Stephen Booth – Blood on the Tongue (страница 2)

‘All suspects could be in possession of baseball bats or similar weapons. Approach with caution.’

Now he could almost taste the coffee; he could feel the crunch of the toasted teacake and the clinging softness of the melted cheese. Saliva began to seep on to his tongue. Cooper pulled back his glove to look at his watch. Plenty of time.

While his nose was pressed close to the window, a hand came up and wiped away some of the condensation. A woman’s face appeared, her eyes wide with outrage. She mouthed an obscenity and raised two fingers that poked from a blue woollen mitten. Cooper pulled away. There would be no toasties this morning, and no coffee.

‘Control, I need a car outside the Starlight Café in Hollowgate.’

‘With you in two minutes, DC Cooper … Is it still dark out there?’

‘It’s an hour before dawn,’ said Cooper. ‘What do you think?’

It was the ice and the scouring wind that created the worst of Marie Tennent’s delusions. They were like daggers thrust into her brain, plunged in so deeply that their edges scraped together in the middle of her skull, filling her head with noise.

For the last hour before she died, Marie believed she could hear music wailing in the wind, the hissing of wheels on an icy road, and the muttering of voices deep in the snow. Her mind struggled to interpret the sounds, to make sense of what was happening to her. But the music was meaningless and the voices distorted, like the babbling of a badly tuned radio when its batteries were almost dead.

Marie lay amid the smells of bruised snow and damp air, with the taste of her own blood in her mouth and her body a bewildering pattern of cold spots and numbness and pain. Her arms and legs were burning where the snow had melted into her clothes and frozen again. And the ache in her head had flowered into a savage, unbearable agony.

It was because of the pain that Marie knew, in a lucid spell, that the sounds she could hear were caused by the tiny bones of her inner ear shrinking and twisting as they froze. They were grating against each other as they contracted, creating an internal whisper and mumble, a parody of sound that mocked her slow withdrawal from the boundaries of reality. It was a disturbing and inarticulate farewell, a last baffling message from the world. It was the only accompaniment to her dying.

The sun had dropped over the edge of Irontongue Hill, so that the snow-covered moor was in shadow, and the temperature was dropping fast. Marie felt the faint, cold kiss of snowflakes on her face. Yet the top of the hill was still touched by the last of the sun, and the snow on the rocks was turned blue by the light. Irontongue itself was hidden from her, its fissured shaft of dark gritstone poking southwards over the valley. But she caught a glint of water to the north, where Blackbrook Reservoir lay in a hollow of the moors.

The last thing Marie saw before her eyelids closed was a thin, dark shape that sliced the skyline on the hill. It seemed to cut into the grey belly of cloud like the blade of a razor. Her mind clutched at the thought of it as she drew together the dregs of her willpower to fight the pain. In the end, that crumbling memorial in the middle of the snowfield had not been the place she was destined to die. It was for men who had lived and died together. It was quite a different thing to die alone.

A series of out-of-focus slides seemed to flicker across a screen in her mind. They were gone too quickly for her to puzzle out their significance, though she knew they were connected to her life. Each one had vague figures that swung and jerked against a dark background. Each brought with it a momentary burst of smells and tastes and sounds, a kaleidoscope of sensations that dragged all the emotions out of her and ripped them away before she could recognize what they were.

There was a voice, too – the voice of a real, remembered person, not a phantom of the snow. ‘We’ll be together,’ it said. ‘Are you happy?’ it said.

And then there were just three final words. They came amid an eruption of intolerable pain, the smell of dirty sheets and the sound of scuttling feet above her head. The same voice, but not the same.

‘It’s too late,’ it said.

And Marie Tennent would never see the dawn.

Ben Cooper entered the café. It was full of customers, who sat half-asleep over their mugs of tea, their brains kept barely alert by the tendrils of steam they breathed in through their noses. As Cooper stamped his feet to shake off the snow, a few faces turned away from him, as usual.

One man sat alone near the counter. He was wearing a dark overcoat and a Manchester United hat. Cooper moved up behind him until he was close enough to recognize the smell. The man had an odour about him that identified him against the background of bacon and fried eggs, even among the wet-dog smells from sodden coats and muddy floor tiles.

Cooper moved slightly so that he could see the man’s face.

‘Morning, Eddie,’ he said.

The customer nodded cautiously. It was the best that Cooper could expect, in the circumstances. Eddie Kemp was well known to most of the officers at E Division headquarters. He had visited the custody suite and interview rooms there many times in the past. These days, though, he visited other parts of the West Street station, too, if only from the outside. Eddie Kemp had started a window-cleaning business.

‘Bad weather for business, isn’t it?’ said Cooper.

‘Bloody awful. My chamois leathers are frozen solid. Like dried-up cow pats, they are.’

Kemp didn’t look too good today. His eyes were red and tired, as if he’d been up all night. The Starlight opened at five o’clock for the postal workers starting their shift at the sorting office, for the bus drivers and railway staff, and even a few police officers. Kemp looked as though he had been here since the doors opened that morning.

‘Put your hands on the table, please,’ said Cooper.

Kemp stared at him sourly. ‘I suppose you’re going to spoil my breakfast,’ he said.

‘I’m afraid you’re under arrest.’

The other man sighed and held out his wrists. ‘They only got what they deserved,’ he said.

Yes, it was the sound of feet. Feet creaking around her in the snow. Marie Tennent’s heart lurched painfully against her diaphragm, and a spurt of adrenalin ran through her muscles like acid. She was sure she could hear the footsteps of human rescuers, as well as those of something quicker and lighter that skittered across the surface of the snow. She became convinced that a search dog had sniffed her out, and that arms were about to pull her from the snow and wrap her in a thermal blanket, that friendly hands would bring warmth to her skin with their touch and reassuring voices would ease the agony in her ears.

But the footsteps passed her by. She couldn’t cry out for help, because her reflexes failed and her body had no strength left to react. Her lips and tongue refused to obey the screaming in her head.

Then Marie knew she was wrong. The feet she heard were those of wolves or some other wild predators that lived on the moors. She could sense them creeping towards her and scuttling away, dragging their hairy bellies through the wet snow, eager to claim a share of her body. She pictured them drooling in desperation to tear off chunks of her cooling flesh with their teeth, yet afraid of her lingering smell of humanity. The faint tingling on her cheeks and in the folds of her eyes told her the predators were close enough for her to feel their breath on her face. If she had opened her eyes, she knew she would have found herself staring into their jaws, into the drip of their saliva and the whiteness of their teeth. But she could no longer open her eyes; the tears had frozen her eyelids shut.

The fear passed, as Marie’s brain lost its grasp on the thought and it went slipping away. The pictures were still in her mind, but the cold had drained all the colours from them. The dyes had melted and run, leaving washed-out greys and dark corners, bleeding the meaning from her memories. She could no longer capture the sounds and scents and tastes, no longer even keep hold of that one overwhelming emotion which had swollen so large that it filled her mind, but which now wriggled away from her grasp. Was it grief, anger, fear, shame? Or was it just the same unnameable longing that had haunted her all her life?

Marie had forgotten how she came to be lying in the snow, with the pain in her head and the blood in her mouth. But she knew there was a reason she ought to get up and go home. And she knew it had something to do with Sugar Uncle Victor. But the fingers of ice were squeezing out her consciousness, so that she would soon know nothing at all.

Marie was unaware of her bladder failing and releasing a warm stream that thawed a ragged patch in the snow. Soon, the physical sensations stopped altogether. As Marie’s skin froze and her blood thickened to an ooze, even the illusory sounds retreated beyond the reach of her senses. The footsteps faded and the voices fell silent, because there was no one left to hear them. Her heart slowed until its valves were left fluttering uselessly, pumping no blood through her body.