REGINALD HILL
ON BEULAH HEIGHT

A Dalziel and Pascoe novel

Copyright

Harper an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Reginald Hill 1998

Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed

in it are the work of the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780006490005

Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007374014

Version: 2015-06-19

Dedication

For Allan

a wandering minstrel, he!

Epigraph

Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.

JOHN BUNYAN: The Pilgrim’s Progress

O where is tinye Hew?

And where is little Lenne?

And where is bonny Lu?

And Menie of the Glenne?

And where’s the place of rest –

The ever changing hame?

Is it the gowan’s breast,

Or ’neath the bells of faem?

Ay, lu, lan, dil y’u

ANON: The Gloamyne Buchte

Wir holen sie ein auf jenen Höh’n

Im Sonnenschein.

Der Tag ist schön auf jenen Höh’n

FRIEDRICH RÜCKERT:

Kindertotenlieder IV

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Day One: A Happy Rural Seat of Various View

MAP

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

Day Two: Nina and the Nix

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

NINA AND THE NIX

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

Day Three: The Drowning of Dendale

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

Day Four: Songs for Dead Children

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

Keep Reading

About the Author

By Reginald Hill

About the Publisher

day one A Happy Rural Seat of Various View

MAP

ONE

BETSY ALLGOOD [PA/WW/4.6.88]

TRANSCRIPT 1

No 2 of 2 copies

The day they drowned Dendale I were seven years old.

I’d been three when government said they could do it, and four when Enquiry came out in favour of Water Board, so I remember nowt of that.

I do remember something that can’t have been long after, but. I remember climbing up ladder to our barn loft and my dad catching me there.

‘What’re you doing up here?’ he said. ‘Tha knows it’s no place for thee.’

I said I were looking for Bonnie, which were a mistake. Dad had no time for animals that didn’t earn their keep. Cat’s job was keeping rats and mice down, and all that Bonnie ever caught was a few spiders.

‘Yon useless object should’ve been drowned with rest,’ he said. ‘You come up here again after it and I’ll get shut of it, nine lives or not.’

Before I could start mizzling, sound of a machine starting up came through the morning air, not a farm machine but something a lot bigger down at Dale End. I knew there were men working down there, but I didn’t understand yet what they were doing.

Dad went to the open hay door and looked out. Low Beulah, our farm, were built on far side of Dender Mere from the village and from up in our loft you got a good view right over our fields to Dale End. All on a sudden, Dad picked me up and swung me on to his shoulders.

‘Tek a good look at that land, Betsy,’ he said. ‘Don’t matter a toss now that tha’s only a lass. Soon there’ll be nowt here for any bugger to work at, save only the fishes.’

I’d no idea what he meant, but it were grand for him to be taking notice of me for a change, and I recall how his bony shoulder dug into my bare legs, and how his coarse springy hair felt in my little fists and how he smelt of sheep and earth and hay.

I think he forgot I were up there till I got a bit uncomfortable and moved. Then he gave a little start and said, ‘Things to do still. Nowt stops till all stops.’ And he dropped me to the floor with a thump and slid down the ladder. That were typical. Telling me off for being up there one minute then forgetting my existence the next.

I stayed up a long while till Mam started shouting for me. She caught me clambering down the ladder and gave me a clout on my leg and yelled at me for being up there. But I said nowt about Dad ’cos it wouldn’t have eased my pain and it would just have got him in bother too.

Time went on. A year maybe. Hard to say. That age a month can seem a minute and a minute a month if you’re in trouble. I know I got started at the village school. That’s where most of my definite memories start too. But funny enough, I still didn’t have any real idea what them men were doing down at Dale End. I think I just got used to them. It seemed like they’d been there almost as long as I had. Then some time in my second year at school, I heard some of the older kids talking about us all moving to St Michael’s Primary in Danby. We hated St Michael’s.

We just had two teachers, Mrs Winter and Miss Lavery, but they had six or seven and one of them was a man with a black eye-patch and a split cane that he used to beat the children with if they got their sums wrong. At least that’s what we’d heard.

I piped up and asked why we had to move there.

‘Dost know nowt, Betsy Allgood?’ asked Elsie Coe, who was nearly eleven and liked the boys. ‘What do you think they’re building down the dale? A shopping centre?’

‘Nay, fair do’s,’ said one of her kinder friends. ‘She’s nobbut a babbie still. They’re going to flood all of Dendale, Betsy, so as the smelly townies can have a bath!’

Then Miss Lavery called us in from play. But I went to the drinking fountain first and watched the spurt of water turn rainbow in the sun.

After that I started having nightmares. I’d dream I were woken by Bonnie sitting on my pillow and howling, and all the blankets would be wet, and the bed would be almost floating on the water which were pouring through the window. I’d know it were just a dream, but it didn’t stop me being frightened. Dad told me not to be so mardy and Mam said if I knew a dream were just a dream I should try and wake myself up, and sometimes I would, only I wouldn’t really have woken up at all and the water would still be there, lapping over my face now, and then I really would wake up screaming.

When Mam realized what were troubling me, she tried to explain it all. She were good at explaining things when she wasn’t having one of her bad turns. Nerves, I heard Mrs Telford call it one day when I was playing under the window of the joiner’s shop at Stang with Madge. It was Mrs Telford I heard say too that it were a pity Jack Allgood (that’s my dad) hadn’t got a son, but it didn’t help anyone Lizzie (that’s my mam) cutting the girl’s hair short like a boy’s and dressing her in trousers. That was me. I looked in the mirror after that and wondered if mebbe I couldn’t grow up to be a boy.

I was saying about my mam explaining things. She told me about the reservoir and how we were all going to be moved over to Danby, and it wouldn’t make all that much difference ’cos Dad were such a good tenant, Mr Pontifex had promised him the first farm to come vacant on the rest of his estate over there.

Now the nightmares faded a bit. The idea of moving were more exciting than frightening, except for the thought of that one-eyed teacher with the split cane. Also the weather had turned out far too good for young kids to worry about something in the future. Especially about too much water!

That summer were long and hot, I mean really long and hot, not just a few kids remembering a few sunny days like they lasted forever.

Winter were dry, and spring too, apart from a few showers. After that, nothing. Each day hotter than last. Even up on Beulah Height you couldn’t catch a draught, and down in the dale we kept all the windows in the house and school wide open, but nought came in save for the distant durdum of the contractors’ machines at Dale End.

Fridays at school was the vicar’s morning when Rev Disjohn would come and tell us about the Bible and things. One Friday he read us the story about Noah’s Flood and told us that, bad as it seemed for the folks at the time, it all turned out for the best. ‘Even for them as got drowned?’ cried out Joss Puddle whose dad were landlord at the Holly Bush. Miss Lavery told him not to be cheeky, but Rev Disjohn said it was a good question and we had to remember that God sent the Flood to punish people for being bad. What he wanted to say was that God had a reason for everything, and mebbe all this fuss about the reservoir was God’s way of reminding us how important water really was and that we shouldn’t take any of his gifts for granted.

When you’re seven you don’t know that vicars can talk crap. When you get to be fourteen, you know, but.

Slowly day by day the mere’s level went down. Even White Mare’s Tail shrank till it were more like a white mouse’s. White Mare’s Tail, in case you don’t know, is the force that comes out of the fell near top of Lang Neb. That’s the steep fell between us and Danby. It’s marked Long Denderside on maps, but no one local ever calls it owt but Lang Neb, that’s because if you look at it with your head on one side, it looks like a nose, gradually rising till it drops down sudden to Black Moss col on the edge of Highcross Moor. On the other side it rises up again but more gradual to Beulah Height above our farm. There’s two little tops up there and because they look a bit like a mouth, some folk call it the Gob, to match the Neb opposite. But Mrs Winter said we shouldn’t call it owt so common when its real name was so lovely, and she read us a bit from this book that Beulah comes into. Joss Puddle said it were dead boring and he thought the Gob were a much better name. But I liked Beulah ’cos it were the same as our farm and besides it sort of belonged to us, seeing as my dad had the fell rights for his sheep up there and he kept the fold between the tops in good repair, which Miss Lavery said was probably older than our farmhouse even.

Any road, no one could deny our side of the valley were much nicer than Lang Neb side, which was really steep with rocks and boulders everywhere. And in the rainy season, while there’d be becks and falls streaking all of the hillsides, on the Neb they just came bursting straight out of fell, like rain from a blocked gutter. Old Tory Simkin used to say there were so many caves running through the Neb, there was more water than rock in it. And he used to tell stories about children falling asleep in the sunshine on the Neb, and being taken into the hill by nixes and such, and never seen again.

But he stopped telling the stories when it really started happening. Children disappearing, I mean.

Jenny Hardcastle were the first. Holidays had just started and we were all splashing around in Wintle Pool where White Mare’s Tail hits fell bottom. Usually little ones got told off about playing up there, but now the big pool were so shallow even the smallest could play there safe.

They asked us later what time Jenny left, but kids playing on a summer’s day take no heed of time. And they asked if we’d seen anyone around, watching us or owt like that. No one had. I’d seen Benny Lightfoot up the fell a way, but I didn’t mention him any more than I’d have mentioned a sheep. Benny were like a sheep, he belonged on the fell, and if you went near him he’d likely run off. So I didn’t mention him, not till later, when they asked about him particular.

My friend Madge Telford said that Jenny had told her she was fed up of splashing around in the water all day like a lot of babbies and she were going to Wintle Wood to pick some flowers for her mam. But Madge thought she were really in a huff because she liked to be centre of attention and when Mary Wulfstan turned up we all made a fuss of her.

You couldn’t help but like Mary. It weren’t just that she were pretty, which she was, with her long blonde hair and lovely smile. But she were no prettier than Jenny, or even Madge, whose hair was the fairest of them all, like the water in the mere when the sun’s flat on it. But Mary were just so nice you couldn’t help liking her, even though we only saw her in the holidays and at weekends sometimes.

She were my cousin, sort of, and that helped, her mam belonging to the dale and not an offcomer, though they did only use Heck as a holiday house now. Mary’s granddad had been my granddad’s cousin, Arthur Allgood, who farmed Heck Farm which stood, the house I mean, right at mere’s edge just out of bottom end of the village. Mary’s mam was Arthur’s only child and I daresay were reckoned ‘only a girl’ like me. But at least she could make herself useful to the farm by getting wed. Next best thing after a farmer son is a farmer son-in-law, if you own the farm, that is. Arthur Allgood owned Heck, but our side of the family were just tenants at Low Beulah, and while a son could inherit a tenancy, a daughter’s got no rights.

Not that Mary’s mam, Aunt Chloe (she weren’t really my aunt, but that’s what I called her) married a farmer. She married Mr Wulfstan, who’s got his own business, and they sold off most of the Heck land and buildings to Mr Pontifex, but they kept the house for holidays.

Mr Wulfstan were looked up to rather than liked in the dale. He weren’t stand-offish, my mam said, just hard to get to know. But when he had Heck done up to make it more comfortable, and got the cellar properly damp-proofed and had racks set up there to keep his fine wines, he gave as much work locally as he could, and people like Madge’s dad, who ran the dale joinery business at Stang with his brother, said he were grand chap.

But I’m forgetting Jenny. Maybe she did go off in a huff because of Mary or maybe that was just Madge making it up, and she really did go off to pick some flowers for her mam. That’s where they found the only trace of her, in Wintle Wood. Her blue suntop. She could have been carrying it and just dropped it. We took everything but our pants off when we played in the water in them hot days and we were in no hurry to get dressed again till we got scolded. We ran around the village like little pagans, my mam said.

But that all stopped once police were called in. It was questions questions then and we all got frightened and excited, but mebbe more excited to start with. When sun’s shining and everything looks the same as it always did, it’s hard for kids to stay frightened for long. Also Jenny were known for a headstrong girl and she’d run off before to her gran’s at Danby after falling out with her mam. So mebbe it would turn out she’d run off again. And even when days passed and there were no word of her, most folk thought she could have gone up the Neb and fallen down one of the holes or something. The police had dogs out, sniffing at the suntop, but they never found a trail that led anywhere. That didn’t stop Mr Hardcastle going out every day with his collies, yelling and calling. They had two other kids, Jed and June, both younger, but the way he went on, you’d have thought he’d lost everything in the world. My dad said he never were much of a farmer, but now he just didn’t bother with Hobholme, that’s their farm, though as he were one of Mr Pontifex’s tenants like Dad and the place would soon be drowned, I don’t suppose it mattered.

As for Mrs Hardcastle, you’d meet her wandering around Wintle Wood, picking great armfuls of flopdocken which was said to be a good plant for bringing lost children back. She had them all over Hobholme and when it were her turn to take care of flowers in the church, she filled that with flopdocken too, which didn’t please the vicar, who said it was pagan, but he left them there till it were someone else’s turn the following week.

The rest of the dale folk soon settled back to where they were before. Not that folk didn’t care, but for us kids with the weather so fine, it were hard for grief to stretch beyond a few days, and the grown-ups were all much busier than we ever knew with making arrangements for the big move out.

It were only a matter of weeks away but that seemed a lifetime to me. I’d picked things up, more than I realized, and a lot more than I really understood. And the older girls like Elsie Coe were always happy to show off how much they knew. She it was who told me that there were big arguments going on about compensation, but it didn’t affect me ’cos my dad were only a tenant, and Mr Pontifex had sold Low Beulah and Hobholme along with all the rest of his land in Dendale and up on Highcross Moor long since. Some of the others who owned their own places were fighting hard against the Water Board. Bloody fools, my dad called them. He said once Mr Pontifex sold, there were no hope for the rest and they might as well go along with the miserable old sod. Mam told him not to talk like that about Mr Pontifex, especially as he’d been promised first vacant farm on the Danby side of the Pontifex estate, and she’d heard that Stirps End were likely to be available soon. And Dad said he’d believe it when it happened, the old bugger had sold us out once, what was to stop him doing it again?

He talked really wild sometimes, my dad, especially when he’d been down at the Holly Bush. And Mam would either cry or go really quiet, I mean quiet so you could have burst a balloon against her ear and she’d not have heard. But at least when she were like this I could run around all day in my pants or in nothing at all and she’d not have bothered. Or Dad either.

Then Madge, my best friend, got taken. And suddenly things looked very different.

I’d gone round to play with her. Mam took me. She were having one of her good days and even though most folk reckoned that Jenny had just fallen into one of the holes in the Neb, our mams were still a bit careful about letting us wander too far on our own.

The Stang where Mr Telford had his joiner’s shop were right at the edge of the village. Even though it were a red-hot day, smoke was pouring from the workshop chimney as usual, though I didn’t see anyone in there working. We went up the house and Mrs Telford said to my mam, ‘You’ll come in and have a cup of tea, Lizzie? Betsy, Madge is down the garden, looking for strawberries, but I reckon the slugs have finished them off.’

I went out through the dairy into the long narrow garden running up to the fellside. I thought I saw someone up there but only for a moment and it probably weren’t anyone but Benny Lightfoot. I couldn’t see Madge in the garden but there were some big currant bushes halfway down, and I reckoned she must be behind them. I called her name, then walked down past the bushes.

She wasn’t there. On the grass by the beds was one strawberry with a bite out of it. Nothing else.

I felt to blame somehow, as if she would have been there if I hadn’t gone out to look for her. I didn’t go straight back in and tell Mam and Mrs Telford. I sat down on the grass and pretended I was waiting for her coming back, even though I knew she never was. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. And she didn’t.

Mebbe if I’d run straight back in they’d have rushed out and caught up with him. Probably not, and no use crying. There was a him now, no one had any doubt of that.

Now there were policemen everywhere and all the time. We had our own bobby living in the village. His name was Clark and everyone called him Nobby the Bobby. He was a big fierce-looking man and we all thought he was really important till we saw the way the new lot tret him, specially this great glorrfat one who were in charge of them without uniforms.

They set up shop in the village hall. Mr Wulfstan made a right fuss when he found out. Some folk said he had the wrong of it, seeing what had happened; others said he were quite right, we all wanted this lunatic caught, but that didn’t mean letting the police walk all over us.

The reason Mr Wulfstan made a fuss was because of the concert. His firm sponsored the Mid-Yorkshire Dales Summer Music Festival, and he were head of the committee. The festival’s centred on Danby. I think that’s how he met Aunt Chloe. She liked that sort of music and used to go over to Danby a lot. After they got wed and she inherited Heck, he got this idea of holding one of the concerts in Dendale. They held them all over, but there’d never been one here because there were so few people living in the dale and the road in and out wasn’t all that good. The Parish Council had held a public meeting to discuss it the previous year. Some folk, like my dad, said they cared nowt for this sort of music and what were the point of attracting people up the valley when in a year or so there’d be nowt for them to see but a lot of water? This made a lot of folk angry (so I were told) ’cos things hadn’t been finally settled and they were still hopeful Mr Pontifex would refuse to sell. Not that that would have made any difference except to drag things out a little longer. But the vote was to accept the concert, specially when Mr Wulfstan said he’d like the school choir to do a turn too.

So the previous year we’d had our first concert. The main singer were from Norway, though he spoke such good English you’d not have known it till you heard his name, which were Arne Krog. He was a friend of Mr Wulfstan’s and he stayed at Heck, along with the lady who played the piano for him. Inger Sandel she was called. Arne (everyone called him Arne) was really popular, especially with the girls, being so tall and fair and good looking. Stuff he sang were mainly foreign, which didn’t please everyone. He’d come back again this year and he were right disappointed when it looked like there wouldn’t be a concert. I was too. I were in the school choir and this year I’d been going to sing a solo.

And most folk in the dale were disappointed as well. The concert were due to take place not long before the big move, and next year there’d be no hall, and no dale, to stage it in.

Then we heard that Mr Wulfstan had persuaded Rev Disjohn to let us use St Luke’s instead and you’d have thought we’d won a battle.

But none of this took our minds off Madge’s vanishing. Every time you saw police, and we saw them every day, it all came back. All the kids who knew Madge got asked questions by this lady policeman, and me most of all ’cos we were best friends. She were very nice and I didn’t mind talking to her. It were a lot better than answering questions Mr Telford kept on asking. I liked Mrs Telford a lot, and Madge’s Uncle George, her dad’s brother who worked at the joinery with him, he were all right too. But Mr Telford were a bit frightening, mebbe because it was him made the coffins for the dale and wore a black suit at a burying. Madge were like me, an only daughter, with the difference that as far as my dad were concerned, I might as well not have existed, while Madge were like a goddess or a princess or something to Mr Telford. Not that he didn’t get angry with her, but that was only because he got so worried about her. Like if she came home late, even if it were just ten minutes after school, he’d tell her he was going to lock her up with the coffins till she learnt obedience. I don’t think it would have bothered Madge. Sometimes we used to sneak into the old barn where he stored the coffins, and we’d play around them, even climbing inside sometimes. I’m not saying I’d have liked to be in there by myself, but it would have been better than the belt. Any road, he never did it. When he got his rag back, he usually blamed someone else, like me, for keeping her late. Now he were on at me all the time, looking for someone or something to blame, I suppose. But I think mebbe it was himself he blamed most. ‘It ’ud be different if only she’d come back,’ he’d say. ‘I’d never let her out of my sight.’

But I think like me he knew she were never coming back.

The lady policeman asked me all sorts of questions, like, had Madge ever said anything about any man bothering her? and how did she get on with her dad and her Uncle George? I said no she hadn’t, and grand. Then she asked about the afternoon she went missing and had I noticed anyone anywhere near the Telfords’ house when I were looking for Madge in the back garden? And I said no. And she said, not even Benny Lighfoot? And I said, oh aye, I think I saw Benny up the fell a way, but nobody paid any heed to Benny. And that was when she asked me about the time we were playing in the water and Jenny went off, had I seen Benny that day too. And I said yes, I thought I had. And she asked why I hadn’t mentioned it then, and I explained that I didn’t think that seeing Benny counted.

Now no one in the dale believed any harm of Benny Lightfoot and it were thought a right shame when police car went bumping up the track to Neb Cottage, right up under the Neb, where he lived with his gran. Nobby Clark explained that the glorrfat one without a uniform had kept on bothering him to know if there were anyone a bit odd lived local. ‘I telt him I didn’t know many that wasn’t a bit odd,’ he said. (This were reckoned a good joke and spread round the dale right quick.) But he’d had to tell him about Benny.

Benny were about nineteen, and I’d heard say he had an accident when young and had a bit of metal in his head, and mebbe this helped make him so shy, especially of lasses. You’d see his long lean figure hanging around village hall when there were a social on, or up by Wintle Wood where the big lads and lasses used to lake around on a fine evening. But once he saw he’d been seen, he’d vanish so quick, you wondered if you’d ever really seen him in the first place. ‘Never knew a bugger better named,’ folk used to say, and everyone had a right good laugh when they heard that as the police car pulled up at the front of Neb Cottage, Benny went out of the back and took off up the hillside.

One of the bobbies tried to chase him, but there was no point. Once Benny had been persuaded to enter the Danby Tops which is the big fell race out of Danby Show in August. They got him to the start all right and when the gun went, he were off like a whippet and when they turned for home half an hour later at top of the Danby side of Lang Neb, he were half a mile ahead. He came down like a loose boulder, just bouncing from rock to rock, with never another runner in sight. Then he heard crowd cheering and he stopped a couple of hundred feet above the showground on Ligg Common and looked down at all them people.

Next thing he’d turned round and were running back up the fell almost as fast as he came down, and I doubt if he paused till he were over the ridge and back in his gran’s cottage in Dendale.

So like I say, most folk just laughed when they heard this ’cos they reckoned it was a waste of time, especially as they were certain it weren’t anyone local the police should be looking for, it were some offcomer, and most likely one of the contractors working on the dam.

They’d been round a long time. They’d started work soon as Mr Pontifex had sold them his Dendale estate. They couldn’t start on dam proper until the result of the Enquiry, but this made no difference, I heard my dad say later. The Water Board knew they were going to get the result that they wanted, and by the time it came through, they’d laid new drains up on Black Moss between Neb and Beulah Height on Highcross Moor so that what had just been a great bog were now a wide tarn waiting to be spilled down into valley. And at Dale End, they’d cleared the land and put down hardcore tracks for heavy machinery and built cabins for their contractors.

So they’d been around for a long long time by that long hot summer when dam were getting close to being finished and the dale had got used to them. There were odd bits of trouble, but not much. When some chickens got stolen at Christmas and when someone started nicking undies from washing lines, everyone said it must be the contractors, and Nobby Clark went and had a word, but apart from that they weren’t any bother. They’d get in the Holly Bush an odd time, but they had their own bar and canteen and games room down at Dale End and seemed to prefer sticking together. But there was one of them who were different. This was a man called Geordie Turnbull.

Geordie wasn’t anyone important, he drove one of the big machines that dug up the earth, but he liked to come into the village, drink in the pub, shop in the post office. Everyone liked him, except mebbe for a few of the men who didn’t like the way he got on so well with the women.

Even Mrs Winter our old head teacher thought he were grand, and Miss Lavery seemed fair stricken. Few months earlier, Water Board had put on some lectures in the village hall to explain all about the dam, dead boring, I heard my dad say. He stood up and asked questions and it got into a row and he wanted to hit the lecturer but some of the others stopped him even though most agreed with him. Anyway, the Board asked Mrs Winter if they could send a lecturer into the school, and she said no, it would likely just worry the children but if they sent someone we all knew like Geordie Turnbull to explain about the dam, that would be OK.

So Geordie came.

He had a funny way of talking which Miss Lavery said was because he came from Newcastle. He didn’t lecture us but just sort of chatted and answered questions. I recall him saying, ‘Which of you kiddies ever tried to dam a stream?’ And when all the hands went up, he said, ‘All right, so tell me, bonnie lads and lasses, what’s the best stuff to work with when you’re building your dam?’ And some said earth, and some said stones, and some said branches. Geordie nodded and said, ‘Good answer,’ to all of those. Then he said, ‘Now here’s a hard one. What’s the worst stuff of all for your dam?’ And while everyone was thinking, Madge yelled out, ‘It’s the watter!’ And Geordie laughed out loud, and we all laughed with him ’cos you had to laugh when he did, and he picked her up and swung her on his shoulders and said, ‘Yes it’s the watter,’ – taking her off – ‘the very stuff you’re trying to save that fights against you saving it. So when it’s hot and dry like now, building a dam’s a lot easier than when it’s cold and wet. In fact, you might say it’s a dam sight easier.’ We all laughed again, and even Mrs Winter had to smile.

Then he swung Madge down and gave her a kiss and said if ever she wanted a job moving earth, she just had to come and see Geordie Turnbull.

So it were a great success. And Geordie were even more popular after that. And everyone used to say that it were the well-off folk in their big offices in the city who were responsible for drowning the dale, no use blaming the contractors who were just ordinary working lads trying to earn a living.

But when Madge got took, everything changed. Suddenly we were told not to go anywhere near the site, not to speak to anyone working on the dam, and if anyone tried to talk to us, to run off fast and tell Constable Clark.

And above all we were warned not to talk to Geordie Turnbull. At the talk he gave in the school, no one had been bothered by him putting Madge on his shoulders or giving her a kiss or telling her to come and see him if she wanted a job. Now everyone was talking about it and they wouldn’t serve him in the Holly Bush any more, and there was nearly a fight when he wouldn’t leave. Then one day we saw him took off in a police car, and everyone was saying they’d got him and he ought to be lynched. Two days later, but, he were back at work, though he never came into village again. But it didn’t matter because now there was something new to occupy people’s minds.

The bobbies had had no luck getting hold of Benny Lightfoot, but in the end they got a piece of paper saying they could search his room. Old Mrs Lightfoot said that it’d take more than paper to get in her house and she set the dogs on them, but in the end they did get in, and up in Benny’s room they found books with mucky pictures and some of the knickers that had gone missing off clothes lines. I don’t think they wanted anyone to know owt of this straight off, but it were all round village in an hour.

Now they were really hot to catch Benny. They put two men to hide in the old byre alongside Neb Cottage. Everyone said they must be daft to imagine Benny wouldn’t be watching them from up the Neb and after couple of days a car bumped up the track and took the men who’d been hiding away. What no one knew was they dropped another man from out the back of the car, and he hid in the byre, and that night when Benny came down to his gran’s, he jumped on him. Then he shut both himself and Benny up in the byre and radioed for help, which were just as well. When the others got there, old Mrs Lightfoot were outside byre with her dogs and a shotgun, trying to break down door.

They took Benny away into town, and while everyone were sorry for the old lady, they all hoped this were the end of it. But four or five days later, Benny were back. According to what Nobby Clark said, they’d questioned him and questioned him, but he just kept on saying he’d done no harm, and they had to give him a lawyer, and though they kept hold of him long as they could, in the end they had to let him go.

No one in the dale knew what to think, but all the mams told their kids the same thing: if you see Benny Lightfoot, run like heck. And some of the dads after a few pints in the Holly Bush were all for going up to Neb Cottage and getting things sorted, though my dad said they were a load of idiots who’d pissed their brains out up against the wall. There might have been a fight, but Mr Wulfstan were in the bar with Arne Krog and someone asked what he thought. Folk had a lot of respect for Mr Wulfstan, even though he were an offcomer. He’d married local, he didn’t object to hunting and shooting, and he spent his brass in the dale. Above all, he’d fought the Water Board every inch. So they listened when he said they’d got to trust the Law. Best thing they could do was keep the kids in plain view till time came for us all to move out of the dale, which weren’t too far away.

It were funny. The more worried folk got about their kids, the less they worried about the dam. In fact some of the mams were saying it would be a blessing to move and get this behind them and start off new somewhere, a long way away from Benny Lightfoot, just as if him and his gran weren’t going to have to move too.

Hot weather went on. Mere went down, dam went up. Folk said that with no water to hold in, it weren’t really a dam at all, just a big wall, like Hadrian’s up north, to keep foreigners out.

Except it hadn’t worked. There were two in already. Arne Krog and Inger Sandel.

I knew them quite well ’cos Aunt Chloe often invited me to Heck to play with Mary. Also Arne remembered me from singing in the school choir last year, and when he heard I were singing ‘The Ash Grove’ solo this year, he asked me to sing it to him one day. I were so pleased I just started right off without waiting for him to start playing the music on the piano. He listened till I finished, then sat down at the piano. It were one of them baby grands, Mr Wulfstan played a bit himself, but he’d really bought it for Mary to practise on during the holidays. Mary didn’t like playing very much, she told me. I’d have liked to learn but we didn’t have a piano and no hope of getting one. Anyway, Arne played a note and asked me to sing it, then a few more, then he played half a dozen and asked me which was the one that came at the end of the second line of ‘The Ash Grove’.

When I told him, he turned to Inger and said, ‘You hear that? I think little Betsy could have perfect pitch.’

She just looked at him, blank like, which meant nowt ’cos that was how she usually looked. She could talk English as good as him, only she never bothered unless she had to. As for me, I had no idea what he were talking about but I felt really chuffed that I’d got something that pleased Arne.

This piano at Heck had to be shifted to St Luke’s for the concert. There were an old piano in the village hall but it were useless for proper singing, and the one at school weren’t much better. If a cat ran up and down keyboard, he’d have made it sound as musical as Miss Lavery when she tried to play it. So it had to be Mr Wulfstan’s baby grand.

My dad came to Heck with a trailer pulled by his tractor. He’d brushed most of muck off trailer and put a bit of fresh straw on the boards, so it didn’t look too bad. It took Dad and two lads from the village to get the piano out of the house while Aunt Chloe and Arne gave advice. I tried to help, but Dad told me to get out of the bloody way before I tripped someone up. I went and stood by Mary and she held my hand. Her dad never spoke to her like that. If he hadn’t seen her for half a day he made more fuss when he got home than my dad had made of me when I came back from hospital after I spent a couple of nights there when I broke my leg.

Mr Wulfstan wasn’t there that day. Most days he drove into town to see to his business and this was one of them. We went through the village in a sort of procession, Dad driving the tractor, the lads standing on trailer making sure piano didn’t slip, Arne, Inger, Aunt Chloe, Mary and me, walking behind. Folk came to their doors to see what was going off and there was a lot of laughing which hadn’t been heard for a bit. No one had forgot about Jenny and Madge, but grieving doesn’t pay the rent, as my mam said. Even the policemen who were in the hall looked out and smiled.

Rev Disjohn were waiting at the church. Getting it through the door weren’t easy. St Luke’s isn’t a big fancy building like you see some places. We learned all about it at school. Couple of hundred years back there were no church in Dendale and folk had a long trek over the fell to Danby for services. Worst was when someone died and you had to take the coffin with you. So in the end they built their own church by Shelter Crag at the foot of the fell where they took the bodies out of the coffins and strapped them to ponies that carried them over to Danby. And when they built it they applied same rule as they did to their houses which was, the bigger the door, the bigger the draught.

At last they got it in and set it up. Dad and the farm lads went off with the trailer. Inger sat down at the piano and tried it out. It had had a right jangling, getting it on and off trailer and through that narrow door, and she settled down to retune it. Aunt Chloe said she had some things to do in the village and she’d see us back home. Mary and I asked if we could stay and come back with Arne and Inger and she said all right, so long as we didn’t go outside of the church. Arne said he’d keep an eye on us and off Aunt Chloe went. Arne wandered round the church, looking at the wood carvings and such. Rev Disjohn sat in a pew watching Inger at work. I often noticed when she were around he never took his eyes off her. She were too busy to pay any heed to him, playing notes, then fiddling inside the piano. It was dead boring so Mary and I slipped outside to play in the churchyard. You can have a good game of hide and seek there around the gravestones. It’s a bit frightening but nice-frightening, so long as the sun’s shining and you know that there’s grown-ups close by. Not all grown-ups, but. You can still see the old Corpse Road winding up the fellside from Shelter Crag. I were hiding behind a big stone at the bottom end of the churchyard and I could see right up the trail through the lych gate and I glimpsed a figure up there. Like I told the police after, I thought it were Benny Lightfoot but I couldn’t be absolutely sure. Then Mary suddenly came round the headstone and grabbed me, frightening me half to death, and I forgot all about it.

Now it were her turn to hide, mine to seek. She were good at hiding because she could keep still as a mouse and not start giggling like most of us did.

I went right round the church without spotting her. As I passed the door, I heard Arne start singing. Inger must have finished tuning and they were trying it out. I stepped inside to listen.

The words were foreign, but I’d heard him sing it before and he told me what it meant. It’s about this man riding in the dark with his young son and the boy sees this sort of elf called the Erlking who calls him away. The father tries to ride faster but it’s no use, the Erlking has got his child and when he reaches home the boy is dead. I didn’t like it much, it were really frightening, but I had to listen.

Arne saw me in the doorway and all of a sudden he stopped and said, ‘No, it’s not right. Something’s wrong with this place, perhaps it’s the acoustics, perhaps you haven’t got the piano quite right. I have to go back to the house now. Why don’t you play your scales to little Betsy here? She has a better ear than either of us, I think. Let her say what is wrong.’

I recall the words exactly. He were looking straight at me as he spoke and sort of smiling. He had these bright blue eyes, like the sky on one of them sharp winter’s days when the sun is shining but the frost never leaves the air.

He picked me up and set me on his shoulder and carried me up the aisle. I remember how cold it felt inside after the hot sun. And I recalled the time Dad put me on his shoulder in the hay loft.

Arne set me down in a pew next to the vicar and ruffled my hair, what there was of it. Then he said, ‘See you later,’ and smiled at Inger but she didn’t smile back, just gave him a funny look and started playing scales as he went out. Every now and then she’d pause and look at me. Sometimes I’d nod, sometimes shake my head. Don’t know how I know if something’s right or not, I just do.

We must have been there another half hour or more. Finally she were satisfied and we said goodbye to the vicar. He wanted to talk but I could tell Inger weren’t interested in him, and we went out of the door. It were like stepping into a hot bath after the cold church, and the bright light made my eyes dazzle.

Then I remembered Mary.

I called her name. Nothing. It were like being at the bottom of Madge’s garden again.

Inger called too and Rev Disjohn came out of the church and asked what were up.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Inger. ‘I think Mary must have gone back to the house with Arne.’

She said it dead casual, but I saw the way she and the vicar looked at each other that they were worried sick.

I were sick too, but not with worry. Worry’s for what you don’t know. And I knew Mary were gone.

We hurried back to Heck. Arne were there and Aunt Chloe. I thought she were going to die in front of us when we asked if Mary had come home. I’d heard folk say that someone had gone white as a sheet often enough, but now for the first time I knew what it meant.

Vicar had stopped off at the hall on the way through the village and the police were close behind us.

I told all I could. ‘Are you sure it was Lightfoot?’ they kept on asking and I kept on saying, ‘I think it was.’ Then Arne said, ‘I think that this young lady has had enough, don’t you?’ And he put his arm around me and led me out of the house and took me home.

They went searching up the Neb again, with the dogs and everything, just like last time. And just like last time, they came back with nothing.

And they went looking for Benny again, and he weren’t to be found either.

His gran said he’d been with her all afternoon till he saw the police cars turning up the track. Then he’d taken off because he couldn’t stand any more questioning. No one believed her, at least not about being with her all afternoon.

Then Mr Wulfstan came home. He were like a mad thing. He came round to our house and started asking me what had happened. At first he tried to be nice and friendly, but after a bit his voice got louder and he started sounding so fierce that I began to cry. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know where she was hiding? What do you mean, you think you saw Lightfoot? What do you mean, you stopped playing and went inside to listen to the music?’

By now he’d got a hold of me and I was sobbing my heart out. Then Mam, who’d gone out to make some tea, came rushing back in and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. I’d never heard her swear before. Mr Wulfstan calmed down and said he were sorry but not sounding like he meant it, then he rushed off without having any tea. We heard later he went up to Neb Cottage and had a big row with old Mrs Lightfoot, and the police had to make him come away, and he told them it were all their fault for letting Lightfoot loose when they had him in their cells, and if anything had happened to Mary he was going to make sure every one of them suffered.

I asked my mam why he were so mad with me. She said, he’s not mad with you, he’s mad with himself for not taking better care of the thing he loves most in the world. I said, but it’s not his fault that Mary got took, and she said, aye, but he thinks it is, and that’s why he’s running round looking for someone else to blame. And I wondered if my dad would run around like that if I got took. Weeks passed. They didn’t find Mary. And they didn’t find Benny. The concert was cancelled. Arne and Inger went away. And the day came when we all had to move out of our homes.

I were glad to go. Everyone else had long faces and there were some who were wailing and moaning. Dad went around like he were looking for someone to hit and Mam, who were having one of her bad turns again, could hardly drag herself out of the house. But I sat in the back seat of the car with Bonnie held tight in my arms and bit my cheeks to stop myself smiling. Remember, I were only seven and I thought that grief and guilt and fear were things you could drive away from like houses and barns and fields, leaving them behind you to be drowned.

And when, as we drove down the village street for the last time, the first drops of rain we’d seen in nigh on four months burst on the windscreen, I recalled Rev Disjohn’s Friday talk and felt sure that God was once again sending His blessed floods to cleanse a world turned foul by all our sins.

TWO

‘And now the sun will rise as bright

As though no horror had touched the night.

The horror affected me alone.

The sunlight illumines everyone.’

‘Nice voice,’ said Peter Pascoe, his mouth full of quiche. ‘Pity about the tuba fanfare.’

‘That was a car horn, or can’t your tin ear tell the difference? But no doubt it is Tubby the Tuba leaning on it.’

‘Why do you think I’m bolting my food?’ said Pascoe.

‘I noticed. Peter, it’s Sunday, it’s your day off. You don’t have to go.’

He gave her an oddly grave smile and said gently, ‘No, I don’t. But I think I will. Give you a chance for a bit of productive Sabbath-breaking.’

This was a reference to Ellie’s writing ambitions, marked by the presence of a pad and three pens on the patio by her sunbed.

‘Can’t concentrate in this heat,’ she said. ‘Christ, the fat bastard’s going to rouse the whole street!’

The horn was playing variations on the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Pascoe, ignoring it, said, ‘Never mind. You’re probably famous already, only they haven’t told you.’

Ellie had written three novels, all unpublished. The third script had been with a publisher for three months. A phone call had brought the assurance that it was being seriously considered, and with it a hope that was more creatively enervating than any heat.

The doorbell rang. The fat bastard had got out of his car. Pascoe washed the quiche down with a mouthful of wine and stooped to kiss his wife. With Ellie any kiss was a proper kiss. She’d once told him she didn’t mind a peck on the cheek but only if she wasn’t sitting on it. Now she arched her bikini’d body off the sun lounger and gave him her strenuous tongue.

The doorbell went into the carillon at the end of the ‘1812’ Overture, accompanied by cannon-like blows of the fist against the woodwork.

Reluctantly, Pascoe pulled clear and went into the house. As he passed through the hallway, he grabbed a light cagoule. It hadn’t rained for weeks, but Andy Dalziel brought out the boy scout in him.

He opened the door and said, ‘Jesus.’

Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, ever full of surprises, was wearing a Hawaiian shirt bright enough to make an eagle blink.

‘Always the cock-eyed optimist,’ he said, looking at the cagoule. ‘Hello, what’s yon? I know that tune.’

This beat even the shirt. Like a child catching the strains of the Pied Piper, the Fat Man pushed past Pascoe and headed through the house to the patio where the radio was playing.

‘You must not dam up that dark infernal,’ sang the strong young mezzo voice. ‘But drown it deep in light eternal!’

‘Andy,’ said Ellie, looking up in surprise. ‘Thought you were in a hurry. Time for a drink? Or a slice of quiche?’ She reached for the radio switch.

‘Nay, leave it. Mahler, isn’t it?’

With difficulty, Ellie prevented her gaze meeting her husband’s.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘You’re a fan?’

‘Wouldn’t say that. Usually in Kraut, but?’

‘True. This is the first time I’ve heard it in English.’

‘So deep in my heart a small flame died. Hail to the joyous morningtide!’

The voice faded. The music wound plangently for another half-minute then it died too.

‘Elizabeth Wulfstan singing the first of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the songs for dead children,’ said the announcer. ‘A new voice to me, Charmian. Lots of promise, but what an odd choice for a first disc. And in her own translation too, I believe.’

‘That’s right. And I agree, not many twenty-two-year-olds would want to tackle something like this, but perhaps not many twenty-two-year-olds have a voice with this kind of maturity.’

‘Maybe so, but I still think it was a poor choice. There’s a straining after effect as if she doesn’t trust the music and the words to do their share of the work. More after the break. This is Coming Out, your weekend review of the new releases.’

Ellie switched off.

‘Andy, you OK?’

The Fat Man was standing rapt, no longer Hamelin child lured away by the piper, but Scottish thane after a chat with the witches.

‘Nay, I’m fine. Just feel like someone had walked over my grave, that’s all.’

This time the Pascoes’ gazes did meet and shared the message, it’d be a bloody long walk!

He went on, ‘Yon lass, he said her name was Wulfstan?’

‘That’s right. She’s going to be singing in the Dales Festival. I saw the disc advertised in The Gramophone, special mail-order price, so I’ve got it coming, but I might not have bothered if I’d heard that review first. What do you think, Andy, being an expert? And are you sure you won’t have a drink?’

The gentle irony, or the repeated offer, brought Dalziel out of his reverie and for the first time his gaze acknowledged that Ellie was wearing a bikini whose cloth wouldn’t have made a collar for his shirt.

‘Nay, lass. I know nowt about music. And there’s no time for a drink. Sorry to be dragging him off on a Sunday, but.’

He made dragging off sound like a physical act.

Ellie was puzzled. Three things which passeth understanding: Dalziel recognizing Mahler; Dalziel refusing a drink; Dalziel not clocking her tits straight off.

‘It sounds urgent,’ she said.

‘Aye, kiddie goes missing, it’s always urgent,’ he said. ‘Where’s young Rosie?’

The juxtaposition of ideas was abrupt enough to be disturbing.

Pascoe said quickly, ‘She’s spending the weekend with a schoolfriend. Zandra with a Zed, would you believe? Zandra Purlingstone?’

There was a teasing interrogative in his tone which Dalziel was on to in a flash.

‘Purlingstone? Not Dry-dock Purlingstone’s daughter?’ he exclaimed.

Derek Purlingstone, General Manager of Mid-Yorks Water plc, the privatized version of the old Water Board, had played down the threat of shortages when this year’s drought started by gently mocking the English preoccupation with bathing, adding, ‘After all, when you want to clean a boat, you don’t put it in a bath, do you? You put it in a dry dock!’

He had learned the hard way that only the sufferers are allowed to make jokes about their pain. Dalziel’s surprise rose from the fact that Dry-dock’s position and politics made him the kind of man whose company Ellie would normally have avoided like head-lice.

‘The same,’ said Pascoe. ‘Zandra’s in Rosie’s class at Edengrove and they’ve elected each other best friend.’

‘Oh aye? With all his brass, I’d have thought he’d have gone private. Still, it’s reckoned a good school and I suppose it’s nice and handy, being right on his doorstep.’

Dalziel spoke without malice, but Pascoe could see that Ellie was feeling provoked. Edengrove Primary, with its excellent reputation and its famous head, Miss Martindale, might lie right on Purlingstone’s doorstep, but it was a good four miles north of the Pascoes’, while Bullgate Primary was less than a mile south. Ellie had made enquiries. ‘Bullgate has many original and unique features,’ a friend in the inspectorate told her. ‘For instance, during break, they play tiggie with hammers.’ After that, she made representations, with the upshot that Rosie went to Edengrove. Even with the shining example of New Labour leadership before her, Ellie felt a little exposed, and as always was ready to counterpunch before the seconds had left the ring.

‘If Derek is democratic enough to send his girl to a state school, I don’t see why we should try to prove him wrong by refusing to let Rosie make friends with Zandra, do you?’ she said challengingly.

Normally, Dalziel would have enjoyed nothing more than winding Ellie Pascoe up. But this morning standing here on this pleasant patio in the warm sunshine, he felt such a longing to subside into a lounger, accept a cold beer and while away the remains of the day in the company of these people he cared for more than he’d ever acknowledge, that he found he had no stomach for even a mock fight.

‘Nay, you’re right, lass,’ he said. ‘Being friendly with your little lass would do anyone the power of good. But I thought her best mate was called Nina or something, not Zandra. T’other night when I rang and Rosie answered, I asked her what she were doing, and she said she were playing at hospitals with her best friend Nina. They fallen out, or what?’

Pascoe laughed and said, ‘Nina has many attractions, but she doesn’t have a pony and a swimming pool. At least, not a real pony and a real swimming pool. Nina’s Rosie’s imaginary best friend. Ever since Wieldy gave her this last Christmas, they’ve been inseparable.’

He went into the living room and emerged with a slim shiny volume which he handed to the Fat Man.

The cover had the title Nina & the Nix above a picture of a pool of water in a high-vaulted cave with a scaly humanoid figure, sharp-toothed and with a fringe of beard, reaching over the pool to a small girl with her hands pressed against her ears, and her mouth and eyes rounded in terror. At the bottom it said ‘Printed at the Eendale Press’.

‘Hey,’ said Dalziel. ‘Isn’t that the outfit run by yon sarky sod our Wieldy took up with?’

‘Edwin Digweed. Indeed,’ said Pascoe.

‘Ten guineas, it says here. I hope the bugger got trade discount! You sure this is meant for kiddies? Picture like that could give the little lass bad dreams.’

He sounds like a disapproving granddad, thought Pascoe.

He said, ‘It’s Caddy Scudamore who did the illustrations. You remember her?’

‘That artist lass?’ Dalziel smacked his lips salaciously. ‘Like a hot jam doughnut just out of the pan and into the sugar. Lovely.’

It was an image for an Oxford Professor of Poetry to lecture on, thought Ellie as she said primly, ‘I tend to agree with you about the illustration, Andy.’

‘Come on,’ said Pascoe. ‘She sees worse in Disney cartoons. It’s Nina that bothers me. I had to buy an ice cream for her the other day.’

‘That’s because you never had an imaginary friend,’ laughed Ellie. ‘I did, till I was ten. Only children often do.’

‘Adults too,’ agreed Dalziel. ‘The Chief Constable’s got several. I’m one of them. What’s the story about anyway?’

‘About a little girl who gets kidnapped by a nix – that’s a kind of water goblin.’

A breeze sprang up from somewhere, hardly strong enough to stir the petals on the roses, but sufficient to run a chilly finger over sun-warmed skin.

‘Could have had that drink,’ said Dalziel accusingly to Pascoe. ‘Too late now. Come on, lad. We’ve wasted enough time.’

He thrust the book into Ellie’s hands and set off through the house.

Pascoe looked down at his wife. She got the impression he was seeking the right words to say something important. But what finally emerged was only, ‘See you then. Expect me … whenever.’

‘I always do,’ she said. ‘Take care.’

He turned away, paused uncertainly as if in a strange house, then went through the patio door.

She looked after him, troubled. She knew something was wrong and she knew where it had started. The end of last year. A case which had turned personal in a devastating way and which had only just finished progressing through the courts. But when if ever it would finish progressing through her husband’s psyche, she did not know. Nor how deeply she ought to probe.

She heard the front door close. She was still holding Rosie’s book. She looked down at the cover illustration, then placed the slim volume face down on the floor beside her and switched the radio back on.

The strong young voice of Elizabeth Wulfstan was singing again.

‘Look on us now for soon we must go from you.

These eyes that open brightly every morning

In nights to come as stars will shine upon you.’

THREE

Pascoe sat in the passenger seat of the car with the window wound fully down. The air hit his face like a bomb blast, giving him an excuse to close his eyes while the noise inhibited conversation.

That had been a strange moment back there, when his feet refused to move him through the doorway and his tongue tried to form the words, ‘I shan’t go.’

But its strangeness was short-lived. Now he knew it had been a defining moment, such as comes when a man stops pretending his chest pains are dyspepsia.

If he’d opted not to go then, he doubted if he would ever have gone again.

He’d known this when Dalziel rang him. He’d known it every morning when he got up and went on duty for the past many weeks.

He was like a priest who’d lost his faith. His sense of responsibility still made him take the services and administer the sacraments, but it was mere automatism maintained in the hope that the loss was temporary.

After all, even though it was faith not good works that got you into the Kingdom, lack of the former was no excuse for giving up the latter, was it?

He smiled to himself. He could still smile. The blacker the comedy, the bigger the laugh, eh? And he had found himself involved in the classic detective black comedy when the impartial investigator of a crime discovers it is his own family, his own history, he is investigating, and ends up arresting himself. Or at least something in himself is arrested. Or rather …

No. Metaphors, analogies, parallels, were all ultimately evasive.

The truth was that what he had discovered about his family’s past, and present, had filled him with a rage which at first he had scarcely acknowledged to himself. After all, what had rage to do with the liberal, laid-back, logical, caring and controlled Pascoe everyone knew and loved? But it had grown and grown, a poison tree with its roots spreading through every acre of his being, till eventually controlling it and concealing it took up so much of his moral energy, he had no strength for anything else.

He was back with metaphors, and mixing them this time, too.

Simply, then, he had come close from time to time to physical violence, to hitting people, and not just the lippy low-life his job brought him in contact with who would test a saint’s patience, but those close around him – not, thank God, his wife and his daughter – but certainly this gross grotesquerie, this tun of lard, sitting next to him.

‘You turned Trappist or are you just sulking?’ the tun bellowed.

Carefully Pascoe wound up the window.

‘Just waiting for you to fill me in, sir,’ he said.

‘Thought I’d done that,’ said Dalziel.

‘No, sir. You rang and said that a child had gone missing in Danby and as that meant you’d be driving out of town past my house, you’d pick me up in twenty minutes.’

‘Well, there’s nowt else. Lorraine Dacre, aged seven, went out for a walk with her dog before her parents got up. Dog’s back but she isn’t.’

Pascoe pondered this as they crossed the bypass and its caterpillar of traffic crawling eastwards to the sea, then said mildly, ‘Not a lot to go at then.’

‘You mean, not enough to cock up your cocktails on the patio? Or mebbe you were planning to pop round to Dry-dock’s for a dip in his pool.’

‘Not much point,’ said Pascoe. ‘We’ll be passing the Chateau Purlingstone shortly and if you peer over his security fence, you’ll observe that he’s practising what he preaches. The pool is empty. Which is why they’ve taken the girls to the seaside today. We were asked to join them, but I didn’t fancy wall-to-wall traffic. A mistake, I now realize.’

‘Don’t think I wouldn’t have airlifted you out,’ growled Dalziel.

‘I believe you. But why? OK, a missing child’s always serious, but this is still watching-brief time. Chances are she’s slipped and crocked her ankle up the dale somewhere, or, worse, banged her head. So the local station organizes a search and keeps us posted. Nothing turns up, then we get involved on the ground.’

‘Aye, normally you’re right. But this time the ground’s Danby.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Danbydale’s next valley over from Dendale.’

He paused significantly.

Pascoe dredged his mind for a connection and, because they’d just been talking about Dry-dock Purlingstone, came up with water.

‘Dendale Reservoir,’ he said. ‘That was going to solve all our water problems to the millennium. There was an Enquiry, wasn’t there? Environmentalists versus the public weal. I wasn’t around myself but we’ve got a book about it, or rather Ellie has. She’s into local history and environmental issues. The Drowning of Dendale, that’s it. More a coffee-table job than a sociological analysis, I recall … Sorry sir. Am I missing the point?’

‘You’re warm, but not very,’ growled the Fat Man, who’d been showing increasing signs of impatience. ‘That summer, just afore they flooded Dendale, three little lasses went missing there. We never found their bodies and we never got a result. I know you weren’t around, but you must have heard summat of it.’

Meaning, my failures are more famous than other people’s triumphs, thought Pascoe.

‘I think I heard something,’ he said diplomatically. ‘But I can’t remember much.’

‘I remember,’ said the Fat Man. ‘And the parents, I bet they remember. One of the girls was called Wulfstan. That’s what fetched me up short back there when I heard the name.’

‘The singer, you mean? Any connection? It can’t be a common name.’

‘Mebbe. Not a daughter, but. They just had the one. Mary. It nigh on pushed the father over the edge, losing her. He chucked all kinds of shit at us, threatened he’d sue for incompetence and such.’

‘Did he have a case?’ enquired Pascoe.

Dalziel gave him a cold stare, but Pascoe met it unblinking. Hidden rage had its compensations, one of them being an indifference to threat.

‘There were this local in the frame,’ said the Fat Man abruptly. ‘I never really fancied him, two sheets short of a bog roll, I reckoned, but we pulled him in after the second lassie. Nothing doing, we had to let him go. Then Mary Wulfstan vanished and her old man went bananas.’

‘And the local?’

‘Benny Lightfoot. He vanished too. Except for one more sighting. Another girl, Betsy Allgood, she got attacked, but that was later, weeks later. Said it were definitely Lightfoot. That did it for most people, especially bloody media. In their eyes we’d had him and we’d let him go.’

‘You didn’t agree?’

‘Or didn’t want to. Never easy to say which.’

This admission of weakness was disturbing, like a cough from a coffin.

‘So you went looking for him?’

‘There were more sightings than Elvis. Someone even spotted him running in the London Marathon on telly. That figured. Lived up to his name, did Benny. Light of head, light of foot. He could fair fly up that fellside. Might as well have flown off it for all we ever found of him. Or into it, the locals reckoned.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Into the Neb. That’s what they call the fell between Dendale and Danby. It’s Long Denderside on the map. Full of bloody holes, specially on the Dendale flank. Different kind of rock on the Danby side, don’t ask me how. So there’s lots of caves and tunnels, most on ’em full of water, save in the drought.’

‘Did you search them?’

‘Cave rescue team went in after the first girl vanished. And again after the other two. Not a sign. Aye, but they’re not Benny Lightfoot, said the locals. Could squeeze through a crack in the pavement, our Benny.’

‘And that’s where he’s been hiding for fifteen years?’ mocked Pascoe.

‘Doubt it,’ said Dalziel, with worrying seriousness. ‘But he could have holed up there for a week or so, scavenging at nights for food. Betsy Allgood, that’s the one who got away, she said he looked half-starved. And sodden. The drought had broken then. The caves in the Neb would be flooding. I always hoped he’d have gone to sleep down there somewhere and woke up drowned.’

The radio crackled before Pascoe could examine this interesting speculation in detail and Central Control spilled out an update on the case.

Lorraine Dacre, aged seven, was the only child of Tony Dacre, thirty, Post Office driver, no criminal record, and Elsie Dacre, née Coe, also no record. Married eight years, residence, 7 Liggside, Danby. Lorraine did not appear on any Social Service or Care Agency list. Sergeant Clark, Danby Section Office, had called in his staff of four constables. Three were up the dale supervising a preliminary search. Back-up services had been alerted and would be mobilized on Superintendent Dalziel’s say-so. Sergeant Clark would rendezvous with Superintendent Dalziel at Liggside.

The Fat Man was really reacting strongly to this, thought Pascoe. Old guilt feelings eating that great gut? Or was there something more?

He brooded on this as they ate up the twenty or so miles to Danby. It was a pleasant road, winding through the pieced and plotted agricultural landscape of the Mid-York plain. As summer’s height approached, the fields on either side were green and gold with the promise of rich harvest, but on unirrigated set-aside land blotches of umber and ochre showed how far the battle with drought was already engaged. And up ahead where arms of rising ground embraced the dales, and no pipes or channels, sprayers or sprinklers, watered the parching earth, the green of bracken and the glory of heather had been sucked up by the thirsty sun, turning temperate moor to tropical savannah.

‘It was like this fifteen years ago,’ said Dalziel, breaking in on his thought as though he had spoken it aloud.

‘You’re thinking heat could be a trigger?’ said Pascoe sceptically. ‘We’ve had some good summers since. In fact, if you listen to Derek Purlingstone, the Sahara’s had more rain than Mid-Yorkshire in the past ten years.’

‘Not like this one. Not for so long,’ said Dalziel obstinately.

‘And just because there’s a drought and Danby is the next valley over from Dendale …’

‘And the place where most of the Dendale folk were resettled,’ added Dalziel. ‘And there’s one thing more. A sign …’

‘A sign!’ mocked Pascoe. ‘Let me guess. Hearing the name Wulfstan on the radio? Is that it? My God, sir, you’ll be hearing voices in the bells next!’

‘Any more of your cheek, I’ll thump you so hard you’ll be hearing bells in the voices,’ said Dalziel grimly. ‘When I say a sign, I mean a sign. Several of them. Clark rang me direct. He knew I’d be interested. Hold on now. There’s the first on ’em.’

He slammed on the brake with such violence Pascoe would have been into the windscreen if it hadn’t been for his seat belt.

‘Jesus,’ he gasped.

He couldn’t see any reason for the sudden stop. The road stretched emptily ahead under a disused railway bridge. He glanced sideways at the Fat Man and saw his gaze was inclined upwards at an angle suggestive of pious thanksgiving. But his expression held little of piety and it wasn’t the heavens his eyes were fixed on but the parapet of the bridge.

Along it someone had sprayed in bright red paint the words BENNY’S BACK!

‘Clark says it must have been done last night before the kiddie went missing,’ said Dalziel. ‘There’s a couple more in the town. Coincidence? Sick joke? Mebbe. But folk round here, especially them who came from Dendale, seeing that and hearing about Lorraine, especially folk with young kiddies of their own …’

He didn’t complete the sentence. He didn’t need to. He thinks he’s failed once and he’s not going to fail again, thought Pascoe.

They drove on in silence.

Pascoe thought of little children. Of daughters. Of his own daughter, Rosie, safe at the seaside.

He found himself thanking God, whom he didn’t believe in, for her presumed safety.

And Lorraine Dacre … he thought of her waking up on a day like this … How could a day like this hold anything but play and pleasure beyond computation for a child?

He prayed that the God he didn’t believe in would reproach his disbelief by having the answer waiting in Danby, little Lorraine Dacre safely back home, bewildered by all the trouble she’d caused.

At Pascoe’s side, the God he did believe in, Andy Dalziel, was thinking too of answers that awaited them in Danby, and of the little girl waking up perhaps for the last time on a day like this …

FOUR

Little Lorraine wakes early, but the sun has woken earlier still.

These are the long summer days which stretch endlessly through all happy childhoods, when you wake into golden air and fall asleep a thousand adventures later, caressed by a light which even the tightest drawn of curtains can only turn into a gentle dusk.

There is no sound of life in the cottage. This is Sunday, the one day of the week when Mam and Dad allow themselves the luxury of a lie-in.

She gets out of bed, dresses quickly and quietly, then descends to the kitchen where Tig yaps an excited welcome. She hushes him imperiously and he falls silent. He’s very well trained; Dad insisted on that. ‘Only one thing worse than a disobedient dog, and that’s a disobedient daughter,’ he said. And Mam, who knows that Lorraine can twist him round her little finger, smiled her secret smile.

A quick breakfast, then up on a stool to withdraw the top bolt of the kitchen door and out into the yard with Tig eager on her heels. No need for the lead. The yard opens right on to the edge of Ligg Common. Well-trodden paths wind through furze and briar till she arrives on the bank of Ligg Beck whose once boisterous waters have been tamed by this parching weather into a barely dimpling trickle.

Never mind. The dried-up beck broadens the path running alongside, slowly climbing high up the dale where there are rabbits for Tig to chase, and butterflies to leap at, and tiny orchids for her to seek, while all around skylarks rocket from their heathy nests to sing their certainty that the sun will always shine and skies be blue forever.

Tony Dacre wakes an hour later. The sun fills the room with its light and warmth. He sits up, recalls it is Sunday, and smiles. His movement has half woken Elsie, his wife, who rolls on her back and opens her eyes a fraction. They sleep naked in this weather. She is slim almost to skinniness and the outline of her light body under the single sheet sets his pulse racing. He bends his lips to hers, but she shakes her head and mouths, ‘Tea.’ He swings his legs out of bed, stands up and pulls his underpants on. He is no prude, but doesn’t think that parents should parade naked in front of their children.

When he reaches the kitchen, a badly hacked loaf, an open jar of raspberry jam, a glass of milk half-finished, and a trail of crumbs to the back door, tell him his precautions were unnecessary. He looks out into the yard. No sign of Lorraine. He shakes his head and smiles. Then he makes some tea and takes two cupfuls upstairs.

Elsie sits up in bed to drink it. From time to time he glances sideways, taking in her small dark-nippled breasts, checking the level of her tea. Finally it is finished.

She leans across him to put the cup on his bedside table. As she straightens up, he catches her in his arms. She smiles up at him. He says, ‘All that money I wasted buying you gin when I could have had you for a cup of tea!’

They make love. Afterwards he sings in the bathroom as he shaves. When he comes back into the bedroom she has gone downstairs. He gets dressed and follows.

She frowns and says, ‘Lorraine’s had her breakfast.’

‘Aye, I know.’

‘I don’t like her using that bread knife. It’s really sharp. And standing on a stool to unlock the door. We’ll have to talk to her, Tony.’

‘I will. I will,’ he promises.

She shakes her head in exasperation and says, ‘No, I’ll do it.’

They have breakfast. It’s still only half-past nine. The Sunday papers arrive. He sits in the living room, reading the sports page. Outside in the street he can hear the sound of girls’ voices. After a while he stands up and goes to the front door.

The girls are playing a skipping game. Two of them are swinging a long rope. The others come running in at one end, skip their way to the other, then duck out making violent falling gestures.

Skippers and swingers alike keep up a constant chant.

One foot! Two foot! Black foot! White foot!

Three foot! Four foot! Left foot! Right foot!

No one runs as fast as Benny Lightfoot!

OUT GOES SHE!

Tony calls out, ‘Sally!’

Sally Breen, a stout little girl who lives two doors up, says, ‘Yes, Mr Dacre?’

‘You seen our Lorraine?’

‘No, Mr Dacre.’

‘Anyone seen her?’

The chanting fades away as the girls look at each other. They shake their heads.

Tony goes back into the house. Elsie is upstairs making the beds. He calls up the stairway, ‘Just going for a stroll, luv. I want a word with old Joe about the bowling club.’

He goes out of the back door, through the yard, across the common. He’s been walking with his daughter often enough to know her favourite route. Soon he is by the dried-up beck and climbing steadily along its bank up the dale.

After a while, when he is sure he is out of earshot of Liggside, he starts calling her name.

‘Lorraine! Lorraine!’

For a long time there is nothing. Then he hears a distant bark. Tremulous with relief he presses on, over a fold of land. Ahead he sees Tig, alone, and limping badly, coming towards him.

Oh, now the skylarks like aery spies sing She’s here! she’s hurt! she’s here! she’s hurt! and the dancing butterflies spell out the message She’s gone forever.

He stoops by the injured dog and asks, ‘Where is she, Tig? SEEK!’

But the animal just cringes away from him as though fearful of a blow.

He rushes on. For half an hour he ranges the fellside, seeking and shouting. Finally, because hope here is dying, he invents hope elsewhere and heads back down the slope. Tig has remained where they met. He picks him up, ignoring the animal’s yelp of pain.

‘She’ll be back home by now, just you wait and see, boy,’ he says. ‘Just you wait and see.’

But he knows in his heart that Lorraine would never have left Tig alone and injured up the dale.

Back home, Elsie, already growing concerned, without yet acknowledging the nature of her concern, goes through the motions of preparing Sunday lunch as though, by refusing to vary her routine, she can force events back into their usual course.

When the door bursts open and Tony appears, the dog in his arms, demanding, ‘Is she back?’ she turns pale as the flour on her hands.

All the windows of the house are open to move the heavy air. Out in the road the girls are still at their game. And as husband and wife lock gazes across the kitchen table, each willing the other to smile and say that everything’s right, the words of the skipping chant come drifting between them.

One foot! Two foot! Black foot! White foot!

Three foot! Four foot! Left foot! Right foot!

No one runs as fast as Benny Lightfoot!

OUT GOES SHE!

FIVE

Danby, according to a recent Evening Post feature, was that rarest of things, a rural success story.

Bucking the usual trend to depopulation and decline, new development, led by the establishment of a Science and Business Park on its southern edge, had swollen the place from large village to small town.

It ain’t pretty but it works, thought Pascoe as they drove past the entrance to the Park on one side of the road and the entrance to a large supermarket backed by a new housing estate on the other.

It takes more than the march of modernity to modify the English provincial sabbath, however, and the town’s old centre was as quiet as a pueblo during siesta. Even the folk sitting outside the three pubs they passed with no more than a faint longing sigh from Dalziel looked like figures engraved on an urn.

The main sign of activity they saw was a man scrubbing furiously at a shop window on which, despite his efforts, the words BENNY’S BACK! remained stubbornly visible, and another man obliterating the same words with black paint on a gable end.

Neither of the detectives said anything till open countryside – moorland now, not pastoral – began to open up ahead once more.

‘This Liggside’s right on the edge, is it?’ asked Pascoe.

‘Aye. Next to Ligg Common. Ligg Beck runs right down the valley. Yon’s the Neb.’

The sun laid it all out before them like a holiday slide. Danbydale rose ahead, due north to start with, then curving north-east. The Neb rose steeply to the west. The road they were on continued up the lower eastern arm of the dale, its white curves clear as bones on a beach.

‘Next left, if I recall right,’ said Dalziel.

He did, of course. Lost in a Mid-Yorkshire mist with an Ordnance Survey cartographer, a champion orienteer, and Andy Dalziel, Pascoe knew which one he’d follow.

Liggside was a small terrace of grey cottages fronting the pavement. No problem spotting number 7. There was a police car parked outside and a uniformed constable at the door, with two small groups of onlookers standing a decent distance (about ten feet in Mid-Yorkshire) on either side.

The constable moved forward as Dalziel double-parked, probably to remonstrate, but happily for his health, recognition dawned in time and he opened the car door for them with a commissionaire’s flourish.

Pascoe got out, stretched, and took in the scene. The cottages were small and unprepossessing, but solid, not mean, and the builder had been proud enough of them to mark the completion by carving the date in the central lintel: 1860. The year Mahler was born. Dalziel’s unexpected recognition of the Kindertotenlied brought the name to his mind. He doubted if the event had made much of a stir in Danby. What great event did occupy the minds of the first inhabitants of Liggside? American Civil War … no, that was 1861. How about Garibaldi’s Redshirts taking Sicily? Probably the Italian’s name never meant much more to most native Danbians than a jacket or a biscuit. Or was he being patronizingly elitist? Who should know better than he that there was no way of knowing what your ancestors knew?

What he did know was that his mental ramblings were an attempt to distance himself from the depth of pain and fear he knew awaited them beyond the matt-brown door with its bright brass letter box and its rudded step. Where a lost child was concerned, not even rage was strong enough to block that out.

The constable opened the house door and spoke softly. A moment later a uniformed sergeant Pascoe recognized as Clark, i/c Danby sub-station, appeared. He didn’t speak but just shook his head to confirm that nothing had changed. Dalziel pushed past him and Pascoe followed.

The small living room was crowded with people, all female, but there was no problem spotting the pale face of the missing child’s mother. She was sitting curled up almost foetally at the end of a white vinyl sofa. She seemed to be leaning away from, rather than into, the attempted embrace of a large blonde woman whose torso looked better suited to the lifting of weights than the offering of comfort.

Dalziel’s entrance drew all eyes. They looked for hope and, getting none, acknowledged its absence by dropping their focus from his face to his shirt.

‘Who the hell’s this clown?’ demanded the blonde in a smoke-roughened voice.

Clark said, ‘Detective Superintendent Dalziel, Head of CID.’

‘Is that right? And he comes out here at a time like this dressed like a frigging fairground tent?’

It was an image that made up in comprehensiveness what it lacked in detail.

Dalziel ignored her, and crouched with surprising suppleness before the pale-faced woman.

‘Mrs Dacre, Elsie,’ he said. ‘I came soon as I got word. I didn’t waste time changing.’

The eyes, mere glints in dark holes, rose to look at him.

‘Who gives a toss what you’re wearing. Can you find her?’

What do you say now, old miracle worker? wondered Pascoe.

‘I’ll do everything in my power,’ said Dalziel.

‘And what’s that then?’ demanded the blonde. ‘Just what are you doing, eh?’

Dalziel rose and said, ‘Sergeant Clark, let’s have a bit of space here. Everyone out please. Let’s have some air.’

The blonde’s body language said quite clearly that she wasn’t about to move, but Dalziel took the wind out of her sails by saying, ‘Not you, Mrs Coe. You hold still, if Elsie wants you.’

‘How the hell do you know my name?’ she demanded.

It was indeed a puzzling question, but not beyond all conjecture. Coe was Elsie Dacre’s maiden name, and an older woman who had assumed the office of chief comforter without either a family resemblance or the look of a bosom friend was likely to be an in-law.

Dalziel just looked at her blankly, not about to spoil that impression of omniscience which made people tell him the truth, or at least feel so nervous, it showed when they tried to hide it.

‘Right Sergeant,’ he said, as Clark closed the door after the last of the departing women. ‘So what’s going off?’

‘I’ve got my lads up the dale …’

‘Three. That’s how many he’s got,’ interposed Mrs Coe scornfully.

‘Tony – that’s Mr Dacre – naturally wanted to get back up there looking and a bunch of locals were keen to help, so I thought it best to make sure they had some supervision,’ Clark went on.

Dalziel nodded approvingly. The more disorganized and amateur an early search was, the harder it made any later fine-tooth combing whose object was to find clues to an abduction, or murder.

‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Little lass could easily have turned her ankle and be sitting up the dale waiting for someone to fetch her.’

Such breezy optimism clearly got up Mrs Coe’s nose, but she kept her mouth shut. It was Elsie Dacre who responded violently, though so quietly to start with that at first the violence almost went unnoticed.

‘No need for all this soft soap, Mr Dalziel,’ she said. ‘We all know what this is about, don’t we? We all know.’

‘Sorry, luv, I’m just trying to …’

‘I know what you’re trying to do, and I know what you’ll be doing next. But it didn’t do any good last time, did it? So what’s changed, mister? You tell me that. What’s bloody changed!’

Now the woman’s voice was at full throttle, her eyes blazing, her face contorted with anger and fear.

‘Nay, lass, listen,’ said Dalziel intensely. ‘It’s early doors, too early to be talking of last time. God knows, I understand how that’ll be in your mind, it’s in mine too, but I’ll keep it at the back of my mind long as I can. I won’t rush to meet summat like that, and you shouldn’t either.’

‘You remember me then?’ said Mrs Dacre, peering at Dalziel closely as if there was comfort to be fixed in the Fat Man’s memory.

‘Aye, do I. When I heard your maiden name I thought, that could be one of the Coes from over in Dendale. You were the youngest, weren’t you?’

‘I were eleven when it started. I remember those days, hot days like now, and all us kids going round in fear of our lives. I thought I’d never forget. But you do forget, don’t you. Or at least, like you say, you put it so far at the back of your mind it’s like forgetting … and you grow up and start feeling safe, and you have a kiddie of your own, and you never let yourself think … but that’s where you’re wrong, mister! If I hadn’t kept it in the back of my mind, if I’d kept it at the front where it belongs … something like that’s too important … too bloody terrible … to keep at the back of …’

She broke down in a flood of tears and her sister-in-law embraced her irresistibly. Then the door opened and an older woman came in. This time the family resemblance was unmistakable. She said, ‘Elsie, I was down at Sandra’s … I’ve just heard …’

‘Oh, Mam,’ cried Elsie Dacre.

Her sister-in-law was thrust aside and she embraced her mother as though she could crush hope and comfort out of her.

Dalziel said, ‘Mrs Coe, why don’t you make us all a cup of tea?’

The three policemen and the blonde woman went into the kitchen. It was just as well. It was full of steam from a kettle hissing explosively on a high gas ring. Mrs Coe grabbed a tea towel, used it as a mitt to remove the kettle.

‘Should make a grand cuppa,’ said Dalziel. ‘Needs to be really hot. Mrs Coe, what do you reckon to Tony Dacre?’

‘What kind of question’s that?’ demanded the woman.

‘Simple one. How do you feel about your brother-in-law?’

‘Why’re you asking, is what I want to know.’

‘Don’t act stupid. You know why I’m asking. If I can eliminate him from my enquiries, then I won’t have to take this house to pieces.’

Honesty is not only the best policy, it’s also sometimes the best form of police brutality, thought Pascoe, watching as shock slackened the woman’s solid features.

Dalziel went on, ‘Afore you start yelling at me, think on, missus. You want me to have to start asking that poor woman if her man works on a short fuse or has got any special interest in his own daughter? You’re not daft, you know these things happen. So just tell me, is there owt I ought to know about Tony Dacre?’

The woman found her voice.

‘No, there bloody isn’t. I don’t like him all that much, but that’s personal. As for Lorraine, he worships that little lass, I mean like a father should. In fact, if you ask me, he spoils her rotten, and if she set fire to the house he’d not lose his temper with her. Jesus, I’d not have your job for a thousand pounds. Aren’t things bad enough here without you looking for something even filthier in it?’

Her tone was vehement, but she managed to control the sound level to keep it in the kitchen.

‘Grand,’ said Dalziel with a friendly smile. ‘Bring the tea through when it’s mashed, eh?’

He went out, pulling the door shut behind him. Behind it, Pascoe noticed for the first time, was a dog basket. Lying in it was a small mongrel dog, somewhere between a spaniel and a terrier. Its eyes were open but it didn’t move. Pascoe stooped over it and now its ears went back and it growled deep in its throat. Pascoe responded with soothing noises and though its eyes remained wary, it accepted a scratch between the ears. But when his hand strayed down to its shoulder, it snarled threateningly and he straightened up quickly.

‘Anyone sent for the vet?’ he enquired.

Mrs Coe said, ‘For crying out loud, my niece is missing out there and all you’re worried about is the sodding dog!’

The sergeant replied, ‘Not that I know of. I mean, with everything else …’

‘Do it now, will you? I don’t like to see an animal in pain, but just as important, I want to know how it got its injuries.’

‘Oh aye. I didn’t think, sir,’ said Clark guiltily. ‘I’ll get on to it right away.’

The woman, who’d busied herself mashing the tea, pushed past them angrily. Clark, following her, paused at the door and said, ‘Owt else I should have thought of, sir?’

‘Unless Lorraine turns up OK in the next half hour or so, this thing’s going to explode into a major enquiry. We’ll need an incident room. Somewhere with plenty of space and not too far away. Any ideas?’

The sergeant’s broad features contorted with thought, then he said, ‘There’s St Michael’s Hall. It’s shared between the church and the primary school and it’s just a step away …’

‘Sounds fine. Now get that vet. Good job you thought of it before the super, eh?’

He smiled as he spoke and after a moment Clark smiled back, then left.

One thing about Dalziel, thought Pascoe. He provides solid ground to build a good working relationship with the troops.

He opened the back door of the kitchen which led into a small, tidily kept yard with a patch of lawn and a wooden shed. He stepped out into the balmy air and opened the shed door. Some gardening tools, an old pushchair, and a child’s bike.

Carefully controlling his thoughts, he next went to the yard door and unlatched it. He found himself looking across an area of worn and parched grassland scattered with clumps of furze whose bright yellow flowers threw back defiance at the blazing sun. This had to be Ligg Common with beyond it the long sweep of Danbydale rising northwards to Highcross Moor.

Sunlight eats up distance and the head of the valley looked barely a half-hour’s stroll away, while the long ridge of the Neb stood within range of an outfielder with a good arm. He let his gaze cross to the valley’s opposite lower arm and here caught the glint of the sun on the glass of a descending car, and suddenly its tininess gave a proper perspective to the view.

There was a huge acreage of countryside out there, more than a few dozen men could search properly in a long day. And when you added to the outdoors all the buildings and barns and byres from the outskirts of the town to the farmed limits of the fell, then what lay in prospect was a massive operation.

He stood and felt the sun probe beneath his mop of light brown hair and beneath the surface of his fair skin. A few more minutes of this and he’d turn pink and peel like a new potato, while another hour or so would beat his brain into that state of sun-drunk insensibility he usually experienced on Mediterranean beach holidays while Ellie by his side only grew browner and browner and fitter and fitter.

Sometimes insensibility was the more desirable fate.

‘You taken root or wha’?’

He turned and saw Dalziel in the yard doorway.

‘Just thinking, sir. Anything happened?’

‘No. She’s quieter now. Much better with her mam than yon sister-in-law. Where’s Clark? I want to ask him about Dennis Coe, the brother.’

‘Mrs Coe’s husband?’

‘We’ll make a detective of you yet. Six or seven years older than Elsie, if I recall. We’ll need to take a close look at him.’

‘Why? Was he in the frame fifteen years back?’ asked Pascoe, thinking that Dalziel’s coup with Mrs Coe’s name was looking a pretty simple conjuring trick now.

‘Missing kids, every sod old enough to have a stiff cock ends up in the frame. He’d be eighteen or thereabout. Bad age. And all the kids who went missing were blonde and he wed himself a blonde …’

‘Come on!’ said Pascoe. ‘You reach any further and you’ll be in the X-files. In any case, I’d say Mrs Coe’s colour comes straight out of a bottle.’

‘So he married dark but let her know he preferred blondes. OK, stop flaring your nostrils else you’ll get house martins building. One thing you can’t argue with, he’s Lorraine’s uncle, and uncles rate high in the statistics for this kind of thing.’

Pascoe shook his head and said dully, ‘Mrs Coe said she’d not have our job for a thousand pounds. She’s way out. Sometimes a million’s not enough for the way we have to look at things.’

‘Talking of looking, what’s yon?’

The Fat Man was staring north. Over the distant horizon the heat haze had coalesced into something thicker.

‘Never a cloud, is it?’ said Dalziel.

‘Not of rain,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’d say smoke. Slightest spark starts a grass fire this weather.’

‘Best make sure some other bugger’s noticed,’ said Dalziel.

He pulled out his mobile, dialled, spoke and listened.

‘Aye,’ he said, switching off. ‘They know. It’s a big one. And not the only one either. Brigade’s on full alert and they’re using our uniformed too, which isn’t good news for us if we have to hit the red button.’

‘When?’ said Pascoe. ‘You don’t think that there’s …’

He was interrupted by Sergeant Clark from the doorway.

‘Excuse me, sir, but Mr Douglas the vet’s here. We got him on his mobile coming back from a farm call.’

‘Vet?’ said Dalziel to Pascoe. ‘What’s up? Feeling badly?’

In the kitchen they found a broad-built grey-bearded man kneeling down by the dog basket. His examination of the mongrel produced the odd rumbling growl but nothing as menacing as the snarl provoked by Pascoe’s inexpert probe.

Finally he stood up and turned his attention to the humans.

‘Peter Pascoe, DCI,’ said Pascoe, offering his hand. ‘And this is Superintendent Dalziel.’

‘We’ve met,’ said Douglas shortly. His voice had a Scots burr.

‘Aye, what fettle, Dixie?’ said Dalziel. ‘So, what’s the damage?’

‘Shoulder and ribcage badly bruised. I don’t think there’s a fracture, but he needs an X-ray to be sure. Possibility of internal injury. I think it’s best in all the circumstances if I take him back to the surgery with me. Any news of the wee lassie?’

‘Not yet,’ said Pascoe. ‘These injuries, what do you think caused them?’

‘No accident, that’s for sure,’ said the vet flatly. ‘If I had to guess, I’d say someone had given the poor beast a good kicking. Good day to you.’

Gently he lifted the dog from the basket and went out of the kitchen.

‘Good man, that,’ said Sergeant Clark approvingly. ‘Really worries about sick animals.’

‘Aye, well, he supports Raith Rovers,’ said Dalziel. ‘So someone gave the dog a kicking. That’s enough to get the show on the road. Good thinking to have the beast checked out.’

Pascoe said, ‘Yes. Well done, Sergeant Clark. So what do you want me to do, sir? Call in the troops and set up an incident room?’

‘Aye, best go by the book,’ said Dalziel without enthusiasm. ‘Any suggestions, Sergeant? As far as I recall, your Section Office isn’t big enough to swing a punch in.’

‘St Michael’s Hall, sir,’ said Clark with brisk efficiency. ‘Doubles as assembly hall and gym for the primary school and as a community centre. I’ve spoken on the phone with Mrs Shimmings the school head. You’ll likely remember her, sir. She were in Dendale, like me. Miss Lavery, she was then. She’s really upset. Says she’ll go to the school now to be on hand in case we need her help, talking about the little girl and such.’

Dalziel looked at him reflectively and said, ‘Well done, Sergeant. You’re thinking so far ahead, you’ll end up telling fortunes. OK, Peter, off you go. Tell ’em I want someone from uniformed who knows left from right to head up the search team. Maggie Burroughs’ll do nicely. And we’ll need a canteen van. It’ll be thirsty work tramping round them fells. And an information caravan for the Common. I’ll be here to see they get themselves sorted. Any questions?’

‘No, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘Lead on, Sergeant.’

Clark went out. As Pascoe followed, Dalziel’s voice brought him to a halt.

‘Word of advice, lad,’ he said.

‘Always welcome,’ said Pascoe.

‘Glad to hear it. So listen in. You do Nobby Clark a favour, don’t let him pay you back in beer. Make sure you work the bugger’s arse off. All right?’

Not just a conjuring trick, thought Pascoe. He really does know everything.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘Right off its haunches.’

SIX

St Michael’s Primary, like Danby itself, had grown.

The original stone building, apparently modelled on the old church from which it took its name, had sprouted several unbecoming modern extensions which compensated in airiness for what they lacked in beauty. The Hall, standing between the church and the school, was clearly designed by the same hand and even had a belfry and stained-glass windows through which filtered a dim religious light to illumine a spacious lofty interior with a stage at one end and a small gallery at the other.

Pascoe wrinkled his nose as the musty smell set up resonances both of lessons in the gym and of amateur dramatics in draughty village halls. Not that the entertainments on offer here were totally amateur. Among the notice board’s ‘Forthcoming Attractions’ he saw a poster for the opening concert of the eighteenth Mid-Yorkshire Dales Music Festival due to take place the following Wednesday and consisting of a song recital by Elizabeth Wulfstan, mezzo-soprano, and Arne Krog, baritone.

That name again. He recalled the strong young voice singing mournfully, And now the sun will rise as bright/As though no horror had touched the night …

The heat wave looked set for many more days, perhaps weeks, but he doubted if there’d be any more bright dawning for the Dacres.

For Christ’s sake! he admonished himself. Don’t rush to embrace the worst.

‘This will do nicely,’ he said to Clark, and got on his mobile. He’d already set the operation in motion back at Liggside and this was merely to confirm the location. ETA of the first reinforcements was given as thirty minutes.

‘I’ll go and have a word with Mrs Shimmings,’ he said. ‘You OK, Sergeant?’

The man was pale and drawn, as if he’d been exposed to biting winds on a winter’s day.

‘Yes, fine. Sorry. It’s just being here at the school, the incident room … suddenly it’s really happening. I think up till now I’ve been trying to pretend it were different from last time, over in Dendale, I mean. Not that it wasn’t the same then to start with, telling ourselves that at worst there’d been an accident and little Jenny Hardcastle ’ud be found or manage to get back herself …’

‘Then you’ll know how these things work,’ said Pascoe harshly. ‘One thing we’ll need to get sorted quickly is this Benny business. Someone’s responsible for these graffiti. We need to find out who, then we can start asking why. Any ideas?’

‘I’m working on it,’ said Clark. ‘Has to be a stupid joke and a lousy coincidence, hasn’t it, sir? I mean, it were done last night and Lorraine didn’t vanish till this morning. And the perp wouldn’t do it in advance, would he?’

‘Less chance of being caught,’ said Pascoe.

‘But that ’ud mean the whole thing were planned!’

‘And that’s worse than impulse? Well, you’re right. Worse for us, I mean. Impulse leaves traces, plans cover them up. Either way, we need the spray artist.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Clark. ‘Sir …’

‘Yes?’ prompted Pascoe.

‘Benny. Benny Lightfoot. Anything you know that I don’t? I mean, there could be information that reached HQ but you felt best not to pass on down here, for fear of opening old wounds …’

‘You mean, could Benny really be back?’ said Pascoe grimly. ‘From what I’ve heard, I doubt it. But the very fact that you can ask shows how important it is to finger this joker’s collar. Get to it.’

He walked across the playground to the school. He could see the figure of the head teacher at the window of a classroom he guessed would be Lorraine’s. She’d been standing at the main entrance when they arrived, but after a brief exchange, he’d cut the conversation short and headed into the hall.

Now he joined her in the classroom and said, ‘Sorry about that, Mrs Shimmings, but I had to get things rolling.’

‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I know how these things work.’

He recalled then that like Clark, she too had been here before. Looking at her closely, he detected the same symptoms of re-entry to a nightmare she thought she’d left behind.

She was a slimly built woman with greying chestnut hair and candid brown eyes. Late forties. Thirty-plus when Dendale died.

She said, ‘So you think the worst?’

‘We prepare for the worst,’ said Pascoe gently. ‘Tell me about Lorraine.’

‘She was … is a bright, intelligent child, a little what they used to call old-fashioned in some ways. It doesn’t surprise me to hear that she got up early and decided to take her dog for a walk all by herself. It’s not that she’s a solitary child. On the contrary, she’s extremely sociable and has many friends. But she never has any difficulty performing tasks by herself and on occasion, if given a choice, she will opt for the solitary rather than the communal activity.’

After the initial slip, she had kept determinedly, almost pedantically to the present tense. As she talked, Pascoe let his gaze wander round the classroom. Bringing up Rosie had honed his professional eye to the school environment. Now he found himself assessing the quality of wall displays, the evidence of thought and order, the use of material that was stimulating aesthetically, intellectually, mathematically. In this classroom everything looked good. This teacher hadn’t shot away on Friday afternoon but had stayed behind after the children had gone, to refine their efforts at tidying up and make sure the room was perfectly prepared for Monday morning. This teacher, he guessed, was going to be devastated when she discovered what had happened to one of her pupils.

He said, ‘Would she go off with a stranger?’

‘Someone offering her sweets in the street, asking her to get into a car, no way,’ said Mrs Shimmings. ‘But you say she’d gone up the dale for a walk? Things are different up there, Mr Pascoe. Do you do any walking yourself?’

‘A little,’ said Pascoe, thinking of Ellie cajoling her rebellious husband and daughter into completing the Three Peaks Walk last spring.

‘Then you’ll know that, in the street if a complete stranger says “Hello” to you, you think there’s something wrong with him, but up there on the hills if you meet anyone, you automatically exchange greetings, sometimes even stop and have a chat. Not to say something would be the odd thing. Yes, I think that nowadays we’ve all got our children trained to regard strangers with the utmost suspicion, but they learn by example more than precept, and out in the country the example they get is of strangers being greeted almost like old acquaintance.’

‘So she might stop and talk.’

‘She wouldn’t be surprised if someone spoke to her and she wouldn’t run. Indeed, up there, what would be the point? Didn’t she have her dog with her, though?’

‘Dogs are an over-rated form of protection,’ said Pascoe. ‘Unless they’re so big and fierce, you wouldn’t let a little girl take it out alone anyway. This one may have tried. It got badly kicked about for its pains. Any of these Lorraine’s?’

He was looking at a display of paintings with the general heading ‘My Family’.

Even as he asked, he saw the neatly printed label LORRAINE’S FAMILY under a picture of a man and a woman and a dog. The human figures were of roughly equal size, both with broad slice-of-melon smiles. The dog was, relatively, the size of a Shetland pony. Psychologists would probably say this meant she had no hang-ups with either parent, but was really crazy about Tig. Just what you’d hope to find in a seven-year-old girl. He recalled his own sinking feeling a little while back when, without comment, Ellie had shown him a painting of Rosie’s which had her standing there like the fifty-foot woman and himself a mere black blob in a car moving away fast.

‘Happy family?’ he said.

‘Very happy. I’ve known the mother since she was a girl.’

‘Of course. You used to teach in Dendale back before they built the reservoir, I gather.’

‘That’s right. Like everyone else, I had to move out. Part of the price of progress.’

‘But in the end, some people were probably glad to go, even to see the valley under water?’ he probed.

‘You think Lorraine’s disappearance may have something to do with what happened back then?’

‘You tell me, Mrs Shimmings,’ said Pascoe. ‘I wasn’t around then. You’ve heard about these painted signs? “Benny’s Back”?’

She nodded.

‘So, could he be back? And if so, where’s he been? I heard he was a bit simple.’

‘He could have been living with people who don’t ask questions or make judgements,’ she offered. ‘Like these New Age travellers. Anyway, Benny wasn’t simple. In fact, he was very bright.’

‘I’m sorry. I was told he’d had an accident … something about a plate in his head …’

‘Oh, that,’ she said dismissively. ‘I taught Benny both before and after that accident, Mr Pascoe. And he was just as sharp after it as before. But he was always different, and folk in Yorkshire confuse different with daft just as readily as anywhere else. No, he wasn’t simple, but he was … fey, I think that’s the word. I taught him till he was old enough to go to the secondary. That meant taking the bus out of the dale and he wasn’t keen. But his father told him to go and do his best, and Benny paid a lot of heed to Saul, his dad. Then, when Benny was twelve, Saul Lightfoot died.’

‘How?’ asked Pascoe. The policeman’s question.

‘He drowned. He was a fine athletic man,’ said Mrs Shimmings, with what a romantic observer might have called a faraway look in her eyes. ‘He used to go swimming in the mere. He was a good strong swimmer, but they think he got tangled up with a submerged tree branch. It devastated poor Benny. The family all lived with old Mrs Lightfoot, Benny’s gran, in Neb Cottage. It must have been a tight squeeze, there were three kids: Benny, and his younger brother and sister, Barnabas and Deborah. But it worked all right as long as Saul was around. He was that sort of man. Charismatic, I suppose they’d say nowadays. Or what the young girls would call a hunk.’

Pascoe smiled and glanced surreptitiously at his watch. Local history was fine, but he had responsibilities in the here and now which wouldn’t wait.

‘I’m sorry, I’m holding you back,’ said Mrs Shimmings.

He’d forgotten she was a head teacher with an eye long trained for the tell-tale minutiae of behaviour.

‘Nothing I can do till my men arrive,’ he assured her. ‘Please, carry on.’

‘Well, Marion, that’s Benny’s mother, and old Mrs Lightfoot never really got on. She wasn’t a country lass, Saul had met her at a dance in town, and now with him gone, there was nothing to keep her in Dendale. It was no surprise when she got a job in town and took the children off. Benny came back from time to time to see his gran. I gathered he wasn’t happy. Not that he spoke much to anyone, he was becoming more and more withdrawn. Then it seems his mother met up with a new man. He moved in. I think that ultimately they got married, but only because they’d decided to emigrate – Australia, I think it was – and being married made things easier. Benny didn’t want to go. The night before they were due to leave, he took off and came to his gran’s. Marion came looking for him. He refused point-blank to go back with her and old Mrs Lightfoot said he could stay with her. So that’s what happened. I daresay there were a great number of other things said that shouldn’t have been said. Net result was the family left and Benny settled in at Neb Cottage. As far as I can make out, he dropped right out of school. The truancy officer came round several times, and the Social Services, but at the first sight of anyone vaguely official, indeed anyone he didn’t recognize, Benny would take off up the Neb, and in the end they more or less gave up, though I’m sure they found some face-saving formula to regularize the situation.’

‘How do you regularize truancy?’ wondered Pascoe.

‘You don’t. Time does that,’ said Mrs Shimmings. ‘I think they must have heaved a mighty sigh of relief in the Education Office when Benny passed his sixteenth birthday. But the psychological damage was done. Benny was wary, elusive, introverted, solitary, devoid of social skills – in other words, in the eyes of most people, plain simple.’

‘And could he have been responsible for the disappearances?’ he asked.

‘Sex is a strong mover in young men,’ she said. ‘But before the attack on Betsy Allgood, I had serious reservations. After that, however …’

She shook her head. ‘You were quite right what you said before. In the end, I think a lot of folk were glad to get out of Dendale, glad to see it go under water. The more biblically inclined saw it as a repeat of the Genesis flood, aimed at drowning out wickedness.’

‘Nice thought,’ said Pascoe. ‘But wickedness is a strong swimmer. And how did you feel, Mrs Shimmings?’

It seemed an innocent enough question, but to his distress he saw her eyes fill with tears, even though she turned away quickly to hide them and went to the teacher’s desk.

‘Funny,’ she said. ‘While I was waiting for you, I went into our little library and this was the book I picked out.’

She took a book from the desktop and held it up so he could see the title.

It was The Drowning of Dendale.

‘I know it,’ said Pascoe. ‘My wife has a copy.’

It was, as he recalled, a coffee-table book, square-shaped and consisting mainly of photos with very little text. It was in two parts, the first entitled ‘The Dale’, the second ‘The Drowning’. The first photograph was a panorama of the whole dale, bathed in evening light. And the epigraph under the subtitle was A happy rural seat of various view.

‘Paradise Lost,’ said Mrs Shimmings. ‘That’s how I felt, Mr Pascoe. It may have been spoilt, but it was still like leaving Paradise.’

A horn blew outside. Glad of a diversion from this highly charged and, he hoped, totally irrelevant display of emotion, Pascoe went to the window.

They were arriving, all kinds of vehicles bearing everything necessary for the Centre. Furniture, telephones, radios, computers, catering equipment, and of course personnel. Must be like this in a war, he thought. Before a Big Push. Like Passchendaele. So much hustle and bustle, so many men and machines, failure must have seemed inconceivable. But they had failed, many many thousands of them needlessly killed, one of them his namesake, his great-grandfather, not drowning in mud or shattered by shell-fire, but tied to a post and shot by British bullets …

He said, ‘We’ll talk again later, Mrs Shimmings,’ and went out to take control.

SEVEN

‘I often think they’ve only gone out walking,

And soon they’ll come homewards all laughing and talking.

The weather’s bright! Don’t look so pale.

They’ve only gone for a hike updale.’

‘So what’s this? Narcissism, or the artist’s response to just criticism?’

Elizabeth Wulfstan pressed the pause button on her zapper and turned her head to look at the man who’d just come in.

The years had been good to Arne Krog. Into his forties now, his unlined open face framed in a shock of golden hair and a fringe of matching beard kept him looking more like Hollywood’s idea of a sexy young ski-instructor than anyone’s idea of a middle-aged baritone. And if, in terms of reputation and reward, the years had not been quite so generous, he made sure it didn’t show.

She said, ‘Most of what you said was right. Makes you happy, does it?’

She spoke with a strong Yorkshire inflexion which came as a surprise to those who knew her by her singing voice alone.

‘It makes me happy that you have seen your error. Never mind. It will be a collector’s disc when you are old and famous. Perhaps then, to be contrary, you will make your last recording of songs best suited to a young, fresh voice. But preferably in the language in which they were written.’

‘I wanted folk to understand them,’ she said.

‘Then give them a translation to read, not yourself one to sing. Language is important. I should have thought someone so devoted to her own native woodnotes wild would have understood that.’

‘Don’t see why I should have to speak like you just to please some posh wankers,’ she said.

She smiled briefly as she spoke. Her face with its regular features, dark unblinking eyes, and heavy patina of pale make-up, all framed in shoulder-length ash blonde hair, had a slightly menacing mask-like quality till she smiled, when it lit to a remote beauty, like an Arctic landscape touched by a fitful sun. She was five nine or ten, and looked even taller in the black top and lycra slacks which clung to her slim figure.

Krog’s eyes took this in appreciatively, but his mind was still on the music.

‘So you will change your programme for the opening concert?’ he said. ‘Good. Inger will be pleased too. The transcription for piano has never been one she liked.’

‘She talks to you, does she?’ said Elizabeth. ‘That must be nice. But chuffed as I’d be to please our Inger, it’s too late to change.’

‘Three days,’ he said impatiently. ‘You have the repertoire and I will help all I can.’

‘Thanks,’ she said sincerely. ‘And I’d really like your help to get them right. But as for changing, I mean it’s too late in here.’

She touched her breastbone.

He looked exasperated and said, ‘Why are you so obsessed with singing these songs?’

‘Why’re you so bothered that I’m singing them?’

He said, ‘I do not feel that, in the circumstances, they are appropriate.’

‘Circumstances?’ She looked around in mock bewilderment. They were in the elegant high-ceilinged lounge of the Wulfstans’ town house. French windows opened on to a long sunlit garden. Faintly audible were the rumbles of organ music under the soaring line of young voices in choir. If they’d stepped outside they could have seen a very little distance to the east the massive towers of the cathedral whose gargoyled rain-spouts seemed to be growing ever longer tongues in this unending drought.

‘Didn’t think you got circumstances in places like this,’ said Elizabeth.

‘You know what I mean. Walter and Chloe …’

‘If Walter wanted to complain, he’s had the chance and he’s got the voice,’ she interrupted.

‘And Chloe?’

‘Oh aye. Chloe. You still fucking her?’

For a moment shock time-warped him to his early forties.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he demanded, keeping his voice low.

‘Come on, Arne. That’s one English word no one needs translating. Been going on a long time, hasn’t it? Or should I say, off and on? All that travelling around you do. Must be great comfort to her you don’t let yourself get out of practice, but. Like singing. You need to keep at your scales.’

He had recovered now and said with a reasonable effort at lightness, ‘You shouldn’t believe all the chorus-line gossip you hear, my dear.’

‘Chorus line? Oh aye, I could give Chloe enough names to sing the Messiah.’

He said softly, ‘What’s the point of this, Elizabeth? What do you want?’

‘Want? Can’t think of owt I want. But what I don’t want is Walter getting hurt. Or Chloe.’

‘That is very … filial of you. But you work very hard at that role, don’t you? The loving, and beloved, daughter. Though in the end, alas, as with all our roles, the paint and wigs must come off, and we have to face ourselves again.’

He spoke with venom, but she only grinned and said, ‘You sound like you got out the wrong side of bed. And you were up bloody early too. Man of your age needs his sleep, Arne.’

‘How do you know how early I got up? Am I under twenty-four hour surveillance then?’

‘Woke with the light myself, being a country lass,’ she said. ‘Heard your car.’

‘It could have been someone else’s.’

‘No. You’re the only bugger who changes up three times between here and end of the street.’

He shrugged and said, ‘I was restless, the light woke me also. I wanted to go for a walk, but not where I’d be surrounded by houses.’

‘Oh aye? See anyone you know?’

He fingered the soft hair of his beard into a point beneath the chin and said, ‘So early in the day I hardly saw anyone.’

She said, ‘Give us a knock next time, mebbe I’ll come with you. Listen, now you’re here, couple of things in the Mahler you can help me with.’

He shook his head wonderingly and said, ‘You are incredible. I tell you, I think you made a mistake to sing these songs on your first recording and that you will be making another to sing them at the concert. You ignore my advice. You make outrageous accusations, and now you want me to help you to do what I do not think you should be doing anyway!’

‘This isn’t personal, Arne. This is about technique,’ she said, sounding puzzled he couldn’t make the distinction. ‘I might think you’re a bit of a prick, but I’ve always rated you a good tutor. Mebbe that’s what you should have gone in for instead of performing. Now listen, I’m a bit worried about my phrasing here.’

She pressed her zapper and the song resumed.

‘Oh, yes, they’ve only gone out walking,

Returning now, all laughing and talking.

Don’t look so pale! The weather’s bright.

They’ve only gone to climb up Beulah Height.’

‘You hear the problem?’ she said, pressing pause again.

‘Why did you say up Beulah Height?’ he demanded. ‘That is not a proper translation. The German says auf jenen Höh’n.’

‘All right, keep your hair on. Let’s say on yonder height, that keeps the scansion,’ she said impatiently. ‘Now listen, will you?’

She started to play the song again. This time Krog concentrated all his attention on her voice, so much so that he didn’t realize the door had opened till Elizabeth said, ‘Chloe, what’s the matter? What’s happened?’

Chloe Wulfstan, heavier now than she’d been fifteen years before, but little changed in feature apart from a not unbecoming pouchiness under the chin, had come into the room and was leaning against the back of a sofa and swaying gently. ‘I’ve been listening to the local news,’ she said. ‘It’s happening again.’

Krog went to her and put his arm round her shoulders. At his touch she let go of the sofa and leaned all her weight into his body so that he had to support her with both arms. His eyes met Elizabeth’s neutral gaze and he gave a small shrug as if to say, so what am I supposed to do?

‘What’s happening again?’ asked the younger woman in a flat, calm voice. ‘What have you heard?’

‘There’s a child gone missing,’ said Chloe. ‘A little girl. Up the dale above Danby.’

Now the man’s gaze met Elizabeth’s once more. This time it conveyed as little message as hers.

And around them the rich young voice wound its plaintive line;

‘Ahead of us they’ve gone out walking

But shan’t be returning all laughing and talking.’

EIGHT

Ellie Pascoe was ready for fame. She had long rehearsed her responses to the media seagulls who come flocking after the trawlers of talent. For the literary journalist doing in-depth articles for the posh papers she had prepared many wise and wonderful observations about life and art and the price of fish and flesh, all couched in periods so elegant, improvement would be impossible and abbreviation a crime.

For the smart-arses of radio and television she had sharpened a quiverful of witty put-downs that would make them sorry they’d ever tried to fuck with Ellie Pascoe!

And for her friends she had woven a robe of ironic modesty which would make them all marvel that someone revealed as so very much different could contrive to remain so very much the same.

She’d even mapped out a History of Eng. Lit. account of her creative development.

Her first novel, which she steadfastly refused to allow to be published, but whose discovery in her posthumous papers was the literary event of 2040 – no make that 2060 – is the typical autobiographical, egocentric, picaresque work by which genius so often announces its arrival on the world stage. Much of it is ingenuous, even jejune, but already the discerning eye can pick out that insight, observation and eloquence which are the marks of her maturity.

Her second novel, which after much pressure and considerable revision, she allowed to appear at the height of her fame, is the story of a young woman of academic bent who marries a soldier and finds herself trying to survive in a world of action, authority and male attitudes which is completely foreign to her. The autobiographical elements here are much more under control. She has not merely regurgitated her experience, but first digested it then used it to produce a fine piece of … art.

(That metaphor needed a bit of work, she told herself, grinning.)

But it is in her third novel, which exploded her name to the top of the best-seller lists, that the voice of the mature artist – assured, amused, amusing, passionate, compassionate, compelling and melismatic – is heard for the first time in all its glory …

After Peter had left that Sunday morning, she lay in the sun for a while, playing the fame-game in her mind, but found that it quickly palled. If it ever did happen, she guessed it would be very unlike this. Reviewers, interviewers, and programme makers might be the poor relatives at the great Banquet of Literature, but one tidbit they were always guaranteed was the Last Word.

So finally her thoughts turned to where she had been trying to avoid turning them – to Peter.

She knew – had known for some time – that something was going on inside him that he wasn’t talking about. He wasn’t a reticent man. They shared most things. She knew all the facts of the case which had thrown up the devastating truth about his family history. They had talked about them at great length, and the talk had lulled her into a belief that the wounds she knew he had suffered would heal, were already healing, and only needed time for the process to complete. She was sure he had thought so too. But he’d been wrong, and for some reason was not yet able to admit to her the nature of his wrongness.

So far she hadn’t pressed. But she would. As wife, as lover, as friend, she was entitled to know. Or, failing those, she could always claim the inalienable right of the Great Novelist to stick her nose into other people’s minds.

The thought made her pick up her notebook and pen and start considering the jottings she’d made for her next opus. But looked at with these personal concerns running around inside her head, and this sun beating down on its outside, the jottings seemed a load of crap.

Dissatisfied, she got up and went into the house in search of something that would really stretch her mind. All that she could come up with was a pile of long neglected ironing. She switched the radio on and set to work.

It was, she discovered (though she would not have dreamt of admitting it outside the cool depths of the confessional which, as a devout atheist, she was unlikely ever to plumb anyway), a not unpleasant way of passing a mindless hour or so. From time to time she went outside again to give herself another shot of ultraviolet, followed by another slurp of iced apple juice, while the local radio station burbled amiably and aimlessly on. She even ironed some bed sheets with great care. Normally her attitude to sheets was that, as one night’s use creased them like W. H. Auden’s face, what was the point in doing much more than show them a hot iron threateningly? But Rosie, she guessed, would have been sleeping on Jill Purlingstone’s smooth and crisp sheets last night, and while the Pascoe house might not be able to compete by way of swimming pools and ponies, in this one respect, on this one occasion, her daughter would not feel deprived.

The radio kept her up to date with reports of the marvellous weather and how the incredible British public were finding intelligent ways of enjoying it. Like starting fires on the moors or sitting in crawling traffic queues on the roads to and from the coast.

Finally, with the ironing finished and the apple juice replaced by a long gin and tonic, she sat down calm of mind, all passion spent, at about six o’clock, just in time to hear a report of a major traffic accident on the main coast road.

There was an information number for anxious listeners. She tried it, found it engaged, tried the Purlingstones’ number, got an answering machine, tried the emergency number again, still engaged, slammed down the phone in irritation and as if in reaction it snarled back at her.

She snatched it up and snapped, ‘Yes?’

‘Hi. It’s me,’ said Pascoe. ‘You heard about the accident?’

‘Yes. Oh God, what’s happened? Is it serious? Where …’

‘Hold it!’ said Pascoe. ‘It’s OK. I’m just ringing to say I got on to the co-ordinator soon as I heard the news. No Purlingstones involved, no kids of Rosie’s age. So no need to worry.’

‘Thank God,’ said Ellie. ‘Thank God. But there were people hurt …’

‘Four fatalities, several serious injuries. But don’t start feeling guilty about feeling relieved. Keeping things simple is the one way to survive.’

‘That what you’re doing, love?’ she asked. ‘How’s it going? No mention of developments on the news.’

‘That’s because there are none. We’ve got a couple of dog teams out on the fell now and as many men as we’ve been able to drum up with all this other stuff. You’ve heard about the fires? God, people. I’m going to join the Lord’s Day Observance Society and vote for making it an offence to travel further than half a mile from home on a Sunday.’

Beneath his jocularity she easily detected the depression.

She said, ‘Those poor people. How’re they taking it?’

His memory played a picture of Elsie Dacre’s wafery face, of Tony Dacre who’d finally come down off the hillside, his legs rubbery with grief and hunger and fatigue. He said, ‘Like something’s been switched off. Like the air they breathe is tinged with chlorine. Like they’re dead and are just looking for a spot to drop in.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘Keep looking till dark. Start again in the morning. A few other things ongoing.’

Nothing he had much hope in or wanted to talk about. She tried to think of something comforting to say and was admitting failure when the doorbell rang and she heard the letter box rattle and Rosie’s voice crying impatiently, ‘Mummy! Mummy! It’s me. We’re home again. Mummy!’

‘Peter, Rosie’s back,’ she said.

‘Thought I could hear those dulcet tones,’ he said.

‘I’d better go before she breaks the door down.’

‘Give her my love. Take me when you see me.’

When she opened the door, Rosie burst in crying, ‘Mummy, look at me, I’m going to be brown as you. We had five ice creams and three picnics and Uncle Derek’s car blows really cold air and I can beat Zandra at backstroke.’

Ellie caught her, hugged her and swung her high. I remember when I was like that, she thought. So much to tell, that vocal cords seemed inadequate and what you really need is some form of optical-fibre communication able to carry thousands of messages at once.

Derek Purlingstone was smiling at her on the doorstep. He was a tall Italianately handsome man in his mid-thirties but looking six or seven years younger. His origins were humble – his father had been a Yorkshire coal miner – but he wore the badges of wealth – the Armani shirt, the Gucci watch – as if they’d been tossed into his cradle.

She smiled back and said, ‘Three picnics. That sounds a bit excessive.’

‘No, we had a breakfast picnic and a lunch picnic and a tea picnic and we drove through a fire …’

‘A fire? You were near the accident?’ she said to Purlingstone, alarmed.

He said, ‘You mean the pile-up on the main road? I heard it on the news. No, we used the back road, bit longer, damn sight quicker. The fire was up on Highcross Moor as we came back. Lot of smoke, no danger, though there seemed to be a lot of police activity round Danby.’

‘Yes. Peter’s there. There’s a child gone missing, a little girl.’

He made a concerned face, then smiled again.

‘Well, lovely to see you, Ellie, especially so much of you.’

His tone was theatrically lecherous and his gaze ran over her bikini’d body in a parody of bold lust. Ellie recalled a sentence from some psycho-pop book she’d read recently: To conceal the unconcealable, we pretend that we’re pretending it. Purlingstone was what her mother would have called ‘a terrible flirt’. Ellie had no problem dealing with it, but sometimes wondered how close it came to sexual harassment when aimed at younger women in subordinate positions at his office.

Despite this, and despite his fat-cat job in a privatized industry, she quite liked the guy and was very fond of his wife, Jill, who dressed at Marks and Sparks and had insisted that little Zandra went to Edengrove Junior rather than, as she put it, ‘some Dothegirls Hall where you pay through the nose for monogrammed knickers.’

‘No time for a drink?’ she said.

‘Sorry, but better get back. Zandra’s feeling a bit under par. Too much sun, I expect. She’s got her mum’s fair skin, not like us Latin types who can pour on the olive oil and let it sizzle, eh?’

The hot gaze again, then his hand snaked out and for a second she thought he was reaching for her breast, but all he did was ruffle Rosie’s short black hair before moving off to the Mercedes estate whose colour coincidentally matched the shade of his jeans. Coincidentally? thought Ellie. Bastard’s probably got a colour co-ordinated car for all his fancy outfits. Miaou. Envy wasn’t her usual bag, and really she was quite fond of Derek. It was just that in this weather it would be rather nice to have some form of in-car air-conditioning a touch more sophisticated than the draught through the rust holes in her own mobile oven.

Rosie’s voice broke through her thoughts, crying, ‘Mummy, you’re not listening!’

‘Yes, I am, dear. Well, I am now. Come and sit down and tell me all about it. I’m sorry Zandra’s not well.’

‘Oh, she’ll be all right,’ said the girl dismissively. ‘I want to tell Daddy all about it too.’

‘And he’ll want to hear,’ said Ellie. ‘So I’m afraid you’ll have to tell it all again when he comes home.’

The prospect of having a second captive audience was clearly not displeasing. Rosie’s day now spilled out in a stream-of-consciousness spate in which sensations and emotions drowned out details of time and place. The only downbeats were that Zandra had started feeling poorly on the way home and that Rosie had lost her cross. The Purlingstones were Catholic and Zandra wore a tiny crucifix round her neck on a fine silver chain. Rosie had indicated that her life would not be complete without one. Ellie, on more grounds than she cared to enumerate, had told her, no way! But when her daughter with considerable ingenuity had ‘borrowed’ a dagger-shaped earring from Ellie’s jewel box, threaded a piece of blue ribbon through it and hung it round her neck as a cross, neither of her parents had felt able to take it away.

Ellie made a note to hide the other one of the pair, then felt guilty. Was she thinking like this because of her genuine opposition to all forms of revealed religion? Or did it have anything to do with her mixed feelings of great delight that her daughter had apparently had the best time of her life, and small resentment that she could have had it despite her own absence?

Someone else was absent too, she noted. It had been interesting to observe over the past couple of weeks how reality in the shape of Zandra had edged out fiction in the form of Nina.

She said casually, ‘Nina wasn’t there then?’

‘No,’ said Rosie dismissively. ‘The nix got her again. Can I have a cold drink? I’m a bit hot.’

So much for imaginary friendship, thought Ellie. Now you’re here, now you’re back in the story book!

She said, ‘No wonder you’re hot after a day like that. Let’s see what we’ve got in the fridge, then I’ll rub some of my after-sun lotion on just to make sure you don’t start peeling like an old onion. OK?’

‘OK. Will Daddy be home before I go to sleep?’

She yawned as she spoke. The effort of telling her tale seemed to have drained all the energy from her.

‘I doubt it,’ said Ellie. ‘From the look of you, I think we’ll be lucky to get you into bed before you go to sleep.’

‘But he will be coming home soon as he finds the little girl?’

Oh, shit. Something else to remember from her own childhood, how sharp her ears had been to pick up and note down scraps of adult conversation.

She recalled Peter’s description of the missing child’s parents – like something’s been switched off – and another line came into her mind: so deep in my heart a small flame died.

She put her arms round Rosie and hugged her so hard the child gasped.

‘Sorry,’ said Ellie. ‘Let’s go find that cold drink.’

NINE

They are long, the days of midsummer, and usually their beauty lies in their length, with sunlight and warmth apparently unending and giving those able to relax a taste of that eternal bliss which was ours before the Great Banker in the Sky repossessed our first home and garden.

It was not so for the police working in Danby. There was not even that sense of growing urgency which the approach of night usually brings to a search team, that resentment at having the operation interrupted by several hours of darkness. From somewhere a dullness had stolen upon them, a feeling of futility. It sprang, Pascoe guessed, from the community’s close links with Dendale, from a common memory of what had happened there fifteen years ago, and from the link made in so many minds between the three Dendale children who had vanished without trace and Lorraine Dacre.

On the surface, Andy Dalziel fought against it, but in some ways it seemed to Pascoe he was a major contributor to it. It wasn’t that he gave the impression of a lack of urgency and involvement. On the contrary, he seemed to be more personally involved in this case than in any other Pascoe could recall. It was just that somehow he seemed to feel the whole physical and bureaucratic structure of the investigation – the search parties, the incident room, the house-to-house – was some kind of going-through-the-motions gesture, serving only as a sop to public morale.

For Pascoe, the machine was a comfort. It collected scraps of information, some negative, such as, this patch of ground or that outhouse had been searched and nothing had been found; some positive. You put these scraps in place, and joined them together carefully like the numbered dots in a child’s drawing book, and eventually with luck a recognizable shape emerged.

He wished Wieldy was here. When it came to making sense out of joined-up dots, no one came close to Sergeant Wield. But he and his partner were away for the weekend on a book-buying expedition in the Borders. At least that was what the partner, Edwin Digweed, antiquarian bookseller, was doing. Wield’s interest in books began and stopped with the works of H. Rider Haggard. He, as Andy Dalziel with instinctive salaciousness had put it when told of the sergeant’s non-availability, was just along for the ride.

About eight o’clock, Dalziel appeared in the incident room and told Pascoe he’d given instructions for the search to be wound down for the night.

‘Still a couple of hours of daylight,’ said Pascoe, slightly surprised.

‘We’re short-handed,’ said Dalziel. ‘And knackered. They’ll miss things in the dusk, start thinking of home, stop for a quiet drag, next thing we’ve got another grass fire down here and everyone’s up all night. I’ve called in on the Dacres, let them know.’

‘How’d they take it?’

‘How do you think?’ snarled the Fat Man. Then relenting, he added, ‘I pushed the no-news-good-news line. Never say die till you’ve got a body that has.’

‘But you don’t feel like that, sir?’ probed Pascoe. ‘From the start you’ve been sure she’s gone for good.’

‘Have I? Aye. Happen I have. Show me I’m wrong, lad, and I’ll give you a big wet kiss.’

Nobly, in face of such a threat, Pascoe persisted. ‘It could be abduction. There’s still some car sightings unaccounted for.’

This was straw-grasping stuff. All early-morning vehicle sightings had been eliminated except for three. A local farmer had seen a blue car heading up the Highcross Moor road at what he termed a dangerous speed; several people had noticed a white saloon parked on the edge of Ligg Common; and Mrs Martin, a short-sighted lady who’d gone early into St Michael’s Church to carry out her flower-arranging duties, thought she’d heard a vehicle going up the Corpse Road.

‘The Corpse Road?’ Dalziel echoed.

‘That’s right. It’s what they call the old track …’

‘… that runs over the Neb into Dendale, the one they used for bringing their dead ’uns across to St Mick’s for burying before they got their own church,’ completed Dalziel. ‘Don’t come the local historian with me, lad; I’m a sodding expert.’

He scratched his chin thoughtfully, then said, ‘Tell you what, fancy a walk? It’ll do you good, you’re looking a bit peaky.’

‘A walk …? But where …?’

‘You’ll see. Come on.’

Outside, the Fat Man plunged briefly into the boot of his car, from which he emerged with a small knapsack which he tossed to Pascoe.

‘You carry it up. I’ll carry it down.’

‘Up?’ said Pascoe uneasily.

‘Aye. Up.’

He led the way through a small gateway into the churchyard, through the green and grey lichened tombstones, past the church and out of the lych gate on the far side. A pleasant green track stretched ahead running between old elms and yews. At least it was pleasant for the first thirty yards or so, then it began to grow more rocky and steep.

‘Anything that came up here would need four-wheel drive. Or a tractor maybe,’ panted Pascoe. ‘Ground’s too hard to leave any traces.’

‘Well, thank you, Natty Bumppo,’ said Dalziel. ‘What’s been here then? Herd of cows in gum-boots?’

In a small clearing just off the track where the trees had thinned out considerably, he pointed to the crushed grass and powdered earth in parts of which tyre tracks were clearly visible.

‘Yes, well, OK,’ said Pascoe. ‘There’s been something up here. Well spotted, sir.’

He turned away and took a couple of steps back down the track.

‘Hey, sunshine, what’s your hurry? We’ve not got there yet.’

He looked back to see that Dalziel was still heading uphill where the track emerged from the trees and began to wind across the open fellside.

‘But why …? I thought you were just … Oh, sod it!’ said Pascoe, and followed.

In fact, the track meandered fairly gently up the fellside, worn there over centuries by the heavy feet of all those sad processions – and also, he reassured himself as the melancholy vision threatened to overwhelm him, by their presumably much lighter feet, tripping merrily back to Dendale after the wake.

At least, being the eastern flank of the Neb, it was out of reach of the declining sun, though he managed to produce sweat enough by the time he laboured up to the sunlit ridge.

‘Forty-five minutes,’ said Dalziel, sitting at his ease against a boulder. ‘I’d have thought a fit young shag like you ’ud have done it in half an hour.’

Pascoe sagged to the ground beside him, trying not to pant too audibly.

‘Gi’s the sack then,’ said the Fat Man.

Pascoe wriggled it off his shoulders and handed it over.

Then he turned his attention to Dendale.

It was only now, looking down, that he realized how much of a real frontier the Neb must have seemed to the old dalesmen. The fell on this side was much steeper and the sinuous curves of the Corpse Road on the Danby side turned into sharp zigzags beneath him. Also, while Danby had one foot and half its soul in the great fertile agricultural plain of Mid-Yorkshire, the narrow glaciated valley of Dendale belonged completely to the county’s wild moorlands.

It was, he supposed, this wildness and steep enclosure which had made the dale so attractive to the grey suits in search of a reservoir site. He knew nothing of their search and final selection, but guessed it contained much that was unedifying, with references to the greater good of the greater number and the difficulties of making omelettes without breaking eggs flowing like hot lava, destroying all lives and homes that lay in its path.

Doubtless there’d been an Enquiry. There always was. Some linguistic archaeologist of the next age, putting together a lexicon of late twentieth-century usage would probably conclude that the space between choosing a site and starting work on it was for some arcane reason called ‘The Public Enquiry’.

So the inevitable had happened and the valley had changed. Beyond recognition? Possibly. Beyond redemption? Probably. In one sense it was wilder now than before, because human beings no longer lived and worked here.

But the stamp of man’s presence was visible beyond disguise in the shape of the long curve of the dam wall.

Nature, though, is a tough cookie. Through his art man tries to perfect her, and through his science to control her. But always she will shrug her shoulders and be herself again.

So here it was, the famous reservoir, built out of public money for the public weal in the days when privatization of public utilities was still a lurid gleam in a pair of demon eyes. Now of course it was a key feature in the master plan by which Mid-Yorkshire Water plc hoped to keep its consumers (sorry; customers) wet and its shareholders wealthy for the next hundred years.

And Nature, simply by opening her great red eye in the sky for a couple of months, had set all the plans at nought.

Around the dark waters of the reservoir ran a broad pale fillet of washed rock and baked mud across which ran the lines of ancient walls and on which stood piles of shaped and faced stone showing where bits of the drowned village had come gasping up for air again.

‘You want this beer or not?’ said Dalziel.

Pascoe turned to find the Fat Man was proffering a can of bitter.

‘Well, I carried it up,’ said Pascoe. ‘I might as well carry it down.’

He took a long satisfying pull. Dalziel meanwhile had put down his own can and extracted from the knapsack a pair of binoculars with which he was scanning the valley.

What else did I lug up here? wondered Pascoe. A kitchen sink?

‘This is where it all started, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘This is what I wanted you to see.’

‘Thank you for the thought, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘Is there anything in particular I should be looking at, or is it just the general aesthetic I should be drinking in?’

‘Is that what they call irony?’ wondered Dalziel. ‘That’s sarcasm for intellectuals, isn’t it? Lost me. I just want you to have some idea what it used to be like down there, what it must have felt like fifteen years back when they were told they had to get out. I reckon it pushed one of the buggers over the edge. Now I know you think I’ve been brushing my teeth in home-brew or something, but if I’m going to be tret like a half-wit, I’d like to be tret like a half-wit by some half-wit who’s got half an idea what I’m talking about. You with me, lad?’

‘Trying to be, sir.’

‘That the best you can do?’

‘I’ve always felt that if Satan took me up to a high place, I’d be inclined to go along with most anything he said till I got down safe,’ said Pascoe. ‘So fire away. Give me a guided tour.’

‘No need,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ve got a map. It was in the file. I’ve got the rest of the file down in the car. You can take it home tonight and have a good read. Here.’

He passed over a sheet of cartridge paper. Pascoe looked at it and smiled.

‘I recognize this fair hand, surely? Yes, there they are, the magic initials E.W.’

‘Aye, it’s one of Wieldy’s. Thing you’ve got to remember is that what he’s marked as houses are nowt but piles of rubble down there.’

‘Was that the action of the water?’ wondered Pascoe.

‘No. The Water Board bulldozed them. They reckoned if they left buildings standing underwater, they’d be paying off sub-aqua freaks’ widows for evermore. Even the houses that weren’t going to be submerged they knocked down. Didn’t want anyone trying to sneak back and take possession.’

Pascoe studied the map. Dalziel passed him the glasses.

‘Start at the main body of the village,’ said Dalziel. ‘If you follow the Corpse Road down, you’ll see it ends at a bloody great rock. Shelter Crag, that is. So called ’cos that’s where they used to lay their dead ’uns, all wrapped up nice and cold for their trip over the hill to St Mick’s. When they got their own church, that seemed obvious place to build it, and that’s what that big pile of stones was.’

Slowly Dalziel guided Pascoe round the ruined valley with the care and precision of a courier who’d made the trip too often ever to forget. The main body of the village was easy enough to sort out once he’d got the church located. In any case, its relicts were substantial enough to be immediately obvious. Buildings which had stood apart weren’t so easily identified. Hobholme, the farm where the first girl had lived, wasn’t too difficult, but the Stang, site of the dale joinery, seemed to have been scattered far and wide. Heck, the Wulfstans’ house, had re-emerged as a substantial promontory of stones running out from the new shore to the edge of the shrinking mere, and on the far side it was easy to spot the long rounded hillock alongside which had stood Low Beulah, the home of the girl who had survived.

But Neb Cottage, home of prime suspect Benny Lightfoot, and scene of that last attack, perhaps because it was high enough up the fell not to have spent the last fifteen years under water, was very hard to spot. Perhaps, like the man himself, it had re-entered the earth from which its stones had been prised.

He didn’t share this fancy with the Fat Man but swung the glasses to bring the dam wall into view.

Somewhere there was a valley – the Lake District was it? – whose naive inhabitants according to legend built a wall to keep the cuckoo in and so enjoy spring forever. Here the purpose had been scientifically sounder, but not all that much more successful. With two-thirds of its footing in dried-up clay and the middle third lapped by sun-flecked wavelets that wouldn’t have swamped a matchbox, the dam wall looked as awkward as a rugger forward at a ballet school.

He ran his gaze up the gentle concavity of its front to the balustraded parapet. There was someone there, a man, strolling along, very much at his ease. From this distance and angle it was hard to get much impression of his face, but he was tall with long black hair brushed straight back.

‘Someone down there,’ said Pascoe.

‘Oh aye? Bit earlier and likely you’d have seen dozens. Local historians, bird-watchers, nebby hikers. No way the Water Board can keep them away without mounting an armed guard,’ said Dalziel. ‘Let’s have a shufti.’

He took the glasses, scanned the dam, then lowered them.

‘Gone, else you’re having visions. Someone up on Beulah Height, though.’

He’d raised his glasses to the saddled crest of the opposite fell.

‘Beulah Height. And Low Beulah. Someone must have been pretty optimistic,’ mused Pascoe.

‘Am I supposed to ask why?’ demanded Dalziel. ‘Well, no need, clever-clogs. “Thou shalt be called Hephzibah and thy land Beulah.” Isaiah sixty-two: four. And Pilgrim’s Progress, last stop afore heaven, the Land of Beulah “where the sun shineth night and day”. Got that just about right. Mind you, there’s some as say it comes originally from Anglo-Saxon. Beorh-loca or some such. Means hill enclosure. There’s the remains of some old hill-fort up there, dating from Stone Age times they reckon. Some time later on, farmers used the stones to make a sheepfold under the saddle, so they could be right.’

‘You haven’t been going to evening classes, have you, sir?’ asked Pascoe, amazed.

‘You ain’t heard nothing yet. Could be it’s the fold itself gives the name. Bought or bucht is a fold and law’s a hill.’

‘That makes Height a touch tautologous, doesn’t it?’ said Pascoe. ‘And it all sounds a bit Scottish, anyway.’

‘Do you not think we sent missionaries down to civilize you buggers?’ said Dalziel, referring to his own paternal heritage. ‘Any road, there’s others still who say it’s really Baler Height, bale meaning fire, ’cos this is where they lit the beacon to warn of the Armada in 1588. You likely got taught that at college, or were they not allowed to learn you about times when we used to whup the dagoes and such?’

Ducking the provocation, and slightly miffed at having their usual cultural roles reversed, Pascoe said, ‘And Low Beulah? They lit a beacon to warn the ducks, perhaps?’

‘Don’t be daft. A low’s one of them burial mounds. Yon little hillock next to where the farm was is likely one of them.’

Pascoe knew when he was beaten.

‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘You really did your homework fifteen years back.’

‘Aye. Whatever there were to know about Dendale, I learnt by heart,’ said Dalziel heavily. ‘And you know what? Like all them dates and such I learnt at school, it did me no fucking good whatsoever.’

He pushed himself to his feet and stood there, glowering into Dendale, looking to Pascoe’s imagination like some Roman general sent to tame a rebellious province, who’d discovered that in terrain like this against foes like these, classical infantry tactics were no sodding good.

But he’d find a way. They – Roman generals and Andy Dalziels – always did.

Except of course in this case he was looking into the wrong valley.

As if in response to this critical thought, Dalziel said, ‘I know what’s down there is old stuff, lad. And what’s down in Danby is a new case. But there’s one thing I learnt fifteen year back that chimes useful to me now.’

‘What’s that, sir?’ asked Pascoe dutifully.

‘I learnt that in this place in this kind of weather, the bastard who took that first lass didn’t stop, mebbe couldn’t stop, till he’d taken two more and had a go at taking another. That’s why I brought you up here, to try to get it into your noddle. Some things you can’t learn out of books. But take the Dendale file home with you for homework anyway. I’ll test you on it tomorrow.’

‘Will I be kept in if I fail?’ asked Pascoe.

‘With this one, I think we’ll all be kept in long after the bell goes,’ said Dalziel. ‘Now let’s be getting back down while it’s still light enough to see how far we’ve got to fall.’

He strode ahead down the Corpse Road.

Pascoe took a last look across the dale. The setting sun filled the fold bowl between the two tops of Beulah Height with a pool of gold. Last stop afore heaven. On a night like this you could believe it.

‘Oy!’

‘Coming,’ he called.

And he followed his great leader into the darkness.

day two Nina and the Nix

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

We came from water and if the Greenhouse theorists are right, to water we shall probably return.

It accounts for 72% of the earth’s surface and 60% of a man’s body.

In places under permanent threat of drought, like Arabia Deserta and Mid-Yorkshire, it brings riches to some and death to others.

And over the centuries man has peopled it with a whole range of elemental creatures, mermaids, undines, naiads, neriads, krakens, kelpies, and many more, all suited to the particular age and culture which spawned them.

Here in Mid-Yorkshire the most common hydromythic entity is the nix.

The nix stands midway between the English pixie and the Scandinavian nicor.

In some tales it figures as a sort of brownie, generally benevolent in its relation with humanity. In others it is much closer to its Norse cousin which emerges from its watery lair by night to devour human prey. The Grendel monsters in the Beowulf saga are a form of nicor.

The present tale I heard many years ago from the lips of old Tory Simkin of Dendale, now sadly taken from us, both man and valley. It troubles me to think how much of the past we have lost while modern technology preserves in electronic perpetuity the idiocies of our own age (of all that have ever been perhaps the most deserving of oblivion). I thank God there are a few superannuated fools like myself who think it worthwhile to record the old stories before they are lost forever.

If this be vanity or blasphemy, then behold a vain blasphemer from whom you may obtain further copies of this book and information about other publications of The Eendale Press at Enscombe, Eendale, Mid-Yorkshire.

EDWIN DIGWEED

NINA AND THE NIX

Once there were a nix lived by a pool in a cave under a hill.

For food he et whatever swam in his pool or crawled in the mud around it.

Only friend he had were a bat that hung upside down high in the roof of his cave, though often when it spoke to him its little squeaky voice seemed to come from somewhere high in the roof of his own head.

If nix wanted to go out, he usually waited till night. But sometimes he’d hear voices of kiddies playing in village far below and he’d sneak out in the daytime and find a shady place in the hillside where he could watch them.

Best of all were when they played in the pond on the village green and splashed each other, and ran around shouting, their shining faces and white limbs all dripping with water.

The one he liked watching most were called Nina. Her hair was as blonde as his was black and her skin as smooth as his was scaly.

Came a summer when sun shone so warm and sky stayed so cloudless that not even thought of seeing Nina could ’tice nix out into that heat and that brightness. He sat tight in his dark dank cave waiting for weather to change. But it didn’t change and after a week or so he noticed when he knelt to take a drink that the water in his pool were further away than it used to be.

Day followed dry day. Sun burnt so hot, nix could feel its stuffy heat even down here in his cave. And without a drop of rain to slip through the cracks in the hillside and fill up his pool, the level got lower and lower. Soon the creatures that lived in it, and them as lived in the muddy edge which was getting bigger and bigger and drier and drier, began to die. And soon the nix began to feel very hungry.

‘You going to sit there moping till you fade away?’ said bat.

‘Don’t see what else I can do,’ said nix.

‘You can find some food,’ said bat.

‘I’ve looked and I’ve looked and there’s nowt left to feed me,’ said nix.

‘I weren’t thinking of feeding thee,’ said bat. ‘I were thinking of feeding the pool.’

‘Eh?’ said nix.

‘Have you not noticed? Yon pond in the village hasn’t got much smaller. And you know why that is?’

‘No,’ said nix.

‘It’s because of them juicy young lasses always splashing about in it,’ said bat. ‘Get yourself one of them, and you’d soon see pool filling up again.’

So nix went up to the surface to take a look for himself. It were so bright and hot he could only stay up there for half a minute, but it were long enough to see that bat was right. The village pond were still full of water, and the little kids were still splashing around in it.

Back down he came to his cave and he said, ‘So you’re right, but it’s not much help. How am I going to get one of them to come down here? They’re all shut up in their homes at night, and if I go out during the day, I’ll shrivel up and die.’

‘Then she’ll have to come to you,’ said bat. ‘Go out tonight and gather all the prettiest flowers you can find, and plant them all around the entrance to the cave. Then just sit and wait.’

So that night the nix stole out and went far and wide over hill and dale, uprooting all the flowers he could find, moon daisies and stepmothers, Aaron’s rod and bedstraw, but no flopdocken, for that’s a flower nixes and their kind cannot abide. And he planted them all around the mouth of his cave.

Next morning, Nina went for a walk up the hill afore the sun got too hot. She wanted to pick some flowers for her mam, but there weren’t very many because the heat had dried up all the ground and baked it so hard that even the grass was brown. Then suddenly she spotted this hollow in the hillside so full of flowers it looked like a garden. She made haste to get there and started picking the brightest blooms when a voice said, ‘What do you think you’re up to, little girl? Do you always steal flowers from other folks’s gardens?’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ cried Nina. ‘I didn’t realize this was anybody’s garden.’

‘Well, you realize now,’ said the voice.

She couldn’t see who was speaking but the voice seemed to be coming out of this hole in the hillside. So she went to it and said timidly, ‘I really am sorry. I’ll put them down here, shall I?’

‘Nay, now they’re picked, you might as well keep them,’ said the voice.

‘That’s right kind of you,’ said Nina. ‘But won’t you come out into your garden where I can see you?’

‘Nay, lass. I can’t bear this heat,’ said the voice. ‘In fact, I were just making myself a jug of iced lemonade. Would you like to try a glass?’

Now Nina was very hot and thirsty indeed and she said eagerly, ‘Yes please.’

‘Right, I’ll pour you one. Just step inside and help yourself.’

So she pushed past the flowers which fringed the entrance to the tunnel leading down to the cave and stepped inside.

Next moment she felt herself seized by her long blonde hair which she was wearing in two pigtails and before she could scream she was dragged right down into the bowels of the earth.

There she lay in the foul-smelling dark, sobbing her heart out.

Finally she ran out of tears and rubbed her eyes and sat up to take a look around.

Outside, sun were so bright, a little bit of light filtered down the entrance tunnel. By its dim glow she saw she were in a cave. The ground were strewn with rocks and stuff. In the middle of the cave was a small, foul-smelling pool, and on its edge sat this thing.

Its body was long and scaly, its fingers and toes were webbed with long curved nails, its face was gaunt and hollow, its nose hooked, its chin pointed and fringed with sharp spikes of beard, its eyes deep-set and staring, and its mouth twisted in a mockery of a smile showing sharp white teeth as it spoke.

‘How do, Nina,’ it said.

‘How do, Nix,’ she answered in a very low voice.

‘You know who I am then?’ said nix.

‘Aye. My mam’s told me about you,’ said Nina.

What her mam had told her was never go up the fell on her lone else the wicked nix that lived beneath it might steal her.

Now she wished with all her might that she’d taken heed!

‘Then it’s nice of you to come visiting, Nina,’ said nix.

‘It’s nice of you to have me,’ said Nina politely like she’d been taught. ‘But please, I’d like to go home now, it’s nearly time for my dinner.’

‘It’s long past time for mine,’ snapped nix. Then, smiling his terrible smile again, he went on, ‘Tell you what, Nina. It’s so hot, why don’t you have a little swim afore you go?’

Nina looked at the dreadful pool and shook her head.

‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘My dad says I’m never to go swimming by myself, only when there’s someone bigger around to take care of me.’

‘Never fear,’ said nix, standing up. ‘I’m bigger and I’ll take care of thee.’

He came round the pool towards her. At that moment a voice came drifting down the tunnel from far above.

‘Nina! Nina!’ it cried.

‘It’s Dad!’ cried Nina. ‘I’m coming. I’m coming.’

And she set off to run up the tunnel, but she’d only gone a little way when those terrible hands caught at her ankles and dragged her screaming back down.

Far above she could still hear her dad’s voice, but now it was fading and soon it was far away, then she couldn’t hear it at all.

She lay on the edge of the pool with the nix towering over her.

‘Just wait till my dad gets a hold of you,’ she sobbed. ‘He’ll pull your neck like a chicken’s for the pot.’

‘He’ll have to catch me first,’ laughed nix. ‘Now let’s go for this swim.’

Nina looked up at him and saw he were strong enough to make her do whatever he wanted her to do. No use fighting then. What was it her mam used to say? God made men strong but he made us clever. Why use fists when you can use your noddle? And her dad were always boasting she were bright as a button.

Well, now was time to see just how bright a button she really was.

‘All right,’ said Nina. ‘But I’ll need to tidy up first.’

She stood up and began brushing off her dress, which had got all dusty when the nix dragged her down the tunnel. Then she took the ribbons out of her pigtails and unplaited her hair and combed it with her fingers so that it tumbled over her shoulders like a fall of bright water.

And all the while nix watched her with eyes like hot coals.

‘There,’ said Nina. ‘I’m ready. But you’ll need to jump in with me to help me to swim.’

‘Take care, Nix,’ squeaked bat. ‘They’re sly as spiders, these lasses.’

But nix wasn’t listening. His eyes and his thoughts were fixed entirely on Nina.

She took his hand in hers and made him stand alongside her on a big rock at the edge of the pool.

And she said, ‘I’ll count up to three and then we’ll jump together. All right?’

‘All right,’ said nix.

‘One,’ said Nina.

‘And two,’ said Nina.

‘And three,’ said Nina.

And they jumped.

Only, as nix jumped forward into the pool, Nina let go his hand and jumped backwards on to the ground.

Then she turned and ran as fast as she’d ever run in her life up the tunnel.

It only took nix a second to realize her trick.

Then, screaming with rage and dripping foul-smelling mud and water, he dragged himself from the pool and set out after her.

Oh, she were fast, but he were faster.

She didn’t dare waste time looking back, but she could hear him behind her, his sharp nails screeling against the rock like hard chalk on a shiny slate, his stinking breath panting like Bert the blacksmith’s bellows.

Her long hair streamed behind her and she felt it touched by his outstretched hand. Faster then she ran, and faster, till she felt it no more. But still he was close and her strength was failing. Now she felt the hand again, this time close enough to get a hold of a tress.

She felt the grip tighten, she felt her hair being twisted to make the grip firmer, above her she could see the ring of bright light that marked the end of the tunnel.

But it was too late. He had her hair fast now. He was pulling her to a stop. It was too late.

She stretched out her arms to the light and screamed, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

And just as she gave up hope and knew she were about to be dragged back down to the depths, she felt her hands seized.

For a moment she was stretched taut as a rope in the tug-o’-war at the village sports. Then, just as in the tug-o’-war when it seems the two teams are so evenly matched they must hold each other there for ever, suddenly one side will find the strength for one last pull and the other will go sprawling helpless on the ground, so Nina felt the pull above increase, the pull behind slacken.

And next moment she was out on the hillside in the bright golden sunlight, lying on the grass at her father’s feet.

Oh, how they hugged and kissed, and nothing was said to scold her or remind her she’d disobeyed.

When they were done hugging and kissing, her dad rolled a huge boulder across the entrance to the cave.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That’ll keep yon nix where he belongs. Now, let’s be getting you home to your mam. Let’s take her some flowers to brighten the house.’

So they set to, and picked moon daisies and stepmothers, Aaron’s rod and bedstraw, and on their way home they found a bank covered with flopdocken, which the nixes hate, and them they picked also.

And very soon after, when Nina’s Mam went to the back of her cottage and looked anxiously up the hillside, her heart jumped with joy as she saw her man and her little lass coming downhill towards her with their eyes bright as star-shine, their voices raised in a merry catch, and their arms full of flowers.

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.

‘So what kind was it?’

‘Saab 900 cabriolet.’

‘Did you notice the number?’

‘No, but it was the latest model.’

That was that. She thanked the boy and his mother, who had been holding the twins apart like a pair of over-psyched contenders in a title fight, and now she continued dragging them towards the school entrance.

‘Clever,’ said Mrs Shimmings.

‘Lucky,’ said Novello. ‘I could have got a boy whose sole obsession was football. So why did Mrs K dump the kids on Gran all day yesterday, I wonder? Nothing to do with the case, just idle curiosity.’

‘Boyfriend,’ said Mrs Shimmings laconically. ‘Kendrick took off last year. Joy’s got herself a man, but Simon hates him. And you can’t have good sex with a protest meeting going on outside your bedroom door, can you?’

‘Never tried it,’ said Novello with a grin.

She went back to the Hall. Still no sign of Wield. No reply yet from Control to her query about the Discovery. She ought to give someone what she’d got, but she couldn’t see anyone she altogether trusted to make sure the credit stayed with herself. Many of her male colleagues, even those not quite so chauvinist as to think a woman’s place was in the kitchen, had no problem with thinking it was in the background. What man, complimented on his appearance, says, ‘My wife chose the tie, ironed the suit, washed the shirt and starched the collar and cuffs?’

Anyway, she was hot, she was on a roll. Two down, one to go.

She went in search of Geoff Draycott of Wornock Farm who’d seen the blue estate speeding up the Highcross Moor road.

FOUR

There were two men scrubbing away at the BENNY’S BACK! graffiti on the railway bridge as Pascoe drove beneath it.

They didn’t seem to be making much progress. Perhaps they would scrub and scrub till finally they wore out the solid stonework and nothing remained but the red letters hanging in the air.

An idle fancy, or a symptom? Reading the Dendale file earlier that morning, before his mind took refuge in sleep, he had found himself reluctant to engage with the facts as presented, or indeed any facts as presented, preferring to slip sideways into surreal imaginings. There had been a time when life seemed a smooth learning curve, a steady progress from childish frivolity through youthful impetuosity to mature certainty, which would occur somewhere in early middle age, whenever that was, but you’d recognize it by waking one morning and being aware that you’d stopped feeling nervous about making after-dinner speeches, you really believed the political opinions you aired at dinner parties, you no longer felt impelled to tie your left shoelace before your right to avoid bad luck, and you didn’t have to read the instruction book every time you programmed the video.

Well, that was out, that was a sunlit plateau he knew now he was never going to reach. This, for what it was worth, was it

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