On Beulah Height

TWO

Monday dawned, the sun rising into the inevitable blue sky with the radiant serenity of Alexander entering a conquered province.

Its soundless reveille against the leaded light of Corpse Cottage in Enscombe did not disturb the deep slumber of Edwin Digweed, antiquarian bookseller and founder of the Eendale Press, but not for nothing had Edgar Wield been nicknamed by a previous lover, Macumazahn, He Who Sleeps With His Eyes Open.

He answered the summons immediately, taking care to make as little noise as possible. Edwin was not at his best if woken too early, one of the many adjustment-necessitating discoveries made during their first year together.

Downstairs, Wield brewed his morning coffee (two spoons of instant and three of white sugar in boiling milk, not the cafetière of freshly ground Colombian Edwin insisted on at all times of day) then went on his morning visit.

This took him via the churchyard into the grounds of Old Hall, home of the Guillemard family, by permission squires of Enscombe for nearly a thousand years. Falling on hard times, the family had been preserved by the acumen of its present commercial head, Gertrude (known, misleadingly, as Girlie), who had lured visitors to the estate by all manner of attractions, including a Children’s Animal Park. Here, in pens or roaming free as their nature required, could be found calves, lambs, kids, piglets, fowl (domestic and game), dormice, harvest mice, field mice, and a rat called Guy. But it was not on any of these that Wield was making his morning call.

He made for a lofty oak which held the remains of a tree house in its fork and whistled gently.

Instantly a small figure appeared and dropped with scarcely more than a token touch to trunk or branch the thirty feet into his arms.

‘Morning Monte,’ said Wield. ‘What fettle?’

Monte was a monkey; a marmoset, the local vet had informed him when he’d taken the animal for a comprehensive check – a necessary precaution in view of its origins. For Monte was an escapee from a pharmaceutical research lab who’d taken refuge in Wield’s car. The sergeant had smuggled it out, assuring himself this was a decision postponed, not a decision made.

It had been the first real test of his new relationship. Edwin Digweed, though fond enough of animals, made it clear that he had no intention of sharing his home with a free-roaming primate. ‘A ménage à trois may have its attractions,’ he said. ‘A ménagerie à trois has none.’

There had been a moment, as Wield’s unblinking eyes in that unreadable face regarded him calculatingly, that Digweed had recalled an anecdote told of John Huston. Required by his current mistress to choose between herself and a pet monkey of peculiarly disgusting habits, the film director had thought for thirty seconds, then said, ‘The chimp stays.’

Digweed held his breath, suddenly fearful that his world might be about to dissolve beneath his feet.

But what Wield had said was, ‘He’s not going back there. He escaped.’

Hiding his relief, Digweed exclaimed, ‘He … it … is a monkey, not the Count of bloody Monte Cristo. All right, we can’t send him … it … back to that place, but the proper place for him … it … is a zoo.’

‘Monte. That’s what we’ll call him,’ said Wield. ‘As for the zoo, I know just the spot.’

He’d taken Monte to see Girlie Guillemard. Much impressed by the little animal, and having established he was marginally less inclined to bite, scratch or otherwise assault ill-behaved children than herself, she’d offered him refuge in the Animal Park.

The move had worked surprisingly well. Wield visited every morning he could, bearing gifts of peanuts and fruit. There’d been an early crisis when duty had prevented his visit for nearly a week. Finally, Monte had gone looking for him at Corpse Cottage. Finding only Edwin there, asleep in bed, Monte had awoken him, presumably to make enquiries, by pushing up his eyelids.

‘Naturally, my first thought was, I’m being raped by an ape,’ said the bookseller. ‘So I lay back and thought of Africa.’

Now Wield gently removed the beast from his head where it was searching diligently for nits. He regarded the little animal with great affection. He’d tried to explain to Edwin that it wasn’t just sentimentality. In fact, of all the decisions he’d made as a gay man, of all the small steps he’d taken towards his present state of ‘outness’, none – not even his acceptance of Digweed’s suggestion that they set up house together – seemed more significant than his rescue of Monte.

It had been theft, no matter how you looked at it. It had put his career on the line. Would he have done it before he took up with Edwin? He doubted it. It was as if his own pool of contentment had filled to such an unanticipated level there was a constant overspill which could no more let him ignore the monkey’s plight last November than his sense of duty could have permitted him to steal it a year earlier.

Edwin, who, as he listened to his partner’s untypically hesitant self-analysis, had been preparing huevos a la flamenca, remarked acidly, ‘Do let me know when you go soft on unborn chickens.’ Thereafter, however, whenever Monte came searching for the absent Wield, he was greeted with great kindness and given a lift back to Old Hall.

Dalziel did not know, at least not officially, about Monte. ‘Keep it that way,’ advised Pascoe, who’d got the full story, ’else some day when you think you’re out of reach, he’ll use the beast to track you down.’

The previous day, the Fat Man had had to rely on the telephone. When Wield and Digweed got back from their book-buying foray into the Borders, the former had found what the latter called an HMV message on the answering machine. After a terse outline of the situation, Wield had been invited with satirical courtesy to put in an appearance at the incident room in Danby first thing the following morning, weather and social calendar permitting.

It was not a prospect that pleased. Wield, too, remembered Dendale. Like the Fat Man said, it wasn’t your collars kept you awake, it was the ones that got away, and Dendale rated high on that insomniac list. OK, Danby was different, thriving, pushing up from village to township, nowhere near as enclosed, and certainly not doomed the way Dendale had been. But it was just a couple of miles west, just a short walk over the Corpse Road …

‘But a man’s gotta do … something,’ said Wield. ‘Don’t crap on too many kids, kid. See you.’

He threw the monkey up into the lower branches of the oak and walked away.

Half an hour later, as he freewheeled his old Thunderbird down the track from Corpse Cottage in order not to disturb Edwin, he was still thinking how pleasant it would be to be still lying abed on such a morning as this. But Danby called. And Dalziel.

He switched on the ignition and kicked the starter and, as the engine roared into life, he cried to a surprised cat on the hunt for early birds, ‘Hi-yo Silver. Away!’

In the Pascoe household, too, there was reluctance at all levels.

Pascoe himself, after rising early and settling down to read the Dendale file, had fallen asleep in his chair, and wasn’t aroused till Ellie started the morning bustle of getting Rosie ready for school.

His first instinct as he bestirred himself ere well awake was to rush off unshaven and unfed, but Ellie’s cooler counsel had brought him to his senses and when he rang St Michael’s Hall at Danby and was assured by the duty officer that the only thing disturbing the peace was the approaching roar of Sergeant Wield’s motorbike, he had relaxed in the certainty that on the ground organization was in the best possible hands.

So he had sat down to the relatively rare pleasure of taking breakfast with his daughter.

It did not seem to be a pleasure shared. Rosie blinked her eyes irritably against the sun streaming in through the kitchen window and announced, ‘I’m feeling badly.’

Her parents exchanged glances. Peter, left in sole charge some weeks earlier, had been targeted by his daughter at breakfast with little sighs and sobs as she bravely forced her branflakes down, till, always a soft target, he had caved in and said, ‘Are you feeling badly or something?’

‘Yes,’ she’d replied. ‘I’m feeling very badly.’

‘Then perhaps you’d better not go to school,’ he’d replied, secretly glad of an excuse to keep her at home all day with him.

In the event, by halfway through the morning she’d recollected that her class was going out on a bird-spotting expedition that afternoon, so made a rapid recovery and nobly insisted it would be wrong of her to remain at home under false pretences.

But the phrase, ‘I’m feeling badly,’ was thereafter used as a formula to unlock her father’s heart when necessary.

Ellie Pascoe, however, was made of sterner stuff.

‘I told you to keep your sunhat on yesterday,’ she said indifferently.

‘I did,’ retorted Rosie. ‘All the time.’

‘Of course you did,’ said Pascoe. ‘Even when you were swimming underwater.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she snapped. ‘It would float away. Do I have to go to school?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ he said. ‘I think I saw Nina waiting at the gate for you just now.’

‘No, you didn’t. I told you. She got taken again. By the nix. I saw her get taken.’

Pascoe looked at Ellie, who made an I-forgot-to-mention-it face.

‘Perhaps her dad’s rescued her again,’ he said.

‘Not yet he won’t have. It was only yesterday. You’ll be sorry if I get taken too.’

Not so much a conversation-stopper as a heart-stopper.

‘Well, try to hang around as long as you can,’ he said lightly. ‘It’s the same for me too, you know. I’d rather stay at home.’

‘Not the same,’ she said sullenly. ‘You haven’t got a stiff neck.’

‘And you have? Like the people of Israel,’ he laughed. ‘We should have called you Rose of Sharon.’

Being a curious child, she usually insisted on explanations of jokes she didn’t understand, but this morning all she did was repeat with great irritation, ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I’ll try not to,’ said Pascoe, rising. ‘See you tonight.’

Her skin was warm to his kiss.

At the front door he said, ‘She does look a bit flushed.’

‘You would too if you’d been running around in the sun all day,’ said Ellie.

‘I was,’ he said. ‘And no doubt will be again.’

‘Well, keep your sunhat on,’ said Ellie, determinedly cheerful. She had listened to his weary account of the day’s frustrations when he got home the previous night, held him close for a while, then poured him a large whisky and talked brightly about Rosie’s trip to the seaside. At first he thought her motive was purely distraction, but after a while he became aware that it was her own mind she was distracting too, from her unbearable empathy with Elsie Dacre. So he had switched on the TV allegedly in search of the news and instead had got a late-night discussion on the growing problem of juvenile runaways. A psychiatrist called Paula Appleby whose strong opinions, linguistic fluency and photogenic features had got her elected ‘the thinking man’s thinking woman’ was saying, ‘When a child disappears, rather than simply looking for the child, we should be looking at first the parents, who are often the cause, then the police, who are more likely to be part of the problem than its solution.’

‘Time for bed,’ Pascoe had said, switching off.

Now he looked up at the perfectly laid blue wash of the sky and guessed that hours earlier the Dacres’ dark-rimmed, sleepless eyes had watched it pale from black to grey and then to pink and gold, and sought in the returning light and the rising birdsong some hint of that freshness and hope that had always been there before, but was now nowhere to be found.

And then his mind’s eye ran up the Corpse Road and over the sun-rimmed Neb and looked down into Dendale still filling with pearly light.

It seemed to him that he saw far below a shadowy figure who peered up towards the fell’s gilded rim, then threw up its arms in welcome or derision, before slipping silent and naked into the still dark waters of the mere.

Daylight visions now, he thought. Were they better or worse than waking in the dark and still smelling the mud of Passchendaele?

‘Peter!’ said Ellie in a tone that told him she’d spoken his name already.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Miles away.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed. Peter, don’t you think …’

But the moment wasn’t ripe. A voice said, ‘Lovely morning again, sod it!’ and they saw the postman coming up the drive. He handed Pascoe two packages, one small, one large. Both were addressed to Ellie, but when he proffered them, she took the small one and ignored the other.

‘Oh, good,’ she said, tearing it open. ‘That Mahler disc.’

‘Songs for Dead Children. Just the stuff for a summer’s day,’ he said, taking it from her hand and replacing it with the other package which bore a well-known publisher’s logo. ‘What about this?’

‘If I want cheering up, I’ll listen to Mahler,’ she said.

‘Perhaps they’ve just sent your script back to ask you to make a few minor revisions?’ he offered.

‘Bollocks,’ said Ellie. ‘I’ve got these Braille-sensitive fingers. They can read “get stuffed” through six layers of wrapping. Weird design.’

She was determined not to talk about the novel. He looked down at the disc which bore a silhouette drawing of a girl’s or cherub’s profile, spouting a line of music. He found himself thinking of Dendale, though the connection seemed slight. Then he spotted what it was. In the bottom right corner, as on the map from the Dendale file, were the initials E.W. Not of course Edgar Wield this time, but, as was confirmed when he turned the disc over and read the small print on the back, Elizabeth Wulfstan.

‘Does the translation, sings the songs, designs the cover; I wonder if she plays the instruments in the orchestra?’ he said.

‘Very likely. Some people get all the talent, which is why there’s so little left over for the rest,’ said Ellie, dispiritedly.

‘It’ll happen, love. Really. You’ve got more writing talent in your little finger than any of those London creeps licking each other’s bums in the Sunday reviews,’ he said loyally, putting his arms round her.

They clung together as if he were going back to the Front after all too short a leave.

Then he got into his car and drove away.

THREE

‘How many times?’ said Father Kerrigan.

‘Five.’

‘Jesus! With the same fellow, was it?’

‘Yes, Father,’ said Detective Constable Shirley Novello indignantly.

‘And on the Sabbath, too.’

‘Does that make it worse?’

‘It doesn’t make it any better. Five times. It’s this hot weather I blame. Is he one of mine? Don’t tell me. I’ll recognize him by the weary way he walks. And this is why I didn’t see you in church yesterday? You were too busy fornicating.’

‘No, Father. I told you. We went off to the seaside for the day, and it just sort of happened.’

‘No, my girl. Once it just sort of happens, five times takes enthusiasm.’

It wasn’t easy, thought Novello as she left the church a little later, being a modern woman, a Roman Catholic, and a Detective Constable all at the same time. They got in each other’s way. To the soul sisters, a good screw was ‘exuberating in your own sexuality’; to the holy father it was the sin of fornication. As for her job, there were times when it required her to behave in ways equally offensive to both the sisterhood and the Fatherhood.

She arrived at the Danby incident room five minutes late. No sign of Dalziel (thank you for that at least, God); or Pascoe. But Wield was there.

‘Sorry, Sarge,’ she said. ‘Went to confession.’

Somehow telling a lie in these circumstances didn’t seem on.

‘Hope you got it on tape,’ said Wield.

A joke? She made a guess and smiled.

‘You weren’t here yesterday? Me neither. Get up to speed, then I’d like you to take a closer look at these three car sightings.’

‘Super around?’

‘Up the dale with DI Burroughs and the search team.’

‘And Mr Pascoe?’

‘Along shortly. He’s checking the shop.’

An excuse for lateness? They covered each other’s backs, these two.

The thought must have showed. Wield said, ‘Or mebbe he’s at confession too. Takes longer as you get older, they say.’

Another joke? He was in an odd mood today. She found herself a computer screen and went to work.

Three cars. In the early stages of a case like this when you went in mob-handed, with rough-terrain search teams, house-to-house enquiries, media appeals, etc. etc., what you rapidly got was a vast amount of clutter. Which is why the better part of investigation was elimination. (Pascoe.) Not easy. Probably by the time she sorted out these three, there’d be several others reported. Sunday was a bad day for witnesses. People went off for the day, didn’t get back till late. There’d be huge gaps in yesterday’s house-to-house. Not her problem. Yet.

She plotted her car sightings on the map. The closest, not a sighting but a hearing, was on the Corpse Road. Someone had added a note, evidence of parking two hundred yards up track: 4WD? Not much point pursuing the flower arranger. On the other hand … she looked at her watch, then rose and headed out, whistling a hymn tune which caused Sergeant Wield to wonder if too much religion might be getting in the way of her work.

The hymn was in fact ‘In Life’s Earnest Morning’, but its present occasion was secular. Novello had once lodged with a dog-owning family. The dog, a well-trained poodle, had signalled its need to go out every morning by a loud yapping to which her landlord, equally well trained, had responded by singing, ‘In life’s earnest morning, When our hope is high, Comes thy voice in summons, Not to be put by,’ as he got the lead and headed for the door.

She headed past the church and sat on a stone at the foot of the Corpse Road. After only five minutes her faith was rewarded. A springer spaniel came running down the track, stopped dead when it saw her, then approached cautiously. She reached out her hand and spoke to it softly and finally it allowed her to scratch its head.

It was followed a few moments later by a breathless, thickset woman in loose cotton slacks and a pink suntop.

‘There you are, Zebedee,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. He won’t bite.’

‘Me neither,’ said Novello.

She stood up and introduced herself. The woman gave her name as Janet Dickens, Mrs, and said she lived about ten minutes’ walk away.

‘Is this about that little girl?’ she asked. ‘That’s really dreadful. We were away all day yesterday across at my sister’s near Harrogate – we go alternate Sundays and they come here – but I heard it on the news when we got back.’

‘Did you take Zebedee for his walk before you went?’ asked Novello.

‘Oh yes. No way he’ll let me get away without his morning stroll.’

‘And you always come here.’

‘That’s right. He gets quite uppity if I try to take him anywhere else.’

‘Good. I wonder if you noticed a vehicle up this track yesterday morning,’ said Novello.

‘A vehicle? Oh, you mean the Discovery? Yes, it was there again. Why? You don’t think …?’

‘No, we don’t think anything,’ said Novello firmly. ‘This is just one of several vehicles we need to check out for elimination purposes. This vehicle was a Land Rover Discovery, you say?’

‘That’s right. Green. Local, it had the Mid-Yorkshire letters, and this year’s registration, and one of the numbers was a six, I think, but I’m sorry, I can’t recall the others.’

‘You’ve done very well,’ said Novello, making notes. ‘But you said “again”. It was there again. What did you mean?’

‘Oh, I’ve seen it four or five times in the past couple of weeks. That’s how I remember as much as I do about the number, I suppose; I’m so scatter-brained, if I’d just seen it once, I’d likely have told you it was a yellow Porsche with an 007 number plate. What will you do now? Put out some kind of alert?’

‘Nothing as dramatic as that, Mrs Dickens,’ said Novello.

It took a couple of minutes to persuade Mrs Dickens that she wasn’t about to conjure up the Flying Squad and a pack of bloodhounds. Finally, assurances that as they’d missed her yesterday, the house-to-house team would probably be on her doorstep this very moment, got her on her way.

Novello returned to the Hall. Wield was nowhere to be seen, so she passed her information to Control and asked for a list of possibilities. Then, with one down, and feeling hot for hunches, she went in pursuit of another.

The two people reporting the white car at the edge of Ligg Common had been vague and contradictory. One described it as small, another as quite big. The first opined it might have been a Ford Escort, the second was certain it was some sort of Vauxhall but couldn’t say which.

But there’d been a third sighting even vaguer, picked up during house-to-house, Mrs Joy Kendrick who’d been driving by the common early and thought she’d noticed a car and it could’ve been white, but she wasn’t absolutely sure as the kids were being fractious in the back because they didn’t like being left with their gran for the day, which was the purpose of the journey.

Novello had noticed children beginning to arrive for school as she went out to the Corpse Road. On her return, the numbers had grown considerably. Because of the constant coming and going of police vehicles from the incident centre next door, a line of crowd-control barriers had been set up to reinforce the low wall which divided the playground from the hall forecourt, and the naturally curious kids were pressing thick against them. There were a lot of adults there too. After yesterday’s news, parents who’d normally just drop their kids off, or even let them walk there under their own steam, were taking extra precautions.

As Novello re-emerged from the Centre, a couple of teachers were going along the barrier urging the children to go into the school. Novello entered the playground and approached one of them showing her warrant card.

‘I’m Dora Shimmings, head teacher,’ said the woman. ‘Look, I arranged with Mr Pascoe yesterday that any general questioning of the children in Lorraine’s class wouldn’t be done until we’d got the school day under way in as normal a fashion as possible.’

She spoke with a quiet authority that made Novello glad she wasn’t about to contradict her.

‘It’s not that,’ she said reassuringly. ‘I just wanted to know if Joy Kendrick was one of your parents.’

‘Very much so. We have all three of hers. But none of them is in Lorraine’s class.’

‘What age are they?’

‘The twins are six and Simon’s eight. There they are now.’

Novello turned. A harassed-looking woman with loose blonde hair bobbing around her shoulders with all the vigour but none of the gloss of a shampoo ad was shepherding a trio of children through the gate – twin girls who, contrary to the usual image of close love and special understanding, seemed each ambitious to achieve uniqueness by kicking shit out of the other, and an older boy, Simon, looking as bored and aloof as only an eight-year-old with twin sisters can.

‘I’d like to meet them. It’ll only take a few seconds,’ promised Novello.

Unlike most police promises, this one was just about kept.

After the introduction, Novello said, ‘Mrs Kendrick, when you talked to the officer who called at your house yesterday, did he talk to the children?’

‘No. They weren’t there, were they? I didn’t pick them up till seven.’

‘Of course not. Simon, your mum says there was a white car parked by the common as you drove past yesterday morning. You didn’t happen to notice it, did you?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. It wasn’t an uninterested or ill-mannered monosyllable. Children, Novello recalled, tended to answer questions asked them, unlike adults who were always reaching for your reasons for asking.