Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ one more?’

      ‘One of the Poles,’ said Baine. ‘The navigator. Pilot Officer Klemens Wach.’

      ‘Apart from McTeague, that leaves just one who survived,’ said Cooper.

      ‘Correct.’

      ‘The last one then is the flight engineer. I’m not quite sure how to pronounce it …’

      ‘It’s Lukasz,’ said Baine. ‘Like goulash. The other survivor was Pilot Officer Zygmunt Lukasz.’

      Grace Lukasz noticed that Zygmunt showed no interest now in attending Dom Kombatanta, the Polish ex-servicemen’s club. She was glad about that. These days, the old soldiers and airmen seemed to talk of nothing else but war and death, as if the lives they had lived over nearly six decades since 1945 had been telescoped into a fortnight’s leave from operational duties. She had heard one former paratrooper who had drunk too much vodka in the club one night say that he had never been so alive as when he was facing death. And that’s what they were doing now, too – the old servicemen were standing by to climb on board for their last journey, their final venture into the unknown. This time, their transport would be a hearse.

      At one time, Zygmunt and his friends had taken an interest in British politics. They had discussed endlessly what they thought was an amazing apathy on the part of the British themselves, who hardly seemed to want to bother voting, let alone listening to what the politicians had to say.

      ‘They haven’t been the same since Winston Churchill,’ Zygmunt had said one day.

      ‘Dad, that was nearly sixty years ago,’ said Peter.

      ‘That’s what I mean!’ said Zygmunt. ‘It’s been downhill ever since.’

      But that had been in the days when he would still speak English.

      The old man had a knack of making Grace feel foreign. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which she had never quite got used to since marrying Peter. Before, her name had been Woodward, and she had never even considered her national identity. She had been British, and that meant you didn’t have to think about it. But suddenly one day, her name was Lukasz, and people treated her differently, as if she had been re-born as a foreigner. Even people she had known all her life and had been to school with seemed to imagine that she might have forgotten how to speak English.

      And then, after the accident six years ago, Grace had found herself being glad to feel foreign. Now, when she went into a shop and people fell suddenly silent, she was able to believe that it was because they had heard only her name and mentally labelled her as some kind of East European asylum seeker. There were plenty of asylum seekers now, in the guest houses in Buxton Road.

      Grace had read stories in the newspapers recently about groups of East European women and children visiting shops in local villages supposedly asking for directions and distracting the shopkeepers while their children stole from the shelves. She had no doubt it was true. Most of these people were gypsies anyway, and Edendale had suffered its share of gypsy problems for many years. One year, a tribe of them had parked their lorries and caravans in a field next to Queen’s Park. From the corner of the Crescent, she had been able to see their washing lines and their children playing in the hedge bottoms; she had watched their dogs running wild and their rubbish piling up day by day in the corner of the field. It had been like watching the coming of winter and the dying of the landscape, like waiting and waiting for the first day of spring, when the sun eventually came out and it seemed possible to make things look neat and respectable again. She had experienced the same sense of impotence, the same impatience, as she waited for an irritation to be gone from her life.

      But finally, one morning, the gypsies had departed before dawn, leaving a sea of mud in the field and litter of all kinds strewn down the banking towards the road. What did it matter to her where the gypsies went when they moved on? What did it matter to her where the snow went? The snow was absorbed back into the earth somehow, that was all that mattered. There was a cleansing rhythm to nature that she found comforting.

      Grace turned back to the room. Her eye immediately fell on the Lukasz family photograph in the alcove near the door. Herself and Peter, Zygmunt and Krystyna, with the grandchildren at their knees. She had once, before they were married, tried to persuade Peter to change their surname. She thought it would be best for their future children. A good alternative would have been Lucas, she had said. It would only have been a change in spelling really; the pronunciation was almost the same. Peter had said no. He had said it in a tone of voice she had not heard from him until then, a tone that made her hesitate, then decide not to argue. He had never given her a reason, and she had not asked, in the end.

      She looked at the face of the old man, Zygmunt, at the proud tilt of his head and the direct stare. Peter was becoming more and more like his father with age. Sometimes, if she watched him carefully, she saw a different look in her husband’s eyes when the old man called him ‘Piotr’. It was a look that she had never been able to bring to his eyes, even in their most intimate moments. No matter how many times she whispered his name, she could never bring the same look of pride. The meaning wasn’t there for him in ‘Peter’ in the way it was when he heard his Polish name. For a moment, she wished she could do it by calling him ‘Piotr’ herself. But she knew it was too late to change a habit now.

      Grace went quickly to the window when she heard the sound of a car. A Ford had pulled up at her kerb beyond their hedge. She could see a man with fair hair in the driver’s seat. It wasn’t Andrew. A woman got out on the passenger side. She met Grace’s eyes for a moment. Then she turned away and walked to a house two doors down, while the driver waved and drove off. Grace let go of the breath she had been holding. It wasn’t her either. Not yet.

      Frank Baine waited to be sure he still had their attention. Alison Morrissey had her gaze fixed on Chief Superintendent Jepson. She seemed to be trying to will the Chief to listen, though Ben Cooper knew Jepson well enough to see that his brain had switched off already. Probably he had decided in advance the amount of time he was prepared to give. Cooper wondered how fast the clock was ticking down.

      ‘Former Pilot Officer Zygmunt Lukasz is the sole surviving crew member of Sugar Uncle Victor,’ said Baine. ‘Lukasz was one of the youngest of the crew, but even he is seventy-eight now. As it happens, he lives here, in Edendale.’

      ‘No doubt you’ll be visiting him,’ said Jepson, as if suggesting there was no time like the present.

      ‘We have been in contact with the Lukasz family,’ said Baine. ‘It would be fair to say that they’re not keen to co-operate.’

      ‘Pity,’ said Jepson.

      ‘On the day of the crash, the skipper had filed a visual flight record with flight control, as was normal practice,’ said Baine. ‘He’d been briefed on broken clouds at two thousand feet and poor visibility. But somehow he went off course and found himself over the Peak District. He discovered the fact too late, when he nosed the aircraft down through the overcast to establish his position. Directly in front of him was Irontongue Hill. He never stood a chance of avoiding it.’

      ‘Five men died in the crash. There were two who survived.’

      ‘Yes, the seventh was the pilot, my grandfather,’ said Alison Morrissey. ‘After the crash, he was never found.’

      Cooper was ready for this. It was the whole point of the meeting, after all. The rest was just preamble. ‘He was listed as having deserted,’ he said. ‘In the air accident enquiry, he was also blamed for the crash.’

      Morrissey СКАЧАТЬ