On Beulah Height

Book by Hill Reginald

Three

Pascoe sat in the passenger seat of the car with the window wound fully down. The air hit his face like a bomb blast, giving him an excuse to close his eyes while the noise inhibited conversation.

That had been a strange moment back there, when his feet refused to move him through the doorway and his tongue tried to form the words I shan't go.

But its strangeness was short lived. Now he knew it had been a defining moment, such as comes when a man stops pretending his chest pains are dyspepsia.

If he'd opted not to go then, he doubted if he would ever have gone again.

He'd known this when Dalziel rang him. He'd known it every morning when he got up and went on duty for the past many weeks.

He was like a priest who'd lost his faith. His sense of responsibility still made him take the services and administer the sacraments, but it was mere automatism maintained in the hope that the loss was temporary.

After all, even though it was faith, not good works, that got you into the Kingdom, lack of the former was no excuse for giving up the latter, was it?

He smiled to himself. He could still smile. The blacker the comedy, the bigger the laugh, eh?  And he had found himself involved in the classic detective black comedy when the impartial investigator of a crime discovers it is his own family, his own history, he is investigating, and ends up arresting himself. Or at least something in himself is arrested. Or rather . . .

No. Metaphors, analogies, parallels, were all ultimately evasive.

The truth was that what he had discovered about his family's past, and present, had filled him with a rage which at first he had scarcely acknowledged to himself. After all, what had rage to do with the liberal, laid-back, logical, caring, and controlled Pascoe everyone knew and loved?  But it had grown and grown, a poison tree with its roots spreading through every acre of his being, till eventually controlling it and concealing it took up so much of his moral energy, he had no strength for anything else.

He was back with metaphors, and mixing them this time too.

Simply, then, he had come close from time to time to physical violence, to hitting people, and not just the lippy lowlifes his job brought him in contact with who would test a saint's patience, but those close around him--not, thank God, his wife and his daughter--but certainly this gross grotesquerie, this tun of lard, sitting next to him.

"You turned Trappist or are you just sulking?" the tun bellowed.

Carefully Pascoe wound up the window.

"Just waiting for you to fill me in, sir," he said.

"Thought I'd done that," said Dalziel.

"No, sir. You rang and said that a child had gone missing in Danby and as that meant you'd be driving out of town past my house, you'd pick me up in twenty minutes."

"Well, there's nowt else. Lorraine Dacre, aged seven, went out for a walk with her dog before her parents got up. Dog's back but she isn't."

Pascoe pondered this as they crossed the bypass and its caterpillar of traffic crawling eastward to the sea, then said mildly, "Not a lot to go at, then."

"You mean, not enough to cock up your cocktails on the patio?  Or mebbe you were planning to pop round to Dry-Dock's for a dip in his pool."

"Not much point," said Pascoe. "We'll be passing the Chateau Purlingstone shortly and if you peer over his security fence, you'll observe that he's practicing what he preaches. The pool is empty. Which is why they've taken the girls to the seaside today. We were asked to join them but I didn't fancy wall-to-wall traffic. A mistake, I now realize."

"Don't think I wouldn't have airlifted you out," growled Dalziel.

"I believe you. But why?  Okay, a missing child's always serious, but this is still watching-brief time. Chances are she's slipped and crocked her ankle up the dale somewhere, or worse, banged her head. So the local station organizes a search and keeps us posted. Nothing turns up, then we get involved on the ground."

"Aye, normally you're right. But this time the ground's Danby."

"Meaning?"

"Danbydale's next valley over from Dendale."

He paused significantly.

Pascoe dredged his mind for a connection and, because they'd just been talking about Dry-Dock Purlingstone, came up with water.

"Dendale reservoir," he said. "That was going to solve all our water problem to the millennium. There was an inquiry, wasn't there?  Environmentalists versus the public weal. I wasn't around myself but we've got a book about it, or rather Ellie has. She's into local history and environmental issues. The Drowning of Dendale, that's it. More a coffee-table job than a sociological analysis, I recall . . . sorry, sir. Am I missing the point?"

"You're warm, but not very," growled the Fat Man, who'd been showing increasing signs of impatience. "That summer, just afore they flooded Dendale, three little lasses went missing there. We never found their bodies and we never got a result. I know you weren't around, but you must have heard summat of it."

Meaning, My failures are more famous than other people's triumphs, thought Pascoe.

"I think I heard something," he said diplomatically. "But I can't remember much."

"I remember," said the Fat Man. "And the parents, I bet they remember. One of the girls was called Wulfstan. That's what fetched me up short back there when I heard the name."

"The singer, you mean?  Any connection?  It can't be a common name."

"Mebbe. Not a daughter, but. They just had the one. Mary. It nigh on pushed the father over the edge, losing her. He chucked all kinds of shit at us, threatened he'd sue for incompetence and such."

"Did he have a case?" inquired Pascoe.

Dalziel gave him a cold stare but Pascoe met it unblinking. Hidden rage had its compensations, one of them being an indifference to threat.

"There were this local in the frame," said the Fat Man abruptly. "I never really fancied him, two sheets short of a bog roll I reckoned, but we pulled him in after the second lassie. Nothing doing, we had to let him go. Then Mary Wulfstan vanished and her old man went bananas."

"And the local?"

"Benny Lightfoot. He vanished too. Except for one more sighting. Another girl, Betsy Allgood, she got attacked, but that was later, weeks later. Said it were definitely Lightfoot. That did it for most people, especially bloody media. In their eyes we'd had him and we'd let him go."

"You didn't agree?"

"Or didn't want to. Never easy to say which."

This admission of weakness was disturbing, like a cough from a coffin.

"So you went looking for him?"

"There were more sightings than Elvis. Someone even spotted him running in the London Marathon on telly. That figured. Lived up to his name, did Benny. Light of head, light of foot. He could fair fly up that fellside. Might as well have flown off it for all we ever found of him. Or into it, the locals reckoned."

"Sorry?"

"Into the Neb. That's what they call the fell between Dendale and Danby. It's Long Denderside on the map. Full of bloody holes, specially on the Dendale flank. Different kind of rock on the Danby side, don't ask me how. So there's lots of caves and tunnels, most on 'em full of water, save in the drought."

"Did you search them?"

"Cave rescue team went in after the first girl vanished. And again after the other two. Not a sign. Aye, but they're not Benny Lightfoot, said the locals. Could squeeze through a crack in the pavement, our Benny."

"And that's where he's been hiding for fifteen years?" mocked Pascoe.

"Doubt it," said Dalziel, with worrying seriousness. "But he could have holed up there for a week or so, scavenging at nights for food. Betsy Allgood--that's the one who got away--she said he looked half starved. And sodden. The drought had broken then. The caves in the Neb would be flooding. I always hoped he'd have gone to sleep down there somewhere and woke up drowned."

The radio crackled before Pascoe could examine this interesting speculation in detail and Central Control spilled out an update on the case.

Lorraine Dacre, aged seven, was the only child of Tony Dacre, thirty, Post Office driver, no criminal record, and Elsie Dacre, nee Coe, also no record. Married eight years, residence, No. 7 Liggside, Danby. Lorraine did not appear on any Social Service or Care Agency list. Sergeant Clark, Danby Section Office, had called in his staff of four constables. Three were up the dale supervising a preliminary search. Backup services had been alerted and would be mobilized on DS Dalziel's say-so. Sergeant Clark would rendezvous with DS Dalziel at Liggside.

The Fat Man was really reacting strongly to this, thought Pascoe. Old guilt feelings eating that great gut?  Or was there something more?

He brooded on this as they ate up the twenty or so miles to Danby. It was a pleasant road, winding through the pieced and plotted agricultural landscape of the Mid-York plain. As summer's height approached, the fields on either side were green and gold with the promise of rich harvest, but on unirrigated set-aside land blotches of umber and ochre showed how far the battle with drought was already engaged. And up ahead, where arms of rising ground embraced the dales, and no pipes or channels, sprayers or sprinklers, watered the parching earth, the green of bracken and the glory of heather had been sucked up by the thirsty sun, turning temperate moor to tropical savannah.