A group of men in their thirties came into the pub, let loose by their wives for Sunday lunchtimc. They were talking noisily, joking about someone who had lost money through his ignorance when buying a secondhand car. They wore sweatshirts, and denim jeans with the waistbands rolling over from the pressure of their stomachs, and they made a fuss of choosing the specialist guest beers as if they were ordering cases of vintage wine.
‘Then I had another problem,’ said Morrissey. ‘I had to consider whether to contact the relatives of the other airmen. Would they want to know the information I had? I had to try to put myself in their position. I was worried that I would be opening up old wounds. Just because those wounds are fifty-seven years old doesn’t necessarily make them any less painful. I know that.’
Cooper tried to keep his eyes on hers, to encourage her to carry on talking. Often, that was all people needed, an air of attcntiveness. But gazing into her eyes began to make
2+0
him feel too disorientated after a while, and he had to look away.
‘At first, it seemed an impossible task that I’d set myself,’ she said. ‘My imagination failed at the hurdle of putting myself in other people’s shoes.’
‘If you’ve never had that sort of experience yourself …’
‘No. It wasn’t that. It was because these were people who blamed my grandfather for their relatives’ deaths. In the end, I decided that there was only one approach to take. I had to assume that the relatives, like me, would be happy to know what had really happened.’
She was talking constantly, barely pausing to eat, hardly waiting for him to nod or shake his head in response. It was as if she didn’t want him to get a word in, as if she were afraid he might try to change the subject before she had finished explaining herself. Cooper began to feel he was unduly honoured by the fact that she had chosen him to explain it to. He wondered if anybody else had been given this privilege. Frank Baine, probably.
‘You see. to me it felt as though I’d been reading a book but
o o
had been forced to put it down before the final chapter, and had never been able to finish it. It was a sense of frustration that drove me, I think. I knew finishing the last page would be a
‘ o f o
bitter-sweet experience. Gut it was an experience I had to go through with. Do you understand, Ben?’
The fact that she had called him Ben so naturally seemed to mark an important moment in their meeting. Cooper had interviewed enough people to know that unburdening herself of her thoughts had made Morrissey feel closer to him and had put him in the role of a friend. He had no problem with that.
‘I think I understand.’
‘Good. Did you know that last Monday was the anniversary of the crash?’
‘Yes, I realized that.’
‘I don’t know why, but it seemed important I should come over here now.’
‘Do you happen to have the medal with you?’ asked Cooper.
‘Yes. And the package it came in, too.’ Morrissey placed the
241
modal on the table. ‘My grandfather kept it on him all the time when he was Hying. It was a kind of lucky charm.’
Cooper used a dessert spoon to tip the medal towards the light from the pub window, so that he could sec the shine from its metal surface.
Morrissey watched him with a smile, ‘if you’re looking for fingerprints, I have to tell you that the first thing my mother did was give it a good clean. She said it was dirty. Tarnished. She used metal polish on it.’
‘Great.’ Cooper could smell the polish. But there were pitted areas of corrosion on the metal, and damp stains on the faded ribbon. There were darker stains, too small specks that could have been blood. The medal had arrived in an ancient leather pouch, which had crumbled and split until it was practically useless. On the inside were the remains of decayed stitching, where a label mi^ht once have been attached. The pouch had been wrapped in brown paper folded over several times and sealed with parcel tape, and the Canadian address was written in capital letters with a black felt-tipped pen.
‘No note?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘And the address is correct?’
‘Yes.’
“I wonder how the sender knew your mother’s address.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Morrissey.
Cooper looked up (from the package. ‘Sorry?’
‘Don’t you think that’s what we’ve been wondering for months, ever since the medal arrived?’
‘Of course.’
‘It has to be someone who either had access to my grandfather’s service records, or who was close enough to him for my grandfather to have given them his home address. Perhaps he wrote it down for them, so that they could stay in touch after the war was over.’
‘You mean one of the members of his crew^?’
‘And since it was mailed from Edendale …’
‘You concluded that it came from the surviving crew member, Zygmunt Lukasz.’
242
‘Who else? When Frank Bainc told us Lukas/ still lived in Eclendale, it seemed a
