‘OK, Sarge. Thanks.’
And turning quickly before he could change his mind, she hurried out into the sweaty embrace of the panting sun.
As she got into her car she saw DI George Headingley’s gleaming Lada turn into the car park. She sent her beat-up Golf roaring past him with a casual wave. George had always had a reputation as a careful man, but as retirement loomed closer, carefulness became an obsession. Privately, not a penny was spent unnecessarily and it was rumoured he’d worked out to the hour if not the minute the best time to take his pension. Professionally, he did everything by the book, and if the book didn’t tell him what to do, he did what he thought would please the Chief Constable and Andy Dalziel, not necessarily in that order.
No way if he’d arrived ten minutes earlier would she have been heading out on a hunch. ‘Make us a cup of tea, Shirl,’ he would have said. ‘Then you can take care of answering the phone till the Super gets back.’
But now, with one mighty bound, she was free. She gunned the car up the rising road, wound down the window and pulled up her T-shirt to let the cooling draught play upon her burning skin.
She didn’t stop till she reached the high bend where Geoff Draycott thought the blue estate might have halted. Recognizing that a lot of people would be tempted to stop here for the view, the Council when they improved the road in response to Danby’s growing prosperity had put down some hardstanding to make a small informal car park complete with rubbish bin.
Are we the only race in the world, she wondered, who if they visit a place of great natural beauty where there isn’t a rubbish bin, would just dump their litter all over the ground?
She got out of the car and viewed the view. It was worth looking at in every direction. She had a pair of binoculars with her and through them she scanned the peaceful roofs of Danby, grey and blue slated, red, yellow, brown and ochre tiled, basking and baking far below. Then she followed the winding line of Ligg Beck up the valley. She began to feel her good feeling drain out of her as she reached a police Range Rover and remembered why she was here.
She picked out Maggie Burroughs wearing a very unofficial straw sun bonnet as she pored over a map on the open tailgate and talked into a radio. And standing a little apart in deep conversation with Sergeant Clark was Peter Pascoe, shirt-sleeved, his fair skin pinking, looking very like a twenties young gent out on a walking tour.
She continued her sweep up the valley, moving over the double line of searchers advancing slowly a half mile ahead of the Range Rover, till the slight eastwards twist put the valley head out of her vision.
And finally she came full circle and looked at the closest section, that which fell away immediately beneath her feet.
Now this was interesting. The valley narrowed the further up it you went, and this plus the location of the viewpoint on a spur of ground meant that the deep gash which marked the beck’s course in the upper reaches was relatively close here. Of course the tucks and folds of the terrain meant a lot remained hidden. But a man standing up here and glimpsing a child walking along the path beside the ghyll, say at that point there, would have no problem moving down the valley flank, far less steep on this side than on the Neb, and cutting her off, say there.
She lowered the glasses and studied the scene without them. Now it all looked a lot further off. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? But no reason someone stopping here shouldn’t have a pair of binoculars. And with them it would be all too easy to establish that what you were looking at was one small girl, alone, except for one equally small dog…
All theory, of course. Not to be paraded naked before the sceptical gaze of the Holy Trinity. But clothe it with a couple of relevant facts …
She scanned the ground at the edge of the hardstanding in hope of seeing something to show that someone had headed down the slope. Rapidly she realized it was not a very profitable way of spending her time. She was no Chingachgook to read in bent and heather who had passed this way and when. Also probably every kid in every family who’d ever stopped here had run a little way down the fellside.
She went to the car, found a pair of plastic gloves, and removed the inner liner of the rubbish bin. It was packed full. This would have been a popular stopping place yesterday as the day wore on, and the presence of a Sunday tabloid on the top indicated it hadn’t been emptied since. She tipped the contents on to the ground and began to sift through the lower strata. From her convent school Latin lessons the word haruspex popped into her mind; a soothsayer who based his prognostications on the entrails of animals. Good name for those FBI investigators she’d read about who specialized in the interpretation of trash. Could be Scotland Yard or MI 5 had a few too, but it didn’t rate high in the Mid-Yorkshire training programme. Possibly an expert could have made much of the food containers and wrappings which made up the greater part of the rubbish, but Novello concentrated on the rest and after a few minutes she had isolated a lithium 3V battery of the type used in some cameras, an empty Marlboro Lights cigarette packet, two Sunday papers (one broadsheet, one tabloid), a broken earring, and a tissue with a brown stain that might be blood.
These she bagged separately. The rest she replaced in the plastic liner, which she sealed with tape and placed in the boot of her car. She had no real hope that any of it would have anything to do with the case, but if it did, she didn’t want to have to tell Dalziel that the rest of the potential evidence was in some municipal tip.
Now she scanned her map. There were four farms worth visiting. Her hopes were high. She felt things were going well.
A couple of hours later, things were grinding to a halt. Finding the farms was easy. Finding all the folk who might have been around on Sunday morning was less so. Soon, as she tramped across tussocky heather and grazed her knees and elbows clambering over drystone walls, all that was left of the famous ‘feeling’ was aching muscles and the beginnings of a heat rash under her arms.
But she was determined that whatever other accusation might be aimed at her, half-heartedness wasn’t going to be on the agenda. Thoroughness, an old teacher had once told her, was its own reward. Which was just as well as by the time she crossed off the last farm, she had to acknowledge she had reaped no other.
So finally she came down to the Highcross Inn.
SIX
There was a RESIDENTS PARKING ONLY sign at either end of Holyclerk Street.
Dalziel nipped into a spot ahead of an old lady who scanned his screen furiously for sight of a resident’s disc, found none, started to get out of her car to remonstrate, glimpsed that huge face regarding her with a Buddha’s benevolence, felt her road rage evaporate, and drove on.
Had she followed her first instinct and dropped a lighted match into his petrol tank, Holyclerk Street would not have been surprised. There was very little of human emotion and appetite it hadn’t seen during its long history.
Its name pointed its link with the great cathedral which loomed over the human dwellings like an ocean-going liner over a fleet of bumboats. It stood ‘within the bell’, which meant that anyone living here could set out at a brisk pace on the first note of any summons and guarantee being in his place by the last. Nowadays a house ‘within the bell’ usually cost at least 20 per cent more than a comparable house without, but it was not always thus.
The original medieval street containing the seminary from which it derived its name had by the reign of Queen Anne fallen almost completely into disrepair and disrepute. The timbered buildings had developed such alarming lists and been so often patched and propped, they looked like a file of drunken veterans staggering home from a very hard war. No person of wealth or standing would have dreamt of occupying one, and they had declined to low taverns, verminous lodging houses, and brothels.
That such a civic sore should pustulate within pissing distance of the cathedral was regarded by many good burghers as an offence
against both God and Man. But as a substantial number of the said good burghers actually owned the houses and shared in their profits, Man de
layed so long in providing a remedy that God grew impatient, and one dark September night, having first ensured the wind was in the right quarter, He tripped a drunken punk and her geriatric jo as they climbed the stairway to her reechy bed and sent their link flying like a meteor through a hole in the rotten boards down into the cellar where it landed in an open cask of illicit brandy.
The resultant fire left an ashen scar which for many years was regarded as lively evidence of the wrath of the living God, but when a combination of shanty town and Paddy’s Market looked to be developing there, the City Fathers this time pre-empted the deity by sweeping the area clean of undesirables and initiating a building programme of dwellings fit for dignitaries of the Church.
It was these elegant residences that now lay before Dalziel’s unimpressed eye. He knew little of medieval history and eighteenth-century fires, but he could look back to a period when the well-to-do had demonstrated their well-to-do-ness by migrating to the Green Belt, leaving the likes of Holyclerk Street to fragment into student flats and fly-by-night offices. But the Church had flexed its financial muscle (this was before its Commissioners had demonstrated their inability to serve either God or Mammon by losing several millions), purchased and refurbished, then made a killing when a hugely successful tele-adaptation of the Barchester novels cast a romantic glow over cathedral closes and made living ‘within the bell’ once more the thing.
The sun was laying its golden blade right down the centre of the street so there was no shade to be found. Dalziel thought of following the example of the owner of the white cabriolet parked in front of him which had been left with its top down and its expensive hi-fi equipment on open offer. Surely in these ecclesiastic surroundings such confidence was justified? He wound his window down an air-admitting fraction, walked a step or two away, remembered the Church Commissioners, and returned to wind the window up as far as it would go.
This second passing of the white cabriolet registered that it was a Saab 900, the property of a national car-hire company. He checked the Resident’s parking disc. It was marked temporary and the address on it was 41 Holyclerk Street. The Wulfstan house.
Glancing up at the cathedral tower, he nodded appreciatively and moved on.
At number 41 he leaned on the bellpush a measured second then stepped back and waited.
In its previous posh manifestation he’d guess this street’s doors had been opened by uniformed maids, but nowadays domestic servants were pretty thin on the ground, if only because the kind of people who needed the work weren’t prepared to kow-tow to the kind of prats who needed the servants.
He recognized instantly the woman who opened the door though it was fifteen years since they had met.
And Chloe Wulfstan’s face showed that she recognized him.
‘Mr Dalziel,’ she said.
Age hadn’t changed her much. In fact she looked a lot younger than last time he’d seen her, but that wasn’t so surprising. Then, the news of her daughter’s disappearance not only drained the blood from her face but also melted the flesh from her bones. But he had never seen her cry, and somehow he knew that she hadn’t cried in private either. All her energy had gone to holding herself together even at the expense of locking everything inside.
No point in mucking about.
He said, ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Mrs Wulfstan. You’ll have heard about this lass who’s gone missing from Danby?’
‘It was on the radio,’ she said. ‘And in this morning’s paper. Is there any news?’
The voice was level, conventionally polite, as if he were the vicar being invited to take tea. Fifteen years back he recalled that she’d still retained a trace of the accent of her birth and upbringing on Heck Farm; educated, yes, but enough there to remind you that she was a Mid-Yorkshire lass. Now that had entirely gone. She could have been presenting Woman’s Hour.
Over her shoulder he could see a hallway hung with prints of musical cartoons. Down a broad staircase drifted the tinkle of a piano and a woman’s voice singing.
‘When your mother dear to my door draws near,
And my thoughts all centre there to see her enter
Not on her sweet face first off falls my gaze
But a little past her…’
There was the sound of discord as if someone had banged a hand down on the piano keys and a man’s voice said, ‘No, no. Too much too soon. At this point he is still trying to be matter of fact, still trying to be rational about his own irrational behaviour.’
That voice. He thought he recognized it. Both voices in fact. The woman’s was the lass he’d heard singing on the radio at Pascoe’s the previous morning. Same bloody set of songs too. His memory took him back to the first time he’d heard them … He wrenched it back to the other voice, the man’s. That rather too perfect English. Surely it was the Turnip. Despite Wield’s frequent reminders that Arne Krog was a Norwegian, not a Swede, Dalziel had persisted in his awful joke. Poncy sod had once dared correct his English, and Dalziel was an unforgiving God.
‘Mr Dalziel?’ said Chloe Wulfstan.
He realized he hadn’t answered her question.
‘No. No news,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry for it,’ she said. ‘How are … no, I needn’t ask.’
‘How’re the parents?’ he concluded. ‘Just like you’d expect. You’d likely know the mother. Came from Dendale. Elsie Coe afore she married.’
‘Margaret Coe’s girl? Oh, God. Margaret was very ill last year. Her recovery seemed a miracle. Now I wonder if it wasn’t a curse. Is that a wicked thing to say, Mr Dalziel?’
He shrugged impassively, denying the inclination rather than the qualification to judge.
She went on, in a curious reflective tone. ‘I got used to thinking wicked things, you know. When I saw their sympathetic faces, women like Margaret Coe, I used to think: inside you’re really glad it’s me, not you, glad it’s my Mary who’s gone, not your Elsie or …’
She stopped as if someone had alerted her to her hostessly duties and said, briskly, ‘Is it Walter you want to see, Mr Dalziel? He is here, but he’s in the middle of a meeting about the Music Festival. They have to find a new location for the opening concert … but of course, you’d know that. I’m being very rude keeping you on the doorstep. Do come inside. I’ll let him know you’re here.’
He advanced into the hallway. It was a relief to be out of the sun’s direct rays, but even with all the windows open, its heat walked in with him.
You’d have thought a bugger into solar power would have installed air-conditioning, grumbled Dalziel.
Chloe Wulfstan knocked gently on a door, opened it and slipped inside.
In his brief glimpse into the room which looked like an old- fashioned oak-panelled study, Dalziel saw three people, one full face, one in profile, and one just the back of a head above an armchair. But it was the back of the head that he focused on. He felt something inside him tighten for a second, his stomach, his heart, it wasn’t possible to be anatomically precise, but it was the kind of feeling he couldn’t recolfect having had for a long long time.
The door opened again and Mrs Wulfstan came out. The piano had started again upstairs.
‘But a little past her seeking something after
There where your own dear features would appear
Lit with love and laughter …’
The woman in the chair had turned her head and was peering towards the doorway. Their gazes met. Then the door closed.
‘If you can give him just a minute,’ said Chloe Wulfstan apologetically. ‘He should be able to bring the meeting to a close, then the other committee members won’t have to hang around waiting for Walter to return. In here, if you please.’
She led him into a drawing room at the back of the house with French windows wide open on to a long garden whose lawn showed the effect of the drought.
‘One is tempted, of course,’ she said following his gaze. ‘But I’m afraid that we’ve all become water-vigilantes, and i
f anyone thought our lawn was looking a little too green… Quite right too, I suppose. But when I think that we gave up Dendale to provide a sure supply for the future … it makes you think, doesn’t it?’
Her tone was now bright, polite and light.
‘It does that,’ he said. ‘Reservoir’s right down. Do you ever go back to take a look, Mrs Wulfstan?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I never do, Mr Dalziel.’
He studied her for a moment, pulling at his heavy lower lip. It came across as a sceptical assessing stare, but in fact his eyes were seeing another face completely.
‘Would you like a glass of something cold?’ asked Chloe Wulfstan.
‘What? Oh aye, that ‘ud be nice,’ he said. ‘By the by, there’s a car outside, white Saab, got a visitor’s parking disc …’
‘That’s Arne’s. You remember Arne? Ame Krog, the singer. He’s staying with us during the festival. And Inger. His accompanist. She’s here, too.’
‘Well, she would be. Accompanying him,’ said Dalziel. He smiled to show he was attempting a joke but she just looked faintly puzzled, then left the room.
Old habits die hard and Dalziel immediately started wandering round, glancing at the papers on an open bureau, trying the odd drawer, but his heart wasn’t in it. Upstairs the piano had fallen silent again and there’d been another spate of raised voices. Suddenly the door burst open and a tall slim woman strode into the room. She was wearing black cotton trousers and a black T-shirt which accentuated the whiteness of her skin and the paleness of her long ash blonde hair. She stopped dead at the sight of Dalziel and regarded him impassively out of slate-grey eyes which somehow looked ageless by comparison with the rest of her which looked early twenties.
He put the voice and place together and said, ‘How do, Miss Wulfstan. I’m Detective Superintendent Dalziel.’
If he’d expected his prescience to impress, he was disappointed. If anything, she seemed amused, a faint smile touching her long still face like a sunstart on a mountain tarn.
On Beulah Height Page 13
