‘That’s all right. I’ve seen the faxes anyway.’
‘Good. There’s just one thing I’d like you to do for me, Ben.’
‘No,’he said.
‘Please/ she said. ‘You know these people won’t talk to me. I want you to go and sec Walter Rowland again.’
‘Why should I do that?’
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‘There’s something that my grandmother told my mother, and my mother passed on to me. It was one of the allegations that were thrown at my grandfather at the time. But even Frank Baine
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doesn’t seem to know anything about it. So I want you to ask Walter Rowland.
‘About what?’ said Cooper.
‘I want you to ask him what he knows about the missing money.’
As Ben Cooper tried to warm himself up back at West Street, two images stayed with him. One was the powerful impression he’d had of the dead and dying airman. The other was an image of the
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bright red poppy on its w ooden cross, which remained imprinted on his memory as if it had been burned there by the electric brightness of the snow. Sergeant Dick Abbott, 24th August 1926 to 7th January 1945. Who would take the trouble to remember Dick Abbott?
During that afternoon, Cooper tracked down the old inquest reports for the five airmen in the county archives at Derby and had them faxed to him. Of course, the verdicts on Klemens Wach, Dick Abbott and the other airmen had all been recorded as accidental deaths. There was some technical evidence given by an RAF accident investigator, who had referred to the fact that the Lancaster was well off course and over high ground in low cloud —
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that fatal combination. But there was also the suggestion of human error. Either the navigator had given the pilot the wrong^ course, or the pilot had ignored his instructions. Nobody could know, except those who had been involved. The navigator had died in the crash, and the pilot himself had gone missing.
The RAF’s own investigation had placed the blame for the loss of the aircraft on the pilot. The pilot was always in charge, no matter what his rank. But no one seemed to have troubled to ask what the flight engineer might have known about SU-V’s last few minutes. He was best placed to have noticed whether the navigator had got his calculations wrong, or whether the pilot had been incapable. But the flight engineer had been Zygmunt Lukasx, and the navigator had been his cousin Klemens.
The archivist had also sent him a copy of a report from the
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Accidents Investigation Branch of the Air Ministry. It had been signed in black fountain pen by someone called C.I. (Accidents), and it gave the results of a detailed examination of the main
o
parts of the aircraft. No structural cause had been discovered. The report also covered weather conditions, the pilot’s history and the airframe’s history. The documents were useless to him. They told him nothing about the human lives involved.
But someone had known the background of Sergeant Dick
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Abbott. Alison Morrissey had mentioned finding out that another member of the crew of Sugar Uncle Victor had a young child, as well as Danny McTcaguc. That had been Dick Abbott, hadn’t it? So where had Morrissey got her information from?
Cooper dialled a number in Edendale.
‘Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner,’ said Prank Baine. ‘He was from Glasgow. He worked in a steel foundry before he joined up in the RAF.’ ‘He was married, with a child?’
‘That’s right, he was. Only two members of the crew of SUV were fathers Abbott and McTeague. Abbott was very young himself — eighteen. Maybe he had to get married because of the baby, I don’t know.’
‘Did you manage to trace his family?’
‘ Abbott’s? Well, I went through the squadron historical society. They tried to contact the wife for me, but it seems she remarried and emigrated. I never took it any further than that.’
‘f see. 1 suppose you know about these people who collect bits of aircraft wrecks. I’ve heard them called vultures.’
‘Yes, I know all about them. Some folk think it’s desecration, that the WTecks are memorials to the men who died.’
‘I imagine relatives must feel strongly about that.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Alison Morrissey, for a start?’
‘Alison? I’m not sure about her,’ said Baine.
‘What do you mean?’
Baine sighed. ‘She always seems to be holding something back. Do you know what I mean? She’s told me the entire story, all about her mother and her grandfather, Danny McTeague. I’ve had the whole thing. Sometimes it seems she’s telling me far more than
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I need to know, and that makes me wonder … Well, I have the impression she docs it so that I won’t ask her questions. She doesn’t like questions, though God knows she asks enough herself.’
