On Beulah Height (18 page)

She shook her head.

"Not me. On wi' the motley and over the plonk," she said.

"And you, miss?"

This to Sandel.

"No. I take exercise for necessity, not for recreation," she said.

He returned his attention to Krog.

"So where did your walk take you?"

"Across the common, to the right--the east, that would be? I'm not so hot on points of the compass."

"Aye. East. Not up the beck path, then?"

"No. I had thought of going up the beck, but when I got out of the car and realized how warm it was, I decided to head in this other direction. There is farmland over there, with trees--no big woods, just some copses, but at least they provide some shade. The little girl went up the beck path, did she? I wish now I had done so too. Perhaps if I had ..."

Chloe Wulfstan had come back into the room, bearing Dalziel's cold drink. As she handed it to him, behind her back Krog made a little gesture of the head, inviting Dalziel to continue his interrogation out of her presence.

Ignoring the gesture, Dalziel sipped the freshly pressed lemonade and said, "That's grand, luv. So you saw nowt, Mr. Krog?"

"Of course I saw sky and earth and trees, and I heard birds and sheep and insects. But I did not see or hear any other person that I recall. I'm sorry."

"That's okay. You'd see the Neb, too, of course."

"What?"

First time he didn't appear fully briefed.

"The Neb. Being on the other side of the valley, you'd not be able to avoid looking over at it, I'd have thought. You didn't think of strolling up there along the Corpse Road, say, and taking a look down into Dendale?"

He was still speaking over Mrs. Wulfstan's shoulder. Her eyes were fixed unblinkingly on his face.

"No, I did not," said Krog angrily. "I have told you what I did, Mr. Dalziel. If you have any more questions to ask, I think that common courtesy, if not common decency, requires that you ask them elsewhere."

"By gum, I reckon tha talks better English than a lot of us natives, Mr. Krog," said Dalziel. He caught Elizabeth Wulfstan's eye as he spoke and fluttered a gentle wink her way. That got him that faint brief smile again.

Chloe Wulfstan said, "If you're done here, Superintendent, Walter's meeting is over. He thought you might prefer to talk to him in private, so if you care to go into the study ..."

"Thanks, luv," said Dalziel. He finished his lemonade, handed her the glass, nodded pleasantly at the other two women, and went out of the door.

Arne Krog followed.

"You are seeing Walter about the Danby girl too?" he asked.

"Happen," said Dalziel.

"Do you really think it has something to do with Dendale all those years ago?"

"Any reason it should have, Mr. Krog?"

"I drove to Danby yesterday morning, remember? I saw those words painted on the old railway bridge," said Krog somberly. "At the time I thought little of it. Graffiti these days is like advertising. You see the signs without registering the message, not consciously anyway. But later, when I heard ..."

"Mustn't jump to conclusions," said Dalziel with the kindly authority of one who in his time had jumped to more amazing conclusions than "Red Rum."

"You are right, of course. But please, I beg you, think of Chloe, Mrs. Wulfstan. In this house we try to avoid mention of anything which might remind her of that dreadful time."

He let the note of accusation sound loud and clear.

"Very noble," said Dalziel. "But a waste of time."

"I'm sorry?"

"You don't imagine a day's gone by in the last fifteen years without her thinking of her daughter, do you, Mr. Krog?" said Dalziel. "Thing like that, just waking up each morning reminds her of it."

He spoke with great force and Krog looked at him curiously.

"And you, too, Superintendent. I think you have thought of it."

"Oh, aye. But not every day. And not like her. I just lost a suspect, not a daughter."

"I think perhaps if you had, you would not have lost your suspect also," said Krog, making a sharp chopping movement with his right hand.

"For a foreigner, you're not so bloody daft, Mr. Krog," said Andy Dalziel.

7

Peter Pascoe, being, as Ellie put it, not exactly a New Man but certainly a one-careful-lady-owner, genuine-low-mileage, full-service-record-available kind of used man, had tried his hardest to like Inspector Maggie Burroughs, but he couldn't quite manage it. That she was efficient was beyond doubt. That she had become a sort of unofficial shop steward for all Mid-Yorkshire's women officers was most commendable, given the number of female high fliers who adopted the Thatcher principle of I'm aboard, pull up the gangplank! That she was sociable, reasonable, and desirable was generally agreed.

And yet ... and yet ...

"I don't think I'd have taken to her even if she'd been a fellow," Pascoe told his wife in an effort to assure her that this was not a gender issue.

He was a little taken aback when Ellie's response was to hover between screaming with rage and laughter. Happily she had opted for the latter even when he compounded his unwitting condescension by adding, "No, no, I assure you, I really do see her as the future of the force. ..."

"Exactly. And like most men approaching an interesting age, the last thing you can look at with any equanimity is the future."

Perhaps she was right. But certainly not in every respect.

Because one identifiable factor in, but uncitable reason for, his dislike of Burroughs was that he'd detected she didn't care for Ellie, and that, especially in another woman, showed a deficiency of judgment beyond forgiveness or repair.

Unlike Dalziel, who let dislike show like buttocks through torn trousers, Pascoe hid his behind smiling affability.

"Hi, Maggie," he said. "How's it going?"

"Not a damn thing so far," she said. "I'm beginning to agree with the locals that she's not here."

"Car, you reckon? That's what Shirley Novello is plugging. Not to any great effect, mind you."

He made a wry face to dissociate himself from the Fat Man's putdown of the WOULDC, but Maggie Burroughs was shaking her head.

"No, not a car, but ghosts and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night--or the morning, in this case. They're all convinced this Benny guy's got her, and it's catching. What's the official line on that, sir? I mean, it is all bollocks, isn't it?"

"Benny is to Danby what Freddy was to Elm Street," said Pascoe. "A legend based on a terrible reality."

He saw her hide a smile and guessed he must have sounded a touch portentous.

"Just make sure every inch of ground gets covered," he said abruptly. "Sergeant Clark around?"

"Yes. Using his local knowledge to singularly little effect," said Burroughs scornfully.

"He's a good man," said Pascoe. "You know he was the resident constable over in Dendale when it all happened fifteen years ago?"

"I doubt if there's anyone over the age of two he hasn't told that," said Burroughs. "He's hanging around somewhere."

Advice formed in his mind. Make friends unless you feel strong enough to make enemies. But he kept it to himself. Perhaps she was tomorrow's version of Andy Dalziel. His own philosophy was You don't have to suffer fools gladly, but for a lot of the time it makes sense to suffer quietly. In any case he didn't think Clark was a fool, just the kind of steady stolid old-fashioned sergeant a go-getter like Burroughs would see as a dinosaur.

He found Clark pulling on a cigarette in the stingy shade of a clump of furze.

He dropped the butt end guiltily at Pascoe's approach and ground it under his heel.

"Make sure it's out," said Pascoe. "I'd rather you destroyed your lungs than set fire to the fellside. So, tell me about Jed Hardcastle."

"Oh, aye. Jed. Thing you should know is, Jed's the youngest of the Hardcastles out of Dendale--"

"Yes, yes, and he lives at Stirps End and he's got a sister, June, and they don't get on with their dad, I know all that stuff," said Pascoe impatiently. "What I want from you is why you think he's responsible for the graffiti."

He'd got his information from Mrs. Shimmings, never suspecting how much his interruption had pissed off Shirley Novello.

"Jed Hardcastle?" the head teacher had said. "Yes, I know him well. His eldest sister was one of the Dendale girls, but you'll know that."

"Yes," said Pascoe. "Tell me about Jed."

"Well, he was the youngest of the three Hardcastle children, only two years old when they moved over here, so he did all his schooling in Danby."

"So the move can't have had much effect on him?" said Pascoe.

"Growing up in a family where a child's gone missing must have had an effect, I imagine," she said quietly. "And in the Hardcastle family, there'd not be much doubt about it. None of the other kids were ever allowed to forget what happened to Jenny. Cedric blamed himself for not keeping a closer eye on her, and in reaction he brought up June, her young sister, like she was going to be empress of China. She couldn't do anything without close supervision. Didn't matter so much when she was a child, but when she got to be a teenager ... well, you know what teenage girls are like."

"I'm looking forward to finding out," said Pascoe. "My girl's seven."

"Then be warned. At seven, June was a quiet, biddable child but by the time she got to fifteen, she'd had rebellion bred into her. One day she took off to town. They found her and brought her back. She waited a year, then took off again, this time to London. It took months, but finally they made contact with her. But she's not coming back, she's made that quite clear."

"And Jed?"

"The same story but different. He suffered both ways. From over-protection when he should have been learning how to flex his wings. And from the Yorkshire farmer's assumption that an only son will follow in his father's footsteps when he's dead, but till that time he'll act as unpd, unprivileged farm laborer. It didn't help that Jed's a slightly built lad, and quite sensitive. To be told that your dead sister was a better help about the place when she was half your age can't be very encouraging."

"But he didn't follow his sister to the bright lights?"

"No. He got into a bit of bother, nothing serious, teenage vandalism, that sort of stuff. And life round the farm was one long slanging match with his father, so I gather. Heaven knows how it might have ended, but Mr. Pontifex --it's one of his farms that Cedric leases--saw the way the wind was blowing and took young Jed under his wing, gave him a job helping round the estate office. Like I say, he's bright, picks things up quickly, could do well in the right environment."

"Which isn't mucking out byres?"

"Especially not with your father telling you how useless you are all the time," agreed Mrs. Shimmings.

"And he still lives at home?"

"That was the main aim of the exercise," she said. "One thing everyone agrees on. If Jed leaves home, too, his mother will either kill herself or her husband before next quarter day."

No doubt he could have got some of this from Clark, but when it came to psychological profiling of the young of Danby, he preferred Mrs. Shimming's keener professional eye.

Clark said, "After we talked yesterday, I made out a list of possibles. We'd had a bit of bother with these spray-can jokers a while back and I'd tracked it back to a bunch of half a dozen of 'em--"

"But not Hardcastle," said Pascoe. "I ran his name through the computer. Nothing known."

"Not enough evidence to go to court, so I dealt with it myself," said Clark, making a small chopping gesture with his big right hand. Pascoe regarded him blankly. The mythology that there'd been a time when a clip round the ear from your friendly local bobby produced good upstanding citizens was not one he subscribed to, though he had to admit that healthy terror at the approach of Fat Andy did seem to have a temporarily salutary effect.

"So you had a short list. How come you picked out Hardcastle?"

"Made inquiries," said Clark vaguely. "Three of the lads I spoke to pointed the finger at Jed and his mate, Vernon Kittle."

He didn't make the gesture this time, but Pascoe could imagine the nature of the inquiries. What was more important was the reliability of the replies.

"This Kittle, anything known?"

"Bit of juvenile. Thinks he's a hard case. Impresses Jed but not many others."

"So why didn't you do something about this last night?" asked Pascoe.

"Sunday. Every bugger's off doing something, so it took me till last night to get hold of most on 'em."

"Even so--"

"And Jed weren't home," continued Clark. "Went off to the seaside with Kittle and a couple of birds in Kittle's van. Molly, that's Mrs. Hardcastle, she said there was no telling when he'd get back. Lads ... well, you know. So I thought I might as well leave it till morning and pass it on to you."

So he'd been right. A gift to pay him back for protecting the sergeant from the wrath of Dalziel the previous day. They didn't like to be beholden, these Yorkshiremen. And they didn't like to be treated as fools, as Maggie Burroughs might find out to her cost someday.

He said, "Tell me, Nobby. All this stuff about Dendale, what do you reckon? Waste of time or could it lead somewhere?"

The sergeant hesitated, almost visibly weighing up the implications of the new intimacy implied by use of his nickname.

Then he said, "Happen it could. But I hope not."

"Why not? If it turns out there's a connection, we could solve four mysteries for the price of one."

"Mebbe. But what if we're just waking a lot of sleeping dogs for nowt? Folk were just about getting to be able to think of Dendale without just thinking about them poor lasses. That were terrible, but life's full of terrible things, and they shouldn't be let spoil everything that's lovely."

He spoke defiantly, as though anticipating objection, or more probably mockery, for his fancy words.

"And Dendale was lovely, was it?" said Pascoe.

"Oh, yes. It were a grand place, full of grand folk. Oh we had our bad 'uns, and we had our ups and downs, but nowt we couldn't sort ourselves. I'd have been happy to see my time out there, I tell you, promotion or not."