Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth

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       4

      Diane Fry hated these spells of standing around doing nothing. There were plenty of people who were better at that sort of thing than she was. It had been marginally better back at West Street, where at least she might have been able to hang on to the SOCOs’ fan heater for a little while longer. But out here there was nothing to keep her warm, apart from the long, red scarf she had bought from Gap at Meadowhall for the winter. There was no shelter, nor even any physical activity to prevent her body from seizing up. She would rather have been the officer directing the traffic – at least he got to wave his arms a bit. But it wasn’t the thing for a new detective sergeant to be doing.

      Instead, she spent her time going through some discreet exercises, rising up on her toes, stretching her tendons, practising her breathing, feeling for the centres of energy in her body, keeping her circulation moving in her extremities to combat the cold. She became so absorbed in what she was doing that she almost forgot she wasn’t alone. Almost.

      ‘No blood,’ said DI Paul Hitchens. He folded his arms across his chest as he leaned casually on the wheel arch of the snowplough, whose blade had been hastily covered by a sheet of blue plastic. Hitchens looked relaxed, and he spoke as if he were commenting on the weather. No blood today then, just snow. How boring. But Fry knew the comment wasn’t addressed to her. Hitchens had a more appreciative audience.

      DC Gavin Murfin had been talking to the county council driver and his mate, who were now sitting in the back of a patrol car. Murfin was wearing a pair of unsuitable fur-covered boots that came up to his knees, like the bottom half of a yeti costume. He stamped his feet on an area of compacted snow as he came round the back of the plough and wheezed faintly in the cold air.

      ‘Blood? Not a drop,’ he said cheerfully.

      Fry frowned at Murfin as he fumbled among his clothes for a pocket to put his notebook away in. He was wearing so many sweaters that he looked like the original Michelin Man, with layers of rubber wobbling around his middle. Yet his face was flushed with cold. Somewhere in his pockets, she suspected, there might be a secret supply of food – something to keep him going for an hour or two, until he could find the nearest Indian takeaway for a beef biryani to stink her car out again.

      ‘You know, I really hate it when there’s no blood,’ said Hitchens.

      The pathologist, Juliana Van Doon, was suited up and working in the area cleared of snow, while an officer video’d the scene. Mrs Van Doon had the dead man’s clothes open across his abdomen to examine a gaping wound. In her white suit, she looked like a badly designed snowman. Fry sighed. A snowman and the Michelin Man. There must be something wrong with her brain today. The cold weather was giving her hallucinations.

      ‘Blood really makes a body, I always think,’ said Hitchens. ‘It gives it that bit of excitement. A certain je ne sais quoi. A subtle edge of implied violence, perhaps. The bitter-sweet taste of mortality. Do you know what I mean, Gavin?’

      ‘Oh, sure,’ said Murfin. ‘It means you know the bloke’s a definite stiff ’un, like.’

      Fry thought Murfin’s voice sounded slightly muffled, as if he had smuggled something into his mouth without her noticing. She thought she heard the rustle of a chocolate wrapper in his pocket. She looked longingly towards her car. There were things for her to be doing back at West Street. There were always things for her to be doing at the moment. Life went on in all its predictable messy ways in Edendale, as it did in every town in Derbyshire, as it no doubt did in every town and city in the country. There were plenty of crimes that went by without being investigated, let alone cleared up. The paperwork was everywhere to prove it – cases that had been allocated crime numbers for insurance claims, and then filed. Everyone was crying out for more police time to be spent on solving crime, as if the world depended on it.

      But here, at the foot of the Snake Pass, Fry felt as though she were standing on the edge of the world. On either side of the A57 there was a white wall a couple of feet deep where the snow lay untouched and unnaturally smooth, so that the edges of the road merged seamlessly into the surrounding moorland. The tarmacked surface of the A57 was normally the only sign of civilization this far out of Edendale, and Fry found its disappearance unsettling. It seemed to be telling her she might never get out.

      Mrs Van Doon turned for a second to stare at the police officers standing in the road. Their voices carried loud and clear to where she was working. She shook her head and concentrated again on her job.

      ‘You’d think if someone had been cut almost in half by a snowplough, they would bleed a bit,’ said Hitchens.

      ‘Yes, you’d think so,’ said Murfin. ‘A bit.’

      ‘If only out of a desire to be artistically satisfying in their final moments.’

      Hitchens caught Fry’s eye and nodded at her, as if she had said something intelligent. She knew he sensed her antipathy to Murfin and her irritation at the way the DI was encouraging him. But Hitchens smiled, like a man who had all the time in the world at his disposal and had chosen to spend part of it right here, in this isolated, snow-covered spot, with a handful of fellow police officers, two distraught council workmen, and a body with no blood.

      ‘Mind you, it’s probably a clue,’ he said.

      Fry watched the pathologist taking a temperature and examining the corpse’s skin for lividity. The dead man was dressed in a dark suit that bore the marks of the snowplough blade where it had gouged into him and tossed him on to the roadside verge like a sack of rubbish. The blue overnight bag that had been found with him stood a few feet away. He could almost have been a passenger stranded at a snowbound airport, sleeping uncomfortably on the floor of the terminal as he waited for a flight that would never leave.

      Murfin surreptitiously chewed something and swallowed. When he opened his mouth, Fry imagined she could see tiny particles of chocolate hanging in the cloud of his breath, perhaps a sweet-flavoured mist that drifted and dissipated in the sharp air. ‘I think I’ve got it, sir,’ he said.

      ‘Yes, Gavin?’

      ‘The snowplough driver is a vampire. He sucked all the blood out of the body, and he never left a drop.’

      Fry turned away so that they wouldn’t see her expression. She felt the irritation СКАЧАТЬ