Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) Page 3

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ asked Peter.

  ‘He’s with his photographs again,’ she said.

  ‘It’s been a bad night, Grace. We had two young men brought in who’d taken a terrible beating with baseball bats.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  They sat for a few moments in silence. Grace could tell from the angle of her husband’s head that he wasn’t taking in the news on the TV any more than she was herself. She waited, aware of the power of silence, calming her breathing until she could hear the ticking of the radiators and the sound of a car engine on the crescent. There was a faint rustling of feathers from the far corner, where their blue and green parrot stirred in its cage, perhaps sensing the atmosphere in the room. It turned a black eye on the couple, then snapped at its bars with a sudden, angry click of its beak.

  ‘If you must know,’ said Peter, ‘I think he’s gone back.’

  Grace felt her shoulders go rigid. ‘Gone back where?’ she said, though she knew perfectly well what he meant.

  ‘Where do you think? To London.’

  ‘To her?’

  ‘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’d 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.

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

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

  ‘In a day? 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 can’t dwell on the past for ever.’

  She’d 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. If you had no present and no future, where was there to live but the past?

  ‘But 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 …’

  But 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’d 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 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 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 screen, the weather girl smiled out at them cheerfully, as if she thought snow was absolutely the best thing she could imagine in the whole world.

  The Derbyshire County Council snowplough was brand new. It was a yellow Seddon Atkinson, with a bright steel blade, 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 Ladybower Reservoir, with the River Ashop below them and the Roman road above them, skirting the lower slopes of Bleaklow 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’d 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 flasks with coffee and given 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.

  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 the 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 falling 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 pie 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 breeze-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 for 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 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’d 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’d seen some of the bosses wearing back at the council offices. He touched it a
s he wiped away the frozen snow. It was definitely a sock for an office worker, not for wearing with a work boot. Your feet would be frozen solid out here in the snow, if you wore fancy socks like that.

  He realized his mind was wandering a bit. It was a long minute before 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 back at his driver, who was still inspecting the plough. The blade was bright and sharp and shiny, and it weighed half a ton. Last winter, with one much like it, they’d removed the entire front wing of a Volkswagen Beetle before they even noticed it abandoned in a snowdrift. Bradley remembered how the blade 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’d 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. He 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’d 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 body.

  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 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 Irontongue Hill. It was an Air Canada Boeing 767, and it was at the end of a seven-hour flight from Toronto.

  3

  A pair of shoes stood outside each door in the bare corridor. There were a set of trainers with thick rubber souls, 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 off them to form puddles on the floor. In the background, Nigel Kennedy was playing The Four Seasons.

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

  ‘A doctor?’ The 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.’

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

  The sergeant was well over six feet tall. He had the weariness about him that Cooper had seen all custody officers develop after a few months processing prisoners. They saw far too much of the wrong end of life. They saw far 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 sergeant. ‘Apart from having his sense of smell amputated?’

  ‘He is a bit ripe, isn’t he?’

  ‘Ripe? Putrescent 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 oozed 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 yards. When his old overcoat and body warmer came off, the paint on the walls had almost begun to peel.

  They’d 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 day, like his frozen foot.

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

  ‘I don’t know who’s going to interview Eddie Kemp, but rather them than me,’ said Cooper. ‘Besides, I think he might have some popular support out on the streets. I’m sure three of his mates were at the café. But 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’d 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. But a couple who’d 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 fame 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 anyone of a different ethnic origin in their town unless they ran restaurants and cafes, like Sonny Patel, or were tourists and didn’t count. The sudden appearance of Iranians, 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. Anyway, 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 and the desk to make the energy flow better or some such rubbish.’

  ‘Feng shui,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Feng 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.’

  He was much too tall for the counter he worked at, and he leaned 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 for him in the last half-hour. They’d started plaguing him about other enquiries while he was still escorting his prisoner through the snowbound streets of Edendale.

  ‘All these new ideas, what’s the point?’ said the sergeant. ‘I can’t get my breath sometimes. A bloody 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’d been nursing for the last few minutes. He’d 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.