On Beulah Height (6 page)

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. ...

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 onto 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 healthy 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. Afterward 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 favorite 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 toward 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!"

5

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 development on the other.

It takes more than the march of modernity to modify the English provincial sabbath, however, and the town's old center 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 northeast. 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 gray cottages fronting the pavement. No problem spotting No. 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.

Eighteen sixty. Year Mahler was born. Dalziel's unexpected recognition of the Kindertotenlied brought the name to his mind. He doubted if the event 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 matte-brown door with its bright brass mail slot 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, head of Danby substation, 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 fetally at the end of a white vinyl sofa. She seemed to be leaning away from rather than into the attempted embrace of a large blond 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."