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

by Reginald Hill

  It were coming from right near the water's edge, where the ruins of Heck were. I climbed over the fallen walls, still shouting, and again I heard the reply, and it were coming from a gap half blocked by a big stone and a lot of rubble but I managed to push some of this aside and there were space enough for me to get through. Only, it looked dark and wet down there, and I knew where it was, it was the cellar where Mr. Wulfstan kept his fancy wine. I'd been down there with Mary and it was really eery, even with the electric light on. Now it looked like the hole in our yard, I mean the yard at Low Beulah where Dad used to hose all the muck down when Mam started complaining it were like living on a midden. I used to watch muck and watter bubbling down into it and imagine what it 'ud be like to be down there with the rats and all. So I didn't fancy going into the Heck cellar one little bit, only suddenly I heard not a voice but a long meow that I'd have known from a thousand others. I didn't hesitate now. Bonnie were down there and he needed my help.

  So I climbed through the gap. There were bits of rubble lying around to make a sort of staircase, and when I'd got down a bit I found I were stepping into water. It wasn't all that deep yet, just above my knees, and the good thing about it was that the bit of light coming through the hole reflected off the surface and after a while I began to see what there was to see.

  I said, "Bonnie, are you there?" and a voice said back, "Here I be," and it was then I made out this shape in a corner of the cellar and realized there was a man there, and I strained my eyes and I saw that it were Benny Lightfoot and he had Bonnie in his arms.

  After that it happened more or less like I told Dr. Appleby.

  Except that when Bonnie scratched his face and he had to let him go and I ran off with the cat, I recall Benny tried to come after me. And he got quite close and I thought he were going to catch hold of me again. I turned to try and fight him off, but suddenly he pulled up short and I could see something stretched out taut behind him, and I saw it was a chain, one end wrapped around his waist, t'other fixed to the wall.

  He strained toward me with his hands outstretched, and his eyes were big as saucers 'cos his face were so hungered and waste. And he didn't look frightening anymore. No, he looked more frightened than frightening. He looked real sad and lost. And all he said was "Help me, please help me."

  Then I turned and scrambled out, and I recall I pushed a lot of stone and stuff back into the gap, and I ran off up the fell hard as I could, I didn't know where, till I had to stop and rest. And it was then that Dad came and found me.

  I think this is the truth 'cos Dr. Appleby said I'd feel a lot better when I recalled the truth of what happened and told someone, and I do feel better now I've told someone even though it's not Dr. Appleby. I don't want to tell anyone else, but, not now, not ever. All I want is to live quietly in London with Aunt Chloe and go to school and do my lessons and be a good daughter like a daughter owt to be.

  When Dalziel finished reading, he turned and looked toward the sunlit remains of Heck on the edge of the bright and placid mere. He wasn't a man at the mercy of imagination, but like a movie director, he could let it loose when he chose. Now he chose to turn off the sun and bring the rain lashing down and the mist swirling in. And he chose to see a man chained to a wall under the ground with rising water lapping round his thighs. And he chose to be the man and hear someone calling what he thought was his name and feel hope rise faster than the water that rescue was close. ...

  He thrust the sheets into Wield's hand and said to Pascoe, "All right, clever clogs. Everything was going nice and simple till you got back in the game. Would you like to tell me what you think is going off here?"

  Nice and simple didn't seem to Novello a possible description of any aspect of the investigation that she'd observed. She looked greedily at the sheets of blue paper in Wield's hands and longed to get hold of them to see what it was that had brought Dalziel to the edge of being gobsmacked.

  Pascoe said, "We'll need dental records for absolute confirmation, but for my money, the plate in the skull's enough. That was Lightfoot down there. Someone chained him up. Most likely candidate is Wulfstan. That would explain why he started climbing up the Neb recently when the drought brought the village back to the surface. Not nostalgia, not grief. Just good old guilt and worry that after all this time he was going to be found out."

  "Explain, too, why he didn't comment on the BENNY'S BACK signs," said Wield. "He knew he couldn't be."

  "Why'd yon lass not say anything?" demanded Dalziel.

  "A terrified kid answering questions the way she thought the police wanted them answered?" offered Pascoe. "It happens. Or it used to."

  Dalziel glowered but let this pass.

  "And Wulfstan, if it were him, what was he up to? Trying to beat a confession out of Lightfoot?"

  "That's one possibility, sir."

  "One? Give us another."

  "Well, it could be he had a vested interest in making sure the chief suspect in the Dendale child disappearances disappeared also."

  "Eh? Come on, lad. You going doolally, or wha'? Tell me one thing which ever suggested Wulfstan could be in the frame for any of them, let alone all."

  "Can't, sir. I wasn't there, remember?"

  "So you've got nowt."

  "Not quite," said Pascoe. "What I do have is a witness who saw Wulfstan assaulting Lorraine Chase on Sunday morning."

  No doubt about it this time, thought Novello. Dalziel was definitely gobsmacked. And angry.

  "Now listen," he finally got out. "I'm making allowances, but if this is one of thy clever games--"

  "No game, sir," said Pascoe. "Though I doubt if it would stand up in court. In fact, I'm absolutely certain I won't be letting this witness get anywhere near court. You see, it's Rosie."

  And the Fat Man was gobsmacked again. Twice in twenty seconds. Plus that earlier near miss. Novello's respect for Pascoe soared to new heights.

  And her own mind was sparked by his example to make a connection.

  "The earring," she said, knowing she was right but not why.

  Pascoe smiled at her and said, "Her crucifix substitute, actually. She picnicked early Sunday morning at the viewpoint on the Highcross Moor road. She was looking through Derek Purlingstone's binoculars. And she saw her imaginary friend, Nina, get taken by the nix."

  "The nix?" said Dalziel, clearly still not convinced Pascoe's recent trauma hadn't pushed him over the edge.

  "That's right. Nina is a little blond girl with pigtails, like this." He reached into his car and produced the Eendale Press volume.

  "And that's what the nix looks like. Remind you of anyone?"

  Dalziel shook his head, still in denial. But Novello said, "That photo in the Post. ..."

  "Right," said Pascoe. "I showed Rosie that pageful of photos and she pointed straight at Wulfstan and said, there's the nix. I'm sure she saw him, sir."

  The Fat Man shook his head, more to clear it than express absolute doubt.

  "Pete," he said gently. "The lass has been through a bad time. You too. Can do funny things to you. On t'other hand, she's the only one in your family I'd trust with two pigs at Paddy's Market. So there's no harm in checking it out."

  With a sudden renewal of energy, he strode down to the mere's edge where the divers were packing up their gear, spoke to Perriman, picked up the length of chain, and, dragging it behind him like Marley's ledgers, made for the Range Rover.

  "Right," he called. "Pete, you travel with us. Esther Williams down there will fetch your car back to Danby. I'm not letting you out of my sight, else God knows how many more whences and thences you'll be plucking out of the air."

  "Where exactly are we headed, sir?" asked Pascoe, as he climbed into the front passenger seat.

  "Where do you think? You like music, don't you? We're off to a concert. And I reckon if we shout Piss! Piss! loud enough we might just get some of them buggers to sing us an encore."

  "I think you mean Bis! Bis!" suggested Pascoe.

  "I know what I
mean," said Andy Dalziel.

  The opening concert of the twentieth Mid-Yorkshire Dales Summer Music Festival started late.

  This was expected. Despite posters, local press announcements, and word of mouth, news of the change of venue hadn't reached everyone and several patrons had had to be redirected from St. George's Hall to the Beulah Chapel.

  In the circumstances no one complained. In fact, commercially speaking, it was no bad thing, thought Arne Krog as he observed the throng of people examining the tapes and discs on sale at the foot of the chapel. There were half a dozen on which he figured, though only two on which he was the sole artist. His recording career had paralleled his performing career--a steady effulgence that rarely threatened to explode into stardom.

  Elizabeth had only the one disc on offer, but it was the one attracting most attention. In the circumstances not surprising. The clever among them would buy half a dozen copies and get her to sign and date them. Fifteen years on they could be a collector's item. Whereas his voice would hardly even rank as forgotten because it had never really ranked as rememberable. He could smile ruefully at the thought. The trappings of stardom he had always envied, but the possession of the kind of voice that brought them he regarded as a gift of God, and therefore simply to be marveled at. So it didn't bother him that Elizabeth might be a star, only that her brightening might be at the expense of others' darkness.

  But he still wasn't sure he'd been wise to hand that envelope to the detective. It had been a moment's impulse, unlikely to have been acted on had the man been that fat bastard, Dalziel!

  He went into what would have been the vestry if the Beulahites had vestries. Elizabeth was in there, looking as calm as a frozen mere. Inger was going through her usual preperformance finger-suppling exercises. Walter was looking at his watch as though it had disobeyed a direct command.

  "I think we must start," he said.

  "Fine," said Krog. "I'm ready. Inger?"

  "Yes."

  They looked at Wulfstan. There had been a time when, as chairman of the committee, he had acted as a sort of MC, introducing the performers. But there had been something so unbending about his manner that in the end the experiment had been discontinued. "Not so much a warm-up," Krog had described it, "as a chill-down." Now it was his custom to signal to the regulars that things were about to start by simply joining Chloe on the front row.

  Tonight, however, he said, "I will stay with Elizabeth so she is not sitting here alone."

  The singer looked at him and smiled with a kind of distant compassion, like some classical goddess gazing down on the mortal coil from her Olympian tea table.

  "No, I'll be fine. You go and sit with Chloe. She'll be expecting you."

  Wulfstan didn't argue. He simply left. He might not be much good on a stage but he certainly knew how to get off it.

  In a broad American accent Krog said, "Okay. Let's do it."

  He stood aside to let Inger go out before him.

  "Good luck, Elizabeth," he said. "Or if you are superstitious, break a leg."

  She met his gaze with an expression blank beyond indifference and he turned away quickly.

  The applause which had begun as Inger took her seat at the piano swelled at his appearance. Small audiences loved him. If he could have performed to the whole world, fifty or sixty at a time, in village halls on summer eves, he would have been an international favorite.

  He smiled on them and they smiled back as he bade them welcome with easy charm. As he spoke, his eyes ran along the rows. Many he recognized from previous years, the Mid-Yorks culture vultures who came flapping down to feast, and be seen feasting, on these musical bar-snacks. Then there were the tourists, glad of an evening excursion from musty hotel lounges, or holiday cottages not half as comfortable as home. And scattered among them were other faces he remembered or half remembered, from those long-off days when he stayed at Heck and was a popular customer at the village shop and patron of the Holly Bush Inn.

  Wasn't that Miss Lavery from the village school? And old Mr. Pontifex, who'd owned half the valley? And those wizened features at the back of the hall, didn't they belong to Joe Telford, the joiner, by whose gracious permission they were performing here tonight? And that couple there, she like patience on a monument, and he like the granite it was carved from, were not they the Hardcastles, Cedric and Molly?

  His gaze came forward and met Chloe's in the front row, and his voice faltered. His instinct had been right. This was no occasion for the Mahler cycle. Elizabeth had wanted to end the concert with it, but at least his resistance had prevented that. He wanted the concert to end on an upbeat note with a rousing encore or two. No one would be calling for encores after the Kindertotenlieder. So finally she had agreed to end the first half with it. Now he saw even that as a mistake. God help us, they'd probably all go home!

  But it wasn't possible to change now. All he could hope was that the Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel which sat ill with the Kindertotenlieder but which he'd chosen deliberately for that reason would act as a kind of advance antidote.

  By the time he came to the ninth and final song, he knew he'd been wrong. Sometimes an audience creates its own atmosphere, let the artist do what he will. He could feel them turning from the masculine vigor and sturdy independence expressed in several of the songs, and immersing themselves in the fatalistic melancholy which he'd always regarded as their lesser component. Even this last song, I have trod the upward and the downward path, a sort of middlebrow "My Way" in its assertion of stoic refusal to be overwhelmed by the vagaries of unfeeling fate, somehow came out positively plangent with despair.

  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 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 blond hair framing the face of a tragic queen.

  Krog turned and walked off, suspecting he could have hopped off backward, 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 program with its mix of love duets and popular favorites 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!"