At this point her husband appeared. He was as thin as his wife was broad, angular, almost lupine. Jack Spratt and his wife. Introduced and put in the picture, he immediately poured scorn on any hope of getting useful information from Bella on the subject of motor vehicles.
"She can tell our Cavalier from the brewery wagon and that's about it," he averred.
His wife, though willing enough to admit her deficiencies voluntarily, was not disposed to have them trumpeted by one who didn't have enough spare flesh on him to merit the description "better half."
"At least I were up and about, not pigging it in my bed like some I could name," she said indignantly. "Mebbe if you hadn't spent most of Saturday night supping our profits, you'd have been lively enough to be able to help this lass instead of slagging me off."
Novello, though young in years, was old enough in experience to know that marital arguments have their long-established scripts which, once started, are very hard to stop.
She said loudly and firmly, "So it wasn't a Cavalier, then. Was it bigger?"
"Yes, bigger," said Bella, glaring defiantly at her husband.
"A lot bigger? Like a van, maybe?"
"No. Too many windows."
"A sort of jeep, then. You know, a Land-Rover like the farmers use? Fairly high?"
"No! It were more like one of them long things, like a funeral-car sort of thing. Like what Geordie Turnbull drives."
This last was aimed at her husband. Signaling a truce by appealing to his expertise, perhaps? Didn't sound like that somehow. More like a sly shot from a hidden gun.
"Oh, aye, you'd remember that all right," Postlethwaite spat out viciously.
"What kind of vehicle does this Mr. Turnbull drive?" asked Novello quickly, before his six-gun could clear leather.
"A Volvo station wagon," said the man. "Aye, and it's blue."
"Blue? Light blue? Dark blue?" demanded Novello.
"Light blue."
"And this vehicle you saw, Mrs. Postlethwaite, was that light or dark?"
"Lightish," admitted the woman meeting her husband's glare with a matching anger. "But it weren't Geordie's."
"How'd you know?" jeered Postlethwaite. "All you'll have studied close is his roof from the inside."
To hell with guns, this was hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets! Bella drew in a deep breath and looked ready to go for the jugular. Then she caught Novello's pleading gaze and decided to postpone the pleasure till she had him alone.
With a promissory glare at her husband, she said, "If I had a mind like thine, I'd grow mushrooms in it. And I know for a fact this couldn't have been Geordie's car, 'cos there were a kiddie in the back."
She didn't realize what she was saying until she'd said it, and in that moment the script changed from long-running soap to tragic drama.
Ten minutes later Novello was on her mobile, talking to Wield in St. Michael's Hall.
He listened with an intensity she could feel over the air and when she'd finished he asked, "How do you rate this Bella?"
"No good on car makes. Fair on colors. I tried her with some cars passing on the main road. Not what you'd call an artist's eye but she could tell blue from black, gray, and green."
"And the kiddie?"
"Just a glimpse. Little blond girl looking out of the back window."
"Frightened? Distressed? Waving? Or what?"
"Just looking. She didn't get a look at anyone else in the car, can't say if there was anyone but the driver. But even though it was just a glimpse, she's certain about the girl."
"Didn't mention her straight off, but."
"No reason to. I didn't want to risk leading her."
Novello described her interrogation stratagem.
"Nice," said Wield. "And this guy, Turnbull. Anything there?"
"She's adamant it wasn't his car."
"But it was her mentioned him first."
"Only to wind up her husband. Way I read it is, this Turnbull drops in fairly regularly and has a nice line in chat she enjoys. Maybe they've got something going, or maybe she just gets fed up of jealous Jack's innuendo. Either way, I'd guess he's a red herring. Bella may not know makes, but she insists this car was a lot newer and cleaner looking than Turnbull's."
"They've got these things called car washes," said Wield. "Couldn't she just be trying to get him off the hook she thinks she's put him on?"
He's doing the devil's disciple bit, thought Novello. Making me double-check my conclusions.
She said carefully, "I've heard her going on about what she'd do to child molesters. No way can I see her protecting anyone suspected of that."
"But if she's certain in her own mind this Turnbull couldn't be our man ... There's men banged up for multiple murder who've got mothers and lovers protesting their innocence."
"You think I should give him a look," said Novello, uncertain whether to feel resentful or not.
"You know where he lives?"
"Oh, yes. Jealous Jack is very much of your mind, Sarge, and he insisted on giving me clear directions. Turnbull has a contracting business in Bixford on the coast road, about ten miles. He lives next to the yard, but if he's not there, Jack says it'll be easy to find him. Just look for bulldozers with GEORDIE TURNBULL painted on them in big red letters, crawling along, holdin' up bloody traffic. ..."
Novello had lapsed into what she thought was a rather good impression of the publican's bitter snarl, but Wield clearly didn't rate the act.
"What was that you said?" he interrupted. "Geordie Turnbull?"
"That's right."
"Hold on."
Silence. Had the Fat Man turned up? The silence stretched. She thought of suggesting they get a tape to play when they put you on hold. "The Gendarmes' Duet"? Too obvious. Judy Garland singing "The Man Who Got Away"? Her grandfather had been very partial to Garland. She was indifferent, but knew all the songs off by heart from hearing them blasted out of his old record player. Now approaching eighty, his taste was turning back to the Italian music of his childhood. ...
"You there?"
"Yes, Sarge."
"Don't move, I'm coming to join you."
His voice gave away as little as his face, but Novello detected an underlying excitement which filled her head with speculation. She reckoned that if Wield were juggling eggs as his lottery number came up, he'd never crack a shell. So for him to be excited ...
She felt she'd done all that was to be done at present with the Postlethwaites, so she took her drink to a bench on the shady side of the pub and sat there trying to separate in her mind her real concern for the missing child and her imagined advancement if she should be the one who cracked it.
When Wield arrived he said to her, "I'm going over it all again with them."
"Sure," she said. "That's okay, Sarge."
"I'm not telling you so's not to hurt your feelings," he said. "I'm telling you so I can be sure you'll be listening close instead of feeling hard done to."
He went through it all again. When he was finished he said, "Thank you both very much. You've been very helpful."
They left Wield's car and drove in hers. She drove north on the main road without being told, watching for the sign pointing east to Bixford.
He said, "So what do you think? Hear anything you missed first time?"
"She was a bit more positive about shape and things. And also how bright and shiny it looked. Didn't sound much like an old Volvo."
"Like I said before, mebbe she was trying to make it sound as little like an old Volvo as possible."
"Could be, Sarge. But if it had been a car she knew well, wouldn't she have recognized it straight off? Also her husband ..."
She paused to marshal her thoughts. Wield didn't prompt, but waited patiently for her to resume.
"I got the impression that he'd really like this Turnbull to be in bother with the police, but even though he resents the man, he can't bring himself to believe he'd be in this kind of bother. Maybe he just can't see how anyone who
'd fancy someone like Bella could also fancy little children."
"That the way you feel?"
"Instinctively, yeah. But I've not had enough experience to know if my instinct's got anything to do with reality. Anyway, I'm really curious to meet this Turnbull."
"Why's that?" asked Wield.
"Because you are, Sarge. Do I get to hear why?"
"Simple," said Wield. "Fifteen year back when we were investigating the Dendale disappearances, one of the men we questioned was called Geordie Turnbull. He was a bulldozer driver on the dam site."
Novello whistled. It was one of many men sounds she had learned to produce as part of her work camouflage. Giggles, screams, anything which could be designated "girlish," were out. She had a good ear and had rapidly mastered, which is to say, mistressed, a whole range of intonation, accent, and rhythm. She'd even managed, like that old politician what's-her-name?, to drop her voice half an octave. Indeed she'd overcooked it and reached a sexy huskiness which was counterproductive, so had headed back up a couple of tones.
"But you didn't keep him in the frame?" she said.
"He stayed in the bottom left-hand corner, so to speak. Nothing to prove he couldn't have been around at the possible times, but even less to suggest he was. Only reason he got picked up in the first place was locals pointing the finger."
"He wasn't liked, then?"
"He were one of the best liked men I ever met," said Wield. "Everyone, men, women, kids, even jealous husbands, thought he were grand. But when trouble hit, it were loyalty, not liking, that mattered. The locals wanted to believe it were an outsider, not one of their own."
"God," she said with all the superiority of a townie in her early twenties for a rustic of any age. "Closed places, closed minds, eh?"
"Sorry?"
"Communities like Dendale," she explained. "They must get to be so inbred and inward looking, it's no wonder dreadful things happen."
"Sort of deserve it, you mean?"
There was nothing in his voice to suggest anything but polite interest, but she recalled that Wield was now living out in the sticks up some valley or other with his boyfriend.
"No, of course not," she said, trying to recover. "It's just that, like you say, any isolated community will tend to close ranks, blame the outsider. It's human nature."
"Yes, it is. It's also human nature to want your life to be as lovely as the place you're spending it in."
This came as close to a personal statement as she'd ever heard from Wield. Amazing that it was the kind of quote they'd love in Hello! magazine.
"You sound like you were fond of Dendale, Sarge," she pressed.
"Fond? Aye. It were a place a man could have got fond of," he said. "Even doing what we were doing. You can't always be looking at the sun and seeing eclipses, can you?"
Better and better. I should have a tape recorder! she thought.
"You mean, like, we're always looking at the dark side of things."
"Something like that. I recall a day ..."
She waited. After a while she realized it wasn't a tape recorder she needed but a mind-reader.
... a day when lost for anything else to do, he'd walked off up the fell toward Beulah Height, justifying his absenteeism by following a team of dog handlers, whose animals were sweeping ever wider in their search for any trace of the missing girls.
It was early evening--the sun still two or three hours from completing its long summer circuit, but already giving that special gloaming light which invests everything it touches with magic--and as he climbed higher from the dale floor he felt the burden of the case slip slowly from his shoulders.
Standing on the higher of the two peaks of Beulah with his back to Dendale, he looked out over a tumble of hills and moorland. He could see far but not clearly. The heat smudged the sharp lines of the horizon into a drowsy golden mist, and it was possible for a man to think he could walk off into that golden haze and by some ancient process of absorption become part of it. Even when, attracted by the baaing of sheep and barking of dogs, he turned and looked down, he was still able for a while to keep that feeling. Between the two tops a craggy rock face about ten feet deep fell to a relatively level area of turf which had been turned into a sheepfold by the erection of a semicircular drystone wall. Wield, who had read the tourist books about Dendale as assiduously as his master in their desperate search for anything which might throw light on what had happened here, knew that the stones forming the wall had probably been used in the prehistoric hill-fort which had once stood on the Height. The fold was full of sheep at the moment, and they and the collies belonging to the man who'd brought them there were getting agitated at the approach of the search dogs.
For a while, though, it was possible to let the image of the shepherd with his long carved crook, and the sound of the sheep and the dogs, blend into his sense of something that had been before, and would be long after, this present trouble.
Then one of the search dogs and one of the collies launched themselves in a brief but noisy skirmish, the shepherd and the handler shouted and dragged them apart, and Wield, too, felt himself dragged back to here and now.
By the time he descended to the fold, the searchers had moved on. In an effort to reestablish his previous mood, he'd greeted the shepherd cheerfully.
"Lovely day again, Mr. Allgood," he said. "Right kind of weather to be up here doing this job, I should think."
He knew everyone in the dale by sight and name now. This was Jack Allgood from Low Beulah, a whipcord-thin man with skin tanned dark brown by wind and weather, and a black unblinking gaze which gave promise of assessing the exact value of sheep or of a man in a very few seconds.
"That's what you think, is it?" retorted Allgood. "I'm supposed to be grateful, am I? Mebbe you should stick to your own job, Sergeant, though you don't seem to be so hot at that either."
The man had a reputation for being a prickly customer, but this seemed unprovoked.
"Sorry if I've said owt to offend you," said Wield mildly.
"Aye, well, not your fault, I suppose. Reason I'm getting my sheep ready for bringing down this time of year is they've all got to go. Aye, that's right. What did you think? That we'd be dragged out of our houses but all the stock would just stay here to take care of itself?"
"No. I'm sorry. It must be hard. Leaving somewhere like this. Your home. All of it."
For a moment the two men stood looking down at the valley bottom--the village with its church and inn, the scattered farms, the mere blue with reflected sky. And then their eyes dropped down to the dam site with its moving machines, its cluster of prefabs, and the wall itself, almost complete now.
"Aye," said Allgood. "Hard."
He turned back to his sheep and Wield set off down the fellside, the sun still as warm, the day still as bright, the view still as fair, but with every step he felt the burden reassembling on his shoulders. ...
"Sarge?" prompted Novello. "You were saying?"
"Next right's the turn to Bixford," said Wield. "Slow down, else you'll miss it."
"Mr. Dalziel," said Walter Wulfstan. "It's been a long time."
He didn't make it sound too long, thought Dalziel.
They shook hands and took stock of each other. Wulfstan saw a man little changed from the crop-headed overweight creature he had once publicly castigated as gross, disgusting, and incompetent. Dalziel found recognition harder. Fifteen years ago he had first known this man as a lean, energetic go-getter with an expensive tan, bright impatient eyes, and a shock of black hair. News of his daughter's disappearance had hit him like a hurricane blast hitting a pine. He had bent, then seemingly recovered, pain, rage, and a desperate hope energizing him into a hyperbolical parody of his normal self. But it had been the false brightness of a Christmas tree and all these years on, nothing remained but dried-up needles and dying wood. The hair was gone, the skin was gray and stretched so tight across the skull that his nose and ears seemed disproportionately large, and his eyes glinted fr
om deep caverns. Perhaps in an effort at concealment or compensation, he had grown a fringe of mustacheless beard. It didn't help.
"So, let's get to it," said Wulfstan, remaining standing himself and not inviting Dalziel to sit. "I'm very busy, and this necessity of finding a new venue for the opening concert has already taken up time I could ill spare."
"Sorry about that, sir, but in the circumstances ..."
He let his voice tail off.
Wulfstan said, "I'm sorry, is that a sentence?"
If the bugger wants to play hard, let's play hard, thought Dalziel.
"I mean, in the circumstances, which are that a child's gone missing and we need a base to organize the hunt for her, I'd have thought mebbe, seeing what you went through, you'd have been a bit sympathetic. Sir," said Dalziel.
Wulfstan said softly, "Naturally when I hear that parents have lost a daughter and are relying on you and your colleagues to recover her, I am deeply sympathetic, Superintendent."
Nice one, thought Dalziel appreciatively. His instinct was to hit back but his experience was that, if you lay down submissively, your antagonist often decided it was all over, got careless, and exposed his soft underbelly. So he sighed, scratched his breastbone raucously, and sat down in an armchair.
"If she's still alive we want to find her quick," he said. "We need all the help we can get."
Wulfstan stood quite still for a moment, then pulled up an elegant but uncomfortable-looking wheelback chair and sat directly in front of the Fat Man.
"Ask what you need to ask," he said.
"Where were you yesterday morning between, say, seven o'clock and ten o'clock?"
"You know already. I presume someone noticed my car."
Hill, Reginald - Dalziel and Pascoe 17 - On Beulah Height Page 16
