brought the snow down from the moors and blown it round the edge of the woods, sculpting it into strange and unlikely shapes.
e
Just past the last car park, before the end of the woods, Bradley thought he felt the impact of something solid that dragged along the road surface for a few yards under th<
oo o
blade of the plough. Then he saw a dark shape that was briefly revealed in a shower of snow as the blade lifted it and pushed it into the banking. It was followed by the impression of a man’s face hovering near his window for a second, then (ailing away again. It had been a very white face, quite unreal, and could only have been a trick of the snow and the poor light.
‘We hit something, Jack,’ he said, sucking the last of the warm jelly from the pork pic off his fingers.
‘No kidding?’
Jack stopped the engine, and they both got down. The driver seemed to be more worried about damage to the equipment than anything else. He’d told Trevor that people dumped loads of builder’s rubbish in the lay-bys, and stuff like breexe-block and broken bricks could easily chip the blade. The plough was the latest investment by the highways department, and he was conscious of his responsibility (or its pristine condition.
Meanwhile, Bradley poked around a bit by the side of the road, scraped some snow away with his gloved hands, and finally lifted a blue overnight bag out of the drift. The bag was empty. He could tell by the weight of it.
‘ That’s careless,’ he said.
He pushed a bit more snow aside. It looked as though the clothes had spilled out of the bag on to the roadside, because
1 O
there was a shoe lying in the snow. It had a smart black leather toe, with a pattern printed on the upper. It wasn’t a shoe anybody would have been walking in, of course, so it must have come from the luggage. Probably it had been some of the clothes that he had seen in the headlights a white shirt, perhaps, crumpled into the illusion of a human face as it was tossed out of the bag by the impact of the plough blade.
Bradley bent down and tried to pick the shoe up, but felt some resistance, as if it were heavier than it ought to be. Maybe it was frozen to the ground. He brushed a bit more snow clear, and then he noticed the sock. It had a green and blue Argyll design, the sort of sock he had seen some of the bosses wearing
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hack at the council offices. He touched it as he wiped away the frozen snow. It was definitely a sock lor an office worker, not for wearing with a work hoot. Your feet would he frozen solid out here in the snow, if you wore fancy socks like that.
He realized his mind was wandering a hit. It was a long minute helore he finally accepted what his fingers were telling him. There was an ankle in that Argyll sock, and a foot in the shoe. A man lay under the snowdrift.
Bradley straightened up and looked hack at his driver, who was still inspecting the plough. The hlade was bright and sharp and shiny, and it weighed half a ton. Last winter, with one much like it, they had removed the entire Iront wing of a Volkswagen
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Beetle before they had even noticed it abandoned in a snowdrift. Bradley remembered how the hlade had ripped the metal of the car clean away, like a carving knife going through a well-cooked chicken. In fact, the Beetle had been a trendy bright yellow, not unlike a supermarket chicken. For a few moments they had both stared at the lump of metal caught on the blade without recognizing what it was, until the wind had caught it and the wing had flapped off down the road, trailing its headlight cables like severed tendons.
Now, Trevor Bradley recalled his impression of the thing that had bumped and dragged along the road under the plough blade a couple of minutes ago. I Ic remembered the glimpse of something that had waved momentarily from the midst of a spray of snow. It was an object which his brain hadn’t registered at the time, and which he only now identified as having been a human arm. Then there had been the face. The arm and the face had been all that he had seen of the body as they flailed over the edge of the blade and were jerked back into the darkness.
He gulped suddenly, and decided that he didn’t even want to imagine the damage the snowplough could have done to the rest of the bodv.
Bradley opened his mouth to call to his driver.
‘Jack!”
But his voice came out too faintly on the cold air, and it was drowned by the noise of a jet airliner that passed low in the cloud as it manoeuvred for the approach to Manchester
21
Airport. The rumble of the aircraft vibrated the windscreen on the snowplough and set Trevor Bradley’s limbs trembling, too. His stomach decided that, as long as his mouth was open, he might as well be sick.
The noise of the airliner gradually receded as it descended behind the shoulder of Irontonguc Hill. It was an Air Canada Boeing 767, and it was at the end oi a seven-hour ilight from 1 oronto.
22
J. pair of shoes stood outside each door in the hare corridor. There were a set of trainers with thick rubber soles, some brown brogues split down the side, and a pair of high-sided Doc Martens. Right at the end were Eddie Kemp’s wellies, with melted snow running ott them to torm puddles on the floor. In
O I
the background, Nigcl Kennedy was playing The Four Seasons.
‘Has he asked for a doctor?’ asked Ben Cooper.
‘A doctor?’ 1 he custody sergeant frowned as he checked over the paperwork carefully. ‘No. All he said was that he takes two sugars in his tea, when I’m ready.’
‘Giye him the chance to ask, just in case, Sarge.’
The sergeant was well over six feet tall. lie had the weariness about him that Cooper had seen all custody officers develop after a tew months processing prisoners. They saw tar too much of the wrong end of life. they saw tar too many of the same prisoners coming in and out, over and over again.
