‘Who is it?’ said Frv.
‘Sergeant Caudwell, from the Ministry of Defence Police/
‘OK, put her on.’
For a moment, Fry pictured Caudwell and Nash sharing a hotel with Alison Morrissey, but recalled that the MDP officers had been sent somewhere cheaper and more basic, probably the Travelodge.
o
‘Ah, still on duty, I sec,’ said Caudwell when she got through to Fry. ‘That’s lucky.’
‘What can I do for you?’ said Fry.
‘Well, 1 soon got bored in this hotel we’ve found, and there
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didn’t seem to be anything else to do in Edcndalc, so I asked them to send up the local newspapers. I found some interesting reading.’
o
‘They’ve covered the story of the unidentified body extensively,’ said Fry. ‘A lot of speculation as usual, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, yes. But not only that. There was the woman who froze to death.’
Fry looked down at the file still in her hand. ‘Marie Tennent. But ‘
‘And a missing baby, and all that. Rather worrying for you, 1 imagine. And now there arc the remains of a child, found at the site of an aircraft wreck. The papers don’t say, but it seems to me you might be linking the two incidents.’
‘Yes, we’re sure the dead baby was Marie Tennent’s.’
‘I see/ Caudwell paused for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had a different tone. Fry could picture her smiling. ‘DS Fry, I’m going to ask you a favour. I’d be very grateful if you could send me over a copy of your Hie on Marie Tennent.’
‘Why would you want that?’
‘lust following a line of thought,’ said Caudwell airilv. When
-* o o
Fry hesitated, she added: ‘The aircraft wreck. You realize that’s Ministry of Defence property? We have an interest. We’re entitled to full consultation. Strictly speaking, we should have been informed before any action was taken at the site. But I’m
v
sure we don’t need to argue about that.’
‘I’ll send a copy over to your hotel as soon as I can,’
said Fry.
‘Thank you very much. An hour would be fine.’
Fry replaced the phone and read carefully through the
Tennent Ale again. She frowned at the line she had marked
about poppies, then shrugged her shoulders. At least it should
keep Sergeant Caudwell quiet for a while.
It had only been a day since he had moved out of Bridge End Farm, yet Ben Cooper found it was the most difficult time of all. After he had dropped Diane Fry off at West Street, he had walked through the town to the Old School Nursing Home. He
o o
had promised that he would visit his mother nearly every day,
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and that was what he was trying to do, even if she didn’t know that he had been.
At the end of the visit, it was hard to tear himself awav. He
‘ V
had to remember that he had his own home to go back to now. But all he actually had was an unfamiliar door in Welbeck Street and a dark, empty Hat. Only the presence of a fat, idle cat in the conservatory made the idea tolerable.
On his ay back through town from the nursing home, Cooper found himself standing in Clappergate, on the pedestrianized area near the corner of High Street. This was a spot he normally tried to avoid. Usually, he walked further up the hill and came into Clappergate from Rack Lane or through the shopping precinct. That way he didn’t have to sec the flowerbed where council gardeners planted daffodils to grow in the spring. It meant he didn’t have to sec the plaque on the wooden bench next to the flowerbed.
But today, he’d had other things on his mind, and the street looked different in the snow. The flowerbed was partly hidden by a layer of frozen snow into which passers-by had thrust empty bottles and McDonald’s cartons, spontaneously creating a piece of modern art. That was how Cooper had found himself right by the bench, staring at the memorial plaque as if it had dropped out of the sky in front of him, like a fallen meteorite. He realized he must be only a few yards from the door of the Vine Inn and the place where the blood had settled and stained the stone setts.
The plaque looked shiny and clean today, but he had been told it was sometimes vandalized and sprayed by graffiti artists with red paint. The paint was as difficult to remove from the plaque as the blood had been to clean from the setts. The inscription on the plaque read:
