On Beulah Height

by Reginald Hill

Even with half his mind on her hypothesis, he could see the gaping cracks in it, she thought bitterly.

  ‘No, sir,’ she said, trying not to sound like a sulking child.

  ‘So what did you think might be your next move?’ Pascoe enquired courteously.

  They had reached the Water Company building and she brought the car to a halt by the main entrance.

  ‘Well, I had thought maybe a watch on Turnbull might be a good move,’ she said for the want of anything better.

  ‘In case Lightfoot comes back to try what another beating might do?’

  This time he did manage a faint smile, and with a great effort she matched it.

  ‘Yeah, well, now I think about it, doesn’t seem all that likely, even if I’d managed to get it right, which seems even less likely.’

  He opened the car door.

  ‘So why not do it?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Keep an eye on Geordie.’

  ‘But you said … I thought you said …’ Time for truth, long past time for pussyfooting around. ‘… you did say, not in so many words, but what you meant was, it was a bloody stupid idea!’

  He got out, closed the door, and leaned in through the open window.

  ‘No,’ he said mildly. ‘If I meant anything like that, it was that your reasons for doing it were … flawed. But the heart has its reasons that reason wots not of. I, for instance, have only the faintest notion what I’m doing here, but here I am. But it might be wise while you are keeping your watch to think up a better reason than the one you’ve offered me for doing it. Nor would I fall back on a French philosopher. Mr Dalziel is more a Nietzsche man. May I borrow your Post?’

  He plucked the paper from the rear seat, managed the faint smile again, and walked away.

  She stared after him without gratitude. All that crap about the heart’s reasons. The clever sod had some clever notions in his noddle that he didn’t have the time or maybe the inclination to waste on her. Or likely he’d say it was part of the learning process to make her work things out for herself. Who the fuck did he think he was? Socrates?

  Now here she was, parked within sight of Turnbull’s bungalow, working out reasons for her presence, each ten times dafter than the last.

  Turnbull was at home. Through her glasses she’d glimpsed him moving around inside. It had been early afternoon when she arrived, so whether he’d been out that morning or not, she had no way of knowing. Certainly there was only one digger remaining parked in the compound, so presumably the others were out on a job somewhere. Perhaps after the assault he didn’t feel well enough to go out to the sites himself.

  Fortunately, Novello had had the sense to grab a prepacked sandwich and a bottle of water from the incident room fridge. Even so, with the sun burning down and time ticking by, she guessed she was going to end up baked, parched and hungered before the day was out. And still nothing happened. The good pan of the nothing was that nobody was trying to raise her with angry queries as to what the hell she thought she was doing. The bad part was that after an hour or so without further sight of Turnbull through the wide-open windows of the bungalow, she began to fear that he might somehow have slipped out of the back and away across the fields. Had there been a rear gate in the compound security fence? She tried to recall, and failed.

  Perhaps she should take a stroll. Even if he clocked her, he’d only seen her the once, no reason he should remember.

  Except of course that he was Geordie Turnbull. She recalled that unashamedly appreciative gaze which flattered rather than offended. Part of its power was that it seemed to be registering you as an individual, not just as an arrangement of tits and crotch. Once your face was filed in Geordie’s memory, she betted it was retrievable for ever.

  But just as she thought both professional necessity and personal comfort made such a stroll essential, something happened.

  A vehicle transporter turned into the compound. A flabbily fat man slid out and sat on the running board, gasping with the effort. He was wearing football shorts and a string vest through whose meshes glowed diamonds of red flesh. Flayed, you could have used him to decorate an Indian restaurant. Finally he recovered enough to reach into the cab, take out a plastic carrier bag and head to the bungalow, the door of which opened before him. He went inside. Twenty minutes later he re-emerged, minus the bag and plus a can of lager. Novello watched in envy as he squeezed the last drops into his mouth and handed the can to Turnbull who dropped it to the floor behind him. The two men now manoeuvred the digger on to the transporter, made it secure, and shook hands. Turnbull watched as the vehicle drove out of the compound, then turned back into the bungalow.

  Novello made a note of the transporter number, called up Control on her radio and asked for a vehicle check. It was registered to Kellaway Plant Sales, proprietor Liberace Kellaway. Novello gave details of the transporter’s likely present location and asked if it could be stopped, ostensibly for a check on stability or something, but in fact to find out anything they could about the origins of the digger. When the sergeant i/c Control came on to enquire who it was requesting this misuse of hard-worked car officers’ time, with the implication that it had better not be anyone low as a DC, Novello thought of sheep and lambs and said, ‘Mr Dalziel would be grateful.’

  In Mid-Yorkshire police circles, this was the equivalent of a Royal Command, and half an hour later the word came back. The transporter, which was being driven by Mr Kellaway himself (Liberace! thought Novello. What a fan his mother must have been. What a disappointment little Lib probably was!) had passed all tests satisfactorily. As for the digger, it had just been purchased from the firm of G. Turnbull, (Demolition & Excavation) Ltd of Bixford, and he had the papers to prove it.

  Novello uttered her thanks, plus a request that no further reference be made to this matter on open air, hoping thus to delay the moment when the Fat Man discovered his name had been taken in vain.

  Now she settled down again to wait, still hungry, still hot, but refreshed by hope as her mind began to get an inkling of what that smart-ass Pascoe had probably worked out several hours before.

  ELEVEN

  In fact, Shirley Novello was both overestimating Pascoe, and underestimating Dalziel.

  The former it was true had glimpsed the outline of a sketch of a cartoon of a possible picture when he advised her to follow her heart, but no more than that, and in the hours since he had found little leisure or inclination to essay bolder strokes and finer shadings.

  The awaking of Rosie was both huge joy and piercing pain.

  She had opened her eyes and been instantly aware of her parents. Initially she showed no curiosity about where she was but babbled on - not deliriously but merely out of her customary eagerness to tell everything at once - about caves and pools and tunnels and bats and nixes.

  Then she paused and said, ‘Where’s Zandra? Is Zandra back too?’

  That was the pain. The pain of her loss to come. And the infinitely greater pain of Derek and Jill Purlingstone’s loss, which Pascoe shared by empathy as his heart and imagination showed him how he would have felt had it been Rosie, and which was joined by guilt as he found himself offering up thanks to the God he didn’t believe in that it hadn’t been her.

  ‘It wasn’t a choice, Peter,’ urged Ellie when he explained this. ‘There was no moment when someone, or some thing, decided, we’ll take this one and let that one go.’

  ‘No,’ said Pascoe. ‘But if it had been a choice, and I had to make it, this is what I would have chosen without a second’s thought.’

  ‘And that makes you feel guilty?’ said Ellie. ‘If you’d needed a second’s thought, that would have been something to feel guilty about.’

  Rosie had fallen asleep now, as if the excitement of recovery was as exhausting as the illness itself, but now her rest was recognizably the repose of sleep, with all the small grunts and changes of expression and shifts of position which her watching parents knew so well.

  They sat by the b
ed hand in hand, sometimes talking quietly, sometimes in a shared silence full of pleasurable memory of times past, and in pleasurable anticipation of times to come; but always if the silence went on too long, they would finally look at each other and register that each had drifted in his and her reverie to that other place in the hospital where a small form lay and two other parents sat in their own silence as profound and unreachable as that beneath the sea.

  As for Andy Dalziel, it was some time since he had turned his attention to the disposition of his troops and first of all he asked, ‘What’s Seymour on?’

  Wield, who made it his business to find out in rapid retrospect what he had failed to know in long advance, said, ‘He’s at Wark House in case Lightfoot shows up there.’

  ‘Oh aye? I thought that were Ivor’s assignment.’

  ‘No. It were her idea to send Seymour.’

  ‘Her idea?’ said Dalziel making it sound oxymoronic. ‘And where’s she at?’

  ‘She’s watching Turnbull.’

  ‘And whose idea were that?’

  ‘She says the DCI’s.’

  ‘She says,’ Meaning she’s doing it off her own bat, I suppose. Dear God, Wieldy, you’ve got to watch these women. Give ‘em an inch and they’re black-leading your bollocks.’

  ‘You want I should call her up?’

  ‘Nay. Let her be. There’s nowt for her to do here and if she turns summat up, she’ll be a hero.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t?’ said Wield.

  ‘Then likely she’ll be sorry she ever troubled the midwife,’ said Dalziel balefully.

  The superintendent was in a bad mood. So far the fresh lines of enquiry he’d anticipated from the finding of the body hadn’t materialized. The post mortem had confirmed the on-the-spot diagnosis. Death following a skull fracture caused either by being hit by an irregular-shaped object, probably a piece of rock, or by falling heavily against same. No sexual assault. Forensic examination of the clothing had so far come up with nothing. In fact the only opportunities for Dalziel to exercise any of his many skills came from being required by first the Chief Constable and secondly the press to explain how come an extensive, and expensive, search over the same ground had failed to turn up the child’s corpse.

  Desperate Dan Trimble, the CC, had been relatively easy to deal with. Despite their occasional differences, they had a lot of respect for each other, which is to say Trimble accepted that Dalziel’s regime was good for the area’s crime figures, and Dalziel accepted that, as far as was possible, Trimble protected his back. Also Dan liked the way Dalziel made no effort to offload responsibility on to Maggie Burroughs or any other of the officers on the ground. ‘Shifting dead sheep and paying special heed to the area round about was my shout,’ said the Fat Man. ‘I missed it.’ And the question rose in his mind as to whether he might have missed it fifteen years ago also. If this were the same killer, why should he have bothered to learn new tricks?

  At the press conference summoned in late afternoon in a classroom at St Michael’s school, the ladies and gents of the press were another kettle of fish. The locals, knowing that keeping on the right side of Dalziel was good survival technique, were relatively kind, but the national pack had no such inhibitions. After they’d worried the police incompetence hare to death, they turned their attention to their second perceived prey, the Dendale connection. This was a two-pronged onslaught with the sensationalist tabloids eager to tell their readers this was the same killer come back to start again (which meant that police incompetence fifteen years ago was now coming back to haunt them), while the rest were pursuing the line that the two cases were probably not connected but Dalziel was letting his obsession with Dendale contaminate the contemporary investigation.

  The Fat Man bit back the word, ‘Bollocks!’ and said, ‘Nay, we’ve got an open mind to all possibilities, and we hope you gents will keep an open mind too.’ … And I’ll be happy to help open it with a hatchet, his thoughts ran on.

  A smarmily sarky sod from one of the heavyweight Sundays said, ‘I presume it’s in pursuance of this open-minded approach that you still have a diving team searching the Dendale Reservoir?’

  Shit! thought Dalziel. So much had happened today that he’d forgotten to call the mermaids off.

  ‘In view of the discovery of the lass’s body,’ he said portentously, ‘we are of course now re-searching the whole area for traces of the assailant.’

  ‘Think he got away by swimming, do you?’ called someone to laughter.

  ‘Water’s a good place for getting rid of things,’ said Dalziel stonily.

  ‘Like a murder weapon, you mean?’ said the sarky sod. ‘Which I understand, is likely to have been a rock? You mean, you’ve got a team of divers searching the bed of a reservoir in a Yorkshire dale for a rock? Tell me, Superintendent, have they managed to find one yet?’

  More amusement. This was getting out of hand.

  He waited for silence, then said, ‘I see the serious questions are over, so I’ll get back to work now. I know I don’t need to remind you folk that there’s people suffering out there, and there’s people frightened, and the last thing they need is for what’s gone off to be sensationalized or trivialized.’

  He let his gaze run slowly over the assembled faces, as if committing each one to memory, then spoke again.

  ‘Up here we judge folk not only by the way they keep the Law but by the way they treat each other. And we don’t take kindly to intrusion or harassment. So think on.’

  He rose, ignoring the attempts to continue the questioning, and walked out.

  ‘You were good,’ said Wield.

  ‘I were crap,’ said Dalziel indifferently. ‘Wieldy, get on the line to them mermaids and tell them to start towelling off.’

  The sergeant went away. He was back in a couple of minutes, looking - so far as it was possible to tell from those craggy features - unhappy.

  ‘All sorted?’ said Dalziel.

  ‘Not really,’ said Wield. ‘When I got through they were just on the point of contacting us. Sir, they’ve found some bones.’

  ‘What? You mean, human?’

  ‘Aye. Human.’

  ‘Champion,’ said Dalziel, looking out of the window at the infinite blue of the sky. ‘Like my old dad used to say, it never bloody rains but it pours!’

  TWELVE

  At five o’clock, Geordie Turnbull was on the move.

  Novello had been driven by a call of nature to leave the car in search of seclusion. This enforced exploration had led her to a small copse in a field almost opposite the compound where, relief achieved, she discovered that with the aid of her glasses, she was able to get a view clear through the length of the bungalow’s living room, from open front window to open French door.

  She could see Turnbull’s head and shoulders as he slouched in an armchair, occasionally taking a sip from a glass. Then he straightened up, reached out and picked up the telephone.

  He didn’t dial so it had to be an incoming call. It didn’t last long. He replaced the receiver, drained his glass and stood up.

  Then he moved out of sight. Novello didn’t hang about but headed back to her car fast.

  Her instinct proved right. A minute later, Turnbull came out of the bungalow carrying a bag. He got into the Volvo estate and drove out through the compound gate, turning eastward. It was a fairly empty B-road and Novello hung well back. But six or seven miles beyond Bixford, the B-road joined the busy dual carriageway to the coast and she had to accelerate to keep him within sight.

  A few miles further on he signalled to turn off into a service area. She thought it must be fuel he was after, but he turned into the car park, got out, still carrying the bag, and headed for the cafeteria.

  Novello followed. She hung back till several more people joined the queue behind him, then took her place. He bought a pot of tea and carried it to a table by the window overlooking the road. She noticed he took the seat which gave him a view of the entrance door.

 
She got a coffee and found a seat a few tables behind him. Someone had left a newspaper. She picked it up and held it so that, if he should happen to glance round, half her face would be covered. If his roving eye was keen enough to identify her from the top half alone, tough.

  He was waiting for someone, there was no doubt about that. He poured his tea and raised the cup to his lips with his left hand, his right never letting go of the handle of the bag on the chair next to his, and his head angled towards the doorway.

  This went on for twenty minutes. People came and ate and left. A clearer-up tried to remove Novello’s empty cup, but she hung onto it. She had turned the pages of her paper several times without reading a word or even identifying which title she was holding. He likewise had squeezed the last drops out of his teapot. More time passed. Whatever reason he had for being here, he was determined his journey should not have been in vain.

  Then finally he froze. Not that he’d been moving much before, but now he went so still he made the furniture look active.

  Novello looked towards the entrance door.

  She knew him at once from Wield’s doctored photograph.

  Benny Lightfoot had just come into the cafeteria.

  Andy Dalziel was standing at the edge of Dender Mere, close by the pile of stones which marked the site of Heck Farm. On the sun-baked mud at his feet lay a small selection of bones. He stirred them with his toe.

  ‘Radius, ulna, and we think these could be carpal bones, but being small, they’ve been a bit more mucked about,’ said the chief mermaid, whose everyday name was Sergeant Tom Perriman.

  ‘Age? Sex? How long they’ve been there?’ prompted Dalziel greedily.

  Perriman shrugged his broad rubberized shoulders.

  ‘We just pulled ‘em out,’ he said. ‘Adult, I’d say, or adolescent at least.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘Still looking,’ said Perriman. ‘Funny really. Not much in the way of current here. You’d expect them to stay pretty much together even after a fairly long time. Pure chance I found them. We weren’t really interested in searching near the side where it’s so shallow …’