Kemp’s street, and noted that the Isuzu wasn’t on its concrete apron.
Now he was nearly half an hour ahead of schedule. Next on his list of tasks was a visit to the Snake Inn, where he was supposed to take statements from the staff and try to jog their memories about vehicles that might have passed the inn after the Pass had been closed because of the heavy snow on Monday night. Half an hour in a cosy pub with a blazing fire and a pint
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of beer sounded attractive. Then his mobile phone rang. It was Diane Fry.
‘Ben I know you’re busy, but I need you to meet me at Eddie Kemp’s house in Bceley Street in half an hour.’
‘Half an hour?’
‘Can you make that?’
‘Of course, but
‘We’ve just had Marie Tennent’s mother in,’ said Fry. ‘Guess who used to be Marie’s boyfriend until he went back to his wife?’
‘Not Eddie?’
‘Yes. That sounds like a desperate woman to me.’
‘Maybe he’s got hidden qualities.’
‘Yeah, she probably liked him for the size of his squeegee.’
‘Do you think he might have the baby? I hope so.’
‘Do you? He wouldn’t be my idea of the perfect father.’
‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘But it’s better than some of the alternatives.’ He looked at the street where he had parked. Eddie Kemp’s house was just round the corner. ‘Half an hour you said, Diane?’
‘I’ve got to show my face at a meeting Arst, so I can’t make it any sooner. Is that OK?’
‘No problem at all.’
When Cooper finished the call, he checked an address in his notebook and turned the car round. The former RAF mountain rescue man, Walter Rowland, lived only a couple of streets down from Eddie Kcmp, in a terrace of houses that hung over the antique shops in the Ruttercross like a line of birds perched among the trees.
Rowland’s front door was one of two narrow entrances which shared a wooden portico carved with stylixcd flower designs. A
v O
stone mounting block found at one of the former coaching inns
o &
in town now stood outside the cottages among the remains of some frost-blackened petunias. On the end of the row stood a modern Gospel Hall, and further up, on the corner of Harrington Street, was another church that Cooper didn’t recognize.
He looked up at Rowland’s cottage. The first-floor windows had tiny glass panes, so grubby and dark that it was obvious
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neither Eddie Kcmp nor any of his window- cleaner colleagues had called this way recently with their ladders and chamois leathers. The putty was crumbling away from the window frames, and the lintels were badly worn where the weather had eaten deep chunks out of the soft golden sandstone. From outside, it looked as though only the ground floor was occupied. The lower windows were stuffed with cheaper versions of the brass in the nearby antique shops, along with pot plants and porcelain figurines in front of the net curtains. These objects were the traditional barricades against the prying eyes of the tourists who passed by in the street during the summer, only inches from the private lives of those who lived here all year round.
Walter Rowland was in his mid-seventies and looked like a man who had been accustomed to doing things with his hands, but no longer could. He had deformed fingers, in which the tendons twitched occasionally, their movement clearly visible under the skin, like the strings of a puppet. Ben Cooper found the movement distracted his eye rrom Rowland’s face and the sound of his voice.
‘Yes, you can come in,’ said Rowland. “I don’t know what you want, but I don’t get much company.’
The cottage was a traditional two up and two down, clean and neat. On the ground floor there was a combined sitting-and dining-room looking on to the street, and a kitchen at the back. Rowland led Cooper through the front room, which was dominated by a pine table and black iron fireplace with an incongruous gas fire that pumped out enough heat to wipe out memories of the cold outside.
In the kitchen, Cooper saw an open back door, which didn’t lead directly to the outside but into a small workshop that had been built on to the house. He saw a wooden workbench, with a gleaming lathe and tools hanging neatly in racks. There were old wood shavings on the floor and several half-finished objects on a table.
Rowland closed the door to the workshop. He did it awkwardly, not using his hands, but leaning into it with his
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dhow and shoulder. Then, without even bothering to ask whether his visitor wanted a cup of tea, he switched on an electric kettle that stood next to the sink under the hack window. Cooper noticed that the skin of the old man’s face was translucent, like his hands. You could see the veins in his temples and the light from the window shining through his ears.
‘Of course I remember the crashed Lancaster,’ said Rowland. ‘I rememhcr all the crashes I went to, every body or injured airman I helped to carry off the mountains. That’s not the sort of thing you forget. And the Lancaster was the worst of them all/
‘Do you remember the fuss about the Canadian pilot who went missing?’
‘That one walked away,’ said Rowland. ‘The pilot. McTcague. Murder, that was, pure and simple. That man left four of his crew dead, and another one dying, and he walked away. He didn’t care about them, did he?’
‘Maybe it was shock. People behave in strange ways in those circumstances. He might not even have known where he was, or what had happened.’
Rowland sniffed. ‘I’ll give you that. Sometimes we had men that would wake up in hospital and not know why
