Now, with all the interviews completed, the work was guing on to huild a case against Frank Raine and the Kemps, and the MDP were still pursuing their own enquiry. The one thing they were still looking for was Sergeant Easton’s black Ford Focus.
Alison Morrisscy was hack in Canada, and Baby Chloe had been taken into care. The hahy had come to no harm while she was under Mrs Shelley’s protection, kept out of the way of Eddie Kcmp’s threats. And Marie Tennent had hcen wrongly judged from the start. The only thing she had cared ahout was keeping the hahy safe. No. there had been two things she cared ahout. She had also
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rememhered the dead.
Rut it seemed to Ben Cooper there was one person left whose late eeryone had forgotten ahout. This whole husiness hadn’t started with Nick Easton or Marie Tennent, or any of them. It had started with Pilot Officer Uanny McTcague.
On Irontongur Hill, water was scouring the moors in every direction, carving channels through the hare peat, sculpting it into castles and mounds, dragging small stones into heaps and gathering in dark pools in the hollows. Further down the hill, the streams had turned brown with peat, bursting with far more meltwatcr than they could cope with. They were no longer picturesque.
Yet George Malkin’s house at Harrop still had snow on the roof. Normally, that was a sign of good insulation, which prevented the heat from rising. Rut in Malkin s case, Cooper knew there wasn’t enough warmth in Hollow Shaw Farm to melt the snow.
Malkin had been right about the grass in the Held near his house. Even now, as the snow began to wear thin, the grass looked a brighter green than any other grazing in Derbyshire. The black-faced ewes lifted their heads and watched Cooper as he parked the Toyota and walked up the path to the house. Some of the animals nodded their heads, as if to saw they had known this
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would happen. If they hadn’t been sheep, they might have looked wise. But their constantly rotating jaws and unblinking eves were only derisive.
‘How was the rabbit?’ said Malkin, when Cooper entered the house.
‘It was a life saver.’
‘Ah, grand.’
In Malkin’s sitting room, a small drift of snow lay on the window ledge where the blizzard had driven it through the twisted window frame. The snow showed no sign of thawing, even now. The crystals glittered against the stained wood. Cooper didn’t want to be inside this house today.
‘Mr Malkin, would you come outside with me for a minute?’
‘If you like.’
They walked a few yards up the slope of the hill, to where Jrontongue was just visible in the distance, with the hump of Blackbrook Reservoir in between, its dam wall emerging from the snow.
‘The night before last, I was up there in the dark,’ said Cooper. ‘I wouldn’t normally go up on the mountain in the dark, but that night I did.’
‘I heard about that,’ said Malkin.
‘Well, when you’re up there at night like that, in the snow, you’re desperate tor any signs of life, you know. For a long time, there was only one thing I eould see anywhere a light. It was the light from your window. I knew it was yours. You don’t bother drawing your curtains.’
‘I didn’t know you were up there,’ said Malkin. ‘What did you expect me to do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Cooper. ‘But if I’d been lost and didn’t know which way to go, I would certainly have headed for your house. It was the one light for miles. It was like a symbol of safety.’
‘It you say so.’
‘I remember thinking that I would never have set off towards the other side of the reservoir and down to the water board road, which you can’t even see from up there. You wouldn’t even know it existed. You’d have to be blind or stupid to set off in that direction.’
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Malkin seemed to catch on to the drift of what Cooper was saying. ‘Or drunk?’ he said.
‘Pilot Officer Mdeague was not drunk,’ said Cooper.
The air felt damp, and Cooper could see that the cloud was lowering rapidly. He pulled his collar up and shivered.
‘I checked the Accident Investigator’s report myself,’ he said. ‘The whisky on hoard Lancaster SU-V was a gift for the station commander at RAF Renson. The Wing Commander at Leadenhall had a black market supply, and he wanted to share it with his old friend in Lancashire.’
‘Is that right?’
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‘Mr Malkin, 1 don’t think you can possibly have seen or heard Pilot Officer McTcague walking down the road singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home”.’
‘Well, I might have been mistaken,’ said Malkin. ‘The memory plays tricks after all this time.’
‘I think there are things you remember all too well.’
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Malkin stared across the moor for a moment or two. Banks of mist were beginning to move across in front of Irontonguc Hill, and soon they wouldn’t be able to see it at all from Hollow Shaw.
‘Would you like to tell me about it?’ said Cooper.
Malkin stood quite still and rigid. ‘You have to understand something,’ he said. ‘Ted and I had heard our mother and father and some of their friends talking about counterfeit bank notes that
