Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth

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      A few minutes after re-starting, the snowplough had reached the stretch of road through Lady Clough and the Snake Plantations. Here, the hill became steeper and the headlights fell on even deeper drifts, where the wind had brought the snow down from the moors and blown it round the edge of the woods, sculpting it into strange and unlikely shapes.

      Just past the last car park, before the end of the woods, Bradley thought he felt the impact of something solid that dragged along the road surface for a few yards under the blade of the plough. Then he saw a dark shape that was briefly revealed in a shower of snow as the blade lifted it and pushed it into the banking. It was followed by the impression of a man’s face hovering near his window for a second, then falling away again. It had been a very white face, quite unreal, and could only have been a trick of the snow and the poor light.

      ‘We hit something, Jack,’ he said, sucking the last of the warm jelly from the pork pie off his fingers.

      ‘No kidding?’

      Jack stopped the engine, and they both got down. The driver seemed to be more worried about damage to the equipment than anything else. He’d told Trevor that people dumped loads of builder’s rubbish in the lay-bys, and stuff like breeze-block and broken bricks could easily chip the blade. The plough was the latest investment by the highways department, and he was conscious of his responsibility for its pristine condition.

      Meanwhile, Bradley poked around a bit by the side of the road, scraped some snow away with his gloved hands, and finally lifted a blue overnight bag out of the drift. The bag was empty. He could tell by the weight of it.

      ‘That’s careless,’ he said.

      He pushed a bit more snow aside. It looked as though the clothes had spilled out of the bag on to the roadside, because there was a shoe lying in the snow. It had a smart black leather toe, with a pattern printed on the upper. It wasn’t a shoe anybody would have been walking in, of course, so it must have come from the luggage. Probably it had been some of the clothes that he had seen in the headlights – a white shirt, perhaps, crumpled into the illusion of a human face as it was tossed out of the bag by the impact of the plough blade.

      Bradley bent down and tried to pick the shoe up, but felt some resistance, as if it were heavier than it ought to be. Maybe it was frozen to the ground. He brushed a bit more snow clear, and then he noticed the sock. It had a green and blue Argyll design, the sort of sock he had seen some of the bosses wearing back at the council offices. He touched it as he wiped away the frozen snow. It was definitely a sock for an office worker, not for wearing with a work boot. Your feet would be frozen solid out here in the snow, if you wore fancy socks like that.

      He realized his mind was wandering a bit. It was a long minute before he finally accepted what his fingers were telling him. There was an ankle in that Argyll sock, and a foot in the shoe. A man lay under the snowdrift.

      Bradley straightened up and looked back at his driver, who was still inspecting the plough. The blade was bright and sharp and shiny, and it weighed half a ton. Last winter, with one much like it, they had removed the entire front wing of a Volkswagen Beetle before they had even noticed it abandoned in a snowdrift. Bradley remembered how the blade had ripped the metal of the car clean away, like a carving knife going through a well-cooked chicken. In fact, the Beetle had been a trendy bright yellow, not unlike a supermarket chicken. For a few moments they had both stared at the lump of metal caught on the blade without recognizing what it was, until the wind had caught it and the wing had flapped off down the road, trailing its headlight cables like severed tendons.

      Now, Trevor Bradley recalled his impression of the thing that had bumped and dragged along the road under the plough blade a couple of minutes ago. He remembered the glimpse of something that had waved momentarily from the midst of a spray of snow. It was an object which his brain hadn’t registered at the time, and which he only now identified as having been a human arm. Then there had been the face. The arm and the face had been all that he had seen of the body as they flailed over the edge of the blade and were jerked back into the darkness.

      He gulped suddenly, and decided that he didn’t even want to imagine the damage the snowplough could have done to the rest of the body.

      Bradley opened his mouth to call to his driver.

      ‘Jack!’

      But his voice came out too faintly on the cold air, and it was drowned by the noise of a jet airliner that passed low in the cloud as it manoeuvred for the approach to Manchester Airport. The rumble of the aircraft vibrated the windscreen on the snowplough and set Trevor Bradley’s limbs trembling, too. His stomach decided that, as long as his mouth was open, he might as well be sick.

      The noise of the airliner gradually receded as it descended behind the shoulder of Irontongue Hill. It was an Air Canada Boeing 767, and it was at the end of a seven-hour flight from Toronto.

       3

      A pair of shoes stood outside each door in the bare corridor. There were a set of trainers with thick rubber soles, some brown brogues split down the side, and a pair of high-sided Doc Martens. Right at the end were Eddie Kemp’s wellies, with melted snow running off them to form puddles on the floor. In the background, Nigel Kennedy was playing The Four Seasons.

      ‘Has he asked for a doctor?’ asked Ben Cooper.

      ‘A doctor?’ The custody sergeant frowned as he checked over the paperwork carefully. ‘No. All he said was that he takes two sugars in his tea, when I’m ready.’

      ‘Give him the chance to ask, just in case, Sarge.’

      The sergeant was well over six feet tall. He had the weariness about him that Cooper had seen all custody officers develop after a few months processing prisoners. They saw far too much of the wrong end of life. They saw far too many of the same prisoners coming in and out, over and over again.

      ‘Why, what does he reckon is wrong with him?’ said the sergeant. ‘Apart from having his sense of smell amputated?’

      ‘He is a bit ripe, isn’t he?’

      ‘Ripe? Putrescent is the word that springs to mind.’

      There was a strange, rancid odour about Eddie Kemp – not his breath, but the smell of his body, a sourness that oozed directly from his pores. It seemed to eddy in the air around him when he moved, restrained only by his clothes from overpowering anyone within twenty yards. When his old overcoat and body warmer came off, the paint on the walls had almost begun to peel.

      They had bagged up Kemp’s outer clothes as quickly as they could and sent a PC around the custody suite with disinfectant. There were three prisoners on the women’s side, and they’d soon be complaining again. Cooper thought the smell would stay with him all day, like his frozen foot.

      ‘I hope they’re not going to be too long coming to interview him,’ said the sergeant. ‘One of our prostitutes down the corridor there has been reading up on the Human Rights Act. There might be a clause about infringement of a prisoner’s right to fresh air, for all I know.’

      ‘I don’t know who’s going to interview Eddie Kemp, but rather them than me,’ said Cooper. ‘Besides, I think he might have some popular support out on the streets. I’m sure three of his mates were at the café. But he’s the only one we had a witness ID for.’

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