Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) Read online

‘Going down?’ she said.

  Cooper felt his foot slip off the rock. He put out his left hand to steady himself and stop his weight making the rope swing. He twisted his torso slightly to look down at his brake hand as he fed the rope through the figure eight of the descender. The gritstone was hard and bruising to the fingers, yet in some places it was crumbly and unsafe, its stability undermined by decades of quarrying.

  They moved on a bit further. The officers at the top kept calling down to ask if they were OK, as if somehow they might get lost on the way down. Cooper promised he would be sure to let them know if the rope broke. They laughed, but not much.

  A few yards from the bottom, Liz paused. Cooper watched her wrap the rope round her thigh with three loops. This freed her brake hand, and she reached into the pocket of her jacket for her digital camera to take an establishing shot of the quarry floor. They didn’t know what to expect down there. Probably it was a futile effort. But there had been too many instances when small items of forensic evidence had been overlooked until it was too late.

  Liz was lighter than Cooper, and had perfected that effortless rhythm that allowed her to float down in easy steps. She’d already unclipped her belay and removed her harness by the time he touched bottom. She shouted up to a colleague at the top, and her case was lowered down to her.

  ‘Right,’ said Liz, as Cooper unclipped his straps. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’

  The floor of the quarry was littered with lumps of gritstone blasted away from the walls. To the east, a vast stack had been heaped up to block access to the site. Liz Petty took some shots of the quarry floor. Then she crouched by a large rock, opening her case and unfolding a tight stack of evidence bags.

  ‘We’re looking for clothes, right? Well dressed? Casual, or what?’

  ‘Yes, well dressed.’

  ‘We can discount the donkey jacket, then.’

  Cooper leaned over her shoulder. She was pointing to a dark, sodden mass on the ground. It reeked of mould, and patches of the fabric were turning green with mildew. There were rips in the leather patches on the shoulders.

  ‘It’s been there too long, anyway.’

  ‘Pity. It could probably have told you a lot about the owner. What he had for breakfast, for a start. Those encrusted stains have survived well.’

  Much of the debris and rubble from the quarrying operations had simply been left in place, and there were still lethal shards of buried metal and invisible holes to fall into. Cautiously, they picked their way among the stones, glad of the boots that protected their feet from the sharp edges and the sudden shifting of the ground that could turn an ankle.

  Cooper pointed up to the edge of the quarry. ‘If the clothes were thrown over the side of the quarry, it would have been from up there somewhere.’

  Liz tried to push her helmet back from her eyes, but it soon slipped forward again as she bent to clamber over a boulder that must have weighed a couple of tons. Now and then, she stopped to examine something more closely. Cooper waited patiently each time, holding out little hope that the grubby-coloured scraps of material lying among the debris had belonged to the Snowman.

  ‘This is more like it.’

  She was taking photographs again, manoeuvring for different angles to identify the exact spot, then going for a close-up.

  ‘What have you got?’

  Liz held up a blue garment, her tweezers gripping a corner of fabric. ‘Knickers. They’re quite recent. A bit damp, but no more than lying in the snow would cause.’

  Cooper considered the scrap of material. ‘If those are out of the Snowman’s bag, it casts a new light on the enquiry.’

  ‘It tells you something about his sexual inclinations, perhaps.’

  ‘I was thinking more of a woman accompanying him. We’d assumed we were looking for male clothing.’

  Liz chose a paper bag as a temporary container for her find. The blue pants would have to be allowed to dry out naturally in the air, rather than sealed in airtight plastic that would encourage the proliferation of micro-organisms.

  There were shouts from on top of the cliff again. Cooper turned, gave them a thumbs-up and pointed at the bag.

  ‘DI Hitchens says this quarry is a Knightsbridge boutique,’ he said.

  Liz held up the bag and studied the underwear critically. ‘If you ask me,’ she said. ‘We’re in an Age Concern charity shop.’

  Fry found herself feeling a little guilty about Cooper’s allocation in his absence to the quarry job. But she reassured herself by reflecting that, if he’d actually been at the meeting, he would certainly have volunteered anyway. He was that sort of man. No sense at all.

  But to help him out she went to have a look at what he had on his desk, in case there was anything urgent that needed to be dealt with. The first file she noticed was the one on Eddie Kemp, the window cleaner. Since Kemp had been arrested, there had been a positive snowstorm of calls, accusing him of every offence in the book. According to the callers, he’d been getting up to everything from flashing to stalking, from social security fraud to child abuse. And there were at least three calls naming him as the killer of the man found on the Snake Pass.

  The information had been copied to the incident room, but the reports were lacking in convincing details like names, places and times. An absence of detail was usually the giveaway for malicious calls. Eddie Kemp wasn’t top of the popularity stakes among his neighbours, by the look of it. So it might come as a shock to some of them to find out he’d already been bailed and was back at home. What the police really needed was reliable intelligence on his associates, and witnesses to the assault or the events just before it.

  But there was one useful piece of information that had come through. One of the rolls of blue plastic sheeting from Kemp’s car had revealed the impression of two objects shaped like baseball bats, and traces of both human blood and sweat had been obtained from the plastic. DNA analysis could provide a match if the division was willing to pay for samples to be sent to the Forensic Science Service laboratory. So progress on that had become a budgetary decision.

  Fry wrote a note for Cooper to read when he eventually returned to his desk. There were other enquiries piling up for him, too, and most of the files had messages attached to them – phone calls from the Crown Prosecution Service, officers in other departments or other sections, and even the victims of crimes themselves, wondering what was happening to their case, desperate to contact the person they naively thought was busy investigating it. But they would all have to wait. She just hoped that Cooper was wearing a safety harness. The last thing they needed was another casualty.

  Fry’s phone rang again. It had that tone which usually meant a call she didn’t want to answer. This time it was the control room informing her that the search of the quarry had been abandoned. The mountain rescue team had pulled out to respond to an emergency call, and had since located a body on nearby Irontongue Hill. Police officers at the quarry had been diverted to attend. Control were letting her know as a courtesy, because DC Cooper was one of the officers at the scene.

  Fry rested her head in her hands and stared across the room at her remaining staff.

  ‘Ooh-wee, baby, won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise.’

  ‘Gavin,’ she said. ‘Shut that bloody lobster up, or I’ll throw it out of the window.’

  Marie Tennent was barely recognizable as human at first. By the time Cooper arrived at the scene, someone had scraped some of the ice from her, so that now she at least looked like a pile of wet clothes abandoned on the hillside. The frozen snow clung to her in small lumps. Cooper had tried to brush a patch clear near her pocket, but the crystals were attached firmly to the fibres of her coat.

  He stood around with the other police officers and members of the mountain rescue team, who were stamping their feet as they waited for the doctor to come and certify that the woman was indeed dead, rather than cryogenically frozen and in a state of suspended animation. One of the rescue team was a m
iddle-aged Peak Park Ranger, who’d seen his fair share of bodies. He made a joke about the doctor needing to borrow an ice pick before he could use his rectal thermometer, and everyone laughed uneasily.

  Liz Petty had walked to the site with him, though she wouldn’t be of any use just yet. She was still wearing her helmet, and her eyes were bright with speculation as she looked up at Cooper.

  ‘Mrs Snowman, by any chance?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Give me a shout if I can help, when you’re sure she’s dead.’

  That morning, the pilot of a small plane had finally seen Marie Tennent’s outline against the peat as the snow had begun to slip from her shoulders. It was none too soon – the snow had come again since then, and Marie might have stayed undiscovered for another few days by the look of the sky in the north.

  Cooper found Liz was still standing next to him, watching him deep in thought.

  ‘It could be suicide, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘The assumption will be death by misadventure.’

  ‘Tried to climb a mountain in bad weather, then fell, and died of exposure before she could be found? It sounds reasonable.’

  ‘It’s the sort of thing people do all the time around here. It’s as if they think bad weather isn’t real, just a bit of gloss added by the National Park Authority to make the scenery more picturesque.’

  Cooper turned and looked over the surrounding moorland. Today the Peak District really did look like a scene from one of those old-fashioned winters that people always talked about. The snow that had fallen earlier in the week had smoothed out the familiar features of the landscape, until the hills and valleys had become unrecognizable.

  Everyone who’d lived in the area before the mid-1980s had their own tales of deep snows that brought everything to a halt, of chest-high snowdrifts and people skating on iced-over rivers. It was said that Burbage Edge had once been covered in drifts thirty feet deep, that it had taken years for its birch trees to recover from the damage after the weight of snow had snapped their boughs like matchsticks and ripped them limb from limb where they stood. On days like that, it was foolhardy to venture on to the moors.

  Cooper turned over the plastic bag containing the woman’s purse, which he’d found in the left-hand pocket of her coat, the first part of her to emerge from the snow. A cash card and bank statement revealed her name to be Marie Tennent, of 10 Dam Street, Edendale. Why had no one reported Marie Tennent missing? He knew without checking that she wasn’t on the missing persons list – he’d been through it only yesterday with Gavin Murfin, and she’d been lying here longer than that. So where were Marie’s family? What about her friends and neighbours?

  The postmortem would tell them whether Marie Tennent had been injured or had collapsed through the cold, or had simply lain down and frozen to death. The physical circumstances could be established in the mortuary, but no amount of examination of the brain would prove her state of mind.

  ‘I can see some animal traces,’ said Liz. ‘They might help with time of death.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  But Cooper was looking at the dead woman’s face. She lay curled on her side, and her head was towards him, with her hands at her temples, as if she’d been covering her ears to shut out the sound of approaching death. Her eyes were closed, and the skin of her face was white and rimed with a thin layer of frost. Her nose and lips were already starting to turn black.

  Cooper knew his colleagues sometimes accused him of being over-imaginative. And he wasn’t supposing that he could read the expression of a corpse. But he did know one thing, which a quick glance over his shoulder confirmed. When she died, Marie Tennent had been facing towards Irontongue Hill, not away from it. The remains of the tail fin of the wrecked Lancaster bomber SU-V were plainly visible from here. The last thing Marie would have seen in life was a rusty fragment of Sugar Uncle Victor.

  Cooper recalled what Diane Fry had said about a name you heard for the first time, which then seemed to crop up again and again. He’d been vaguely aware since his childhood of the wreckage of the Lancaster bomber on Irontongue Hill. It was a story that would have appealed to him as a boy, when war had seemed exciting and glamorous, probably because it was something so distant that it was never likely to touch him personally. He’d missed the height of the Cold War, when people had believed they were in daily danger of being wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. He’d been too young to remember Vietnam. It was all history, as remote as World War Two, not affecting real people that he knew. Yet the wreck had always been there, at the back of his mind.

  Cooper didn’t think he’d heard the name of the aircraft before yesterday. Lancaster SU-V. Sugar Uncle Victor. He was sure it would have stuck in his mind. It sounded so innocuous for a machine designed to kill and destroy. He didn’t think he could have missed the irony. Now the flight engineer of Sugar Uncle Victor had been drawn to his attention twice in two days. And here was a woman who might have been heading either towards or away from the wreck when she died.

  There were too many assumptions that could be made in a case like this. The first assumption would be that Marie Tennent had been responsible for her own death, in one way or another. Suicide or misadventure. Did it matter? Perhaps only to the High Peak coroner, who liked his records to be neat.

  ‘Ben?’ called Liz. ‘I think you’re wanted over here.’

  ‘Coming.’

  The doctor had been lowered on to the hill by the RAF rescue helicopter, which still hovered overhead, waiting to take the body up on the winch.

  Cooper took a last look at the tattered tail fin barely visible above the rocks on Irontongue Hill. He would have to get up there one day soon and take a closer look at what was left of the aircraft that Pilot Officer Danny McTeague had walked away from. He couldn’t imagine what connection there might be between the wreck and two sudden deaths. But he had a strong feeling that they were rapidly going to become intertwined.

  It was as if the phantom shape of Sugar Uncle Victor was circling the Eden Valley again, its Merlin engines rumbling beneath the cloud cover, its slaughtered crew returning for a final mission. It was as if the ancient Lancaster had flown in under the slipstream of Alison Morrissey’s Air Canada Boeing 767 from Toronto.

  12

  Frank Baine leaned against the wall of the post office next to the Buttercross. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the snow, where it fizzled briefly. He drew hard on the smoke and held the cigarette cupped in his hand as he watched two teenage boys lean their bikes against the window of the post office and run inside.

  A DAF articulated lorry came down Buxton Road towards the roundabout. Instead of turning on to the relief road, it came straight on towards the Buttercross. Baine let out a lungful of smoke, noting the lorry’s registration number automatically as its driver applied the air brakes and pulled up a few yards short of the traffic lights. A line of cars immediately began to build up behind the lorry as it blocked the carriageway.

  A man climbed down from the passenger side of the cab. Baine couldn’t see him until the lorry indicated and pulled away again towards the lights. Then he watched George Malkin cross the road. Malkin didn’t look at him until he was within a few feet.

  ‘Frank Baine?’

  ‘That’s me. I love the transport.’

  Malkin didn’t answer.

  Baine smiled and drew on his cigarette. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about money.’

  The lower eastern slopes of Irontongue Hill were a favourite area for motorcycle scramblers, bikers who liked to get off-road with their machines and spray a bit of dirt.

  Only last Sunday, before the snow came, there had been a confrontation here between a party of hikers and a group of scramblers. For some time, there had been complaints that the motorcyclists had been churning up the pathways, turning the surface into mud impossible for walkers to cross without sinking up to their knees.

  This morning, someone had stolen a scramble bike from a trai
ler parked in a farmyard outside Edendale. A patrol car driving up the A57 saw a rider in a lay-by next to the woods above the inn and stopped to question him. But he rode off as soon as he saw them, and they gave chase. The police crew were in a Range Rover, but they knew they wouldn’t have much hope of catching the biker if he went off-road. A hundred yards away was an open gateway leading on to one of the paths favoured by scramblers.

  The motorbike slid across the gateway and ploughed through a snowdrift, scattering a white spray against the stone wall. The Ranger Rover skidded as the driver braked, but he kept control and turned into the gateway to follow the bike up the track.

  The track rose steeply and started to get narrower.

  ‘We’d better call it off,’ said the passenger.

  ‘Just round this next bend, we’ll be able to see where he goes,’ said the driver. ‘Anyway, he’ll be struggling if the snow gets any deeper.’

  ‘Watch out!’ shouted the passenger.

  The bend had been too sharp and too sudden for the Ranger Rover. The driver skidded again, but this time failed to control the vehicle. It went off the track and slid a couple of yards into a streambed, ending up with its bumper and front wheels in the water.

  The driver turned off the engine. ‘Damn and blast,’ he said.

  ‘The garage won’t be pleased,’ said his passenger. ‘It had a new radiator only last week.’

  ‘Call in,’ said the driver.

  He opened his door and stepped into a couple of inches of freezing cold water. The streambed was full of uneven stones, and he had difficulty keeping his balance as he tried to get to the side against the force of the water. He reached out a hand to grasp the branch of a birch sapling growing out of the bank and found himself clutching something else – an item of clothing. It was a shirt – a blue shirt, with a thin white stripe and white cuffs. He could see the label inside the collar and recognized that it was from a well-known manufacturer, not one of the cheap Portuguese things that he bought himself from the bargain shops in Edendale.