Stephen Booth - Blood on the Tongue

'I'll have to explain it all to Alison later today,' said Cooper.

Fry switched off the engine and sat for a moment looking at the bookshop, listening to the roar of the River Eden under the bridge. She didn't know what to say to him.

Outside Eden Valley Books, two police motorcyclists were unbuckling the straps of their crash helmets. When they were bare headed, the officers hardly looked any different. They both had bald domes as smooth and white as their helmets.

Cooper pushed open the front door and walked among the shelves of books. The shop seemed dead without Lawrence's presence. Cooper felt as though he was walking through a set for a TV costume drama. In the little kitchen area at the back, he found a window open. A few lumps of snow had dropped inside and scattered on the draining board. A small heap of it lay on the base of an upturned coffee mug.

While Fry took a call on her radio, Cooper went upstairs and walked slowly through the upper rooms. The shop was so quiet that he was reluctant to open each door that he came to, for fear of what he might find behind it. On the second floor, the biggest room was the one that he and Fry had seen, where the aviation memorabilia was displayed. A second room had been converted into a kind of study, where a couple of computers sat humming quietly to themselves. No wonder so many books had been piled on the landing and in the corridor — they must once have occupied these rooms.

Between a couple of stacks of books, Cooper found what he'd expected — a door that was a step up from the floor, a door that opened to reveal not a room but another flight of stairs, narrow and uncarpeted. The top floor of the building was Lawrence's living quarters. There was an untidy sitting room, a bathroom and a large bedroom with a vast iron bedstead. Cooper was looking for signs of Marie Tennent's presence when he heard a noise over his head. The sound of rats in a house was distinctive. They made so much noise on bare floorboards that they sounded as though they were wearing hobnailed boots. And there was that faint, dragging scrape that went with the footsteps — a sound that conjured up a clear picture of a scaly tail slithering across the floor in the dust.

Fry stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching him, not speaking. He saw her shudder when she heard the scurrying in the ceiling.

'We've just had a call from the hospital,' she said.

'Lawrence?'

'I'm afraid so.'

Cooper sat down suddenly on the bed, which sagged and gave a protesting squeak.

'You did your best, Ben,' said Fry. 'Nobody could have done any more.'

'I could have done it sooner. I found Lawrence's bookmark in one of Marie's books almost a week ago. I knew she'd been here. Marie read all sorts of books, not only Danielle Steel. They were there in her house, on her shelves. She spent money that she couldn't afford, just to buy more books. Lawrence Daley was her type really, not Eddie Kemp. She was following her mother's advice and doing better for herself. When Marie told her mother that the baby's father ran his own business, she didn't mean he was a window cleaner, for God's sake.'

'There's nothing more we could have done, Ben.'

'No, there is,' said Cooper. 'We could have found the baby.'

Fry had to stand aside as he brushed past her. He went down the first flight of narrow stairs and into the big room where Lawrence's aviation memorabilia was displayed. The Irving suit and the flying helmets and the personal possessions of long-dead airmen looked particularly ghoulish now that their owner was himself dead. Cooper was starting to feel stifled by the atmosphere. He pushed open the outside door and stood at the top of the fire escape, allowing the cold air to blow into the room and stir the cobwebs. Below him, the yard was still untouched, its unidentifiable shapes covered by yesterday's fresh snow.

The back alley was full of police vehicles with their engines rumbling. There was a ripping sound and a loud snap as a member of the task force levered the padlock off the yard gates with a crowbar. But then the team found they had difficulty pushing the gates open against the weight of the snow. The more they cursed and heaved, the more the snow built up and compacted, so that they might as well have been pushing against a brick wall.

'Shovels,' called a sergeant. 'We'll have to dig a space clear.'

Cooper went down the fire escape. The steps were treacherously slippery, and his hands left imprints in the snow frozen to the top of the rail. Under the snow was a layer of ice, so that he felt as though his knuckles were scraping against sandpaper.

He stopped at the bottom and looked around the yard. Last week's snow had lingered here because no sun ever reached the yard, at any time of day. The backs of buildings were all around it, and they were too high to allow any sun through at this time of year. There was a pink glow behind the buildings in the east as the sun rose, but it only made their outlines darker, their shadows longer, so that they almost seemed to meet here in this yard, like old men leaning towards each other to whisper their secrets. They might have been saying: 'Have you seen Baby Chloe?'

Black cast-iron drainpipes formed an intricate spider's web on the back walls of the buildings, and a large part of Edendale's starling population was clustered on the edges of the guttering, chattering at the sunrise over the rooftops.

Cooper followed the paw prints of the cat that had walked through the fresh snow in the yard. It had crossed the tracks of the birds, but hadn't paused — presumably the birds were long gone by the time it arrived. Starlings weren't very bright, but they knew enough to make themselves scarce when there was a cat around. The prints went almost the full width of the yard, then veered away towards one of the snow-covered mounds. Cooper scraped some snow off it. It was a wheel, and part of an undercarriage leg. He caught a whiff of an acidic smell. There was a yellow stain at the base of the wheel, and a spattering of small, melted holes in the surface of the snow, where the cat had marked its territory. Then the animal had walked towards the next object and had circled it for a while, before leaping to the top and from there on to the wall and way into the adjoining yard.

It was easy to see what the object was. The barrels of two rusted Vickers machine guns poked through the snow from a domed shape like a giant helmet. It was a gun turret. Cooper touched the end of one of the barrels, and found it moved slightly on its pivot, dislodging a few inches of snow that slid slowly from the Perspex hood. Through the hole he'd made in the snow, he could see the gunner's seat and something dark thrown over it.

Behind him, members of the task force were backing a Land Rover through the gates and unloading shovels to clear the snow. The vehicle's exhaust fumes began to fill the yard, and the reek of them overlaid the cool, clean smell of the snow.

Cooper couldn't wait for the orderly progression of the search. He wanted to know what was inside the gun turret, what items had been left behind in the confines of the same kind of prison in which Sergeant Dick Abbott had died on board Sugar Uncle Victor. Maybe there was another Irving jacket like the one he'd seen in the upstairs room. Perhaps there was a parachute harness, a flying helmet, or some other personal piece of equipment that he could hold in his hands, hoping it would tell him the story of the man who'd lived and fought, and perhaps died, in this cramped space.

The area he'd cleared wasn't quite wide enough for him to see inside properly. Cooper wiped his hand across the Perspex of the turret, so that another patch of snow broke away and landed on his boots, with a faint swish and a crunch. He had trouble for a moment because of the water that streaked and blurred on the Perspex. But soon it pooled and ran away down the curved surface, and began to drip quietly into the snow.