Blood on the Tongue

Gavin Murfin swayed against the side of Cooper’s Toyota as they bumped over the cobbles, took a sharp turn and then made another steep climb to emerge into the Underbank area. The streets here were even narrower, and the doors of the houses had tiny knockers shaped like owls or foxes, with their numbers picked out in coloured tiles set into the stonework. Further up the hill, a set of three-storey Regency houses stood near a youth hostel. Several of the houses had been converted into flats, but one at the far end looked empty and uncared for. A broken window on the first floor had been left unrepaired.

Beeley Street was hardly more than an alley, with an unmade surface just wide enough for one vehicle to pass. Cooper and Murfin walked up the street and crossed a patch of snow-covered grass.

‘Well, that’s Eddie Kemp’s car,’ said Murfin. ‘I’ve seen it many a time at West Street.’

It was a silver Isuzu Trooper with a set of ladders clipped to its roof rack, and it was parked on a raised concrete platform in front of Kemp’s house, with its headlights looking down the street towards the Buttercross. The council binmen had left a new plastic refuse sack wedged behind a downspout near the front door. They wouldn’t be coming up here again with their wagon soon, though, unless the snow cleared.

Eddie Kemp himself emerged from the house when they knocked.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I’ve answered all the questions I’m going to.’

‘Is this your car, sir?’ said Cooper.

‘Are you deaf? I just said I’ve answered all the questions I’m going to.’

‘It won’t take a minute to check with the DVLC if you’re the registered owner.’

‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’ said Kemp.

‘I don’t know, sir. Is there something wrong with it? Would you like us to have a look while we’re here?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a nice motor,’ said Murfin cheerfully. ‘It looks really useful, like.’

‘Well, you know damn well it’s mine anyway,’ said Kemp. ‘All you coppers know. I park it up at your place regularly when I’m doing the windows.’

‘Four-wheel drive, isn’t it?’ said Cooper.

‘Of course it is.’

‘Good in snow?’

‘It has to be.’

‘Were you driving this car on Monday night, sir?’

‘It was parked here.’

‘From what time?’

‘Has somebody said they saw me in it?’

‘That isn’t an answer.’

Murfin leaned against the concrete platform. ‘You ought to answer DC Cooper,’ he said. ‘If he gets annoyed, he stops calling you “sir”. That can be very nasty.’

Cooper stepped up on to the platform and looked at the tyres of the Isuzu. They wouldn’t tell him anything at all, but Kemp didn’t know that.

‘What time do you finish work, sir?’ he said.

‘When it starts going dark.’

‘About quarter past four, then, at the moment. Did you come straight home from work on Monday night?’

‘I’ve got a wife and a kid,’ said Kemp. ‘They expect to see me occasionally.’

‘I’ll take that as a “yes”, shall I?’

‘You can take it as what the hell you like. What are you looking for?’

Murfin pointed down the street towards the Buttercross. ‘I had a girlfriend who lived around here once. I seem to recall there was a little Indian takeaway on the corner, near the hairdresser’s. Is it still there?’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Kemp.

‘What time does it open?’

‘How the hell should I know?’

There was mud on the tyres of the Isuzu and small stones embedded in the tread. Streaks of brown grit ran along the sides of the vehicle. Cooper worked round the back and looked in through the tailgate.

‘What time did you go out again on Monday, sir?’ said Cooper.

‘I went to the pub for a bit,’ said Kemp. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Which pub?’

‘The Vine. I told them all this yesterday.’

‘Is that where you met your mates?’

‘I’ve got a lot of mates,’ said Kemp.

‘Really?’

‘And some of them drink at the Vine.’

‘Do they serve food at this pub?’ said Murfin.

Kemp came up on to the platform and stood next to Cooper, though it was more in an effort to get away from Murfin than a desire for companionship. Kemp was an inch or two shorter than Cooper, but he was powerfully built. They both looked through the tailgate at the contents of the Isuzu. There were buckets, sponges, plastic trays of cloths and wash leathers. There were also two rolls of stiff blue plastic sheeting, each about four feet long, with mud stains on their outer surfaces.

‘What do you use the plastic sheets for?’ said Cooper.

‘Standing the ladders on, so they don’t make marks on anybody’s fancy paving, and such.’

‘What time did you get home from the pub on Monday?’

‘When it shut. I said all this.’

‘Did you go out in the car again?’

Kemp said nothing. Cooper could see fresh grazes on his knuckles when he leaned on the car. He was also standing quite close now, and the freezing cold air did wonders for clearing the sinuses and sharpening the sense of smell. Cooper thought of the people who claimed to be able to see auras. Was it possible to smell auras, as well as to see them? If he could see Eddie Kemp’s aura, it would be a sort of bilious green, shot through with yellow streaks, like pea soup flavoured with cinnamon.

‘Did you decide to drive up the A57 with your mates?’ said Cooper.

Kemp still said nothing.

‘Which of your mates were with you? The same ones you met in the Vine? Did you find more than two victims that night? Did something go wrong?’

Kemp began to walk back to his house.

‘Can you recommend a good chippie then?’ said Murfin as he passed.

‘We’re going to have to take your car away to have a look at it, sir,’ Cooper called after him.

Kemp put a hand in his pocket, turned and threw a set of keys on to the concrete platform.

‘Give it a wash, then, while you’re at it,’ he said, and slammed the front door.

Ben Cooper and Gavin Murfin sat in Cooper’s Toyota to wait for the vehicle recovery team to arrive. It was cold, and it was starting to get dark already. Cooper kept the engine running so that they could have the heater on, and wondered what he could do with his time while he waited. He looked at Murfin, but as soon as he’d felt the warmth from the heater, Murfin had put his head back on his seat and closed his eyes. His mouth hung open slightly. Not much hope of conversation, then.

Cooper tried the radio. There was a sociological discussion programme on Radio Four, a phone-in on Radio Sheffield, and pop hits of the 1980s on Peak 107. He poked around among his cassettes and found nothing he hadn’t listened to already in the last few days. Then he remembered the books he had bought from Lawrence Daley, which were still somewhere deep in his poacher’s pocket.

He switched on the courtesy light and flicked through the contents pages of the two books. He quickly found the chapter about the crash of Lancaster SU-V, Sugar Uncle Victor. It was one of many aircraft that had fallen victim to primitive navigation equipment and treacherous weather conditions over the Peak District. Some of them were aircraft the Germans hadn’t been able to shoot down, but which the hills of the Dark Peak had claimed.

Ironically, Mk III Avro Lancaster W5013 had been built locally, by Metropolitan Vickers at their factory in Bamford. So it had started life only a few miles from where it had finished its days. From a recent photograph of the wreckage, he could see there were still several of the larger pieces left – part of the tail, a wing section, and engine casings minus their propellers.

Like Frank Baine, the author of these books had done plenty of research, and the details of SU-V’s crew were comprehensive. As Baine had said, there had been seven men on board the Lancaster – four British RAF men, two Poles and the Canadian pilot, Danny McTeague.

Of the British crew, the bomb aimer and rear gunner, Sergeants Bill Mee and Dick Abbott, had been found dead some distance from the aircraft. The text described them as ‘severely mutilated’, but Cooper recognized the euphemism. The phrase was still used today, in official statements to the press on the victims of serious road accidents or suicides on the railway line. It meant their bodies had been dismembered. The wireless operator, Sergeant Harry Gregory, and the mid-upper gunner, Sergeant Alec Hamilton, had been trapped inside the wreckage and had died in the fire that consumed the central section of the fuselage. Burned beyond recognition, they had been identified by the uniforms under their flying suits, and by the contents of their pockets, after their bodies had been taken to the RAF mortuary at Buxton.

Cooper put the book down for a moment. He wondered whether Alison Morrissey had considered the possibility that one of the bodies had been wrongly identified. Perhaps, after all, her grandfather had died in the crash. All this time, it might have been some other member of the crew they should have been looking for. And he wondered about Pilot Officer Zygmunt Lukasz, the flight engineer, who had survived and was now seventy-eight years old.

Gavin Murfin stirred and grunted in his seat. His eyes opened.

‘Where are we?’ he said.

‘Underbank,’ said Cooper. ‘We’re waiting for the recovery crew.’

‘There’s a good Indian takeaway around here somewhere,’ said Murfin. Then he snorted, and his head fell back again.

Weather conditions and primitive equipment – Cooper supposed that was the standard explanation for many of these incidents. Otherwise, the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor seemed inexplicable – the aircraft was flying much too low, and it was off course. But it was hinted in the book that the reason it was off course was that the skipper had apparently ignored the navigator’s instructions. So was it another example of a pilot caught in the trap between high ground and low cloud, finding mountains suddenly in front of him when he thought he was approaching his home airfield in Nottinghamshire? Or had something else gone wrong?

One of the eye witnesses quoted in the account of the fate of Sugar Uncle Victor was the former RAF mountain rescue man, Walter Rowland, who had also been mentioned by Alison Morrissey. Like Zygmunt Lukasz, he had been unwilling to talk to her. Unwilling, or unable? Rowland was described as being eighteen years old at the time of the crash. After all that time, memories faded. But sometimes there were memories which were too clear for anyone to want them reviving.

‘No sign yet?’ mumbled Murfin.

‘Not yet.’

‘It’s no good, Ben. I’m having curry-flavoured dreams. I’m going to have to go and see if that Indian is open.’

‘Fair enough. I’ll still be here when you get back.’

‘Do you want anything?’

‘Some naan bread.’

‘Is that all? You can’t live on that.’

‘I wasn’t intending to,’ said Cooper.

Murfin slipped out of the car, and Cooper watched him stumble down the street, clinging precariously to the steel handrail to stay on his feet. If he made it back up with a set of foil trays and a bag of naan bread intact, it would be a miracle.

Cooper looked at his mobile phone. He was trying to remember whether Frank Baine had said where Alison Morrissey was staying, but he couldn’t recall. There weren’t all that many hotels in Edendale, and he could easily give Baine a call in the morning to find out. He might also ask the journalist for Walter Rowland’s address.

Then Cooper laughed to himself. He was thinking all these things as if he were intending to investigate the fifty-seven-year-old mystery, which was ridiculous. The Chief had already sent the Canadian woman packing, and quite rightly. There was certainly no time to be spared on pointless sidelines, by himself or anyone else. He had more than enough to do. So what use would it be for him to know where Morrissey was staying? Why should he need to visit Walter Rowland? No reason at all.

Thinking he had finished the chapter on Sugar Uncle Victor, Cooper turned the page. He found himself looking at photographs of the wreckage taken shortly after the crash. Sections of broken fuselage lay in the snow, being examined by policemen and servicemen in long overcoats. The letters SU-V were clearly visible on the airframe in one shot. There was no sign of Irontongue Hill in the background, but the photographer had provided a distant glimpse over the moors to a glitter of water on Blackbrook Reservoir, which established the location beyond doubt.

Then, with the next series of photos, the story suddenly took on a human dimension. The first picture was a ‘team line-up’ of the Lancaster crew – seven young men dressed in Irving suits and flying boots, with their fur collars turned up and the wires from their headsets dangling round their shoulders. They were standing in front of the fuselage of an aircraft, which was probably Uncle Victor himself. The sun was low and falling directly on the men, making their eyes narrow and their faces pale, like miners who had just emerged from underground into the light. They were managing smiles for the camera, though they looked exhausted.

Cooper thought the comparison to miners wasn’t a bad one, because working in dangerous conditions forged a bond between men that was hard to break. These young airmen had flown thousands of miles in cramped and difficult conditions night after night, heading into hostile territory, with no idea whether they would make it back to base. And not one of them looked older than his early twenties.

There was a picture of the ground crew and armourers getting the aircraft ready for its mission. This was definitely Uncle Victor, judging from the pawnbroker’s sign painted on the nose of the Lancaster – ‘Uncle’ being the common euphemism in those days for a pawnbroker. He noticed that the ground crew barely seemed to have a standard uniform – they wore leather jerkins, sea-boot socks, gumboots, battledress, oilskins, tunics, scarves, mittens, gloves, balaclavas.

On the facing page was the most atmospheric picture of all. It had been taken inside the aircraft, and it was grainy and spattered with white specks where there had been dust on the negative. The curved interior structure of the aircraft could be seen, and the lettering on an Elsan chemical toilet. In the foreground, a young airman was half-turned towards the camera. His sergeant’s stripes were clearly visible on his arm, and he wore a leather flying helmet and the straps of a parachute harness over his uniform, so he must have been preparing for take-off.

But the airman was surely no more than a boy. There was no caption to say who he was, and it was difficult to identify him as one of the men on the facing page. The photographs must have been taken at a different time, because this young man had a faint moustache, while the only airman in the group photograph with a moustache was identified as the pilot, Danny McTeague. This wasn’t McTeague. This young man had a prominent nose and a narrow face, and a small lock of dark hair that had escaped from under his flying helmet on to his forehead. Cooper decided he must be Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner. He had been eighteen years old, and the crew had called him Lofty because he was only five foot six inches tall.

Cooper stared at the photo for a long time, forgetting to read about the many other aircraft that had come to grief in the Dark Peak. He felt as if the young airman were somehow communicating with him across the distance of more than five decades. It didn’t seem all that long ago that he too had been the same age as this airman. Cooper could sense himself slipping into the young man’s place in the aircraft. He could feel the straps of the parachute over his shoulders and the rough uniform against his skin, hear the roaring of the four Merlin engines and feel the vibration of the primitive machine that would hurtle him into the air. He was eighteen years old, and he was frightened.

Ben Cooper was hardly aware of the vehicle recovery crew negotiating their truck into Beeley Street with lights flashing and diesel engine throbbing. His attention was taken up by trying to analyse his feelings about the photograph, so that he was hardly aware, even, of Gavin Murfin tapping on the window, unable to open the door because of the leaking trays he was balancing.

When Murfin was back in the car, it immediately began to fill with smells of curry and boiled rice. The steam from the trays fogged the windows, so that Beeley Street and Eddie Kemp’s Isuzu gradually vanished in a fog.

‘Here’s your naan bread,’ said Murfin. ‘Dip in, if you want.’

But the naan bread sat in his lap unopened, the grease gradually soaking through the paper on to his coat.

Cooper finally realized that it was the look in the young man’s eyes that was completely different from the group picture; it was a look which made him unrecognizable from the line-up of smiling heroes. It was the blank, empty stare of a man who had no idea whether he would be coming back to his home base that night. The young man’s stare spoke of resignation at the prospect of sudden death as a German night-fighter raked Uncle Victor with machine-gun fire, or the Lancaster’s engines failed and they were forced to ditch in the icy North Sea. According to the text, Lancasters were notoriously difficult to escape from when they were in the water.

In fact, that haunted look and the grey, grainy quality of the photograph made the airman appear almost as though he wasn’t there at all. He might have been no more than a faded image superimposed on the interior of the aircraft, the result of an accidental double exposure on the film.

To Ben Cooper, it seemed that the photographer had captured a moment of presentiment and foreboding, a glimpse into the darkness of the near future. Sergeant Dick Abbott, only eighteen years old, looked as if he were already a ghost.

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