Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth

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СКАЧАТЬ it a wash, then, while you’re at it,’ he said, and slammed the front door.

      Ben Cooper and Gavin Murfin sat in Cooper’s Toyota to wait for the vehicle recovery team to arrive. It was cold, and it was starting to get dark already. Cooper kept the engine running so that they could have the heater on, and wondered what he could do with his time while he waited. He looked at Murfin, but as soon as he’d felt the warmth from the heater, Murfin had put his head back on his seat and closed his eyes. His mouth hung open slightly. Not much hope of conversation, then.

      Cooper tried the radio. There was a sociological discussion programme on Radio Four, a phone-in on Radio Sheffield, and pop hits of the 1980s on Peak 107. He poked around among his cassettes and found nothing he hadn’t listened to already in the last few days. Then he remembered the books he had bought from Lawrence Daley, which were still somewhere deep in his poacher’s pocket.

      He switched on the courtesy light and flicked through the contents pages of the two books. He quickly found the chapter about the crash of Lancaster SU-V, Sugar Uncle Victor. It was one of many aircraft that had fallen victim to primitive navigation equipment and treacherous weather conditions over the Peak District. Some of them were aircraft the Germans hadn’t been able to shoot down, but which the hills of the Dark Peak had claimed.

      Ironically, Mk III Avro Lancaster W5013 had been built locally, by Metropolitan Vickers at their factory in Bamford. So it had started life only a few miles from where it had finished its days. From a recent photograph of the wreckage, he could see there were still several of the larger pieces left – part of the tail, a wing section, and engine casings minus their propellers.

      Like Frank Baine, the author of these books had done plenty of research, and the details of SU-V’s crew were comprehensive. As Baine had said, there had been seven men on board the Lancaster – four British RAF men, two Poles and the Canadian pilot, Danny McTeague.

      Of the British crew, the bomb aimer and rear gunner, Sergeants Bill Mee and Dick Abbott, had been found dead some distance from the aircraft. The text described them as ‘severely mutilated’, but Cooper recognized the euphemism. The phrase was still used today, in official statements to the press on the victims of serious road accidents or suicides on the railway line. It meant their bodies had been dismembered. The wireless operator, Sergeant Harry Gregory, and the mid-upper gunner, Sergeant Alec Hamilton, had been trapped inside the wreckage and had died in the fire that consumed the central section of the fuselage. Burned beyond recognition, they had been identified by the uniforms under their flying suits, and by the contents of their pockets, after their bodies had been taken to the RAF mortuary at Buxton.

      Cooper put the book down for a moment. He wondered whether Alison Morrissey had considered the possibility that one of the bodies had been wrongly identified. Perhaps, after all, her grandfather had died in the crash. All this time, it might have been some other member of the crew they should have been looking for. And he wondered about Pilot Officer Zygmunt Lukasz, the flight engineer, who had survived and was now seventy-eight years old.

      Gavin Murfin stirred and grunted in his seat. His eyes opened.

      ‘Where are we?’ he said.

      ‘Underbank,’ said Cooper. ‘We’re waiting for the recovery crew.’

      ‘There’s a good Indian takeaway around here somewhere,’ said Murfin. Then he snorted, and his head fell back again.

      Weather conditions and primitive equipment – Cooper supposed that was the standard explanation for many of these incidents. Otherwise, the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor seemed inexplicable – the aircraft was flying much too low, and it was off course. But it was hinted in the book that the reason it was off course was that the skipper had apparently ignored the navigator’s instructions. So was it another example of a pilot caught in the trap between high ground and low cloud, finding mountains suddenly in front of him when he thought he was approaching his home airfield in Nottinghamshire? Or had something else gone wrong?

      One of the eye witnesses quoted in the account of the fate of Sugar Uncle Victor was the former RAF mountain rescue man, Walter Rowland, who had also been mentioned by Alison Morrissey. Like Zygmunt Lukasz, he had been unwilling to talk to her. Unwilling, or unable? Rowland was described as being eighteen years old at the time of the crash. After all that time, memories faded. But sometimes there were memories which were too clear for anyone to want them reviving.

      ‘No sign yet?’ mumbled Murfin.

      ‘Not yet.’

      ‘It’s no good, Ben. I’m having curry-flavoured dreams. I’m going to have to go and see if that Indian is open.’

      ‘Fair enough. I’ll still be here when you get back.’

      ‘Do you want anything?’

      ‘Some naan bread.’

      ‘Is that all? You can’t live on that.’

      ‘I wasn’t intending to,’ said Cooper.

      Murfin slipped out of the car, and Cooper watched him stumble down the street, clinging precariously to the steel handrail to stay on his feet. If he made it back up with a set of foil trays and a bag of naan bread intact, it would be a miracle.

      Cooper looked at his mobile phone. He was trying to remember whether Frank Baine had said where Alison Morrissey was staying, but he couldn’t recall. There weren’t all that many hotels in Edendale, and he could easily give Baine a call in the morning to find out. He might also ask the journalist for Walter Rowland’s address.

      Then Cooper laughed to himself. He was thinking all these things as if he were intending to investigate the fifty-seven-year-old mystery, which was ridiculous. The Chief had already sent the Canadian woman packing, and quite rightly. There was certainly no time to be spared on pointless sidelines, by himself or anyone else. He had more than enough to do. So what use would it be for him to know where Morrissey was staying? Why should he need to visit Walter Rowland? No reason at all.

      Thinking he had finished the chapter on Sugar Uncle Victor, Cooper turned the page. He found himself looking at photographs of the wreckage taken shortly after the crash. Sections of broken fuselage lay in the snow, being examined by policemen and servicemen in long overcoats. The letters SU-V were clearly visible on the airframe in one shot. There was no sign of Irontongue Hill in the background, but the photographer had provided a distant glimpse over the moors to a glitter of water on Blackbrook Reservoir, which established the location beyond doubt.

      Then, with the next series of photos, the story suddenly took on a human dimension. The first picture was a ‘team line-up’ of the Lancaster crew – seven young men dressed in Irving suits and flying boots, with their fur collars turned up and the wires from their headsets dangling round their shoulders. They were standing in front of the fuselage of an aircraft, which was probably Uncle Victor himself. The sun was low and falling directly on the men, making their eyes narrow and their faces pale, like miners who had just emerged from underground into the light. They were managing smiles for the camera, though they looked exhausted.

      Cooper thought the comparison to miners wasn’t a bad one, because working in dangerous conditions forged a bond between men that was hard to break. These young airmen had flown thousands of miles in cramped and difficult conditions night after night, heading into hostile territory, with no idea whether they would make it back to base. And not one of them looked older than his early twenties.

      There was a picture of the ground crew and armourers getting the aircraft ready for its mission. This was definitely Uncle Victor, СКАЧАТЬ