‘I don’t know anything about aircraft wrecks,’ said Lawrence. ‘I sell books on them sometimes, but I don’t think I’ve got any in at the moment. I sold my last copies a tew days ago. You’re wasting your time.’
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‘I don’t think so.’
Morrissey took her hand out of her pocket. Carefully, she unwrapped the package she had shown to Ben Cooper. The medal caught the light from the stairs and glittered, so that Lawrence could he in no doubt what it was.
‘This is the reason I’m here,’ she said.
Lawrence took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, whether from tiredness or some sudden emotion, it was impossible to tell in the darkness. ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ he said.
‘Would the police agree with you, I wonder?’
‘There’s nothing illegal here.
‘You wouldn’t mind the police coming, then.’
‘As it happens, 1 know one of the local detectives very well.’
‘Detective Cooper, perhaps? He mentioned your shop to me. And he’s very interested in this medal.’
Lawrence’s shoulders seemed to slump a little. ‘This is very unfair,’ he said.
Morrissey thrust the medal at him like an amulet that would ward off evil. ‘Do you think it’s fair to me? Fair to my familv?
v ^ ..
Fair to the memory of my grandfather?’
Finally, Lawrence gave in.
‘You’d better come upstairs,’ he said.
Before he led Alison Morrisscy towards the stairs, Lawrence took a last look outside, into the dark alley. He wondered who else might be out there, waiting to disrupt his life.
Rack at West Street, Dianc Fry found the file on Marie Tennent still lying on Ben Cooper’s desk. It was only four days since Marie had been found on Irontongue Hill, yet it might as well have been weeks. Fry knew there had been search parties in Dam Street, where Marie had lived. Posters and newspaper appeals were everywhere, calling for information on the whereabouts of Baby Chloc. But Fry had been so absorbed in other things that she had lost touch with what had been going on today.
In the Tennent Ale, there was a report from a sergeant in the uniformed section to say that they had gone over Marie’s house again, and had cleared the snow from the back garden, but there
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was no indication of recent digging in the fro/en ground. There was no sign of a baby. They had gradually keen extending their search, and should by now have searched the millpond. The area of hillside where Marie had been found had also been painstakingly picked over.
And Fry saw that, as far as Marie herself was concerned, they were still waiting for a postmortem result before the inquest could be opened.
Then Fry saw the faxes on Ren Cooper’s desk. They had come on a machine that used the old fax rolls, and the sheets were curling up into thick coils. It took only a glance to sec that they had come from Canada and were connected with Alison Morrissey. There was a yellow message form stuck to the top sheet, too. ‘Please phone Alison,’ it said. Fry tried the phone number it gave, and a voice said: ‘Good evening, the Cavendish Hotel.’
‘Do you have a Miss Alison Morrissey staying there?’ asked Fry.
‘Yes, we do. Would you like me to see if she’s in the hotel?’
‘No, it doesn’t matter/
She put the phone down. It seemed to Fry that there was no doubt where Ben Cooper’s attention was at the moment. He had been told by the Chief Superintendent himself that there was no possibility of helping Alison Morrissey in her hopeless quest. But for Cooper, anything that was hopeless seemed to represent a challenge. Fry recalled the woman she had seen on TV, the same woman who had been chatting to Cooper at Undcrbank the other day. ‘Phone Alison’, the message said. So there was another attraction for Cooper, too.
Fry placed the message carefully back on the roll of faxes. She would have to think seriously about what she was going to do about it.
Turning her attention back to the Tennent Hie, she saw that it had been kept up to date with the inclusion of copies of reports on the baby’s remains. She scanned through the SOCO’s report, then a statement from one of the officers who had attended the scene after the air cadets’ discovery of the remains. It was a
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thorough and detailed account of the scene, written by a young female officer who had put a lot of effort in, even when it might seem there was no point. She had spent some time looking for evidence of recent visitors to the aircraft wreck, despite the fact that the remains were so old. Reading between the lines, it seemed to Fry that the officer had been affected by the sight of the bones and the new babv clothes and had sought
o y &
for something else to concentrate on.
Curiously, one of her observations related to poppies. Not real poppies, but the red plastic or paper ones sold during the weeks before Remembrance Day every year to raise money for exservicemen. During November, many people wore them pinned to their coats; entire wreaths of them were laid at war memorials up and down the country. And it seemed that remembrance poppies verc left at the site of the Lancaster crash, too. Fry supposed the wreckage was itself a memorial, in a way. According to the report, someone had left a poppy there very recently, despite the fact that it was January and Remembrance Day was long since past.
It seemed unimportant. But Fry knew that such details, observed at the right time, could turn out to be surprisingly valuable later on. She marked the line about the poppies with a red pen and was finishing the report when her telephone rang.
She walked back to her own desk, carrying the Tenncnt file. The switchboard operator apologized, saying that she had been told that DS Frv was in the station and wondered if she could deal with a call that had just come in.
