Blood on the tongue bcadf-3 Page 3

  ‘To Tier?’

  ‘Yes, to his wife. She has a name.’

  ‘Andrew said she’s in America, at a cousin’s funeral.’ Grace slapped one of her knees as if it had offended her by its inactivity. ‘I’ve tried to phone him again, Peter. He’s not answering.

  ‘We’ll just have to wait until we hear from him, Grace. What else can we do?’

  Grace manoeuvred alongside one of the armchairs, feeling the wheels slip into well-used grooves in the pile of the carpet. Peter made no move to help her, and he didn’t even look to see how she was coping. She was glad he didn’t do that any more. Once, she had lost her temper at his clumsiness and had pushed him roughly away. He had said nothing, but she knew he had been shocked and hurt by her violence. Her legs might be useless, but her hands and wrists were strong.

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  ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ she said. ‘Why should he arrive out of the blue like that and then disappear asjain so suddenly, without a word?’

  ‘There are a lot of things Andrew never got round to telling us about his life.’

  ‘In a dav? He didn’t have time. A day isn’t enough to make up for five missing; years.’

  ‘Grace, he has an entirely separate life of his own. You ean’t dwell on the past tor ever.’

  She had heard this too often. It had become his mantra, as if it might become true if he repeated it often enough. Grace knew it wasn’t true. li you had no present and no future, where was there to live but the past?

  ‘Hut he’s our son,’ she said. ‘My baby.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  Grace knew she was reaching him. She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘My dear Piotr …”

  Rut she heard Peter sigh and watched him finger a button on the remote. A weather forecast was on the other channel. An attractive young woman stood in front of a map scattered with fluffy white clouds that seemed to be dropping white blobs all over northern England. In a moment, Grace would have to go back to the kitchen to make her husband a pot of tea, or his routine would be upset and he would sulk for the rest of the day.

  ‘There’s a lot more snow on the way,’ he said.

  The moment had passed. Grace lifted her hands to her face and sniffed the faint coating of oil on her fingers. The oil and

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  the dark smudges on her hands were the constant signs of her reliance on machinery, of her enforced seclusion from the rest of humanity. She was a great believer in turning your disadvantages into something positive. But sometimes the positive was hard to find.

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ she said. ‘That’s just what we want. More snow. More excuses for not finding him. Everyone will say they’re too busy with other problems. Then they’ll say it’s too late, that we’ll have to accept the fact he’s gone.’

  Grace stared at the icon of the Madonna in the alcove above

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  the TV set. Tonight, she would pray again for their son. And she would force Peter to pray too.

  ‘It causes a lot of problems, does snow,’ said Peter. ‘More than people think.’

  But on the TV sereen, the weather girl smiled out at them cheertullv, as if she thought snow was absolutely the best thirw

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  she-could imagine in the whole world.

  The Derbyshire Count}’ Council snow plough was brand new.

  It was a vellow Seddon Atkinson, with a bright steel blade,

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  and its automatic hoppers could spray grit at passing cars like machine-gun fire. That morning, its crew was working to clear the main Snake Pass route to Glossop and the borders of Greater Manchester, battling through ever deeper drifts of snow as they climbed away from Ladvbower Reservoir, with the River Ashop below them and the Roman road aboye them, skirting the lower slopes of Bleaklovv and Irontongue Hill.

  Trevor Bradley was the driver’s mate this morning. He didn’t like snowplough work, and he certainly didn’t like getting up in the middle of the night to do it. Even worse, they had been sent to the Snake Pass, which was as desolate a spot as you could find yourself in, when every other bugger was still at home in his bed. They had left the last houses far behind already, and on these long, unlit stretches of road there was nothing to be seen but their own headlights and endless banks of snow in front and on both sides. Bradley was glad when the driver had stopped for a few minutes at the isolated Snake Inn, where the owners had filled their vacuum llasks with coffee and gixen them hot pork pies from the microwave. The snowplough men were popular at the Snake, because on days like this they made all the difference between customers getting through to the inn and no one getting in or out at all.

  A few minutes after re-starting, the snowplough had reached the stretch of road through Lady Clough and the Snake Plantations. Here, the hill became steeper and the headlights fell on even deeper drifts, where the wind had brought the snow down from the moors and blown it round the edge of the woods, sculpting it into strange and unlikely shapes.

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  Just past the last car park, before the end of the woods, Bradley thought he felt the impact of something solid that dragged along the road surface for a few yards under th<

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  blade of the plough. Then he saw a dark shape that was briefly revealed in a shower of snow as the blade lifted it and pushed it into the banking. It was followed by the impression of a man’s face hovering near his window for a second, then (ailing away again. It had been a very white face, quite unreal, and could only have been a trick of the snow and the poor light.

  ‘We hit something, Jack,’ he said, sucking the last of the warm jelly from the pork pic off his fingers.

  ‘No kidding?’

  Jack stopped the engine, and they both got down. The driver seemed to be more worried about damage to the equipment than anything else. He’d told Trevor that people dumped loads of builder’s rubbish in the lay-bys, and stuff like breexe-block and broken bricks could easily chip the blade. The plough was the latest investment by the highways department, and he was conscious of his responsibility (or its pristine condition.

  Meanwhile, Bradley poked around a bit by the side of the road, scraped some snow away with his gloved hands, and finally lifted a blue overnight bag out of the drift. The bag was empty. He could tell by the weight of it.

  ‘ That’s careless,’ he said.

  He pushed a bit more snow aside. It looked as though the clothes had spilled out of the bag on to the roadside, because

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  there was a shoe lying in the snow. It had a smart black leather toe, with a pattern printed on the upper. It wasn’t a shoe anybody would have been walking in, of course, so it must have come from the luggage. Probably it had been some of the clothes that he had seen in the headlights a white shirt, perhaps, crumpled into the illusion of a human face as it was tossed out of the bag by the impact of the plough blade.

  Bradley bent down and tried to pick the shoe up, but felt some resistance, as if it were heavier than it ought to be. Maybe it was frozen to the ground. He brushed a bit more snow clear, and then he noticed the sock. It had a green and blue Argyll design, the sort of sock he had seen some of the bosses wearing

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  hack at the council offices. He touched it as he wiped away the frozen snow. It was definitely a sock lor an office worker, not for wearing with a work hoot. Your feet would he frozen solid out here in the snow, if you wore fancy socks like that.

  He realized his mind was wandering a hit. It was a long minute helore he finally accepted what his fingers were telling him. There was an ankle in that Argyll sock, and a foot in the shoe. A man lay under the snowdrift.

  Bradley straightened up and looked hack at his driver, who was still inspecting the plough. The hlade was bright and sharp and shiny, and it weighed half a ton. Last winter, with one much like it, they had removed the entire Iront wing of a Volkswagen

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  Beetle before they had even noticed it abandoned in a snowdrift
. Bradley remembered how the hlade had ripped the metal of the car clean away, like a carving knife going through a well-cooked chicken. In fact, the Beetle had been a trendy bright yellow, not unlike a supermarket chicken. For a few moments they had both stared at the lump of metal caught on the blade without recognizing what it was, until the wind had caught it and the wing had flapped off down the road, trailing its headlight cables like severed tendons.

  Now, Trevor Bradley recalled his impression of the thing that had bumped and dragged along the road under the plough blade a couple of minutes ago. I Ic remembered the glimpse of something that had waved momentarily from the midst of a spray of snow. It was an object which his brain hadn’t registered at the time, and which he only now identified as having been a human arm. Then there had been the face. The arm and the face had been all that he had seen of the body as they flailed over the edge of the blade and were jerked back into the darkness.

  He gulped suddenly, and decided that he didn’t even want to imagine the damage the snowplough could have done to the rest of the bodv.

  Bradley opened his mouth to call to his driver.

  ‘Jack!”

  But his voice came out too faintly on the cold air, and it was drowned by the noise of a jet airliner that passed low in the cloud as it manoeuvred for the approach to Manchester

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  Airport. The rumble of the aircraft vibrated the windscreen on the snowplough and set Trevor Bradley’s limbs trembling, too. His stomach decided that, as long as his mouth was open, he might as well be sick.

  The noise of the airliner gradually receded as it descended behind the shoulder of Irontonguc Hill. It was an Air Canada Boeing 767, and it was at the end oi a seven-hour ilight from 1 oronto.

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  J. pair of shoes stood outside each door in the hare corridor. There were a set of trainers with thick rubber soles, some brown brogues split down the side, and a pair of high-sided Doc Martens. Right at the end were Eddie Kemp’s wellies, with melted snow running ott them to torm puddles on the floor. In

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  the background, Nigcl Kennedy was playing The Four Seasons.

  ‘Has he asked for a doctor?’ asked Ben Cooper.

  ‘A doctor?’ 1 he custody sergeant frowned as he checked over the paperwork carefully. ‘No. All he said was that he takes two sugars in his tea, when I’m ready.’

  ‘Giye him the chance to ask, just in case, Sarge.’

  The sergeant was well over six feet tall. lie had the weariness about him that Cooper had seen all custody officers develop after a tew months processing prisoners. They saw tar too much of the wrong end of life. they saw tar too many of the same prisoners coming in and out, over and over again.

  ‘Why, what does he reckon is wrong with him?’ said the

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  sergeant. ‘Apart from having his sense of smell amputated?’

  ‘He is a bit ripe, isn’t he?’

  ‘Ripe? Putrcscent is the word that springs to mind.’

  There was a strange, rancid odour about Eddie Kemp - not his breath, but the smell of his body, a sourness that oo/cd directly from his pores. It seemed to eddy in the air around him when he moved, restrained only by his clothes from overpowering anyone within twenty varcls. When his old overcoat and body warmer came off, the paint on the walls had almost begun to peel.

  They had bagged up Kemp’s outer clothes as quickly as they could and sent a PC around the custody suite with disinfectant. There were three prisoners on the women’s side, and they’d soon be complaining again. Cooper thought the smell would stay with him all clav, like his fro/en foot.

  ‘I hope they’re not going to be too long coming to interview him,’ .said the sergeant. ‘One of our prostitutes down the

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  corridor there has been reading up on the Human Rights Act. There might be a clause about infringement of a prisoner’s right to fresh air, tor all I know.’

  ‘I don’t know who’s going to interview Eddie Kemp, but rather them than me/ said Cooper. ‘Resides, I think he might have some popular support out on the streets. I’m sure three of his mates were at the cafe. Hut he s the only one we had a witness ID for.’

  ‘Members of the public can’t be allowed to take the law into their own hands,’ said the sergeant, sounding like a man reading from a script.

  Late the previous night, the two seriously injured young men had been found wandering by the road in Edendale’s Underbank area, a compact warren of streets that ran up the hillside yards from one of the main tourist areas of the town. Although they had been badly beaten, it had been impossible to get a reason From them for the attack. This morning, the police had been having difficulty identifying the assailants. Most of the people in the area had seen nothing, they said. Hut a couple who had looked out of their bedroom window when they heard the noise of the assault had said they recognized Eddie Kemp, who was their window cleaner. Everyone knew Eddie. Cooper had felt the disadvantages of local tame himself, so he sympathized with Kemp a little.

  ‘By the way, I checked the names of the assault victims,’ he said. ‘They’re both regulars of yours, Sarge. Heroin dealers off the Devonshire Estate.’

  Along the corridors, it was approaching the end of Spring, according to Nigel Kennedy.

  ‘I can’t understand why the radio briefing said the incident was suspected to be racially motivated,’ said Cooper. ‘One of the victims is Asian, but the other is white.’

  ‘Default position,’ said the sergeant. ‘We cover our backs, just in case. Talk about the inmates of the asylum …’

  Recently, a number of asylum seekers had been dispersed to Derbyshire, and some were housed in Edendale’s vacant holiday accommodation. Until now, many residents had rarely seen anvone of a different ethnic origin in their town unless they

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  ran restaurants and calcs, like Sonny Patel, or were tourists and didn’t count. The sudden appearance oflranians, Kurds, Somalis and Albanians queuing at the bus stops that winter had been like someone dropping a drum of herbicide into a pond and watching it seethe and bubble. For the first time, a National Front logo had been scrawled on the window of an empty shop in Fargate, and the British National Party were, said to be holding recruitment meetings at a pub near Chesterfield.

  ‘Your prisoner’s a bit of a joker,’ said the sergeant. ‘He gave his name as Homer Simpson.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Oh, think nothing of it. You’d be surprised how many Homer Simpsons we get in here. Some days, I think there must be a convention of them in town. In the old days, it used to be Mickey Mouse, of course. But that name went out of fashion among the custody suite intelligentsia. Anvway, I told him I had to register him in the guest book, otherwise he wouldn t get his breakfast in the morning.’

  ‘I suppose it gets a bit much.’

  ‘Water off a duck’s back, my son. You’ve seen the guidelines, haven’t you? “All idle and foolish remarks will be disregarded”. It helps no end when some inspector in nappies tries to tell me what to do. You can ignore them and say, “It’s in the guidelines, ma’am.’”

  ‘What’s the point of the music, by the way?’ said Cooper.

  ‘It relaxes the customers,’ said the sergeant. But Cooper thought he sounded a bit defensive.

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘So they tell me.’

  The sergeant paused. They both listened to the Vivaldi for a moment. Kennedy had just reached Summer.

  ‘It’s the inspector’s idea,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Ah,’ said Cooper. ‘She’s been on a course, has she?’

  ‘Been on a course? I’ll say she’s been on a bloody course! Show me the week she’s not on a course. This one was called “Conducting a Resources Audit of Your Public Interface”. What the hell does that mean? Mark my words, she’ll have us putting mirrors and potted palms in here next. Moving the doors

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  and the desk to make the energy (low better or some such
rubbish.’

  ‘Feng shui,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Sorry.”

  ‘Fcng shui.’

  “I think you’ve caught a cold standing out in the snow,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Making the energy flow,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s Japanese.’

  The sergeant stared at him. ”Course it is,’ he said. ‘I must be stupid.’

  lie was much too tall lor the counter he worked at, and heleaned awkwardly to write in the custody record. Unless Health and Safety had conducted a proper workplace assessment in here, there would be more compensation to pay out in a year or two, when the sergeant was walking like Quasimodo. But by then, he’d be haunted by the sound of Nigel Kennedy rather than the bells of Notre Dame.

  Cooper felt his pager vibrating in his pocket. It was the fifth call tor him in the last half-hour. They had started plaguing him about other enquiries while he was still escorting his prisoner through the snowbound streets of Edendale.

  ‘All these new ideas, that’s the point?’ said the sergeant. ‘I can’t get my breath sometimes. A bloodv madhouse it is round here. And I don’t mean the customers, either.

  A PC came out of the office behind the sergeant and handed Cooper a note. It said: DC Cooper report to DS Fry ASAP. Urgent. Cooper reluctantly gave up the plan he had been nursing for the last few minutes. He had been hoping to call by his locker for some dry socks, then carry out a raid on Gavin Murfin’s desk to see if he had any spare food.

  ‘Mind you, you didn’t hear me say any of that,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’m very happy in my work, I am.’

  When passengers reached the arrivals gate at Terminal One of Manchester Airport from Air Canada flight 840, a tall, fair man with a beard was waiting. He greeted the woman by shaking her hand, but they both looked for a moment as though they regretted there were so many people around them on the airport