‘Well, if you must. Fifty pence will do.’
Cooper dug out a fifty-pence piece. Living was proving cheap, so far. And he even knew how to prepare and cook rabbit. He and Randy would have a good supper from it.
‘Ihat’s all open and above board then,’ said Malkin, and winked again.
o
When the two detectives had gone, George Malkin went straight back to the sheep. He had to spread iodine on the navels of the newest lambs to stop them getting infections through their cords. And at the far end of the shed, there was another job he had to do, which he had postponed when the police arrived. The woman sergeant wouldn’t have liked it much, and he had been reluctant to let them see what was in his
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pocket, the thing that he had gone to letch from the house when they arrived.
Malkin enjoyed looking after the ewes. He was glad to be of use, happy to be working at his old job again lor a short while. He had lambed hundreds of sheep in his time, and there was no need for anyone to tell him what to do. He could work alone, with his own thoughts for company. His help during the day meant that Rod Whittaker could go off to work on his driving job and take over in the shed when he came home in the evening.
He felt sorrv for Rod. struggling to make a go of it. Farming
J ‘ OO O O O
was in the lad’s blood, but he had no monev to go into it propcrlv, and little hope of making enough profit from his sheep to earn a living. Trying to get into farming was no life for a man now. Rod would be a lorry driver for the rest of his days, forced into earning his living some other way. Every morning, when he set off for work, he looked tired and bleary-eyed from a night dozing uncomfortably in the lambing shed.
Shortly before the police had arrived, one lamb had been born dead. Across the aisle, another ewe had produced two and was rejecting the second, refusing to allow it to feed. The tiny lamb was bleating, but its mother repeatedly butted it away in favour of its larger, stronger sibling, which was sucking vigorously at the teats.
Neither the dead lamb nor the rejected one was unusual, and Malkin knew exactly what he had to do. The fleece had to be skinned from the dead lamb and tied round the body of the rejected one, to give it the right smell for the bereaved ewre to accept it as her own. It was the old way, but the best one. The sheep were stupid they never knew that they’d been fooled.
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24
JJianc Fry sat rigid and silent in the passenger seat of the Toyota on the way back from Harrop. Hen Cooper wanted to tell her that she had some straw sticking to her hair, hut he daren’t say anything. They were almost in Edendale before he felt her start to relax a little. It seemed to be the street lamps that did it, and the appearance of houses and petrol stations, with more light from their security systems and lorecourts.
‘We could try the Lukasxcs, Dianc,’ said Cooper. ‘Or do you want to wait until morning?’
Fry shook herself. ‘Let’s do it now. It could be too late in the morning.’
‘OK.’
When they drove down Woodland Crescent, they found the Lukasz bungalow in darkness, and the BMW missing from the drive. Cooper rang the bell anyway.
‘No luck,’ he said.
‘Damn. It’ll have to be the morning then. I suppose we ought to have known that some people have better things to do on a Sunday evening.’
‘Hold on, what time is it?’ said Cooper. ‘Five o’clock? I know where they’ll be.’
‘You do?’
‘Their op/afgA dinner was due to start an hour ago. They’ll all be down at the Dom Kombatanta.’
The Polish community seemed to be fond of their events. While they waited, Ben Cooper read the notices inside the entrance to the club. There was an Easter dinner in April, followed by something called the Katyn Day of Remembrance, which was celebrated by a Mass and wreath laying. Then 3rd May was Polish Constitution Day, with another Mass and a parade of standards. Cooper wondered if Zygmunt would be on parade for that day,
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with other members of the exservicemen’s organization, the Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantow w W Brytanii.
They had found someone working in the kitchen and asked them to take a message to Peter Lukasz, being reluctant to interrupt the event they could hear taking place through some double doors in the main hall.
‘That’s Peter Lukasz. Not Zygmunt Lukasz.’
Then Cooper noticed the final event on the spring calendar — the annual general meeting of the SPK itself, to be held at Dom Kombatanta. A poor turnout seemed almost to be accepted. The time of the AGM was set for 4 p.m., but underneath it was stated: T^tncre is no quorum, taste
He had seen them before, or old men just like them, lining up at the cenotaph every Remembrance Day. Rut their numbers were dwindling each year, as if it were only the fading memories of their sacrifice that had sustained them until now. Some of those taking part in the parade last year had looked so fragile and translucent that they could have been an illusion, anyway. Perhaps they existed only because of the public’s belief in them, like Tinkcrbell or Santa Claus.
‘Peter says why don’t you go through,’ said the woman from the kitchen.
Diane Fry was still reluctant. ‘Oh, but …’
‘He says you’re quite welcome tonight.’
Fry walked into the hall. Cooper hesitated in the doorway before following her. It was a strange feeling that he experienced, as if he were about to step into a foreign country. No - not a foreign country, but some kind of parallel universe where it was still England, but the people in it weren’t English.
On the surface, the surroundings were familiar. It was a plain hall with a wooden floor and a stage, with a small bar to one side.
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The pumps and optics behind the bar looked like thousands of others, but the lettering on the bottles didn’t make any sense. In
