Stephen Booth - Blood on the Tongue

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 as 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.

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 cafe. 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.'