Fry continued to tug at her scarf while Cooper told her about the visit to the crash site. He was economical with the details, but knew he had to tell her about Alison Morrisscy’s appearance. No doubt she would hear from Caudwell anyway. But it was the poppy and the cross she was most interested in.

‘What makes you think it might have been Marie Tennent who placed the cross?’ she said.

‘January 7th was the anniversary of the crash. We’ve had appeals out for anyone who was up on the moor that day and might have seen Marie. But even the local ranger stayed away from Irontongue because of the weather. You’d have needed a pretty good reason to make it right to the top of the hill. But one person did go, to leave the cross. And one person died on the way back down — Marie Tennent. I’m suggesting they might have been

OO C” v O

one and the same person/

‘OK. And she was remembering this dead airman . . p>

o

‘Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner. Apart from McTeague, he was the only member of the crew who had a child at home. Also, he was Scottish. We need to ask Mrs Tennent whether they were related. I think Marie could have been like Alison Morrissey — a granddaughter of one of the crew. Except, in this case, she knew exactly what had happened to Dick Abbott/

He expected Fry to mock him. He expected her to say that it was a question of priorities, that there could be no possibility of sparing any more resources on a likely suicide or death by misadventure. But she didn’t say any of those things. He knew it was the missing baby that made the difference for them both.

Normally, a mother who abandoned a baby left it somewhere

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that it would quickly be found, though she might make great efforts to remain anonymous. But it Marie Tenncnt had hidden her baby, she had chosen somewhere it couldn’t he found. The remains of the earlier child were too depressing a precedent. Although DNA tests on the bones were awaited for confirmation, the circumstantial evidence was all too clear that they had belonged to Marie’s first child. Surely Baby Chloe, too, must already be dead, succumbed to a lack of care perhaps, because she had been born to a woman who had no idea what to do with her.

‘I hope something is obvious to you, Ben,’ said Fry.

‘What’s that?’

She stood up. ‘You’re going to have big problems justifying how you can spend so much time on this business of Alison Morrissey’s. Think about Sergeant Easton. Think about Marie Tennent and her

o

baby, instead of your Canadian woman. Think about the people who really neeJ you.’

Cooper flushed. Why did Fry always have to be right? And why did she always have to speak to him in a way that prevented him from admitting that she was right?

<3 O

‘Whatever I’m doing to help Alison Morrisscy, I m doing it in my own time,’ he said.

Fry smacked a hand on the faxes from Canada. ‘Really? With these on your desk? I’m seriously doubting whether I can trust you to be out on your own, Ben. If we weren’t so short-staffed, I’d be considering asking to have you replaced with someone I can trust.’

Cooper stood and began putting on his coat. His hand was trembling, and he fumbled with the buttons. But he needed to get out of the office. He didn’t want to get into an argument.

o o o

Fry watched him, her voice quietening. ‘Ben, I’m saying this for your own good. Forget about Alison Morrissey. Tell her to get lost. Seeing her again won’t do you any good at all.’

c? O v ^ O

‘It has nothing to do with you,’ said Cooper.

Ben Cooper went out to his car and started the engine. He found his mind was going round in circles, and he needed to calm down before he began to drive. He w ould only put his foot down too hard on the accelerator and break the speed limit on the relief road.

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He picked up one of the hooks on Peak District aircraft wrecks. There was a picture of those men in their Hying suits that was as clear in his mind as if it had been an actual memory. He could have been thcrr himself, standing with the group of smiling airmen — perhaps feeling grateful, like them, for the hit of sun that lit their tired faces, and breathing in the familiar .smell of aviation fuel and rubber from the aircraft that were lined up behind them on the edge of the runway.

Cooper could almost feel the wind that must have been blowing across the exposed Yorkshire airfield. He knew there had been a wind, because it had lifted Sergeant Dick Abbott’s fringe of dark hair from his forehead. He wanted to reach out and pat the sergeant’s hair back into place, because of the way it made his face look so young and vulnerable.

Rut that reaction was partly due to the knowledge Cooper had of what would happen to Sergeant Abbott a few weeks after the photograph was taken. He could no longer look at the photograph of the Lancaster crew without also seeing a phantom image superimposed on it an image of splintered bones and torn limbs, of charred bodies trapped in twisted metal. He was seeing the ghosts of dead men, overlaid on the page by historical hindsight.

Dianc Fry had watched Cooper go, noting the stubborn set of his shoulders as he buttoned his coat and pulled on his cap before stamping out of the room. Probably she had been wasting her breath in speaking to him. He wasn’t in a state to be talked sense to. Rut she had meant what she had said. It was absolutely for his own good.

Still Fry regretted that she couldn’t say to him what she really wanted to say. She couldn’t tell him that she thought he was being

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used by Alison Morrissey, that he was going to end up being hurt. He would never take that from Acr.

In any case, the words would have stuck in her throat. Fry could imagine the look of embarrassed disbelief on his face, the first mocking laugh at the idea that she could possibly care.

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