Without even touching him, she knew his body was knotted with tension. Peter was frightened, of course. Rut he would never admit it. It was a diliicult time (or him, since he was so close to his lather. She accepted that. The last thing she wanted to do was make it worse for them hoth. She wiped her eyes and put her hand on his shoulder. He felt cold and resisting. She tried to pull him hack towards her so that she could see his face.
‘Peter ‘
Then he rolled on to his hack again. ‘Look, Grace, for God’s sake forget about Andrew for now. He’s not worth it. There are far more important things to worry ahout. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, Peter. I understand.’
Suddenly, the tension went out of them hoth. Peter rolled on to his side. He sighed deeply, as if overwhelmed by tiredness, and within a minute or two he was asleep. Grace smiled in the darkness and patted his shoulder gently. Then she turned over and pressed her body against his, for the sake of the warmth.
After Ben Cooper had been examined at West Street that night, Diane Fry made him sit in the C1D room and do nothing for a while. She even got somebody to make him a cup of tea, for the shock. Cooper knew there would be activity going on down in the town — the passageway where he had been attacked would be sealed off, witnesses would be sought with the usual futility. Later, he would have to make a full statement. It was something he wasn’t looking forward to.
Cooper could see a pile of faxes waiting for him on his desk. Curious, he picked them up. They had come from Toronto, marked for his personal attention. There was a head- andshoulders photograph of a man with wiry hair and a square jaw, and another of him standing next to a woman slightly taller than himself. The man was named as Kenneth Rees, Alison’s mother’s stepfather. Despite the poor quality of the reproduction on the fax machine, there was no doubt this man wasn’t Danny McTcaguc. Flcctingly, Cooper considered the idea that there was no real proof it was Kenneth Rees either.
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He put the faxes down to study in the morning. There had been something else about his conversation with Alison Morrissey earlier that day that had been nagging at him, and he needed to check it. It had been a small thing, but it had undermined his faith in the accuracy of her information.
Cooper found the file that the Local Intelligence Officer had put together for the Chief. According to the information on Klemens Wach, he had done his initial training with the RAF at Blackpool at the same time as his cousin Zygmunt, and they had both been posted to the Operational Training Unit at Lymm, in Cheshire. At Lymm, they had gone through a very British system of assembling air crews — hundreds of men had simply been put into a large room together and encouraged to mingle until they formed their own crews with the right combination of skills. It sounded a bit like the way football teams had been chosen at school you always had to have a good goal- scorer and a goalkeeper, and a couple of big lads in defence. But inevitably, there would be somebody left till the end, the boy who nobody really wanted. Cooper wondered who had been left to the last among the airmen. Might it have been Zygmunt Lukasx or Klemens Wach? It must have been even more difficult when different nationalities were involved. There were fewer natural bonds to bring them together.
But the crew had been formed, and had been sent to their first operational posting a Lancaster squadron at RAF Leadcnhall, where they remained until that fatal crash in January 1945.
According to the LIO’s note, the information on the airmen’s service history came from the official RAF records. So Klemens Wach had only one operational posting, which meant he could never have served with the famous 305 Squadron, as Alison Morrissey had claimed. Morrissey had got it wrong. Until then, Cooper had been assuming that her research had been meticulous, with the help of Frank Bainc. But now he was having doubts. There was a weakness in her research. He wondered what other information she had might be inaccurate.
But of course there was more than one inaccuracy; there had been a major gap. Morrissey had not known the identity of the Malkin brothers, even though the information had been readily
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available. Walter Rowland, for one, would have keen able to tell her. Thinking back to his conversation with the old man, Cooper recollected that he hadn’t seemed to have any great objection to talking to Alison Morrisscy. He wondered who had persuaded Rowland not to.
‘Well, the bayonet isn’t some old military memento, anyway,’ said Diane Fry. ‘So the chances are it didn’t come from one of your old soldiers.’
Ben Cooper looked across the office at her. Fry was holding up a latex evidence bag for him to see. There were still streaks of skin, dried blood and organ tissue along the sides of the long blade of the bayonet. The sight made Cooper wince and clench his stomach, as she had surelv known it would.
‘Airmen,’ said Cooper. ‘They’re old airmen. They wouldn’t have had much use for bayonets.’
‘Who knows what they might have collected? But this one’s quite new, the sort they sell openly in some shops, along with air rifles and hunting knives. The handle is a good surface. We might get some prints from it, or even enough traces of sweat from his hands to get a DNA sample, if he ever handled it without gloves. It could mean we’ve got Eddie Kemp tied up this time.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Cooper.
Fry lowered the bag. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t think it was him.’
‘Ben, we arrested Kemp at the scene.’
‘He was in the vicinitv. But I don’t think it was him who
v
attacked me.’
Fry put down the bag and sat back in her chair. ‘I hope you’re joking.’
‘He was some distance away from me, I’m sure. I don’t think it was Kemp who barged into me. The person who did that ran of! in the other direction, not towards Eyre Street. Besides, I would have recognized the smell.’
‘He was certainly ripe when we processed him. The custody sergeant recognized him before we got him through the door. Fie said to thank you for sending “Homer” back.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
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Fry sighed. ‘Prints or DNA will settle it one way or the other.’
‘I expect so.’
‘If it wasn’t Kcmp, who else would have known you were there? Could somebody have recognized you?’
‘Well…’