pulled out to respond to an emergency call, and had since located a body on nearby Irontongue Hill. Police officers at the quarry had been diverted to attend. Control were letting her know as a courtesy, because DC Cooper was one of the officers at the scene.

Fry rested her head in her hands and stared across the room at her remaining staff.

‘OoA-wcc, 6a6y … oon-wr/ M/bn’t you Vet me (ai% you on a jea cruiie.’

‘Gavin,’ she said. ‘Shut that bloody lobster up, or I’ll throw it out of the window.’

Marie Tcnncnt was barely recognizable as human at first. By the time Ben Cooper arrived at the scene, someone had scraped some of the ice from her, so that now she at least looked like a pile of wet clothes abandoned on the hillside. The frozen snow clung to her in small lumps. Cooper had tried to brush a patch clear near her pocket, but the crystals were attached firmly to the fibres of her coat.

He stood around with the other police officers and members uf the mountain rescue team, who were stamping their feet

123

as they waited for the doctor to come and certify that the woman was indeed dead, rather than cryogenically frozen and in a state of suspended animation. One of the rescue team was a middle-aged Peak Park Ranger, who had seen his fair share of bodies. He made a joke about the doctor needing to borrow an ice pick before he could use his rectal thermometer, and everyone laughed uneasily.

Liz Petty had walked to the site with him, though she wouldn’t be of any use just yet. She was still wearing her helmet, and her eyes were bright with speculation as she looked up at Cooper.

‘Mrs Snowman, by any chance?’

‘Who knows?’

‘Give me a shout it I can help, when you’re sure she’s dead.’

That morning, the pilot of a small plane had finally seen Marie Tennent’s outline against the peat as the snow had begun to slip from her shoulders. It was none too soon — the snow had come again since then, and Marie might have stayed undiscovered for another few days by the look of the sky in the north.

Cooper found Liz was still standing next to him, watching him deep in thought.

‘It could be suicide, I suppose,’ she said.

‘The assumption will be death by misadventure.’

‘Tried to climb a mountain in bad weather, then fell, and died of exposure before she could be found? It sounds reasonable.’

‘It’s the sort of thing people do all the time around here. It’s as if they think bad weather isn’t real, just a bit of gloss added by the National Park Authority to make the scenery more picturesque.’

Cooper turned and looked over the surrounding moorland. Today the Peak District really did look like a scene from one of those old-fashioned winters that people always talked about. The snow that had fallen earlier in the week had smoothed out the familiar features of the landscape, until the hills and valleys had become unrecognizable.

Everyone who had lived in the area before the mid-1980s had their own tales of deep snows that brought everything to a halt, of chest-high snowdrifts and people skating on iced-over rivers.

124

It was said that Burbagc Edge had once been covered in drifts thirty feet deep, that it had taken years for its birch trees to recover from the damage after the weight of snow had snapped their boughs like matchsticks and ripped them limb from limb where they stood. On days like that, it was foolhardy to venture on to the moors.

Cooper turned over the plastic bag containing the woman’s purse, which he had found in the left-hand pocket of her coat, the first part of her to emerge from the snow. A cash card and bank statement revealed her name to be Marie Tennent, of 10 Dam Street, Edendale. Why had no one reported Marie Tennent missing? He knew without checking that she wasn’t on the missing persons list he had been through it only yesterday with Gavin Murfin, and she had been lying here longer than that. So where were Marie’s family? What about her friends and neighbours?

The postmortem would tell them whether Marie Tennent had been injured or had collapsed through the cold, or had simply lain down and frozen to death. The physical circumstances could be established in the mortuary; but no amount of examination of the brain would prove her state of mind.

‘I can see some animal traces,’ said Lix. ‘They might help with time of death.’

‘Yes. [hanks.’

Rut Cooper was looking at the dead woman’s face. She lay curled on her side, and her head was towards him, with her hands at her temples, as if she had been covering her ears to shut out the sound of approaching death. Her eyes were closed, and the skin of her face was white and rimed with a thin layer of frost. Her nose and lips were already starting to turn black.

Cooper knew his colleagues sometimes accused him of being over-imaginative. And he wasn’t supposing that he could read the expression of a corpse. But he did know one thing, which a quick glance over his shoulder confirmed. When she died, Marie

I O ‘

Tennent had been facing towards Irontongue Hill, not away from it. The remains of the tail fin of the wrecked Lancaster bomber SU-V were plainly visible from here. The last thing Marie would have seen in life was a rustv fragment of Sugar Uncle Victor.

v O O

12S

Cooper recalled what Dianc Fry had said about a name you heard for the first time, which then seemed to crop up again and again. He had been vaguely aware since: his childhood of

O O J

the wreckage of the Lancaster bomber on Irontongue Hill. It was a story that would have appealed to him as a boy, when war had seemed exciting and glamorous, probably because it was something so distant that it was never likclv to touch him

O J

personally. He had missed the height of the Cold War, when people had believed they were in daily danger of

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