Stephen Booth - Blood on the Tongue

'So what did you do about the body? Didn't you tell your father?'

Malkin laughed. 'Not bloody likely. He'd have beaten us black and blue with his belt and locked us in the coal shed for telling lies. And then he would have told the police. We thought we'd be put in prison for murder. Because we believed we had murdered him, see. It was our fault he died.'

'But if the body had been left there, it would have been found eventually.'

'Nobody found it, because we sent it back down to the bottom. There was a little rowing boat that was kept by the reservoir. We took it and filled it with stones, and we took our dad's fishing net from his shed. He noticed it was gone one day, but he blamed some gypsies who'd been hanging around.'

Cooper was starting to feel wet and uncomfortable. He almost wished he could see Irontongue Hill. At least the black buttress of rock would have been something solid and familiar. Yet together, Irontongue and the Malkin boys had been the end of Danny McTeague.

'We tied the ends of the net to the airman's body,' said Malkin. 'We tied it to his flying suit, his parachute harness, wherever we could. Then we filled it with stones and we threw it over the side. We didn't think he was going to sink at first, then his face stopped staring at us, and the stones pulled him down to the bottom, and all that was left were some bubbles. I kept looking, in case he came back up. I kept looking for months, even when the summer came. I spent so much time sitting staring at this reservoir that my dad thought I was turning peculiar. But the dead airman never came back up.'

'We'll have to send divers into the reservoir to look for the remains,' said Cooper. 'We might have to drain it.'

'Not much point in that,' said Malkin. 'They drained the reservoir thirty-five years ago.'

'But…'

'It was old and leaking by then, so they emptied it to put a concrete lining on the bottom. It's been drained twice more since, for maintenance. You don't just let a reservoir alone for sixty years, you know — it'd be so full of holes it wouldn't hold a drop of water. And what would be the good of that?'

Cooper wondered whether he'd been spun a complete yarn. But Malkin wasn't laughing. His face was almost grey, and he made no attempt to wipe away the moisture that was settling on his cheeks as the mist gathered around them.

'Mr Malkin, are you telling me the truth?' said Cooper. 'Or was that some childish fantasy you had at the time?'

'Every word I'm telling you is true. But time passes, and things change. A body doesn't stay a body for ever, not in water, not with fish and things nibbling away at it. By the time they drained the reservoir, there would only have been a few bits of bone and some rags buried in the mud on the bottom. Have you ever seen a reservoir when it's emptied? The mud is three feet deep on the bottom. Disgusting the smell is, too.'

'Yes, I remember the year there was a drought and all the reservoirs started to dry up. You could smell them for miles.'

'It was worse than that. It was foul enough to knock your head off. They scooped the mud out and tipped it into lorries. Nobody bothered to sift through it to find any bodies — they wanted to get it away as quick as they could. It all got tipped into a landfill site, over where Bents Quarry used to be. Later they put some top soil over it, and levelled it off. It grassed over nicely in a year or two — it makes a decent bit of grazing now. In fact, it's the pasture Rod Whittaker uses for his sheep.'

Malkin pointed back across the moor towards Hollow Shaw Farm, where Cooper could make out a scatter of white shapes among the remaining patches of snow.

'That's where your missing pilot is,' said Malkin. 'He's helping to feed those ewes.'

Cooper gazed at the sheep. One of the animals lifted its head and stared back at him. Its jaws were rotating steadily, and it had a look of sullen insolence on its black face. Cooper felt an irrational surge of anger. It had been such a long way to come, only to end with a field full of sheep.

'There's something I've often wondered since then,' said Malkin. 'What do you think the folk of Manchester would have said, if they'd known what was in their drinking water?'

Finally, the first patrol car bounced up the potholed road from Harrop. It had its headlights on as it climbed into the mist. George Malkin put his coat on, and walked with Cooper towards the car.

'The Morrissey woman — did you trust her?' said Malkin.

'Of course. I know some of her facts were wrong,' said Cooper. 'Frank Baine gave her false information.'

'That's not what I meant at all. She's known since Tuesday night how her grandfather died. She came here to ask me about the medal, so I told her.'

Cooper stopped suddenly. 'The medal?'

'I picked it up on the moor the night of the crash. It was in a little leather pouch, but with all the excitement about the money and the man on the ice, I forgot about it until later. Then I found it even had the airman's name and address on a label stitched inside the pouch.'

'So you sent her the medal.'

'I sent it back because I'd bottled the whole thing up long enough. It was when I finally knew that Florence was dying, and I needed to get it off my chest, I suppose. But I didn't put my name on the letter — I just said I was one of those boys who saw Danny McTeague walking away from the crash.'

Cooper's face twisted, as a remembered taste came to his mouth. It was that bitter, metallic taste, like blood seeping from his saliva glands, a bitterness that jerked a spasm from his throat. Alison Morrissey had been to Hollow Shaw after he'd let Malkin's name drop on Tuesday, and since then she'd known everything. The following morning she'd been on a flight back to Toronto. Had she been as single-minded as she claimed? Had she been concerned only with her own obsession, even as she kissed him outside the Cavendish Hotel? Alison Morrissey had failed to mention that she'd been kissing him goodbye. But Diane Fry had been watching, and she had known. No doubt she thought she'd been right about Morrissey all along.

'It was all for Florence, you know,' said Malkin. 'She was the one real treasure that I had in my life, not the money. I carried the guilt with me so long that I grew not to trust anybody, in case they found out my secret. But Florence was the one person I never felt like that about. I trusted her and loved her, and I did what I could for her.'

A PC opened the door of the patrol car and Malkin ducked his head obediently to get in. But he paused and turned back towards Cooper.

'It means a lot if there's somebody you can trust,' he said. 'Even if they make a mistake now and then, you know they're genuine about what they do. Somebody like that is rare. If you're a clever lad, you'll find somebody like that and hold on to them, if you can.'

Cooper stared at George Malkin wordlessly. Now it was really raining, and the sky was hidden somewhere behind grey clouds. Cooper was glad not to be able to see the sky. He was glad not to be able to see the scornful faces of the sheep. He was particularly glad not to be able to see the tongue-shaped buttress of black rock on the hill, with its reptilian curl and its ridges and crevices. Irontongue had destroyed too many lives. He couldn't have tolerated its eternal derision.

'By the way,' said Malkin, 'I suppose you'll be wanting the knife.'

He pulled a blade from his pocket and held it out to Cooper. It was very sharp and stained with blood.

'My God. Hold on, I need to get a bag for it.'

'Don't worry,' said Malkin. 'It's sheep blood. I used it for skinning dead lambs. It's a messy job, but it had to be done. I couldn't see the orphans being left without any mothers.'

After Malkin had been driven away, Cooper stood and listened for a moment to the rain dripping through the mist on to the peat moor. The sound was somehow reassuring. It was a totally natural cadence, a reminder that the world all around him continued as normal, no matter what happened in his own life. The moisture still condensed in the chilly air as it always had, and the rain drops still smacked against the wet ground, just as they would if he ceased to exist in this moment, if he were to vanish into a little pool of slush like a melted snowman. The rain was one of nature's primeval forces, oblivious to all human obsessions. The world that Ben Cooper moved in hardly impinged on it.