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

by Reginald Hill

  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 prizing 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 reemerging 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 heartrendingly 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 slablike, 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 fourth, 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 traveler 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. Requiescat. ... 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.

  "Eee, 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."

  "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 l'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 rearranging 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-obsessed father 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 realstunreal nix, surely he must have some inkling of the looking-glass world young girls could wander in and out of, 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 poli
ce 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 farther, 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, lass. 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 teargas 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.

  "And Betsy knows he's this monster but still sets her heart on becoming his daughter?" said Dalziel incredulously. "One thing I'll say about you, lass, is you're not one of them girls-can-do-no-wrong feminists."

  "I'm not talking right or wrong, I'm talking truth," retorted Novello angrily. "And it would probably make our job a damn sight easier if only men were as willing to face up to the truth about themselves as women are."

  Oh, shit, she thought, sinking back in her seat. Up there being hallelujah'd with the Trinity one moment, over the battlements and cometing down to hell the next!

  And this was the point where Pascoe rifled his storehouse of palliatives and could only come up with "What is truth?"

  The rest of the journey to the Beulah Chapel passed in a contemplative silence.

  Once in the chapel, Pascoe abandoned meditation for observation. He had a sense of things coming to an end. But as in all the best shows, before it was over, the Fat Man had to sing.

  A voice cut through the hubbub which broke out after Dalziel's declarations of thirst. It was clear, classy, and came from a well-built, handsome woman whom Pascoe recognized without surprise (he was past surprise) as "Cap" Marvell, Dalziel's ex-inamorata. She was proclaiming, "Ladies and gentlemen, it's such a fine night, refreshments are being served out in the yard."

  As the audience began to file out, she approached the Fat Man, put her hand on his arm, and said softly into his ear, "Andy, what's happened?"

  "Tell you later, luv," he said. "It 'ud be a help if you could get shut of that lot too."

  A few of the audience, motivated by parsimony, curiosity, or arthritis, had opted to remain in their seats. Cap Marvell moved among them speaking quietly, and one by one they rose. She shepherded them to the exit, exchanging a smile with Dalziel as she passed.

  Perhaps, thought Pascoe, I should cancel the ex.

  Dalziel glanced his way, and without thinking he cocked his head to one side and made a hello! hello! face. Christ, I'm getting bold, he thought.

  Marvell closed the door behind the last of the audience. Persuasive lady, thought Pascoe. Or maybe she'd taken lessons from her petit ami and simply told them to sod off out while they still had two unbroken legs to walk on.

  She rejoined Dalziel and said, meek as a housemaid, "Anything else, sir?"

  He said, "I've got a feeling the concert's over, so you could always lead them in a singsong to stop 'em asking for their money back. Seriously, pack 'em off home once they've had their refreshments. Talking of which, I weren't joking when I said I were parched. You couldn't jump the queue, could you, and fetch us a mug of tea? Better still, make it a pot and enough mugs to go round."

  He looked to the far end of the chapel where the three Wulfstans and Arne Krog stood by the piano, at which Inger Sandel remained seated. Like a barbershop quartet waiting for a cue, thought Pascoe.

  "Five of them, four of us, that makes nine," said Dalziel. "Wieldy, you're house trained. Give the lass a hand."

  The lass gave him a submissive smile, trod hard but ineffectively on his toe, and went out, followed by Wield.

  P
ascoe caught a brief flicker of pleasure on Novello's face. Thinks she's forgiven because she's not been elected tea girl, he guessed. Poor sprog. She'd learned a lot. But until she learned that in re Dalziel, pleasure was as emotionally irrelevant as pique, she had not learned enough.

  "Well, let's not be unsociable," said the Fat Man.

  And beaming like an insurance salesman about to sell annuities on the Titanic, he set off toward the group by the piano.

  "Now, this is nice," he declared as he approached. "Family and friends. It'll likely save time if I can talk to all of you at once, but if any of you think that could be embarrassing, just say the word and I'll fix to see you privately."

  Like a wolf asking the sheep if they want to stick together or take their chances one by one, thought Pascoe.

  No one spoke.

  "Grand," said Dalziel. "No secrets, then. That's how it should be with family and friends. Let's make ourselves comfortable, shall we?"

  He helped himself to a chair and sat on it with such force, its joints squealed and its legs splayed. Pascoe and Novello brought out chairs for the others and placed them in a semicircle. Then the two detectives took their places behind Dalziel, like attendants at a durbar.

  Elizabeth was the last to sit down. As she draped herself elegantly over the chair she pulled off her blond wig and tossed it casually toward the piano. It landed half on the frame, half off, hung there for a moment, then slithered to the ground like a legless Pekinese.

  No one noticed. All eyes were on the singer as she scratched her bald head vigorously with both hands.

  "Bloody hot in yon thing," she said. "I think I'll give it up."

  "Change of color, eh?" said Dalziel.

  "Aye. I think my blond days are just about done."