On Beulah Height (8 page)

"I'll go and have a word with Mrs. Shimmings," he said. "You okay, Sergeant?"

The man was pale and drawn as if he'd been exposed to biting winds on a winter's day.

"Yes, fine. Sorry. It's just being here at the school, the incident room ... suddenly it's really happening. I think up till now I've been trying to pretend it were different from last time, over in Dendale, I mean. Not that it wasn't the same then to start with, telling ourselves that at worst there'd been an accident and little Jenny Hardcastle 'ud be found or manage to get back herself--"

"Then you'll know how these things work," said Pascoe harshly. "One thing we'll need to get sorted quickly is this Benny business. Someone's responsible for these graffiti. We need to find out who, then we can start asking why. Any ideas?"

"I'm working on it," said Clark. "Has to be a stupid joke and a lousy coincidence, hasn't it, sir? I mean, it were done last night and Lorraine didn't vanish till this morning. And the perp wouldn't do it in advance, would he?"

"Less chance of being caught," said Pascoe.

"But that 'ud mean the whole thing were planned!"

"And that's worse than impulse? Well, you're right. Worse for us, I mean. Impulse leaves traces, plans cover them up. Either way, we need the spray artist."

"Yes, sir," said Clark. "Sir ..."

"Yes?" prompted Pascoe.

"Benny. Benny Lightfoot. Anything you know that I don't? I mean, there could be information that reached HQ but you felt best not to pass on down here, for fear of opening old wounds. ..."

"You mean, could Benny really be back?" said Pascoe grimly. "From what I've heard, I doubt it. But the very fact that you can ask shows how important it is to finger this joker's collar. Get to it."

He walked across the playground to the school. He could see the figure of the head teacher at the window of a classroom he guessed would be Lorraine's. She'd been standing at the main entrance when they arrived but after a brief exchange, he'd cut the conversation short and headed into the hall.

Now he joined her in the classroom and said, "Sorry about that, Mrs. Shimmings, but I had to get things rolling."

"That's okay," she said. "I know how these things work."

He recalled that like Clark, she, too, had been here before. Looking at her closely he detected the same symptoms of reentry to a nightmare she thought she'd left behind.

She was a slimly built woman with graying chestnut hair and candid brown eyes. Late forties. Thirty plus when Dendale died.

She said, "So you think the worst?"

"We prepare for the worst," said Pascoe gently. "Tell me about Lorraine."

"She was ... is a bright intelligent child, a little what they used to call old fashioned in some ways. It doesn't surprise me to hear that she got up early and decided to take her dog for a walk all by herself. It's not that she's a solitary child. On the contrary, she's extremely sociable and has many friends. But she never has any difficulty performing tasks by herself and on occasion, if given a choice, she will opt for the solitary rather than the communal activity."

After the initial slip, she had kept determinedly, almost pedantically, to the present tense. As she talked, Pascoe let his gaze wander round the classroom. Bringing up Rosie had honed his professional eye to the school environment. Now he found himself assessing the quality of wall displays, the evidence of thought and order, the use of material that was stimulating aesthetically, intellectually, mathematically. In this classroom everything looked good. This teacher hadn't shot away on Friday afternoon but had stayed behind after the children had gone, to refine their efforts at tidying up and make sure the room was perfectly prepared for Monday morning. This teacher, he guessed, was going to be devastated when she discovered what had happened to one of her pupils.

He said, "Would she go off with a stranger?"

"Someone offering her sweets in the street, asking her to get into a car, no way," said Mrs. Shimmings. "But you say she'd gone up the dale for a walk? Things are different up there, Mr. Pascoe. Do you do any walking yourself?"

"A little," said Pascoe thinking of Ellie cajoling her rebellious husband and daughter into completing the Three Peaks Walk last spring.

"Then you'll know that, in the street if a complete stranger says hello to you, you think there's something wrong with him, but up there on the hills if you meet anyone, you automatically exchange greetings, sometimes even stop and have a chat. Not to say something would be the odd thing. Yes, I think that nowadays we've all got our children trained to regard strangers with the utmost suspicion, but they learn by example more than precept, and out in the country the example they get is of strangers being greeted almost like old acquaintances."

"So she might stop and talk."

"She wouldn't be surprised if someone spoke to her and she wouldn't run. Indeed up there, what would be the point? Didn't she have her dog with her, though?"

"Dogs are an overrated form of protection," said Pascoe. "Unless they're so big and fierce, you wouldn't let a little girl take it out alone anyway. This one may have tried. It got badly kicked about for its pains. Any of these Lorraine's?"

He was looking at a display of paintings with the general heading "My Family."

Even as he asked he saw the neatly printed label LORRAINE'S FAMILY under a picture of a man and a woman and a dog. The human figures were of roughly equal size, both with broad slice-of-melon smiles. The dog was, relatively, the size of a Shetland pony. Psychologist would probably say this meant she had no hang-ups with either parent, but was really crazy about Tig. Just what you'd hope to find in a seven-year-old girl. He recalled his own sinking feeling a little while back when, without comment, Ellie had shown him a painting of Rosie's which had her standing there like the fifty-foot woman and himself a mere black blob in a car moving away fast.

"Happy family?" he said.

"Very happy. I've known the mother since she was a girl."

"Of course. You used to teach in Dendale back before they built the reservoir, I gather."

"That's right. Like everyone else, I had to move out. Part of the price of progress."

"But in the end, some people were probably glad to go, even to see the valley underwater?" he probed.

"You think Lorraine's disappearance may have something to do with what happened back then?"

"You tell me, Mrs. Shimmings," said Pascoe. "I wasn't around then. You've heard about these painted signs? BENNY'S BACK!?"

She nodded.

"So, could he be back? And if so, where's he been? I heard he was a bit simple."

"He could have been living with people who don't ask questions or make judgments," she offered. "Like these New Age travelers. Anyway, Benny wasn't simple. In fact he was very bright."

"I'm sorry. I was told he'd had an accident ... something about a plate in his head. ..."

"Oh, that," she said dismissively. "I taught Benny both before and after that accident, Mr. Pascoe. And he was just as sharp after it as before. But he was always different, and folk in Yorkshire confuse different with daft just as readily as anywhere else. No, he wasn't simple, but he was ... fey, I think that's the word. I taught him till he was old enough to go to the secondary. That meant taking the bus out of the dale, and he wasn't keen. But his father told him to go and do his best, and Benny paid a lot of heed to Saul, his dad. Then when Benny was twelve, Saul Lightfoot died."

"How?" asked Pascoe. The policeman's question.

"He drowned. He was a fine athletic man," said Mrs. Shimmings with what a romantic observer might have called a faraway look in her eyes. "He used to go swimming in the mere. He was a good strong swimmer but they think he got tangled up with a submerged tree branch. It devastated poor Benny. The family all lived with old Mrs. Lightfoot, Benny's gran, in Neb Cottage. It must have been a tight squeeze; there were three kids, Benny and his younger brother and sister, Barnabas and Deborah. But it worked all right as long as Saul was around. He was that sort of man. Charismatic, I suppose they'd say nowadays. Or what the young girls would call a hunk."

Pascoe smiled and glanced surreptitiously at his watch. Local history was fine, but he had responsibilities in the here and now which wouldn't wait.

"I'm sorry, I'm holding you back," said Mrs. Shimmings.

He'd forgotten she was a head teacher with an eye long trained for the telltale minutiae of behavior.

"Nothing I can do till my men arrive," he assured her. "Please, carry on."

"Well, Marion, that's Benny's mother, and old Mrs. Lightfoot never really got on. She wasn't a country lass, Saul had met her at a dance in town, and now with him gone, there was nothing to keep her in Dendale. It was no surprise when she got a job in town and took the children off. Benny came back from time to time to see his gran. I gathered he wasn't happy. Not that he spoke much to anyone, he was becoming more and more withdrawn. Then it seems his mother met up with a new man. He moved in. I think that ultimately they got married, but only because they'd decided to emigrate, Australia, I think it was, and being married made things easier. Benny didn't want to go. The night before they were due to leave, he took off and came to his gran's. Marion came looking for him. He refused point blank to go back with her and old Mrs. Lightfoot said he could stay with her. So that's what happened. I daresay there were a great number of other things said that shouldn't have been said. Net result was the family left and Benny settled in at Neb Cottage. As far as I can make out, he dropped right out of school. The truancy officer came round several times, and the Social Services, but at the first sight of anyone vaguely official, indeed anyone he didn't recognize, Benny would take off up the Neb, and in the end they more or less gave up, though I'm sure they found some face-saving formula to regularize the situation."

"How do you regularize truancy?" wondered Pascoe.

"You don't. Time does that," said Mrs. Shimmings. "I think they must have heaved a mighty sigh of relief in the Education Office when Benny passed his sixteenth birthday. But the psychological damage was done. Benny was wary, elusive, introverted, solitary, devoid of social skills--in other words, in the eyes of most people, plain simple."

"And could he have been responsible for the disappearances?" he asked.

"Sex is a strong mover in young men," she said. "But before the attack on Betsy Allgood, I had serious reservations. After that, however ..."

She shook her head. "You were quite right what you said before. In the end I think a lot of folk were glad to get out of Dendale, glad to see it go underwater. The more biblically inclined saw it as a repeat of the Genesis flood, aimed at drowning out wickedness."

"Nice thought," said Pascoe. "But wickedness is a strong swimmer. And how did you feel, Mrs. Shimmings?"

It seemed an innocent enough question, but to his distress he saw her eyes fill with tears, even though she turned away quickly to hide them and went to the teacher's desk.

"Funny," she said, "while I was waiting for you I went into our little library, and this was the book I picked out."

She took a book from the desktop and held it up so he could see the title.

It was The Drowning of Dendale.

"I know it," said Pascoe. "My wife has a copy."

It was, as he recalled, a coffee-table book, square shaped and consisting mainly of photos with very little text. It was in two parts, the first entitled "The Dale," the second "The Drowning." The first photograph was a panorama of the whole dale, bathed in evening light. And the epigraph under the subtitle was A happy rural seat of various view.

"Paradise Lost," said Mrs. Shimmings. "That's how I felt, Mr. Pascoe. It may have been spoiled, but it was still like leaving Paradise."

A horn blew outside. Glad of a diversion from this highly charged and, he hoped, totally irrelevant display of emotion, Pascoe went to the window.

They were arriving, all kinds of vehicles bearing everything necessary for the center. Furniture, telephones, radios, computers, catering equipment, and of course, personnel. Must be like this in a war, he thought. Before a Big Push. Like Passchendaele. So much hustle and bustle, so many men and machines, failure must have seemed inconceivable. But they had failed, many many thousands of them needlessly killed, one of them his namesake, his great-grandfather, not drowning in mud or shattered by shell fire, but tied to a post and shot by British bullets. ...

He said, "We'll talk again later, Mrs. Shimmings," and went out to take control.

"I often think they've only gone out walking, And soon they'll come homewards all laughing and

talking. The weather's bright! Don't look so pale. They've only gone for a hike updale."

"So what's this? Narcissism, or the artist's response to just criticism?"

Elizabeth Wulfstan pressed the pause button on her zapper and turned her head to look at the man who'd just come in.

The years had been good to Arne Krog. Into his forties now, his unlined open face, framed in a shock of golden hair and a fringe of matching beard, kept him looking more like Hollywood's idea of a sexy young ski instructor than anyone's idea of a middle-aged baritone. And if, in terms of reputation and reward, the years had not been quite so generous, he made sure it didn't show.

She said, "Most of what you said was right. Makes you happy, does it?"

She spoke with a strong Yorkshire inflection which came as surprise to those who knew her by her singing voice alone.

"It makes me happy that you have seen your error. Never mind. It will be a collector's disc when you are old and famous. Perhaps then, to be contrary, you will make your last recording of songs best suited to a young, fresh voice. But preferably in the language in which they were written."

"I wanted folk to understand them," she said.

"Then give them a translation to read, not yourself one to sing. Language is important. I should have thought someone so devoted to her own native woodnotes wild would have understood that."