‘The Poles think they know what the truth is,’ said Baine. ‘I’m sorry.’
He used his sidelights as he drove on down the A57. Haltwav clown, Morrissey looked back. Her hand lelt in her coat pocket lor the little autotocus camera that she had not used. Postcards with photographs taken from this spot always seemed to face the other way, to frame a view of the valley bathed in sunlight. I hev never pictured Irontonguc.
Shortly before the Snake Inn, they had to stop behind a line of cars that were waiting for a policeman in a fluorescent vellow jacket to wave them on. The other side of the road was blocked by two patrol cars with their lights flashing, and a snowplough was standing idle, with more cars pulled in close behind it.
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‘There, you see,’ said Baine. ‘I told you there must have been an accident. Somebody’s run into the snowplough.’
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Morrissey stared at the scene as they went by. She couldn’t see any damage, or even figure out what the snowplough had collided with. Maybe they had already towed the other vehicle away. Yet there were people standing by the side of the road, and a woman in a sort of white boiler suit crouching in a snowdrift.
‘Downhill all the way now,’ said Baine. ‘We’ll soon be in Ldendale.’
Me turned on the radio. The sound of the eight o’clock news filled the car, speaking clearlv of families going about their ordinary domestic routines, arguing over the use of the bathroom and the last cup of coffee in the pot, rushing to find the right shoes and cursing as they remembered, one by one, all the things they had to do that day. Morrissev closed her eves.
‘Have a clo/e, if you like,’ said Baine.
‘Frank,’ she said, ‘whenever I close my eyes, that’s when the pictures come. The pictures of dead men.’
Baine nodded. ‘Someone once said that memories are photographs on the wrong side of your eyes.’
‘All my life, I’ve never been quite sure where memorv ends and imagination begins. These davs, I can’t always saw which side of my eves the dead men are.’
She opened her eyes again. A black, unmarked van with tinted rear windows was passing them slowly, going up the hill. Morrissev twisted in her seat to watch the policeman direct it into the side of the road. A blonde woman wearing a black coat and a red scarf stared at her until she turned awav, and they drove on into Edcndale.
35
JJiane Fry hated these spells of standing around doing nothing. There were plenty of people who were better at that sort oi thing than she was. It had been marginally better back at West Street, where at least she might have been able to hang on to
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the SOCOs’ tan heater tor a little while longer. But out here there was nothing to keep her warm, apart from the long, red scarf she had bought from Gap at Meadovvhall for the winter. There was no shelter, nor even any physical activity to prevent her body from sei/ing up. She would rather have been the officer directing the traffic at least he got to wave his arms a bit. But it wasn’t the thing for a new detective sergeant to be doing.
Instead, she spent her time going through some discreet exercises, rising up on her toes, stretching her tendons, practising her breathing, feeling tor the centres of energy in her bodv, keeping
O ‘ O O-J ‘ Jo
her circulation moving in her extremities to combat the cold. She became so absorbed in what she was doing that she almost
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forgot she wasn’t alone. Almost.
‘No blood,’ said DI Paul Hitchens. He folded his arms across his chest as he leaned casually on the wheel arch of the snowplough, whose blade had been hastily covered by a sheet oi blue plastic. Hitchens looked relaxed, and he spoke as it he were commenting on the weather. No blood today then, just snow. How boring. But Fry knew the comment wasn’t addressed to her. Hitchens had a more appreciative audience.
DC Gavin Murfin had been talking to the county council driver and his mate, who were now sitting in the back of a patrol car. Murfin was wearing a pair of unsuitable fur-covered boots that came up to his knees, like the bottom half of a yeti costume. He stamped his feet on an area of compacted snow as he came round the back of the plough and whee/ed faintly in the cold air.
‘Blood? Not a drop,’ he said cheerfully.
Fry frowned at Murfin as he fumbled among his clothes for
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a pocket to put his notebook away in. He was wearing; so many sweaters that he looked like the original Michelin Man, with layers of rubber wobbling around his middle. Yet his face was Hushed with cold. Somewhere in his pockets, she suspected, there might be a secret supply of food something to keep him going for an hour or two, until he could find the nearest Indian takeaway for a beef buryani to stink her car out again.
‘You know, I really hate it when there’s no blood,’ said I litchens.
The pathologist, Juliana Van Doon, was suited up and working in the area cleared of snow, while an officer video’d the scene. Mrs Van Doon had the dead man’s clothes open across his abdomen to examine a gaping wound. In her white suit, she looked like a badly designed snowman. Fry sighed. A snowman and the Michelin Man. There must be something wrong with her brain today. The cold weather was giving her hallucinations.
‘Blood really makes a body, I always think,’ said Hitchens. ‘It gives it that bit of excitement. A certain ye ne sais ^uoi. A subtle edge of implied violence, perhaps. The bitter-sweet taste of mortality. Do you know what 1 mean, Gavin?’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Murfin. ‘It means you know the bloke’s a definite stiff ‘un, like.’
Fry thought Murfin’s voice sounded slightly muffled, as if he had smuggled something into his mouth without her noticing. She thought she heard the rustle of a chocolate wrapper in his pocket. She looked longingly towards her car. There were things for her to be doing back at West Street. There were d/nuy.9 things for her to be doing at the moment. Life went on in all its predictable messy ways in Edendale, as it did in eerv town in Derbyshire, as it no doubt did in every town and city in the country. There were plenty of crimes that
