by Gwen Moffat
‘Well, maybe, but you can’t go up there on your own, and I can’t come with you tomorrow; we’ll be crowded out as the word spreads.’
‘I’ll be careful. I’m not about to do any climbing – and you’ll know where I’ve gone.’ She was walking to the door as she spoke and suddenly she pulled up short. ‘Damn! Look at that!’
Great cumulus clouds were boiling up the sky, showing over the tops of the sycamores, expanding as they watched. Thunder muttered among the western fells. Eleanor inhaled sharply.
‘Oh, poor Phoebe! This could finish her. Is there nothing we can do?’
‘We can go to the quarry. Now.’
They were forestalled. When they reached the turning circle at the head of the dale they found two Mountain Rescue vehicles and a police car parked there. As they stood beside Miss Pink’s Peugeot, sniffing the stagnant air, speculating on which way the searchers had gone, men approached the quarry gate from the far side, walking without haste. Obviously they had found nothing. They were a second team that had been called in to assist the local men. Not unkindly, having sized up Miss Pink’s workmanlike gear, they said that they had searched the quarry meticulously; definitely Phoebe wasn’t there. The consensus now was that she’d gone north from Closewater.
One of the police officers was a woman wearing an anorak and trainers. Seeing Miss Pink’s expression when it was suggested that a walker could deviate so far from her proposed route she mistook scepticism for concern. ‘She could be in a barn,’ she said reassuringly. ‘If she broke her ankle, say, she might have taken shelter and be waiting for rescue.’
Eleanor stirred, started to protest and stopped. Miss Pink tried to visualize a feisty little mountaineer in a barn with an injured ankle waiting for rescue.
‘Nothing more we can do tonight,’ the team leader said. ‘Blamire’s covered the far side of Blaze and the eastern fells. Tomorrow we’ll concentrate on the ground north of Closewater.’
‘She’d have crawled down!’ Eleanor exclaimed as they settled themselves in the Peugeot for the return. ‘No way would she have holed up in a barn. And there aren’t any barns between here and Gowk. And she didn’t go into the central fells, she had to be back at six for Cooper.’
***
The storm struck at ten o’clock. The wind came first, roaring up the dale like an approaching train, lashing the trees and beating down tall garden plants, stakes and all. The air was full of flying leaves and twigs. Lightning slashed the gloom and in Phoebe’s woodshed Cooper’s nerve broke and he made a dash for the nearest house, Ashgill, where Miss Pink dried him with a towel, crooning reassurance, and allowed him to sleep on her bed.
The morning was a sweet contrast: noisy with birds – those that weren’t more concerned with grooming and warming their backs in the sun; trees dripped like rain but already the lawns were steaming, people waiting a while before going out to salvage what they could of beaten lupins and columbine. Down in the bottom the Rutting Beck rushed between its banks, coloured amber from the peat.
At Sunder Misella tied a clean apron over her rusty black frock and made for the door. ‘And don’t you let none of ’em near that water,’ she flung at Sherrel who was feeding the baby. ‘Not Bobby neither. Send him up to Sleylands where he can’t come to no harm.’
Curled on the sofa, his mouth full of peanut butter sandwich, Bobby nodded quick agreement without taking his eyes off the television screen. But unlike his siblings he wasn’t watching Kilroy, he was avoiding eye contact with his grandmother. Bobby was dyslexic but as if to compensate he had a vivid imagination. He knew that if he were to meet Misella’s eye she’d see that he was thinking that it was market day and Jacob would be in town. Giving her time to get out of sight, and waiting until his mother had gone into the kitchen, he slipped out of the door and through the front gate, closing it silently behind him.
The lane was empty, gleaming with long puddles and stretches of silt marked only by a squirrel’s prints and Misella’s shoes. Halfway to the road there was a gap low in the hedge; it had been made by a badger and enlarged by Bobby and it was one of his private runs. He dropped down, nimble as a weasel, and squeezed through to the bank of the beck. He stopped, his eyes alight.
Misella wasn’t being over-cautious when she stressed the dangers of high water but Bobby was one of those rare children: traveller’s child, country boy, who, if not old enough to think laterally, had an animal’s instinctive fear of elemental power. So his initial delight in the flood was followed by boredom and he wandered a short distance upstream scowling, trying to think what options were left if playing in the beck was impossible, and there was no one at Sleylands. He didn’t count Mabel.
The water was going down but slowly; it had been high overnight. He kicked through the litter of dead rushes that marked the limit of the flood, looking for treasures in a desultory fashion and finding nothing, but then he was on the outside of a bend. On the opposite side the bank was higher, undercut, and there was a bay and a heap of wrack that looked promising.
He didn’t consider trying to cross at this point; he ran down the near bank following a vestigial trail – a quick glance round as he came to the footbridge below the Fat Lamb – and he was across and trotting up the far bank. Now he was on a proper footpath and saw that there was someone ahead, the mud marked by a cleated boot.
He came to the bay and slithered down the broken bank. His face fell as he surveyed the pile of plant debris which he saw now was caught about a plastic feed sack. Jacob threw rubbish in the beck when he didn’t tip in the woods. Bobby kicked the pile apart and, finding nothing more than a broken styrofoam beaker, he threw the empty sack in the water and turned to climb the bank. A pale object caught his eye: the brim of a cap.
It was soaked of course but, turning it in his hands, he was enthralled. Even dark and wet he could see that it wasn’t old: a blue denim cap with a pale brim – different from the cheap caps his mates wore. The picture (as he thought of it) was extraordinary, even to an eight-year-old. There were mountains and little trees and a big bird; there was a bear and a wolf: all minuscule but distinct. There were some letters too but he ignored those, he couldn’t read. Under the pale brim there was the other kind of writing (he could recognize a difference between letters and figures) and this had a vaguely familiar look to it …
‘Bobby Lee?’ a voice said.
He whipped the cap behind his back and gaped at a large old lady on top of the bank. He nodded dumbly. How long had she been watching? Had she seen him throw the sack in the beck? That was littering, they said so at school.
‘I am Miss Pink,’ she announced chattily. ‘You’re from Sunder. What have you got there?’
‘Me ’at.’ He gulped. ‘I dropped un in t’beck.’ Mouth pursed in defiance he slammed it on his head, the wrong way round.
‘No school?’ Miss Pink asked.
‘It’s half-term, miss.’ He could have kicked himself, thinking she was a teacher. She couldn’t be; a teacher would have known it was half-term.
She nodded. ‘Of course. You were driving Mr Swinburn’s tractor yesterday.’
‘Not driving.’ He was quick. ‘Just sitting on it like.’ His confidence returning, he added loftily, ‘I help out when un needs an extra hand.’
Miss Pink didn’t pursue the matter of the tractor. She frowned at the beck. ‘Where did you cross?’
He gestured downstream. ‘There’s a bridge.’
‘That’s right.’ She regarded him thoughtfully. Too thoughtfully. She was wondering what he was doing on this side of the beck.
He shifted his feet. ‘There’s me mam! I gotta go now.’
He clawed his way up the bank trying to keep as much distance as possible between them, and set off down the path – too fast – slipping a little in his trainers. She followed slowly. Her hearing was good and she knew that no one had called him. What was making him so nervous? Was it that reference to driving the tractor, or was it that he shouldn’t have been playing on
this side of the beck? Or was it merely because he’d dropped his good hat in the water?
The plastic feed sack floated down the Rutting Beck provoking rage in Tom Howe, resignation in his wife. Ardent conservationists, the Howes carried bin bags and collected litter on their walks. Tom, thin and volatile, whose tendency to ulcers had prompted early retirement from the violence of inner-city classrooms, was feeling particularly frustrated. They hadn’t long moved into their cottage below Borascal and had planned to watch kingfishers this morning, but the storm had put paid to that. No bird could feed in this opaque water, even the dippers were sitting tight until it cleared. Then the feed sack came by and Tom erupted.
‘It doesn’t have to be Jacob,’ Patsy said comfortably; she had a soft spot for Mabel and her free range eggs. ‘They all throw rubbish in the beck,’ she went on – which wasn’t true but it was second nature to remain calm in the face of her husband’s tirades, so bad for his stomach. ‘Is that a buzzard?’ she asked quickly, aiming for distraction.
‘Sounds like one.’ He was grudging. Now that they were retired and looked upon themselves as genuine country folk instead of city types who owned a holiday cottage, they were taking up Nature seriously. He couldn’t ignore a buzzard.
‘There it goes,’ Patsy whispered as a large shape crossed the line of the beck, oddly sinister glimpsed through the leaf canopy.
Downstream from Borascal the water ran through straggling woodland: alders on the banks, ashes and oaks on drained slopes above. The alders had been deep in the water and when the level dropped, all the scourings of the dale were left tangled in low branches: mats of dead vegetation, old posts and planks, more plastic.
‘He’s landed,’ Patsy said, nudging Tom’s arm. ‘There should be a nest. They’ll be feeding young, won’t they?’ A motherly soul, she treated him as she’d treated the children, and it worked.
‘It’s still calling.’ He transferred his attention from the storm debris to the sky. A shape glided clean of the foliage. ‘That’s no buzzard!’ His voice rose. ‘Look, see its tail? It’s forked.’
‘It’s the kite!’ Patsy gasped. Some distraction this.
‘Oh, my God!’ His eyes were shining. She hesitated, blinking, biting her lip. Should she try to put the brake on? But this was pleasure, not a negative emotion. In any event, he was rushing along the bank.
‘You’re making too much noise!’ She tried to call softly, he was going to drive the birds away.
He did. One took off, then the other, but at this point the trees on the opposite bank had been felled. A field of oats came right to the beck and the watchers had a clear view of two birds like large buzzards but with the unmistakable cleft tail. They floated across the oats to land on a dead elm. Two pairs of binoculars rose simultaneously.
After a while Patsy said, ‘They’re waiting. They have to be nesting here. They want to come back.’ He said nothing. She tried again. ‘The young birds will be getting cold.’
‘Rubbish. It’s the end of May. They’ll be fully feathered.’
Patsy started to stroll upstream, trying to remember where kites nested: rock faces or trees?
A crow flapped across the beck cawing angrily. Crows’ nests, that was it; big raptors used unoccupied crows’ nests. So this crow was trying to regain its old nest? Or the kites wanted to raise a second brood and they were after an occupied crows’ nest? There was indeed something big in an alder ahead but it was too low for a nest; it could have been around high water mark last night. Which was how debris came to be snagged there – and that explained the kites and a carrion crow: all scavengers. A drowned sheep hung in the branches, hindquarters dangling, something large but curiously familiar at the end of the legs.
Fascinated, mesmerized by such a common object in so alien a position, too disorientated to call to Tom, she advanced step by cautious step and stopped, quite close, close enough for her brain finally to name the object on the hoofs that her eyes refused to identify – or wouldn’t. It was a boot.
No sheep. Coldly and carefully she traced the upward line of a gaitered leg, then came a litter of dead rushes but a shape showing through, little larger than a sheep. No head was visible or at least she couldn’t make one out, and thinking that there might not be one, she retreated thoughtfully, wondering how she was going to distract Tom in this situation.
Chapter Five
At eleven thirty Isa Lambert was in the Lamb, Honeyman having trawled the village in an effort to find someone, anyone, to help out in view of the expected influx of customers on the second day of the search. Sure enough, half an hour after opening the bar was overflowing, people not only sitting outside at the tables but lining the wall on the far side of the road. Drifting across the tarmac they gave the scene the air of a French place rather than a thoroughfare. Honeyman was beaming and even Dorcas looked smug. As for Isa, carefully groomed but becomingly flushed, wearing a blue frock with bootlace straps and gold sandals, she pranced between tables and the bar, happily aware of speculative glances and the way the frock clung to her skin in the heat. Absorbed in the bustle of a mainly masculine atmosphere she ignored the women and didn’t even notice that one was so old she couldn’t possibly be a reporter despite the fact that she was sitting with three of them.
Miss Pink, who had no aversion to sharing a picnic table, sipped her vermouth on the rocks and listened to the gossip. This was an idle moment but unlooked for. She could formulate no plan of action. With so many young fit searchers on the hill she would be redundant; on the other hand to walk, as she had done earlier this morning, seemed heartless in the circumstances. Like the reporters she was waiting for something to happen.
More holidaymakers arrived: bursting with the news that there were divers in the beck not a mile below the village. The Lamb emptied, leaving only Miss Pink, the Honeymans, Isa and the new arrivals: two smart young fellows who went in the bar. Miss Pink drifted after them.
‘But why divers?’ Isa was asking.
‘Apparently the body’s caught up,’ one of the strangers told her with relish.
‘She’ll have been washed down in t’flood,’ Dorcas said, as if it was an everyday occurrence.
Isa shook her head in disbelief. ‘How could she?’
‘You know her?’ Miss Pink asked. The girl turned blank eyes on her. ‘Phoebe Metcalf?’ Miss Pink’s tone was soft, too soft; the girl’s eyes rolled and she crumpled, one of the young men having just time enough to catch her head before it struck the stone floor.
‘Now look what you done,’ Honeyman told Miss Pink, evidently amused.
‘Put her on t’settle,’ Dorcas ordered, emerging from the bar to push Isa’s head to her knees.
The girl recovered quickly but she stared blankly through rather than at them, pushing away the brandy offered by Honeyman. After a while she said weakly, ‘I never knew anyone who died before.’
‘I have to go and tell Miss Salkeld,’ Miss Pink said.
‘You know her too?’ Honeyman was astonished.
‘Aren’t you a reporter?’ Isa said. ‘No, of course not.’
‘I’m staying at Ashgill.’ Miss Pink frowned. ‘Why do you assume it’s Phoebe? We don’t know that it’s her.’
‘No one else is missing,’ Dorcas said. ‘We’ll know soon enough.’
After a while a few people drifted back. The body hadn’t been identified but it was that of a little woman, very old, dressed like a walker, except that she’d lost a boot. No one had any doubt that it was Phoebe.
***
Mabel Swinburn was washing eggs when the newsflash came through on the local radio: not that it was Phoebe but that the search was being called off, the body of en elderly woman having been found drowned in a flooded beck. Mabel’s hands were still as she stared through the open window to the Closewater track where Phoebe had passed two days ago and waved to Jacob but didn’t speak. And Jacob and young Bobby had gone off in the opposite direction …
Her son-in-law’s old van appeared in
the yard gateway and rattled over the cobbles. Time they had a decent car, she thought distractedly as her daughter emerged, waved, and strode to the back door.
‘You heard t’news?’ Mabel was tense.
‘No. What?’
‘Phoebe. They found her in t’beck.’
‘Oh, Mum! Drowned, you mean? That’s horrible. How did it happen? That poor little lady. You’d never expect it, would you? She was so nimble.’
Mabel shrugged and picked up an egg. ‘It would have been nice if one of us could have said goodbye.’
Jean gaped. ‘Well – yes, but she wasn’t a relative. You mean she died all alone.’ There was a momentary silence. ‘Dad saw her. Didn’t she say anything – call out to him?’
Mabel was studying the egg as if it had been laid by something alien. ‘Him and Bobby went in the wrong direction,’ she said dreamily, seeing the image in her mind. ‘She waved just.’
‘Bobby was up here on Sunday?’
Her mother looked up, frowning. ‘No – yesterday.’ She gasped. ‘I’m going senile. It was Sunday Phoebe went by, of course. It were Miss Pink as called yesterday. Twice. She came up in the evening for eggs. A very gossipy lady.’
‘No, Mum, you gossip. I met her. Martin has no time for her: another accident waiting to happen, he says.’
Mabel wasn’t listening. ‘I wonder if your dad knows. Someone at market must have picked it up.’
Jacob, who had nothing to sell today and had come to town merely to have a pint and a crack with his cronies from other dales, was considering a pen of Swaledales when someone told him the missing woman had been found in the Rutting Beck.
‘You were one of t’last to see her, weren’t you?’ observed Ben Thornthwaite who grazed land north of Closewater.
‘On Borascal side,’ Jacob grunted. ‘More folk coulda seen her your way.’ He thought about that. ‘Depends on where she fell in,’ he added.