‘Anybody else? Anybody in this area?’
The manager hesitated. ‘Funny you should say that. Marie
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always said she was from Scotland. 1 mean, she spoke with a Scottish accent and everything, and that’s where her mum lived. But I always thought she had some connection with Derbyshire. She talked sometimes as if she knew a bit about the history of this area.’
Fry turned to look at her. ‘Anything in particular?’
‘It’s hard to remember. But I think it was something to do with the war.’
‘Could it have been the RAF? A crashed Second World War bomber?’
The frown cleared from the manager’s face. ‘Yes, I believe you’re right. It was a funny thing for a girl like Marie to be interested in. But she mentioned those aircraft wrecks often.’
There was a crack as a gunshot split the frigid air. Recognizing the sound without even having to think, Ben Cooper dived to his left, rolling into the snowdrift behind the undercarriage, scrambling to take advantage of its cover. He looked around for Caudwell, but saw that she hadn’t moved. She was still standing in the open, staring back over her shoulder at something beyond the wreckage.
Then Cooper heard a cackling and a drumming of wings as a brace of red pheasant panicked and burst up from the moor
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a hundred yards away. He caught a glimpse of the sunlight shimmering oil their red hacks like streams of blood in the air as they heat away towards the reservoir. And Cooper saw PC Nash laughing as he shoved what looked like a Glock pistol hack into a holster under his jacket. So Carol Parry had keen right the MDP considered it nccessarv to he armed.
The natural sounds of the moor hecamc audihle again the constant muttering of the wind as it nosed through the drifting snow, the harking of a dog and the clang of a hucket so muffled and distant that the world seemed to have slipped hchind a thick curtain.
Caudwell turned hack and watched Cooper picking himself up and hrushing snow off his shoulders. She met his eye with a sardonic smile.
‘Nash!’ she called. ‘Behave yourself. You’re frightening the wildlife.’
Cooper sat in the snow for a few moments with his hands on his knees and watched Caudwell and Nash. He had to control his temper. He couldn’t lose it that was exactly what they wanted him to do. Prohahlv exactlv what Dianc Fry wanted him to do, too.
Looking at the ground where he had fallen, Cooper noticed a glint in the dark peat. Another piece of aluminium? He picked it up and hrushcd the black fibres from it, revealing a peculiar whiteness. He puzzled over the material it was made from. It seemed to he a hroken section of a narrow shaft, surely too hrittle to have hccn part of the airframe. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed it, seeking the familiar smell of scorched metal. But instead he got a scent that reminded him fleetingly of Sunday dinners - a joint of beef with mashed potatoes and carrots round the dining table with his parents on a damp November day. He shook his head to clear the intrusive memory. Perhaps what he held in his fingers was a fragment from the aircraft’s radio apparatus. It was almost like hakelite, its broken ends grainy and hollow. But it was white …
He flung the object to the ground as if it had suddenly grown hot and burned his fingers. It lay on the peat, gleaming unmistakably now. He stared at it in horror. It was bone. Of course, it was
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more than likely a kit of a dead sheep, part of the carcase of a casualty from the flock across the hill that had been picked clean and dropped here by some scavenger. It didn’t look as though it had been out in the weather for very long. But Cooper couldn’t help associating it with what he had just been thinking of; as he held it in his hand, it had seemed like part of one of the shattered bodies of the airmen who had died in Uncle Victor.
‘Ren — arc you all right?’
Liz Petty was standing over him looking concerned, puzzled by his silence.
‘Yes. Fine.’
But the truth was that Cooper had felt himself shift through time for a moment. He had been picturing that young airman, Sergeant Dick Abbott, hurtling through the torn and splintered metal edges of the Lancaster’s fuselage, his limbs ripping from his body as the impact hurled him into the darkness, where he would bleed to death in the snow. Cooper had once seen a sheep that had been hit by a car on an unfenced moorland road above the Eden Valley. One of the animal’s forelegs had been smashed so badly that bits of its femur lay sprinkled on the tarmac like pieces of a jigsaw. This was far worse than that. Men’s bodies had been torn apart here, their bones had been shattered and their blood had soaked into the peat. People talked about men who had sacrificed their lives. But this was more than a sacrifice. He was standing on the site of a massacre.
Everyone had blamed Pilot Officer Danny McTeague for the crash of Lancaster SU-V, for the death of five men. Cooper wondered what Marie Tennent, or anyone else, might consider to be justice for such a crime.
Diane Fry found Eddie Kemp in a more amenable mood. He looked like a man who was confident there was insufficient evidence against him. It was the sort of confidence that came to a man who had been questioned many times before without being charged, or who had appeared in court and been acquitted. Also, Fry couldn’t detect the smell any more. Maybe the custody suite staff had scrubbed him up specially.
‘Of course, my Vicky knew all about the thing with Marie,’ said
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Kemp. ‘Vicky had kicked me out at the time, so she couldn’t really complain about what I did, could she?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘We sorted it all out, anyway. I went hack to Vicky, and that was that.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last July.’
‘Ahout six months ago, then. Was the parting amicable?’
Kemp hesitated. ‘Marie was a hit upset, and she said some things she didn’t mean. She told me I smelled. But it’s a medical condition I have, so that wasn’t fair, was it?’
‘And you haven’t seen Marie Tennent since then?’
y
