‘I remember – they looked into all that – the police. There weren’t anything came of it – and that were when things were fresh in folk’s minds. Twenty-plus years – it’s a long time to go back.’
She glances at DS Leyton, as if for corroboration of her logic, and then looks again at Skelgill. He nods; he appears convinced. But it is the second time today he has received an oblique answer to an enquiry of this nature. He casts about the snug, surveying superficially.
‘There’s not a lot changed in here, though, I reckon.’
‘It’s been like this for centuries, they say.’
Skelgill gestures over his shoulder.
‘You saw Mary on the day she disappeared.’
He does not elaborate but she knows what he means.
‘Aye – I were behind the bar – facing the window.’ She tilts her head towards him to illustrate her statement. ‘I were serving Pick Pearson and old Walter Dickson. I said – there’s Mary – and they turned round and saw her. Thankfully it weren’t just me. I shouldn’t have liked to be the last one – alone, like.’
‘It was definitely her?’
‘Aye – she stopped to look through.’
‘As if she was trying to make out who was inside?’
‘I suppose so. Pick Pearson thought she were looking for him – he said something about judging her stall. But then she never came in. But it were definitely her – we couldn’t have all been mistaken.’
Skelgill nods pensively. He points past Megan Nicolson to the small counter with space for just two stools where Walter Dickson and Patrick Pearson had been stationed. Set into the wall behind is a framed serving hatch – it is convenient for handing through drinks or bottles only available on one side; the lounge bar in particular stocks a more exotic range of spirits and liqueurs, advocaat for snowballs, and tomato juice and Worcester sauce for bloody Marys.
‘Could she have gone into the lounge without you knowing?’
Megan Nicolson seems unconvinced by this suggestion, that it would be improbable.
‘I would have heard her come down the passage. Happen she’d have had a word – stuck her head round the door.’
‘Were there folk in the lounge?’
Now the woman looks decidedly unsettled, as though she feels this is an unreasonable question, and that he puts her in peril of giving inadvertently a false answer.
‘There were a bell on the counter – there still is – if anyone needs served. But most folk were over the road. On the day of the meet the pub’s quiet first thing – until the fell runners are back and the first round of judging’s announced.’
Skelgill is looking rather like he is not that bothered; indeed that he has some other more important job to do and is largely going through the motions. He sighs before he speaks, his tone one of resignation.
‘The thing is, Mrs Nicolson,’ (she looks uncomfortable at his formal address) ‘if Mary were meeting someone, or had had the notion to look for someone – well, that could go a long way to explaining what happened.’
The woman nods willingly, her expression puppy-like. But she can offer nothing more, and they sit for a few moments in a kind of limbo. Eventually Skelgill breaks the silence.
‘Your husband, it’s Sean – aye?’ She nods, looking apprehensive. In their introduction they have mentioned that they are seeing him later this afternoon – although of course she had been made aware of their intentions. ‘He knew Mary quite well?’
There is a faint but discernable tensing of the muscles of her face.
‘We were all in the same class at school.’
Skelgill, however, is nodding agreeably. He glances at DS Leyton in the way of getting advance confirmation from one who knows of something he is about to say.
‘He supplied Mary with wool for her knitting business?’
The woman nods, more curtly than before, a sharp movement that dislodges a strand of hair and causes her to brush it from her rouged cheek with a nervous jerk.
‘It weren’t a commercial arrangement – nowt like that – it were just waste. You can’t hardly get 50p for a Herdwick fleece even now.’
Skelgill banks the information, though it is not the aspect that interests him.
‘I were more thinking along the lines of what he reckoned to her disappearing.’
Megan Nicolson inhales slowly; she seems discomfited.
‘He were shocked – like we all were. But he were mainly took bad about our Alison – she were just a young lass – all that scaremongering about a murderer loose in the dale. Us folk that had bairns couldn’t sleep nights.’
Skelgill nods, his expression understanding, in blank kind of way.
‘She’ll be grown up now.’
‘Aye – she’s thirty-three. She’s married and lives in Leicestershire. She’s got two of her own.’
There is something in her intonation, perhaps the faintest hint of an inquiry, that wrong-foots Skelgill, and for a moment he finds himself thinking that Megan Nicolson must have borne her child at a relatively tender age. He wonders if he should say she doesn’t look old enough to be a grandmother, but having already risked one such compliment he feels he has probably used up his professional quota. Perhaps rather abruptly he moves the conversation on.
‘It must have come as a relief when the DNA tests gave the all-clear.’
She seems to take a small involuntary gasp; her breathing has become more noticeable, and there is a trace of a flush on her chest around her exposed collarbones and creased cleavage.
‘Truth be told – it were more that time went by and nothing else happened. Eventually folk began to feel safer. I don’t know if anyone properly understood that DNA business – and it all seemed to come to nowt. Course – there were talk that Mary had just run away of her own accord – such that there never had been anything to worry about.’
‘You sound like you never thought that.’
She shakes her head; there is a look of defiance in her eyes that is a little at odds with their sparkling blue.
‘She might have had her differences with Aidan – who knows what goes on in a marriage – but what mother would abandon her bairn? Especially after all that time.’
Skelgill makes an apologetic face on behalf of humanity.
‘We come across it.’ He looks at DS Leyton who nods willingly. ‘There’s nowt stranger than folk.’
She makes as if to speak but then checks herself. It appears she was about to contest the morality of his claim, if not its veracity. Then she does utter a rejoinder.
‘Now we know she didn’t.’
It interests Skelgill that she has in a fashion put the ball back in their court, employing the sort of phrase he might have chosen himself. In turn, he picks up the thread of her logic.
‘Young Nick – we saw him yesterday.’ His inflection invites her acknowledgement, and she nods to indicate there is no need to specify to whom he refers. Anything else would be unlikely in a community where they have both lived continuously. Skelgill gestures towards the bar. ‘Is he a regular?’
She hurriedly shakes her head.
‘I don’t reckon he drinks.’
Skelgill looks a little disappointed.
‘Sounds like he’s handy on the guitar – this would be just the thing – live music on a Sunday night. As I recall, it’s a standing attraction – turn up and jam?’
Skelgill is being somewhat disingenuous, for in days gone by in planning to meet a mountain rescue pal for a Sunday night pint and in suggesting possible pubs with decent ale and a warming hearth they had eliminated the Twa Tups for the very reason that conversation would be drowned out by those who liked to blow their own trumpets. But Megan Nicolson quickly puts him right.
‘Must be above ten years since we’ve had that. The Tups changed hands – the new owners wanted to make it less cliquey – more for visitors. That were when they started doing B&B and bar meals.’
Skelgill inhales with apparent dismay.
&nb
sp; ‘Time flies. I didn’t realise it were that long ago. He’d have been too young – but didn’t his dad play, going back?’
The woman seems perplexed by his question.
‘You mean Aidan? Aidan Wilson? Not as I recall.’
Skelgill shrugs as though this were unimportant in any event.
‘Did he drink here?’
She makes a gesture of appeal, holding out her hands palms upward.
‘As youngsters – though he were older – most of us used to drink here. Friday nights, maybe Saturdays. It were a crowd from the village and the surrounding district. But he stopped coming in. After his Ma died and they took over the cottage – Mary used to say they were hard up – though the rent couldn’t have been that bad, and he had a decent job, according to Mary.’ Now she lowers her voice a little, almost conspiratorially. ‘Mary didn’t like to admit it – but I’d say he were tight – didn’t approve of either of them spending money. Going right back I’ve seen them have a row over a round of drinks – when it were their turn and he wanted to leave. At least Mary weren’t like that.’
Skelgill absently scratches the top of his head.
‘Is it possible there were money troubles at the time she disappeared?’
Megan Nicolson appears doubtful.
‘Happen they were stretched – they’d just had the bairn and Aidan had changed his job. But they were living with Jean Tyson, so they could share the same overheads. I don’t reckon they were any more hard up than most folk.’
Skelgill nods.
‘Would you say you were close to Mary?’
‘I knew her well enough.’
‘But if there’d been something going on – say she owned money – or say she were borrowing from someone – would she have confided in you?’
But the woman is beginning to shake her head.
‘I shouldn’t say I were that close. I were willing, like – but Mary were more the sort to keep her troubles to herself. And I wouldn’t say she were under the thumb – but you could tell she were always worrying what would Aidan think about something or other – that he might not approve.’
Skelgill nods again, though he must appear a little disinterested – for she regards him interrogatively, as though she is dissatisfied with his reaction. But he is indeed distracted; at least three attempts to make specific headway have been rebuffed, and it feels like the conversation is drifting somewhat aimlessly. He knows that if DS Jones were sitting beside him she would be itching to haul the interview back onto a more even keel, a course plotted, a destination in mind. DS Leyton seems to have been lulled into easy-listening mode, leaning back holding his cup and saucer and sipping occasionally. Skelgill suddenly rises to his feet.
‘I must pay a visit to the little boys’ room.’ He affects a bow to the surprised woman. ‘Thanks for your time, Mrs Nicolson. Sergeant Leyton has a couple of quick questions to finish off.’ He looks directly at his colleague. ‘I’ll meet you at the car.’
DS Leyton appears momentarily panicked – but he nods obediently and puts down his coffee and takes up his notebook from the table. As Skelgill exits the snug he pauses to take from the bar a leaflet advertising the forthcoming Balderthwaite shepherds’ meet; as he folds and pockets the item he hears his deputy ask permission to update the woman’s personal details.
A stone-flagged corridor leads to the main entrance, which is at the side of the old building, and there are doors on the left, as he looks, successively signposted to the ladies’ and gents’. But Skelgill takes a door on the right, marked ‘Lounge Bar’. It is a substantially larger room than the snug, and brighter, having both of these qualities by virtue of a flat-roofed extension that has been added to the rear of the inn. It is still a few minutes shy of opening time, and the lounge is empty. It has that strange pub-non-pub atmosphere that Skelgill first noticed after the smoking ban, when combusted tobacco could no longer mask the smell of fermented beer in the carpet.
He approaches the extension, which stretches left and right along the back of the building, halfway to being a conservatory. The long windows give on to the beer garden – merely a collection of picnic benches set on gravel that merges with that of the car park; his own car is there beside a couple of others filmed with condensation that look like they have been left overnight. He walks to the extreme left and takes a seat in a slipper chair. Now he looks over his shoulder. He cannot be seen from the bar counter or the serving hatch; on the other hand he has a clear view of the exterior, the beer garden and car park.
*
‘Why are we stopping, Guv?’
They have travelled barely two minutes and Skelgill has slewed his car into a recessed gateway between dry stone walls. He replies as he springs from the vehicle.
‘Call of nature.’
‘I thought you just went?’
Skelgill is standing with his back to the open door, facing the wall.
‘I got sidetracked.’
DS Leyton waits to see if his superior will elaborate, but Skelgill seems either unwilling, or sufficiently preoccupied with his pressing needs to deem that a reply is low on his list of priorities. After some time – when he continues to stand and stare over the wall into the paddock – he returns to the driver’s seat.
‘Herdwicks gathered for the Balderthwaite meet.’
‘Herdwick’s what, Guv?’
Skelgill looks impatiently at his subordinate, as if he ought to know what he is talking about. But, of course, a more natural assumption would be the creatures’ human namesake, in the shape of the long-serving police pathologist. Skelgill casts a hand towards the gate that impedes their view. As he does so a thick-coated sheep ambles into sight.
‘The yowes in that field – happen they’ve brought them down off the fell for shearing.’
DS Leyton raises a finger to signal his recall.
‘Oh, yeah – it did say that, Guv – on that poster we were looking at?’
Skelgill nods.
‘Aye – hand clipping. The way it were done before the electric came.’
‘That’s gotta be a dying art, Guv. Must be some old boy they’ve dragged out of retirement.’
Skelgill glances sharply at his colleague.
‘It’s her husband, Leyton.’
‘What’s that, Guv?’
‘Megan Nicolson – it’s Sean Nicolson that does the hand clipping demonstration.’
‘Oh – right, Guv. You’ve got local knowledge on me.’
Skelgill grimaces.
‘His name was on the notice, Leyton.’
Now the penny drops.
‘Ah – so he were doing that at the shepherds’ meet when Mary Wilson disappeared?’
‘I reckon that’s the story.’ But now Skelgill folds his arms – for he is not entirely sure of this. ‘He might have entered some sheep – most of the shepherds hereabouts would do – they have upward of forty classes.’
‘I suppose we’ll get it from the horse’s mouth soon enough, Guv.’
Skelgill does not immediately reply. The engine is idling but he is showing no inclination to drive off. Though it is not entirely overcast and there are scrappy patches of blue, rain is in the air and large drops are streaking the screen. He flicks the wipers onto the intermittent setting, taking the opportunity to erase some of the insect smears.
‘What did you make of his missus?’
‘You what, Guv? Megan Nicolson?’ But Skelgill does not answer.
After some apparent racking of his brains, DS Leyton reaches a conclusion that he tentatively puts forward.
‘I don’t reckon she told us much new, Guv. Leastways, not about Mary Wilson – nor what happened back then. I’d say if anything she seems to have a downer on Aidan Wilson. Not overboard – but she had a few little digs at him.’
Skelgill broods for a while. The rhythm of the wipers is soporific, their regular movement verging on the hypnotic. He stares beyond the bars of the gate, his gaze unaffected by sheep that cross his field of visi
on.
‘How about what she didn’t tell us, Leyton.’
‘How do you mean, Guv?’
Skelgill’s face becomes painfully distorted, as if he cannot stomach the effort of voicing his thoughts.
‘She grew up with Mary Tyson – Wilson. They were at school together, knocked about together in the same clique, worked together. She didn’t have a bad word to say about her – but not a good word either.’
DS Leyton is a little perplexed. On occasion his boss will be deliberately cryptic – out of frustration, or devilment – and then there can be a more profound aspect that is not always apparent at the time. In this case he seems to be highlighting the contradiction. DS Leyton experiences a small spark of inspiration.
‘You mean, like – she’s keeping mum, Guv?’
Skelgill nods pensively.
‘Aye. Sommat like that.’
But Skelgill is no more forthcoming – whether out of unwillingness or simply that he is unable to provide a clear explanation of his thoughts. However, DS Leyton produces his notebook and begins to thumb methodically through its pages. He makes a small grunt of triumph.
‘Yeah – now you mention it, Guv.’ He turns to Skelgill. ‘If anything, she’s changed her tune. Remember DS Jones saying there was a suggestion of Mary Wilson having an affair? I’ve made a note here from the files – that came from Megan Nicolson. When originally interviewed about it she said, “Mary’s a dark horse, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been something going on”. There was nothing specific and no names put forward, but the officer made a note to the effect that he believed it was a definite hint. But then of course that aspect was investigated and there was no indication of any relationship.’
‘As the pair of them reminded us, Leyton – her and Aidan Wilson.’
DS Leyton looks keenly at his superior, as if in Skelgill’s tone of voice he detects a deeper meaning beneath its cynicism. But Skelgill without warning rams the car into reverse gear and, taking a chance on there being no oncoming traffic – human, ovine or otherwise – swings blind onto the lane, brakes with a harsh jolt and surges forward.
‘Pearson, aye?’
DS Leyton is desperately lurching from one brace position to another. But he manages to blurt out a response.
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