Kemp.
‘Some relation of your friend Eddie’s?’ she said.
‘Quite possibly. I’ve an idea that he has a brother.’
‘Maybe he knows where Eddie is, then.’
‘I can soon track him down.’
‘No, Ben. It’ll have to wait/
Then Fry was silent for a while. For half an hour, Cooper was left to his own thoughts as he drove towards a yellow sunset, which dripped over the Dark Peak hills like honey running away into the east. Everything he could see ahead of him was distorted by long shadows lying flat on the landscape. In this light, snow could be black, while the bleak gritstone tors could shine like polished gold.
By the time they were approaching Edendale itself, though, the sunset had gone. They were left with the street lamps and the wet roads, and the stained heaps of snow lying in the gutters. In every house they passed, curtains glowed and flickered in the windows as people hugged their own little lives to themselves. But the hills were lost in the darkness somewhere above the town.
‘You’ve still got a job left to do, haven’t you, Ben?’ said Fry as they approached West Street.
‘Have I?’
‘Interviews with the staff at that place near where the Snowman was found.’
‘The Snake Inn,’ said Cooper.
‘You’ve got it.’
‘It’s quite a long drive from here.’
‘You’d better get going, then.’
They saw Gavin Murfin in the car park chatting to members of the task force. He shrugged when he saw Diane Fry.
OC? V
‘I take it there was no Baby Chloc at Eddie Kcmp’s house, Gavin?’ she said.
‘Not a sign. Not a single used nappy.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me? If anything goes right this week, I’ll buy you another singing lobster.’
204
The licensees oi the Snake Inn oujjht to have been the best people to remember vehicles passing along the road after the heavy snowfall had started early on Tuesday morning. There were hardly any buildings for miles in either direction on the A 57, and the inn relied on tourists or passing trade between Derbyshire and Manchester. They would notice when no vehicles were passing; and they were the first place to be cut off when the snow came.
Yet when Ben Cooper went through their statements with them carefully, they could remember nothing except the snowploughs battling their way over the Pass from either direction. The plough from the east they remembered particularly, because its crew had stopped at the inn to fill up their flasks, shortly
belore they found the bodv. That was the sort of incident that
./
focused the memory wonderfully. Rut no matter how manytimes Cooper went over their statements, the Snake Inn licensees recalled no four-wheel drive cars struggling through the snow that morning.
So had somebody been very lucky indeed? Or had the
V V v
Snowman s body been in the lay-by during the night, in full view of passing traffic? Cooper sighed. He was going to have to tell Dianc Fry to re-draw her time line.
On the way back from the Snake Inn, it wasn’t a long diversion from Manchester Road into Woodland Crescent, Edcndale. In fact, it could even be called a short-cut. Cooper drove down the Crescent first, then reversed and came back again, checking for signs of Alison Morrissey or Frank Raine hanging around the L.ukasx bungalow. The blue BMW was parked in the drive again, and its windscreen was clear of snow and frost, which suggested it had been out and had returned quite recently. If Peter Lukasx. had just finished a shift at the hospital, it might be a good time to catch him.
‘We’re rather popular, aren’t we?’ said Lukasx when he answered the door. ‘Some people can’t keep away.’
‘I wondered if this was a better time to speak to your father,’ said Cooper.
‘It’s never a better time.’
20S
‘Could ve try? Just for a minute?’ ‘Very well. II that’s what it takes to convince you.’ Zygjnunt Lukasz was sitting at a small table in the hack room, with a pad of lined A4-paper open in front of him. He was writing with a thick rollerball pen, which produced a convoluted black script. There was line after line of it building up, creating a dense scrawl on the page. Cooper noticed that the old man’s left hand had the two middle fingers missing. There were two
o o
stumps where the hngers had been cut off below the bottom knuckle.
‘Can 1 talk to you, Mr Lukasz? I’d like to ask you a few questions/
The old man didn’t look up from the table. He spoke a few words in a language Cooper took to be Polish. He looked at the
O O 1
younger Lukasz, who seemed a little embarrassed.
‘My father says he has nothing to say to you.’
