Dalziel 17 On Beulah Height

by Reginald Hill

  He was back there again, and this time they were all with him, in that squalid hole with the rising waters lapping ever higher, and the two faces so close together, both so contorted with pain that perhaps it was difficult to tell in that dim light who was torturer, who victim.

  Except that one went back each morning to a world of warmth and light while the other lay bound in chains, surrounded by darkness and lapped with freezing water.

  Then it was easy to tell, thought Pascoe.

  He said, 'So he never talked. And you let him die.'

  Wulfstan said, 'Yes. I'm not sure if I meant to. If I'd have been able to. But I had to go away for a couple of days. I came back on the day that Elizabeth .. . Betsy went missing. When they found her and I heard her story that she'd been attacked by Benny near Neb Cottage, I thought... I don't know what I thought, but part of it was relief that he must have got out, that he was still alive. The next night I went down to Heck. The water had risen considerably. I could see at once he hadn't got away but he must have made a superhuman effort to pull the chain out of the wall ... I could see one of his arms sticking out into the water. A block of stone above the entrance hole had collapsed and trapped it. I reached down into the water and touched his skin. It was cold. I tried to push it back into the cellar but couldn't. So I covered it with bits of rubble and went away.'

  'How did that make you feel?' said Pascoe. 'Knowing you'd killed him.'

  Wulfstan considered this, his lips pursed as though it were some unusual taste he were trying to identify, or a rare wine.

  'Sad,' he said finally.

  'Sad that you'd killed him?'

  'Sad that he'd died without telling me what I wanted to know.'

  Pascoe shook his head, but in sorrow not in disgust. He should perhaps have felt a sense of outrage, but it wasn't there. Not after the past few days.

  Dalziel said, 'You done, Peter?'

  'Yes.'

  'Ivor, you got something more to say?'

  Why was he so keen to let the D C have her head? wondered Pascoe. In murder investigations as in motor cars, back seats were not the kind of place you expected to find Andy Dalziel.

  'Yes, sir. Just a bit,' said Novello. 'I don't think you felt sad, Mr Wulfstan. Why should you when you'd got what you were after? With the prime suspect mysteriously disappeared, no one was going to waste any more time looking, were they?'

  'Looking for what? For my child?'

  'No! For the real killer. He was home and free. And that must have made him really happy.'

  She spoke with a force born partly of moral contempt, but mainly of a desire to provoke a response. She's so sure she's right, thought Pascoe sympathetically. She's desperate to be right! This was what Dalziel was at. There were some lessons best learned in public. And one of them was that being a step in front of everyone else was fine until, in your efforts to keep ahead, it became a step too far.

  'So how about that, Mr Wulfstan?' said Dalziel pleasantly. 'Any chance of this being a cover-up 'cos it were you took the little lasses all along?'

  Not just a lesson then. The Fat Man was making sure this time round no possibility, however improbable, didn't get its airing.

  Wulfstan wasn't registering horror or indignation, but sheer incomprehension as if he were being addressed in a foreign language. He looked towards his wife as if in search of an interpreter. She shook her head and said almost inaudibly, 'This is vile ... Superintendent, this is just not possible . . .'

  'Well, some bugger thought it was,' said Dalziel. 'Gave us a ring, said to take a closer look at Mr Wulfstan. Sounded like a woman. Or a man pitched high. How's your falsetto, Mr Krog?'

  Krog said easily, 'Too false to deceive an ear like yours, Mr Dalziel.'

  Tone, expression, body language, were perfectly right. But it was a role, Pascoe detected. A chosen response, not a natural one. Impossible to prove, but he'd have bet his Christmas bonus the Turnip made the call. Which was pretty safe as cops didn't get bonuses. And he must resist Dalziel's invasive terminology!

  Wulfstan, pale before, had turned a dreadful white as he finally admitted the enormity of the accusation. Interestingly it wasn't Dalziel but Novello, its first mover, that he turned on.

  'You stupid sick child,' he grated. 'What do you know about anything?'

  She stood up to him.

  'I know you've killed one girl,' she snapped back. 'I just want to find out if she was the first.'

  She was standing, he was sitting, but it still resembled a David vs Goliath tableau as he strained forward in his chair, his face twisted in anger. Very good likeness to the nix now, thought Pascoe, readying himself to intervene.

  'Pay her no heed, Walter. Every bugger knows she's talking a load of bollocks. Every bugger save her, that is.'

  The phraseology and accent might have been Andy Dalziel's but the voice was Elizabeth Wulfstan's.

  She touched Wulfstan's arm, and he subsided. And turning her attention from Novello to Dalziel with a completeness which was like a door shut in the DC's face, she went on. 'You there, glorrfat, you know this is bollocks. Walter's told you what happened with yon poor lass. It were dreadful but it were an accident. So why don't I call his solicitor, we'll all go round to the cop shop, you take his statement, then we can all go home. I mean, this is a waste of time, isn't it? I haven't heard any cautions, I don't see any tape recorders. I'm off to Italy tomorrow and I'd like to get a good night's sleep.'

  Dalziel looked at her, and smiled, and shook his head, and murmured, 'Little Betsy Allgood. Who'd have credited it? Little Betsy Allgood turning into a star.'

  She scratched her bald head and said, 'Nay, Andy, I've a ways to go yet.'

  'Aye, but you'll get there, lass,' he said. 'You've come this far, what's going to stop you now?'

  'You mebbe, if you keep us here all bloody night,' she retorted.

  'Nay, you're free to go any time, Betsy,' he said. 'What's to keep you here? You've done what you set out to do. Come back. Sung your songs. Made your peace. But afore you go, there's a little matter you could help us with.'

  He held up his hand. Wield, with that almost telepathic sense of cue which was a necessary survival technique for the Fat Man's acolytes, dipped into the files and papers he was carrying and produced the handwritten blue sheets.

  Reactions: Wulfstan indifferent, hardly registering; Krog, blue- eyed, blank-faced innocence; Elizabeth, frowning, gaze flickering over the others as if assessing how the sheets had got into Dalziel's

  hands; Chloe, head back, eyes closed, the position she'd assumed after her faint denial of the possibility of her husband's involvement; Inger Sandel, on the piano stool, apparently more interested in the keyboard than the conversation .. .

  'Seems you thought later you might have got a bit confused about what happened that night you went after your cat,' said Dalziel. 'Nice to get the record straight.'

  'Should've thought after what we've just heard you'd got the record straight as you're ever likely to get it,' said Elizabeth.

  'There's nowt like hearing it from the horse's mouth.'

  She flashed one of her rare smiles.

  'That's what you think of my singing, is it?'

  'I think you hoped you could close things off here with your singing,' said Dalziel. 'That was the idea, wasn't it? Come back, get it out of your system, quick march into the rest of your life? But the past's like people, luv. They need to be properly buried else they'll keep coming after you forever. Benny really is back now, so we can give him a proper send off. But what about them others? You think some miserable Kraut songs in a disused chapel will do the trick? I don't think so. Ask the Hardcastles. Ask the Telfords. Ask Chloe and Walter here who've tret you like their own daughter all these years.'

  'And she's been a good daughter to me,' proclaimed Chloe Wulfstan, suddenly fully awake. 'A second chance. More perhaps than I deserved. Grief makes you seffish . . . Oh, God, when I think of the pain she put herself through . .. Betsy, I'm sorry, I've tried to ma
ke amends

  She was gripping the younger woman's hand and looking at her with desperate appeal to which Elizabeth, however, responded only with a frown.

  Pascoe coughed gently. Dalziel glanced at him with something like relief and nodded. They had worked together long enough to have sketched out faint demarcation lines. In Dalziel's words, 'I'll kick 'em in the goolies if you'll shovel the psycho-crap.'

  Pascoe said, 'I don't think you need be too hard on yourself, Mrs Wulfstan. You see, I don't think that Betsy's anorexia and bleaching her hair was really an attempt to turn herself into Mary.

  Or if it was, it wasn't for your sake, certainly not just for your sake. No. It was to turn herself into the kind of daughter she thought her own father would have preferred. Fair-haired, slender, attractive, graceful. Everyone thought the short cropped hair and boyish clothes were sops to her father's disappointment at not having a son. But I don't think so, Elizabeth. I think they were your mother's deliberate attempt to make you as un-girl-like as possible. She wanted to make you invisible to him. But you, what you wanted was visibility. Even after he was dead. Perhaps you thought it was because of the way you looked that he died. You blamed yourself for not being what he wanted. Which brings us to the question, how did you know what he wanted? How your mother knew ... well, I think a wife has an instinct. There may be deep layers of pretence which will never permit a public acknowledgement, but she knows. And sometimes the knowledge becomes unbearable. But a little girl . . . Could be it was your sheer invisibility which was the trick. I bet you followed him around ... I bet you could spot him half a mile away in a good light. Just the merest glimpse up the fell would be enough. Yes, I bet that was it, Betsy. I bet that was it.'

  It wasn't working. He'd kept going at such length in the hope of seeing some cracks appearing, but there was nothing on the woman's face except that same frown of concentration. The others more than made up for it, however, as the implications of what he was saying got through. Wulfstan had emerged from his dark inner world, Krog's features had been surprised by a natural feeling. Sandel looked up from her piano amazed, and Chloe's grip on her daughter's hand came close to being an armlock.

  She said, 'Betsy, please, what's he mean? What is he trying to say?'

  'Pay no heed,' said Elizabeth harshly. 'Load of riddles. It's the way these buggers talk when they've got nowt to say.'

  'Betsy, we can't pursue the dead, however guilty,' said Pascoe. 'But the living need to speak out. Think of the pain your silence has caused. OK, a mixed-up child can't be blamed for keeping quiet, but you did more than keep quiet, didn't you? You misdirected. Think of the consequences. Think of that poor man drowning in a cellar. Think of little Lorraine. All these spring from your silence. There has to be an end.'

  'Aye,' she said dragging her arm free from Chloe's grip. 'And I've reached it. I've had enough of this. I'm off first thing in the morning and I'd like a good night's sleep if no one else would. Walter, I'm sorry the way things have worked out, but they can't do much to you for an accident. Chloe . . .'

  In one last desperate appeal, Chloe said, 'Elizabeth, if you know anything, please, please, tell us.'

  'Know what? What should I know?' cried Elizabeth.

  'Where she is. Where my daughter is! Tell me. Tell me!'

  Last chance, thought Pascoe. But to admit she knew would be to admit everything. Not least that she had let the suffering of her adoptive parents stretch out over all those years. Would she have the strength? He could see it was tearing her apart.

  He murmured something to Wield, who delved into the files he was carrying and came up with the map he'd drawn of Dendale fifteen years earlier. He gave it to Pascoe, raising his eyebrows interrogatively. Pascoe took it in his left hand at the same time showing Wield what he held in his right.

  Instantly Wield was back on the sunlit fellside, the dale spread out below him like the Promised Land, behind him the fold built from stones first raised into walls here four thousand years before, beside him the dark, wiry shepherd, his dogs obedient at his feet, and in the gloaming air the song of larks and the bleating of the folded sheep .. .

  You bastard! thought Wield, recalling his thoughts when he realized the dead sheep had been used to hide the missing child's whereabouts. Different man, but yes, the same trick!

  And Pascoe like a conjurer held up the map and CD, then turned the latter through forty-five degrees so that the silhouetted face became the outline of the Dendale fells with a formalized sun arrowing its rays down into what had been the girl's mouth.

  He knew now what the notes coming out of her mouth signified. Ellie had recalled the presenters discussing it on the record review programme she had been listening to that Sunday morning which now seemed a million light years away.

  'Mahler's Second is known as the Resurrection Symphony,' she'd said. 'It's about the awakening of the dead, and judgement, and redemption. These bars are a quote from the first sounding of the resurrection theme, and there was a lot of speculation why she'd used them instead of a quote from the lieder themselves.'

  Well, the speculation was over.

  He held the disc cover close to the singer's eyes.

  'I think you've told us where Mary and the others are already, Betsy,' he said. 'I think you've been longing to tell somebody for ages. You want it to be finished, you want to start moving forward, don't you? But you know there can't be any hope of redemption and renewal without resurrection. That's what you want to tell us, isn't it, Betsy? We'll catch up with them on Beulah Height. In bright sunlight. The weather's bright on Beulah Height.'

  And though very little physical change was possible, it was as if they saw Elizabeth Wulfstan shrink to Betsy Allgood as she sat heavily on her chair and began crying.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Though he'd only heard them once, Pascoe could not get the words of the song out of his mind. They sounded there as he lay in bed and they were still with him next morning as he toiled up the fell.

  Oh, yes, they've only gone out walking,

  Returning now, all laughing and talking.

  There was no laughing and talking among the men who laboured up the hillside with him. It was already warm enough to make them sweat under the burden of picks and shovels, even though the sun had not yet risen high enough to fill the valley. But up ahead the eastern flanks of the double peak were already washed with gold.

  We'll catch up with them on Beulah Height

  In bright sunlight.

  The weather's bright on Beulah Height.

  Now they were close enough to see the sheep fold, a semicircle of dry-stone wall built against the craggy face of the saddle.

  Still no one spoke. Like men in a dream they moved, needing no instructions when they reached the fold, but advancing on the crag as if to some well-rehearsed choreography, and swinging their picks in unison as they probed for the weakness they knew must be present in its apparently solid facade.

  Three times they swung and three times they struck, and at the third blow a strange thing happened.

  Sparks flew as metal clashed against granite and all at once the air seemed to ignite as a bright lava of sunlight poured down the ridge into the hollow of the fold.

  At the same time a huge slab of rock swung open like the gates of a fortress.

  The men stepped back, amazed. And fearful too. Only Pascoe held his ground, straining his eyes to see into that black cavern, straining them so much that after a while his fancy created the impression of movement.

  Fancy? This was no fancy. There was movement in there. He could see shapes in the darkness, small forms advancing slowly towards the light.

  And now the first was close enough for the sun to give detail to the uncertain outline. Oh, Christ! It was a child, a girl with long blonde hair, blinking her eyes against the unaccustomed light and bearing in her arms a bouquet of fresh-picked foxgloves. Behind her came another child, also carrying flowers. And another . . . Oh, sweet Jesus. He recognized these children from their ph
otographs. The first was Jenny Hardcastle, the second Madge Telford. And the third Mary Wulfstan, her mother's features unmistakable in the small solemn face.

  How to account for this Pascoe did not know. Nor did he care. His heart was swelling with such joy he could hardly breathe. So this was how it ended. All that pain and grief and despair hadn't been for nothing. They were alive, alive, alive . ..

  But the miracle wasn't over. Another figure came forward. He looked and did not dare believe. Lorraine. Lorraine Dacre, holding her flowers in one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other, as though just awoken from sleep.

  And behind came another . ..

  Now it wasn't joy that pumped Pascoe's heart, it was fear. He was choking. Not with fear of the child he was seeing, but fear of the knowledge that came with her . . . the knowledge that she had no place in this wild, high landscape, that it was only his imagination that could have put her there . . .

  The fifth figure was Zandra Purlingstone.

  He threw back his head and shrieked his rage and despair to the empty sky. For a second it seemed he stood alone on the bare hillside. Then even that illusion was gone. He was lying in his bed with the pearly light of dawn turning his window into a magic lantern screen against which moved the slender boughs of the silver birch which grew at the bottom of his garden.

  He rose and dressed swiftly. He had plenty of time to keep his first appointment of the day, but there was something else he needed to do which took him in quite the wrong direction. Not pausing for breakfast, he got into his car and drove through the still empty streets into town.

  At the hospital, a security man advanced to challenge him, recognized him, and called a greeting. Pascoe raised a hand but did not pause. Lightly he ran up the stairs, waved a hand at a surprised Sister, and went into the small room where Rosie lay.