Stephen Booth - Blood on the Tongue

Finally, she seemed to become aware of Cooper's face. And Baby Chloe smiled.

Typically, the Peak District weather had changed completely within forty-eight hours. Once the thaw had begun, it had accelerated so fast that the last traces of snow were almost gone by Thursday, apart from a few frozen streaks in the deep gullies on the moors. Water cascaded off the hills and the rivers were swollen, threatening to burst their banks.

Cooper drove out of Edendale on dark, wet roads, remembering how different the Snake Pass had looked on the day he'd gone up to the wreckage of Sugar Uncle Victor with Sergeant Caudwell. The snow had still been pristine then, and the reflection of the sun off the hillsides had been so bright it had hurt his eyes.

Now, in the yard behind Eden Valley Books, there would be water running off the gun turret and the engine casings in rivulets, dripping and crackling as the snow melted. The body of Andrew Lukasz had long since been removed, though not without difficulty. His limbs had been folded to get him into the turret, and rigor mortis had made the pathologist wonder whether his arms would have to be dislocated to get him out. But they'd managed. And when they turned the body over, they'd seen the blood that had soaked into the seat, and the injury to the back of Andrew's head.

Cooper felt sorry for Lawrence Daley. His partners had made sure he was implicated in the death of Andrew Lukasz. With no Lawrence to testify against them, it was going to be very difficult proving whether it had been deliberate or an accident when Andrew had ended up at the foot of the fire-escape stairs. It might be true that they'd simply opened the door to show him the yard. There had been ice for days, and snow had fallen by then. So did Andrew just lose his footing? Or had it been the only way that Baine and his friends could prevent him from meeting Nick Easton next day?

When he'd visited the bookshop with Fry to look at the upstairs room, Cooper had even stood at the top of the fire escape himself and looked down into the yard. Andrew Lukasz's body had already been there, waiting for the snow to clear enough so that it could be removed. Yes, poor Lawrence. He had never really known what he was getting himself involved in.

Now, with all the interviews completed, the work was going on to build a case against Frank Baine and the Kemps, and the MDP were still pursuing their own enquiry. The one thing they were still looking for was Sergeant Easton's black Ford Focus.

Alison Morrissey was back in Canada, and Baby Chloe had been taken into care. The baby had come to no harm while she was under Mrs Shelley's protection, kept out of the way of Eddie Kemp's threats. And Marie Tennent had been wrongly judged from the start. The only thing she'd cared about was keeping the baby safe. No, there had been two things she cared about. She had also remembered the dead.

But it seemed to Cooper there was one person left whose fate everyone had forgotten about. This whole business hadn't started with Nick Easton or Marie Tennent, or any of them. It had started with Pilot Officer Danny McTeague.

On Irontongue Hill, water was scouring the moors in every direction, carving channels through the bare peat, sculpting it into castles and mounds, dragging small stones into heaps and gathering in dark pools in the hollows. Further down the hill, the streams had turned brown with peat, bursting with far more meltwater than they could cope with. They were no longer picturesque.

Yet George Malkin's house at Harrop still had snow on the roof. Normally, that was a sign of good insulation, which prevented the heat from rising. But in Malkin's case, Cooper knew there wasn't enough warmth in Hollow Shaw Farm to melt the snow.

Malkin had been right about the grass in the field near his house. Even now, as the snow began to wear thin, the grass looked a brighter green than any other grazing in Derbyshire. The black-faced ewes lifted their heads and watched Cooper as he parked the Toyota and walked up the path to the house. Some of the animals nodded their heads, as if to say they'd known this would happen. If they hadn't been sheep, they might have looked wise. But their constantly rotating jaws and unblinking eyes were only derisive.

'How was the rabbit?' said Malkin, when Cooper entered the house.

'It was a life saver.'

'Ah, grand.'

In Malkin's sitting room, a small drift of snow lay on the window ledge where the blizzard had driven it through the twisted window frame. The snow showed no sign of thawing, even now. The crystals glittered against the stained wood. Cooper didn't want to be inside this house today.

'Mr Malkin, would you come outside with me for a minute?'

'If you like.'

They walked a few yards up the slope of the hill, to where Irontongue was just visible in the distance, with the hump of Blackbrook Reservoir in between, its dam wall emerging from the snow.

'The night before last, I was up there in the dark,' said Cooper. 'I wouldn't normally go up on the mountain in the dark, but that night I did.'

'I heard about that,' said Malkin.

'Well, when you're up there at night like that, in the snow, you're desperate for any signs of life, you know. For a long time, there was only one thing I could see anywhere — a light. It was the light from your window. I knew it was yours. You don't bother drawing your curtains.'

'I didn't know you were up there,' said Malkin. 'What did you expect me to do?'

'Nothing,' said Cooper. 'But if I'd been lost and didn't know which way to go, I would certainly have headed for your house. It was the one light for miles. It was like a symbol of safety.'

'If you say so.'

'I remember thinking that I would never have set off towards the other side of the reservoir and down to the water board road, which you can't even see from up there. You wouldn't even know it existed. You'd have to be blind or stupid to set off in that direction.'

Malkin seemed to catch on to the drift of what Cooper was saying. 'Or drunk?' he said.

'Pilot Officer McTeague was not drunk,' said Cooper.

The air felt damp, and Cooper could see that the cloud was lowering rapidly. He pulled his collar up and shivered.

'I checked the Accident Investigator's report myself,' he said. 'The whisky on board Lancaster SU-V was a gift for the station commander at RAF Branton. The Wing Commander at Leadenhall had a black market supply, and he wanted to share it with his old friend in Lancashire.'

'Is that right?'

'Mr Malkin, I don't think you can possibly have seen or heard Pilot Officer McTeague walking down the road singing "Show Me the Way to Go Home".'

'Well, I might have been mistaken,' said Malkin. 'The memory plays tricks after all this time.'

'I think there are things you remember all too well.'

Malkin stared across the moor for a moment or two. Banks of mist were beginning to move across in front of Irontongue Hill, and soon they wouldn't be able to see it at all from Hollow Shaw.

'Would you like to tell me about it?' said Cooper.

Malkin stood quite still and rigid. 'You have to understand something,' he said. 'Ted and I had heard our mother and father and some of their friends talking about counterfeit bank notes that were supposed to have been printed by the Germans to upset our economy.'

Cooper frowned. 'What has this got to do with anything?'

'Listen to me. When I first went up to the crash with Ted, we heard two of the airmen talking to each other. They were talking in a foreign language. So we knew they were German.'

'No, it would have been the two Poles you heard,' said Cooper. 'It was Zygmunt Lukasz and Klemens Wach. They were speaking Polish.'

'I know that now,' said Malkin, already starting to get irritated. 'That's why we stayed away from the crew, you see. Not that we would have known what to do if we'd found anyone injured. We were going to find a phone and call the police, but then we saw the bags that had been thrown clear of the wreckage. Ted stopped to take a look inside. And we found the money.'