Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) by Stephen Booth Read Free Book Online

cousin Klemens. It had been set at Wigilia when Zygmunt had first become the head of his own household, and every year since.
    But Grace knew this year had been the last time. Next Wigilia , the extra place would no longer be for the absent Klemens. It would be for Zygmunt.
    *    *    *    *
     
    It might have been more than the cold that made Alison Morrissey shiver and pull her coat closer around her shoulders. In fact, the sun was already rising over Stanage Edge and Bamford Moor. In another hour it would have eased some of the chill from the air and melted away the mist that clung to the black rampart of Irontongue Hill. Morrissey looked as though the sun would bring her no warmth, as though it would take much more than a dose of winter sunlight to do that.
    She was looking across a few yards of rough grass to a snow-covered peat moor and an eruption of bare rock. The wind was scraping across the moor from a more distant mountain to the north.
    'The rock there is Irontongue,' said Frank Baine. 'In the distance is Bleaklow.'
    'This place certainly looks bleak in the snow.'
    'Even without the snow, it's still bleak.'
    It was Irontongue Hill that took her attention. Baine had already told her that it got its name from the eruption of black rock on its summit, an uncompromising slab of millstone grit thrown up by ancient volcanic activity.
    Morrissey turned away. The valley below them looked vast and mysterious in the darkness. It lay like a rumpled sheet tugged into peaks and valleys by a restless sleeper. But gradually the lights of scattered villages and farms were vanishing into the grey wash of dawn. The shadows of the hills deepened and began to spread dark fingers across a patchwork of fields, groping and fumbling among the yards of stone farmhouses and the gardens of invisible hamlets.
    'I didn't anticipate it would be so cold in England,' she said. 'I didn't bring the right clothes.'
    'None of your clothes would have been the right ones,' said Baine. 'The weather changes by the minute in these parts. This snow could be gone completely tomorrow.'
    'Let's hope so. I've got to see the site. That's very important to me.'
    'I understand that,' said Baine.
    'The Lukasz family,' she said, 'will they agree to talk to me?'
    'No,' said Baine.
    'I could persuade them,' she said. 'If only I could get a chance to meet them, face to face, they would see I was human, like them. We all want the same thing.'
    'I'm not sure about that.'
    'But we do. We all want the truth. Don't we?'
    They both stared ahead through the windscreen as they waited for it to clear. The hills in front of them were white and completely smooth, like marble slabs. Morrissey shivered.
    'The Poles think they know what the truth is,' said Baine. 'I'm sorry.'
    He used his sidelights as he drove on down the A57. Halfway down, Morrissey looked back. Her hand felt in her coat pocket for the little autofocus camera that she hadn't used. Postcards with photographs taken from this spot always seemed to face the other way, to frame a view of the valley bathed in sunlight. They never pictured Irontongue.
    Shortly before the Snake Inn, they had to stop behind a line of cars that were waiting for a policeman in a fluorescent yellow jacket to wave them on. The other side of the road was blocked by two patrol cars with their lights flashing, and a snowplough was standing idle, with more cars pulled in close behind it.
    'There, you see,' said Baine. 'I told you there must have been an accident. Somebody's run into the snowplough.'
    Morrissey stared at the scene as they went by. She couldn't see any damage, or even figure out what the snowplough had collided with. Maybe they'd already towed the other vehicle away. Yet there were people standing by the side of the road, and a woman in a sort of white boiler suit crouching in a snowdrift.
    'Downhill all the way now,' said Baine. 'We'll soon be in Edendale.'
    He turned on the radio. The sound of the eight o'clock news