Hill, Reginald - Dalziel and Pascoe 17 - On Beulah Height

by Reginald Hill

  "Right," he said. "You've done the sympathy bit. Now you've got two minutes for the rest."

  It came out fast and slick. This she'd rehearsed, reckoning that if she did get the chance to speak, the faster the better.

  He said, "You got the name of Mrs. Lightfoot's bank?"

  "Mid-Yorks Savings."

  "That's Willie Noolan. Old rugby-club chum of the super's. He'll cooperate if you mention Mr. Dalziel's name and smile knowingly. Tell him you'd like to know when the large sum of money paid into Mrs. Lightfoot's account fifteen years ago went out and in what form."

  "Yes, sir. Please, what large sum?"

  "The compensation money for Neb Cottage. I found out the other day ... yesterday ..."

  He paused. Novello guessed he was having difficulty matching real and relative time.

  "... anyway, it seems Agnes actually owned Neb Cottage, so the Board would have had to cough up before the move, otherwise they wouldn't have been legally entitled to shift her. Don't know how much, but certainly tens of thousands, I should think. If the money left the account after she went to live with her niece, contact Sheffield and let them go after Mrs. Fleck."

  "But the Social people checked when she moved into Wark House."

  "Yes, but only two years back. Working in the home, Fleck would know the procedures and make damn sure she kept ahold of Agnes for at least another couple of years after she'd got her hands on the cash. Of course, if it left her account before she had her first stroke ..."

  Now Novello was with him.

  "It could be that Benny got it and that's how he managed to finance his escape."

  "Right. With forty or fifty thou in his pocket, it wouldn't have been too hard for him to vanish right out of the country."

  "You think so?" said Novello dubiously. "Wasn't he supposed to be a bit simple?"

  "Odd, not simple, according to Mrs. Shimmings. You said this visitor at the home had an Australian accent? Well, you've probably been told Australia was where the rest of his family had gone. So where else would someone like Benny head when everything that meant home and security here had vanished? Anyway, it's a lot more likely than the notion that he disappeared into the Neb like a nix or something. ..."

  He looked at the book he'd laid on the coverlet. The nix leered malevolently up at him. Not much like Lightfoot, from the descriptions in the file.

  He said, "Anyway, check it out, Shirley. Check everything out, no matter how unlikely. It's a funny world, full of surprises. ..."

  He sounded very weary.

  She said, "Thank you very much. I'm sorry to have troubled you when ... I hope everything turns out okay. I lit a candle for Rosie this morning. ..."

  She hadn't meant to say that. Pascoe was at best agnostic and as for his wife, if rumor were true, she'd banish all priests to Antarctica bollock naked. But it was all the hope Novello had to offer, so she offered it.

  "Thank you," said Pascoe. "That was kind. Thank you."

  He replaced the phone.

  "You hear that, Rosie? There's a candle burning for you," he said. "Let's hope it's one of those great big ones, eh? Let's hope it goes on burning a long long time."

  He picked up Nina and the Nix. Was this any use? he wondered. Could she hear anything at all?

  Pointless question. He began to read again.

  Rosie Pascoe is lying in a corner where the nix has thrown her. She is very uncomfortable. There are small pieces of rock digging into her back. But she dares not move.

  The nix is sitting only a few feet away, staring fixedly at her, as if trying to make up his mind what to do. Is there pity in his eyes? She tries to see it but can't, just a terrifying blankness.

  Then somewhere far above her, she hears a telephone ringing.

  The nix looks up. She looks up too. And she realizes it isn't a telephone. It is the squeak of the bat who hangs high in the roof of the cave.

  The nix is still looking up. He has cupped his pointed ears in his webbed hands and seems to be straining to catch a sound. It is a sight almost comical, but Rosie doesn't feel like laughing. She guesses that any message coming down from the bat will not be for her comfort.

  But she takes the chance of the nix's distraction to slide some of the rocks from under her aching body. Only, when she comes to touch they don't feel like rocks. And when she looks down, she sees that they are bones.

  Now she strains her ears, too, and begins to imagine she can catch those high, alien squeaks. How loud they are in the nix's mind she can only guess, but he is nodding his head as though to acknowledge he understands ... and will obey.

  This may be her last chance to escape. The nix sits between her and the cave entrance through which filters that faint light with its promise of the sunlit world above. Is he so rapt by what he hears that she can steal past him and try once more to run up the tunnel? She has to try.

  She begins to move, pushing herself up from the bone-strewn ground with infinite care. Then, just as she reaches a crouching position, she feels her left hand seized.

  Startled, she looks down. The grip is tight but it is no monstrous paw that holds her. It is a child's hand. She lets her gaze run up the slim white arm and finds herself looking at another little girl like herself. Not quite like herself, for her hair is long and blond while Rosie's is short and black. But there is a terror on that pale face she recognizes as her own. And the face, too, she recognizes, or thinks she does. First it is Nina's from the storybook. Then it is her friend Zandra's. Then it is another little blond-haired girl she doesn't know.

  "Help me," says the newcomer. "Please help me."

  But when Rosie looks back to the nix, she sees it is too late for help. The webbed hands have come down from the pointed ears, the fixed gaze swings back to her face once more.

  And the eyes are no longer expressionless blanks.

  They are burning, burning.

  Shirley Novello had always believed you needed a High Court order, if not a papal dispensation, to persuade banks to break the seal of confidentiality on a client's account.

  But now she discovered, as many before her in Mid-Yorkshire, that all seals flew asunder at the open sesame of Dalziel's name.

  Or perhaps it was the smile that did it, she thought, as she followed Pascoe's instructions to the letter and smiled knowingly at Willie Noolan of the Mid-Yorkshire Savings Bank.

  He smiled back, more lecherous than knowing, then turned to a computer keyboard.

  "Old Agnes Lightfoot? She still alive? By God, you're right," he said, peering at the screen. "Not much there, but. No one's going to get rich when she snuffs it."

  "It's fifteen years back Mr. Dalziel's interested in," said Novello.

  "Before we got computerized," said Noolan nostalgically.

  "So no record?" said Novello, disappointed.

  "For shame! You don't get to be a bank by throwing stuff away. It'll be in the cellar. My lad, Herbert, will soon ferret it out. Herbert!"

  Herbert, far from being a lad, was perfect evidence of the bank's reluctance to throw anything away, appearing to a neutral eye more years the far side of a rail pass than the near side of a requiem.

  He moved on nimble feet, however, and in a very short space with even shorter breath he was laying on Noolan's desk a file as creased and dusty as his own suit.

  "Thank you, Herbert," said the manager. "Go and have a lie-down till you get your wind."

  "Isn't he a little old to be working?" said Novello after he'd panted his way out of the office.

  "You think so? And aren't you a little young to be asking?"

  "Sorry," said Novello.

  "Nay, lass, don't look so crestfallen!" laughed Noolan. "Herbert's long retired. Only, he prefers it here to home. Says his wife makes demands. I can't imagine what he means. Now let's take a look, shall we? Oh, yes. There it is, I thought it rang a bell. Fifty thousand paid in as compensation by the Water Board. That was the end of July. Then a short while after, forty-nine thousand withdrawn. In cash. Aye, I
recall it now. Cash withdrawal like that, everyone wants someone else to sign. More signatures here than a peace treaty. It all comes back now. I tried dissuading her, but she told me if I didn't want her business there was plenty as did. And off she went with the loot in a carpetbag."

  "And this was fifteen years ago?"

  "So I said."

  "And the money's never come back into her account?"

  He checked, right through to the time when Agent's account was transferred to computer recording.

  "Not a thing."

  "Well, thank you very much for your cooperation," said Novello. "Mr. Dalziel will be pleased."

  "I'm glad of that. Always happy to help the police, but tell him the slate's beginning to look a bit bare. You don't save with us, do you, luv?"

  "I don't earn enough to save with anyone," said Novello. "Sorry!"

  She examined the facts as she left the building. This let Winifred off the hook. Like Billie Saltair had said, she might be greedy but she'd done nothing dishonest. In fact old Aunt Agnes had rather taken advantage of her cupidity. She probably guessed that it was only the thought of the compensation money that had made her niece take her in. And for all the years she'd spent in Branwell Close, she'd made damn sure Winifred never got a look at her bank statements. But her guard had dropped when she'd had her second stroke and once Winifred saw the state of her accounts, the road to Wark House had been opened. Or rather, the road back from it had been closed.

  So now the crazy scenario in which Benny Lightfoot, with the help of his gran's money, fled to Australia, whence he had returned to start killing children again, took another step toward realization.

  This meant someone had to talk to Agnes. Someone! It meant she had to talk to the old lady.

  Which meant first of all talking to Billie Saltair.

  She rang rather than making the journey back to Sheffield. It was a wise move.

  "Not today," said the matron firmly. "We've just put her to bed. She's not at all well, very feverish. If she gets any worse, we'll call in the doctor. Ring me in the morning."

  Would the Holy Trinity have insisted? Novello wondered. Big Andy was quite capable of interrogating a frail old woman on her deathbed, but was even he capable of pushing past Billie Saltair?

  It would have been a battle worth paying ringside prices to see.

  Novello knew better than to fight outside her weight unless forced by dire necessity.

  "I'll ring you tomorrow," she said.

  As if mollified by this ready compliance, the matron said, "One thing might interest you. Probably nothing to do with Agnes's visitor, but one of our handymen I was chatting to recalled seeing a white van, like a camper van he said, bumping down the drive that Friday morning."

  Novello smiled. Detective work was contagious. Even Billie Saltair wasn't immune.

  "Thanks a lot," she said, putting some warmth into her voice this time. "I'll be in touch."

  She put the phone down, picked it up again, and got through to the Danby incident center. Wield was around somewhere but not immediately visible, so she left her update with DI Headingley, who thanked her avuncularly, like she was a little girl tolerated in the adult world for her lisping voice and golden locks. But to some extent this was preferable to the anticipated response of the sergeant, who, she felt, would rather she didn't come up with any more evidence to support a BENNY'S BACK! scenario.

  And was he back? she wondered. Certainly someone was back.

  She stood at the window of the CID room, wide open in hope of encouraging a cooling draft. All she got, however, were fumes and noise from the traffic in the street below. She raised her eyes to the Madonna-blue sky above the Franciscan-gray roofs and said, "So where are you now, my wild colonial boy?"

  If she'd been a little humbler and cast her eyes down instead of up, she might have seen the "boy" in question pause outside the main entrance of Mid-Yorkshire Police Headquarters and peer up at the old blue lamp which still hung there. She might have observed that for a moment it looked as if he was making up his mind to enter and share whatever was troubling him with those within.

  Then the moment was past. He turned away and in a few steps was lost from view.

  Dalziel dipped his biscuit into his postcoital tea, got it to his mouth before it collapsed, bit it, and said, "Bloody hell," soggily.

  "Bad tooth?" said Cap Marvell sympathetically.

  "No," he replied. "This is a Grannie's Golden Shortie."

  "Is that a problem?"

  "It were for my dad," said Dalziel. "It were his recipe."

  It occurred to Cap she knew nothing of Dalziel before he became a policeman, and very little of him before he became the detective superintendent who had, incredibly, eased his bulk into her bed and her affections.

  He was back in the former now because when he'd turned up at her flat door earlier that evening, she'd realized he'd never left the latter.

  He'd been to the hospital to visit his colleague's sick daughter. There'd been some sort of crisis that afternoon, but the child was stable again. The parents had naturally been in a state and Dalziel, she guessed, had exerted all his energies in the line of optimistic reassurance. Standing on her doorstep, he looked absolutely drained, which was as shocking as visiting Loch Lomond and finding it empty. He'd talked about the sick child, talked about the missing child, talked about the Dendale children, in an uncharacteristically disconnected way, till it was difficult to separate one from the other. What was clear was that he seemed to feel responsible in some way for all of them, and the pain of their parents weighed so heavily that even those broad shoulders were close to bending.

  She'd given him whiskey, refilling his glass three times as he talked, and it wasn't till the third glass was emptied that he paused, licked his lips, sniffed, and said accusingly, "This is Macallan. Twenty-five-year-old Anniversary."

  "That's right."

  During their old itemization, a major point of friction had been her indifference to the subtleties of single malts and her predilection for the purchase of what he termed "rubbing whiskey."

  "You got someone important coming?"

  "Not yet," she said. "But a girl can hope."

  Upon which double-entendre Dalziel had acted.

  It had been an encounter more marked by ferocity than tenderness, but that had suited her to such a degree that when he got his breath back and said with passionate longing, "Ee, I could murder a cup of tea," she had slipped meekly out of bed and mashed it for him.

  There were times even in the best regulated of households when the Old Adam got the vote over the New Man.

  The Golden Shortie had been a treat which looked like paying dividends.

  "Your father was a baker, then?" she said.

  "Aye. Master. Came down from Glasgow for his health, got took on at Ebor."

  The Ebor Biscuit and Confectionery Company was one of Mid-Yorkshire's principal businesses.

  "For his health? He was an invalid?"

  "Don't be daft," said Dalziel, scornful at the idea that the loins whose fruit he was could be in any fettle but fine. "He fell out with some folk in Glasgow it wasn't healthy to fall out with. Misunderstanding about a loan. He were just a lad. If it weren't for gravity, he'd not have known to crap downward, that's what he used to say."

  "I see where you got your silver tongue," observed Cap. "So what about the Golden Shorties?"

  "He used to make his own shortbread at home from his gran's recipe and often took a piece in his snap. One day the general manager stopped for a chat during tea break. He noticed Dad eating this shortbread and he said, "That's not ours, is it?"' sort of reproachful. My dad, being a cheeky bugger, said, "No it's not, and I doubt you could afford it." Manager broke off a bit and et it. Then another bit. And another. Then he said, "Right, lad, why don't you tell me just how much it is you think I can't afford?"' Dad, knowing all his mates' lugs were flapping, thought he'd pitch it real high and said, "Next bit'll cost you five hundred nicker," which w
ere a lot of money in them days. "In that case," said the manager, "you'd best come to my office." And fifteen minutes later, Dad were back with his mates, flashing the biggest bundle of notes most on 'em had ever seen."

  "So, a happy ending," said Cap.

  Dalziel sucked in the rest of his biscuit.

  "Not really," he said. "Made him a big man on the bakehouse floor right enough. And when the first batch of Grannie's Goldens came out, he felt right proud. Then it became Ebor's best-selling line. And forever after when he went into a shop, and saw the packs piled high, he felt sick to his stomach. He were an easygoing man, my dad, but whenever he'd had a couple of drinks and started on about selling his birthright for messy porridge, us kids 'ud take cover 'cos he were likely to start breaking things. It all came back just now when I took a bite."

  "So, more than just a biscuit," said Cap, mentally noting us kids for future investigation. "A madeleine. Now all you've got to do is write a novel about your life and loves in seven volumes."

  "Not enough," said Dalziel. "And what's Madeleine got to do with it? Weren't she the lass who got bedded in that mucky poem?"

  "I don't think I recall the mucky poem in question."

  "Course you do. If I did it at school, every bugger did it. By that pair of puffs, Sheets and Kelly, one of 'em anyway. Sort of poem you had to work at afore you realized just how mucky it was."

  "That is an incentive to learning I don't think they've grasped at Cheltenham Ladies," said Cap who suspected that much of Dalziel's philistinism was a bait to lure her into the trap of patronage.

  Or perhaps not.

  She observed him carefully and found herself carefully observed in return.

  As they were both in that state most perilous to the consumer of crumbly biscuits and hot tea, and both in a condition which marked them as enthusiastic consumers, there was much to observe.

  "So what's to become of us, Andy?" she asked.

  Dalziel shrugged, and said, "You screw a bit, scream a bit, then you die."

  "Thank you, Rochefoucauld," she said. "I was meaning specifically rather than generally."