He looked back down at the ground. Broken scraps of the aircraft seemed to have started dicing themselves into the peat, like burrowing animals anxious to escape the wind and snow, but never quite making it to safety below ground.
‘There were so many during the war,’ he said. ‘The Peak District is littered with them.’
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In fact, there had keen so many that aircraft wrecks had entered local folklore. Even today, there were tales of a ghostly plane that had keen heard, and even seen, over parts of the Dark Peak. Witnesses had keen convinced that the aircraft must surely have crashed into the hillside because it was flying so low. No wreckage could ever he found, but it didn’t stop the stories.
There was also said to be a German bomber that lay somewhere on the remote northern moors alter being shot down during a raid on Manchester. German-made cartridge cases had been picked up in the area, but no one had ever seen signs of wreckage there, either. Cooper wondered it that was one animal that had reached its burrow, ploughing through the peat at a hundred miles an hour as it fell from the sky. A few years ago, archaeologists digging in a peat bog in Cheshire had found the bodv of an Iron Age man, petrified and almost complete. Would the peat here have preserved the bodies of the Luftwaffe crew too, with their skin drv and leathery and their eves hardened
v ^ ^
like bullets?
‘Although I don’t think this one crashed during the war. It w as 1948 that Superfortress down there w as from an American photographic unit. The crew had recorded the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll and filmed the Russian positions in East Germanv during the Berlin Airlift.’
‘But Derbyshire finished them off.’
Cooper lifted an eyebrow at the grim pleasure in Sergeant Caudwell’s voice. He stared out of the helicopter window, surprised at the extent of the debris strewn across the moorland. On the way to the site, Cooper had found himself filling in the time by telling Jane Caudwell the story of the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor and the disappearance of Pilot Officer Danny McTeague. Before he had finished, her eves had closed.
‘I m surprised nobody clears the wrecks away, said Caudwell. ‘Aren’t they offensive to the tidy minds of our bureaucrats?’
‘Not here. In the Peak District they let them stav. They’re memorials, after all. They’re official war graves. I always think it’s funny how that can be, though. I mean - the bodies aren’t still down there, are they?’
‘We hope not, dear.’
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They levelled out again and flew northwards, passing over acres of white, peat-flecked ground, rolling oceans of it that swelled in waves towards the fringes of the Dark Peak. It was barely more than a minute before they located another scatter of wreckage.
‘That’s the one. Sugar Uncle Victor.’
Caudwell gave a chuckle. ‘Sounds like a naughty relative, doesn’t it?’
As the helicopter banked, she hardly used her hands to brace herself, preferring to let her weight roll and wallow in the scat, at times pushing against Cooper’s side like a heavy piece of loose cargo. Her colleague PC Steve Nash had barely acknowledged his presence since they had climbed aboard, and he wasn’t sure whether it was indifference or whether Nash was silently terrified of the flight and dealing with it in his own way. Cooper was determined not to take it personally, anyway.
Below them, the remains of the Lancaster bomber’s wings lay in tatters on the moor. Little of the fuselage was left, but there was a ragged line of burnt-out engines and undercarriage parts, and a single wheel still standing upright. Smaller fragments were scattered for several hundred ieet through a series of water channels and ^roughs. Around the wreckage, the wind had scraped the dark peat bare. Against the snow, it looked like a pool of dried blood in which the broken body of the aircraft lay.
‘They must have taken some of the parts away after the crash,’ said Caudwcll.
‘It depends who you mean by “they”,’ said Cooper. ‘There was no official salvage team. But there have been unofficial ones since. Apparently, there are two kinds of visitors to these wrecks the aviation archaeologists, who want to preserve the remains, and the others, who have their own interests.’
‘The vultures?’
‘Some people call them that.’ Cooper thought he detected a note of irony. ‘The more valuable parts of the Lancaster have been removed over the years. I suppose things like the radio equipment would have been the first to go, followed by anything
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that was movable, anything that could be sold as scrap or might be considered a souvenir or collector’s item.’
‘Local people?’
‘At first. For a long time, they would have been the only ones who knew the location of these wrecks. The others have arrived more recently.’
Who was it that had said the Home Guard men sent to watch over the wrecked plane had not been too keen on their task? Cooper couldn’t blame them, not in the dead of winter on the Dark Peak moors. Staying alive was enough for a man to concentrate on if he found himself out here, particularly at night and as ill-equipped as they would have been in those days, with hobnailed boots and heavy service greatcoats. He could picture the Home Guard sneaking off to some sheltered spot to huddle together around a camp fire made of salvaged spars from the aircraft they were supposed to be guarding. They would have stood no chance of preventing local people from liberating items of value. It had been wartime, after all. It was every man for himself when it came to survival. But Danny McTeague had taken it further than that.
Caudwell was looking straight ahead, over the shoulder of the pilot, unmoved by the snowcovered landscape passing below them. She seemed to be watching for bad weather coming from the north, or maybe for the next outcrop of high ground appearing in front of them, just as the rocks of Irontongue Hill had appeared in front of Pilot Officer Danny McTeague in the linal seconds.
The low sun misted the valley and gleamed yellow on the icy water of a small drinking hole made by a farmer for his livestock. There were cattle huddled below a wall, nervous of stepping on to the concrete lip of the drinking hole because they could feel their hooves slipping on the frozen surface.
Now there was more snow coming. The air had been bitterly cold, but now the chill had eased and there was a dampness about it, an impending heaviness that came from the dark clouds gathering over the Eastern Edges before they dropped their load on the higher hills to the west.
