Blood on the Tongue. Stephen Booth
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, judging from the pawnbroker’s sign painted on the nose of the Lancaster – ‘Uncle’ being the common euphemism in those days for a pawnbroker. He noticed that the ground crew barely seemed to have a standard uniform – they wore leather jerkins, sea-boot socks, gumboots, battledress, oilskins, tunics, scarves, mittens, gloves, balaclavas.
On the facing page was the most atmospheric picture of all. It had been taken inside the aircraft, and it was grainy and spattered with white specks where there had been dust on the negative. The curved interior structure of the aircraft could be seen, and the lettering on an Elsan chemical toilet. In the foreground, a young airman was half-turned towards the camera. His sergeant’s stripes were clearly visible on his arm, and he wore a leather flying helmet and the straps of a parachute harness over his uniform, so he must have been preparing for take-off.
But the airman was surely no more than a boy. There was no caption to say who he was, and it was difficult to identify him as one of the men on the facing page. The photographs must have been taken at a different time, because this young man had a faint moustache, while the only airman in the group photograph with a moustache was identified as the pilot, Danny McTeague. This wasn’t McTeague. This young man had a prominent nose and a narrow face, and a small lock of dark hair that had escaped from under his flying helmet on to his forehead. Cooper decided he must be Sergeant Dick Abbott, the rear gunner. He had been eighteen years old, and the crew had called him Lofty because he was only five foot six inches tall.
Cooper stared at the photo for a long time, forgetting to read about the many other aircraft that had come to grief in the Dark Peak. He felt as if the young airman were somehow communicating with him across the distance of more than five decades. It didn’t seem all that long ago that he too had been the same age as this airman. Cooper could sense himself slipping into the young man’s place in the aircraft. He could feel the straps of the parachute over his shoulders and the rough uniform against his skin, hear the roaring of the four Merlin engines and feel the vibration of the primitive machine that would hurtle him into the air. He was eighteen years old, and he was frightened.
Ben Cooper was hardly aware of the vehicle recovery crew negotiating their truck into Beeley Street with lights flashing and diesel engine throbbing. His attention was taken up by trying to analyse his feelings about the photograph, so that he was hardly aware, even, of Gavin Murfin tapping on the window, unable to open the door because of the leaking trays he was balancing.
When