Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth

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      As always, there had been midnight Mass at the Church of Our Lady of Czestochowa on Harrington Street, under the images of the Black Madonna. Alongside the church was the Polish Saturday School, where a handful of pupils still kept the language alive, studying for their Polish GCSE exams, learning the history of Poland and the Catholic faith. It was the children of the Saturday School who would stage the Nativity play at the oplatek dinner next Sunday.

      In church they had all joined in the singing. Some of the men smelled of vodka, and even some of the women were flushed too. But they all tried to sing, nevertheless. The Poles never seemed to have good singing voices, but they made up for it with enthusiasm. Even Zygmunt, in his croaky voice, had joined in with his favourite Koledy, the Christmas carols that followed Mass.

      There had, of course, been the conversation – the catching up on the latest news. All their Polish acquaintances loved a bit of gossip. It was futile to try to keep the intrusion out of their lives. Grace was glad of the snow as an excuse for keeping to the house, because she didn’t know what to say when their friends asked after Andrew.

      She watched Peter stroke the firm leaves of the cactus and touch the tip of his finger to the points of the three-inch long spikes. He pressed on them until the spikes looked as though they would pierce his skin like nails.

      ‘There was a phone call earlier,’ he said.

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘It was that man, Frank Baine.’

      Grace froze. Irrationally, she wanted to reach out and grab the pot the cactus was in, to hurl it against the wall and smash it. She wanted to fling it through the glass on to the flags in the back garden. She wanted to crush its ugly, vicious spikes and watch the fluid spurt from its swollen body. But she couldn’t even reach that high.

      ‘She’s arrived then, has she?’ said Grace.

      ‘She flew into Manchester this morning.’

      ‘Are you going to tell him?’

      Peter shook his head. ‘Let him rest a while longer,’ he said. ‘He needs his rest.’

      Grace recalled the extra place that had been set at the Wigilia dinner. For an unexpected guest, Krystyna had said. The old lady never tired of explaining that it was the tradition, that it meant they could provide hospitality for any wanderer who might be travelling along the road that night, for any stranger who might knock at the door, whoever that person might seem to be. For at Wigilia, the stranger could be Jesus himself. Grace wanted to laugh out loud at the idea of Jesus wandering along Woodland Crescent, Edendale, on Christmas Eve and deciding to ring the bell at number 37. Surely he had better things to do, just as her parents had told her Santa Claus had at Christmas.

      But Grace had said nothing. It had been Zygmunt who had shaken his head and smiled at his sister’s words. Then, in his quiet, barely audible voice, speaking in Polish, he had insisted the extra place was set for those who were absent, for members of the family who had died. What he meant, of course, was that this place was for his cousin Klemens. It had been set at Wigilia when Zygmunt had first become the head of his own household, and every year since.

      But Grace knew this year had been the last time. Next Wigilia, the extra place would no longer be for the absent Klemens. It would be for Zygmunt.

      It might have been more than the cold that made Alison Morrissey shiver and pull her coat closer around her shoulders. In fact, the sun was already rising over Stanage Edge and Bamford Moor. In another hour it would have eased some of the chill from the air and melted away the mist that clung to the black rampart of Irontongue Hill. Morrissey looked as though the sun would bring her no warmth, as though it would take much more than a dose of winter sunlight to do that.

      She was looking across a few yards of rough grass to a snow-covered peat moor and an eruption of bare rock. The wind was scraping across the moor from a more distant mountain to the north.

      ‘The rock there is Irontongue,’ said Frank Baine. ‘In the distance is Bleaklow.’

      ‘This place certainly looks bleak in the snow.’

      ‘Even without the snow, it’s still bleak.’

      It was Irontongue Hill that took her attention. Baine had already told her that it got its name from the eruption of black rock on its summit, an uncompromising slab of millstone grit thrown up by ancient volcanic activity.

      Morrissey turned away. The valley below them looked vast and mysterious in the darkness. It lay like a rumpled sheet tugged into peaks and valleys by a restless sleeper. But gradually the lights of scattered villages and farms were vanishing into the grey wash of dawn. The shadows of the hills deepened and began to spread dark fingers across a patchwork of fields, groping and fumbling among the yards of stone farmhouses and the gardens of invisible hamlets.

      ‘I didn’t anticipate it would be so cold in England,’ she said. ‘I didn’t bring the right clothes.’

      ‘None of your clothes would have been the right ones,’ said Baine. ‘The weather changes by the minute in these parts. This snow could be gone completely tomorrow.’

      ‘Let’s hope so. I’ve got to see the site. That’s very important to me.’

      ‘I understand that,’ said Baine.

      ‘The Lukasz family,’ she said, ‘will they agree to talk to me?’

      ‘No,’ said Baine.

      ‘I could persuade them,’ she said. ‘If only I could get a chance to meet them, face to face, they would see I was human, like them. We all want the same thing.’

      ‘I’m not sure about that.’

      ‘But we do. We all want the truth. Don’t we?’

      They both stared ahead through the windscreen as they waited for it to clear. The hills in front of them were white and completely smooth, like marble slabs. Morrissey shivered.

      ‘The Poles think they know what the truth is,’ said Baine. ‘I’m sorry.’

      He used his sidelights as he drove on down the A57. Halfway down, Morrissey looked back. Her hand felt in her coat pocket for the little autofocus camera that she had not used. Postcards with photographs taken from this spot always seemed to face the other way, to frame a view of the valley bathed in sunlight. They never pictured Irontongue.

      Shortly before the Snake Inn, they had to stop behind a line of cars that were waiting for a policeman in a fluorescent yellow jacket to wave them on. The other side of the road was blocked by two patrol cars with their lights flashing, and a snowplough was standing idle, with more cars pulled in close behind it.

      ‘There, you see,’ said Baine. ‘I told you there must have been an accident. Somebody’s run into the snowplough.’

      Morrissey stared at the scene as they went by. She couldn’t see any damage, or even figure out what the snowplough had collided with. Maybe they had already towed the other vehicle away. Yet there were people standing by the side of the road, and a woman in a sort of white boiler suit crouching in a snowdrift.

      ‘Downhill all the way now,’ said Baine. ‘We’ll soon be in Edendale.’

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