Stephen Booth - Blood on the Tongue

'Yes.'

'Eddie Kemp never tells the truth about anything.'

'We'll see,' said Cooper. 'Get in the car, and we'll give it a try.'

He leaned his weight on the boot of the Vauxhall, bracing himself to get a good grip on the road surface. Lawrence started the car and let off the handbrake. At first, it seemed as though the wheels weren't going to get any purchase, but then the off-side rear wheel found a bit of clear road surface, and a second later the Vauxhall lurched forward out of the mud. Cooper lost his footing and fell on to his knee behind the back bumper. Lawrence drove the car a few feet on to the road and stopped.

'Thanks!' he called.

Cooper got up. Beating the snow off his gloves, he began to walk past the Vauxhall towards his own car. He stopped at Lawrence's open window. 'Before you go any further, I suggest you clear your windscreen properly,' he said. 'And scrape the snow off your headlights. Because, if you run into my colleagues from Traffic, they'll book you otherwise.'

'I'll do that,' said Lawrence.

Cooper nodded, brushed off some more snow, and got into the Toyota. As he drove off, he looked into his rearview mirror. He could Lawrence Daley waving goodbye.

The Ministry of Defence Police had taken their turn at interviewing Frank Baine on suspicion that he was the main contact for the servicemen the RAF Police had been keeping under surveillance. Fry could see that Baine was certainly a man with a lot of contacts, and very little evidence of income from journalism. According to Lawrence Daley, Baine had also been running the website and the internet bulletin board.

A case against him for the murder of Nick Easton was going to be more difficult to construct. They had found no weapon, and they hadn't been able to show that Eddie Kemp's car had been used to convey Easton's body to the Snake Pass. Besides, there was evidence that Eddie Kemp had been involved in the assault on the two youths near Underbank on Monday night — he was recognizable on the CCTV footage.

Fry shook her head in exasperation. The two young drug dealers were refusing to talk to the police on principal. But enquiries around Underbank had established that residents were well aware of vigilante groups who'd taken it into their own hands to deter the drug gangs from the Devonshire Estate from moving in. Even the old man, Walter Rowland, had told an officer that there were people far more likely to recover his stolen property than the police. Sadly, he was almost certainly right.

The Kemp brothers seemed to have built themselves quite a reputation around Underbank. They were unlucky that the old couple who'd identified Eddie that night had not been told whose side he was on.

She looked at the bayonet that had been used to attack Ben Cooper. She was anxious for her own opportunity to question Frank Baine — and she was hopeful the forensic laboratory would give her a match from the bayonet to Baine's DNA. That would clear up the assault on a police officer, at least. Meanwhile, she had both the Kemp brothers. And Eddie Kemp had some questions to answer about the death of Marie Tennent.

It proved to be a long afternoon before Fry got Eddie Kemp on to the subject she most wanted to know about.

'The baby,' she said. 'Marie's baby.'

'It wasn't mine,' said Kemp, 'She told me the baby wasn't mine.'

'How did you feel about that, Mr Kemp?'

'Feel?'

'Were you angry with her?'

Though they'd given him the required breaks from questioning, Kemp was starting to look tired. He was still trying to act relaxed, completely unconcerned, like a man with nothing to fear. But Fry thought she could see the weariness in his eyes, the first sign that he was being worn down.

'Were you angry, Mr Kemp?'

'It didn't matter to me.'

'No. Let's think about that. If I remember rightly, a pregnancy takes nine months. If that baby wasn't yours, it meant Marie had been seeing someone else while you were still living with her.'

'So?'

'So I think you might have been angry about that,' said Fry. 'I think you might have lost your temper.'

'Well, any bloke might have done, in that situation.'

'So you hit her, did you?'

Kemp grimaced with irritation. 'You seem to have me pegged as the violent type. I don't know why.'

'How many times did you hit her?' asked Fry patiently.

'Look, it was a bit of a blur, to be honest.'

'Once? Twice? More than twice?'

'I don't recall.'

'Where did you hit her? On the face, on the body, or where?'

'On the body, I suppose.'

'Did you hit her in the face, too?'

'If I did, it was an accident.'

'I see.'

'I didn't really hurt her,' said Kemp.

'Sorry?'

'I mean, if I hit her at all, I would just have slapped her a bit. She wouldn't have more than a few little bruises. But she asked for it. She was far too full of herself.'

Fry decided to change tack and come back to the assault later. His story would change in the details until eventually they would have the full account.

'Did Marie tell you who the father of the baby was?'

Kemp blinked a little, then leaned forward across the table.

'Oh, yeah. But she didn't need to — it wasn't hard to guess.'

'And who did she say it was?'

Now Kemp wanted to talk. He wanted to be sure that she understood. Like so many others, he was convinced that everybody would think he'd done the right thing, if only he could explain it properly. Some of them talked for ever once they'd started, baffled by their failure to communicate.

'Look, you have to understand something about Marie,' said Kemp. 'She thought she was cleverer than the rest of us, but she never had the education. She got obsessed with books. That house of hers was full of books before she'd finished.'

'Yes, I've seen them.'

'Well, she thought she was going to better herself by reading. As if reading those novels she had was going to improve anybody's education. What a load of crap! But she thought because she could talk about novels she was an intellectual. She was easily influenced like that, always wanting to please some bloke. So she was round at the bookshop all the time. She thought she was moving in better circles, just because he took an interest in her. But he was after one thing from her, like everybody else.'

'The bookshop?'

'Eden Valley Books, of course. The ponce with the bow tie, Lawrence Daley. It was my fault she met him. And he's no better than the rest of us, is he?'

'Marie told you that Lawrence Daley was the father of her child?' asked Fry.

'That's it. Daley. There's only two things he's interested in, when it comes down to it. And they're the same things as the rest of us — sex and money. All the rest of the stuff is just airs and graces. Books? Rubbish. Sex and money. Yes, I could tell you a thing or two about that bookseller.'

Two miles down the road, Cooper was still trying to thaw out his hands when he took the call on his mobile phone.

'Ben, where are you?'

'A57, near the Snake Inn. I'm on my way to Harrop to get a statement from George Malkin about the items he sold to Lawrence Daley.'

'Perhaps you'd better pull in.'

Cooper tucked the Toyota into the first gateway that he came to. The driver of a Transit van sounded his horn as he pulled out to go past him.

'What is it?' he said.

'We've just interviewed Eddie Kemp again.'

'Yeah. Get anything out of him?'

'The name of the baby's father.'

'It wasn't his?'

'He says not. He says the father is Lawrence Daley.'

Cooper was glad he was no longer driving. He turned around in his seat. Lawrence's blue Vauxhall should have passed him by now. There was no road to turn off the Snake Pass until the Harrop road, the other side of Irontongue Hill.

'I've not long seen him,' said Cooper. 'A couple of miles back, I helped to get his car back on to the road. He told me he was heading this way, but I think he might have turned round.'