On Beulah Height

by Reginald Hill

  He took his bow, made no attempt to milk the applause, but went straight into his introduction of Elizabeth.

  He kept it short and flat, but Walter Wulfstan at his worst would have been hard pressed to lower that overheated atmosphere of expectation. And even if he had, the appearance of Elizabeth would have sent it soaring again. Those who had seen only the photos were rocked back by the reality. And those on whose minds the image was printed of a short, plump, plain child with cropped black hair gasped audibly at the sight of this tall elegant woman with the erect carriage of a model, her slim body sheathed in an ankle-length black gown, with long tresses of blonde hair framing the face of a tragic queen.

  Krog turned and walked off, suspecting he could have hopped off backwards, grimacing like an ape, for all the attention anyone was paying him. Someone remembered to applaud, but the clapping was spasmodic and soon done. Silence fell. Outside, sounds swam by like fish seen from a bathyscope, denizens of a completely different world.

  Elizabeth spoke, her Yorkshire vowels startling as growls from a skylark.

  ‘Fifteen years back, over the Neb in Dendale, three little lasses, friends of mine, went missing. I’m singing these songs for them.’

  Inger came in with the short introduction, then Elizabeth started singing.

  And now the sun will rise as bright

  As though no horror had touched the night.

  It took no more than the first few lines of that first song to show Krog that he had been both right and wrong.

  Wrong that she wasn’t ready for this cycle. She sang with a purity of line, an uncluttered directness, which made her performance on disc seem strained and affected. And the piano accompaniment was the perfect complement to this version of her voice which could have been buried in the richer textures of the full orchestra.

  And right that she should never have been allowed to sing them here. In the silence when the first song ended he heard a stifled sob. And many of the faces he saw from his vantage point to the side were stricken rather than rapt. At the least he should have agreed to her request that the concert finished with the cycle, for after this the second half of the programme with its mix of love duets and popular favourites was going to sound tastelessly bathetic.

  He focused on Chloe Wulfstan’s face. The pain he saw there was reason enough to have banned the Mahler even if everyone else in the audience were simply enjoying the performance as a superb example of lieder singing. It was nearly twenty years since he’d met her on his very first appearance at the Festival. To a young singer making his way, this kind of engagement was a necessary staging post on the way to heights. And when he saw his host’s young wife and felt that familiar tightening of the throat which was the first signal of desire, his instinctive reaction had been to chance his arm because he doubted if he’d be this way again.

  He’d given her the full treatment, but she had only smiled - amused, as she admitted later, by his flowery Continental manners - and returned her attention to its main focus, her young daughter.

  He had thought about her for a while, but not for long, and when Wulfstan invited him back the following year he had accepted, not because of Chloe, but simply because he wasn’t yet in a position where he could afford to refuse.

  When he saw her again, it felt like coming home. That summer they became friends. And his relationship with Wulfstan changed too. Another reason for accepting the invitation was that he’d come to realize the man was rather more than just a big frog in the middle of a little northern pool. He had connections all over Europe, not the kind of connections, alas, which oiled the hinges of the doors of La Scala or l’Opera or the Festspielhaus, but a useful network of local introductions which could help bring work and get himself noticed. At a personal level, he found it hard to warm to the man, which should have made the prospect of seducing his wife that much easier; but now that he saw him as in some degree a patron, self-interest turned its cold shower on his loins, and it was almost pure accident when, during his third festival, while strolling with Chloe under the Neb, he slipped while crossing a stream, fell against her, splashing them both, and they kissed as though there was nothing else to do.

  So it had begun. She saw it as ‘the real thing’, whatever the real thing might be, and this might have worried him had she not made it clear that her daughter’s interests came first, and until the girl was fully grown, there was no way Chloe would contemplate leaving Walter. But she was no fool. When he assured her that his love was so strong, he was willing to wait forever, she replied, ‘That’s very noble, Arne, though it could be of course that you’re just delighted to be able to have your cake and ha’penny!’

  What would have happened if the tragedy of fifteen years ago hadn’t intervened, he could only guess. What he knew for sure was that her pain and their separation had affected him in ways he could not begin to understand, and his life had seemed a walk-on part till in the wake of the Elizabeth crisis, she had come back to him once more.

  Now there seemed nothing to prevent her leaving Wulfstan. Instead, she had prevaricated, and finally come back up here to live.

  What had made Krog start poking around his host’s study, he did not know. He had no particular object in mind, just a vague hope that he might find something to give him leverage in prising Chloe and her husband apart. Inger had caught him searching in there, but in her usual uninvolved way, had said nothing and closed the door. When he had found the transcripts and worked out the implications, his first reaction had been dismay. That a man would wish revenge on his daughter’s killer, he understood. That he could chain a suspect against whom nothing had been proved in a hole in the ground and leave him there to drown, baffled his understanding. And the other big question which he didn’t want to ask because he was afraid of the answer was, how much did Chloe know about this?

  Nothing, he assured himself… he could not believe … nothing! Perhaps indeed he had got it all wrong and these were merely the crazy ramblings of a disturbed adolescent. Or perhaps Walter had nothing to do with the presence of Benny in his cellar. But when he had followed him up the Corpse Road on Sunday morning, and again today, and seen him standing there looking down on the re-emerging relicts of Heck, he had been sure.

  Certainty of knowledge did not mean certainty of action. His earlier doubts about the impulse which had made him give the transcripts to Pascoe were now turning to bitter regrets. Why had he made himself an instrument when he could have simply remained an observer? For now, as his gaze moved from the lovely and beloved face of the wife to the ravaged face of the husband, he thought he saw there, as clearly as the returning outline of Dendale village under the searching eye of the sun, the lineaments of guilt and the acceptance of discovery.

  There were only five songs in the cycle but each created a timeless world of grief of its own. So rapt were the listeners that no one turned during the penultimate song when the rear door opened and three men and a woman stepped quietly inside.

  Don’t look so pale! The weather’s bright.

  They’ve only gone to climb up Beulah Height.

  The local reference turned the screw of pain another notch. And its repetition in the closing lines with their heart-rendingly false serenity in which hope comes close to being crushed out of despair, was too much for Mrs Hardcastle who slumped against her husband’s rigid body, silently sobbing.

  We’ll catch up with them on Beulah Height

  In bright sunlight.

  The weather’s bright on Beulah Height.

  Then almost without pause, Inger Sandel launched into the tumultuous accompaniment of the final song.

  Krog, from his viewpoint through the partially open door of the vestry, could see the reactions of the newcomers. Three he knew. Dalziel, his face slab-like, showing nothing of what was

  going on behind those piggy eyes. Wield, his irregular features equally unreadable but giving an impression of an intensity of listening. Pascoe, visibly moved, unable to hide his feelings. And the fo
urth, a woman Krog did not know, young, attractive without being an obvious beauty, her eyes like a policeman’s taking everything in, while her ears heard the music without responding to it.

  The tumult and strife of the song, with its images of foul weather and guilt and recrimination, all began to fade now as the singer emerged from it, like a lost traveller finally achieving peace and shelter.

  By no foul storm confounded

  Elizabeth’s head was back, her gaze fixed high over the heads of her audience.

  By God’s own hands surrounded

  Krog couldn’t see her face but he knew it would be radiant as a saint’s at that moment of martyrdom when the gates of heaven are seen to open.

  They rest

  They rest. Let them rest.Requiescant… That was what this was. A requiem.

  They rest

  Perhaps she was right, he was wrong. If only the police weren’t there … and whose fault was that? Would Pascoe be discreet about the source of the transcripts? Not that it mattered. Chloe would know. Without being told, she would know.

  … as in their father’s house.

  Father’s? Mother’s surely? A slip? Perhaps. But who was noticing?

  The piano wound its way through the long melancholy coda which set its seal of calm acceptance on all the turbulence of loss and sorrow which had gone before. When it finished, no one spoke. No one applauded.

  This was how it should be. Now they should all simply rise and go home.

  Then came a noise like a thunderclap. And another. And another.

  It was the fat policeman, the abominable Dalziel, standing there like the Spirit of Discord, bringing his huge hands together in what came close to a parody of applause.

  Six times he did this. Heads turned but no one joined in. The young woman in the group looked at the fat man with mingled amazement and admiration. The younger man’s eyes closed momentarily in a spasm of embarrassment, then he picked up a CD and found it necessary to examine it closely. Only the third man, the ugly one called Wield, showed no reaction but kept his gaze fixed unblinkingly on Elizabeth.

  After the final clap, Dalziel spoke.

  ‘Ee, that were grand, lass,’ he said, beaming. ‘I do like a good ballad when it’s sung with feeling. Is it the tea break now? This weather, eh? I’ve got a throat like a dried-up culvert.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘What is truth?’ asked Peter Pascoe.

  Sometimes it hangs before you, bright as a star when only one is shining in the sky.

  Sometimes like a very faint star in a sky full of brilliant constellations, you can only glimpse it by looking aside.

  Sometimes you get close enough to reach out your hand to grasp it, only to find your fingers scrabbling at a trompe I’oeil.

  And sometimes a simple shift of perspective can turn a wild goose into a trapped rabbit.

  The real trick was to recognize it when you saw it and not confuse the part with the whole.

  Dalziel was a gut detective, working through animal instinct. Wield used logic and order, arranging and re-arranging things till they made sense. Pascoe saw himself as a creature of imagination, making huge leaps, then waiting hopefully for the facts to catch up with him.

  And Shirley Novello … ?

  In the Range Rover she’d finally got hold of the transcripts.

  She read through them as the vehicle moved at uncomfortable speed along the narrow country roads. The blue sheets she read twice.

  After the second reading she sat back and closed her eyes tight, as if in darkness she had better hope of illumination.

  She was recalling the confused and fragmented feelings of her own early adolescent years. But that had been a period of halcyon calm compared with this. And Betsy Allgood’s trauma hadn’t just started with the onset of adolescence, but much much earlier. A plain, unloved child, starved of affection by a work-obsessedfather and an emotionally unstable mother, with what envy she must have regarded her prettier, happier, cared-for and cosseted friends, and in particular, Mary Wulfstan, who materialized only during holidays to take her place in the Dendale hierarchy like a little princess.

  Yet Mary’s mother was only an Allgood, like Betsy’s own dad. So this special quality, this enviable, desirable ‘otherness’ must spring from her father, the powerful, enigmatic Walter Wulfstan.

  How much did these men understand of this? Pascoe there, after what he’d been through, after all that business of the imaginary friend and the real/unreal nix, surely he must have some inkling of the looking-glass world young girls could wander in and out of without hardly noticing? And Wield, how much did he partake of those qualities of sensitivity and empathic insight conventionally attributed to gays in literature? Or were they just part of a picture as false as that still more prevalent in police circles which painted gays at best as sad and sordid shirt-lifters, at worst as potential child-molesters?

  And the awful Dalziel … God, he was speaking to her. Let no dog bark!

  ‘You asleep, Ivor, or wha’? I were asking what you reckoned to all this now you’ve read that trick-cyclist crap?’

  Here I am, she thought, stuck in a machine with my three-personed God, sticking out like the fourth corner on a triangle, and they’re waiting to hear my opinion! Chance to shine? Or chance to eclipse myself forever? Wise move might be to box clever, check what these great minds think, then go along with them, so that at worst, if they turn out completely wrong, you’re all in the same clag together.

  Pascoe turned in the front seat and smiled at her.

  ‘No need to worry,’ he said. ‘No Brownie points on offer here. It’s about a dead child, four dead children perhaps, and perhaps one ruined one. It’s only the truth that matters. Not personal ambition. Or personal troubles. I know you understand that.’

  Shit, thought Novello. The mind-reading bastard’s reminding me I went clod-hopping into his life when he was sitting by his daughter’s sickbed, and he’s saying, that was all right if it was for the job but not if it was just for me. Who the hell does he think this is? Gentle bloody Jesus?

  But she knew her indignation was partly based on guilt. And there was something else too, something worse because it ran counter to all her private resolve to make her way to the top of this masculine world without paying the price of becoming part of it. It was a feeling of pleasure that maybe she’d got her geometry wrong, maybe this Holy Triangle was really a Holy Circle which had just been drawn wider to include her in … ?

  I won’t be caught like that either! she assured herself, then gasped as the car went into a skid.

  Dalziel had braked to avoid a dog which had emerged from the hedgerow. It was a small indeterminate creature which went on its way with a jaunty indifference to lesser beings whose shortage of legs required them to can themselves like dog meat in order to travel.

  The incident took only a moment then the car was back under the Fat Man’s control. But Novello found herself thinking of Tig, Lorraine’s pet. She hadn’t seen the beast. She hadn’t seen Lorraine either. Alive or dead.

  But Dalziel had, and Wield too.

  Suddenly she wanted to cry, but this was a feeling she’d long since got used to dealing with.

  She said briskly, ‘Clearly, Betsy was very disturbed, but I’m not so sure she was confused. She obviously wanted Wulfstan to know she remembered the real version of what happened that night. In other words, she was protecting him. But suppose her obsession with Wulfstan went back a lot further, and her protection of him, too? I noticed when I read the file that on every occasion it was Betsy who said she’d seen Lightfoot hanging around. Perhaps she’d already started protecting Wulfstan then, so when she saw Benny chained up in the Heck cellar, it was instinctual for her to relocate him at Neb Cottage.’

  There, she’d done it, suggested that fifteen years back when she herself was little older than the lost girls, these men had been getting things badly wrong and letting a child run rings around them.

  Dalziel said, ‘Bloody hell, l
ass. I know you lot think with your hormones, but could a seven-year-old really be jerking us off like that?’

  She smiled to herself, finding the blast of Dalziel’s breezy crudities refreshing after the tear gas of Pascoe’s pieties.

  She said, ‘I don’t think we’re talking carefully worked-out strategies here, sir. She must have been really frightened and confused the night she met Benny. Maybe because she was found near Neb Cottage and everyone assumed that’s where Benny had attacked her, she just went along with it, even came to believe it, or at least block off the truth. And it wasn’t till Dr Appleby, the psych, got to work on her that it all came back.’

  ‘But she didn’t tell her it had come back, did she?’ said Pascoe.

  ‘No. Not the psych. By then she was old enough to work out the full implication of what she’d seen. And obsessed enough to grasp that she had it in her power to force Wulfstan into the loving father role she’d tried to persuade him into by losing all that weight and bleaching her hair.’

  There was silence in the car. They were on the outskirts of Danby now. It wasn’t exactly a place that throbbed at night, she thought. There was next to no traffic and the few figures visible in the streets moved slow as wreaths of smoke through the evening sunlight.

  A ghost town. A town full of ghosts come drifting down the Corpse Road from the Neb. But not to haunt. Rather to ask to be laid to rest.

  ‘So you reckon Wulfstan’s in the frame for them all, including his own daughter?’ said Dalziel.

  ‘He wouldn’t be the first,’ said Novello.

  ‘The first what?’ enquired Pascoe.

  ‘The first child abuser and killer not to let distinctions of family get in the way of his kicks!’ she exclaimed with more vehemence than she intended.