the drystone walls carved up the landscape into containable sections, forcing the snow into some kind of order, with here and there a line of trees breaking through. But on the empty Dark Peak moorland, the snow had its own way. It had Ailed every cranny, sculpting the world to a shape of its own creation.
These cold, bright days were good. But Cooper knew how quickly the weather could change. If cloud descended on the tops, they could be in the middle of a snowstorm before they got halfway back across the moor.
They crunched over the frozen heather into an easterly wind that picked up small swirls of powdery snow and blew them around like miniature blizzards before dropping them again, as if fussily rearranging the landscape to get the best reflection from the sun. In the deeper areas, the snow had been formed
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into whipped cream shapes or had keen left draped in midair over a gully, like the scalloped edges of a tablecloth. Below it, a stream ran under a thin skin of ice.
Cooper could sec that somebody had been this way already, but not today. A fine dusting of snow had blown into their footprints. There was a distant cackle of black grouse, and a human voice somewhere far away, over the other side of the summit.
They stopped for a breather when they reached the trig point on Irontonguc Hill, where a cairn marked the summit. The bare rock face dropped away from them on one side, back down to the Snake. Across a narrow valley was the next outcrop of rock, High Shelf, where the wreckage of the American Superfortress lay.
‘What a job you’ve got/ said Caudwell. ‘And you say you’re short-staffed!’
Liz Petty had hardly said a word all the way. But now she put her case down and took in the view.
‘Days like this make up for the poor wages,’ she said. Cooper smiled at her.
‘Don’t. You’ll have me in tears,’ said Caudwell.
Beyond High Shelf was a distant view down into Glossop. The hills fell away from the edge of the Dark Peak to a hollow in which the town sat, surrounded by the remains of the textile mills that had once been its main industry. At least Glossop seemed to have grown out of its landscape, like one of those complex eco-systems that formed of their own accord in a pool of stagnant water, (riven time.
But then, out past Glossop, Cooper could sec nothing but a prcv wall where the world seemed to come to an end. It reminded
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him of a scene from a horror novel he had once read, in which a small American town had been cut off from the rest of the country by an alien fog where vast monsters lurked. But he knew that, beneath the grimy blanket he could see in the distance, there were no monsters, only the city of Manchester.
On a warm summer’s day, the white tower blocks of the city centre could look like the battlements of a fairy- talc city or a shimmering mirage lying in the plain. But not today. This
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morning, the uncompromisingly clear winter light exposed every atom of the pollution that hung over the city, every swirl of smoke from a factory chimney, every wisp of exhaust from the traffic choking the streets. With no warm thcrmals to lift it clear of the city, the smog had gathered and thickened, and now it lay like a huge grey rat coiled on its nest. Cooper shuddered. It would he a salutary experience for many a city dweller to take a trip up to High Shelf on a day like this and get a bird’s-eye view of their city. They would hardly dare to breathe again.
Liz Petty turned away from the view and looked up at him thoughtfully.
‘It’s hard to imagine how they could have crashed here/ she said. ‘It’s so ironic somehow.’
‘At night, in low cloud, it would he a different place altogether,’ said Cooper. ‘It would have been a far more dangerous place.’
Cooper pictured Lancaster SU-V coming low across the valley from the south, the rumble of its engines muffled by the blanket of cloud, the crew peering hopelessly from the cockpit windows or from their Perspex gun turrets. Hr imagined the bomb aimer, Rill Mee, lying in his position in the nose turret, looking down and catching a glimpse of the ground rising towards them. Perhaps Mcc would have tapped urgently on the feet of the pilot above him, gesturing upwards as he mouthed: ‘Climb! Climb!’ And McTeague would surely then have heaved back on the controls and Lancaster SU-V would have begun to gain height.
At the rear of the aircraft, young Dick Abbott wouldn’t have known what was happening, until he had suddenly been thrown forward in his harness towards the Perspex bubble as the aircraft climbed. He would have found himself hanging helplessly, almost upside down, with his view tilted so that he could see the hillside winking through a patch of cloud. And he might have heard the frightened voices shouting in his headphones.
But by then it was already too late. The stark face of Irontongue Hill would have been directly in front of them. Maybe the crew had seen it coming towards them a second before the impact, a huge black shape hurtling out of the cloud where there should have been only sky. But it had been too late by then. Far too late.
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1_)C1 Tailbv looked around the conference room. He frowned.
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Dianc Fry had noticed that he was doing a lot of frowning these days. He had never been a barrel of laughs, but his last tew weeks at E Division were proving to be a burden on him.
‘We don’t seem to sec much of DC Cooper at these meetings/ said Tailby.
‘Everybody is so busy/ said Hitchcns. ‘There are so many actions. So many interviews to do.’
‘I know that. Is Cooper all right? He wasn’t injured in the incident last night?’
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‘No, he’s fine. He reported for duty as normal this morning, and hc’sgone out with Sergeant Caudwcll. The MDP asked to visit the site of the aircraft wreck.’
‘He’s with Sergeant Caudwell? You’ve thrown him to the
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dogs then?’
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‘I wouldn’t say that exactly, sir/ said Hitchens.
‘When things get difficult, there’s a temptation to look around for a sacrifice/ said Tailby.
