In A Dry Season

TWO

Banks paused for breath after his walk through the woods. From where he stood on the edge of Thornfield Reservoir, the entire elongated bowl of ruins lay open below him like a cupped hand, about a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long. He didn’t know the full story, but he knew that the site had been covered with water for many years. This was its first reappearance, like an excavated ancient settlement, or a sort of latter-day Brigadoon.

He could see tangles of tree roots sticking out of the slope on the opposite embankment. The difference in soil colors showed where the waterline had been. Beyond the high bank, Rowan Woods straggled away to the north.

The most dramatic part of the scene lay directly below: the sunken village itself. Bracketed by a ruined mill on a hillock to the west, and by a tiny packhorse bridge to the east, the whole thing resembled the skeleton of a giant’s torso. The bridge formed the pelvic bone, and the mill was the skull, which had been chopped off and placed slightly to the left of the body. The river and High Street formed the slightly curving backbone, from which the various ribs of side streets branched off.

There was no road surface, but the course of the old High Street by the river was easy enough to make out. It eventually forked at the bridge, one branch turning toward Rowan Woods, where it soon narrowed to a footpath, and the other continuing over the bridge, then out of the village along the Harksmere embankment, presumably all the way to Harkside. It struck Banks as especially odd that there should have been a fully intact bridge there, under water for all those years.

Below him, a group of people stood by the other side of the bridge, one of them in uniform. Banks scampered down the narrow path. It was a warm evening, and he was sweating by the time he got to the bottom. Before approaching the group, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow and the back of his neck. There was nothing he could do about the damp patches under his arms.

He wasn’t overweight, or even especially unfit. He smoked, he ate lousy food and he drank too much, but he had the kind of metabolism that had always kept him lean. He didn’t go in for strenuous exercise, but since Sandra left he had got into the habit of taking long solitary walks every weekend, and he swam half a mile at the Eastvale public baths once or twice a week. It was this damn hot weather that made him feel so out of shape.

The valley bottom wasn’t as muddy as it looked. Most of the exposed reddish-brown earth had been caked and cracked by the heat. However, there were some marshy patches with reeds growing out of them, and he had to jump several large puddles on his way.

As he crossed the packhorse bridge, a woman walked toward him and stopped him in the middle. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, arm extended, palm out. “This is a crime scene. I’m afraid you can’t come any further.”

Banks smiled. He knew he didn’t look like a DCI. He had left his sports jacket in the car and wore a blue denim shirt open at the neck, with no tie, light tan trousers and black wellington boots.

“Why isn’t it taped off, then?” he asked.

The woman looked at him and frowned. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, by the look of her, long-legged, tall and slim – probably not much more than an inch shorter than Banks’s five foot nine. She was wearing blue jeans and a white blouse made of some silky material. Over the blouse she wore a herringbone jacket that followed the contours of her waist and the gentle outward curve of her hips. Her chestnut hair was parted in the middle and fell in layered, casual waves to her shoulders. Her face was oval, with a smooth, tanned complexion, full lips, and a small mole to the right of her mouth. She was wearing black-rimmed sunglasses, and when she took them off, her serious almond eyes seemed to appraise Banks as if he were a hitherto undiscovered species.

She wasn’t conventionally good-looking. Hers wasn’t the kind of face you’d find on the pages of a magazine, but her looks showed character and intelligence. And the red wellies set it all off nicely.

Banks smiled. “Do I have to throw you off the bridge into the river before I can cross, like Robin Hood did to Little John?”

“I think you’ll find it was the other way round, but you could try it,” she said. Then, after they had scrutinized one another for a few seconds, she squinted, frowned, and said, “You’ll be DCI Banks, then?”

She didn’t appear nervous or embarrassed about mistaking him for a sightseer; there was no hint of apology or deference in her tone. He didn’t know whether he liked that. “DS Cabbot, I presume?”

“Yes, sir.” She smiled. It was no more than a twitch of one corner of her mouth and a brief flash of light behind her eyes, but it left an impression. Many people, Banks mused, probably thought it was nice to be smiled at by DS Cabbot. Which made him all the more suspicious of Jimmy Riddle’s motives for sending him out here.

“And these people?” Banks pointed to the man and woman talking to the uniformed policeman. The man was aiming a video camera at the outbuilding.

“Colleen Harris and James O’Grady, sir. They were scouting the location for a TV program when they saw the boy fall through the roof. They ran to help him. Seems they also had their camera handy. I suppose it’ll make a nice little item on the evening news.” She scratched the side of her nose. “We’d run out of crime-scene tape, sir. At the section station. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever had any in the first place.” She toyed with the sunglasses as she spoke, but Banks didn’t think it was out of nervousness. She had a slight West Country burr, not very pronounced, but clear enough to be noticeable.

“There’s nothing we can do about the TV people now,” Banks said. “They might even be useful. You’d better explain what happened. All I know is that a boy discovered some old bones here.”

DS Cabbot nodded. “Adam Kelly. He’s thirteen.”

“Where is he?”

“I sent him home. To Harkside. He seemed a bit shaken up, and he’d bruised his wrist and elbow. Nothing serious. Anyway, he wanted his mummy, so I got PC Cameron over there to drive him and then come back. Poor kid’ll be having nightmares for months as it is.”

“What happened?”

“Adam was walking on the roof and it gave way under him. Lucky he didn’t break his back, or get crushed to death.” She pointed at the outbuilding. “The rafters that helped support the flagstones must have rotted, all those years under water. It didn’t take much weight. I should think the demolition men were supposed to pull the whole place down before it was flooded, but they must have knocked off early that day.”

Banks looked around. “It does seem as if they cut a few corners.”

“Why not? They probably thought no one would ever see the place again. Who can tell what’s there when it’s all under water? Anyway, the mud broke Adam’s fall, his arm got stuck in it, and he pulled up a skeleton of a hand.”

“Human?”

“Don’t know, sir. I mean, it looks human to me, but we’ll need an expert to be certain. I’ve read that it’s easy to mistake bear paws for human hands.”

“Bear paws? When was the last time you saw a bear around these parts?”

“Why, just last week, sir.”

Banks paused a moment, saw the glint in her eye and smiled. There was something about this woman that intrigued him. Nothing in her tone hinted at self-doubt or uncertainty about her actions. Most junior police officers, when questioned about their actions by a senior, generally either let a little of the “Did I do the right thing, sir?” creep into their tone, or they became defensive. Susan Gay, his old DC, had been like that. But there was none of this with DS Cabbot. She simply stated things as they had occurred, decisions as she had made them, and something about the way she did it made her sound completely self-assured and self-possessed without being at all arrogant or insubordinate. Banks found her disconcerting.

“Right,” he said, “let’s go have a look.”

DS Cabbot folded up her sunglasses, slipped them in her shoulder bag and led the way. Banks followed her to the outbuilding. She moved with a sort of loose-limbed grace, the way cats do whenever it’s not feeding time.

On his way, he stopped and talked briefly to the TV people. They couldn’t tell him much, except that they’d been exploring the area when they saw the lad fall through the roof. They rushed over immediately, and when they got to him they saw what he’d pulled up out of the earth. He hadn’t seemed particularly grateful for their assistance, they said, or even pleased to see them, but they were relieved he wasn’t seriously hurt. True to their profession, they asked Banks if he would mind giving them a comment for the tape. He declined politely, citing lack of information. As soon as he had turned away, the woman was on her mobile to the local news channel. It didn’t sound like the first time she’d called, either.

The outbuilding was about six or seven feet square. Banks stood in the doorway and looked at the depression in the mud where the boy had landed, then at the two heavy slabs of stone on either side. DS Cabbot was right; Adam Kelly had been very lucky indeed. There were more slabs strewn around on the floor, too, many of them broken, some just fragments sticking up out of the mud. He could easily have landed on one and snapped his spine. Still, when you’re that young, you think you’re immortal. Banks and his friends certainly had, even after Phil Simpkins wrapped his rope all the way around a tree trunk, jumped off the top branch and spiraled all the way down onto the pointed metal railings.

Banks shook off the memory and concentrated on the scene before him. The sun shone on the top part of the far wall; the stone glistened, moist and slimy. There was a brackish smell about the place, Banks noticed, though there was no salt water for miles, and a smell of dead fish, which were probably a lot closer.

“See what I mean, sir?” said DS Cabbot. “Because the roof kept the sun out, it’s a lot more muddy in here than outside.” She swept some stray tresses from her cheek with a quick flick of her hand. “Probably saved the kid’s life.”

Banks’s gaze lighted on the skeletal hand curled around the edge of a broken stone slab. It looked like a creature from a horror film trying to claw its way out of the grave. The bones were dark and clotted with mud, but it looked like a human hand to Banks.

“We’d better get some experts in to dig this place out,” he said. “Then we’ll need a forensic anthropologist. In the meantime, I haven’t had my tea yet. Is there somewhere nearby we might be able to get a bite?”

“The Black Swan in Harkside’s your best bet. Will you be wanting Adam Kelly’s address?”

“Have you eaten?”

“No, but-”

“You can come with me, then, fill me in over a meal. I can have a chat with young Adam in the morning, when he’s had time to collect himself. PC Cameron can hold the fort here.”

DS Cabbot glanced down at the skeletal hand.

“Come on,” Banks said. “There’s nothing more we can do here. This poor bugger’s probably been dead longer than we’ve been alive.”

Vivian Elmsley felt bone-weary when she finally got home from the signing. She put her briefcase down in the hall and walked through to the living room. Most people would have been surprised at the modern chrome-and-glass decor in the home of a person as old as Vivian, but she far preferred it to all the dreadfully twee antiques, knickknacks and restored woodwork that cluttered up most old people’s houses – at least the ones she had seen. The only painting that adorned her plain white walls hung over the narrow glass mantelpiece, a framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower, overwhelming in its yellowness and intimidating in its symmetry.

First, Vivian opened the windows to let in some air, then she poured a stiff gin and tonic and made her way to her favorite armchair. Supported by chrome tubes, upholstered in black leather, it leaned back at just the right angle to make reading, drinking or watching television sinfully comfortable.

Vivian glanced at the clock, all its polished brass-and-silver inner workings exposed by the glass dome. Almost nine. She would watch the news first. After that, she would have her bath and read Flaubert.

She reached for the remote control. After the best part of a lifetime’s writing in longhand, with only an old walnut-cabinet wireless to provide entertainment, she had given in to technology five years ago. In one glorious shopping spree the day after she received a large advance from her new American publisher, she went out and bought herself a television, a VCR, a stereo system and the computer she now used to write her books.

She put her feet up and clicked on the remote control. The news was the usual rubbish. Politics, for the most part, a little murder, famine in Africa, a botched assassination attempt in the Middle East. She didn’t know why she bothered watching it. Then, toward the end, came one of those little human-interest bites they use to fill up the time.

This one made Vivian sit up and take notice.

The camera panned a cluster of familiar ruins as the voice-over explained that the drought had brought this lost Dales village of Hobb’s End to light for the first time since it had been officially flooded in 1953. She already knew that – this was the same film footage they had used when the story first made it to television about a month ago – but suddenly the angle changed, and she could see a group of people standing by the bridge, one of them a uniformed policeman.

“Today,” the voice-over went on, “a young boy exploring the scene discovered something he hadn’t bargained for.”

The narrator’s tone was light, fluffy, the way so many of the cozy mysteries Vivian detested made light of the real world of murder. It was a mystery worthy of Miss Marple, he went on, a skeleton discovered, not in a cupboard, folks, but under the muddy floor of an old outbuilding. How could it have got there? Was foul play suspected?

Vivian clutched the cool chrome tubes at the sides of her armchair as she watched, gin and tonic forgotten on the glass table beside her.

The camera focused on the outbuilding, and Vivian saw the man and woman standing on the threshold. The narrator went on about the police arriving at the scene and refusing to comment at this early stage, then he brought the piece to a close by saying they’d be keeping an eye on the situation.

The program was well into the weather by the time Vivian had recovered from the shock. Even then, she found that her hands were still gripping the chrome so tightly, even her liver spots had turned white.

She let go, let her body sag in the chair, and took a deep breath. Then she reached for her gin and tonic, hands shaking now, and managed to take a gulp without spilling it. That helped.

When she felt a little calmer, she went into the study and dug through her filing cabinet for the manuscript she had written in the early 1970s, three years after her last visit to Thornfield Reservoir. She found the sheaf of papers and carried it back through to the living room.

It had never been intended for publication. In many ways, it had been a practice piece, one she had written when she became interested in writing after her husband’s death. She had written it when she thought the old adage “Write about what you know” meant “Write about your own life, your own experiences.” It had taken her a few years to work out that that was not the case. She still wrote about what she knew – guilt, grief, pain, madness – only now she put it into the lives of her characters.

As she started to read, she realized she wasn’t sure exactly what it was. A memoir? A novella? Certainly there was some truth in it; at least she had tried to stick to the facts, had even consulted her old diaries for accuracy. But because she had written it at a time in her life when she had been unclear about the blurred line between autobiography and fiction, she couldn’t be sure which was which. Would she see it any more clearly now? There was only one way to find out.

Banks had never been to Harkside before. DS Cabbot led the way in her metallic purple Astra, and he followed her along the winding one-way streets lined with limestone and gritstone Dales cottages with small, colorful gardens behind low walls. Many of the houses that opened directly onto the street had window boxes or baskets of red and gold flowers hanging outside.

They parked beside the village green, where a few scattered trees provided shade for the benches. Old people sat in the late-summer dusk as the shadows grew long, wrinkled hands resting on knobbly walking sticks, talking to other old people or just watching the world go by. At the center of the green stood a small, obelisk-style war memorial listing the names of Harkside’s dead over the two world wars.

The essentials were arrayed around the green: a KwikSave minimart, which from its oddly ornate facade looked as if it had once been a cinema, a Barclay’s Bank, newsagent’s, butcher’s, grocer’s, betting shop, Oddbins Wines, a fifteenth-century church and three pubs, one of them the Black Swan. Though Harkside had a population of only between two and three thousand, it was the largest place for some miles, and people from the more remote farms and hamlets still viewed it as the closest thing to the big city, full of sin and temptation. It was simply a large village, but most local people referred to it as “town.”

“Where’s the section station?” Banks asked.

DS Cabbot pointed down a side street.

“The place that looks like a brick garage? The one with the flat roof?”

“That’s the one. Ugliest building in town.”

“Do you live here?”

“For my sins, yes, sir.”

It was just a saying, Banks knew, but he couldn’t help wondering what those sins were. Just imagining them gave him a little thrill of delight.

They walked over to the Black Swan, a whitewash-and-timber facade with gables and a sagging slate roof. It was dim inside, but still too warm, despite the open door and windows. Though a few tourists and ramblers lingered over after-dinner drinks at the rickety wooden tables, it was long past their bedtime. Banks walked to the bar with DS Cabbot, who asked the bartender if they could still get food.

“Depends what you want, love,” she said, and pointed to a list on the blackboard.

Banks sighed. The guessing game. He had played it often enough before. You walk in about ten minutes after opening time and ask for something on the menu, only to be told that it’s “off.” After about four or five alternatives, also declared “off,” you finally find something that they just might have. If you’re lucky.

This time Banks went through tandoori chicken and chips, venison medallions in a red wine sauce and chips, and fettucine Alfredo and chips before striking gold: beef and Stilton pie. And chips. He hadn’t been eating much beef for the past few years, but he had stopped worrying about mad-cow disease lately. If his brain was going to turn to sludge, there wasn’t much he could do to stop it at this stage. Sometimes it felt like sludge already.

DS Cabbot ordered a salad sandwich, no chips.

“Diet?” Banks asked, remembering the way Susan Gay used to nibble on rabbit food most of the time.

“No, sir. I don’t eat meat. And the chips are cooked in animal fat. There’s not a lot of choice.”

“I see. Drink?”

“Like a fish.” She laughed. “Actually, I’ll have a pint of Swan’s Down Bitter. I’d recommend it very highly. It’s brewed on the premises.”

Banks took her advice and was glad that he did. He had never met a vegetarian beer aficionado before.

“I’ll bring your food over when it’s ready, dearies,” the woman said. Banks and DS Cabbot took their pints over to a table by the open window. It looked out on the twilit green. The scene had changed: a group of teenagers had supplanted the old men. They leaned against tree trunks smoking, drinking from cans, pushing and shoving, telling jokes, laughing, trying to look tough. Again, Banks thought of Brian. It wasn’t such a bad thing, was it, neglecting his architectural studies to pursue a career in music? It didn’t mean he’d end up a deadbeat. And if it was a matter of drugs, Brian had probably had enough opportunities to try them already. Banks certainly had by his age.

What really bothered him was his realization that he didn’t really know his son very well anymore. Brian had grown up over the past few years away from home, and Banks hadn’t seen much of him. Truth be told, he had spent far more time and energy on Tracy. He had also had his own preoccupations and problems, both at work and at home. Maybe they were on the wane, but they certainly hadn’t gone away yet.

If DS Cabbot felt uncomfortable with Banks’s brooding silence, she didn’t show it. He fished out his cigarettes. Still not bad; he had smoked only five so far that day, despite his row with Brian and Jimmy Riddle’s phone call. Cutting out the ones he usually had in the car was a good idea. “Do you mind?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Sure?”

“If you’re asking whether it’ll make me suffer, it will, but I usually manage to control my cravings.”

“Reformed?”

“A year.”

“Sorry.”

“You needn’t be. I’m not.”

Banks lit up. “I’m thinking of stopping soon myself. I’ve cut down.”

“Best of luck.” DS Cabbot raised her glass, took a sip of beer and smacked her lips. “Ah, that’s good. Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“No.”

She leaned forward and touched the hair at his right temple. “What’s that?”

“What? The scar?”

“No. The blue bit. I didn’t think DCIs went in for dye jobs.”

Banks felt himself blush. He touched the spot she had indicated. “It must be paint. I was painting my living room when Jimmy Riddle phoned. I thought I’d washed it all off.”

She smiled. “Never mind. Looks quite nice, actually.”

“Maybe I should get an earring to go with it?”

“Better not go too far.”

Banks gestured out of the window. “Get much trouble?” he asked.

“The kids? Nah, not a lot. Bit of glue-sniffing, some vandalism. Mostly they’re bored. It’s just adolescent high spirits.”

Banks nodded. At least Brian wasn’t bored and shiftless. He had a direction he passionately wanted to head in. Whether it was the right one or not was another matter. Banks tried to concentrate on the job at hand. “I called my sergeant on the way here,” he said. “He’ll organize a SOCO team to dig out the bones tomorrow morning. A bloke called John Webb will be in charge. He’s studied archaeology. Goes on digs for his holidays, so he ought to know what he’s doing. I’ve also phoned our odontologist, Geoff Turner, and asked him to have a look at the teeth as soon as it can be arranged. You can phone around the universities in the morning, see if you can come up with a friendly forensic anthropologist. These people are pretty keen, as a rule, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem. In the meantime,” he said as his smoke curled and twisted out of the window, “tell me all about Thornfield Reservoir.”

DS Cabbot leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs at the ankles, resting the beer glass against her flat stomach. She had swapped her red wellies for a pair of white sandals, and her jeans rode up to reveal tapered ankles, bare except for a thin gold chain around the left one. Banks had never seen anyone manage to look quite so comfortable in a hard pub chair. He wondered again what she could possibly have done to end up in such a godforsaken outpost as Harkside. Was she another of Jimmy Riddle’s pariahs?

“It’s the most recent of the three reservoirs built along the River Rowan,” she began. “Linwood and Harksmere were both created in the late-nineteenth century to supply Leeds with extra water. It’s piped from the reservoirs to the big waterworks just outside the city, then it’s purified and pumped into people’s homes.”

“But Harksmere and Thornfield are in North Yorkshire, not West Yorkshire. West Riding, I suppose it was back then. Even so, why should they be supplying water to Leeds?”

“I don’t know how it came about, but some sort of deal was struck between North Yorkshire and the Leeds City Council for the land use. That’s why we’re not part of the park.”

“What do you mean?”

“Rowandale. Nidderdale, too. We’re not part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, though we should be if you go by geography and natural beauty. It’s because of the water. Nobody wanted to have to deal with National Parks Commission’s rules and regulations, so it was easier just to exclude us.”

Like Eastvale, Banks thought. Because it was just beyond the park’s border, the severe building restrictions that operated inside the Yorkshire Dales National Park didn’t apply. Consequently, you ended up with monstrosities like the East Side Estate, with its ugly tower blocks and maisonettes, and the new council estate just completed down by Gallows View: “Gibbet Acres,” as everyone was calling it at the station.

Their meals arrived. Banks stubbed out his cigarette. “What about Thornfield?” he asked after he had swallowed his first bite. The pie was good, tender beef and just enough Stilton to complement it. “How long has it been there? What happened to the village?”

“Thornfield Reservoir was created in the early fifties, around the time the national parks system was established, but the village had already been empty a few years by then. Since the end of the war, I think. Used to have a population of around three or four hundred. It wasn’t called Thornfield; it was called Hobb’s End.”

“Why?”

“Beats me. There’s no Hobb in its history, as far as anyone knows, and it wasn’t the end of anything – except maybe civilization as we know it.”

“How long was the village there?”

“No idea. Since medieval times, probably. Most of them have been.”

“Why was it empty? What drove people away?”

“Nothing drove them away. It just died. Places do, like people. Did you notice that big building at the far west end?”

“Yes.”

“That was the flax mill. It was the village’s raison d’être in the nineteenth century. The mill owner, Lord Clifford, also owned the land and the cottages. Very feudal.”

“You seem to be an expert, but you don’t sound as if you come from these parts.”

“I don’t. I read up on the area when I came here. It’s got quite an interesting history. Anyway, the flax mill started to lose business – too much competition from bigger operations and from abroad – then old Lord Clifford died and his son wanted nothing to do with the place. This was just after the Second World War. Tourism wasn’t such big business in the Dales back then, and you didn’t get absentees buying up all the cottages for holiday rentals. When someone moved out, if nobody else wanted to move in, the cottage was usually left empty and soon fell to rack and ruin. People moved away to the cities or to the other dales. Finally, the new Lord Clifford sold the land to Leeds Corporation Waterworks. They rehoused the remaining tenants, and that was that. Over the next few years, the engineers moved in and prepared the site, then they created the reservoir.”

“Why that site in particular? There must be plenty of places to build reservoirs.”

“Not really. It’s partly because the other two were nearby and it was easier for the engineers to add one to the string. That way they could control the levels better. But mostly I imagine it’s to do with water tables and bedrock and such. There’s a lot of limestone in the Dales, and apparently you can’t build reservoirs on that sort of limestone. It’s permeable. The Rowan Valley bottom’s made of something else, something hard. It’s all to do with faults and extrusions. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of my school geology.”

“Me, too. When did you say all this happened?”

“Between the end of the Second World War and the early fifties. I can check the exact dates back at the station.”

“Please.” Banks paused and tasted some beer. “So our body, if indeed there is one, and if it’s human, has to have been down there since before the early fifties?”

“Unless someone put it there this summer.”

“I’m no expert, but from what I’ve seen so far, it looks older than that.”

“It could have been moved from somewhere else. Maybe when the reservoir dried up, someone found a better hiding place for a body they already had.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Whatever happened, I doubt that whoever buried it there would have put on a frogman’s outfit and swum down.”

“Whoever buried it?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I’d say it was buried, wouldn’t you?”

Banks finished his pie and pushed the rest of the chips aside. “Go on.”

“The stone slabs. Maybe the body could have got covered by two or three feet of earth without much help. Maybe. I mean, we don’t know how much things shifted and silted down there over the last forty years or more. We also don’t know yet whether the victim was wearing concrete wellies. But it beats me how a body could have got under those stone slabs on the outbuilding floor without a little human intervention, don’t you think, sir?”

It was a blustery afternoon in April 1941, when she appeared in our shop for the first time. Even in her land girl uniform, the green V-neck pullover, biscuit-colored blouse, green tie and brown corduroy knee breeches, she looked like a film star.

She wasn’t very tall, perhaps about five foot two or three, and the drab uniform couldn’t hide the kind of figure I’ve heard men whistle at in the street. She had a pale, heart-shaped face, perfectly proportioned nose and mouth, and the biggest, deepest, bluest eyes I had ever seen. Her blond hair cascaded from her brown felt hat, which she wore at a jaunty angle and held on with one hand as she walked in from the street.

I was immediately put in mind of Hardy’s novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which I had read only a few weeks previously. Like Elfride Swancourt’s, this land girl’s eyes were “a sublimation of her.” They were “a misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface… looked into rather than at.” Those eyes also had a way of making you feel you were the only person in the world when she talked to you.

“Nasty out, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you’ve got five Woodbines for sale, have you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “We don’t have any cigarettes at all.” It was one of the toughest times we’d had in the war thus far: the Luftwaffe was bombing our cities to ruins; the U-boats were sinking Atlantic convoys at an alarming rate; and the meat ration had just been dropped to only one and tenpence a week. But here she was, bold as brass, a stranger, walking into the shop and without a by-your-leave asking for cigarettes!

I was lying, of course. We did have cigarettes, but what small supply we had we kept under the counter for our registered customers. We certainly didn’t go selling them to strange and beautiful land girls with eyes out of Thomas Hardy novels.

I was just on the point of telling her to try fluttering her eyelashes at one of the airmen knocking about the village – holding my tongue never having been my strongest point – when she totally disarmed me with a sequence of reactions.

First she thumped the counter with her little fist and cursed. Then, a moment later, she bit the corner of her lower lip and broke into a bright smile. “I didn’t think you would have,” she said, “but it was worth asking. I ran out the day before yesterday and I’m absolutely gasping for a fag. Oh, well, can’t be helped.”

“Are you the new land girl at Top Hill Farm?” I asked, curious now, and beginning to feel more than a little guilty about my deceit.

She smiled again. “Word gets around quickly, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a small village.”

“So I see. Anyway, that’s me. Gloria Stringer.” Then she held her hand out. I thought it rather an odd gesture for a woman, especially around these parts, but I took it. Her hand was soft and slightly moist, like a summer leaf after rain. Mine felt coarse and heavy wrapped around such a delicate thing. I always was an ungainly and awkward child, but never did I feel this so much as during that first meeting with Gloria. “Gwen Shackleton,” I muttered, more than a trifle embarrassed. “Pleased to meet you.”

Gloria rested her hand palm-down on the counter, cocked one hip forward and looked around. “Not a lot to do around here, is there?” she said.

I smiled. “Not a lot.” I knew what she meant, of course, but it still struck me as an odd, even insensitive, thing to say. I got up at six o’clock every morning to run the shop, and on top of that I spent one night a week fire-watching – a bit of a joke around these parts until the Spinner’s Inn was burned down by a stray incendiary bomb in February and two people were killed. I also helped with the local Women’s Voluntary Service. Most days, after the nine-o’clock news, I was exhausted and ready to fall asleep the minute my head hit the pillow.

I had heard how hard a land girl’s job was, of course, but to judge by her appearance, especially those soft hands, you would swear that Gloria Stringer had never done a day’s hard physical labor in her life. My first thought was an uncharitable one. Knowing farmer Kilnsey’s wandering eye, I thought that, perhaps, when his wife wasn’t around, he was teaching Gloria a new way of plowing the furrow. Though I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, being only sixteen at the time, I had heard more than one or two farmers use the phrase when they thought I was out of earshot.

But in this, as in most of my first impressions about Gloria, I was quite wrong. This freshness in her appearance was simply one of her many remarkable qualities. She could spend the day hay-making, threshing, pea-pulling, milking, snagging turnips, yet always appear fresh and alive, with energy to spare, as if, unlike the rest of us mere mortals, she had some sort of invisible shield around her through which the hard diurnal toil couldn’t penetrate.

On first impressions, I have to confess that I did not like Gloria Stringer; she struck me as being vain, common, shallow and selfish. Not to mention beautiful, of course. That hurt, especially.

Then, wouldn’t you know it, but right in the middle of our conversation, Michael Stanhope had to walk in.

Michael Stanhope was something of a character around the village, to put it mildly. A reasonably successful artist, somewhere, I’d guess, in his early fifties, he affected a rakish appearance and seemed deliberately to go out of his way to offend people.

That day, he was wearing a rumpled white linen suit over a grubby lavender shirt and a crooked yellow bow tie. He also wore his ubiquitous broad-brimmed hat and carried a cane with a snake-head handle. As usual, he looked quite dissipated. His eyes were bloodshot, he had at least three days’ stubble on his face, and he emanated a sort of general fug of stale smoke and alcohol.

A lot of people didn’t like Michael Stanhope because he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought and he spoke out against the war. I quite liked him, in a way, though I didn’t agree with his views. Half the time he only said what he did to annoy people, like complaining that he couldn’t get canvas for his paintings because the army was using it all. That wasn’t true at all.

But he would have to walk in right then.

“Good morning, my cherub,” he said, as he always did, though I felt far from cherubic. “I trust you have my usual?”

“Er, sorry, Mr. Stanhope,” I stammered. “We’re all out.”

“All out? Come, come now, girl, that can’t be.” He grinned and looked over at Gloria mischievously. Then he winked at her.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stanhope.”

“I’ll bet if you looked in the usual place,” he said, leaning forward and rapping on the counter with his cane, “you would find them.”

I knew when I was beaten. Mortified, blushing to the roots of my being, I reached under the counter and brought out the two packets of Piccadilly I had put aside for him, the way I always did whenever we were lucky enough to get some in.

“That’ll be one and eight, please,” I said.

“Outrageous,” Mr. Stanhope complained as he dug out the coins, “the way this government is taxing us to death to make war. Don’t you think so, my cherub?”

I muttered something noncommittal.

All the while Gloria had been watching our little display with growing fascination. When I glanced at her guiltily as I handed over the cigarettes to Mr. Stanhope, she smiled at me and shrugged.

Mr. Stanhope must have caught the gesture. He was always quick to sense any new nuance or current in the atmosphere. He fed on that sort of thing.

“Ah, I see,” he said, turning his gaze fully toward Gloria and admiring her figure quite openly. “Do I take it that you were inquiring after cigarettes yourself, my dear?”

Gloria nodded. “As a matter of fact, I was.”

“Well,” said Mr. Stanhope, putting the brass snakehead of his cane to his chin as he reflected, “I’ll tell you what. As I very much approve of women smoking, perhaps we can come to some sort of arrangement. I have but one stipulation.”

“Oh,” said Gloria, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes. “And what might that be?”

“That you smoke in the street every now and then.”

Gloria stared at him for a moment, then she started to laugh. “That won’t be a problem,” she said. “I can assure you.”

And he handed her one of the packets.

I was flabbergasted. There were ten cigarettes in each packet and they weren’t cheap or easy to get.

Instead of protesting that she couldn’t possibly accept them but thanking him for his generosity anyway, as I would have done, Gloria simply took the packet and said, “Why, thank you very much, Mr…?”

He beamed at her. “Stanhope. Michael Stanhope. At your service. And it’s my pleasure. Believe me, my dear, it’s a rare treat indeed to meet a woman as comely as thyself around these parts.” Then he moved a step closer and scrutinized her, quite rudely, I thought, rather like a farmer looking over a horse he was about to buy.

Gloria stood her ground.

When Mr. Stanhope had finished, he turned to go, but before the door shut behind him he cast a quick glance over his shoulder at Gloria. “You know, you really must visit my studio, my dear. See my etchings, as it were.” And with that he was gone, chuckling as he went.

In the silence that followed, Gloria and I stared at one another for a moment, then we both burst out giggling. When we had managed to control ourselves, I told her I was sorry for deceiving her over the cigarettes, but she waved the apology aside. “You have your regulars to attend to,” she said. “And these are difficult times.”

“I must apologize for Mr. Stanhope, too,” I said. “I’m afraid he can be quite rude.”

“Nonsense,” she said, with that little pixie-ish grin of hers. “I rather liked him. And he did give me these.”

She opened the packet and offered me a cigarette. I shook my head; I didn’t smoke then. She put one in the corner of her mouth and lit it with a small silver lighter she took from her uniform pocket. “Just as well,” she said. “I can see these will have to last me a while.”

“I can put some aside for you in future,” I said. “I mean, I can try. Depending on how many we can get, of course.”

“Would you? Oh, yes, please! That would be wonderful. Now if I might just have a look at that copy of Picture Goer over there, the one with Vivien Leigh on the cover. I do so admire Vivien Leigh, don’t you? She’s so beautiful. Have you seen Gone With the Wind? I saw it in the West End before I went on my month’s training. Absolutely-”

But before I could get the magazine for her or tell her that Gone With the Wind hadn’t reached this far north yet, Matthew dashed in.

Gloria turned at the sound of the bell, eyebrows raised in curiosity. When he saw her, my brother stopped in his tracks and fell into her eyes so deeply you could hear the splash.

The first thing Banks did when he got back to the cottage that night was check the answering machine. Nothing. Damn it. He wanted to put things right after his miserable cock-up on the phone earlier that day, but he still had no access to Brian’s number in Wimbledon. He didn’t even know Andrew’s last name. He could find out – after all, he was supposed to be a detective – but it would take time, and he could only do it during office hours. Sandra might know, of course, but the last thing he wanted to do was talk to her.

Banks poured himself a whiskey, turned off the bright overhead light and switched on the reading lamp by his armchair. He picked up the book he had been reading over the past week, an anthology of twentieth-century poetry, but he couldn’t concentrate. The blue walls distracted him, and the smell of paint in the deep silence of the countryside made him feel lonely and restless. He turned on the radio. Someone was playing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.

Banks glanced around the room. The walls did look good; they harmonized well with the ceiling, which he had painted the color of ripe Brie. Maybe they were just a little too cold, he thought, though he needed all the air-conditioning he could get in this weather. He could always repaint them orange or red in winter, when the ice and snow came, and that would give the illusion of warmth.

He lit the last cigarette of the day and took his drink outside. The cottage stood on a narrow, unpaved laneway about fifty yards west of Gratly. Opposite Bank’s front door was a sort of bulge in the low wall that ran between the lane and Gratly Beck. In the daytime, it was an ideal spot for ramblers to stop for a moment and admire the falls, but at night there was never anyone there. The lane wasn’t a through road, and there was plenty of room for Banks to park his car there. Just beyond the cottage, it dwindled to a public footpath, which ran between the woods and the side of Gratly Beck.

Banks had come to see this area as his personal veranda, and he liked to stand out there or sit on the low wall dangling his legs over the edge late in the evening, when it was quiet. It helped him think, get things sorted.

Tonight, the stone was still warm; the smoke on his tongue tasted sweet as fresh-mown hay. A sheep bleated high on the daleside, where the silhouetted falls were only a shade or two blacker than the night itself. Sharp starlight pricked the satin sky, along with the lights of a distant farmhouse; a gibbous moon hung over Helmthorpe, in the valley bottom, and the square church tower, with its ancient weather vane, stood solid against the night. This must have been what the blackout was like, Banks thought, remembering his mother’s stories of getting around London during the Blitz.

As Banks sat by the dried-up waterfalls, he thought again about the odd way he had come to live in this isolated limestone cottage. It was a “dream cottage” in more than one way: though he had never told anyone this, he had actually bought it because of a dream.

Over his last few months alone in the Eastvale semi, Banks had drifted so far from himself that he hadn’t even cleaned or tidied the place since Christmas. Why bother? He spent most of his evenings out in pubs or driving the countryside alone, anyway, and his nights falling asleep half-drunk on the sofa, listening to Mozart or Bob Dylan, fish-and-chips wrappers and take-away cartons piling up in an ever-widening circle around him.

In April he seemed to reach his lowest ebb. Tracy, who had been to visit her mother in London that Easter weekend, let it slip over the telephone that there was a new man in Sandra’s life, a photo-journalist called Sean, and that they seemed serious. He looked young, Tracy said. Which was a hell of a compliment coming from a nineteen-year-old. Banks immediately began to wonder just how long this affair had been going on before he and Sandra separated last November. He asked Tracy, but she said she didn’t know. She also seemed upset that Banks would even suggest it, so he backed off.

As a result, Banks was more full of anger and self-pity than usual that night. Whenever he thought of Sean, which was far more often than he would have liked, he wanted to kill him. He even considered phoning an old mate on the Met and asking if they couldn’t put the bastard away for something. There were plenty of coppers on the Met who would jump at the chance to put someone called Sean away. But while he had certainly bent the rules occasionally, Banks had never yet abused his position for his own ends, and even at his lowest ebb he wasn’t going to start.

His hatred was unreasonable, he knew, but when was hatred ever reasonable? He had never even met Sean. Besides, if Sandra wanted to pick up some toy boy and take him home to her bed, it was hardly the toy boy’s fault, was it? More likely hers. But reason didn’t stop Banks from wanting to kill the bastard.

That night, after several whiskeys too many, he had fallen asleep on the sofa as usual, with Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks playing on the CD. Long after the music had finished, he woke from a dream peculiar only for its emotional intensity.

He was sitting alone at a pine table in a kitchen, and sunlight flooded through the open curtains, bathing everything in its warm and honeyed glow. The walls were off-white, with a strip of red tiles over the sink and counter area; matching red canisters for coffee, tea and sugar stood on the white Formica countertops, and copper-bottomed pots and pans hung from a wooden rack beside the set of kitchen knives. The clarity of detail was extraordinary; every grain and knothole in the wood, every nuance of light on steel or copper shone with a preternatural brightness. He could even smell the warm pine from the table and the fitted cupboards, the oil on the hinges.

That was it. Nothing happened. Just a dream of light. But the intense feeling of well-being it gave him, as warm and bright as the sunlight itself, still suffused him when he awoke, disappointed to find himself alone and hung over on the sofa in the Eastvale semi.

When Sandra decided a few weeks later that their separation was to be permanent – or at least that reconciliation wasn’t imminent – they sold the semi. Sandra got the television and VCR; Banks got the stereo and the lion’s share of the CD collection. That was fair; he had collected them in the first place. They split the kitchenware, and for some obscure reason, Sandra also took the tin opener. Books and clothes were easily divided, and they sold most of the furniture. All in all, there hadn’t been a hell of a lot to show for over twenty years of marriage. Even after the sale, Banks didn’t care much where or how he lived, until a few weeks in a bed-and-breakfast place straight out of Bill Bryson changed his mind.

He began to seek isolation. When he first saw the cottage from the outside, he didn’t think much of it. The view of the dale was terrific, as was the seclusion afforded by the woods, the beck, and the ash grove between the cottage and Gratly itself, but it was a squat, ugly little place that needed a lot of work.

A typical Dales mix of limestone, grit and flag, it had originally been a farm laborer’s cottage. Carved into the gritstone doorhead was the date “ 1768” and the initials “J.H.,” probably the time it was built and the initials of the first owner. Banks wondered who J.H. was and what had become of him. Mrs. Perkins, the present owner, had lost both her two sons and her husband, and she was finally leaving to move in with her sister in Tadcaster.

Inside, the place didn’t make much more of an impression at first, either; it smelled of camphor and mold, and all the furniture and decor seemed dark and dingy. Downstairs was a living room with a stone fireplace at one end; upstairs, only two small bedrooms. The bathroom and toilet had been tacked on to the kitchen at the back, as they often were in such old houses. Plumbing was pretty primitive back in 1768.

Banks was not a believer in visions and prescience, but he would have been a fool to deny that when he walked into the kitchen that day he experienced the same feeling of well-being and of peace that he had experienced in the dream. It looked different, of course, but he knew it was the same place, the one in his dream.

What it all meant, he had no idea, except that he had to have the cottage.

He didn’t think he would be able to afford it; properties in the Dales were fetching astronomical prices. But fortune and human eccentricity proved to be on his side for once. Mrs. Perkins had no love whatsoever for the holiday-cottage trade and no particular greed for mere money. She wanted to sell to someone who would actually live in the cottage. As soon as she found out that Banks was looking for just such a place, and that his name was the same as her maiden name, the deal was as good as done. The only black mark against Banks was that he wasn’t born a Yorkshireman, but she took to him anyway, convinced they were related, and she even flirted with him in that way some old ladies have.

When she let him have the place for £50,000, probably about half of what she could have got, telling him it would be enough to see her to her grave, Dimmoch, the estate agent, groaned and shook his head in disbelief. Afterward, Banks always had the impression that Dimmoch suspected him of exerting undue pressure on Mrs. Perkins.

The cottage became Banks’s long-term project – his therapy, his refuge and, he hoped, his salvation. In an odd way he felt working on the cottage was like working on himself. Both needed renovating, and both had a long way to go. It was all new to him; he had never had the faintest interest in DIY or gardening before; nor had he been much inclined to self-analysis or introspection. But somehow he had lost his way over the past year, and he wanted to find a new one; he had also lost something of himself, and he wanted to know what it was. So far, he had fitted some pine cupboards in the kitchen, like the ones in his dream, installed a shower unit to replace the claw-footed Victorian bathtub, and painted the living room. It hadn’t kept the depression away completely, but made it more manageable; at least he always managed to drag himself out of bed in the morning now, even if he didn’t always view the day ahead with any real relish.

A night bird called out far in the distance – a broken, eerie cry, as if perhaps some predator was threatening its nest. Banks stubbed out his cigarette and went back inside. As he got ready for bed, he thought of the skeletal hand, possibly human; he thought of DS Cabbot, definitely human; he thought of Hobb’s End, that lost, ruined village suddenly risen from the depths with its secrets; and somewhere in his mind, in the darkness way beyond the realms of logic and reason, he heard an echo, a click, felt something intangible connect across the years.