On Beulah Height

by Reginald Hill

  For a while, though, it was possible to let the image of the shepherd with his long carved crook, and the sound of the sheep and the dogs, blend into his sense of something that had been before, and would be long after, this present trouble.

  Then one of the search dogs and one of the collies launched themselves in a brief but noisy skirmish, the shepherd and the handler shouted and dragged them apart, and Wield too felt himself dragged back to here and now.

  By the time he descended to the fold, the searchers had moved on. In an effort to re-establish his previous mood, he’d greeted the shepherd cheerfully.

  ‘Lovely day again, Mr Allgood,’ he said. ‘Right kind of weather to be up here doing this job, I should think.’

  He knew everyone in the dale by sight and name now. This was Jack Allgood from Low Beulah, a whipcord thin man with skin tanned dark brown by wind and weather, and a black unblinking gaze which gave promise of assessing the exact value of sheep or of a man in a very few seconds.

  ‘That’s what you think, is it?’ retorted Allgood. ‘I’m supposed to be grateful, am I? Mebbe you should stick to your own job, Sergeant, though you don’t seem to be so hot at that either.’

  The man had a reputation for being a prickly customer, but this seemed unprovoked.

  ‘Sorry if I’ve said owt to offend you,’ said Wield mildly.

  ‘Aye, well, not your fault, I suppose. Reason I’m getting my sheep ready for bringing down this time of year is they’ve all got to go. Aye, that’s right. What did you think? That we’d be dragged out of our houses but all the stock would just stay here to take care of itself ?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. It must be hard. Leaving somewhere like this. Your home. All of it.’

  For a moment the two men stood looking down at the valley bottom - the village with its church and inn, the scattered farms, the mere blue with reflected sky. And then their eyes dropped down to the dam site with its moving machines, its cluster of prefabs, and the wall itself, almost complete now.

  ‘Aye,’ said Allgood. ‘Hard.’

  He turned back to his sheep and Wield set off down the fellside, the sun still as warm, the day still as bright, the view still as fair, but with every step he felt the burden reassembling on his shoulders … ‘Sarge?’ prompted Novello. ‘You were saying?’

  ‘Next right’s the turn to Bixford,’ said Wield. ‘Slow down else you’ll miss it.’

  TEN

  ‘Mr Dalziel,’ said Walter Wulfstan. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  He didn’t make it sound too long, thought Dalziel.

  They shook hands and took stock of each other. Wulfstan saw a man little changed from the crop-headed overweight creature he had once publicly castigated as gross, disgusting and incompetent. Dalziel found recognition harder. Fifteen years ago he had first known this man as a lean energetic go-getter with an expensive tan, bright impatient eyes and a shock of black hair. News of his daughter’s disappearance had hit him like a hurricane blast hitting a pine. He had bent, then seemingly recovered, pain, rage, and a desperate hope energizing him into a hyperbolical parody of his normal self. But it had been the false brightness of a Christmas tree and all these years on nothing remained but dried-up needles and dying wood. The hair was gone, the skin was grey and stretched so tight across the skull that his nose and ears seemed disproportionately large and his eyes glinted from deep caverns. Perhaps in an effort at concealment or compensation, he had grown a spikey fringe of moustacheless beard. It didn’t help.

  ‘So, let’s get to it,’ said Wulfstan, remaining standing himself and not inviting Dalziel to sit. ‘I’m very busy and this necessity of finding a new venue for the opening concert has already taken up time I could ill spare.’

  ‘Sorry about that, sir, but in the circumstances …’

  He let his voice tail off.

  Wulfstan said, ‘I’m sorry, is that a sentence?’

  If the bugger wants to play hard, let’s play hard, thought Dalziel.

  ‘I mean, in the circumstances, which are that a child’s gone missing and we need a base to organize the hunt for her, I’d havethought mebbe, seeing what you went through, you’d have been a bit sympathetic. Sir,’ said Dalziel.

  Wulfstan said softly, ‘Naturally, when I hear that parents have lost a daughter and are relying on you and your colleagues to recover her, I am deeply sympathetic, Superintendent.’

  Nice one, thought Dalziel appreciatively. His instinct was to hit back but his experience was that, if you lay down submissively, your antagonist often decided it was all over, got careless and exposed his soft underbelly. So he sighed, scratched his breastbone raucously, and sat down in an armchair.

  ‘If she’s still alive we want to find her quick,’ he said. ‘We need all the help we can get.’

  Wulfstan stood quite still for a moment, then pulled up an elegant but uncomfortable-looking wheelback chair and sat directly in front of the Fat Man.

  ‘Ask what you need to ask,’ he said.

  ‘Where were you yesterday morning between, say, seven o’clock and ten o’clock?’

  ‘You know already. I presume someone noticed my car.’

  ‘I know where the vehicle was, sir, but that’s not the same as knowing you were in charge of it.’

  Wulfstan nodded acknowledgement of the point and said, ‘I parked my Discovery by the Corpse Road not far from St Michael’s at about eight thirty. I then went for a walk and returned to the car shortly after ten.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And where’d you walk?’

  ‘Up the Corpse Road to the col and back the same way.’

  ‘That’s thirty, thirty-five minutes up and twenty back. What about the rest of the time, sir?’

  Wulfstan said flatly, ‘I stood on the col and looked down into Dendale.’

  The question, ‘At anything in particular?’ rose in Dalziel’s throat, but he kept it there. The man was trying to co-operate.

  ‘Up, down, or standing still, you see anyone else, sir?’

  Wulfstan bowed his head forward and rested the index finger of each hand against his brow. It was a conventional enough ‘thinking’ pose, but in this man it gave an impression of absolute focus.

  ‘There were a couple of cars in Dendale,’ he said finally. ‘Parked by the dam. Some people were walking from one of them. Tourists, I expect. The drought has caused a lot of interest as the ruins of the village start showing through. On the track itself, up and down, I saw no one. I’m sorry.’

  He made as if to rise. End of interview. He thinks, thought Dalziel, making himself more comfortable in the armchair.

  ‘You often walk up the Corpse Road, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Often? What is often?’

  ‘Witness who spotted your car says she’d noticed it several times in the past couple of weeks.’

  ‘Not surprising. My firm has a research unit and display centre at the Danby Science Park and when I’m out there I frequently take the opportunity to stretch my legs.’

  ‘Nowt better than a bit of exercise,’ said Dalziel, patting his gut with all the complacency of Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing his biceps. ‘Sunday yesterday, but.’

  ‘I know. I trained as an engineer, Superintendent, and one of the first things they taught us was the days of the week,’ said Wulfstan acerbically. ‘Has Sabbath breaking been reinstated as an actionable offence in Yorkshire?’

  ‘No, sir. Just wondered about you going to work on a Sunday, and so early. You did say that’s why you went to Danby; because of your business, not just to take a walk?’

  ‘Yes, I did. And that’s what I’ve been doing on and off for many years, Superintendent, as you can check, though why you should want to, I cannot imagine. Running the business takes up so much of my time, it is easy to lose sight of what makes the business run. I am an engineer first, a businessman second. In my work, as in yours, it is easy to let yourself be lifted out of your proper sphere of competence.’r />
  Like Traffic you mean, thought Dalziel.

  He rose, smiling.

  ‘Well, thanks for your help, sir. One thing, but. You obviouslyknew about the missing lass, through the papers and having to change your concert venue and all. And you knew you’d been out there Sunday morning. Did you never think it might be an idea to give us a bell, just in case your vehicle had been noticed and we were spending time trying to eliminate it?’

  Wulfstan stood up and said, ‘You are right, Mr Dalziel. I should have done. But knowing the questions you would ask, and knowing that nothing I said could assist you in any way, I felt that contacting you would simply be a waste of both our times. As it has proved, I fear.’

  ‘Wouldn’t say that, sir. Wouldn’t say that at all,’ said Dalziel, offering his hand.

  He gave him a masonic handshake just for a laugh. He liked people to think the worst of him because then the best often came as an unpleasant surprise.

  ‘Tell Mrs Wulfstan thanks for the drink. Hope the concert goes OK,’ he said at the front door. ‘Have you found somewhere else, by the by? Thought mebbe you’d use the church.’

  This echo of what had happened in Dendale produced no perceivable reaction.

  ‘Unfortunately, St Michael’s has an intolerable acoustic,’ said Wulfstan. ‘But religion may still come to our aid. There’s an old chapel which is a possibility.’

  ‘Chapel?’ said Dalziel doubtfully. ‘From what I know of chapel folk, I should have thought this concert of thine would have been a bit too frivolous.’

  ‘Mahler, frivolous? Hardly. But profane, perhaps. However, happily, for us that is, the chapel is no longer used for worship. The sect that built it - the Beulah Baptists, I believe they were called - died out in this area before the war.’

  ‘Beulah?’ said Dalziel. ‘Like in Pilgrim’s Progress?’

  ‘You’ve read it?’ said Wulfstan, keeping his surprise just this side of insulting. ‘Then you will recall that from the Land of Beulah the pilgrims were summoned to go over the river into Paradise, for some an easy, for others a perilous passage.’

  ‘But they all got there just the same,’ said Dalziel. ‘ “When they tasted of the water over which they were to go, they thought ittasted a little bitterish to the palate, but it proved sweeter when it was down.” Bit like Guinness.’

  ‘Indeed. Well, it seems these Mid-Yorkshire Beulah Baptists, taking their example from Bunyan’s text, went in for a form of total immersion which involved converts passing from one side of a river to the other. The river they used locally was the Strake, which, as you may know, is moderately deep and extremely fast flowing. The candidates for baptism were therefore aided by a pair of Elders known, from the book, as Shining Ones. Unfortunately, at one ceremony in the late thirties, the river was in such spate that not even the strength of the Shining Ones was able to withstand it, and they and their baptismal candidate, a ten-year-old boy, were swept away and drowned. Local revulsion was so great that the sect withered away after that. I’m surprised you have not heard of the case. The police were accounted much to blame for their incompetence in allowing such a dangerous activity to persist. But perhaps with only one child dying, it was not reckoned a failure to mark down in the annals.’

  Dalziel, who had been wondering if the revelation of shared acquaintance with The Pilgrim’s Progress had modified Wulfstan’s attitude to him, realized that he’d got it wrong. But a soft answer turned away wrath.

  ‘And you reckon this chapel might do?’ he said.

  ‘Local memory avers that as a place to sing in it had no equal. Whether it can be rendered usable in so short a space remains to be seen. For some years now it’s been rented by a local joiner for use as a workshop. You may recall him. Joe Telford from Dendale.’

  Oh, shit. He didn’t let up, did he? Dalziel, for whom the study of revenge and immortal hate was among his favourite hobbies, almost admired the man.

  ‘Telford,’ he echoed, playing along. ‘Him whose daughter …’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Dalziel. “Him whose daughter.” Telford moved his business to Danby, but by all accounts his heart was never in it. It was his brother, George - you remember him? - who held things together. Joe became increasingly reclusive. His marriage suffered. Eventually his wife could take no more. She went off. With George.’

  He spoke flatly with a lack of emphasis that was more emphatic than a direct accusation that this tragedy too was down to police incompetence.

  ‘That must have been a shaker,’ said Dalziel.

  ‘They say Joe hardly noticed.’

  ‘And the business?’

  ‘Joe does nothing but a bit of odd-jobbing now, I believe. But he still has a lease on the Beulah Chapel. If he’s agreeable, and we can get his junk moved, the place cleaned up and certificated by the fire-officer in forty-eight hours, then we can go ahead. As a voluntary and amateur body, we have to rely on ourselves to do most of the work, so if I’ve seemed a little impatient…’

  The ghost of an apology. Funny how folk imagined they had the power to give, and he the thin skin to take, offence.

  ‘Nay, I know all about pressure,’ said Dalziel.

  They shook hands. Level on points. But Dalziel knew in his heart that no matter what happened in his encounters with this man, he could never count himself the winner. Mary Wulfstan had been the last of the Dendale girls to go. By then he’d been on the spot for long enough to have taken care of that. You’ve got a strong suspect and you’re running out of time, break the bugger’s leg rather than let him loose. He remembered with affection the old boss who’d given him that advice. Perhaps if he’d contrived an ‘accident’ as Benny Lightfoot was brought up from the cells to be released, Mary Wulfstan would still be alive…

  He put the thought out of his mind and let it be replaced by another as he was escorted to the front door.

  Driving into and through Danby yesterday morning, Wulfstan must have seen the BENNY’S BACK! signs. Why’d he not mentioned them?

  It was worth asking perhaps. He turned. The door was almost closed, but he did nothing to prevent it closing. His gaze had brushed across his car parked a little way down the street, and all desire to resume his interrogation fled.

  There was a figure standing by it looking towards him.

  He blinked against the dazzle of the sun, and felt a surge of heat up his body which had nothing to do with the weather.

  It was the woman he’d glimpsed in Wulfstan’s committee meeting. The woman to whom he owed his tenuous acquaintance with Mahler. And much much more.

  She watched his approach with a faint smile on her full lips.

  ‘How do, Andy?’ she said. ‘What fettle?’

  Her imitation of his speech mode was unmistakable, but, unlike Elizabeth Wulfstan’s wrongly suspected mockery, unresentable. Piss-taking between lovers, even ex-lovers, was an expression of intimacy, of true affection.

  ‘Nowt wrong wi’ me that the sight of you plus two pints of best can’t put right, Cap,’ he said.

  Amanda Marvell, known to her friends as Cap, let her smile blossom fully and held out her hand.

  ‘Then let’s go and complete the medication, shall we?’ she said.

  ELEVEN

  Stirps End Farm lay in the sun like an old ship on a sandbank, lapped around by thistled meadows and surging fell. Everything about the farmhouse and its yard said, ‘We have lost, you have won, leave us be, here to rot, washed by rain, parched by sun. Trouble us not and we’ll not trouble thee.’

  They pushed open a gate hanging off its hinges, though they could as easily have stepped through the dry-stone wall at several places where its fallen stones lay cradled in nettles.

  ‘Don’t know much about farming,’ said Pascoe. ‘But this looks like second-division stuff.’

  ‘Cedric were always a make-do-and-mend kind of farmer,’ replied Clark. ‘But recent years, he’s just stuck to making do.’

  ‘And you reckon Pontifex gave him the tenancy out of guilt
?’ said Pascoe, looking round with distaste at the rusting relicts of agricultural machinery which littered the yard. ‘Lot of guilt to put up with this for fifteen years.’

  ‘Lose a kid, what’s fifteen years?’ said Clark.

  Pascoe felt reproved. Out of the barn, which was a continuation of the house and seemed to lean against it for mutual support, a man had emerged and was standing in the dark rhomboid of its warped doorway, regarding them with weary hostility.

  ‘What you after, Nobby?’ he demanded.

  His voice was harsh and grating, as if from long disuse. He was unageable without expert medical testimony, anything between forty and sixty, with a sharp nose, hollow cheeks, and a salt-and-pepper stubbled chin indicating an early beard or a very late shaving. He was broad in the shoulder and the hip, but the frayed and patched boiler suit he wore hung loosely on him, giving the impression of a big man who’d somehow collapsed in on himself.

  ‘How do, Cedric. This here’s Chief Inspector Pascoe. We’d like a word with Jed.’

  ‘At work, if that’s what you can call it,’ said Hardcastle. ‘You’d think there was nowt to do round here.’