a cap like a lumberjack's, with woollen ear-flaps. Cooper thought at first that he was bundled up with sweaters round his waist, but when Malkin moved he saw that the man was actually pear-shaped, with wide hips like someone who hadn't ever got enough exercise. Cooper introduced himself.

'I wonder if you could spare a few minutes, Mr Malkin? Nothing to worry about.'

'You'd better come in the house.'

This was one farmhouse that had never been converted to the standards of modern living. There was no double glazing and no central heating — a spiral of smoke from the chimney testified that there was still at least one coal fire inside. The last modernization had been in the 1960s by the look of the front door panelled with frosted glass and the blue linoleum visible in the hallway.

Malkin took off his anorak and cap. His skin was weathered and he looked like someone old before his time. George Malkin had been eight years old when the Lancaster crashed, so he could only recently have started drawing his pension.

'Excuse the mess,' said Malkin. 'I don't get a lot of visitors.'

Cooper shivered. There was an unrelenting coldness in the house. Partly, it was the sort of chill that came from years of inadequate heating and a Pennine dampness that had soaked into the stone walls. And now the winds that spiralled down off Kinder and moaned through the empty fields had found their way into Malkin's house for the winter. The draught had crept under the back door and slithered through gaps in the frames of the sash windows, wrapping itself round the furniture and draping the walls in invisible folds. The chill seemed to Cooper like a solid thing. It moved of its own accord, butting against his neck as he walked across the room, and hanging in front of him in every doorway, like a wet curtain.

'It's none too warm today,' said Malkin, watching Cooper turning himself slowly in front of the fire in an effort to absorb some warmth from the flames.

'No, it isn't.'

'This old house takes a bit of heating in the winter. But I suppose I've got used to it. I grew up here, you see, and lived here all my life. I've never known any different. They reckon your blood gets thinner — to compensate, like.'

There was no escape from the chill anywhere. Even when Cooper stood directly in front of the coal fire, there was only warmth on one side. The cold still fastened to his back like a parasite, draining his body heat and sucking at his kidneys. Its presence was part of the house, an icy phantom that would need exorcizing with central heating, double glazing and a good damp-proof course.

'You certainly get a bit of weather up here. Do you get snowed in much?'

'Oh, aye. It's the first place that gets filled in when it snows. It comes down the valley there, you see, and the hills funnel it right into Harrop. When there's a bit of wind behind it, there are some grand drifts to be seen down here. You should have been here in the winter of 78. That was a winter and a half, if you like. We lost our car for days on end. A Ford Escort it was, as I recall. When we finally dug it out, the engine compartment was solid with frozen snow. Aye, there were people walking along the toppings of the stone walls out the front here, because the lane was so deep in snow the walls were the only solid surface you could see for miles.'

'Actually, I do remember it,' said Cooper. He had, after all, been six years old at the time, and he'd missed school for a few days. Probably he hadn't been let out in the snow at all, but had watched it from his bedroom window with his nose pressed to the cold glass, drawing patterns on the frost on the inside. Perhaps his parents had finally allowed him to go out when most of the snow had gone. He remembered being pelted by his brother Matt with snowballs that felt as hard as mahogany when they hit him, but which melted into cold, wet slush inside the hood of his anorak and ran down the back of his neck. There hadn't been snow like that since then, as far as he could remember. Not real snow.

'Come on through to the room,' said Malkin. 'Get yourself warm.'

What Malkin called 'the room' was a kind of sitting room, dominated by a large oak table. Its legs only stood on a carpet at one end. At the other, the carpet had been rolled back to expose the bare floorboards, which looked as though they were still drying out from recent damp. Because the boards were old, there were large gaps between them. Where Cooper stood, he could feel icy draughts rising around him as if he were standing on top of an open chest freezer. A bottle of milk and an unsliced loaf of bread stood on the window ledge alongside some steel cutlery, and several weeks' worth of old newspapers were stacked near an old armchair under a standard lamp. An oil painting on the wall showed a herd of brown cattle against a sombre winter landscape. The mountains behind the cows looked more Switzerland than Derbyshire. Real peaks.

'Fancy anybody remembering the Lancaster crash,' said Malkin. 'A long time ago, that was.'

'Fifty-seven years,' said Cooper, trying to find a patch of carpet to stand on.

'I was only eight years old then.'

'You haven't forgotten, though, have you?'

'No, of course I haven't forgotten. It made a big impression on me. Those things do, when you're that age. I'm getting so as I can't remember what I did five minutes ago, but I remember that plane crash as clearly as if I was there now.'

'You're not all that old,' said Cooper. 'Sixty-five? It's nothing these days. Retirement age, that's all.'

'Retirement? They retired me a few years back. These days, you're useless long before you get to sixty-five.'

A mantelpiece supported ornaments, knick-knacks and assorted junk, and there was a television set standing on what might have been a Victorian aspidistra stand. In an alcove, an electric socket had been pulled out of the skirting board and the wires had been left hanging.

'You were a farmer, weren't you?' said Cooper.

Malkin laughed. He had a rattling laugh, with phlegm shifting noisily in his throat. 'Farmworker. Hired labour, that's all. Shepherd I was, and a good 'un, too. But it doesn't matter how good you are at your trade when it comes down to cutting costs. It's the hired labour that goes first. Sixty-five? Maybe. But it's not a matter of how many years you've lived. It's carrying on doing something useful that stops you being old. The minute you stop being useful, you might as well be dead.'

Malkin's middle-aged spread and the roundness of his belly were emphasized by the tightness of a hand-knitted green sweater that must have been a size too small even when it was made. Of course, farmers weren't as physically active as they used to be. They could spend days sitting in the heated cab of a tractor or combine harvester, hours punching buttons on feed mixers or filling in endless paperwork. Just like coppers, in fact. A modern farmer didn't toss bales of hay or carry stranded sheep on his back any more than a bobby was expected to pound the beat or pursue a suspect on foot. Modern methods made for a different shape of man — a man with a body moulded to the shape of padded seats and computer workstations.

'I wondered if you kept any souvenirs from the crash,' said Cooper.

'Souvenirs?' said Malkin.

'From the aircraft itself?'

'We picked up a few bits and pieces, me and Ted. There's not much left now, though.'

'Ted's your brother, is that right?'

'Aye. He was four years older than me. I followed him round like a dog, the way kids do. I must have been a right nuisance to him sometimes.'

'Where is he now?'

'Long gone,' said Malkin.

Near the fire, a wooden rack was draped with washing left to dry. There was presumably no spin drier in the house, and if left outside on the line, any garment would soon freeze to the consistency of cardboard.

'Let me get the box,' said Malkin. 'Stay by the fire and keep yourself warm.'

'Thanks.'

While Cooper waited, he worried about the drying clothes. They seemed to be a little too near to the fire. Wisps of steam and a warm, foetid smell rose from the lines of damp socks and white Y-fronts. Cooper thought that in another few minutes there would be singe marks on the cotton. Across the room, he could see a short passage into what might have been a kitchen or an old-fashioned scullery. There was an earthenware sink with an enamel drainer and a cold tap, a geyser on the wall for hot water, a cupboard with a flap that let down to create a work surface.

When George Malkin came back with a little wooden box, the first item he produced from it was a photograph. They were always the most treasured items among anyone's collections of mementos, those little snapshots taken on box brownies.

This photo — a tiny black-and-white snap with a wide border — dated from 1945. One corner was turned over, and when Cooper straightened it out he discovered a cobweb of lines formed by dust ingrained into the creases in the paper. The photo showed a section of the crashed Lancaster shortly after the accident, when it had become a focus of attention for sightseers. The wreckage was almost unrecognizable: bits of ripped and crumpled metal, trailing strands of wire, scattered with dark soil thrown up from the peat moor by the impact.

In the background, two men in trilbys could be seen peering into a section of fuselage through holes torn in its side. But in the foreground was another figure — a small boy. He was only about ten years old, but with that curious look about his face of far greater age and knowingness, a look that seemed a peculiarity of old photographs, as if children in those days had grown up long before they should have done. People often said that modern youngsters grew up too soon. But their knowledge these days was mostly about sex and drugs, a streetwise awareness that set them apart from their parents and the older generations. Children growing up in the war years were wise about other things. For a start, they knew all about death.

The boy was dressed in knee-length shorts and a pullover with a white V-neck collar and elasticated cuffs. His socks had crumpled around his ankles, and his heavy boots were laced up tight. A lock of hair fell over his forehead, but at the sides it was cut short and his ears stood out from his head. He was staring directly at the camera with an intense look, striking a self-conscious pose, his left hand raised to rest on one of the huge engines that protruded from the debris. The engine was still intact, and each of the curved propeller blades was taller than the boy. It seemed incredible that souvenir hunters would later cut away those propellers from the engine and remove all trace of them from the moor. It must have taken at least two men to carry one blade, and they would have struggled over the rough ground and the steep slopes to get it back to the road. What motivated them to go to such trouble? And where were the propeller blades and the other aircraft parts now?

'Who is this boy?' asked Cooper.

'Who do you think?' said Malkin.

Cooper looked from the photograph to the man across the table. Though the hair was grey now, and no longer fell over his forehead, the style was much the same as it had been in 1945, and so were the protruding ears. And the direct stare was the same, too — then, as now, it was the stare of someone who had grown too old too soon.

'So you walked up to Irontongue to look at the crash?'

'It was a great bit of excitement in those days. There was no telly, of course. These days they wouldn't shift themselves away from the goggle box or their computers, would they? My dad was too busy to bother with us, but we went up with our Uncle Norman, who lived just outside Glossop. I talked about it at school for months afterwards. I was a real centre of attention for a while.'

'Did you come away with any souvenirs yourself?'

'Well, of course. Everybody did. Only a few mementos, you know. We used to swap them with other lads — the American stuff was what we wanted most, unless we could get hold of something from a German plane. There were plenty of bits and pieces lying around then. But I got rid of nearly everything.'

'Did you happen to find any medals?'

'Medals?' Malkin looked surprised. 'Medals would have been worth something, I reckon. But they would have been on the bodies, probably, wouldn't they?'

'Probably. What did you take, then?'

Malkin pulled the box towards him and poked through its contents. 'There are some newspaper cuttings here, if you want to see them.'

'I've seen most of them already, I think.'

'Fair enough.' He continued to fumble. 'I think it's here somewhere. Ah yes. This is the only thing I've kept.' He produced a round metal object with a blackened casing. Cooper had expected some unidentifiable part of the aircraft superstructure, but this seemed more familiar.

'It looks like a watch,' he said.

'Yes, it is.' Malkin slid the cover away. The blackened face wasn't metal after all, but glass fused by intense heat. Underneath, the face of the timepiece was pretty well intact, though the metal frame had buckled slightly and there was a scorch mark below the figure twelve. The hands had stopped a fraction short of ten to eleven.

'Ten forty-nine,' he said. 'That was the exact time the Lancaster crashed.'

'You mean one of the crew was wearing this watch when the aircraft crashed?'

'I expect so. I found it lying in the peat, half-buried. I didn't show it to my uncle or anyone, just shoved it in my pocket and took it away with me. I only ever showed it to Ted and to my pals at school. Do you think it would be worth much?'

'It was from the body of a dead man,' said Cooper.

'That was what gave it a bit of excitement,' he said. 'Don't you see? The most exciting things are the ones you know are wrong.'

Cooper looked back at the photograph of the eight-year-old boy, while Malkin continued to finger the broken watch. The knowing expression on the boy's face as he leaned against the wrecked propeller gave him an uncomfortable feeling.

Malkin noticed his expression as he stared at the photo. 'Oh, yes,' he said. 'I already had it in my pocket when my uncle took that snap.'

Cooper put the picture back carefully in the box. 'It was you and your brother who saw the airman?' he said. 'The one who disappeared?'

'Yes, you're right. Who told you that?'

'It's in the reports. Did the police interview you?'

'Aye, a bobby came here the day after the crash. We'd told our dad about seeing the airman, and he reported it to the local police station. Everybody round here was talking about it by then.'

'Tell me where you saw the airman, Mr Malkin. What did he look like?'

'Nay, I can't tell you that — it was dark. He was in a flying suit, that's all I know, with his leather helmet and all. He had a torch, and we saw him going along the road that runs round the reservoir and off down the hill. It comes out near the old toll cottage on the Crowden road.'

'Can you show me?'

'I'll point you to it,' said Malkin.

They went back outside and walked back along the wall towards Cooper's car. The sheep munched and snorted quietly in the field.

'Look at that,' said Malkin, waving a hand at the field as if it had been bright daylight rather than the true darkness of the countryside. 'Good, rich land, that is. The best grazing for miles. It used to be a quarry years ago, but they filled it in. Now these Swaledales are prized for miles around for their meat. They produce the tastiest lamb chops in Derbyshire, my mate Rod says. If you like, I'll get you a couple.'

'Thanks. This reservoir road…'

Malkin pointed into the darkness. 'Over yonder. Can you see the line of the wall, with a bit of a gate and a hawthorn bush?'

'Just about,' said Cooper, though all he could distinguish was the general direction the other man was pointing in.

'That's where the water board road runs. It has a locked gate on it now, but it was only a bit of a dirt track in those days, just made for the maintenance men to get up to the reservoir. I bet that airman was glad to find it, though. He would have had to hike across the snow from Irontongue, and it must have taken him an hour in the dark, I bet. Ted and me, we went along the reservoir wall to get up near the crash — we could see the fire burning from the house. I suppose we wouldn't ever have seen the airman if he hadn't been waving a torch around all over the place. Aye, but we heard him.'

'Heard him? Was he shouting?'

'Singing,' said Malkin.

Cooper stared at him. He couldn't see anything of Malkin's face at all under the cap and the ear-flaps, but from his voice he didn't sound as though he were joking.

' Singing? Singing what, Mr Malkin?'

'As I recall, it was "Show Me the Way to Go Home".'