being wiped out in a nuclear holocaust; he had been too young to remember Vietnam. It was all history, as remote as World War Two, not affecting real people that he knew. Yet the wreck had always been there, at the back of his mind.
Cooper didn’t think he had heard the name of the aircraft before yesterday. Lancaster SU-V. Sugar Uncle Victor. He was sure it would have stuck in his mind. It sounded so innocuous for a machine designed to kill and destroy. Lie didn’t think he could
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have missed the irony. Now the (light engineer of Sugar Uncle Victor had been drawn to his attention twice in two days. And here was a woman who might have been heading either towards or away from the wreck when she died.
There were too many assumptions that could be made in a case like this. The first assumption would be that Marie I ennent had been responsible for her own death, in one way or another. Suicide or misadventure. Did it matter? Perhaps only to the High Peak coroner, who liked his records to be neat.
‘Ben?’ called Li/. ‘I think you’re wanted over here.’
‘Coming.’
The doctor had been lowered on to the hill by the RAL rescue helicopter, which still hovered overhead, waiting to take the body up on the winch.
Cooper took a last look at the tattered tail hn barely visible above the rocks on Irontongue Hill. He would have to get up there one day soon and take a closer look at what was left of the aircraft that Pilot Officer Danny McTeague had walked away from. He couldn’t imagine what connection there might bebetween the wreck and two sudden deaths. But he had a strong feeling that they were rapidly going to become intertwined.
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It was as if the phantom shape of Sugar Uncle Victor was circling the Eden Valley again, its Merlin engines rumbling beneath the cloud cover, its slaughtered crew returning for a final mission. It was as if the ancient Lancaster had flown in under the slipstream of Alison Morrissey’s Air Canada Boeing 767 from Toronto.
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.Frank Bainc leaned against the wall of the post office next to the Buttcrcross. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the snow, where it fi//Jed briefly. He drew hard on the smoke and held the cigarette cupped in his hand as he watched two teenage boys lean their bikes against the window of the post office and run inside.
A DAF articulated lorry came down Buxton Road towards the roundabout. Instead of turning on to the relief road, it came straight on towards the Buttercross. Baine let out a lungful of smoke, noting the lorry’s registration number automatically as its driver applied the air brakes and pulled up a few yards short of the traffic lights. A line of cars immediately began to build up behind the lorry as it blocked the carriageway.
A man climbed down from the passenger side of the cab. Baine couldn’t sec him until the lorry indicated and pulled away again towards the lights. Then he watched George Malkin cross the road. Malkin didn’t look at him until he was within a few feet.
‘Frank Bainc?’
‘That’s me. I love the transport.’
Malkin didn’t answer.
Baine smiled and drew on his cigarette. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about money.’
The lower eastern slopes of Irontongue Flill were a favourite area tor motorcycle scramblers, bikers who liked to get off-road with their machines and spray a bit of dirt.
Only last Sunday, before the snow came, there had been a
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confrontation here between a party of hikers and a group of scramblers. For some time, there had been complaints that the motorcyclists had been churning up the pathways, turning the surface into mud impossible for walkers to cross without sinking
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up to their knees.
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This morning, someone had stolen a scramble hike from a trailer parked in a farmyard outside Edendale. A patrol car driving up the AS7 saw a rider in a lay-by next to the woods above the inn and stopped to question him. But he rode off as soon as he saw them, and they gave chase. The police crew were in a Range Rover, but they knew they wouldn’t have much hope of catching the biker if he went off-road. A hundred yards away was an open gateway leading on to one of the paths favoured by scramblers.
The motorbike slid across the gateway and ploughed through a snowdrift, scattering a white spray against the stone wall. The Range Rover skidded as the driver braked, but he kept control and turned into the gateway to follow the bike up the track.
The track rose steeply and started to get narrower.
‘We’d better call it off/ said the passenger.
‘just round this next bend, we’ll he able to see where he goes,’ said the driver. ‘Anvwav, he’ll be struggling if the snow
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gets any deeper.’
‘Watch out!’ shouted the passenger.
The bend had been too sharp and too sudden for the Range Rover. The driver skidded again, but this time failed to control the vehicle. It went off the track and slid a couple of yards into a streambcd, ending up with its bumper and front wheels in the water.
The driver turned off the engine. ‘Damn and blast,’ he said.
‘The garage won’t be pleased,’ said his passenger. ‘It had a new radiator only last week.’
‘Call in,’ said the driver.
He opened his door and stepped into a couple of inches of freezing cold water. The strcambed was full of
