On Beulah Height (42 page)

They kissed. It was, she realized, the first intimate noncomforting contact they'd had since this began.

She watched him go, hoping her homeopathic theory would work, if that was the right way to describe putting him in the way of other parents' woe at the loss of a child. No, it wasn't the right way, she told herself, turning now to look down at Rosie. They weren't going to lose their child. There was a candle burning for her. And, like Dido after all, her mother would make a candle of herself if that's what it took.

"Hello, sir."

"And hello to you, too, Shirley," said Pascoe, getting into the car. "Kind of you to drive me home. You've got between here and there to tell me what you want to tell me."

Novello thought, If you want to know what a man will look like when he's old, put him by his child's sickbed for a couple of nights.

But she responded to his crisp speech, not his wrecked appearance, and ran off the resume she had prepared with a Wieldian conciseness and lucidity.

He offered no compliment. Indeed he seemed to offer little attention, apparently more interested in the crackling air traffic of her car radio, which she'd left switched on.

She reached down to turn it off but he grasped her hand and said, "No, leave it."

It was the first time they'd made physical contact, and in other circumstances with other officers she'd have suspected it was the preliminary to a pass and prepared for defensive action.

He held the hand for a second, then she had to change gear and he released it.

"So," he said. "Benny's been seen in Dendale and in the Central Library by a reliable witness. Agnes drew the money out of the bank. And Geordie Turnbull's been attacked."

Novello, who'd included the latter piece of information only in the interests of comprehensiveness, said, "Yes, but that'll probably be some local nutter, someone like this Jed Hardcastle perhaps--"

"Geordie Turnbull's been living in Bixford for years and making no secret about it, not unless you think having your name printed in big red letters over a fleet of bulldozers is being secretive. Why wait so long?"

"Because of the Dacre girl going missing," said Novello, stating the obvious, and wondering whether this had been such a good idea. "That started it all up again."

To her surprise, he laughed. Or made a sound which had a familiar resemblance to laughter.

"Shirley, you should get it out of your mind that what happened to those families who lost their daughters is something that needs starting up again. It's a permanent condition, no matter how long they survive. Like losing an arm. You might learn to live without it, but you never learn to live as if you've still got it."

He spoke with a vehemence she found disturbing and when he saw the effect he was having on her, he took a breath and made himself relax.

"Sorry," he said. "It's just that in a case like this you share in the woes of others only insofar as they relate to, or underline, your own. When I heard Rosie was ill, the fact that the Dacres' child was missing, probably abducted, possibly already murdered, may not have gone out of my mind altogether, but it certainly dropped right out of my consciousness. Understandable initial reaction, you think? Perhaps so. And the perspective will return. But never the same. I know now that if I was within an arm's length of fingering the collar of Benny or any other serial killer, and someone said, "Rosie needs you," I'd let him go."

He realized that his laid-back confidentiality was troubling her as much as his previous vehemence. He recalled a long time ago in his early days with Dalziel, the Fat Man in his cups had come close to talking about his broken marriage, and he'd shied away from the confidence, unwilling to know what his superior might regret telling.

"In other words, I think we need to look beyond the Dendale families for Turnbull's attacker. And you say he didn't want to report it? That's interesting."

"Yes, sir," she said, aware that the distance between the hospital and Pascoe's house was growing shorter. "But I'm not really concerned with that bit of the investigation anymore."

But you've not forgotten it was you who got the lead in the first place, thought Pascoe, detecting resentment.

He said gently, "I know that being mucked around can be a real pain sometimes. But you've got to keep the whole investigation in view. That's what the people you think are mucking you around are doing. Don't get mad, get promoted. Mr. Dalziel has thought from the start that Lorraine Dacre's disappearance was connected with Dendale fifteen years back. I didn't agree, but the more I see the way things are working out, the more I think he may be right. So, don't create connections, but don't overlook them either."

"No, sir," said Novello. "They do keep on jumping up, don't they? I read the old files. You recall that girl, Betsy Allgood, the one who got away from Benny? Well, seems she's back too!"

She reached into the backseat, picked up the Post, and dropped it in Pascoe's lap.

Not such a clever idea, she thought as he spent the next couple of minutes studying both pages, the one on the case and the one on the concert.

"Betsy Allgood," he murmured. "There was a photo in the file. She didn't look much like that."

"We grow up, sir," she said. "We start looking the way we want, not our parents, as you'll likely find out."

He glanced at her sharply, then smiled his thanks for this oblique reassurance.

"Well, it's certainly an improvement," he said. "She was, if I recall, a rather unprepossessing child."

It was her turn to give him the sharp glance. He thought, That was pretty crass, Pascoe, in your situation, being snooty about other people's kids.

But the photo continued to bother him. Or rather the photos, because while Betsy/elizabeth, who he'd seen before, looked totally unfamiliar, Walter Wulfstan, whom he'd never seen, rang some kind of bell. But why not? Local dignitary, the kind of man you were likely to see on the top table at some of the civic occasions he'd been delegated to attend as what Dalziel called the "smart-arse face of policing."

And something else was bothering him too. ...

He said, "Pull in here, will you? By that phone box."

She obeyed, puzzled, but had the wit to sit in silence while Pascoe listened, frowning, to the air traffic on her radio.

"Something's happening," he said.

She said, "I didn't hear anything, sir. ..."

"No, it's not what anyone's saying, just now and then a pause, an inflection ... maybe I'm way off beam, but do me a favor, Shirley. Check with the incident room at Danby."

"Okay," she said, pulling out her mobile.

"No," he said, pointing to the phone box. "If I'm right, you won't get anything unless you're on a land line."

She flushed at her slowness, and got out of the car.

Pascoe studied the paper again, then twisted round to place it on the rear seat. Novello had the same attitude as Ellie toward her car, he observed. You kept the driver's seat free and used the rest as a mobile litter bin. He frowned as he saw a couple of plastic evidence bags amid the debris. Things like that you kept locked in your trunk till you could hand them in for examination or storage as soon as possible.

He picked the bags up and set them on his lap. They both had tags indicating their contents had been examined by the lab. The larger bag contained a cigarette pack, two Sunday papers, and a stained tissue, the smaller one a camera battery and a silver earring in the shape of a dagger.

He was still looking at this bag when Novello got back into the car, but her words put any questions he had to the back of his mind.

"They've found her," she said in a flat, controlled voice. "I spoke to Mr. Headingley. Not formally identified yet, but it seems Sergeant Wield's sure. He took her dog up the valley. ..."

"Clever old Wieldy," said Pascoe. "Doesn't explain how everyone else missed her. Dogs, thermal imaging ..."

"There was a dead sheep. In this weather ..."

"Clever old killer," said Pascoe, trying to keep the image of the dead girl at arm's length. "Anything on cause yet?"

"No sir. The scene-of-crime team's up there with the doctor now. This knocks my notion about abduction on the head."

She, too, was trying to cope with it by losing the child's body in a heap of detective abstractions.

Pascoe said, "I bet the super's pleased."

"Sir?" Her indignation couldn't be hidden.

"Because he's got a body," said Pascoe. "He'd given her up long since. From the very first moment he heard she'd gone missing, I think. But to get after the killer he needs something concrete. Otherwise you're just punching air. So, anything else?"

"Yes, the super briefed the DI before he went off up the valley."

She passed on the results of Dalziel's interview with Jackie Tilney, with an amount of detail that surprised Pascoe.

"You must have a lot of influence with George Headingley," he said.

The DI belonged to an old school who believed that telling DC'S too much only confused them and telling WOULDC'S anything other than how many sugars you took was a complete waste of breath.

"Told him I was under instructions from you, sir, and you wanted a blow-by-blow. He sends his best wishes, by the way, for ... you know. ..."

"Yes, I know," said Pascoe. "This book --The Drowning of Dendale. I'm sure Ellie's got a copy lying around somewhere. She's into this local history stuff. But why would Benny want to see it? And what would he need photocopies of the maps for? By all accounts he knew the valley like the back of his hand."

"That was fifteen years ago, before the valley was flooded," said Novello.

"With the drought it's pretty well back to what it was," objected Pascoe.

"Except that all the buildings have been bulldozed," said Novello, starting up the car and pulling away from the curb.

"I suppose so," said Pascoe. "Tell me, these evidence bags ..."

She had noticed the bags in his lap and anticipated his reprimand.

"It's okay, sir," she said. "They're for dumping, not storing. It's stuff I got out of the litter bin at the viewpoint on the Highcross Moor road when I was thinking abduction. The lab found nothing, not surprising now the girl's been found in the valley. I'll stick them back in a trash bin next time I have a clear-out."

"Fine," he said.

He sat in silence for the rest of the journey. Not the best idea she'd ever had, thought Novello. But what had she expected? He'd been useful last time, probably because his mind had already taken a couple of hypothetical steps ahead before his personal crisis intervened. But since then, as he said himself, the Dacre case had been relegated to a very low place in his mental priorities.

When they reached his house, he got out, still clutching the plastic bags.

"Sir," she said, pointing.

"What? Oh, yes. I'll stick them in our bin, shall I? Look, come inside for a moment."

She followed him inside. He headed straight upstairs, leaving her wondering whether she was meant to follow. Not that she cared what was meant. Down here by the open door was the place to be. Pascoe was neither a verbal nor a physical groper, but men under stress could behave strangely, and being assaulted by a popular senior officer with a kid on the danger list was not a good career move for an ambitious WOULDC.

A few moments later he came back down, clutching a book.

"Here we are. I knew we had a copy. The Drowning of Dendale. Let's see if we can find what so interested Lightfoot."

"It was the maps, sir. We know that," she said patiently, like an infant teacher.

He caught the intonation, smiled at her, and said, "Thank you, nurse, but that was the first time. He had photocopies of them. So what brought him back to take another look?"

He went into the living room, sat down, and began to flip through the book. Novello stood behind him, looking over his shoulder.

He supposed he must have glanced through the volume sometime in the past, but apart from the first panoramic view of the dale which Mrs. Shimmings had shown him, he could remember nothing of it. In any case, what would any previous examination have meant to him? But now he had looked down at the dale as it had become, and he had seen several of its old inhabitants as they had become, and these pictures brought the past to life in a way that, unaided, his imagination could never have managed.

Here were all the buildings he knew only as heaps of rubble scarcely distinguishable from the stony fellside on which they lay.

Here was Heck, a solid, rather stern house even in the bright sunlight which filled all the photos. No one in sight, but a child's swing on an oak tree in the garden had a twist to its ropes as if some small form had just stepped off and slipped quietly away.

Here was Hobholme, one of those old farms which had grown in linear progression, with barn tagged on to house, cattle shed to barn, lambing shed to shippen, and so on as each need arose. A woman was caught walking purposefully along the line of buildings with a pail in either hand. In the delicate young profile Pascoe had no difficulty in identifying the features of Molly Hardcastle. Here she was going about her business with the dutiful stoicism of a hill farmer's wife, not happy exactly, her mind perhaps preoccupied with contrasting the hard expectations of her husband with the softer approaches of Constable Clark. were these just the idle dreams of a hardworked wife? Was her love for her three young children and perhaps the memory that Hardcastle, too, had once been tender, enough to have kept her anchored here at Hobholme? Or was she seriously contemplating braving her husband's anger and her neighbors' gossip and making a break for happiness? Idle dreams or positive planning, how she must have felt she had paid for either so soon after, when little Jenny walked away alone from the bathing pool. ...

A few pages on was The Stang, with the carpenter's shed bigger than the whitewashed cottage, smoke pouring out of its chimney to remind the onlooker that fire was a necessary workmate even when the sun was hot enough to bake apples on the tree. Outside the shed stood two men, stripped to the waist, with runnels of sweat down their forearms and pectorals, one clutching a saw and the other a plank, both smiling at the camera, clearly relieved at this excuse to pause and take a well-earned breather. There was a strong family resemblance. One was doubtless Joe Telford, the other his brother George, but an unfamiliar eye couldn't tell the difference between them. Doubtless anybody could now.