beginnings of a fascination. They always included a desire to find out everything there was to know about a subject, and a tendency to he thinking about it even when he was supposed to he on duty.
He was lucky that he had survived this long in the job when his mind was so prone to (lights of imagination. Imagination was a trait that didn’t always fit with routine police work. Up to now, his supervisors had given him plenty of leew ay on the strength of his reputation. And, of course, because of who he was. He was Sergeant Joe Cooper’s son. Who wouldn’t find it understandable if he seemed to be a little distracted occasionally? But now, more than ever, Cooper was aware that he ought to watch his step.
He turned off the TV and looked at his watch. The man he most wanted to talk to at this moment was Walter Rowland, the former member of the RAF rescue team who had been on the scene of the Lancaster crash. Aside from Zvgmunt Lukasz.
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Rowland was the only surviving witness he knew of. But it had been a long dav and he was exhausted. Maybe tomorrow he
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would find a chance to contact Rowland. Probably it would be a waste of time. It all happened a long lime ago, after all, and Rowland was an old man by now — no doubt he would have forgotten the whole thing.
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Because he had turned off the TV, Cooper missed the news bulletin later that night, when it was announced that human remains had been found at the site of an old aircraft wreck on Irontongue Hill.
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Ever .since he had retired, Walter Rowland liked to listen to the radio in his workshop. The sound of the voices soothed him as he
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worked, helped him to forget the increasing pain that would knot his hands into claws for days. The news readers’ talk of events going on in and around Derbyshire was somehow reassuring; it made him feel that he was well off where he was, lucky to be out of the constant mad whirl of car crashes and house Hres and endless incomprehensible arguments about subjects he would never have to understand. But tonight, what he heard on the radio made him pause on his lathe. He stared at a curl of wood as it hung from the chair leg, ready to fall. He had forgotten what he was supposed to be doing.
Rowland had been just eighteen years old when the RAF Lancaster crashed on Irontongue Hill. He had enlisted twelve months before the war ended, and had never seen any action. Instead, he had been recruited into the RAF mountain rescue unit based at Harpur Hill. Then he had seen a bit of action all right, and plenty of dead and injured men, too. Rut the bodies had all been from his own side British and American airmen, or Canadians, Australians and Poles. They had not been killed by enemy action, but had died on the hills of the Peak District. A lot of them had flown unwarily into the deadly embrace of the Dark Peak, into that old trap that lay between low cloud and high ground.
They didn’t say much on the radio news late that evening. But he heard the newsreader mention human remains and an aircraft wreck on Irontongue Hill. The words were enough to take Rowland back over half a century, to a scene of carnage and a burning aircraft on a snowcovered hill. There had been human remains then, all right. There had been pieces everywhere, and men charred like burnt steaks in the wreckage.
He thought about the possibility that there might, after all, have been another body the rescue team hadn’t found, a fatally injured crew member who had been overlooked. But then Rowland remembered how thorough the search of
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the wreckage had been, not only by the rescue teams and the local police, but also later by the RAF recovery squad. And he recalled how many of the fragments of the aircraft
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had disappeared over the years, scavenged by souvenir collectors or tugged loose by curious walkers and left to be
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scattered by the ferocious gales that blasted those moors in winter.
Rowland brushed the wood shavings off his overalls with the backs of his hands.
‘No way,’ he said to the chair leg sitting on his workbench. ‘No way on this earth.’
He had lost interest in the chair. The smooth surface and delicate turns seemed irrelevant now, an old man’s preoccupation, no more than a means of keeping himself occupied and away from his memories. His hands weren’t as good as they used to be now, anyway. The arthritis had progressed too far, and the pain was so great that it was impossible to keep his grip on the wood. He knew he would suffer for the rest of the week now, as a result of the short time he had spent working on the chair. Some folk would tell him to stop, to give in and accept that he was wasting his effort. Aye, and the clay that he gave in would be the day that he died.
Rowland opened the back door of the workshop and coughed out a mouthful of sawdust on to the side of the path, staining a patch of snow. Then he lifted his head slowly and spoke to the night sk, as if the cold air might somehow carry his voice to the place on Irontongue Hill where the wreckage of Lancaster SU-V lay.
‘All of them that died in that crash, we got out,’ he said. ‘And the one that should have died that bastard walked away.’
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1 he tiny bones looked pathetic on the slab. Dark peat had dried and crumbled away from the skeleton, to be carefully swept into an evidence bag. Some of the bones were crushed or were freshlv
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broken where Flight Sergeant Josh Mason had dropped the wing of Sugar Uncle Victor on them.
‘If it weren’t for the skull, you could be forgiven for thinking you had found a dead lamb/ said the pathologist, Julian Van Doon. ‘At this age, they’re barely formed.’
‘What age?’ said Dianc Fry.
‘Mmm. Two weeks, perhaps. We’ll ask a forensic anthropologist to take a closer look. The only injuries I can see. are definitely postmortem.’
‘Blasted air cadets.’
‘It’s hardly their fault.’ The pathologist used a small steel instrument to remove a live insect that had been
