On Beulah Height (10 page)

"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 fiber 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 bikinied 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 go 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 station wagon, whose color, coincidentally, matched the shade of his jeans. Coincidentally? thought Ellie. Bastard's probably got a color-coordinated car for all his fancy outfits. Meow. 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 draft 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 storybook!

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. Okay?"

"Okay. 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."

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, there was 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 nonavailability, 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 shorthanded," 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 sedan parked on the edge of Ligg Common; and Mrs. Martin, a shortsighted 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--"

"--t 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 trunk 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-gray 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 tire tracks were clearly visible.

"Yes, well, okay," 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 labored 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 gray 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 Inquiry. 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 Inquiry."

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.