On Beulah Height (41 page)

He knelt on the trod, heedless that his knees were resting on ground stained by the juices of the decomposing sheep.

He kept his head a little way back from the hole to permit as much light as possible to enter. And he waited.

At first he could see nothing but the vaguest of shapes. Then gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he saw the light gently run over the outlines of things. As he'd guessed, there was a triangular space in here, almost tentlike, about two and a half feet wide, three feet high, and six feet deep. In the middle of it, a hump, difficult to make out, perhaps because his mind didn't want to make it out. The first thing he really identified was the gleam of Tig's eyes, and then his teeth as his lips drew back in a soundless snarl.

The dog was lying up against something. Wield knelt there straining his eyes, till slowly, inexorably, he was forced to see what he had known for some minutes he was going to see.

He rose unsteadily to his feet and reached into his pocket. Flashlight he might not have, but he hadn't forgotten his mobile.

"Stay, Tig," he said unnecessarily.

Then, telling himself it was to improve reception, but knowing that he wanted above all things to be out of this dark and noisome canyon and back into the bright light and fresh air, he climbed up from the ghyll, pressed the necessary buttons, and began to speak.

The woman's name was Jackie Tilney. She was overweight, overworked, over thirty, and so pissed off with having told her story to three different sets of cops that she was ready to tell the fourth to take a jump.

Only, the fourth wasn't a set, though possessed of enough flesh to make two or three ordinary bobbies, and if he'd taken her putative advice and jumped, she feared for the foundations of the public library, where she worked.

So she told her story again.

She had definitely seen the man in the photograph. And she had spoken with him. And he had an Australian accent.

"The first time was--"

"Hang about. First time?" said Dalziel. "How many times were there?"

"Two," she retorted. "Don't your menials tell you anything?"

Dalziel regarded her thoughtfully. He liked a well-made feisty woman. Then he recalled that in Cap Marvell, he'd got the cruiser weight Queen of Feist, smiled fondly, and said, "Nay, lass, I don't waste time with tipsters when I can go straight to the horse's mouth. Go on."

Deciding there had to be a compliment in there somewhere, Jackie Tilney went on.

"The first time was last Friday. He came to the reference desk and asked if we had anything about the building of the Dendale Reservoir. I told him that he could look at the local papers for the period on our microfiche system. Also this book."

She showed him the volume. It was called The Drowning of Dendale, a square volume, not all that thick. He remembered it vaguely. It had been written by one of the Post journalists and contained more photographs than text, basically a before-and-after record.

"He asked me to do a couple of photocopies," Tilney went on. "These maps."

She showed him. One was of Dendale before the flooding, the other after.

"Did you chat to him at all?"

"A bit. He had a nice easy manner. Just about the weather and such, how it was a lot cooler back home this time of year and how he'd packed three raincoats for his trip to England because everyone told him it rained all the time."

"Was he trying to chat you up, do you think? Good-looking lass like yourself, it 'ud not be surprising."

"Am I meant to be flattered?" she said. "No, as a matter of fact, he didn't come on at me at all. It made a nice change. World's full of fellows who think, just because you're on the other side of a counter, you're sales goods. I got the impression he had other things on his mind anyway."

"Such as?"

"Look, mister, I'm too busy trying to keep an underfunded understaffed library system going in this town to have time to develop my psychic powers. I wouldn't be spending this amount of time with you if it didn't have something to do with that missing girl."

"Now, what makes you think that, luv?"

"I read the Post, don't I?"

She produced the paper and spread it before him, open at an article about the investigation with photos of Lorraine Dacre and her parents, of the Hardcastles and Joe Telford, of Geordie Turnbull and his solicitor, and one of Dalziel himself, caught at what looked like a moment of religious contemplation.

With that subtlety and taste for which British journalists are universally famed, the editor had opted to print on the page opposite a feature about the Mid-Yorkshire Music Festival, highlighting the facts that the opening concert was in Danby, featuring Songs for Dead Children sung by Elizabeth Wulfstan, who as a child in Dendale fifteen years back had been the last and only surviving victim of the uncaught abductor of three local girls.

There was a full-figure picture of Elizabeth looking inscrutable, a close-up of Walter Wulfstan looking irritated, and a midshot of Sandel on a piano stool looking bored with the Turnip by the piano looking charming.

Without being actionable, the combined effect of the two pages was to suggest that the police were as out of their depth now as they'd been fifteen years ago.

"Sounds like you need all the help you can get," said Jackie Tilney.

"I'll not quarrel with that," said Dalziel. "So that's the first time you saw him. What about the second?"

"Yesterday afternoon, he were back. He went through the papers again. And then he went through the book. He was noting things down. Then I noticed he'd left the table where he'd been sitting and I thought he'd gone. But I glimpsed him over there, behind that stack."

"And what's kept over there?" asked Dalziel.

"Business directories, mainly," said Tilney.

"Oh, aye?"

Dalziel strolled over and took a look. She was right. Why shouldn't she be? He returned to the desk.

"And then?"

"And then he left. He was going somewhere else in town, I think. I saw him looking at one of those town maps you get from the Tourist Center. And that was the last I saw of him till that constable of yours stuck that picture in front of me this morning. By the by, is he fit to be let out by himself? The bugger came after me with his stick!"

"He's an impulsive young lad," said Dalziel. "But good hearted. I'll have a fatherly word with him."

He gave her a savage smile suggesting the father he had in mind was Cronos.

"Are we done?" she asked.

He didn't answer. When you've caught a bright witness, don't let it go till you've squeezed it dry, was a good maxim. A uniformed constable approached and was not put off by Dalziel's Gorgon glare.

"What?"

"You're to ring Sergeant Wield at the van, sir."

Meaning, use a land line, not your mobile phone, for extra security. Meaning ...

Jackie Tilney said, "There's a phone in the office. You can be private there."

She'd caught the vibes of his reaction. Sharp lady.

He went through and dialed. Half a ring and the phone was answered.

"It's me," he said.

"We've found her, sir."

The tone told him, dead. His head had long since given up hope of any other outcome, but a tightening of the chest told him his heart had kept a secret vigil.

He said, "Where?"

"Up the valley."

Where he himself had ordered the abandonment of the search the previous night. Shit.

He said, "I'm on my way. You got things started?"

Unnecessary question.

"Yes, sir."

"And quiet as you can, Wieldy."

Unnecessary injunction. Born of his own sense of missing things.

"Yes, sir."

He put the phone down and went back to the desk.

"That'll do for now, luv," he said. "Thanks for your help."

Her eyes suggested his efforts to stay casual were failing.

He picked up The Drowning of Dendale.

"All right if I borrow this?"

"Long as you pay the fine," she said. "Good luck."

"Thanks," he said.

He strode out of the library. Suddenly he felt full of energy. The pain at the confirmation of the child's death was still there, but alongside it was another feeling, less laudable and best kept hidden from others, but unhideable from himself.

After fifteen years, he finally had a body. Bodies told you things. Bodies had been in contact with killers at their most desperate, hasty, and unthinking moments. Mere vanishings were the mothers of rumors, of false trails, of myths and imaginings. But a body ...!

He might hate himself for it, but he could not keep a spring out of his step as he headed for his car.

Tuesday's bright dawn had brought little but the blackness of contrast to the Pascoes, but Wednesday's brought a glimpse of hope.

Mrs. Curtis, the consultant, was still several watts short of optimism, but when she said, "For a while yesterday we seemed close to falling through, but now it seems more likely we were simply bottoming out," Ellie didn't even register the medically patronizing we but simply embraced the embarrassed woman.

She knew there was no question yet of celebration. Rosie was still unconscious. But at least and at last the sunshine brought with it the hope of hope. And with hope came space for her mind to relax its relentless focus on a single object.

Halfway through the morning Ellie was in the washroom regarding herself critically in the mirror. She looked a wreck, but that was nothing to the way Peter looked. He looked like a wreck that had had another couple of accidents. Which, she thought, was not all that far from the truth.

They were both in the wrong jobs, she'd often thought it. He should have been basking on the fringes of the life academic, trying his hand at the novel introspective, running Rosie back and forth to school, keeping the house ticking over ... no, more than ticking over; on the odd occasion when he'd taken over the ironing, she'd found him pressing underpants, for God's sake! With Peter in charge, they'd have crisp new sheets every night.

And herself? She should have been out there on the mean streets, riding the punches and taking the bumps, moving on from one case to the next with nothing to show but the odd bit of scar tissue, none of these deep bruises which keep on hemorrhaging around the bone long after the surface flesh has apparently recovered.

Trouble was, though they shared great areas of social conscience in common, the spin that nature and/or nurture had put on hers made her regard the police force as a cure almost as bad as the disease. Peter, on the other hand, though not blind to its flaws, felt himself duty driven to work from within. A right pious little Aeneas, Italiam non sponte sequor and all that crap. Which made her ... Odysseus? Fat, earthy, cunning old Odysseus? Hardly! That was much more Andy Dalziel. Then Dido? Come on! See her chucking herself on a pyre 'cos she'd been jilted. Helen? Ellie looked at herself in the mirror. Not today. So who?

"Me, myself," she mouthed in the mirror. "God help me."

As she returned to the ward, a nurse came toward her, saying, "Mrs. Pascoe, we've got someone on the phone for your husband. She says she's a colleague and it's important."

"She does, does she?" said Ellie. "I'll be the judge of that."

She went to the phone and picked it up.

"Hello," she said.

There was silence, then a woman's voice said, "I was trying to get hold of DCI Pascoe. ..."

"This is Mrs. Pascoe."

"DC Novello, Shirley Novello. Hi. Mrs. Pascoe, I was so sorry to hear ... how is she, the little girl?"

"Hanging on," said Ellie not about to share her hope of hope with a woman she'd only met once briefly. "So tell me, DC Novello, what's so important?"

Another silence, then, "I just wanted a quick word ... look, I'm sorry, this is a terrible time, I know. It's just that there's this line of inquiry he started really, and it would be useful, the way he looks at things ... I'm sorry ... it's really insensitive, especially ... it really doesn't matter, Mrs. Pascoe. I do hope your little girl gets better soon."

She meant, especially because it's about the child who'd gone missing from Danby, thought Ellie. This was the woman who'd rung yesterday. Peter had mentioned her, provoking an outburst of indignation at such crassness. What had Peter replied? She lit a candle for Rosie.

Ellie had no time for religion, but no harm in hedging your bets with a bit of good old-fashioned magic.

"That candle still burning?" she said.

"Sorry?"

"Never mind. What precisely do you want, Miss Novello? No way you get to tell Peter without telling me first."

Five minutes later she reentered the ward.

Pascoe looked up and said, "Still nice and peaceful. Hey, you going somewhere?"

Ellie had brushed her hair and used her minimalist makeup to maximum effect.

"No. You are. I want you to go home, have a bath, get a couple of hours' sleep in a real bed. No, don't argue. Come here."

She led him to the window and swung the panel so that it acted as a mirror.

"See that antique wreck standing next to that gorgeous woman? That's you. If Rosie opens her eyes and sees you first, she'll think she's done a Rip van Winkle and slept for fifty years. So go home. Sleep with your mobile under your pillow. Slightest change and I'll ring till you waken, I promise."

"Ellie, no--"

"Yes. And now. I've fixed a lift for you, that nice young girl from your office called, Shirley Novello is it? She said she'd be delighted to run you home. She's down in the parking lot waiting."

"Shirley? Again? Jesus ..."

"She's in touch with him, too, I gather. Listen, she wants help and she must think you're the only one if she's willing to come after you here. Perhaps she's delusional, but I think in this case, if you can help, you ought to."

He shook his head, not in denial but in wonderment.

"You are ... ineffable," he said.

"Oh, I don't know. I'm looking forward to being effed quite a lot when this is over," she said lightly. "Now go."

"Only if you'll promise to do the same when I get back."

"Drive around with a WOULDC? You must be joking. Yes, yes, I promise."