‘We don’t,’ said Hitchens.
‘And where’s the damn father?’ said Jepson.
‘Marie’s mother might give us some clues,’ said Fry. ‘She’s arriving tomorrow morning.’
‘Diane, you’ve got another case here,’ said Hitchens.
‘Thank you. 1 was so hoping you’d say that.’
‘Use available resources where they’re needed most,’ said Jepson, like a man repeating a mantra.
‘What does that mean exactly?’ asked Fry. She looked at the Dl.
‘It means you get half a traffic warden,’ said Hitchens.
Jepson tried breathing deeply through his nose, filling his lungs with oxygen until his head became pleasantly light.
‘You can tell me about the ambulance now,’ he said.
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On the television monitor, a street scene appeared. Ben Cooper recogni/ed it as Fargate, with the antique shops in the Buttcrcross area in the background. Two figures were visible, waiting to cross the road. There was no snow on the ground. The display gave the date as 8th January, and the time was 01:48.
One of the figures in the CCTV footage was a tall, slim, white youth of about eighteen with a prominent nose and an aggressive haircut. I le was followed across Fargate by an Asian of the same age, less tall and wearing a heavily padded jacket that made it impossible to judge his build. They walked with a kind of overly casual swagger that suggested they had been fuelled by alcohol to an artificially heightened bravado.
When they reached the antique shops in the Buttercross, one of the youths tapped the other on the arm as they came up behind a third figure, someone heavier and slower. The two youths broke into a run over the last few vards and pounced on their victim, fists flying. What they intended wasn’t clear —
‘ J O ^
whether it was an attempted mugging, or merely a moment of casual violence. But their attack didn’t last long. They were near the corner of one of the shops, where Cooper knew there was an allevwav leading up towards the Underbank area. And suddenly there were more figures appearing from the alley, and the two youths were in the middle of a melee.
Cooper cursed the lighting that threw too many shadows on faces and washed out the colours of clothes. It was impossible to be sure how many newcomers were involved in the attack, but there were at least three. The white youth pulled something from his coat that looked like a knife, and a weapon that might have been a baseball bat was swung at him. Cooper saw one youth go down, then the other, and a boot connected with someone’s ribs so hard you could almost hear the thud on the videotape.
The fracas was over quickly. It was going to be very difficult to sort out who did what, even if anybody could be identified. Cooper knew Eddie Kemp, but he could not have been sure that he was among the group that had been lurking in the shadows.
He had almost stopped the tape when he saw a group appear further up the road, walking away from the camera. There were four of them, probably all male, and it was possible they had
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cut through one of the alleyways to avoid passing in the direct line of the CCTV surveillance. There were cars parked by the roadside, but the group had disappeared from view before they could be seen approaching a particular vehicle.
Cooper re-wound the tape. At accelerated speed, the group backed down the street, and the two youths stood up and drew back. When he ran the tape forward again, he connrmed what he had glimpsed the hrst time. There was a second when one of the men walking away turned to look back over his shoulder at the youths, and his face was partially exposed to the light from a street lamp. The picture would be grainy, but the frame was good enough to be usable in court. Eddie Kemp would have a lot of talking to do to get out of this one.
The air cadets found the wreckage easily. There was no mistaking
o ^ c*
it once it appeared out of the snow. For a while they poked around the scattered pieces. There was probably more under the snow, but the smaller fragments would not reappear until the thaw. The cadets were growing colder and more unhappy as they watched Flight Sergeant Josh Mason clamber over the undercarriage and sit astride an engine casing. He waved his arms
o o o
like a rodeo cowboy.
‘Watch me ride this bugger!’
‘Can’t we go back now?’ said Sharon Thompson.
‘Don’t you want to look at it, now we’re here? It’s a Lancaster bomber. You won’t see one of these very often. Do you know how many pounds of bombs these babies carried?’
Mason tugged at the wing section, lifting it an inch or two from the ground, revealing a dark cavity between mounds of peat, and a trickle of gritty sand. Then he stopped and braced himself against the weight, his cagoule flapping suddenly in a spiral of wind.
‘Hey,’ he shouted, “I think they missed one of the crew!’
‘What?’
‘There are bones under here. It’s a skeleton! A dead body.’
‘Don’t talk daft.’
‘It’s a missing airman from 1945.’
o
The cadets laughed uneasily. They knew Mason had found
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nothing more than the remains of a sick sheep or abandoned lamb that had crawled under the wing section
