On Beulah Height

by Reginald Hill

  ‘I think you know, Mr Dalziel,’ he said. ‘Fifteen years ago, I believed you were irredeemably stupid; now I see I may have been mistaken. About the irredeemable element at least. I started going up to the ridge of Lang Neb when I heard that the reservoir was shrinking so much that Dendale village was reappearing. I make my living from the sun so I appreciated the irony that it was solar heat that was going to bring that living to an end.’

  ‘How exactly?’ said Dalziel. ‘Just so’s everyone knows what you’re talking about.’

  He glanced towards Chloe Wulfstan. Pascoe, probably the most advanced Dalzielogist in the civilized world, read the message with little difficulty.

  Tell her now, publicly, so that if she knew before, no one will be able to trick it out of her.

  An unexpected chivalry? Or just a subtle turn of the screw to make sure Wulfstan kept on talking?

  Whichever, it was working.

  ‘You will find, probably have found already, the remains of a man in the ruins of Heck. That man is … was … Benny Lightfoot. I put him there. I left him there to drown. I am solely responsible for his death. My motive was, I think, obvious.’

  Dalziel looked towards Novello who was scowling with concentration as she followed events. Hers was one of those rare faces that look prettier in a scowl.

  ‘Not to them as weren’t around, mebbe,’ said the Fat Man. ‘So if you could just give us an outline… You’ll have lots of opportunity to dot your p’s and q’s later.’

  As well as studying Dalzielogy, Pascoe collected Dalzieliana. He made a mental note of this one.

  ‘After we had all moved out of the dale and the rains started, I found I couldn’t keep away. At all hours of day and night, I’d be hit by this irresistible urge to go back there and wander around on the fellside. You might imagine such a compulsion, often involving a long drive from some distant place, would be relatively easy to control. But when I tell you that the form it took was an absolute certainty that Mary was there, wandering lost and frightened, and if I didn’t go and find her she would certainly die, you may understand why I always obeyed.

  ‘I never found her, of course. Sometimes I imagined …’

  He paused and almost visibly withdrew into himself, and Pascoe went with him, to a dark, rain-swept fellside, where every fitful gleam of light seemed to glance off a head of blonde curls and every splash and gurgle of water sang like the echo of childish laughter.

  ‘But one night,’ he resumed, ‘I heard a noise and saw a figure which wasn’t just in my imaginings. It was close by the ruins of Neb Cottage, near where you were found a little later,’ he said to Elizabeth, who returned his gaze blankly. ‘It was of course Benny Lightfoot.’

  Another living ghost haunting the valley, finding what comfort he could in the ruined remains of the only existence he had ever wanted.

  But there had been nothing for his comfort in this encounter with a fellow ghost.

  ‘I should have brought him in and handed him over to you,’ said Wulfstan to Dalziel. ‘But I didn’t trust you not to let him go again. No. That’s too simple. That’s too much of an excuse. I wanted him for myself because I felt sure I could get out of him things about my daughter that you with your more restricted methods never could.’

  ‘You tortured him,’ said Novello.

  ‘I beat him,’ said Wulfstan. ‘With my fists. I never used instruments then or later. Does that make it better? It is your area of expertise, not mine. And when I couldn’t get anything out of him and I saw dawn lightening the sky, I forced him down to Heck. I knew the cellar was still accessible because I’d cleared a gap sufficient for my entrance in my search for Mary, in case she’d gone back to her old home and taken shelter there. I bound him tight with strips of cloth I tore from his own jacket, and the next night I returned with lengths of chain, and padlocks, and staples, and made him secure. All I wanted was for him to tell me what he’d done to her, where she was. But he wouldn’t. No matter what I did to him, he wouldn’t. I thought it was because he believed once he’d told me what I wanted to know, I’d kill him. And I swore by everything I held holy, by the memory of Mary herself, that I’d let him live if only he’d tell me what I needed to know. But still he wouldn’t talk. Why? Why? All you had to do was tell me …’

  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 hig
h. 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 make 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 every
thing. 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.’