Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) (35 page)

'Where exactly were you passing on your way to?' he said, finally.

The tone of his voice made Fry look at him quizzically.

'I'm not always working, you know. I have my own private life.'

'Right.'

There was a small noise from the direction of the kitchen, a sort of tentative chirrup. Cooper turned and saw a broad, black face and a yellow eye that peered at Fry, hoping for attention.

'What on earth is that?' she said.

'That's Randy,' said Cooper. 'He's sort of part of the property.'

Fry stared at Cooper, then back at the cat, which had decided not to come any closer, after all.

'It's so typical,' said Fry. 'Only you, Ben, would take on a flat that came complete with its own stray.'

After that, they both seemed to run out of things to say. Fry looked at the window. Cooper could see that she was thinking of where she had to go next. She'd put in an appearance, done her duty, and now she was ready to move on to more important business. She began to move towards the door, then stopped and pulled something from her pocket. It was a small object wrapped in blue paper.

'I don't like you all that much, as you know,' she said. 'But I brought you this.'

'Thank you.'

Cooper took it and weighed it in his hand. It was solid, and heavy for its size. He began to tug at the tape sealing the parcel.

'No need to open it now,' said Fry. She swung her scarf round her neck. 'I can see you've still got things to do.'

'I suppose so.'

'See you on Monday, then.'

Cooper watched her slither down Welbeck Street. Presumably, she'd been obliged to leave her car at the bottom of the street because of the number of vehicles parked outside the houses. Fry didn't look back, and she soon disappeared. He'd noticed when she was in the flat that she was wearing new shoes. He wondered whether she'd bought some that had a bit of grip in the soles.

He went back to the sitting room and opened the little parcel. She'd bought him a clock.

*    *    *    *

Cooper considered the advantages of living alone. He looked forward to being able to listen to the omnibus edition of
The Archers
on Sunday morning, without competition from videos or pop music or daytime children's TV. And, because he was on his own, it would hardly seem necessary to get dressed or have a shave on his days off. As long as he didn't have to go out of the house, no one would see him. He could slop around in his dressing gown or a pair of jogging bottoms for as long as he liked. He could sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee and eat toast and read the Sunday papers all morning, if he really wanted. If he'd thought to put an order in to have any papers delivered, that is. At the moment, all he would be able to do while drinking his coffee and eating his toast was stare at the cat. Maybe he'd have to unpack the box of books he'd brought.

Finally, he realized why his thoughts were running on so fast. He was babbling to himself to cover the silence in the house. He'd never known a silent house in his life. He had a foreboding of how depressing, how desperate, even how frightening it would be to come home every night to a dark and empty house. Every evening, the post would still be lying on the doormat where it had fallen in the morning. A single unwashed coffee mug would be in the sink where he'd left it after breakfast because he'd been in a rush to get to work again. The house would have that feel of having gone along in its own world without him all day, that his presence in it was unnecessary, maybe even unwelcome. That wasn't what you would call a home.

The first taste of loneliness was sour and unexpected, a burst of metallic bitterness on the back of his tongue. He remembered once breaking a tooth playing rugby at school, when he'd got a boot in the face attempting a foolhardy tackle. The sudden gush of blood in his mouth had given him a moment of cold panic and made him feel nauseous. He'd felt the taste of his own life trickling between his teeth and mingling with his saliva. Loneliness was like that taste. Just like the bitterness of the blood on his tongue.

The sound of every little movement made by the cat was reassuring. The touch of its claws on the tiles in the conservatory, the rustling as it changed position in its basket, even the faint snore when it was sleeping. These were now the sounds he listened for. Without them, the house would have been dead and hostile. Like a narrow crack of light entering his brain, he thought he had an inkling for the first time of why Diane Fry spent so much time at work.

The cat had moved up on him silently and sat watching him from the arm of a chair. When Cooper stroked its fur, he felt the sharp sting of static electricity, and the animal flinched away from his hand. The air was very dry. There would be another frost tonight.

21

Every morning when Fry opened the door of her car she had to vacuum bits of polystyrene carton and fragments of greasy paper off the floor. She also had to spray air freshener inside until it was so thick she was forced to open the windows to prevent herself from suffocating. Sunday morning was no exception. The traces of Gavin Murfin lingered all weekend. She was sure Murfin used food as a means of avoiding talking to her when they were in the car. Ben Cooper at least had some conversation. He didn't have to buy a singing lobster to do his talking for him.

This Sunday morning, Fry finished cleaning out her car to find that her mobile was ringing and ringing. It was DI Hitchens.

'Diane, you'd better get into the office right away,' he said. 'Before the shit hits the fan.'

*    *    *    *

The Cavendish wasn't exactly the newest hotel in Edendale. There was the Holiday Inn on the roundabout at the end of the relief road, and the Travel Lodge in Eyre Street. And now there was the recent conversion of the old Conservative Club, with its portraits of Margaret Thatcher and John Major still hanging on the wall in the bar as historical souvenirs, like the heads of stags that had been shot and stuffed. But the Cavendish was the hotel that had 'character', according to the tourist brochures. It was the one where a waiter would bring you a copy of
The Times
as you relaxed in a leather armchair in the residents' lounge. It was the one where the Rotary Club held its charity dinners at £80 a head. In front of the hotel, there were iron railings painted green and topped with spikes. In most towns such ironwork had disappeared long ago, ripped up during the Second World War to make weapons. Somehow they'd escaped this fate in Edendale.

Cooper found Alison Morrissey waiting for him on the steps of the Cavendish. The morning was cold, but not unpleasant. It felt as though there could be rain at any time, which would at least wash away the snow still lying in the gutters and on the hillsides rising out of the town.

'Thanks for coming,' she said. 'I wasn't sure you would. I didn't think they would let you.'

'I'm off duty today. I can do what I like.'

'You can probably guess what I'm going to say.'

'Yes. But the reason I came is that I don't want there to be any misunderstanding.'

'Misunderstanding? I've had to accept that the Derbyshire police weren't going to offer any assistance. I hadn't realized you would actively try to interfere and obstruct me.'

'That isn't the case,' said Cooper.

'No? You visited the Lukasz family before I could get to them. And then you went to see Mr Rowland. Don't try to tell me it's a coincidence. You're trying to thwart me. Your chiefs don't want me to talk to these people. They'd like me to get so frustrated that I give up and go back home. They've sent you to hinder me, to make sure that happens.'

Cooper felt himself shuffling his feet with embarrassment and tried to pretend that he was stamping them against the cold.

'I've had no instructions to do anything like that,' he said.

'No?' Alison hesitated. 'But you're the man to do it, aren't you? You talk the same language as these people. Every time you get there before I do, you make me seem so much more of an alien. They hear my accent and they shut up, like I'm a foreign spy. You'd think it was still wartime as far as they're concerned. Careless talk costs lives. They're still carrying the motto with them. Don't they know we were on their side?'

'It isn't like that,' said Cooper. 'They're naturally reticent people. You have to work a bit harder to get them to talk to you.'

'Yeah? It seems to me they're still living in the war. Suspicious isn't the word.'

Cooper shook his head. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'But you're the one obsessed with the war. It's been over a very long time. Long before you and I were born.'

'You're wrong,' said Alison. 'It isn't over for me. It won't be over until I find out what happened to my grandfather.'

They looked at each other for a moment. Where they stood, on the corner near the Cavendish Hotel, there was an icy wind blowing round the stone walls. He saw Morrissey shiver. But then her mood changed suddenly, and she smiled.

'Well, you have to let me buy you a drink, at least. No argument,' she said. 'Where can we go – is there somewhere near?'

They went into the Wheatsheaf, where, to Cooper's surprise, Alison Morrissey asked for a pint of cider. Cooper realized that he didn't have to drive home any more when he was in town, and he ordered a pint of Derbyshire Drop. It was one of the strong local beers, its label a tribute to the original name for the unique semi-precious mineral Blue John, which attracted so many tourists to the Peak District.

'I've asked for the Sunday lunch menu, too,' said Morrissey. 'I hope you don't mind.'

'I can't let you pay for me,' he said.

'You're not going to be stuffy, are you? Didn't you say you were off duty today?'

'Even so, I have to be careful.'

'I see. You sound like a man treading a line. Well, I can relate to that. It's exactly what I'm doing myself.'

Morrissey chose a vegetable bake, while Cooper settled for a lasagne. He felt ridiculously nervous. When the food was served, he couldn't quite think what order he should do things – where to put his napkin, what part of his meal to load on to his fork first, when to order coffee.

'What did you mean about "treading a line"?' said Cooper.

Morrissey raised an eyebrow. 'The line between two worlds, the line between the right and the wrong thing to do, the line between the past and present. Choose which you prefer. I'm treading them all.'

'And the line between rationality and obsession, perhaps?'

She looked at him, nursing her cider. Her cheeks were already turning pink from the alcohol and the warmth of the pub. Then, gradually, she began to talk. Cooper could feel her relaxing as the words trickled out.

'Yes, you're right – it
has
become an obsession,' she said. 'It became an obsession after I saw the report on the crash of Lancaster SU-V, and the list of names of the dead. From that moment, those men were no longer the crew of an RAF bomber – they were people. They had lives, they had wives and children. It was the fact that Dick Abbott had also been father of a young child that was the real trigger. Abbott was barely more than a boy himself. It set off something inside me, some urge, an instinct that has been driving me on to find out what exactly happened.'

'An instinct? Not curiosity?'

'Maybe. I don't understand what else to call it. But I had to know what happened. I had to know the truth, and in a way it was on behalf of that other fatherless child, as much as for myself. I wondered about Zygmunt Lukasz, too, and the family he might have. I can't explain why those British and Polish children mean anything to me at all. I know, in my logical moments, that the pictures of those children that I've been carrying in my head are nothing like the reality. I know they'll be well into middle age by now. But I found I was starting to live in some kind of parallel universe, where everyone was still as they were in 1945. So I made no attempt to explain it to anyone, not even to my mother. I was aware of the fact that I couldn't justify it, too afraid of the reasonable arguments that could be put to me, which I couldn't counter, but which would only make my determination stronger. Some people already call me obsessed, like you. I didn't want to give them an opportunity to call me mad.'

'I'll take the word back if it makes you feel better.'

'It doesn't matter. It helps if you understand how determined I am.'

'It's so far in the past, though …'

'Yes, I know. It was such an alien time. It makes you appreciate peace. Do you know, it took me a long time to understand that an aircraft falling out of the sky was an everyday occurrence in wartime Britain.'

'And more than fifty aircraft have been wrecked in the Dark Peak area alone since the start of the Second World War.'

Morrissey looked at him in surprise. 'How did you know that?'

'I found a book,' said Cooper.

'Where?'

'In a second-hand bookshop we have here in town. Eden Valley Books.'

'That's interesting. I'd like to see it some time. Yes, I could hardly believe the figures when Frank Baine told me. I mean, on the map, the Peak District looks so small. It's no more than a few dozen miles across, locked in between the big cities. And the hills aren't even all that high. I mean, these summits are three thousand feet at the highest. We're not exactly talking the Rockies here, are we, Ben? Why was this area the graveyard for so many aircraft and airmen?'