Read the book: «Blood on the Tongue»
STEPHEN BOOTH
Blood on the Tongue
Dedication
For Eric Jefferson
Epigraph
Lines from ‘Won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise?’, a rock’n’roll classic recorded by Frankie Ford, reproduced by permission of Sea Cruise Productions, Inc.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
It was an hour before dawn when Detective Constable Ben Cooper first began to get the news. An hour before dawn should be the dead hour. But in the bedrooms of third-floor flats on the council estates, or in stone-built semis in the hillside crescents, there were people blinking in bewilderment at an alien world of deadened sounds and inverted patterns of dark and light. Cooper knew all about the hour before dawn, and it was no time of day to be on the streets. But this was January, and dawn came late in Edendale. And snow had turned the morning into shuddering chaos.
Cooper pulled up the collar of his waxed coat to meet the rim of his cap and brushed away the flecks of snow that had caught in the stubble on his jawline where he had rushed shaving that morning. He had walked down one of the alleyways from the market square, crunching through fresh snow, slithering on the frozen cobbles, passing from light to dark as he moved out of the range of the street lamps. But he had stepped out of the alley into a noisy snarl of traffic that had choked the heart of Edendale and brought its snow-covered streets to a halt.
On Hollowgate, lines of frustrated motorists sat in their cars, boot to bonnet in clouds of exhaust fumes. Many of them had been driving almost blind, their windscreens covered in half-scraped snow or streaks of brown grit that their frozen wipers couldn’t clear. The throbbing of engines filled the street, echoing from shop facades and the upper storeys of nineteenth-century buildings. Headlights pinned drivers and their passengers in cruel shadows, like silhouettes on a shooting range.
‘We have a serious double assault, believed to be racially motivated. Approximately zero two hundred hours. Underbank area.’
The voice from his radio sounded alien and remote. It was the crackly voice of a tired operator in a control room with no windows, where they would never know if it was still snowing or the sun had risen. Not unless somebody called in and gave them a weather report. We have sporadic outbreaks of violence. Occasional blood on the streets. It’s an hour to go before dawn.
Cooper stepped off the edge of the pavement and straight into six inches of wet slush. It went over the top of his shoe and turned his foot into a frozen sponge. Since it was only seven o’clock and still completely dark, it was going to be a long, uncomfortable shift unless he got to his locker at E Division headquarters in West Street pretty soon for a change of socks.
‘Two male victims received multiple injuries and are described as being in a serious condition.’
Cooper worked his way between the gridlocked cars to reach the far side of Hollowgate. Around him, fumes rose from the shadows and hung under the lamps, trapped in the street by the freezing temperature and the stillness of the air. They created a grey blanket that absorbed the light and swirled slowly in front of black Georgian windows sparkling with frost.
‘Four suspects are currently being sought. All are white males, aged between twenty-five and forty-five. Local accents. One suspect has been identified as Edward Kemp, 6 Beeley Street, Edendale. Thirty-five years of age. Hair short and dark brown, approximately six feet tall.’
The weather changed so quickly in the Peak District that snowfall always seemed to take motorists in the town by surprise. Yet within a few miles of Edendale all the minor roads and passes would still be closed and outlying villages would be cut off until the snowploughs reached them. They might be isolated until tomorrow, or the next day.
Cooper had set off early because of the weather. On his way in from Bridge End Farm, as he steered his Toyota into the tracks left by the first snowplough, the hills around him had been glittering and pristine, like huge wedding cakes covered in sugar icing, lurking in the darkness. But it meant he had missed his breakfast. Now what he needed was a couple of cheese toasties and a black coffee. He was tempted by the lights of the Starlight Café, reflecting off the banks of untouched snow.
‘Edward Kemp is described as powerfully built, with a distinctive body odour. Last seen wearing a dark overcoat and a hat. No further description available at this time.’
Cooper peered into the café. Behind the condensation on the plate-glass window there were figures wrapped in coats and anoraks, scarves and gloves, and a variety of hats made of fur, leather and wool. They looked like models posing for an Arctic explorers’ clothing catalogue.
‘All suspects could be in possession of baseball bats or similar weapons. Approach with caution.’
Now he could almost taste the coffee; he could feel the crunch of the toasted teacake and the clinging softness of the melted cheese. Saliva began to seep on to his tongue. Cooper pulled back his glove to look at his watch. Plenty of time.
While his nose was pressed close to the window, a hand came up and wiped away some of the condensation. A woman’s face appeared, her eyes wide with outrage. She mouthed an obscenity and raised two fingers that poked from a blue woollen mitten. Cooper pulled away. There would be no toasties this morning, and no coffee.
‘Control, I need a car outside the Starlight Café in Hollowgate.’
‘With you in two minutes, DC Cooper … Is it still dark out there?’
‘It’s an hour before dawn,’ said Cooper. ‘What do you think?’
It was the ice and the scouring wind that created the worst of Marie Tennent’s delusions. They were like daggers thrust into her brain, plunged in so deeply that their edges scraped together in the middle of her skull, filling her head with noise.
For the last hour before she died, Marie believed she could hear music wailing in the wind, the hissing of wheels on an icy road, and the muttering of voices deep in the snow. Her mind struggled to interpret the sounds, to make sense of what was happening to her. But the music was meaningless and the voices distorted, like the babbling of a badly tuned radio when its batteries were almost dead.
Marie lay amid the smells of bruised snow and damp air, with the taste of her own blood in her mouth and her body a bewildering pattern of cold spots and numbness and pain. Her arms and legs were burning where the snow had melted into her clothes and frozen again. And the ache in her head had flowered into a savage, unbearable agony.
It was because of the pain that Marie knew, in a lucid spell, that the sounds she could hear were caused by the tiny bones of her inner ear shrinking and twisting as they froze. They were grating against each other as they contracted, creating an internal whisper and mumble, a parody of sound that mocked her slow withdrawal from the boundaries of reality. It was a disturbing and inarticulate farewell, a last baffling message from the world. It was the only accompaniment to her dying.
The sun had dropped over the edge of Irontongue Hill, so that the snow-covered moor was in shadow, and the temperature was dropping fast. Marie felt the faint, cold kiss of snowflakes on her face. Yet the top of the hill was still touched by the last of the sun, and the snow on the rocks was turned blue by the light. Irontongue itself was hidden from her, its fissured shaft of dark gritstone poking southwards over the valley. But she caught a glint of water to the north, where Blackbrook Reservoir lay in a hollow of the moors.
The last thing Marie saw before her eyelids closed was a thin, dark shape that sliced the skyline on the hill. It seemed to cut into the grey belly of cloud like the blade of a razor. Her mind clutched at the thought of it as she drew together the dregs of her willpower to fight the pain. In the end, that crumbling memorial in the middle of the snowfield had not been the place she was destined to die. It was for men who had lived and died together. It was quite a different thing to die alone.
A series of out-of-focus slides seemed to flicker across a screen in her mind. They were gone too quickly for her to puzzle out their significance, though she knew they were connected to her life. Each one had vague figures that swung and jerked against a dark background. Each brought with it a momentary burst of smells and tastes and sounds, a kaleidoscope of sensations that dragged all the emotions out of her and ripped them away before she could recognize what they were.
There was a voice, too – the voice of a real, remembered person, not a phantom of the snow. ‘We’ll be together,’ it said. ‘Are you happy?’ it said.
And then there were just three final words. They came amid an eruption of intolerable pain, the smell of dirty sheets and the sound of scuttling feet above her head. The same voice, but not the same.
‘It’s too late,’ it said.
And Marie Tennent would never see the dawn.
Ben Cooper entered the café. It was full of customers, who sat half-asleep over their mugs of tea, their brains kept barely alert by the tendrils of steam they breathed in through their noses. As Cooper stamped his feet to shake off the snow, a few faces turned away from him, as usual.
One man sat alone near the counter. He was wearing a dark overcoat and a Manchester United hat. Cooper moved up behind him until he was close enough to recognize the smell. The man had an odour about him that identified him against the background of bacon and fried eggs, even among the wet-dog smells from sodden coats and muddy floor tiles.
Cooper moved slightly so that he could see the man’s face.
‘Morning, Eddie,’ he said.
The customer nodded cautiously. It was the best that Cooper could expect, in the circumstances. Eddie Kemp was well known to most of the officers at E Division headquarters. He had visited the custody suite and interview rooms there many times in the past. These days, though, he visited other parts of the West Street station, too, if only from the outside. Eddie Kemp had started a window-cleaning business.
‘Bad weather for business, isn’t it?’ said Cooper.
‘Bloody awful. My chamois leathers are frozen solid. Like dried-up cow pats, they are.’
Kemp didn’t look too good today. His eyes were red and tired, as if he’d been up all night. The Starlight opened at five o’clock for the postal workers starting their shift at the sorting office, for the bus drivers and railway staff, and even a few police officers. Kemp looked as though he had been here since the doors opened that morning.
‘Put your hands on the table, please,’ said Cooper.
Kemp stared at him sourly. ‘I suppose you’re going to spoil my breakfast,’ he said.
‘I’m afraid you’re under arrest.’
The other man sighed and held out his wrists. ‘They only got what they deserved,’ he said.
Yes, it was the sound of feet. Feet creaking around her in the snow. Marie Tennent’s heart lurched painfully against her diaphragm, and a spurt of adrenalin ran through her muscles like acid. She was sure she could hear the footsteps of human rescuers, as well as those of something quicker and lighter that skittered across the surface of the snow. She became convinced that a search dog had sniffed her out, and that arms were about to pull her from the snow and wrap her in a thermal blanket, that friendly hands would bring warmth to her skin with their touch and reassuring voices would ease the agony in her ears.
But the footsteps passed her by. She couldn’t cry out for help, because her reflexes failed and her body had no strength left to react. Her lips and tongue refused to obey the screaming in her head.
Then Marie knew she was wrong. The feet she heard were those of wolves or some other wild predators that lived on the moors. She could sense them creeping towards her and scuttling away, dragging their hairy bellies through the wet snow, eager to claim a share of her body. She pictured them drooling in desperation to tear off chunks of her cooling flesh with their teeth, yet afraid of her lingering smell of humanity. The faint tingling on her cheeks and in the folds of her eyes told her the predators were close enough for her to feel their breath on her face. If she had opened her eyes, she knew she would have found herself staring into their jaws, into the drip of their saliva and the whiteness of their teeth. But she could no longer open her eyes; the tears had frozen her eyelids shut.
The fear passed, as Marie’s brain lost its grasp on the thought and it went slipping away. The pictures were still in her mind, but the cold had drained all the colours from them. The dyes had melted and run, leaving washed-out greys and dark corners, bleeding the meaning from her memories. She could no longer capture the sounds and scents and tastes, no longer even keep hold of that one overwhelming emotion which had swollen so large that it filled her mind, but which now wriggled away from her grasp. Was it grief, anger, fear, shame? Or was it just the same unnameable longing that had haunted her all her life?
Marie had forgotten how she came to be lying in the snow, with the pain in her head and the blood in her mouth. But she knew there was a reason she ought to get up and go home. And she knew it had something to do with Sugar Uncle Victor. But the fingers of ice were squeezing out her consciousness, so that she would soon know nothing at all.
Marie was unaware of her bladder failing and releasing a warm stream that thawed a ragged patch in the snow. Soon, the physical sensations stopped altogether. As Marie’s skin froze and her blood thickened to an ooze, even the illusory sounds retreated beyond the reach of her senses. The footsteps faded and the voices fell silent, because there was no one left to hear them. Her heart slowed until its valves were left fluttering uselessly, pumping no blood through her body.
Finally, Marie Tennent existed only as a speck like a grain of sand floating in an oily residue of memories. Then they, too, swirled away into a hole in the back of her brain, and were gone.
For the fifth time, Ben Cooper turned to peer towards the corner of Hollowgate and High Street. The traffic lights had changed to green, but a queue of traffic was stuck in the middle of the junction.
‘Where’s the car?’ said Cooper, feeling for the radio in his pocket, wondering whether it was worth worsening the mood of the control-room operators at West Street with a complaint about somebody else’s slow response. ‘It should have been here by now.’
Eddie Kemp was wearing black wellies, with woollen socks rolled over the top of them, and his overcoat was long enough to have come back into fashion two or three times since he first bought it from the army surplus store, probably around 1975. Cooper thought he looked warm and comfortable. And no doubt his feet were dry.
‘We could flag down a taxi, I suppose,’ said Kemp. ‘Or we could catch a bus. Have you got the right fare on you?’
‘Shut up,’ said Cooper.
Down the road, traffic was still moving on High Street. Cars crawled through white flurries that drifted across their headlights. An old lady in fur-lined boots picked her way over the snow in the gutter. For a moment, Cooper thought of his own mother. He had promised himself he would talk to her tonight, and make sure that she understood he was serious about moving out of Bridge End Farm. He would call in to see her when he finally went off duty.
‘I’m not walking all the way up that hill,’ said Kemp. ‘It’s not safe in these conditions. I might slip and injure myself. Then I could sue you. I could take the police for thousands of pounds.’
Cooper wished he could distance himself from Kemp’s powerful smell, but he daren’t loosen his grip or shift from his eight-o’clock escort position at his prisoner’s left elbow.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘We’re waiting for the car.’
He was aware of customers coming out of the café now and then, the doorbell clanging behind them. No doubt each one stopped for a moment in the doorway, staring at the two men on the kerb. Cooper shifted his weight to maintain his grip. He felt the slush in his left shoe squelch as he put his foot down.
‘Maybe the car’s broken down,’ said Kemp. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t start. These cold mornings play hell with cheap batteries, you know.’
‘They’ll be here soon.’
On the far side of Hollowgate, shopkeepers were clearing the snow from the pavement in front of their shops, shovelling it into ugly heaps in the gutter. The beauty of snow vanished as soon as it was touched by the first footstep or the first spray of grit from a highways wagon. By daylight, it would be tarnished beyond recognition.
‘I have to tell you I’ve got a delicate respiratory system,’ said Kemp. ‘Very susceptible to the cold and damp, it is. I might need medical attention if I’m kept outside in these conditions too long.’
‘If you don’t keep quiet, I’m going to get annoyed.’
‘Bloody hell, what are you going to do? Shove a snowball down my neck?’
A pair of flashing blue lights lit up the front of the town hall in the market square, just past the High Street junction. Cooper and Kemp both looked towards the lights. It was an ambulance. The driver was struggling to make his way through the lines of crawling cars.
‘That’s clever,’ said Kemp. ‘Sending for the ambulance first, before you beat me up.’
‘Shut up,’ said Cooper.
‘If you took the cuffs off for a bit, I could use my mobile to phone the missus. She could get the sledge out and hitch up the dogs. They’re only corgis, but it’d be quicker than this performance.’
Behind them, somebody laughed. Cooper looked over his shoulder. Three men were standing in front of the window of the café. leaning on the plate glass, with their hands in the pockets of their anoraks and combat jackets. They wore heavy boots, a couple of them with steel toecaps, like the safety boots worn by builders in case they dropped bricks or scaffolding on their feet. Three pairs of eyes met Cooper’s, with challenging stares. Four white males, aged between twenty-five and forty-five. Could be in possession of baseball bats or similar weapons. Approach with caution.
Finally, Cooper’s radio crackled.
‘Sorry, DC Cooper,’ said the voice of the controller. ‘Your response unit has been delayed by a gridlock situation on Hulley Road. They’ll be with you as soon as possible, but they say it could be five minutes yet.’
One of the men leaning against the window began to form a snowball between his gloved fists, squeezing it into the shape of a hand grenade with short, hard slaps.
‘Damn,’ said Cooper.
Kemp turned his head and smiled. ‘Do you reckon we could go back inside and have another cup of tea?’ he said. ‘Only I think it’s starting to snow again. We could freeze to death out here.’
By morning, Marie Tennent’s body had stiffened into a foetal position and was covered in frost, like a supermarket chicken. Ice crystals had formed in the valves of her heart and in her blood vessels; her fingers and toes and the exposed parts of her face had turned white and brittle from frostbite.
Nothing had disturbed Marie’s body during the night – not even the mountain hare that had pattered across her legs and squatted on her shoulder to scratch at patches of its fur. The hare was still brown and ragged, instead of in its winter camouflage white. It defecated on Marie’s neck and left a scattering of fur, dead skin cells and dying fleas for the pathologist to find. For a long while afterwards, Marie lay waiting, just as she had waited in life.
Later in the morning, a patrolling Peak Park Ranger almost found Marie, but he stopped short of the summit when he saw more snow coming towards him in the blue-grey clouds rolling across Bleaklow Moor. He turned back to the shelter of the briefing centre in the valley, retracing his own footsteps, failing to notice the smaller tracks that ended suddenly a few yards up the hill.
When the fresh snowfall came, it quickly covered Marie’s body, gently smoothing her out and softening her outline. By the end of the afternoon, she was no more than a minor bump in the miles of unending whiteness that lay on the moors above the Eden Valley.
That night, the temperature dropped to minus sixteen on the exposed snowfields. Now there was no hurry for Marie to be found. She would keep.
2
Detective Sergeant Diane Fry knew she was going to die buried under an avalanche one day – an avalanche of pointless paperwork. It would be a tragic accident, resulting from the collapse of a single unstable box file under the weight of witness statements piled on top of it. The landslide would carry away her desk and swivel chair and smash them against the wall of the CID room like matchsticks. It would take days for the rescue teams to locate her body. When they did, she would be crushed beyond recognition, her bones flattened in the same way that the reports on her desk were even now pressing down on her brain.
The piles of paper reminded her of something. She turned her head and looked out of the window, squinting to see past the condensation that had streaked the panes. Oh yes. Snow. Outside, the stuff was piled as high and as white as the paperwork. She couldn’t decide which was worse.
Then she felt the touch of warm air. It came from the noisy fan heater that she had stolen from the scenes of crime department that morning before the SOCOs arrived for work. The paperwork was just about preferable. At least it meant she could stay in the warmth for a while. Only masochists and obsessives chose to wander the streets of Edendale on a morning like this. Ben Cooper, for example. No doubt Cooper was somewhere out there even now, conducting a one-man crusade to clean up crime, despite the icicles hanging off his ears.
Soon, scenes of crime officers would be scouring the building for their missing heater. Eventually, she would have to give it up, unless she could find somewhere to hide it when she heard them coming. You could always tell when the SOCOs were coming by the sound of their grumbling. But the heater was the only source of warmth in the room. Fry put a hand to the radiator on the wall. It was warm, but only faintly. It felt like a body that hadn’t quite cooled but had already gone into rigor mortis. No need to call in the pathologist for a verdict on that one. Dead for two hours, at least.
She sniffed. A whiff of sausages and tomato sauce trickled down the room and settled on a burglary file that lay open on her desk. It was the sort of smell that was responsible for turning the walls that strange shade of green and for killing the flies whose bodies had lain grilling for months inside the covers of the fluorescent lights.
‘Gavin,’ she said.
‘Mmm?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Mmm-mmph-mm.’
‘I know you’re there somewhere – I can smell you.’
A head appeared above a desk. It had sandy hair, a pink face, and dabs of tomato sauce on its lower lip. DC Gavin Murfin was the current bane of Diane Fry’s life – less temperamental than Ben Cooper, but far more prone to dripping curry sauce on the floor of her car. Murfin was overweight, too, and a man in his forties really ought to think about what he was doing to his heart.
‘I was having some breakfast, like,’ he said.
‘Can’t you do it in the canteen, Gavin?’
‘No.’
Fry sighed. ‘Oh, I forgot –’
‘We don’t have a canteen any more. We have to make our own arrangements. It says so on all the noticeboards. Twenty-two years I’ve been stationed here, and now they take the canteen away.’
‘So where did you get the sausage bap?’
‘The baker’s on West Street,’ said Murfin. ‘You should have said if you wanted one.’
‘Not likely. Do you realize how much cholesterol there is in that thing? Enough to turn your arteries solid. In another five minutes, you’ll be dead.’
‘Aye, with a bit of luck.’
The smell of fried meat was doing strange things to Fry’s stomach. It was clenching and twitching in revulsion, as if food were something alien and disgusting to it.
‘There’s garlic in that sausage, too,’ she said.
‘Yes, it’s their special.’
Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens opened the door and seemed to be about to speak to Fry. He paused, came in, and looked around. He sniffed.
‘Tomato sauce? Garlic sausage?’
‘Mmm,’ said Murfin, wiping his mouth with a sheet from a message pad. ‘Breakfast, sir.’
‘Mind you don’t drop any on those files, that’s all, Gavin. Last time you did that, the CPS thought we were sending them real bloodstains, just to make a point that we had sweated blood over the case.’
Fry looked at Murfin. He was smiling. He was happy. She had noticed that food did that for some people. Also DI Hitchens was looking a little less smartly dressed these days, a little heavier around the waist. It was four or five months since Hitchens had set up home with his girlfriend, the nurse. It was depressingly predictable how soon a man let himself go once he got a whiff of domestic life.
‘I only wanted to tell you Ben Cooper has called in,’ said the DI.
‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ said Fry. ‘He’s joining the sick brigade.’ She looked at the empty desks in front of her. With leave, courses, abstractions and sickness, the CID office was starting to look like the home stand at Edendale Football Club. ‘What is it with Ben? Foot and mouth? Bubonic plague?’
‘No. To be honest, I don’t remember Ben ever having a day off sick in his life.’
‘He can’t get into work because of the snow, then. Well, it’s his own fault for living in the back of beyond.’
‘That’s why he bought that four-wheel drive jeep thing,’ said Hitchens. ‘It gets him through where other people get stuck, he says.’
‘So what’s the problem?’ said Fry impatiently.
‘No problem. He’s made an arrest on the way in.’
‘What?’
‘He collared one of the double assault suspects. Apparently, Cooper came into town early and called in for the morning bulletins on the way. He was intending to stop for a coffee and found Kemp in the Starlight Café, so he made the arrest. Good work, eh? That’s the way to start the day.’
‘That’s Ben, all right,’ said Murfin. ‘Never off duty, that lad. He can’t even forget the job when he’s having breakfast. Personally, it’d give me indigestion.’
‘It isn’t being conscientious that gives you indigestion, Gavin,’ said Fry.
‘Watch it. You’ll upset Oliver.’
Oliver was the rubber lobster that sat on Murfin’s desk. At a push of a button, it sang extracts from old pop songs with a vaguely nautical theme. ‘Sailing’, ‘Octopus’s Garden’, ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’. One day, Fry was going to make it into lobster paste and feed it to Murfin in a sandwich.
‘Look at that weather,’ said Hitchens. ‘Just what we need.’
Fry stared out of the window again. The wind was blowing little flurries of snow off the neighbouring roofs. They hit the panes with wet splatters, then slid down the glass, smearing the grime on the outside. She couldn’t remember it ever snowing back home in Birmingham, not really. At least, it never seemed to have stuck when it landed; it certainly hadn’t built up in knee-high drifts. Maybe it had been something to do with the heat rising from the great sprawl of dual carriageways and high-rise flats she had worked in, the comforting warmth of civilization. Her previous service in the West Midlands was a memory that she almost cherished now, whenever she looked out at the primitive arctic waste she had condemned herself to. She had left Birmingham without a farewell to her colleagues. She might as well have said: ‘I’m going out now. I may be some time.’
‘Well, there’s one thing to be said in its favour,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘At least the snow will keep the crime rate down.’
And somewhere under the mountains of paper, Diane Fry’s telephone rang.
Inside Grace Lukasz’s bungalow on the outskirts of Edendale, the central heating was turned up full in every room. Ever since the accident, Grace had been unable to bear the cold. Now, even in summer, she insisted on keeping the windows and doors closed, in case there was a draught. These days, her immobility meant that she felt the chill more than most, and she could not tolerate discomfort. She saw no reason why she should.
This morning Grace had been up and about early, as usual. She had gone immediately to adjust the thermostat in the cupboard in the hallway, and had spent her time gazing with some satisfaction at the outside world beyond her windows, where her neighbours in Woodland Crescent were turning white with cold as they scraped the ice from their cars or slid and stumbled on the slippery pavements. Once, a woman from across the road had fallen flat on her back on her driveway, her handbag and her shopping flying everywhere. It had made Grace laugh, for a while.
But now the stuffy heat in the bungalow caused her husband to frown and turn pink in the face the moment he arrived home from his night duty at the hospital, and it had spoiled Grace’s mood. Peter stamped his feet on the mat and threw his overcoat on the stand. Grace wanted to ask him her question straight away, right there by the door, but he wouldn’t meet her eye, and he brushed past her chair to get to the lounge door. With sharp tugs of her wrists, she backed and turned in the hallway, her left-hand wheel leaving one more scuff mark on the skirting board. Peter had left the door open for her from habit and she followed right behind him, glaring at his back, angry with him for walking away from her. He should know, after all this time, how much it infuriated her.
‘Did you phone the police?’ she said, more sharply now than she had intended to speak to him.
‘No, I didn’t.’
Grace glowered at her husband. But she said nothing, making the effort to keep her thoughts to herself. She knew him well enough to see that no purpose would be served by pressing him too hard. He would only say she was nagging him, and he would set his face in the opposite direction, just to demonstrate that he was his own man, that he could not be bullied by his wife. Sometimes he could be so stubborn. He was like an obstinate old dog that had to be coaxed with a bone.
‘Well, I don’t suppose it would make any difference,’ she said.
‘No.’
Grace watched him wander off towards the sofa, tugging his tie loose. Within a few minutes he would have the TV remote control in his hand and his mind would be distracted by some inane quiz show. Peter always claimed that he needed to turn off his mind when he got home from a night at the hospital, that his brain was exhausted by the stress of his work. But it was never acknowledged that she might need to turn off from the things that had plagued her mind all day. No matter what she did, there was far too much time for brooding. She had been used to looking forward to Peter’s return home as something to occupy her mind, but these days it never seemed to work.
Peter had brought with him an odour of cold and damp from outside. The smell was on his coat and in his hair, and there had been snow on the shoes that he had left on the wet doormat. For the past few hours, the only thing Grace had been able to smell was the scorching of dust on the radiators, the invisible dust that gathered behind them where she couldn’t reach to clean. A few minutes before he came home, she had sprayed the rooms with air freshener. But still he had brought in this unpleasant cold smell, and the world outside had entered the bungalow with him.
‘You know it wouldn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘You’re expecting too much, Grace. You’re getting things all out of proportion again.’
‘Oh, of course.’
She swung the wheelchair towards the centre of the room and lowered her head to rub at her limp legs. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, waiting for a sign that he was weakening. Although he was stubborn, he was susceptible to the right tactics, like any man.
Peter threw himself on the sofa and dug the remote from under a cushion. The set came on with a sizzle of static. There was news on – leading with a report on the effects of the bad weather across the country. Shots of children sledging and making snowmen were interspersed with clips showing lines of stranded cars, airport lounges packed with frustrated holidaymakers, railway travellers staring morosely at information boards, and snowploughs piling up snow twelve feet high by the side of a road in Scotland.
‘Where’s Dad?’ asked Peter.
‘He’s with his photographs again,’ she said.
‘It’s been a bad night, Grace. We had two young men brought in who’d taken a terrible beating with baseball bats.’
‘I’m sorry.’
They sat for a few moments in silence. Grace could tell from the angle of her husband’s head that he wasn’t taking in the news on the TV any more than she was herself. She waited, aware of the power of silence, calming her breathing until she could hear the ticking of the radiators and the sound of a car engine on the crescent. There was a faint rustling of feathers from the far corner, where their blue and green parrot stirred in its cage, perhaps sensing the atmosphere in the room. It turned a black eye on the couple, then snapped at its bars with a sudden, angry click of its beak.
‘If you must know,’ said Peter, ‘I think he’s gone back.’
Grace felt her shoulders go rigid. ‘Gone back where?’ she said, though she knew perfectly well what he meant.
‘Where do you think? To London.’
‘To her?’
‘Yes, to his wife. She has a name.’
‘Andrew said she’s in America, at a cousin’s funeral.’ Grace slapped one of her knees as if it had offended her by its inactivity. ‘I’ve tried to phone him again, Peter. He’s not answering.’
‘We’ll just have to wait until we hear from him, Grace. What else can we do?’
Grace manoeuvred alongside one of the armchairs, feeling the wheels slip into well-used grooves in the pile of the carpet. Peter made no move to help her, and he didn’t even look to see how she was coping. She was glad he didn’t do that any more. Once, she had lost her temper at his clumsiness and had pushed him roughly away. He had said nothing, but she knew he had been shocked and hurt by her violence. Her legs might be useless, but her hands and wrists were strong.
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ she said. ‘Why should he arrive out of the blue like that and then disappear again so suddenly, without a word?’
‘There are a lot of things Andrew never got round to telling us about his life.’
‘In a day? He didn’t have time. A day isn’t enough to make up for five missing years.’
‘Grace, he has an entirely separate life of his own. You can’t dwell on the past for ever.’
She had heard this too often. It had become his mantra, as if it might become true if he repeated it often enough. Grace knew it wasn’t true. If you had no present and no future, where was there to live but the past?
‘But he’s our son,’ she said. ‘My baby.’
‘I know, I know.’
Grace knew she was reaching him. She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘My dear Piotr …’
But she heard Peter sigh and watched him finger a button on the remote. A weather forecast was on the other channel. An attractive young woman stood in front of a map scattered with fluffy white clouds that seemed to be dropping white blobs all over northern England. In a moment, Grace would have to go back to the kitchen to make her husband a pot of tea, or his routine would be upset and he would sulk for the rest of the day.
‘There’s a lot more snow on the way,’ he said.
The moment had passed. Grace lifted her hands to her face and sniffed the faint coating of oil on her fingers. The oil and the dark smudges on her hands were the constant signs of her reliance on machinery, of her enforced seclusion from the rest of humanity. She was a great believer in turning your disadvantages into something positive. But sometimes the positive was hard to find.
‘Oh, wonderful,’ she said. ‘That’s just what we want. More snow. More excuses for not finding him. Everyone will say they’re too busy with other problems. Then they’ll say it’s too late, that we’ll have to accept the fact he’s gone.’
Grace stared at the icon of the Madonna in the alcove above the TV set. Tonight, she would pray again for their son. And she would force Peter to pray too.
‘It causes a lot of problems, does snow,’ said Peter. ‘More than people think.’
But on the TV screen, the weather girl smiled out at them cheerfully, as if she thought snow was absolutely the best thing she could imagine in the whole world.
The Derbyshire County Council snowplough was brand new. It was a yellow Seddon Atkinson, with a bright steel blade, and its automatic hoppers could spray grit at passing cars like machine-gun fire. That morning, its crew was working to clear the main Snake Pass route to Glossop and the borders of Greater Manchester, battling through ever deeper drifts of snow as they climbed away from Ladybower Reservoir, with the River Ashop below them and the Roman road above them, skirting the lower slopes of Bleaklow and Irontongue Hill.
Trevor Bradley was the driver’s mate this morning. He didn’t like snowplough work, and he certainly didn’t like getting up in the middle of the night to do it. Even worse, they had been sent to the Snake Pass, which was as desolate a spot as you could find yourself in, when every other bugger was still at home in his bed. They had left the last houses far behind already, and on these long, unlit stretches of road there was nothing to be seen but their own headlights and endless banks of snow in front and on both sides. Bradley was glad when the driver had stopped for a few minutes at the isolated Snake Inn, where the owners had filled their vacuum flasks with coffee and given them hot pork pies from the microwave. The snowplough men were popular at the Snake, because on days like this they made all the difference between customers getting through to the inn and no one getting in or out at all.
A few minutes after re-starting, the snowplough had reached the stretch of road through Lady Clough and the Snake Plantations. Here, the hill became steeper and the headlights fell on even deeper drifts, where the wind had brought the snow down from the moors and blown it round the edge of the woods, sculpting it into strange and unlikely shapes.
Just past the last car park, before the end of the woods, Bradley thought he felt the impact of something solid that dragged along the road surface for a few yards under the blade of the plough. Then he saw a dark shape that was briefly revealed in a shower of snow as the blade lifted it and pushed it into the banking. It was followed by the impression of a man’s face hovering near his window for a second, then falling away again. It had been a very white face, quite unreal, and could only have been a trick of the snow and the poor light.
‘We hit something, Jack,’ he said, sucking the last of the warm jelly from the pork pie off his fingers.
‘No kidding?’
Jack stopped the engine, and they both got down. The driver seemed to be more worried about damage to the equipment than anything else. He’d told Trevor that people dumped loads of builder’s rubbish in the lay-bys, and stuff like breeze-block and broken bricks could easily chip the blade. The plough was the latest investment by the highways department, and he was conscious of his responsibility for its pristine condition.
Meanwhile, Bradley poked around a bit by the side of the road, scraped some snow away with his gloved hands, and finally lifted a blue overnight bag out of the drift. The bag was empty. He could tell by the weight of it.
‘That’s careless,’ he said.
He pushed a bit more snow aside. It looked as though the clothes had spilled out of the bag on to the roadside, because there was a shoe lying in the snow. It had a smart black leather toe, with a pattern printed on the upper. It wasn’t a shoe anybody would have been walking in, of course, so it must have come from the luggage. Probably it had been some of the clothes that he had seen in the headlights – a white shirt, perhaps, crumpled into the illusion of a human face as it was tossed out of the bag by the impact of the plough blade.
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 had 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 had removed the entire front wing of a Volkswagen Beetle before they had 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 had 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 had 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.
3
A pair of shoes stood outside each door in the bare corridor. There were a set of trainers with thick rubber soles, 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 Ben 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 had 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 café. 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 had 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 had 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 cafés, 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.’
‘I suppose it gets a bit much.’
‘Water off a duck’s back, my son. You’ve seen the guidelines, haven’t you? “All idle and foolish remarks will be disregarded”. It helps no end when some inspector in nappies tries to tell me what to do. You can ignore them and say, “It’s in the guidelines, ma’am.”’
‘What’s the point of the music, by the way?’ said Cooper.
‘It relaxes the customers,’ said the sergeant. But Cooper thought he sounded a bit defensive.
‘Does it?’
‘So they tell me.’
The sergeant paused. They both listened to the Vivaldi for a moment. Kennedy had just reached Summer.
‘It’s the inspector’s idea,’ said the sergeant.
‘Ah,’ said Cooper. ‘She’s been on a course, has she?’
‘Been on a course? I’ll say she’s been on a bloody course! Show me the week she’s not on a course. This one was called “Conducting a Resources Audit of Your Public Interface”. What the hell does that mean? Mark my words, she’ll have us putting mirrors and potted palms in here next. Moving the doors and the desk to make the energy flow better or some such rubbish.’
‘Feng shui,’ said Cooper.
‘Sorry?’
‘Feng shui.’
‘I think you’ve caught a cold standing out in the snow,’ said the sergeant.
‘Making the energy flow,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s Japanese.’
The sergeant stared at him. ‘’Course it is,’ he said. ‘I must be stupid.’
He was much too tall for the counter he worked at, and he leaned awkwardly to write in the custody record. Unless Health and Safety had conducted a proper workplace assessment in here, there would be more compensation to pay out in a year or two, when the sergeant was walking like Quasimodo. But by then, he’d be haunted by the sound of Nigel Kennedy rather than the bells of Notre Dame.
Cooper felt his pager vibrating in his pocket. It was the fifth call for him in the last half-hour. They had started plaguing him about other enquiries while he was still escorting his prisoner through the snowbound streets of Edendale.
‘All these new ideas, what’s the point?’ said the sergeant. ‘I can’t get my breath sometimes. A bloody madhouse it is round here. And I don’t mean the customers, either.’
A PC came out of the office behind the sergeant and handed Cooper a note. It said: DC Cooper – report to DS Fry ASAP. Urgent. Cooper reluctantly gave up the plan he had been nursing for the last few minutes. He had been hoping to call by his locker for some dry socks, then carry out a raid on Gavin Murfin’s desk to see if he had any spare food.
‘Mind you, you didn’t hear me say any of that,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’m very happy in my work, I am.’
When passengers reached the arrivals gate at Terminal One of Manchester Airport from Air Canada flight 840, a tall, fair man with a beard was waiting. He greeted the woman by shaking her hand, but they both looked for a moment as though they regretted there were so many people around them on the airport concourse. Alison Morrissey smiled when she heard his strong local accent, as if it made her trip to England seem real.
‘So you came,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t think of you arriving on your own and knowing no one.’
‘That’s kind.’
There was a moment’s silence between them. As the crowd of passengers passed her on either side, the woman looked at the unfamiliar names on the airport shops – W. H. Smith, Virgin, Boots the Chemist. For a moment, she looked no older than a schoolgirl as she cocked her head to listen to the announcements.
‘We’ve got a bit of a walk to the car park,’ he said, watching her. ‘Will you be all right? You look pale.’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
He found a baggage trolley and pushed it for her towards the exit. Alison Morrissey paused to rub her legs, though she had performed her exercises religiously all the way across the Atlantic from Toronto Pearson.
‘The weather’s not too good outside,’ he said. ‘But I suppose you’re used to snow in Canada.’
‘Frank, I live in a suburb of Toronto. No grizzly bears or lumberjacks for miles.’
She looked dizzy and disorientated, but when she shook herself hard, she reverted to a confident woman in her mid-twenties.
‘The meeting is set up with the local police, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Of course. Don’t worry about that. It’s all organized.’
‘I’m sorry, Frank. It just hit me suddenly. This is more than travelling to a foreign country – it’s like venturing into the past.’
‘I understand that.’
‘And it’s a dangerous past. I really feel as though I’m on the borders of hostile territory.’
‘Don’t expect hostility from every quarter,’ he said. Not necessarily.’
Outside, Alison Morrissey looked at the grey sky and ran a hand across her forehead.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Transatlantic flights knock hell out me. I suppose it’s past breakfast time here?’
‘Nearly lunchtime, in fact. We can find somewhere to eat here at the airport, if you like.’
‘May we drive out to Derbyshire first, Frank? How long will that take?’
‘It depends whether they’ve got the A57 clear yet,’ he said. ‘I had to come here by the motorway. The last I heard on the radio traffic bulletins, the Snake Pass was still blocked. I don’t know why – they’re usually pretty good at getting the snowploughs out to clear the main roads. Perhaps there’s been an accident or something.’
Grace Lukasz peered cautiously round the door into the back room of the bungalow, clinging on to the wheels of her chair to suppress the noise. Zygmunt was in his armchair by the table. He looked as though he might be asleep. His hands lay on the table, the blue veins standing up prominently, as if he really did suffer from the high blood pressure that he had always complained about, but which the doctors said didn’t exist. His head was tipped against the back of the chair, and he had taken off his spectacles. Grace could see the red marks on the sides of his nose and the small wings of white hair pushed up over his ears. There were tufts of hair inside his ears, too, and more hair on his neck where he never thought to shave.
The old man’s eyes were closed, but Grace wasn’t sure that he was really sleeping. Often he sat like this while awake. Zygmunt always said he was thinking, when he took the trouble to explain at all. Grace supposed he was going back over his life in his mind, dwelling on his past. It was all he seemed to do now, to dwell on the past. But maybe she was misjudging him. Perhaps the old man was thinking of his wife, Roberta. She doubted it, though. It was more likely that he was thinking of Klemens Wach. These days, he thought mostly about Klemens.
Next Sunday was the day for the Edendale oplatek dinner. Almost the whole of the Polish community would gather for the event in the ex-servicemen’s club, the Dom Kombatanta. Grace knew that for Zygmunt this would be the emotional high point of the year, more important even than Wigilia, the Christmas Eve celebration. This was the time when everyone began the year anew, but it was also a chance to reflect on their history and their place in the world. Most of the folk who would come to the dinner had not been born in Poland, of course. But since Solidarity and democracy, and the possibility of EU membership, some of those people had begun to talk more and more about their culture, their roots, their place in Europe. Not Zygmunt, though. Zygmunt didn’t talk much at all these days. When he did, it was about the past.
But still, there would be the dinner. Though the community celebration had drifted back into January, it was no less of an occasion and everything had to be done just right. Grace could taste already the beetroot soup, the poached pike, the carp with horseradish sauce, the mushroom-stuffed tomatoes. The ladies who organized the dinner clung tenaciously to the traditions, no matter how much trouble they had to go to.
The stops had been pulled out for the family Wigilia, too, when all of them had sat down to the traditional twelve meatless dishes, with the extra place set for an unexpected guest. First they had shared the oplatki wafers. The symbols of reconciliation and forgiveness meant more this year than ever. Of course, forgiveness wasn’t easy. Grace knew Peter was thinking of their eldest son in London, with no family around him to celebrate Wigilia, except some skinny bottle-blonde. They had sent an oplatek to Andrew as always. But whether Andrew had shared it with his blonde was doubtful. As far as Grace could gather, the apartment they rented in Pimlico contained nothing of relevance to oplatek, precious little that spoke of forgiveness.
The younger members of the family would change the traditions, if they had their way. Richard and Alice were embarrassed by the whole business. They would have made a meaningless ritual of oplatek just to get it over with quickly, so they could move on to the food and watch some American film on television. But they knew better than to upset Zygmunt, not at this time of year, and particularly not in these last few months. It was the time for reconciliation, when they could forgive each other their faults and their mistakes over the previous year. It was not a time for arguments.
So Zygmunt, as the eldest, had taken the first oplatek and offered it to his sister Krystyna, blessing her and wishing her health and a good year ahead. She had then broken off a piece of his wafer and offered her own oplatek in turn. And she had gazed into his face as she carefully wished him health and happiness in the year ahead, repeating the words as she was supposed to; but then her voice had broken and the old woman had begun to cry. Grace had edged her wheelchair nearer and put her arm round Krystyna’s shoulders. But the old woman had looked as though she would go on weeping for ever, for the whole twelve days of Christmas maybe, right through to the Feast of the Three Kings. The front of her best dress had got stained with her tears.
Zygmunt had simply frowned and waited for her to continue with the ceremony, until everyone had shared their wafers with each other, biting into the nativity scenes moulded into the unleavened bread. And then, and only then, had they sat down to dinner, to the twelve meatless courses, one for each apostle. The family had visibly sighed with relief. Some of them had expected Zygmunt to make a speech, to talk about the mistakes and the sins of the last year, as he said his father and grandfather had always done, listing all the things the young people had done wrong before forgiving them and wiping the slate clean for a new year.
If Zygmunt had done that, it would have made things difficult. It was easier to pretend things hadn’t happened when they weren’t spoken out loud.
Grace took one last look at Zygmunt, to assure herself that he was still breathing, and backed across the passage. Peter was in the conservatory, among his cacti and the pelargoniums. There remained a thin covering of snow on the glass panels of the roof, and the light beneath it was pale blue.
‘Is Dad all right?’ he said, without turning from his inspection of a spiky monstrosity on a high shelf. His hearing was attuned to the sound of her chair. Even Zygmunt had acute hearing; Grace wouldn’t have been surprised if the old man had known she was there, in the doorway of the room, all the time she had been looking at him. It would have been just like him to pretend he was unaware of her. It was like Peter, too. She could imagine him being exactly the same when he was a decade or two older. They were stubborn and hot-headed in turns, immovable or flying into tempers. His unpredictability had been one of the things that had attracted her to Peter. But recently his temper had been kept firmly in check, corked up inside.
‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s been looking at the photo albums.’
It hardly seemed necessary for Grace to say it. The photographs had been in front of Zygmunt on the table where they stayed almost permanently. They were photographs of the family, the bits of the Lukasz history pieced together as best they could be, given the gaps, the sudden ends to so many lives. There was nothing that could be said to explain the page on which a young man of eighteen stood smiling and full of life in one photo, while below it the rest of the page was blank but for an almost indecipherable shot of a metal plaque.
At Wigilia, there had been many quiet prayers as the Lukasz family had tried to connect with their relatives overseas. They had been thinking mostly of Zygmunt and Krystyna’s cousins in Poland, but now also of Andrew. Everybody had spoken of him as Andrzej in the presence of the old people.
Krystyna said she always tried to conjure the memory of her dead parents back in Poland to strengthen the connection. Grace wanted to ask her if the prayers actually worked. But a glimpse of Krystyna’s face in an unguarded moment told her what she wanted to know.
As always, there had been midnight Mass at the Church of Our Lady of Czestochowa on Harrington Street, under the images of the Black Madonna. Alongside the church was the Polish Saturday School, where a handful of pupils still kept the language alive, studying for their Polish GCSE exams, learning the history of Poland and the Catholic faith. It was the children of the Saturday School who would stage the Nativity play at the oplatek dinner next Sunday.
In church they had all joined in the singing. Some of the men smelled of vodka, and even some of the women were flushed too. But they all tried to sing, nevertheless. The Poles never seemed to have good singing voices, but they made up for it with enthusiasm. Even Zygmunt, in his croaky voice, had joined in with his favourite Koledy, the Christmas carols that followed Mass.
There had, of course, been the conversation – the catching up on the latest news. All their Polish acquaintances loved a bit of gossip. It was futile to try to keep the intrusion out of their lives. Grace was glad of the snow as an excuse for keeping to the house, because she didn’t know what to say when their friends asked after Andrew.
She watched Peter stroke the firm leaves of the cactus and touch the tip of his finger to the points of the three-inch long spikes. He pressed on them until the spikes looked as though they would pierce his skin like nails.
‘There was a phone call earlier,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘It was that man, Frank Baine.’
Grace froze. Irrationally, she wanted to reach out and grab the pot the cactus was in, to hurl it against the wall and smash it. She wanted to fling it through the glass on to the flags in the back garden. She wanted to crush its ugly, vicious spikes and watch the fluid spurt from its swollen body. But she couldn’t even reach that high.
‘She’s arrived then, has she?’ said Grace.
‘She flew into Manchester this morning.’
‘Are you going to tell him?’
Peter shook his head. ‘Let him rest a while longer,’ he said. ‘He needs his rest.’
Grace recalled the extra place that had been set at the Wigilia dinner. For an unexpected guest, Krystyna had said. The old lady never tired of explaining that it was the tradition, that it meant they could provide hospitality for any wanderer who might be travelling along the road that night, for any stranger who might knock at the door, whoever that person might seem to be. For at Wigilia, the stranger could be Jesus himself. Grace wanted to laugh out loud at the idea of Jesus wandering along Woodland Crescent, Edendale, on Christmas Eve and deciding to ring the bell at number 37. Surely he had better things to do, just as her parents had told her Santa Claus had at Christmas.
But Grace had said nothing. It had been Zygmunt who had shaken his head and smiled at his sister’s words. Then, in his quiet, barely audible voice, speaking in Polish, he had insisted the extra place was set for those who were absent, for members of the family who had died. What he meant, of course, was that this place was for his cousin Klemens. It had been set at Wigilia when Zygmunt had first become the head of his own household, and every year since.
But Grace knew this year had been the last time. Next Wigilia, the extra place would no longer be for the absent Klemens. It would be for Zygmunt.
It might have been more than the cold that made Alison Morrissey shiver and pull her coat closer around her shoulders. In fact, the sun was already rising over Stanage Edge and Bamford Moor. In another hour it would have eased some of the chill from the air and melted away the mist that clung to the black rampart of Irontongue Hill. Morrissey looked as though the sun would bring her no warmth, as though it would take much more than a dose of winter sunlight to do that.
She was looking across a few yards of rough grass to a snow-covered peat moor and an eruption of bare rock. The wind was scraping across the moor from a more distant mountain to the north.
‘The rock there is Irontongue,’ said Frank Baine. ‘In the distance is Bleaklow.’
‘This place certainly looks bleak in the snow.’
‘Even without the snow, it’s still bleak.’
It was Irontongue Hill that took her attention. Baine had already told her that it got its name from the eruption of black rock on its summit, an uncompromising slab of millstone grit thrown up by ancient volcanic activity.
Morrissey turned away. The valley below them looked vast and mysterious in the darkness. It lay like a rumpled sheet tugged into peaks and valleys by a restless sleeper. But gradually the lights of scattered villages and farms were vanishing into the grey wash of dawn. The shadows of the hills deepened and began to spread dark fingers across a patchwork of fields, groping and fumbling among the yards of stone farmhouses and the gardens of invisible hamlets.
‘I didn’t anticipate it would be so cold in England,’ she said. ‘I didn’t bring the right clothes.’
‘None of your clothes would have been the right ones,’ said Baine. ‘The weather changes by the minute in these parts. This snow could be gone completely tomorrow.’
‘Let’s hope so. I’ve got to see the site. That’s very important to me.’
‘I understand that,’ said Baine.
‘The Lukasz family,’ she said, ‘will they agree to talk to me?’
‘No,’ said Baine.
‘I could persuade them,’ she said. ‘If only I could get a chance to meet them, face to face, they would see I was human, like them. We all want the same thing.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’
‘But we do. We all want the truth. Don’t we?’
They both stared ahead through the windscreen as they waited for it to clear. The hills in front of them were white and completely smooth, like marble slabs. Morrissey shivered.
‘The Poles think they know what the truth is,’ said Baine. ‘I’m sorry.’
He used his sidelights as he drove on down the A57. Halfway down, Morrissey looked back. Her hand felt in her coat pocket for the little autofocus camera that she had not used. Postcards with photographs taken from this spot always seemed to face the other way, to frame a view of the valley bathed in sunlight. They never pictured Irontongue.
Shortly before the Snake Inn, they had to stop behind a line of cars that were waiting for a policeman in a fluorescent yellow jacket to wave them on. The other side of the road was blocked by two patrol cars with their lights flashing, and a snowplough was standing idle, with more cars pulled in close behind it.
‘There, you see,’ said Baine. ‘I told you there must have been an accident. Somebody’s run into the snowplough.’
Morrissey stared at the scene as they went by. She couldn’t see any damage, or even figure out what the snowplough had collided with. Maybe they had already towed the other vehicle away. Yet there were people standing by the side of the road, and a woman in a sort of white boiler suit crouching in a snowdrift.
‘Downhill all the way now,’ said Baine. ‘We’ll soon be in Edendale.’
He turned on the radio. The sound of the eight o’clock news filled the car, speaking clearly of families going about their ordinary domestic routines, arguing over the use of the bathroom and the last cup of coffee in the pot, rushing to find the right shoes and cursing as they remembered, one by one, all the things they had to do that day. Morrissey closed her eyes.
‘Have a doze, if you like,’ said Baine.
‘Frank,’ she said, ‘whenever I close my eyes, that’s when the pictures come. The pictures of dead men.’
Baine nodded. ‘Someone once said that memories are photographs on the wrong side of your eyes.’
‘All my life, I’ve never been quite sure where memory ends and imagination begins. These days, I can’t always say which side of my eyes the dead men are.’
She opened her eyes again. A black, unmarked van with tinted rear windows was passing them slowly, going up the hill. Morrissey twisted in her seat to watch the policeman direct it into the side of the road. A blonde woman wearing a black coat and a red scarf stared at her until she turned away, and they drove on into Edendale.
The free sample has ended.
