Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ those days for a pawnbroker. He noticed that the ground crew barely seemed to have a standard uniform – they wore leather jerkins, sea-boot socks, gumboots, battledress, oilskins, tunics, scarves, mittens, gloves, balaclavas.

      On the facing page was the most atmospheric picture of all. It had been taken inside the aircraft, and it was grainy and spattered with white specks where there had been dust on the negative. The curved interior structure of the aircraft could be seen, and the lettering on an Elsan chemical toilet. In the foreground, a young airman was half-turned towards the camera. His sergeant’s stripes were clearly visible on his arm, and he wore a leather flying helmet and the straps of a parachute harness over his uniform, so he must have been preparing for take-off.

      But the airman was surely no more than a boy. There was no caption to say who he was, and it was difficult to identify him as one of the men on the facing page. The photographs must have been taken at a different time, because this young man had a faint moustache, while the only airman in the group photograph with a moustache was identified as the pilot, Danny McTeague. This wasn’t McTeague. This young man had a prominent nose and a narrow face, and a small lock of dark hair that had escaped from under his flying helmet on to his forehead. Cooper decided he must be Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner. He had been eighteen years old, and the crew had called him Lofty because he was only five foot six inches tall.

      Cooper stared at the photo for a long time, forgetting to read about the many other aircraft that had come to grief in the Dark Peak. He felt as if the young airman were somehow communicating with him across the distance of more than five decades. It didn’t seem all that long ago that he too had been the same age as this airman. Cooper could sense himself slipping into the young man’s place in the aircraft. He could feel the straps of the parachute over his shoulders and the rough uniform against his skin, hear the roaring of the four Merlin engines and feel the vibration of the primitive machine that would hurtle him into the air. He was eighteen years old, and he was frightened.

      Ben Cooper was hardly aware of the vehicle recovery crew negotiating their truck into Beeley Street with lights flashing and diesel engine throbbing. His attention was taken up by trying to analyse his feelings about the photograph, so that he was hardly aware, even, of Gavin Murfin tapping on the window, unable to open the door because of the leaking trays he was balancing.

      When Murfin was back in the car, it immediately began to fill with smells of curry and boiled rice. The steam from the trays fogged the windows, so that Beeley Street and Eddie Kemp’s Isuzu gradually vanished in a fog.

      ‘Here’s your naan bread,’ said Murfin. ‘Dip in, if you want.’

      But the naan bread sat in his lap unopened, the grease gradually soaking through the paper on to his coat.

      Cooper finally realized that it was the look in the young man’s eyes that was completely different from the group picture; it was a look which made him unrecognizable from the line-up of smiling heroes. It was the blank, empty stare of a man who had no idea whether he would be coming back to his home base that night. The young man’s stare spoke of resignation at the prospect of sudden death as a German night-fighter raked Uncle Victor with machine-gun fire, or the Lancaster’s engines failed and they were forced to ditch in the icy North Sea. According to the text, Lancasters were notoriously difficult to escape from when they were in the water.

      In fact, that haunted look and the grey, grainy quality of the photograph made the airman appear almost as though he wasn’t there at all. He might have been no more than a faded image superimposed on the interior of the aircraft, the result of an accidental double exposure on the film.

      To Ben Cooper, it seemed that the photographer had captured a moment of presentiment and foreboding, a glimpse into the darkness of the near future. Sergeant Dick Abbott, only eighteen years old, looked as if he were already a ghost.

       9

      Back at West Street, Ben Cooper dug through the paper that had been collecting on his desk until he found the file produced by the Local Intelligence Officer for the meeting with Alison Morrissey. It didn’t have anything like the amount of detail about the crash and the Lancaster’s crew that was in the book from Lawrence’s shop. But the LIO’s file did have one advantage – it had the names of the two boys who had reported seeing the missing airman walking down the Blackbrook Reservoir road that night.

      Cooper had remembered that point, because Morrissey had complained during the meeting that she was unable to track them down since their names weren’t given in the reports. It hadn’t seemed wise to admit that he had the information in front of him; the Chief Superintendent would certainly not have approved of too apparent a willingness to assist. But it meant the LIO had done a good job collecting the information. Either that, or Alison Morrissey’s research was badly flawed.

      ‘Do you know Harrop, Gavin?’ he said.

      Murfin sniffed. ‘Godawful place. Back of the moon that is, Ben. That’s not where you’re thinking of moving to, is it?’

      ‘No. I don’t think I’ve ever been there.’

      ‘It’s up the top of the Snake Pass somewhere, on the way to Glossop.’

      ‘It must be over the other side of Irontongue Hill.’

      ‘That’s it. I bet they were cut off up there today all right. There’s no bus service in Harrop. No bus route, so no priority for the snowplough. Somebody will dig them out tomorrow, maybe.’

      The names of the boys were Edward and George Malkin, aged twelve and eight, of Hollow Shaw Farm, Harrop. From what Gavin said, Harrop sounded the sort of village where families might stay in one place, generation after generation of them sometimes. Cooper found a telephone directory. Sure enough, there was a G. Malkin still listed at Hollow Shaw Farm. There seemed a good chance that this was the same George Malkin, then aged eight, now sixty-five.

      ‘Knocking off, Ben?’ said Murfin. ‘Fancy a pint?’

      ‘I’d love to, Gavin,’ said Cooper. ‘But I’ve got things to do. Places to look at.’

      ‘Ah, the pleasures of house-hunting. It kind of ruins your social life, like.’

      Cooper drove eastwards out of Edendale. He climbed the Snake Pass and descended again almost into Glossop before he turned north and skirted the outlying expanses of peat moor around Irontongue Hill. The buttress of rock on top of the hill was a familiar sight to him, as it was prominently visible on a good day from the A57. The rock was certainly tongue-shaped when you looked at it from this direction, with ridges and crevices furrowing its dark surface. It wasn’t a human tongue, though. There was something reptilian about its length and the suggestion of a curl at the tip. And it was colder and harder than iron, too – it was the dark rock that millstones had been made out of, the sort of rock that the weather barely seemed to touch, even over centuries. The wind and rain had merely smoothed its edges, where the tongue lay on the broken teeth of volcanic debris.

      Tonight, Irontongue was visible even in the dark. It uncoiled from the snow-covered slopes to poke at the sky, with dribbles of white lying in its cracks.

      Cooper found that Harrop was barely big enough to be called a village, yet the roads were clear enough of snow for the Toyota to have no problems. Above Harrop there was a scatter of farms and homesteads with those austere Dark Peak names – Slack House, Whiterakes, Red Mires, Mount Famine and Stubbins. They clung to the edges of the mountain like burrs on the fur of a sleeping dog.

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