‘Is she paying you?’ asked Cooper.
For a moment, Baine hesitated. ‘Well, expenses really. Why do you ask?’
‘You seem to be doing a lot for her, to say that she’s a complete stranger and you don’t even trust her yourself. Dropping her of! near Irontongue Hill this morning was a bit stupid. It caused me a few problems.’
‘I’m sorry, but she’s very persuasive when there’s something she wants you to do.’
‘I know. I’ve found that, too.’
Diane Fry had entered the office while Cooper was talking to Baine. He wasn’t sure whether she had heard him mention Alison Morrisscy. But there was something about the way she toyed w ith her scarf, stretching and twisting it tightly between her hands, which made him think she had.
She walked up to his desk and lifted the pile of faxes. She held them in the air and waited for him to finish the call.
‘So what’s with the faxes?’ she said. ‘Anything interesting?’
‘Oh, nothing important.’
Before he could take them from her, she was reading the top sheet. ‘Who is Kenneth Rees? Should I know the name?’
‘No.’
‘He’s not very attractive, is he? Also, it seems that he lives in
/ ‘
Canada.’
Cooper gritted his teeth. ‘He’s Alison’s mother’s stepfather.’
‘Ben, are you telling me that you’re having details of her family faxed to you at work?’
‘It’s to do with Pilot Officer Danny McTeague.’
‘Is it? Are you sure?’
‘I happened to suggest the possibility that he might have got back to Canada and taken on a new identity.’
‘Ah. Even you are sceptical, eh?’
‘It s not impossible to change your identity. Deserters did it often.’
331
‘And I suppose you’re thinking that this Rccs character is really McTeague with a new identity, who remarried his wife after a decent interval of mourning tor his old self. Where on earth did
o
you get that idea from, Ben?’
‘He’s nothing like McTeague anyway,’ said Cooper. ‘Kenneth Rees was a mining engineer from Newcastle. He had red hair, and was only five foot eight inches tall. You sec, I checked.’
‘Don’t tell me - you read the idea in a novel. I read a novel myself once.’
‘I didn’t think you read novels, Dianc.’
‘I was sick at the time. It didn’t do anything to cure me.’
‘Right. Anyway, it looks as though McTeague never went back to his wife and baby. But the thing that worries me is that he kept telling his crew about his family back in Canada, and how he couldn’t wait to get back to them. He wouldn’t have deserted them, no matter what. He would have got in touch with them somehow and let them know he was alive, at least.’
Fry put down the fax. Cooper was surprised that she was still listening to him. ft was the first time she had allowed him to talk
o
about McTeague for more than thirty seconds.
‘So what then?’ she said.
‘I’m convinced now that he never made it back to Canada. Maybe he suffered amnesia in the crash and forgot who he was. f suppose he could have taken on a new identity here and settled down in England.’
‘Ben, I think the authorities were quite keen on knowing who people were at that time. They were paranoid about German spies landing and all that.’
‘Right at the end of the war? I’m not so sure. We’d have to
o
ask somebody who was around at the time. But Hitler was beaten by then. The war had turned. It was Bomber Command and the American air force who were flattening German cities by then, not the other way round. The most the Germans could do to this part of the country was to fire of? a few V2 rockets and hope they reached Sheffield. And here, in the Peak District … well, I suspect there might have been people in this area who didn’t ask too many questions. Let’s face it, they’re still like that today. During the war, they were short of men, short of labour for the
332
farms. A lot of the farmers had to rely on German and Italian prisoners of war for their workforce. It’s possible an airman with a Canadian accent would have keen accepted on a farm somewhere, without any questions asked. They were strange times/ He could see Fry was starting to get restless now.
V OO
‘It’s all speculation/ she said. ‘You could never find out one way or the other, unless McTeague were to turn up somewhere/
‘I suppose not/
‘And, Ben? Reading that novel didn’t do anything for me. It just made me feel sicker/
