Dalziel 17 On Beulah Height

by Reginald Hill

  He rose unsteadily to his feet and reached into his pocket. Torch he might not have, but he hadn't forgotten his mobile.

  'Stay, Tig,' he said unnecessarily.

  Then, telling himself it was to improve reception, but knowing that he wanted above all things to be out of this dark and noisome canyon and back into the bright light and fresh air, he climbed up from the ghyll, pressed the necessary buttons, and began to speak.

  SIX

  The woman's name was Jackie Tilney. She was overweight, overworked, over thirty, and so pissed off with having told her story to three different sets of cops that she was ready to tell the fourth to take a jump.

  Only the fourth wasn't a set, though possessed of enough flesh to make two or three ordinary bobbies, and if he'd taken her putative advice and jumped, she feared for the foundations of the public library where she worked.

  So she told her story again.

  She had definitely seen the man in the photograph. And she had spoken with him. And he had an Australian accent.

  'The first time was...’

  'Hang about. First time?' said Dalziel. 'How many times were there?'

  'Two,' she retorted. 'Don't your menials tell you anything?'

  Dalziel regarded her thoughtfully. He liked a well-made feisty woman. Then he recalled that in Cap Marvell, he'd got the cruiserweight Queen of Feist, smiled fondly and said, 'Nay, lass, I don't waste time with tipsters when I can go straight to the horse's mouth. Go on.'

  Deciding there had to be a compliment in there somewhere, Jackie Tilney went on.

  'The first time was last Friday. He came to the reference desk and asked if we had anything about the building of the Dendale Reservoir. I told him that he could look at the local papers for the period on our microfiche system. Also this book.'

  She showed him the volume. It was called The Drowning of Dendale, a square volume, not all that thick. He remembered it vaguely. It had been written by one of the Post journalists and contained more photographs than text, basically a before-and-after record.

  'He asked me to do a couple of photocopies,' Tilney went on. 'These maps.'

  She showed him. One was of Dendale before the flooding, the other, after.

  'Did you chat to him at all?'

  'A bit. He had a nice easy manner. Just about the weather and such, how it was a lot cooler back home this time of year and how he'd packed three raincoats for his trip to England because everyone told him it rained all the time.'

  'Was he trying to chat you up, do you think? Good-looking lass like yourself, it 'ud not be surprising.'

  'Am I meant to be flattered?' she said. 'No, as a matter of fact, he didn't come on at me at all. It made a nice change. World's full of fellows who think, just because you're on the other side of a counter, you're sales goods. I got the impression he had other things on his mind, anyway.'

  'Such as?'

  'Look, mister, I'm too busy trying to keep an underfunded understaffed library system going in this town to have time to develop my psychic powers. I wouldn't be spending this amount of time with you if it didn't have something to do with that missing girl.'

  'Now, what makes you think that, luv?'

  'I read the Post, don't I?'

  She produced the paper and spread it before him, open at an article about the investigation with photos of Lorraine Dacre and her parents, of the Hardcastles and Joe Telford, of Geordie Turnbull and his solicitor, and one of Dalziel himself, caught at what looked like a moment of religious contemplation.

  With that subtlety and taste for which British journalists are universally famed, the editor had opted to print on the page opposite a feature about the Mid-Yorkshire Music Festival, highlighting the facts that the opening concert was in Danby, featuring 'Songs for Dead Children' sung by Elizabeth Wulfstan, who as a child in Dendale fifteen years back had been the last and only surviving victim of the uncaught abductor of three local girls.

  There was a full-figure picture of Elizabeth looking inscrutable, a close-up of Walter Wulfstan looking irritated, and a mid-shot of Sandel on a piano stool looking bored, with the Turnip by the piano looking charming.

  Without being actionable, the combined effect of the two pages was to suggest that the police were as out of their depth now as they'd been fifteen years ago.

  'Sounds like you need all the help you can get,' said Jackie Tilney.

  'I'll not quarrel with that,' said Dalziel. 'So that's the first time you saw him. What about the second?'

  'Yesterday afternoon, he were back. He went through the papers again. And then he went through the book. He was noting things down. Then I noticed he'd left the table where he'd been sitting and I thought he'd gone. But I glimpsed him over there, behind that stack.'

  'And what's kept over there?' asked Dalziel.

  'Business directories, mainly,' said Tilney.

  'Oh aye?'

  Dalziel strolled over and took a look. She was right. Why shouldn't she be? He returned to the desk.

  'And then?'

  'And then he left. He was going somewhere else in town, I think. I saw him looking at one of those town maps you get from the Tourist Centre. And that was the last I saw of him till that constable of yours stuck that picture in front of me this morning. By the by, is he fit to be let out by himself? The bugger came after me with his stick!'

  'He's an impulsive young lad,' said Dalziel. 'But good-hearted. I'll have a fatherly word with him.'

  He gave her a savage smile suggesting the father he had in mind was Cronos.

  'Are we done?' she asked.

  He didn't answer. When you've caught a bright witness, don't let it go till you've squeezed it dry, was a good maxim. A uniformed constable approached and was not put off by Dalziel's Gorgon glare.

  'What?'

  'You're to ring Sergeant Wield at the caravan, sir.'

  Meaning, use a land line not your mobile for extra security. Meaning . .. Jackie Tilney said, 'There's a phone in the office. You can be private there.'

  She'd caught the vibes of his reaction. Sharp lady.

  He went through and dialled. Half a ring and the phone was answered.

  'It's me,' he said.

  'We've found her, sir.'

  The tone told him, dead. His head had long since given up hope of any other outcome, but a tightening of the chest told him his heart had kept a secret vigil.

  He said, 'Where?'

  'Up the valley.'

  Where he himself had ordered the abandonment of the search the previous night. Shit.

  He said, 'I'm on my way. You got things started?'

  Unnecessary question.

  'Yes, sir.'

  'And quiet as you can, Wieldy.'

  Unnecessary injunction. Bom of his own sense of missing things.

  'Yes, sir.'

  He put the phone down and went back to the desk.

  'That'll do for now, luv,' he said. 'Thanks for your help.'

  Her eyes suggested his efforts to stay casual were failing.

  He picked up The Drowning of Dendale.

  'All right if I borrow this?'

  'Long as you pay the fine,' she said. 'Good luck.'

  'Thanks,' he said.

  He strode out of the library. Suddenly he felt full of energy. The pain at the confirmation of the child's death was still there, but alongside it was another feeling, less laudable and best kept hidden from others, but unhideable from himself.

  After fifteen years, he finally had a body. Bodies told you things. Bodies had been in contact with killers at their most desperate, hasty, and unthinking moments. Mere vanishings were the mothers of rumours, of false trails, of myths and imaginings. But a body ... !

  He might hate himself for it, but he could not keep a spring out of his step as he headed for his car.

  SEVEN

  Tuesday's bright dawn had brought little but the blackness of contrast to the Pascoes, but Wednesday's brought a glimpse of hope.

  Mrs Curtis, the consultant, was st
ill several watts short of optimism, but when she said, 'For a while yesterday we seemed close to falling through, but now it seems more likely we were simply bottoming out,' Ellie didn't even register the medically patronizing we but simply embraced the embarrassed woman.

  She knew there was no question yet of celebration. Rosie was still unconscious. But at least and at last the sunshine brought with it the hope of hope. And with hope came space for her mind to relax its relentless focus on a single object.

  Halfway through the morning, Ellie was in the washroom regarding herself critically in the mirror. She looked a wreck, but that was nothing to the way Peter looked. He looked like a wreck that had had another couple of accidents. Which, she thought, was not all that far from the truth.

  They were both in the wrong jobs, she'd often thought it. He should have been basking on the fringes of the life academic, trying his hand at the novel introspective, running Rosie back and forth to school, keeping the house ticking over ... no, more than ticking over; on the odd occasion when he'd taken over the ironing, she'd found him pressing underpants, for God's sake! With Peter in charge, they'd have crisp new sheets every night.

  And herself? She should have been out there on the mean streets, riding the punches and taking the bumps, moving on from one case to the next with nothing to show but the odd bit of scartissue, none of these deep bruises which keep on haemorrhaging around the bone long after the surface flesh has apparently recovered.

  Trouble was, though they shared great areas of social conscience in common, the spin that nature and/or nurture had put on hers made her regard the police force as a cure almost as bad as the disease. Peter, on the other hand, though not blind to its flaws, felt himself duty driven to work from within. A right pious little Aeneas, Italiam non sponte sequor and all that crap. Which made her .. . Odysseus? Fat, earthy, cunning old Odysseus? Hardly! That was much more Andy Dalziel. Then Dido? Come on! See her chucking herself on a pyre 'cos she'd been jilted. Helen? Ellie looked at herself in the mirror. Not today. So who?

  'Me, myself,' she mouthed in the mirror. 'God help me.'

  As she returned to the ward, a nurse came towards her, saying, 'Mrs Pascoe, we've got someone on the phone for your husband. She says she's a colleague and it's important.'

  'She does, does she?' said Ellie. 'I'll be the judge of that.'

  She went to the phone and picked it up.

  'Hello,' she said.

  There was silence, then a woman's voice said, 'I was trying to get hold of DCI Pascoe

  'This is Mrs Pascoe.'

  'D C Novello, Shirley Novello. Hi. Mrs Pascoe, I was so sorry to hear . . . how is she, the little girl?'

  'Hanging on,' said Ellie, not about to share her hope of hope with a woman she'd only met once briefly. 'So tell me, DC Novello, what's so important?'

  Another silence, then, 'I just wanted a quick word . . . Look, I'm sorry, this is a terrible time, I know. It's just that there's this line of enquiry he started, really, and it would be useful, the way he looks at things . . . I'm sorry ... it's really insensitive, especially ... it really doesn't matter Mrs Pascoe. I do hope your little girl gets better soon.'

  She meant, especially because it's about the child who'd gone missing from Danby, thought Ellie. This was the woman who'd rung yesterday. Peter had mentioned her, provoking an outburst of indignation at such crassness. What had Peter replied? She lit a candle for Rosie.

  Ellie had no time for religion, but no harm in hedging your bets with a bit of good old-fashioned magic.

  'That candle still burning?' she said.

  'Sorry?'

  'Never mind. What precisely do you want, Miss Novello? No way you get to tell Peter without telling me first.'

  Five minutes later she re-entered the ward.

  Pascoe looked up and said, 'Still nice and peaceful. Hey, you going somewhere?'

  Ellie had brushed her hair and used her minimalist make-up to maximum effect.

  'No. You are. I want you to go home, have a bath, get a couple of hours sleep in a real bed. No, don't argue. Come here.'

  She led him to the window and swung the panel so that it acted as a mirror.

  'See that antique wreck standing next to that gorgeous woman? That's you. If Rosie opens her eyes and sees you first, she'll think she's done a Rip Van Winkle and slept for fifty years. So go home. Sleep with your mobile under your pillow. Slightest change and I'll ring till you waken, I promise.'

  'Ellie, no . ..'

  'Yes. And now. I've fixed a lift for you, that nice young girl from your office called . . . Shirley Novello, is it? She said she'd be delighted to run you home. She's down in the car park waiting.'

  'Shirley? Again? Jesus . ..'

  'She's in touch with him, too, I gather. Listen, she wants help and she must think you're the only one if she's willing to come after you here. Perhaps she's delusional, but I think in this case, if you can help, you ought to.'

  He shook his head, not in denial but in wonderment.

  ‘You are .. . ineffable,' he said.

  ‘Oh, I don't know. I'm looking forward to being effed quite a lot when this is over,' she said lightly. 'Now go.'

  ‘Only if you'll promise to do the same when I get back.'

  'Drive around with a DC? You must be joking. Yes, yes, I promise.'

  They kissed. It was, she realized, the first intimate non-comforting contact they'd had since this began.

  She watched him go, hoping her homeopathic theory would work, if that was the right way to describe putting him in the way of other parents' woe at the loss of a child. No, it wasn't the right way, she told herself, turning now to look down at Rosie. They weren't going to lose their child. There was a candle burning for her. And, like Dido, after all, her mother would make a candle of herself if that's what it took.

  'Hello, sir.'

  'And hello to you, too, Shirley,' said Pascoe, getting into the car. 'Kind of you to drive me home. You've got between here and there to tell me what you want to tell me.'

  Novello thought, if you want to know what a man will look like when he's old, put him by his child's sickbed for a couple of nights.

  But she responded to his crisp speech, not his wrecked appearance, and ran off the resume she had prepared with a Wieldian conciseness and lucidity.

  He offered no compliment. Indeed, he seemed to offer little attention, apparently more interested in the crackling air traffic of her car radio which she'd left switched on.

  She reached down to turn it off, but he grasped her hand and said, 'No, leave it.'

  It was the first time they'd made physical contact and in other circumstances with other officers she'd have suspected it was the preliminary to a pass and prepared for defensive action.

  He held the hand for a second, then she had to change gear and he released it.

  'So,' he said. 'Benny's been seen in Dendale and in the Central Library by a reliable witness. Agnes drew the money out of the bank. And Geordie Turnbull's been attacked.'

  Novello, who'd included the latter piece of information only in the interests of comprehensiveness, said, 'Yes, but that'll probably be some local nutter, someone like this Jed Hardcastle, perhaps

  'Geordie Turnbull's been living in Bixford for years and making no secret about it, not unless you think having your name printed in big red letters over a fleet of bulldozers is being secretive. Why wait so long?'

  'Because of the Dacre girl going missing,' said Novello, stating the obvious, and wondering whether this had been such a good idea. 'That started it all up again.'

  To her surprise, he laughed. Or made a sound which had a familiar resemblance to laughter.

  'Shirley, you should get it out of your mind that what happened to those families who lost their daughters is something that needs starting up again. It's a permanent condition, no matter how long they survive. Like losing an arm. You might learn to live without it, but you never learn to live as if you've still got it.'

  He spoke with a vehemenc
e she found disturbing and when he saw the effect he was having on her, he took a breath and made himself relax.

  'Sorry,' he said. 'It's just that in a case like this you share in the woes of others only insofar as they relate to, or underline your own. When I heard Rosie was ill, the fact that the Dacres' child was missing, probably abducted, possibly already murdered, may not have gone out of my mind altogether, but it certainly dropped right out of my consciousness. Understandable initial reaction, you think? Perhaps so. And the perspective will return. But never the same. I know now that if I was within an arm's length of fingering the collar of Benny or any other serial killer, and someone said, "Rosie needs you," I'd let him go.'

  He realized that his laid-back confidentiality was troubling her as much as his previous vehemence. He recalled a long time ago in his early days with Dalziel, the Fat Man in his cups had come close to talking about his broken marriage, and he'd shied away from the confidence, unwilling to know what his superior might regret telling.

  'In other words, I think we need to look beyond the Dendale families for Turnbull's attacker. And you say he didn't want to report it? That's interesting.'

  'Yes, sir,' she said, aware that the distance between the hospital and Pascoe's house was growing shorter. 'But I'm not really concerned with that bit of the investigation any more.'

  But you've not forgotten it was you who got the lead in the first place, thought Pascoe, detecting resentment.

  He said gently, 'I know that being mucked around can be a real pain sometimes. But you've got to keep the whole investigation in view. That's what the people you think are mucking you around are doing. Don't get mad, get promoted. Mr Dalziel has thought from the start that Lorraine Dacre's disappearance was connected with Dendale fifteen years back. I didn't agree, but the more I see the way things are working out, the more I think he may be right. So, don't create connections, but don't overlook them, either.'

  'No, sir,' said Novello. 'They do keep on jumping up, don't they? I read the old files. You recall that girl, Betsy Allgood, the one who got away from Benny? Well, seems she's back too!'

  She reached into the back seat, picked up the Post and dropped it in Pascoe's lap.