Stephen Booth - Blood on the Tongue

'Aye,' said Malkin, as the tractor began to move.

'So you could take this tractor out with the snowplough attachment, when it's needed to clear the roads around here?'

'I suppose I could.'

The tractor bumped across the yard and headed for the open gate on to the moor. Cooper remembered his visit to the Snake Inn, where the staff had said that one of the snowplough crews had stopped to fill their flasks on the morning Nick Easton's body had been found. But only one crew. They said the crews that came over the Pass from the north weren't council workers — they were on contract, so it was in their own interests to get the job done quicker. And one of them had been a big tractor with a snowplough. Very early on the job, it was. It would have come over from somewhere near Glossop, they said. It could easily have come from Harrop.

'You could get as far as the Snake Inn, couldn't you?' said Cooper over the roar of the engine. 'Nobody would think twice about a snowplough on the road after it had been closed to traffic. The staff at the inn didn't. They never saw or heard any other vehicles — just the snowploughs coming down the Pass, and then, later on, another one coming up. The one that found Nick Easton's body. And I think one of those that came down left him there.'

Blackbrook Reservoir appeared ahead of them in the mist. Malkin swung the wheel and reversed through the wet peat towards a padlocked gate.

'Stop,' said Cooper.

'Don't worry. I'm stopping.'

Malkin kept the engine running while he climbed down and swung open the gate. Cooper stood clear of the tractor's wheels, noticing that the padlock on the gate had been cut.

'You helped Frank Baine get rid of the body,' said Cooper. 'Did Baine have some kind of hold over you?'

'No, that's not right,' said Malkin.

He backed the tractor towards the edge of the reservoir, where a concrete slipway ran down into the water. Then Malkin fiddled with something at the back of the vehicle, and Cooper saw he had hold of a thick chain with a massive hook on one end. He watched in amazement as Malkin waded into the freezing water and was soon up to his waist. He bent and attached the hook to something under the surface. When he returned to the tractor, Malkin was soaked and white with cold.

'Frank Baine came here a couple of weeks ago,' he said. 'He'd worked out that I had the money. I sold a lot of other stuff to Lawrence Daley, and Baine is no fool. He asked Daley where it came from, and put two and two together.' Malkin climbed back into the tractor cab. 'Baine said the white fivers were worth a lot. He said they were collectors' items, that people would pay good money for them, proper money. He offered to sell them for me — in exchange for a cut of the profits, of course. We worked out there was over a hundred thousand pounds' worth. That was enough to send Florence to America for treatment.'

'It must have seemed like a miracle,' said Cooper.

'Aye, after all that time, the miracle I'd been praying for. You wouldn't reckon me to be a man that prayed, would you? But that's what I'd been doing, and I thought Baine had brought my miracle.' Malkin shook his head. 'Then the RAF policeman came. Of course, it was all too late by then. And everything I did after that was pointless.'

He put the tractor into gear, and the chain tightened. Cooper stood on the edge of the reservoir and looked down. The surface was black and oily with the mud that had been churned up by all the meltwater running into it, full of dark brown peat. Anything could have been lurking down there.

But as the tractor began to edge forward, it was something metallic and shiny that began to emerge from the water. Bit by bit, recognizable objects became visible. A bumper, a number plate and a back window. Eventually, the car stood on the concrete slipway, water streaming out of it, mud sliding slowly down its windscreen.

'Get your fingerprint kit on that,' said Malkin.

'It's Nick Easton's Ford Focus.'

'Clever lad.'

This time, Cooper called in. George Malkin waited while he did it. He wasn't looking at Cooper, but gazing at Hollow Shaw Farm, as if he might be seeing it for the last time. It was the house he'd lived in all his life, the place that had held his secrets.

Cooper shook his head as he looked at the dripping car.

'So you thought Nick Easton had come to take the money from you?'

'Of course he had,' said Malkin. 'Just when I thought I had that fortune in my grasp again, he came to snatch it away. I couldn't let him do that.'

'So you killed him.'

'It was blind panic. I don't think I really knew what I was doing.' Malkin's voice became a little unsteady. 'Once he was dead, I didn't seem to be able to think straight at all. I don't have any idea what I did for the next few hours, until I realized it was the middle of the night, and by then the snow had started. Rod had already put the snowplough blade on the tractor in case he was needed for road clearing, so I got the body in the back and took it down the Snake.'

'And there were no cars on the road,' said Cooper.

'You had that right. Nobody bothered about seeing a snowplough. But do you know what? I emptied the bloke's pockets before I tipped him out, and it was only when I found his keys that it dawned on me he'd have a car. How's that for stupid? I found the car parked just past the farm. I didn't see it on the way out, or I might have thought of putting him into the reservoir with it. At the time, all I wanted was to get him as far away as possible. Like I say, I wasn't thinking straight.'

Cooper frowned. 'But how did Nick Easton know you had the money? Who told him?'

Then Malkin laughed his coarse, gravelly laugh. The noise sounded alien in the damp stillness of the moor.

'I did,' he said. 'I told him myself.'

'I don't understand.'

'Years ago, it was. I'd known the bank notes were worthless for a long time. But they were on my conscience and I couldn't rest easy thinking that Florence might find them one day. It seemed to me that, if I owned up to the money, I might get the airman off my conscience too — that he wouldn't appear in my nightmares any more. So I got the number for the RAF Police, and I rang them. I gave them my name and address and told them I knew where the money from the crashed Lancaster was.'

'They would have had no idea what you were talking about.'

'Of course not,' said Malkin. 'Everyone had forgotten about it, but for me.'

'So what did they do?'

'Not a thing. They thanked me for the information and said somebody might get in touch with me. But nobody ever did. Well, they had better things to do, I suppose. They didn't care about what had happened all those years ago, and why should they? I suppose they just put a note in a file somewhere about this old idiot at Harrop, and then they left me with my nightmares.'

'Until Andrew Lukasz told Sergeant Easton the story. And Easton must have dug out the old files before he came to Edendale.'

'Aye.'

For a few moments, Cooper watched the ripples that were still disturbing the surface of the water, breaking sluggishly on the concrete slipway.

'You could hide anything in that reservoir,' he said. 'And it might never come to the surface. Danny McTeague's body never did.'

Malkin's face contorted again. 'Oh yes,' he said.

Cooper misunderstood him at first. He thought Malkin was agreeing with him. But there was something about the tone of the man's voice, an abruptness that choked the words in his throat.

'Mr Malkin?'

'He came to the surface when the ice began to melt,' said Malkin. 'Four days later.'

'You saw him?'

'Not at first. The ice gradually began to get thinner — so thin that we could see through it when we stood at the top of the reservoir wall. On the third day, we saw him. He was floating on his back, staring up at us, with his face squashed up against the ice. It was like he was pulling faces at us, sticking out his tongue to say that he'd got the better of us, after all.'