On Beulah Height (21 page)

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 from 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."

"I know where the vehicle was, sir, but that's not the same as knowing you were in charge of it."

Wulfstan nodded acknowledgment of the point and said, "I parked my Discovery by the Corpse Road not far from St. Michael's at about eight-thirty. I then went for a walk and returned to the car shortly after ten."

"By yourself?"

"That's right."

"And where'd you walk?"

"Up the Corpse Road to the col and back the same way."

"That's thirty, thirty-five minutes up and twenty back. What about the rest of the time, sir?"

Wulfstan said flatly, "I stood on the col and looked down into Dendale."

The question At anything in particular? rose in Dalziel's throat, but he kept it there. The man was trying to cooperate.

"Up, down, or standing still, you see anyone else, sir?"

Wulfstan bowed his head forward and rested the index finger of each hand against his brow. It was a conventional enough "thinking" pose, but in this man it gave an impression of absolute focus.

"There were a couple of cars in Dendale," he said finally. "Parked by the dam. Some people were walking from one of them. Tourists, I expect. The drought has caused a lot of interest as the ruins of the village start showing through. On the track itself, up and down, I saw no one. I'm sorry."

He made as if to rise. End of interview. He thinks, thought Dalziel, making himself more comfortable in the armchair.

"You often walk up the Corpse Road, sir?" he asked.

"Often? What is often?"

"Witness who spotted your car says she'd noticed it several times in the past couple of weeks."

"Not surprising. My firm has a research unit and display center at the Danby Science Park, and when I'm out there I frequently take the opportunity to stretch my legs."

"Nowt better than a bit of exercise," said Dalziel patting his gut with all the complacency of Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing his biceps. "Sunday yesterday, but."

"I know. I trained as an engineer, Superintendent, and one of the first things they taught us was the days of the week," said Wulfstan acerbically. "Has Sabbath breaking been reinstated as an actionable offense in Yorkshire?"

"No, sir. Just wondered about you going to work on a Sunday, and so early. You did say that's why you went to Danby, because of your business, not just to take a walk?"

"Yes, I did. And that's what I've been doing on and off for many years, Superintendent, as you can check, though why you should want to, I cannot imagine. Running the business takes up so much of my time, it is easy to lose sight of what makes the business run. I am an engineer first, a businessman second. In my work as in yours, it is easy to let yourself be lifted out of your proper sphere of competence."