A Dedicated Man

THREE

Sally slammed down her knife and fork and yelled at her father: ‘Just because I go for a walk with a boy it doesn’t mean I’m a tramp or a trollop or any of those things!’

‘Sally!’ Mrs Lumb butted in. ‘Stop shouting at your father. That wasn’t what he meant and you know it.’

Sally continued to glare. ‘Well that’s what it sounded like to me.’

‘He was only trying to warn you,’ her mother went on. ‘You have to be careful. Boys try to take advantage of you sometimes. Especially a good-looking girl like you.’ She said it with a mixture of pride and fear.

‘You don’t have to treat me like I’m a baby, you know,’ Sally said. ‘I’m sixteen now.’ She gave her mother a pitying glance, cast another baleful look at her father, and went back to her roast beef.

‘Aye,’ said Mr Lumb, ‘and you’ll do as you’re told till you’re eighteen. That’s the law.’

To Sally, the man sitting opposite her was at the root of all her problems, and, of course, Charles Lumb fitted easily into the role his daughter had assigned him: that of an old-fashioned, narrow-minded yokel whose chief argument against anything new and interesting was, ‘What was good enough for my father and his father before him is good enough for you too, young lady.’ There was a strong conservative streak in him, only to be expected of someone whose family had lived in the area for more generations than could be remembered. A traditionalist, Charles Lumb often said that the dale as he had loved it was dying. He knew that the only chance for the young was to get away, and that saddened him. Quite soon, he was certain, even the inhabitants of the dales villages would belong to the National Trust, English Heritage or the Open Spaces Society. Like creatures in a zoo, they would be paid to act out their quaint old ways in a kind of living museum. The grandson of a cabinetmaker, Lumb, who worked at the local dairy factory, found it hard to see things otherwise. The old crafts were dying out because they were uneconomic, and only tourists kept one cooper, one blacksmith and one wheelwright in business.

But because Lumb was a Yorkshireman through and through, he tended to bait and tease in a manner that could easily be taken too seriously by an ambitious young girl like Sally. He delivered the most outrageous statements and opinions about her interests and dreams in such a deliberately deadpan voice that anyone could be excused for not catching the gentle, mocking humour behind them. If he had been less sarcastic and his daughter less self-centred, they might have realized that they loved each other very much.

The thing was, though, Charles Lumb would have liked to see more evidence of common sense in his daughter. She was certainly a bright girl, and it would be easy for her to get into university and become a doctor or a lawyer. A damn sight easier, he reflected, than it was in his day. But no, it had to be this bloody academy, and for all he tried, he could see no value in learning how to paint faces and show off swimsuits. If he had thought she had it in her to become a great actress, then he might have been more supportive. But he didn’t. Maybe time would prove him wrong. He hoped so. At least seeing her on the telly would be something.

Sally, after a few minutes’ sulking, decided to change the topic of conversation. ‘Have you seen those men on the hill?’ she asked. ‘I wonder what they’re doing?’

‘Looking for something, I shouldn’t wonder,’ her father replied dryly, still not recovered from the argument.

Sally ignored him. ‘They look like policemen to me. You can see the buttons of their uniforms shining. I’m going up there to have a look after dinner. There’s already quite a crowd along the road.’

‘Well, make sure you’re back before midnight,’ her mother said. It cleared the air a bit, and they enjoyed the rest of their meal in peace.

Sally walked up the hill road and turned right past the cottages. As she hurried on she danced and grabbed fistfuls of dry grass, which she flung up high in the air.

Several cars blocked the road by the field, and what had looked from a distance like a large crowd turned out to be nothing more than a dozen or so curious tourists with their cameras, rucksacks and hiking boots. It was open country, almost moorland despite the drystone walls that criss-crossed the landscape and gave it some semblance of order. They were old and only the farmers remembered who had built them.

There was more activity in the field than she could recollect ever seeing in such an isolated place. Uniformed men crawled on all fours in the wild grass, and the area by the wall had been cordoned off with stakes and rope. Inside the charmed circle stood a man with a camera, another with a black bag and, seemingly presiding over the whole affair, a small wiry man with a brown jacket slung over his shoulder. Sally’s eyesight was so keen that she could even see the small patches of sweat under his arms.

She asked the middle-aged walker standing next to her what was going on, and the man told her he thought there’d been a murder. Of course. It had to be. She’d seen similar things on the telly.