On Beulah Height

12

At five o'clock, Geordie Turnbull was on the move.

Novello had been driven by a call of nature to leave the car in search of seclusion. This enforced exploration had led her to a small copse in a field almost opposite the compound where, relief achieved, she discovered that with the aid of her glasses, she was able to get a view clear through the length of the bungalow's living room, from open front window to open French door.

She could see Turnbull's head and shoulders as he slouched in an armchair, occasionally taking a sip from a glass. Then he straightened up, reached out, and picked up the telephone.

He didn't dial, so it had to be an incoming call. It didn't last long. He replaced the receiver, drained his glass, and stood up.

Then he moved out of sight. Novello didn't hang about but headed back to her car fast.

Her instinct proved right. A minute later, Turnbull came out of the bungalow carrying a bag. He got into the Volvo station wagon and drove out through the compound gate, turning eastward. It was a fairly empty B road and Novello hung well back. But six or seven miles beyond Bixford, the B road joined the busy dual parkway to the coast and she had to accelerate to keep him within sight.

A few miles farther on he signaled to turn off into a service area. She thought it must be fuel he was after, but he turned into the parking lot, got out, still carrying the bag, and headed for the cafeteria.

Novello followed. She hung back till several more people joined the queue behind him, then took her place. He bought a pot of tea and carried it to a table by the window overlooking the road. She noticed he took the seat which gave him a view of the entrance door.

She got a coffee and found a seat a few tables behind him. Someone had left a newspaper. She picked it up and held it so that, if he should happen to glance round, half her face would be covered. If his roving eye was keen enough to identify her from the top half alone, tough.

He was waiting for someone, there was no doubt about that. He poured his tea and raised the cup to his lips with his left hand, his right never letting go of the handle of the bag on the chair next to his, and his head angled toward the doorway.

This went on for twenty minutes. People came and ate and left. A clearer-up tried to remove Novello's empty cup, but she hung on to it. She had turned the pages of her paper several times without reading a word or even identifying which title she was holding. He likewise had squeezed the last drops out of his teapot. More time passed. Whatever reason he had for being here, he was determined his journey should not have been in vain.

Then finally he froze. Not that he'd been moving much before, but now he went so still, he made the furniture look active.

Novello looked toward the entrance door.

She knew him at once from Wield's doctored photograph.

Benny Lightfoot had just come into the cafeteria.

Andy Dalziel was standing at the edge of Dender Mere, close by the pile of stones which marked the site of Heck Farm. On the sun-baked mud at his feet lay a small selection of bones. He stirred them with his toe.

"Radius, ulna, and we think these could be carpal bones, but being small, they've been a bit more mucked about," said the chief mermaid, whose everyday name was Sergeant Tom Perriman.

"Age? Sex? How long they've been there?" prompted Dalziel greedily.

Perriman shrugged his broad rubberized shoulders.

"We just pulled 'em out," he said. "Adult I'd say, or adolescent at least."

"And the rest?"

"Still looking," said Perriman. "Funny, really. Not much in the way of current here. You'd expect them to stay pretty much together even after a fairly long time. Pure chance I found them. We weren't really interested in searching near the side where it's so shallow-"

"Where exactly?" demanded Dalziel.

"Just here," said Perriman, disgruntled at having his narrative flow interrupted.

He indicated a spot on the watery side of the exposed pile of rubble and went on. "I was just coming out, stood up to walk the last couple of yards, and felt something under my foot. Of course it would have been a lot deeper here before the drought. But where's the rest, that's my question."

"Perhaps there is no more," suggested Wield.

"What? Someone cut off an arm and hoyed it into the mere?" said Dalziel. "Still means there's the rest of him somewhere, or some bugger caused a bit of comment by going out for a stroll with a full set of arms and coming back one short."

"Some very secretive folk in Mid-Yorkshire, sir. Any road, chances are it's nowt to do with our case."

"Oh, aye? So what are you suggesting, Wieldy? Chuck it back and if any bugger asks, tell 'em it got away? Listen, even if it's not our case, it's certainly another of our cases. Bag this lot and get them down to the lab, Tom. And keep looking."

The Fat Man turned and headed toward his Range Rover, Wield following.

"There's been a few suicides up here, sir," he said.

"Aye, I think of them every time I mash my tea, Wieldy," said Dalziel. "But we usually trawl them out, don't we?"

"The ones we know about," agreed the sergeant. "But anyone could come up here and take a walk into the middle with a pocketful of stones and end up a statistic on our missing persons list."

"I may have to give up tea," said Dalziel. "You know, I never liked this water from the first time I saw it. Something about Dender Mere always gave me the creeps. Here, that sounds like George Headingley laying an egg on the car radio. What's woken him up, I wonder?"

"Soon find out," said Wield, picking up the mike and responding.

"Is he there, Wieldy?" demanded Headingley. "Tell him we've just got a message in from WOULDC Novello. She says she's sitting in the cafeteria of the Orecliff Services cafeteria on the coast road watching Geordie Turnbull having a chat with Benny Lightfoot. You see what this means? They could be in it together! Two of them, not just the one. That 'ud explain a hell of a lot, wouldn't it?"

Dalziel reached over and took the mike.

He said, "It wouldn't explain what you're doing telling the world and his mother this on the open air, George. So shut up unless you're sending the four-minute warning. We're on our way!"

"So what do you think, sir?" said Wield as they drove away. "Two for the price of one?"

"I think George Headingley got his brain on the National Health and his immune system's rejecting it," said Dalziel. "But if yon Ivor really has got us Benny Lightfoot, I think I might have to marry her."

At about the same time, Rosie Pascoe woke again and announced she was hungry. When she was only allowed a very light amount of liquid intake, she started to complain bitterly and her parents looked at each other with broad smiles.

"Am I very ill?" the little girl asked suddenly.

Pascoe's heart jolted for a second, but Ellie's ear was much more attuned to the note of calculation in the question.

"You've been fairly ill," she said firmly. "But now you are much better. And if you're completely better in time for the Mid-Yorks Fair, Daddy will take you and you can go on the Big Loop. Now Mummy's got to go out for a little while, but I'll be back shortly."

Pascoe followed her to the door.

"What was all that about?" he asked.

"The trick is to make the reward for getting better, not for being ill, otherwise she'll spin the invalid state out for months," said Ellie patiently.

"Yes, I got that. I meant about the Big Loop. You know it makes me sick."

"Peter, though I'll deny ever having said it, sometimes a little more Schwarzenegger, a little less Hugh Grant, would be a useful corrective."

"Okay. Where the hell do you think you're going, babe?"

"That is pure Cagney," she said. Then, more serious, "I'm just going to check on Jill. Okay, I understand what you said before, and I'm not going to push myself on her. She'll be at home now anyway, I should think. But I wanted to talk to someone about her and try to work out what's best for us to do."

"Okay," said Pascoe. "I'll entertain the monster."

After a fairly short spell of "entertainment," the monster looked ready to go back to sleep again.

"That's right, sweetie. You have a nap, get your strength up," said Pascoe. "In hospital you need to be fit to keep an eye on all the visitors trying to steal your grapes."

"Will I get a lot of visitors?" asked Rosie sleepily.

"Depends on the quality of your grapes."

"Will Zandra come?"

Pascoe made a huge effort to keep his voice light.

"If she can," he said.

He didn't know when the time would be ripe to tell her, but he knew it wasn't now.

"I haven't seen her since Sunday. Not to talk to, anyway. She might have the photos Derek took by now."

"Yes. Darling, remember when you had your breakfast picnic on Sunday?"

He felt guilty about asking but assured himself he wouldn't have brought it up if she hadn't mentioned Zandra herself.

"Yes. And I saw the nix taking Nina," she said.

It was as if he'd somehow conveyed the trend of his thought to her.

"That's right. You were using Derek's binoculars, weren't you?"

"Yes. They make things a lot bigger than yours, you know," she said seriously.

"I'm sure," he said, smiling. "And you saw Nina down in the valley. By herself, was she?"

"Yes. No. She had a little dog."

"Then the nix came."

"Yes. He came running down the hill and he threw her into a hole in the ground. I expect his cave is down there somewhere."

Her voice was very faint and weary now.

Pascoe pulled Novello's Post out of his pocket and unfolded it so that the double page spread at its center showed.

"Just before you drop off, darling, anyone here you recognize?"

She peered through half-closed eyes, then smiled and stabbed with her finger.

"That's Uncle Andy," she said.

"Hello. What's this game you're playing?" said Ellie's voice.

She had come in undetected and her tone was light and playful. But something in her husband's manner as he looked up must have alerted her, for now she asked suspiciously, "What is that you're showing her, Peter?"

"Just a photo of Uncle Andy, that's all," said Pascoe, starting to fold the paper.

But before he could do this, the little hand reached out and the finger stabbed again.

"And that's the rotten old nix," said Rosie Pascoe.

Then she yawned hugely and fell asleep.

The Summer Festival Concert was due to start at seven o'clock.

After a light lunch, Elizabeth went into the garden, stretched out on a lounger shaded by a parasol, and fell asleep.

She was woken by a sound and opened her eyes to Arne Krog looking down at her.

"I was moving the umbrella," he said. "The sun's moved round. I didn't think you'd want to sing with your face looking like a partial eclipse. And you have such delicate skin, don't you?"

"No, I've got skin like a cucumber, but I like it to look delicate," she said. "As you, of course, know."

"I do?"

"Aye, you don't miss a lot, Arne. Especially when it comes to watching women. Not that it's just women you watch."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"What did you see when you followed Walter this morning?" She laughed as he looked taken aback. "Gotcha! I guessed that's what tha were up to."

"You are a clever girl, Elizabeth. Or perhaps I should call you Betsy when your accent is as broad as this?"

"Please yourself," she said, swinging her legs off the lounger.

"Not if, as I observe, it doesn't please you. You were asking about Walter. I saw him park his car in the usual spot and take his walk up the Corpse Road to the top of the Neb, where he stood looking down into Dendale. I had a look myself after he'd gone. It's quite fascinating to see how the valley has been resurrected by the drought. Have you been to take a look, Elizabeth?"

"Got the wrong word, I think, Arne. Resurrected means fetched back to life. And no, I haven't been."

"I think you ought to. I'll be happy to accompany you, if you feel the experience might be too arduous."

She stood up and stretched, yawning widely.

"Going with you might be too arduous, I reckon you're right there," she said. "But it might be interesting to take a look."

She went into the house. The Wulfstans were sitting in the living room, Walter studying some papers, Chloe reading a book.

"Walter, I wouldn't mind going off to Danby a bit early," she said. "I thought you and me could take a walk up the Neb. You, too, Chloe, if you fancied it."

"I don't think so, dear," said the woman not looking up from her reading.

"You don't want to rest before the performance?" said Wulfstan.

"I've rested. Any road, you said you've fixed up a room at the Science Park for me to change and smarten up in. I might as well be there as here."

"I suppose so. What about you, Arne?"

"Arne can bring Chloe and Inger when they're ready," said Elizabeth firmly. "Right. I'll just get my stuff and we'll be off."

They didn't speak at all on the journey to Danby, but when Wulfstan slowed down as they approached the entrance to the Science and Business Park, Elizabeth said, "Can we go straight on to the Corpse Road and come back here after?"

"As you wish," said Wulfstan.

Passing through the streets of Danby, Elizabeth stared out of the window and said, "Funny. I felt nowt when we came yesterday, but I thought it might just be a sort of numbness. But it's not. I really do feel nowt. It's not like coming home. I weren't here long enough for that. Three years, was it? Four? And with what happened and all, it were never home."

They drove past the school and the church. She looked at the police vehicles parked outside St. Michael's Hall, but made no comment. When they'd bumped up the Corpse Road as far as the Discovery could take them, Wulfstan parked and they got out.

"You are sure you want to do this?" he asked.

"Why not?"

"It's very hot. And steep. You do not want to tire yourself out."

She laughed and said, "Don't talk daft. I'm a country lass, remember? When I went out on the fell helping Dad fold his sheep, I could cover more ground than these hikers do in a hard day's walk, and never notice it."

He looked at her without speaking, then set out up the track.

She matched him stride for stride and wasn't even breathing hard when they reached the crest.

She stood in silence for a while looking down into the sunlit valley, then she said quietly, "Now I'm home."

He said harshly, "How can you say that? What is there down there for any of us to call home?"

She said, "The buildings, you mean? They were nowt but heaps of rock to start withand that's what they are now. Couple of months' hard work and you could raise them up again. No, this is it for me. Full circle."

"Full circle implies completion," said Wulfstan.

"Is that right? Time for a fresh start, eh? You and Chloe never really managed a fresh start, did you? I mean, you went off, but back you came to Yorkshire eventually, which is a bit of a full circle. But I don't see the fresh start."

"There are things you cannot leave behind, not without amputation," said Wulfstan.

"Mary, you mean? Little Mary. She'd be same age as me, right? But she'd never have had my voice. That's something, eh? She'd never have had my voice. Except, of course, if what happened hadn't have happened, I'd likely never have had the chance to use it. Singing down the pub. Karaoke. That would likely have been the limit. 'Stead of which, in a hundred years they could be looking back to me like we look back to Melba. First great diva of the new millennium. Could be a plan, eh? You might almost think it could have been a plan."

He looked at her with an intensity almost tangible, but all he said was "You are planning to raise your register?"

"What? Oh, Melba. Yeah, mebbe. I could do it, I think. We'll see what that old woman in Italy says next year."

"That old woman in Italy is one of the finest voice coaches living," said Wulfstan. "And not cheap."

"Oh, aye," said Elizabeth indifferently. "When she hears me, she'll likely work for IOU'S and know her money's safe. What's going off down there, do you think?"

There were men standing in the shallows close by the ruins of Heck. One of them moved out of the water and went to a parked Range Rover and took a long crowbar out of the back. As they watched, he returned to the water's edge and began to probe in the rubble.

"It seems they are looking for something," said Wulfstan.

"Oh, aye? And is there owt to find, do you think?"

He looked at her for a moment then said, "I saw him, you know."

"Who?"

"Benny Lightfoot. I was up here and I saw him."

"Down there?"

"No. Up here on the ridge. Walking toward the Neb."

"And what did you do?"

"I followed him, of course. Isn't that why evil spirits visit us, so they can lure us to our destruction?"

"And did he?"

"Of course. It wasn't a long journey. Elizabeth…"

"Yes?"

"One thing remains. If…"

"Yes," she said. "I think mebbe it's time we made a start."

"That fresh start, you mean?"

"Aye, that too. Though mebbe that's been made for us. Walter, I'm sorry."

"For what? How is anything your fault?"

"Nay, but I always thought everything was, and I can't be altogether wrong, can I? Let's talk. But not till after I've sung, eh?"

She took his hand and turned him away from the valley, and hand-in-hand they began to descend the Corpse Road.

It had been a risk, but a small one, for Novello to leave the cafeteria to ring in for backup. She had spent enough hours in the police gym to feel fairly confident about confronting one unarmed man, but two was pushing things. And while Turnbull with a weapon other than his charm seemed unlikely, she couldn't be sure about Lightfoot.

Moving back to the entrance, she saw that she'd just been in time. The two men were rising together and making for the door. She noted that Lightfoot was carrying the leather bag, which meant he had one hand occupied. She retreated before them to the parking lot.

No sign yet of any help, but it should be close. The coast road was well patrolled. She wouldn't hear it coming, as she'd asked specifically for no siren. Sometimes she suspected some of her male colleagues learned more from cop shows than police college. No one on the telly seemed to have worked out the advantages of sneaking up on a suspect. They either rang a warning bell or simply shouted, "Oy! You!" from a distance of fifty yards. Of course this meant you got an exciting chase or lively shootout, which was a visual plus. In real life, you wanted to be neither seen nor heard till you'd got within half-nelson distance.

Anyway, close or not, she couldn't wait. A suspect in a car was an arrest problem squared.

She turned away as they approached, watching them in the window of a parked Peugeot. Then as they drew level, she turned, smiled widely, and said, "Geordie, how're you doing? Why don't you introduce me to your lovely friend?"

Turnbull instinctively smiled back before recognition began to dawn. She reached out her hand to Lightfoot. Instinctively he took it. She twisted his arm sharply, at the same time pulling him off balance and driving her toe cap into his shin.

He fell forward against the car, setting its alarm off, and Novello forced his arm up between his shoulder blades till he yelled with pain.

Into his left ear she told him he was being arrested on suspicion of murder and advised him of his right to remain silent, but he carried on yelling all the same. She glanced sideways to see how Turnbull was taking all this. To her surprise he was standing watching with an expression in which resignation warred with admiration.

"I hope you and me are going to stay good friends, bonny lass," he said. She smiled. He had the great gift of making you smile, but in this case half her pleasure came from the sight over his shoulder of a police car nosing into the car park. Attracted by the alarm and also a gathering group of spectators they came straight to her, and two young constables got out.

"You Novello?" asked one of them.

"That's right. Cuff this one, I'll take care of the other."

Relieved of Lightfoot, she bent down and picked up the bag he'd dropped. She pulled open the zip.

It was full of money.

Lightfoot, upright now with his hands cuffed behind his back, was glaring in angry disbelief at Turnbull.

"Why the hell'd you do this, you stupid bastard? You think this is going to get you anywhere but jail?"

He spoke pure Strine.

"Get him into the car," said Novello. A crowd was forming. She didn't want anyone to have the chance to recognize Lightfoot and warn the media pack.

They pushed him into the backseat of the police car and she turned to the onlookers.

"Okay," she said. "Show over. Nothing to bother yourselves with."

They looked unconvinced.

The owner of the beeping Peugeot arrived, pressed his remote key, and silenced it.

"Did he get inside?" he demanded, examining the bodywork for damage.

"No, sir, it's fine. Good alarm that you've got."

"Look, I'm in a hurry. Do I have to make a statement?"

"No, thank you, sir. We've got enough and we've noted your vehicle number if we need you."

"Great. Hope they hang the bastard."

The man got into his car and the onlookers drifted away. Just another car break-in, nothing worth boasting that you'd seen.

"Clever," said Turnbull. "You did that really well, petal."

"Mr. Turnbull, I am not your petal," said Novello wearily.

She stooped to the window of the police car. Lightfoot was looking more angry than afraid. He said, "What the hell are you talking about, murder? Okay, I gave the guy a pasting, but the money's mine. Tell them, you stupid bastard! The money's mine!"

"Where do you want him, luv?" inquired the driver.

She said, "First I need his keys."

The constable sitting beside Lightfoot dug his hand into the prisoner's pocket and came up with the keys.

"Where are you parked?" asked Novello.

"Over there," he said jerking his head. "You're making a big mistake here, girl."

She spotted the top of the white camper a couple of rows away. At the same time, with relief, she saw another couple of police cars turning into the parking lot. This meant she had enough personnel to take care of the prisoners separately, plus both their vehicles. She made a quick calculation. They'd make quite a little procession, but there shouldn't be anyone alerted yet to take notice of it.

"Danby," she said. "I think we should all go to Danby."

In company of their friends, Peter and Ellie Pascoe mocked the kind of well-heeled people who lived "within the bell," but privately they both lusted for a house here. This was the nearest you could get in Mid-Yorkshire to rus in urbe, all the peace of the countryside in your lovely back garden, all the pleasures of the city outside your front door.

Or, to put it more crudely, you could get pissed out of your pericranium in your favorite pub and not need to rely on a sourly sober spouse to drive you home.

So usually when he had occasion to be in "the bell," his imagination was as active as an oil sheikh's in Mayfair, selecting this property and discarding that with reckless abandon.

Today, however, despite the fact that Holyclerk Street looked at its most seductive in the cidrous aureola of the early evening sun, the springs of covetousness were quite dried up within him as he walked along looking for the Wulfstan residence.

Ellie had told him she knew that being a policeman rotted your soul, but when you considered the Wulfstans' tragic history, not to mention the fact that his own daughter was just recovering from a serious illness, he was breaking all known records of insensitivity, illogicality, and irresponsibility…

"Listen," he said. "It's because of Rosie I'm doing this-"

"Because of what an overexcited kid thinks she saw? Because of a fucking picture book?" she'd interjected. "Now I've heard everything!"

"No," he said with matching ferocity. "Because we nearly lost her. Because in my head I did lose her, and I got to understand what I've often observed but never really fathomed before, why all those poor sods who do lose a kid run around like headless chickens, organizing protests and pressure groups and petitions and God knows what else. It's because you've got to make some sense of it, you've got to juggle with reasons and responsibilities, you've got to know the whys and the wherefores and the whens and the hows and the whos, oh, yes, especially the whos. Listen, you want to find out what you can do for Jill, and when you think you've found it, nothing will stop you doing it. Well, that's how I feel about Mr. and Mrs. Dacre. Knowing is all that's left for them, I'm not talking justice or revenge at this stage, just simple knowing. I may be right off-line here, but I owe it to them, I owe it to whatever God or blind fate gave us back Rosie, to check this thing out."

She had never seen him, certainly never heard him, like this before, and for once in their life together, she let herself be beaten into silence by his flailing words.

All she said as he left the hospital, where Rosie had fallen into a deep, peaceful sleep which looked set to last the night, was "Softly, softly, eh, love?" then kissed him hard.

He had gone on his way, not exactly triumphing, but with that glow of righteousness which springs from winning a heated moral debate.

But now, as he stood before the door of No. 41, it suddenly seemed to him, as so very often in the past, that though Ellie might not be right in every respect, she was right enough to have got the points decision.

This was crazy. Or if in its essentials, which were that something had come up in connection with a serious inquiry that needed to be investigated, not altogether crazy, certainly in this way of going about it totally bonkers.

He took a step back from the door, and might have fled, or might not, he never knew which, for at that moment the door opened and he found himself looking at Inger Sandel.

They had never met, but he recognized her from the photograph in the Post, which he was carrying in his briefcase.

She said, "Yes?"

He said, "Hello. I'm Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe."

She said, "Mr. Wulfstan is already gone to Danby with Elizabeth, but Chloe is still here, if you want to talk to her."

"Why not?" he said, though he could think of reasons.

He stepped into the hall. There were several boxes full of compact discs standing on the floor.

"We poor troubadours must be our own merchants too," she said, catching his glance. "They are to sell at the concert."

"Oh, yes?" He picked up the Kindertotenlieder disc. "Interesting design. The bars of music are Mahler, I presume?"

"Yes. But not from the lieder. The second symphony, I think." She paused as if waiting for a response, then went on. "You would like to buy one?"

"No, thanks," he said, putting it down hastily. "My wife's got one already. Mrs. Wulfstan's in, you say?"

"Yes, she is," she said, smiling as if at some private joke. "Goodbye, Mr. Pascoe. Nice to have met you."

She stepped outside and began pulling the door to behind her.

"Hold on," he said anxiously. "Mrs. Wulfstan…"

"It's all right," she reassured him. "I must go out for a little while. Just shout."

He'd have preferred that she did the shouting. As he'd once explained to Ellie, being a cop isn't a cure for shyness, it just makes it rather inconvenient on occasion, as when for example you found yourself in a strange house without any visible authority.

He first coughed, then called, "Hello," in the small voice, at once summons and apology, he used for waiters.

He strained his ears for a response. There was none, but he thought he detected a distant murmur of voices.

Dalziel would either have bellowed, "SHOP!" or taken the chance to poke around.

He opened his mouth to shout, then decided that on the whole for a man of his temperament, being caught poking around was the lesser of two embarrassments.

He pushed open the nearest door with an apologetic smile ready on his lips.

It opened onto what looked like a gent's study of the old school. He ran his eyes over the glazed bookcases, the mahogany desk, the oak wainscoting, and thought of the converted bedroom which he used as a home office. Perhaps he should start taking bribes?

The room was empty and even his decision to follow one of the Fat Man's paths didn't mean he could go as far as poking through the desk drawers.

He went back into the hall and tried the door opposite. This led into a small sitting room, also empty, which had another door leading into a nicely sized dining room, very Adam, with an oval table so highly polished, it must have been a card-sharper's delight.

In the wall opposite the door he'd come in by was a serving hatch, partially open. The voices he'd heard before were now quite distinct, and he went forward and peered through the hatch without opening it further.

He found he was looking into a kitchen, but the talkers weren't in there. The back door was wide open onto a patio with one of those lovely long luscious "bell" gardens beyond, and he felt the stab of covetousness once more. He could see two people out there. One, a woman, visible in half profile, was seated into a low-back wicker chair. The other, a man, was leaning over her from behind with his hands inside her blouse, gently massaging her breasts.

The man (again identified from the Post) was Arne Krog. The woman he assumed to be Chloe Wulfstan, a deduction quickly confirmed.

Krog was saying, "Enough is enough. Someday you will have to leave him. If not now, when?"

The woman replied agitatedly, "Why will I have to leave? All right, yes, you're probably right. But it's an option. Like suicide. Knowing you can, knowing one day you probably will, is a great prop to endurance."

"You mean, knowing one day you'll leave gives you strength to stay? Come on, Chloe! That's just a clever way of using words to avoid making decisions."

She gripped both his wrists and forced his hands up out of her blouse.

"Don't talk to me about avoiding decisions, Arne. Where's the decision you're making in all this? Are you saying if I left Walter today, you'd fling me over your saddle, gallop me away into the sunset, and make sure I lived happily ever after?"

Arne Krog fingered his fringe of silky beard sensuously. Likes to have his hands on something soft, thought Pascoe.

"Yes, I suppose that's more or less what I'm saying," he said.

"More? Or less?"

"Well, less the saddle," he said, smiling. "And I'm not sure if anyone should promise ever after. But as far as is humanly possible, that's what I'd do."

He spoke the last sentence with a simple sincerity that Pascoe found quite moving.

Chloe stood up and regarded him fondly, but with the kind of fondness one feels for a lovable but untrainable dog.

"So you love me, Arne. Enough to want to spend the rest of your life with me. My very perfect, gentle, and chaste knight. You would be chaste, wouldn't you, Arne? I mean, when we're not together, you don't go putting it around your little groupies on the concert circuit, or in the opera chorus, do you?"

Krog's fingers stopped moving in his beard.

"Let me guess," he said softly. "The lovely Elizabeth, the Yorkshire nightingale, has been singing?"

"I talk to my daughter, yes."

"Your daughter." Krog smiled. "I remember your daughter, Chloe. And not all the wigs and cosmetics and diets in the world can turn Betsy Allgood into your daughter. If that is what she is trying to be, of course."

"Why do you hate her so much, Arne? Is it because she's going to have the kind of career you always dreamt of? A huge fish in the big ponds, not just a smallish one in the puddles?"

"That shows how close we really are, Chloe. I cannot hide my disappointments from you."

The woman smiled sadly.

"Arne, you don't hide them from anybody. No one can be so laid back unless he's seething inside. Perhaps you should have let some of the anger show in your singing."

"Ah, a music critic as well as a psychologist. Perhaps you are right. Just because I appear calm doesn't mean I'm not angry. By the same token, just because I screw around doesn't mean I don't love you. Always follow your logic through, my dear. And just because I'm not flying into a despairing rage doesn't mean I'm giving up on you. If you won't leave, I'll wait until you are left, as you will be, believe me. Everyone will go, Elizabeth to her career, Walter to… God knows what. And one day you'll look around, and there'll be nobody left but good old laid-back Arne. Better to run now, I say. You notice pain far less if you're running than if you're standing still."

It was, Pascoe decided, time to make his move before Inger Sandel returned and wondered why he'd been in the house all this time without making contact with Chloe.

He went back into the hallway, walked toward the kitchen door, pushed it open, and shouted with Dalzielesque force, "Shop!"

Then he went into the kitchen, put on his apologetic smile as he saw their surprised faces turned toward him, and advanced onto the patio, flourishing his warrant card and saying, "Hello, sorry to intrude, but Miss Sandel let me in. Chief Inspector Pascoe. Mrs. Wulfstan, I wonder if I might have a word."

Krog was looking at him frowningly. Pascoe thought, This clever sod is thinking it's at least five minutes since the woman left, so what the hell have I been doing in the meantime?

He said, "It's Mr. Krog, isn't it? The singer? My wife's a great fan."

He recalled hearing a writer say during a radio interview that when men told him their wives loved his books, he ran his eyes up and down the speaker and replied, "Well, no one can be indiscriminating all of the time."

All Krog said was "How nice. Excuse me." And left.

Chloe Wulfstan said, "Please sit down, Mr. Pascoe. I'm afraid I don't have too much time."

"Yes. Of course. The concert. Your husband's gone already? Actually it was really him I wanted to see, so I don't need to delay you any longer."

Once more his mind supplied the smart reply. "I don't see why you needed to delay me at all." And once again the opportunity was missed.

"You're sure it's nothing I can help you with?" she said. "Has it anything to do with that poor child out at Danby? I heard on the news they'd found her body."

"Yes, it's terrible, isn't it?" said Pascoe. "I can guess how painful it must be for you, Mrs. Wulfstan-"

"Oh, you can guess, can you?" interrupted the woman contemptuously.

He thought of the past few days and said quietly, "Yes, I think I can. I'm sorry. I'll go now and let you get ready for the concert. It's okay, I'll see myself out."

He left her sitting there, staring fixedly into the garden. What she was seeing he didn't know, but he suspected it was more than grass and trees and flowers.

As he moved along the entrance hall, the door of the study opened and Arne Krog stepped out.

He had a sealed A4 envelope in his hand.

"Leaving so soon, Mr. Pascoe?" he said.

"Yes."

"Though not perhaps so soon as it seems."

So the clever sod had worked it out.

Pascoe said, "I was brought up to believe it was rude to interrupt."

"Which must also be convenient in your adult profession. You heard something of the discussion between Mrs. Wulfstan and myself?"

"Something," said Pascoe, seeing no point in lying.

The man nodded, but there was as much uncertainty in the gesture as affirmation. He was close to doing something, but not absolutely committed to the final step.

"Then you will see a part of my motive in giving you this, and may mistake it for the whole. But please believe in the other larger part which has to do with justice." He smiled his attractive smile which made him look ten years younger. "As with your eavesdropping, sometimes even a virtue may also be convenient."

He handed over the envelope, gave a stiff, rather Teutonic bow, and went up the stairs.

Pascoe opened the front door. Inger Sandel was coming up the steps.

"Just leaving?" she said. "You must have had a good talk."

Her eyes were fixed on the envelope.

"Yes. I hope you have a good concert."

"You are coming?"

He shook his head and said, "No, I don't think so."

But five minutes later as he sat in his car with the contents of the envelope on his knee, he had changed his mind.

He rang the hospital and finally got hold of Ellie.

"How is she?"

"Sleeping soundly. You coming back?"

"Not directly."

He explained. It took a deal of explanation, but finally her disapproval faded, and she said, "Okay, Aeneas, off you go and do what you've gotta do."

"Aeneas?"

"Private joke. I love you."

"I love you too. I love you both. More than any of this."

"Which is why you've got to do it, yeah, yeah. Pete, remember way back in one of our more heated debates, you told me I was neglecting my family so that I could play at being a left-wing revolutionary?"

"Did I say that? Sounds more like Fat Andy on a good day."

"That's what really bothered me. But all I want to say now is it's a good job you never got the revolutionary bug, because there'd have been no playing. Kalashnikovs and Semtex all the way. Take care. And if you look back and see a light in the sky, don't worry. It's only me."

Pascoe switched off his phone, smiling. Through the open sunroof of his car he said to the delft-blue sky, "I am probably the luckiest man alive."

Then he set off north.

The arrival of Shirley Novello's convoy at Danby police station was observed through an upper window by Andy Dalziel with great satisfaction.

"That's what I like, Wieldy," he said. "Bit of swank. Like the Allies rolling into Paris in '44. We should be throwing flowers. You've not got the odd poppy or lily in your pocket, have you?"

Wield, who was just relieved the WOULDC had had the sense not to have lights flashing and sirens blaring, said, "How do you want to do this, sir?"

"Let's see what they say about briefs," said Dalziel.

"Duty solicitor's on standby," said Wield. "And I daresay Turnbull will be yelling for Hoddle again."

"Yon death's head. Well, it'll almost be a pleasure to see him. I doubt if he can pull Geordie out of this one."

Wield frowned superstitiously at this display of confidence. He felt they'd a long way to go before they were out of this wood.

The Australian police had still come up with nothing useful about the Slater family. The myth that modern technology made it almost impossible to vanish in the civilized world was one that most policemen saw exploded every day. Even without making any huge effort to cover their tracks, people dropped out and the waters of society closed over their heads with scarcely a ripple to show the spot. All they did have now was a record that a B. Slater, Australian citizen, had landed at Heathrow ten days earlier.

It took Novello a little while to book her prisoners in, then she came up to report.

Dalziel greeted her beamingly.

"Well done, lass. I always said you were a lot more than just a pretty face, though I've got nowt against pretty faces when you see some of the ugly buggers I've got to work with."

Novello avoided glancing at Wield. One thing she had to give Andy Dalziel, he was an equal-opportunity employer. He was bloody rude to everyone.

"So what's the crack, Ivor? Fill us in," continued the Fat Man.

She made her rehearsed report, succinct and to the point, and got an approving nod from Wield.

"Grand," said Dalziel, rubbing his hands in anticipation of the interviews to come. "Yelling for their briefs, are they?"

They weren't.

Turnbull had shrugged and said, "I reckon I'll play this one solo, bonny lass."

And Slater/lightfoot had said, "What the fuck do I need with a fucking lawyer? Just fetch the bastard who's in charge of this shit pile, will you?"

She told them this verbatim.

"And there's something else," she added, seeing that Dalziel's expression had lost some of its previous manic sparkle, and deciding that bad news was best spilled out in a single bucketful. "Slater gave his name as Barney, not Benny. And it's there on his passport. Barnaby Slater."

She waited to be assured this meant nowt, but from the Fat Man's face she saw it meant more than she knew.

"The younger brother," said Wield. "The one who stayed with his mam. He was called Barnabas. Benjamin and Barnabas. The old lady's choice, I always thought. From the sound of it, Marion were none too religious."

"So Benny's not going to come back using his own name, is he?" said Dalziel. "Helps himself to his brother's passport. Mebbe he had to. Mebbe he never got round to changing his own name."

He sounded less than convinced.

Wield said, "One way to find out, sir."

"Aye. Let's get to it. Ivor, you sit in on this too. Don't gab on, but don't be afraid to speak up if you see the need."

So this time she wasn't going to be dumped after doing the donkey work, thought Novello. Great!

Unless, of course, Dalziel simply wanted a sacrificial victim handy if things started turning sour. Which they gave every sign of doing from the moment they entered the tiny interview room.

Slater looked from Wield to Dalziel without the slightest sign of recognition and said, "Jesus what's this? You gonna sit on my legs while he frightens me to death?"

"A joker," said Dalziel. "I like a laugh."

"Yeah? And just who the hell are you, mate?"

"Me? I'm the bastard in charge of this shit pile," said Dalziel. "But you know that, don't you, Benny? We've met before."

The man looked at him blankly. Then he said, "What was that you called me?"

"Benny. Benjamin Lightfoot as was."

A grin split the man's face.

"The name's Barney. You think I'm Benny, is that what this is all about? Jeez, what a screw-up."

If it was an act it was a great one. But Wield, studying the man's face, was almost sure it wasn't. The man certainly looked very like the photo of Benny which he himself had doctored, but seen in the flesh, there were too many differences.

It wasn't a question of physical characteristics, all of which fitted well enough. It was a matter of expression, a glint in the eyes, a twist of the lips, a watchful cocking of the head to one side, little things like this. Okay, so people could change a lot in fifteen years, but there was no way Wield could imagine that repressed, shy, fey youngster turning into this assured, aggressive, self-sufficient man, any more than (he now admitted fully to himself for the first time) he had ever been able to believe that Benny Lightfoot had the savvy to get himself safe out of the country. Not even with fifty thousand pounds. He'd have had it taken off him by the first con man he met!

He said, "When did you last see your brother, Mr. Slater?"

"Before ma took us to Oz," said the man. "We went up the valley to see Granny Lightfoot. Ma said he could still come with us if he wanted, but he just shook his head and clung on to the old lady like someone was going to try and drag him free."

Dalziel groaned, like thunder over the sea, but he didn't speak.

"You keep in touch? Letters and such?" said Wield.

"Nah. Christmas cards was the limit. We're not a writing family. Not till the old lady's letters when Benny had his spot of trouble, and then there was only the two."

"You knew about the Dendale disappearances?"

"Heard something. Didn't pay it much mind. Troubles of our own. Things started falling apart for us soon after we hit Oz. Jack, that's Jack Slater, my stepfather, turned out a wrong 'un. Nothing crooked, well, not so's you'd notice. But the horses, the booze, the sheilas. I left school soon as I could, lot sooner than I should, that's for certain. Someone had to earn. To start with, ma tried to keep up with Jack, in the boozing at least. Only, she didn't have the constitution. By the time Jack up and left, she was real ill with it. That's when the letters came, I guess."

"The letters from your grandmother, Mrs. Lightfoot?"

"That's right. Look, telling you all this stuff is going to get me out of here, right?"

He addressed his words to Dalziel.

The monkey might be doing the talking, thought Novello, but this guy knows who's grinding the organ.

"I'm starting to think the sooner I see thy back, the better," said Dalziel with feeling. "But I reckon I can thole thy face till you've answered all our questions."

"No need to turn on the charm, mate," said Slater. "Okay. These letters. I didn't pay them any heed till years later when I was tidying up after Ma passed on. First one said the old girl had changed her address and was living with some relative in Sheffield and if we saw anything of Benny, would we let her know. Second said she moved again to this nursing home, Wark House, and asked about Benny again. That was it."

"Your mother write back?" asked Wield.

"How would I know?" said Slater. "Could be, but like I say, she wasn't much in control for a helluva lot of the time. Talked about Granny Lightfoot sometimes, hated her guts as far as I could make out, and I gathered the feeling was mutual. But one thing Ma always did say about her was she was a tidy old bird with her head screwed on, and if anyone in our family could hang on to a bit of dosh, Agnes was the girl."

"Wasn't she concerned about Benny?" Novello heard herself asking.

Slater shrugged and said, "Who knows? Didn't talk about him much and when she did, it was usually to say he'd made his bed and could lie on it. I think she was really pissed when he chose to stay with his gran rather than take off with her."

"But he was her son, her firstborn," Novello persisted.

"So? That just made getting the old heave-ho from him worse. Sometimes when the booze had got her to the weepy stage, she'd say she'd like to see Benny before she died. Then she'd get past it and say he'd probably got the old girl's dosh by now and was living high on the hog, so why the hell should she worry about him when he didn't worry about her?"

Wield was looking over his shoulder at Novello to see if she had anything else to say. She gave a small shake of her head.

"So after your mother died, you thought you'd come back to England and check whether in fact the old lady was seriously rich and see if you could squeeze some of it your way?" said the sergeant.

"Not so," said Slater, unperturbed by the provocative question. "Ma died, and suddenly I was footloose and fancy free, no one to please but myself, no one to spend my money on but me, and I thought, the only relatives I got in the whole wide world are back there in Pommerania, so why not take a trip and see what there was to see."

"But you made a beeline for Wark House, right?" said Wield accusingly.

"No way, mate. Touched down on Monday. Dossed down with this mate of a mate in London. He had this old camper he let me borrow for a few quid. Lot cheaper than hotels, and I'm a real open-air boy. I drifted north, taking in the sights. Hit Yorkshire Friday morning and thought, no harm in checking Gran Lightfoot out. It was good to find her still alive. Mind you, she was pretty crook. And confused. Thought I was Benny. I tried to put her straight, then she said something which really made my ears prick and I stopped trying. Something about she knew I'd have found the money and used it to get away safe."

"Thought you weren't interested in money," said Wield.

"Didn't say that, mate. What I said was, that wasn't why I came back. But I wasn't going to look the other way if it looked like some dosh might be due to me. Especially when she let on in her ramblings it was fifty thou in cash, and she'd put it in a tin chest up under the eaves where Benny knew she always hid her valuables, so that's where he'd have looked after she went into hospital."

"And she believed Benny had got the money?" said Wield.

"Yeah, that's clearly what she reckoned when he vanished from sight. And now that she knew for certain he'd got it-because she'd seen me, thinking I was Benny-she said she could die happy. Now I did try telling her again, no need for her to die just yet, happy or not, as I was Barney not Benny, but she was pretty flaked out by now and I could tell she wasn't taking it in. So I left. Look, no need to sit there looking all po faced. I want her to know who I really am. I'm going to call in again on my way back south and hope I get her when she's a bit more with it."

He stared defiantly at Wield and the others, then it came to him that it wasn't just disapproval he was seeing on their faces.

"What?" he said.

"Bad news," said Dalziel. "Or mebbe good, depending how you look at it. After your visit, she died happy. Last night."

"Ah, shit, you're jossing me? No, you're not, are you? Shit. I really hoped…"

He appeared genuinely distressed.

Novello waited for someone to suggest a break in the interview but all Dalziel said was "Never fret, lad. Tha's still in good time for the funeral. And now there's the money to make it a good 'un. Sooner we get this sorted, sooner you can start seeing to all that. So let's get on, shall we? Just take it from when you leave Wark House."

The implication that soon as Slater had told them this, he would be free to go, came close to being an inducement, thought Novello. Not that it mattered. She reckoned she could have told most of the man's story for him anyway.

"I headed on north 'cos that was the way I was pointing," he began. "But all the time I was thinking, like you do when you're driving. And what I thought was if Benny had picked up the dosh and taken off, why'd he never tried to contact Gran? I mean, he loved her more than anyone else in the world, right? So what had happened to him? And the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, had it happened to him before or after he got his hands on the money?"

"So you got to wondering if mebbe the box were still where Agnes put it, up in the attic of Neb Cottage," said Dalziel.

"That's right. Seemed a long shot, but what the hell, I had nowhere else in particular I wanted to be. Only, when I got to Dendale I discovered there was no Neb Cottage anymore. I had a wander round but it was so long since I'd been there, I couldn't even be sure I was looking at the right heap of stones! But by now I was getting to feel stubborn. If that money was still around and Benny wasn't, then I had as good a claim as anyone, right? So I headed into town and tried the library. Lady there was truly helpful. I was able to read all about what happened back there in the old papers. Also she showed me this book which had before-and-after maps in it, which I got photocopied."

"Hold on," said Wield, ever the stickler for detail. "Let's get the timing sorted. You arrived in Dendale when?"

"Saturday morning. Got myself a pitch at this farm, then walked up the dale and started looking. When I realized I was getting nowhere, that's when I drove into town. Was in the library till closing, which was also close to opening, so I had a few beers and a spot of grub, then back to the dale. Sunday I was up with the lark. This time I boxed clever and first off I climbed up to the ridge of the Neb and wandered along there awhile, getting a bird's-eye view. Best way to get your bearings, made more sense of the maps than working out mileage and such on the ground. Once I was sure I'd located the right heap of rubble I went down there and started digging."

"Let's hold it there," said Dalziel. "You're up on the ridge. Just looked down one side, did you? Into Dendale? Never looked down the Danby side?"

"What? Hey, you're not still trying to tie me in to that missing kiddie, are you? Come on! It's clear from what the papers said that you're running around like headless chickens, pointing the finger at poor Benny, who no one's seen for fifteen years. You try to keep it in the family and you'll look a real load of assholes!"

Pascoe at this point would probably have said something about headless chickens not having fingers, thought Novello.

Dalziel just looked longingly at the tape machine as if trying to switch it off by force of will so he could have a real heart-to-heart.

Then he said gently, "Not missing kiddie. Dead kiddie, Mr. Slater. Just tell us. Please."

"Yeah. Sure. Sorry. You've got a job to do. I hope to hell you get the bastard," said Slater. "No, I don't believe I did look down the Danby side. I was concentrating on locating what I hoped might be the site of fifty thousand quid, remember. Soon as I was sure I'd located the cottage ruins, I headed on down there."

"You mean you returned to the col and went back down the Corpse Road?" said Wield.

"Nah. Headed straight down. Crazy really, it's bloody steep. I went arse over tip and nearly did my ankle. In the end I dropped into this ghyll, White Mare's Tail they call it. The going was a bit easier there, though I'd not have liked to try it if the fell hadn't been all dried up with the heat."

"And did you see anyone else?"

"In the valley? Not a soul for a long time. Oh, yeah, there was someone on the ridge, I think. I glanced back and think I saw some guy on the col where the Corpse Road crosses. But he was a long way off and the ridge took a dip just then and I didn't see him again."

"But there were people in the valley later?" said Wield.

"Yeah, sure. Hikers, families having picnics, all kinds of folk wandering around the bits of the old village that the drought's brought back up. I didn't want an audience to what I was doing, natch, but by then anyway I was pig sick of the business. I'd done all I could with my hands and found nothing. There were blocks of stone there I'd need a crow or pickax to shift. So I gave myself the rest of the day off, went off to get a wet and see if I could find any action."

"Any luck?" asked Dalziel.

"Not sure. All I know is I woke in my tent next morning with my Jockey shorts back to front and a mouth like a pigman's bucket. All I could think was When I finally stop shaking, I'm out of here. But by midday, when I'd got a few pints of tea inside me and could think of taking solids without spewing my ring, I got a little more upbeat. So I drove off to get some tucker, and afterward, I found one of these big DIY superstores and bought myself a pick and a crow. I waited till late evening, when I had the valley to myself, before I started work. It was almost pitch black by the time I gave up. By then I knew for certain that wherever the money was, it wasn't there."

"But you still didn't accept the obvious conclusion that Benny had got it?" said Wield.

"Did at first," said the man. "Then I got to thinking, you jokers were after him, right? So one place you'd be watching day and night till it was 'dozed would be Neb Cottage, 'cos that's where he'd most likely make for. So if he'd shown, you'd have spotted him. And as you didn't, maybe he had never come back for the money."

"Maybe he did come back," said Novello. "Maybe that's what he was doing by the ruins when he attacked Betsy Allgood. Looking for the box."

"Could be," said Dalziel. "Had a bad night, didn't he? So you started wondering who else might have got the money?"

"Right," said Slater. "First off, I thought it might be one of you lot. Well, you were on the spot, right? And fifty thou in used notes is a helluva temptation even for virtuous gents like yourselves."

He smiled at Novello as if to exclude her from the slur. She didn't smile back.

"But once you'd put such a daft notion out of your head," said Dalziel genially, "you still didn't give up. Once a Yorkie, always a Yorkie, eh? So it was back to yon bonnie lass in the library, eh?"

"Right," grinned Slater. "I just didn't want to leave before I'd made damn sure I'd not missed anything. And this time I found myself staring at the pic of the 'dozer demolishing the cottage."

They were all as far ahead of him now as Novello had been from the start, but it was necessary for him to spell it out for the tape.

He'd made out the name painted on the bulldozer, checked it in the local business directories, and discovered that for the last several years Tommy Tiplake had been trading as Geordie Turnbull out of the same address. And he recalled reading in the local paper the day before that this same Turnbull had been helping the police with their inquiries just as he'd done fifteen years ago in Dendale.

"Coincidence? Maybe," he said. "I almost dropped it in your laps then, got as far as the cop shop, but thought, what the hell, with all this stuff in the paper about Benny Lightfoot fifteen years back, once you jokers get your hands on Benny's brother, you're going to be more interested in fucking him around-pardon my French, miss-than following up some half-baked gumshoe work I'd been doing. So I went off to Bixford and had a drink in the pub and got chatting to some of the locals. All the talk was about Turnbull, and I soon heard enough to make me wonder how come a 'dozer driver like him had suddenly got enough put by to buy into his boss's firm way back. It made me think it was worth having a quick talk with Geordie."

"Talk?" said Dalziel. "If that's what you do to any poor sod you have a quiet talk with, I shouldn't like to see anyone you fancied having a quiet kiss with!"

"There was a misunderstanding," said Slater. "But we soon got on the same wavelength. I'll give him his due. Once he saw the wind was blowing, he didn't mess around but put his hand up straightaway. Said it had been bothering him for years, but he just hadn't been able to resist the temptation when he pushed over the old cottage and saw this tin box lying in the rubble with tenners spilling out of it. Can't say I blamed him. Would probably have done the same myself."

"I get the impression, Mr. Slater, that you have done much the same yourself," said Wield.

"The money, you mean? Listen, mate, I got that money fair and square. You ask Turnbull. Like I said, once he understood who I was, he cooperated of his own free will. Wanted to get it off his conscience. Also he's done all right, our Geordie. Fifteen years ago, fifty thou was big money still. Now it's a down payment on one of those earthmovers of his. I told him, get me the dosh in readies today and I'll forget the fifteen years' interest I'd be entitled to. He agreed. If he says different, he's a liar. Why the hell he wanted to get you people involved, I don't know. He's the only one committed a crime here, not me."

"Blackmail's a crime," said Dalziel softly. "Extortion's a crime. And don't give me any of that kangaroo crap about this being your money. It was your gran got robbed, not you. It's her sodding money if it's anyone's."

"Yeah, and that's where I was heading, straight back down to Wark House to give it to her," said Slater.

He gazed openly at them with what was either wide-eyed sincerity or you-prove-different complacency.

Novello said quietly, "That's good to hear, Mr. Slater. The Social Service Department that's been picking up your grandmother's tab at Wark House for the past several years, will be pleased to hear it too. You see, they've been dishing out taxpayers' money on the understanding she was penniless, and now they'll be able to get most of it back."

Slater looked shocked for a moment, then smiled ruefully.

"Hell, perhaps I should talk to Turnbull about interest after all!"

Dalziel stood up so suddenly, his chair rattled back and almost fell over.

Slater shoved his chair back a few inches, as though anticipating assault. But the Fat Man's tone had more of resignation than aggression in it.

"Interview terminated," he said flicking off the tape switch. "And no, you won't talk to Turnbull, Mr. Slater. We'll talk to him instead. We'll need a written statement of all this, okay?"

"Yeah. Sure thing," said Slater. "Then that's it?"

"Unless my sergeant here can thumb through the big book and find summat tasty to charge you with."

"Assault on Mr. Turnbull?" said Wield hopefully.

"Not much hope of that if we've just been listening to the truth. I think we're done here. Wieldy. Ivor?"

Wield shook his head. Novello said, "What do you think happened to your brother, Mr. Slater?"

"Benny? I don't recall much of him, miss, except that he was the nervous type, always scared of his own shadow. My bet would be, with his gran gone and the cottage wrecked, the poor bastard topped himself, God rest his soul."

It seemed a suitable note to finish on. The station didn't run to two interview rooms, so Slater was returned to his cell with pen and paper to write his statement and Geordie Turnbull was brought out.

He had had time to recover most of his old bounce. In fact the feeling that emanated from him was of euphoria that at last things were out in the open.

"Daft to say, but when I saw your face, bonny lad," he said to Wield, "I thought it had somehow come out then and I was almost relieved when you started asking about the poor little girl instead. Makes you think, doesn't it. Fancy preferring to be suspected of something like that! No, I'm glad it's out."

Probably the first time in his life Wield had been addressed as bonny lad, thought Novello. Or was that just mental queer-bashing? Could be this boyfriend out in the sticks everyone gossiped about thought he was lovely.

The story he told confirmed in every significant respect that offered by Slater.

He should have had his lawyer, thought Novello. The hideous Hoddle would have made him keep his mouth shut. With old Mrs. Lightfoot dead and only Slater's hearsay to set against him, there was no way the CPS would have entertained a charge.

But this had less to do with legality than guilt. It soon emerged that simple down-to-earth, happy-go-lucky Geordie had a strong streak of religious fatalism. If he hadn't kept the money, Tommy Tiplake's business would have failed and he, Geordie, would have been long gone and well out of the way of this second round of child molestation inquiries. This was his punishment. Anything the CPS could throw at him would merely be almost welcome public evidence of his lack of culpability in the larger case.

Novello found herself totally in sympathy with him by the time the interview was finished. If his innate and unselfconscious charm hadn't done the trick (which, she assured herself firmly, it wouldn't have done), his final words would have won her over.

"What really bothers me now I know the whole story is the thought of yon poor lad, Benny, coming back in the rain and searching through the rubble of Neb Cottage for the money his gran had promised him. Poor sod."

"Poor sod?" said Dalziel incredulously. "Yon poor sod might be responsible for kidnapping and killing three young girls, and afore you say that's not proved, there's no doubt he attacked Betsy Allgood that same night you're talking about."

"You think so? Well, that's the way you're trained to look at things, Mr. Dalziel," said Turnbull with some dignity. "Me, I knew the lad and I could never see any harm in him. I never believed he had anything to do with those lasses disappearing any more than I did. As for attacking the Allgood girl, I'm sure he gave her a nasty fright. Little kid lost on the fell in a storm at night suddenly sees the man everyone's been telling her is the bogeyman, naturally she's going to be scared out of her wits, isn't she? I daresay if you'd been the one she met on the fellside that night, she'd have been just as frightened, poor little lass."

"Interview terminated," said Dalziel. "Nowt turns my stomach more than listening to a Newcastle United supporter who's got religion."

"Is that right, bonny lad? Well, one thing's for sure, despite all them signs you told me about, Benny's not back, is he? And I had nothing to do with little Lorraine, and nor did Barney Lightfoot, from the sound of it. So I'll get back to my cell, shall I? And let you lot get back to your work. From the sound of it you've still got a hell of a lot to do."

The three detectives sat in silence after Turnbull was removed from the interview room.

Finally Novello said, "Could he be right, sir? Could Betsy Allgood have got it wrong? She was so frightened at seeing Lightfoot, she panicked, and when he tried to reassure her, she thought he was attacking her."

"For a lass her age she were one of the best witnesses I ever came across," said the sergeant approvingly. "We'd talked with her several times afore this, and this time she were just the same, nice and calm and precise. All that stuff about her cat, you're not saying she just imagined that? Rang true to me then, rings true to me now. You've read the file? Then you'll know what I mean."

Yes, thought Novello. I know what you mean. But I'm not sure I know what I mean, which is maybe something more than you know. Or can know. Something about the way little girls think. About the way they can be frightened into the most fanciful inventions… the way they rearrange reality to suit their own needs and desires… the way they observe and analyze the adult world…

Her mind ran back over the Dendale file, highlighting it not as a record of an investigation but as a sort of patterned tapestry, with its intricate design based on the thrice-repeated motif of a vanished child. Suddenly looked at like this, she saw something she had only been dimly conscious of before.

She said, "Sir-"

The door opened and Sergeant Clark's head appeared.

He said, "Sorry, sir, but compliments of Mr. Pascoe, and would you care to join him at Dender Mere, which is to say, the Dendale Reservoir?"

"Pascoe?" said Dalziel looking toward Wield with astonishment. "What's yon bugger doing back on the job? You know owt of this, Wieldy?"

"No, sir."

"What about you, Ivor? You were the last to see him."

"Yes, sir. Well, like I told you, his daughter was doing much much better, they thought she was out of danger. And he seemed to be quite excited about something, I don't know what, something about an earring-"

"So what's he say to you, Nobby?" demanded Dalziel.

"Nothing more than I've told you, sir. Compliments to Mr. Dalziel and would you care-"

"Aye, aye, I can hear them prissy tones without the club impressionist act," he said testily. "Well, I don't think there's owt else to do round here this night except go to yon bloody concert, so let's go and see what our resident intellectual has got laid on for us. But it had better be good!"

It was.

Peter Pascoe, on his way to Danby, had rung the incident room at St. Michael's Hall. Here he got George Headingley sitting in solitary state. He had given a detailed account of everything that had been happening that afternoon. The DI'S demob-happiness had rendered him something of a liability when it came to active policing, but he was an excellent man to leave in charge of the shop, if only because, though reluctant to initiate action in case something went wrong in a manner which might adversely affect his pension, this same preoccupation made him an assiduous collator of the minutiae of other people's activities, to avoid the fallout if any of them went wobbly.

"So his Fatship and Wieldy are down the local nick with wet towels at the ready?" said Pascoe, knowing how even jokes about police impropriety made old George tremble.

"They are interrogating the suspects, yes," said Headingley.

"But this fellow Lightfoot they've caught says he's Barney, not Benny?"

"That's what Nobby Clark says. And he agrees. He knew Benny well and says that this fellow might have a family resemblance, but no way is he the real thing."

"Interesting," said Pascoe. "Tell me, George, the frog team at the mere, they still there?"

"Just had them on asking if Mr. Dalziel had left authority for overtime. I said no, so they're packing up for the night."

Pascoe thought then said, "Do me a favor. Get onto them and say

… no, on second thoughts, give me their number."

George was quite capable of staging a breakdown of all communication equipment rather than risk getting involved in an unauthorized overtime scandal.

Pascoe dialed the diving team's mobile and was pleased to hear Tom Perriman's voice answer. They were old acquaintances and got on well.

"Pete, how are you? I heard about your trouble. How're things going?"

"Fine," Pascoe assured him. "Hairy while it lasted, but I think everything's going to be okay now. Listen, Tom, I'm on my way to join you, so don't rush off."

"Oh, come on!" protested Perriman. "We've just got all the gear packed."

"It's all right. It's not diving I want you for. Listen, you can get started while I'm on my way."

He explained what he wanted. When he finished, Perriman said, "And it's your signature on the overtime authority?"

"It's more than my signature. It's my neck," said Pascoe.

"I'll come to the execution," said Perriman. "Okay, see you soon."

"Great," said Pascoe. He turned off the Danby road and, using the sun as navigational aid, wove a path along quiet country lanes until he found himself on the road running into the mouth of Dendale.

The reservoir gate was still open and he drove all the way to where the underwater search van was parked. He could see the men down at the water's edge, wielding picks and shovels. Tom Perriman detached himself from the group and came to meet him.

"Who's a clever boy, then?" he said. "I poked around with a grapple and came up with half a rib cage. I'd say it's pretty definite the rest of our guy's down there. It must have been a cellar, and when the house was 'dozed the slabs on the floor above cracked open to leave a space you could get down through. Somehow this poor sod got himself trapped. Probably got up far enough to get an arm through the gap, then his efforts brought the slab down on him. Water rose. He died, then decomposed till eventually his arm bones broke free and washed out a meter or so into the mere."

"Great. So you've got the rest of the skeleton up?"

"Give us a chance," said Perriman. "It's still full of water down there and badly silted up. Also I'm not too happy sending someone down into gunge a body's been decaying in."

"Thought this was the same gunge we're drinking and cooking with?"

"Not quite in this concentration. But I see you're in too much of a hurry to wait till we get a pump set up. Is it something identifiable you're after? Like a jawbone? Okay, I'll give it a whirl, but it'll cost you several large disinfectant Scotches."

Pascoe stood and watched the operation. The slab they'd moved had left a space just wide enough for a diver to drop through. The water was dark and murky. Not even the warmth of the evening air could make the prospect of dipping into those depths attractive. Perriman had to work by touch. He sank out of sight and groped about the bottom till his fingers felt something. A femur emerged, then a scapula. Then a skull.

Pascoe took it and washed it in the cleaner waters of the mere. When he saw the gleam of a metal plate, he said, "This'll do nicely. You can get out now before you catch your death of something."

"Gee, thanks for your concern," said Perriman. "But I like it down there. Besides there's something else…"

He vanished again. Thirty seconds passed, then he erupted to the surface, both hands raised high, not in triumph but to display his trophy.

No length of white bone this time, but a coil of rusting chain.

Pascoe took it from him and laid its heavy length on the sun-baked ground. One end had been formed into a narrow noose by a padlock, the other had several large staples rammed into its links.

"Jesus," said Perriman, who'd climbed out. "Looks like the poor bastard could've been chained up down there. And I think there's a bit more of the stuff lying around."

"Leave it till you've got the place pumped out," said Pascoe.

"I was going to. Pete, you don't look too surprised."

Pascoe looked down at the chain, then raised his gaze to take in the placid waters of the mere, the valley slopes, the long sweep of the fell ridge with the Neb and Beulah Height serenely mysterious against the deepening blue of the evening sky.

It seemed to him there was perfection out there which it would only take an outstretched hand to touch and absorb like an electric current into the very core of human life. It seemed so close that not to partake of it must be deliberate denial, at once willful and wicked.

Then he thought of his despair in the past forty-eight hours, of the Purlingstones' despair for the next God knows how many years, and finally as his gaze came full circle and took in the chain and the bones once more, of this man's despair as the waters floated him up toward light and freedom, and then drowned him.

"No," he said. "I'm not too surprised."

He rang Danby Station, got Clark, and left his message for Dalziel. Then he strolled away along the margin of the lake and dialed the hospital and got them to fetch Ellie to a phone.

"Everything okay?" he said.

"Fine. Looking better by the minute. And you?"

"Making progress," he said. "I'm not sure when I'll be done, though."

"That's okay. Plenty to occupy myself with here."

"Oh, yes? You found a handsome doctor, or what?"

She laughed. It was a good sound to hear.

"No such luck. But I've got my pen. Got a few ideas I'd like to play with."

"Oh, yes." He was thinking, She can't really be thinking of using what we've been through-not yet… But how to say this?

He didn't need to. She laughed again and said, "It's okay, Peter. It'll be a long time before I'll feel able to lay what we've been through on anyone else's plate. But it's not the same old stuff either. If no one will pay the piper, it's time to play a new tune. I think we'll all be ready for some new tunes after this, won't we?"

"Oh, yes," he said fervently. "Talking of old tunes, but, would you care to whistle me through Mahler's Second Symphony?"

"You what?"

He explained. They talked a little longer. Finally he rang off and looked around. His walk had brought him to the ruins of the old village which the sun had rescued from the deep. He still had the copy of Wield's map that Dalziel had given him. From it he tried to locate individual buildings but couldn't be positive about anything but the church. From what he'd read in The Drowning of Dendale, it had been built close by the crag under whose shelter the departed of Dendale had lain prior to their journey over the Corpse Road to St. Michael's. The rest of the village was just a jumble of stones, needing more local knowledge or archaeological expertise than he had to interpret.

He stood there a long while, feeling all about him the ghosts of the dead, and of the living, too, whose departure from this place had been a rehearsal for death. Then he heard a car engine and saw a police Range Rover bumping down the water's edge where the divers were. Out of it climbed Dalziel, followed by Wield and Novello.

By the time he joined them, they'd heard Perriman's account of things, but their first inquiries were after Rosie.

"Spoke to Ellie on my mobile not long back," he said. "She's still sleeping sound, I mean really sleeping. It looks good."

"Great," said Dalziel. "And t'other lass, the one with the funny name?"

"Zandra?" said Pascoe. "She died."

"Oh, shit."

There was a long silence, the sort which seems unbreakable. Finally Dalziel cleared his throat and said brusquely, "Right, lad. So what's going off here? How come, with all you've had on your plate, you know more than I do?"

"I had help," said Pascoe. "From unexpected quarters."

He led them to his car and took a large envelope from the front seat.

"How much do you know about Elizabeth Wulfstan?" he said.

"Know that she's Betsy Allgood who got orphaned, then adopted, way back," said Dalziel. "Needed a shrink to get her straight in her early teens."

"Right," said Pascoe, unsurprised at Dalziel's knowledge, though he might have raised an eyebrow if he'd realized how recently, and how, he'd acquired it. "The shrink, incidentally, seems to have been Paula Appleby."

"Her on the telly? Thinks cops should be injected with estrogen? Jesus!" said Dalziel. "So what's this got to do with anything?"

Pascoe extracted several sheets from the envelope.

"These are transcripts of Betsy's memories of Dendale and after, recalled and taped during the course of her treatment."

"You wha'?" said Dalziel taking the sheets.

He ran his eye over them quickly. He might not have Wield's almost total recall after a single reading, but when it came to sheer speed, he was county class.

"So?" he said when he'd finished. "Lass seems to be saying, bit more grown-up like, what she told us fifteen years back in Dendale."

"Indeed," said Pascoe. "I also have a copy of Dr. Appleby's final assessment as prepared for the Wulfstans. She concluded that the girl's condition was the result of her desperate need to feel secure in her new home after the trauma of losing both her parents at a time when she still hadn't recovered from what happened in Dendale, as well, of course, as her family's forcible removal thence."

"Thence," said Dalziel. "I've been missing words like that. But what bothers me most is not thence, but whence did you get all this stuff? You've not been at Wulfstan's desk with a bent hairclip, I hope?"

"It's all right, sir, I wiped my fingerprints," said Pascoe. Then he grinned and said, "Relax. Nothing illegal. Not by me anyway. I was given them, by Arne Krog."

"Thank God for that," said Dalziel, relieved not so much that no crime had been committed, but that it hadn't been committed by Pascoe, whom he didn't trust not to get caught. "But why did the Turnip give you them? And what the hell have they got to do with them bones down there?"

"There's more," said Pascoe. "A revised version. Or perhaps the authorized version. You decide."

He took from the envelope three sheets of blue-lined paper covered with round, flowing handwriting in black ink.

Dalziel took them, laid them on the roof of the car, and began to read.

There was no heading.

I've been thinking about what I said to Dr. Appleby and I'm not sure I got it right. I'm alright up to where I got down to the mere and started shouting, "Bonnie! Bonnie!" Then I think I heard someone shouting back and I know it's daft, but I never thought it were anything but Bonnie. I were wet and frightened and only seven, so I never asked myself how come my cat could talk, and when I shouted again and heard the words, "Here, here!" I just went toward the sound.

It were coming from right near the water's edge, where the ruins of Heck were. I climbed over the fallen walls, still shouting, and again I heard the reply, and it were coming from a gap half blocked by a big stone and a lot of rubble but I managed to push some of this aside and there were space enough for me to get through. Only, it looked dark and wet down there, and I knew where it was, it was the cellar where Mr. Wulfstan kept his fancy wine. I'd been down there with Mary and it was really eery, even with the electric light on. Now it looked like the hole in our yard, I mean the yard at Low Beulah where Dad used to hose all the muck down when Mam started complaining it were like living on a midden. I used to watch muck and watter bubbling down into it and imagine what it 'ud be like to be down there with the rats and all. So I didn't fancy going into the Heck cellar one little bit, only suddenly I heard not a voice but a long meow that I'd have known from a thousand others. I didn't hesitate now. Bonnie were down there and he needed my help.

So I climbed through the gap. There were bits of rubble lying around to make a sort of staircase, and when I'd got down a bit I found I were stepping into water. It wasn't all that deep yet, just above my knees, and the good thing about it was that the bit of light coming through the hole reflected off the surface and after a while I began to see what there was to see.

I said, "Bonnie, are you there?" and a voice said back, "Here I be," and it was then I made out this shape in a corner of the cellar and realized there was a man there, and I strained my eyes and I saw that it were Benny Lightfoot and he had Bonnie in his arms.

After that it happened more or less like I told Dr. Appleby.

Except that when Bonnie scratched his face and he had to let him go and I ran off with the cat, I recall Benny tried to come after me. And he got quite close and I thought he were going to catch hold of me again. I turned to try and fight him off, but suddenly he pulled up short and I could see something stretched out taut behind him, and I saw it was a chain, one end wrapped around his waist, t'other fixed to the wall.

He strained toward me with his hands outstretched, and his eyes were big as saucers 'cos his face were so hungered and waste. And he didn't look frightening anymore. No, he looked more frightened than frightening. He looked real sad and lost. And all he said was "Help me, please help me."

Then I turned and scrambled out, and I recall I pushed a lot of stone and stuff back into the gap, and I ran off up the fell hard as I could, I didn't know where, till I had to stop and rest. And it was then that Dad came and found me.

I think this is the truth 'cos Dr. Appleby said I'd feel a lot better when I recalled the truth of what happened and told someone, and I do feel better now I've told someone even though it's not Dr. Appleby. I don't want to tell anyone else, but, not now, not ever. All I want is to live quietly in London with Aunt Chloe and go to school and do my lessons and be a good daughter like a daughter owt to be.

When Dalziel finished reading, he turned and looked toward the sunlit remains of Heck on the edge of the bright and placid mere. He wasn't a man at the mercy of imagination, but like a movie director, he could let it loose when he chose. Now he chose to turn off the sun and bring the rain lashing down and the mist swirling in. And he chose to see a man chained to a wall under the ground with rising water lapping round his thighs. And he chose to be the man and hear someone calling what he thought was his name and feel hope rise faster than the water that rescue was close…

He thrust the sheets into Wield's hand and said to Pascoe, "All right, clever clogs. Everything was going nice and simple till you got back in the game. Would you like to tell me what you think is going off here?"

Nice and simple didn't seem to Novello a possible description of any aspect of the investigation that she'd observed. She looked greedily at the sheets of blue paper in Wield's hands and longed to get hold of them to see what it was that had brought Dalziel to the edge of being gobsmacked.

Pascoe said, "We'll need dental records for absolute confirmation, but for my money, the plate in the skull's enough. That was Lightfoot down there. Someone chained him up. Most likely candidate is Wulfstan. That would explain why he started climbing up the Neb recently when the drought brought the village back to the surface. Not nostalgia, not grief. Just good old guilt and worry that after all this time he was going to be found out."

"Explain, too, why he didn't comment on the BENNY'S BACK signs," said Wield. "He knew he couldn't be."

"Why'd yon lass not say anything?" demanded Dalziel.

"A terrified kid answering questions the way she thought the police wanted them answered?" offered Pascoe. "It happens. Or it used to."

Dalziel glowered but let this pass.

"And Wulfstan, if it were him, what was he up to? Trying to beat a confession out of Lightfoot?"

"That's one possibility, sir."

"One? Give us another."

"Well, it could be he had a vested interest in making sure the chief suspect in the Dendale child disappearances disappeared also."

"Eh? Come on, lad. You going doolally, or wha'? Tell me one thing which ever suggested Wulfstan could be in the frame for any of them, let alone all."

"Can't, sir. I wasn't there, remember?"

"So you've got nowt."

"Not quite," said Pascoe. "What I do have is a witness who saw Wulfstan assaulting Lorraine Chase on Sunday morning."

No doubt about it this time, thought Novello. Dalziel was definitely gobsmacked. And angry.

"Now listen," he finally got out. "I'm making allowances, but if this is one of thy clever games-"

"No game, sir," said Pascoe. "Though I doubt if it would stand up in court. In fact, I'm absolutely certain I won't be letting this witness get anywhere near court. You see, it's Rosie."

And the Fat Man was gobsmacked again. Twice in twenty seconds. Plus that earlier near miss. Novello's respect for Pascoe soared to new heights.

And her own mind was sparked by his example to make a connection.

"The earring," she said, knowing she was right but not why.

Pascoe smiled at her and said, "Her crucifix substitute, actually. She picnicked early Sunday morning at the viewpoint on the Highcross Moor road. She was looking through Derek Purlingstone's binoculars. And she saw her imaginary friend, Nina, get taken by the nix."

"The nix?" said Dalziel, clearly still not convinced Pascoe's recent trauma hadn't pushed him over the edge.

"That's right. Nina is a little blond girl with pigtails, like this." He reached into his car and produced the Eendale Press volume.

"And that's what the nix looks like. Remind you of anyone?"

Dalziel shook his head, still in denial. But Novello said, "That photo in the Post…"

"Right," said Pascoe. "I showed Rosie that pageful of photos and she pointed straight at Wulfstan and said, there's the nix. I'm sure she saw him, sir."

The Fat Man shook his head, more to clear it than express absolute doubt.

"Pete," he said gently. "The lass has been through a bad time. You too. Can do funny things to you. On t'other hand, she's the only one in your family I'd trust with two pigs at Paddy's Market. So there's no harm in checking it out."

With a sudden renewal of energy, he strode down to the mere's edge where the divers were packing up their gear, spoke to Perriman, picked up the length of chain, and, dragging it behind him like Marley's ledgers, made for the Range Rover.

"Right," he called. "Pete, you travel with us. Esther Williams down there will fetch your car back to Danby. I'm not letting you out of my sight, else God knows how many more whences and thences you'll be plucking out of the air."

"Where exactly are we headed, sir?" asked Pascoe, as he climbed into the front passenger seat.

"Where do you think? You like music, don't you? We're off to a concert. And I reckon if we shout Piss! Piss! loud enough we might just get some of them buggers to sing us an encore."

"I think you mean Bis! Bis!" suggested Pascoe.

"I know what I mean," said Andy Dalziel.

The opening concert of the twentieth Mid-Yorkshire Dales Summer Music Festival started late.

This was expected. Despite posters, local press announcements, and word of mouth, news of the change of venue hadn't reached everyone and several patrons had had to be redirected from St. George's Hall to the Beulah Chapel.

In the circumstances no one complained. In fact, commercially speaking, it was no bad thing, thought Arne Krog as he observed the throng of people examining the tapes and discs on sale at the foot of the chapel. There were half a dozen on which he figured, though only two on which he was the sole artist. His recording career had paralleled his performing career-a steady effulgence that rarely threatened to explode into stardom.

Elizabeth had only the one disc on offer, but it was the one attracting most attention. In the circumstances not surprising. The clever among them would buy half a dozen copies and get her to sign and date them. Fifteen years on they could be a collector's item. Whereas his voice would hardly even rank as forgotten because it had never really ranked as rememberable. He could smile ruefully at the thought. The trappings of stardom he had always envied, but the possession of the kind of voice that brought them he regarded as a gift of God, and therefore simply to be marveled at. So it didn't bother him that Elizabeth might be a star, only that her brightening might be at the expense of others' darkness.

But he still wasn't sure he'd been wise to hand that envelope to the detective. It had been a moment's impulse, unlikely to have been acted on had the man been that fat bastard, Dalziel!

He went into what would have been the vestry if the Beulahites had vestries. Elizabeth was in there, looking as calm as a frozen mere. Inger was going through her usual preperformance finger-suppling exercises. Walter was looking at his watch as though it had disobeyed a direct command.

"I think we must start," he said.

"Fine," said Krog. "I'm ready. Inger?"

"Yes."

They looked at Wulfstan. There had been a time when, as chairman of the committee, he had acted as a sort of MC, introducing the performers. But there had been something so unbending about his manner that in the end the experiment had been discontinued. "Not so much a warm-up," Krog had described it, "as a chill-down." Now it was his custom to signal to the regulars that things were about to start by simply joining Chloe on the front row.

Tonight, however, he said, "I will stay with Elizabeth so she is not sitting here alone."

The singer looked at him and smiled with a kind of distant compassion, like some classical goddess gazing down on the mortal coil from her Olympian tea table.

"No, I'll be fine. You go and sit with Chloe. She'll be expecting you."

Wulfstan didn't argue. He simply left. He might not be much good on a stage but he certainly knew how to get off it.

In a broad American accent Krog said, "Okay. Let's do it."

He stood aside to let Inger go out before him.

"Good luck, Elizabeth," he said. "Or if you are superstitious, break a leg."

She met his gaze with an expression blank beyond indifference and he turned away quickly.

The applause which had begun as Inger took her seat at the piano swelled at his appearance. Small audiences loved him. If he could have performed to the whole world, fifty or sixty at a time, in village halls on summer eves, he would have been an international favorite.

He smiled on them and they smiled back as he bade them welcome with easy charm. As he spoke, his eyes ran along the rows. Many he recognized from previous years, the Mid-Yorks culture vultures who came flapping down to feast, and be seen feasting, on these musical bar-snacks. Then there were the tourists, glad of an evening excursion from musty hotel lounges, or holiday cottages not half as comfortable as home. And scattered among them were other faces he remembered or half remembered, from those long-off days when he stayed at Heck and was a popular customer at the village shop and patron of the Holly Bush Inn.

Wasn't that Miss Lavery from the village school? And old Mr. Pontifex, who'd owned half the valley? And those wizened features at the back of the hall, didn't they belong to Joe Telford, the joiner, by whose gracious permission they were performing here tonight? And that couple there, she like patience on a monument, and he like the granite it was carved from, were not they the Hardcastles, Cedric and Molly?

His gaze came forward and met Chloe's in the front row, and his voice faltered. His instinct had been right. This was no occasion for the Mahler cycle. Elizabeth had wanted to end the concert with it, but at least his resistance had prevented that. He wanted the concert to end on an upbeat note with a rousing encore or two. No one would be calling for encores after the Kindertotenlieder. So finally she had agreed to end the first half with it. Now he saw even that as a mistake. God help us, they'd probably all go home!

But it wasn't possible to change now. All he could hope was that the Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel which sat ill with the Kindertotenlieder but which he'd chosen deliberately for that reason would act as a kind of advance antidote.

By the time he came to the ninth and final song, he knew he'd been wrong. Sometimes an audience creates its own atmosphere, let the artist do what he will. He could feel them turning from the masculine vigor and sturdy independence expressed in several of the songs, and immersing themselves in the fatalistic melancholy which he'd always regarded as their lesser component. Even this last song, I have trod the upward and the downward path, a sort of middlebrow "My Way" in its assertion of stoic refusal to be overwhelmed by the vagaries of unfeeling fate, somehow came out positively plangent with despair.

He took his bow, made no attempt to milk the applause, but went straight into his introduction of Elizabeth.

He kept it short and flat, but Walter Wulfstan at his worst would have been hard pressed to lower that overheated atmosphere of expectation. And even if he had, the appearance of Elizabeth would have sent it soaring again. Those who had seen only the photos were rocked back by the reality. And those on whose minds the image was printed of a short, plump, plain child with cropped black hair gasped audibly at sight of this tall, elegant woman with the erect carriage of a model, her slim body sheathed in an ankle-length black gown, with long tresses of blond hair framing the face of a tragic queen.

Krog turned and walked off, suspecting he could have hopped off backward, grimacing like an ape, for all the attention anyone was paying him. Someone remembered to applaud, but the clapping was spasmodic and soon done. Silence fell. Outside sounds swam by like fish seen from a bathyscope, denizens of a completely different world.

Elizabeth spoke, her Yorkshire vowels startling as growls from a skylark.

"Fifteen years back, over the Neb in Dendale, three little lasses, friends of mine, went missing. I'm singing these songs for them."

Inger came in with the short introduction, then Elizabeth started singing.

"And now the sun will rise as bright As though no horror had touched the night."

It took no more than the first few lines of that first song to show Krog that he had been both right and wrong.

Wrong that she wasn't ready for this cycle. She sang with a purity of line, an uncluttered directness, which made her performance on disc seem strained and affected. And the piano accompaniment was the perfect complement to this version of her voice, which could have been buried in the richer textures of the full orchestra.

And right that she should never have been allowed to sing them here. In the silence when the first song ended he heard a stifled sob. And many of the faces he saw from his vantage point to the side were stricken rather than rapt. At the least he should have agreed to her request that the concert finished with the cycle, for after this the second half of the program with its mix of love duets and popular favorites was going to sound tastelessly bathetic.

He focused on Chloe Wulfstan's face. The pain he saw there was reason enough to have banned the Mahler even if everyone else in the audience were simply enjoying the performance as a superb example of lieder singing. It was nearly twenty years since he'd met her on his very first appearance at the festival. To a young singer making his way, this kind of engagement was a necessary staging post on the way to heights. And when he saw his host's young wife and felt that familiar tightening of the throat which was the first signal of desire, his instinctive reaction had been to chance his arm because he doubted if he'd be this way again.

He'd given her the full treatment but she had only smiled-amused, as she admitted later, by his flowery continental manners-and returned her attention to its main focus, her young daughter.

He had thought about her for a while, but not for long, and when Wulfstan invited him back the following year he had accepted, not because of Chloe, but simply because he wasn't yet in a position where he could afford to refuse.

When he saw her again, it felt like coming home. That summer they became friends. And his relationship with Wulfstan changed too. Another reason for accepting the invitation was that he'd come to realize the man was rather more than just a big frog in the middle of a little northern pool. He had connections all over Europe, not the kind of connections, alas, which oiled the hinges of the doors of La Scala or l'Opera or the Festspielhaus, but a useful network of local introductions which could help bring work and get himself noticed. At a personal level, he found it hard to warm to the man, which should have made the prospect of seducing his wife that much easier; but now that he saw him as in some degree a patron, self-interest turned its cold shower on his loins, and it was almost pure accident when during his third festival, while strolling with Chloe under the Neb, he slipped while crossing a stream, fell against her, splashing them both, and they kissed as though there was nothing else to do.

So it had begun. She saw it as "the real thing," whatever the real thing might be, and this might have worried him had she not made it clear that her daughter's interests came first, and until the girl was fully grown, there was no way Chloe would contemplate leaving Walter. But she was no fool. When he assured her that his love was so strong, he was willing to wait forever, she replied, "That's very noble, Arne, though it could be, of course, that you're just delighted to be able to have your cake and ha'penny!"

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 police 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.

Pascoe 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."

She sat there like an alien in a sci-fi movie. Pascoe whose impression of her till now had been of a woman striking in appearance but chilling in effect surprised himself by having a sudden image of pressing that naked head down between his thighs. She caught his eye and smiled as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. He turned his attention quickly to her CD, which he was still carrying.

And that was when goose turned to rabbit.

At this moment Wield reappeared bearing a tray laden with teapot, cups, sugar, milk, and a trayful of biscuits.

"Here comes Mother," said Dalziel. "Funny thing, that. When weather's hot and you're really parched, there's nowt cuts your thirst like a cup of tea."

He spoke with the conviction of a temperance preacher. Pascoe watched with resigned amusement as the Fat Man made a big thing of seeing the ladies were served first before lifting his own cup to his great lips with little finger delicately crooked in the best genteel fashion. Either he was still planning his strategy or he felt that something which had been fifteen years coming deserved a leisurely delectation.

Finally he was ready.

His opening gambit surprised Pascoe, because it repeated his offer of separation, only this time targeted and sounding sincere.

"Mrs. Wulfstan," he said gently, "this could be painful for you. If you'd rather we spoke later, or at home…"

"No," she replied. "I'm used to pain."

Krog, seated to her left, gripped her hand, which was dangling loosely almost to the floor, but she offered no return pressure and after a moment he let it go. Wulfstan did not even turn his head to look at her. All his attention was concentrated on Dalziel.

Was the Fat Man's concern for the woman genuine or just another way of turning the screw on her husband? wondered Pascoe.

Probably a bit of both. Dalziel was long practiced at bringing down whole flocks of birds with one stone.

"So it's cards-on-the-table time," he said with all the engaging openness of a Mississippi gambler who has got pasteboard up his sleeve, down his collar, and behind his hatband, and in every orifice known to man. "Who's going to start us off?"

Silence. Which was what he expected. Pascoe caught Wield's eye and murmured something in his ear. The sergeant nodded and moved quietly toward the exit.

"Stage fright, is it?" said Dalziel. "All right. WOULDC Novello, why don't you see if you can give us a kick start?"

Jesus Christ! thought Novello, in both oath and prayer.

She had been watching with interest to see how the Fat Man was going to play this. Would he come in at the past or the present? Would he be open about what they'd found out or keep most of it back to trip them up with?

She'd been ready to make critical notes, to give mental marks. Now here she was, at the front of the class, chalk in hand.

Jesus, she repeated, this time wholly supplicatory.

Her mind was spinning between the chained skeleton at Heck, the blue sheets of Betsy's revised recollection, Barney Lightfoot's story, Geordie Turnbull's confession…

Then she thought, That's all to do with the past! Sod the past. Fat Andy might be anchored in it, but I'm not. The case I'm working on is the murder of Lorraine Dacre, age seven.

She said, "Mr. Wulfstan, is there anything you'd like to add to your account of your visit to Danby early last Sunday morning?"

She focused hard on Wulfstan's gaunt features, partly in resistance to her desire to glance at Dalziel in search of approval, but also keen to catch any telltale reaction. An emotion did move like a mist-wraith across those passive features, but she couldn't quite read it. If anything it resembled… relief?

He said, "As I told Mr. Dalziel, I went up the Corpse Road and stood for some time on the col, looking down into Dendale."

"And then?"

"And then as I turned away to start the descent to Danby, I glanced along the ridge toward the Neb. And I saw a man."

"A man? What man? You didn't mention this in your statement. Why not?"

She was gabbling too many questions in her eagerness to be at him.

He touched his hand to his face as though in need of tactile reassurance that he was flesh and blood.

Then he said quietly, "Because it was Benny Lightfoot."

Novello let out a snort of angry derision. The bastard was going to play silly buggers, was he? He was hoping to hide behind all this BENNY'S BACK! hysteria. But she had the wherewithal to chop that frail prop from under him.

Her voice sour with sarcasm, she said, "You saw Benny Lightfoot? Now, that must have been a real shock, Mr. Wulfstan. Especially as you, of all people, must have known beyond any shadow of doubt that he was dead."

If she'd expected shocksthorror all round, she was disappointed.

Wulfstan shook his head wearily and repeated, "I saw him."

The three women showed nothing, or very little, on their faces.

And Arne Krog said, "It's true. There was a man."

And to Wulfstan he said, almost apologetically, "I followed you."

This confirmation set Novello back for a second till she grasped its implications. Of course, there had been a man, not Benny but Barney, who'd talked about wandering high on the Neb in search of a bird's-eye view of the valley.

Wulfstan was looking at Krog, faintly surprised. Well, a man would be surprised to have his sighting of a ghost confirmed from such an unexpected source.

"So what did you do then, Mr. Wulfstan?" inquired Novello.

"I went up the ridge after him," said Wulfstan.

"And did you catch up with him?" she asked.

"No. He disappeared."

"You mean, like in a puff of smoke?" she mocked.

"No. There are crags and folds of ground along the ridge. He went out of sight and did not reappear. I assumed he'd dropped down one side or the other."

She got his drift now. Benny/barney had dropped down on the Ligg Beck side and there encountered Lorraine and… Good try, Walter. Only, it wouldn't wash.

Feeling completely in control, she set about clearing the ground.

"What about you, Mr. Krog? You see which way this man went?"

Krog said, "No. I saw Walter go after him, then I went back down the Corpse Road."

"And you didn't see Mr. Wulfstan again?"

"Not till later that day at his house."

So now you're on your own, Wulfstan. Just you, and me.

And the child.

"So what happened next, Mr. Wulfstan?" she asked gently. "Did you walk along the ridge, looking left and right in search of this man you thought was Benny Lightfoot? And did you look down at the Ligg Beck side and see someone down there, far below? And was it a little girl you saw, Mr. Wulfstan?"

In court this would be called "leading the witness." She almost hoped he wouldn't let himself be led, forcing her to drive him with angry scorn.

But there was no defiance in his face, nor denial in his voice.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I looked down. And I saw a little girl. I looked down and I saw Mary."

"Mary?" Novello was momentarily bewildered. Against her will she glanced sideways at the men. Pascoe gave a small encouraging nod. Wield, who had rejoined the group bearing the Dendale file and the envelope with Betsy Allgood's transcripts, was as unreadable as ever. Dalziel was staring at Wulfstan and frowning.

She, too, wrenched her attention back to the man. So he was still wriggling, was he? She gathered her strength for a frontal attack.

"Come on, Mr. Wulfstan!" she said. "You mean Lorraine, don't you? You looked into the valley and saw Lorraine Dacre."

There was a creaking sound as Dalziel shifted his weight forward on his uneasy chair.

"No, lass," he corrected gently. "He means Mary. That right, Mr. Wulfstan? You looked down toward Ligg Beck and you saw your daughter, Mary? Looking just like she looked last time you saw her, fifteen years back?"

And for the first time in their acquaintance, Wulfstan regarded Andy Dalziel with something close to gratitude and said, "Yes. That's right, Superintendent. I saw my Mary."

The sky shimmers like blown silk, the sun staggers drunkenly, the rocky ridge beneath his feet yields like a trampoline. After so many years, after so much pain, she is there, as blond and blithe as he remembers her, not a day older, not a whit changed. The ghost of the man who took her has led him back to her.

He does not pause to wonder how she has grown no older during all those years. He does not pause to ask why she is in this valley rather than Dendale where she was lost. He does not pause to consider the steepness of the hillside beneath him. Instead he plunges down the slope like a champion fell runner at the peak of his form. Nimble footed he bounds from rock to rock. Below, at the edge of the deep ghyll through which the beck runs out of sight, she gathers flowers, heedless of anything but herself and the plants beneath her feet, and perhaps the little dog that circles her, barking at bees and flies and nothing at all.

He calls her name. He is too breathless to call very loud, but he calls it all the same. The dog hears him first and looks up, its excited bark turning to deep-throated growl. He calls again, louder this time, and this time the girl hears him.

"Mary!"

She turns and looks up. She sees, rushing down on her, a wild-eyed creature mouthing strange words, his arms flailing high and wild, his legs tiring now and sending him staggering like a drunkard. The flowers fall from her hand. She turns to flee. He shouts again. She runs blindly. The edge of the ghyll is near. She looks back to see his outstretched hands descending upon her.

And she falls.

"I saw two things when I got down beside her. I saw that she was not Mary. And I saw that she was dead."

Novello glared at him, trying not to believe, and failing. She had wanted a trapped monster, not a crazed father. She opened her mouth to ask skeptical questions, but Dalziel gave her a silencing glance and said, "So what did you do then?"

"I picked up the body and began to climb out of the ghyll. I think I was going to carry her back down the valley and seek help, though I knew that for her the time of help was over. Halfway up the slope, on a ledge, the dog attacked me, biting at my ankles. I had to stop to try and chase it away. Finally I kicked it so hard, it fell to the bed of the ghyll and lay there, still snarling up at me. It was now I noticed this gap behind a large flake of rock. When I peered in I saw that this must have been some kind of den for the child. It contained the kind of things a little girl would choose to have around her… I remember from the days when…"

He looked at his wife, whose face had lost all color. Elizabeth was holding one of her hands and Arne Krog was gripping the other arm.

"I laid her in there, thinking that this would be a good place to leave her while I went for assistance. And then I started thinking of what that meant, of telling people, of seeing her parents perhaps… I found I did not have the strength for that. Over the years I had grown to think I had the strength for anything, but I knew I hadn't got the strength for that. So I blocked the entrance to her little den. All I wanted to do was give myself time to think. I was not trying to hide her forever. I would not do that to her parents. I know all too well what not knowing where your child's body lies can do a parent's mind."

"So why'd you cover your traces with that dead sheep?"

It was Wield, who'd come back into the chapel unnoticed. "I'm the one who found her," he went on accusingly. "I saw how hard you'd worked to make sure she stayed hid."

"The dog was still close," said Wulfstan. "I chased it off with stones but I was worried that it might come back. I thought the dead sheep might prevent it, or any predator, from penetrating behind to where I'd laid the child. And I went back to the car along the fellside and drove home. I don't think anybody saw me."

Oh, yes, they did, thought Pascoe. Another little girl who, thank God, imagined she was seeing a scene from the realstunreal world of her storybooks.

"And exactly when were you going to come forward and give us the benefit of this information, sir?" said Dalziel with functionary courtesy.

"After the concert. Tomorrow morning," said Wulfstan. "I have been putting my affairs, both business and personal, in order for some time now. These last three days have given me time to complete the process, and I thought I would not wish to spoil Elizabeth's… to spoil my other daughter's debut at the festival."

He looked toward Elizabeth now. What passed between them was hard to read.

Affection? Understanding? Apology? Regret? All of these, though in what proportion and in what direction was impossible to say.

"Owt else you want to tell us," said Dalziel, "-l for instance why you've been going up the Corpse Road these past few weeks? And why you started putting your affairs in order?"

Wulfstan gave him a distant, almost headmasterly nod of approval.

"I think you know, Mr. Dalziel," he said. "Fifteen years ago I believed you were irredeemably stupid, now I see I may have been mistaken. About the irredeemable element at least. I started going up to the ridge of Lang Neb when I heard that the reservoir was shrinking so much that Dendale village was reappearing. I make my living from the sun, so I appreciated the irony that it was solar heat that was going to bring that living to an end."

"How exactly?" said Dalziel. "Just so's everyone knows what you're talking about."

He glanced toward Chloe Wulfstan. Pascoe, probably the most advanced Dalzielogist in the civilized world, read the message with little difficulty.

Tell her now publicly, so that if she knew before, no one will be able to trick it out of her.

An unexpected chivalry? Or just a subtle turn of the screw to make sure Wulfstan kept on talking?

Whichever, it was working.

"You will find, probably have found already, the remains of a man in the ruins of Heck. That man is-was-Benny Lightfoot. I put him there. I left him there to drown. I am solely responsible for his death. My motive was, I think, obvious."

Dalziel looked toward Novello, who was scowling with concentration as she followed events. Hers was one of those rare faces that look prettier in a scowl.

"Not to them as weren't around, mebbe," said the Fat Man. "So if you could just give us an outline… You'll have lots of opportunity to dot your p's and q's later."

As well as studying Dalzielogy, Pascoe collected Dalzieliana. He made a mental note of this one.

"After we had all moved out of the dale and the rains started, I found I couldn't keep away. At all hours of day and night, I'd be hit by this irresistible urge to go back there and wander around on the fellside. You might imagine such a compulsion, often involving a long drive from some distant place, would be relatively easy to control. But when I tell you that the form it took was an absolute certainty that Mary was there, wandering lost and frightened, and if I didn't go and find her she would certainly die, you may understand why I always obeyed.

"I never found her, of course. Sometimes I imagined…"

He paused and almost visibly withdrew into himself, and Pascoe went with him, to a dark, rain-swept fellside, where every fitful gleam of light seemed to glance off a head of blond curls and every splash and gurgle of water sang like the echo of childish laughter.

"But one night," he resumed, "I heard a noise and saw a figure which wasn't just in my imaginings. It was close by the ruins of Neb Cottage, near where you were found a little later," he said to Elizabeth, who returned his gaze blankly. "It was, of course, Benny Lightfoot."

Another living ghost haunting the valley, finding what comfort he could in the ruined remains of the only existence he had ever wanted.

But there had been nothing for his comfort in this encounter with a fellow ghost.

"I should have brought him in and handed him over to you," said Wulfstan to Dalziel. "But I didn't trust you not to let him go again. No. That's too simple. That's too much of an excuse. I wanted him for myself because I felt sure I could get out of him things about my daughter that you with your more restricted methods never could."

"You tortured him," said Novello.

"I beat him," said Wulfstan. "With my fists. I never used instruments then or later. Does that make it better? It is your area of expertise, not mine. And when I couldn't get anything out of him and I saw dawn lightening the sky, I forced him down to Heck. I knew the cellar was still accessible because I'd cleared a gap sufficient for my entrance in my search for Mary, in case she'd gone back to her old home and taken shelter there. I bound him tight with strips of cloth I tore from his own jacket, and the next night I returned with lengths of chain, and padlocks, and staples, and made him secure. All I wanted was for him to tell me what he'd done to her, where she was. But he wouldn't. No matter what I did to him, he wouldn't. I thought it was because he believed once he'd told me what I wanted to know, I'd kill him. And I swore by everything I held holy, by the memory of Mary herself, that I'd let him live if only he'd tell me what I needed to know. But still he wouldn't talk. Why? Why? All you had to do was tell me…"

He was back there again, and this time they were all with him, in that squalid hole with the rising waters lapping ever higher, and the two faces so close together, both so contorted with pain, that perhaps it was difficult to tell in that dim light who was torturer, who victim.

Except that one went back each morning to a world of warmth and light while the other lay bound in chains, surrounded by darkness and lapped with freezing water.

Then it was easy to tell, thought Pascoe.

He said, "So he never talked. And you let him die."

Wulfstan said, "Yes. I'm not sure if I meant to. If I'd have been able to. But I had to go away for a couple of days. I came back on the day that Elizabeth… Betsy went missing. When they found her and I heard her story that she'd been attacked by Benny near Neb Cottage, I thought… I don't know what I thought, but part of it was relief that he must have got out, that he was still alive. The next night I went down to Heck. The water had risen considerably. I could see at once he hadn't got away but he must have made a superhuman effort to pull the chain out of the wall-I could see one of his arms sticking out into the water. A block of stone above the entrance hole had collapsed and trapped it. I reached down into the water and touched his skin. It was cold. I tried to push it back into the cellar but couldn't. So I covered it with bits of rubble and went away."

"How did that make you feel," said Pascoe, "-knowing you'd killed him?"

Wulfstan considered this, his lips pursed as though it were some unusual taste he were trying to identify, or a rare wine.

"Sad," he said finally.

"Sad that you'd killed him?"

"Sad that he'd died without telling me what I wanted to know."

Pascoe shook his head, but in sorrow, not in disgust. He should perhaps have felt a sense of outrage, but it wasn't there. Not after the past few days.

Dalziel said, "You done, Peter?"

"Yes."

"Ivor, you got something more to say?"

Why was he so keen to let the WOULDC have her head? wondered Pascoe. In murder investigations as in motorcars, backseats were not the kind of place you expected to find Andy Dalziel.

"Yes, sir. Just a bit," said Novello. "I don't think you felt sad, Mr. Wulfstan. Why should you when you'd got what you were after? With the prime suspect mysteriously disappeared, no one was going to waste any more time looking, were they?"

"Looking for what? For my child?"

"No! For the real killer. He was home and free. And that must have made him really happy."

She spoke with a force born partly of moral contempt, but mainly of a desire to provoke a response. She's so sure she's right, thought Pascoe sympathetically. She's desperate to be right! This was what Dalziel was at. There were some lessons best learned in public. And one of them was that being a step in front of everyone else was fine until, in your efforts to keep ahead, it became a step too far.

"So how about that, Mr. Wulfstan?" said Dalziel pleasantly. "Any chance of this being a cover-up 'cos it were you took the little lasses all along?"

Not just a lesson, then. The Fat Man was making sure this time round no possibility, however improbable, didn't get its airing.

Wulfstan wasn't registering horror or indignation, but sheer incomprehension, as if he were being addressed in a foreign language. He looked toward his wife as if in search of an interpreter. She shook her head and said almost inaudibly, "This is vile… Superintendent, this is just not possible…"

"Well, some bugger thought it was," said Dalziel. "Gave us a ring, said to take a closer look at Mr. Wulfstan. Sounded like a woman. Or a man pitched high. How's your falsetto, Mr. Krog?"

Krog said easily, "Too false to deceive an ear like yours, Mr. Dalziel."

Tone, expression, body language, were perfectly right. But it was a role, Pascoe detected. A chosen response, not a natural one. Impossible to prove, but he'd have bet his Christmas bonus the Turnip made the call. Which was pretty safe, as cops didn't get bonuses. And he must resist Dalziel's invasive terminology!

Wulfstan, pale before, had turned a dreadful white as he finally admitted the enormity of the accusation. Interestingly, it wasn't Dalziel but Novello, its first mover, that he turned on.

"You stupid sick child," he grated. "What do you know about anything?"

She stood up to him.

"I know you've killed one girl," she snapped back. "I just want to find out if she was the first."

She was standing, he was sitting, but it still resembled a David-versus-Goliath tableau as he strained forward in his chair, his face twisted in anger. Very good likeness to the nix now, thought Pascoe, readying himself to intervene.

"Pay her no heed, Walter. Every bugger knows she's talking a load of bollocks. Every bugger save her, that is."

The phraseology and accent might have been Andy Dalziel's but the voice was Elizabeth Wulfstan's.

She touched Wulfstan's arm, and he subsided. And turning her attention from Novello to Dalziel with a completeness which was like a door shut in the WOULDC'S face, she went on. "You there, glorrfat, you know this is bollocks. Walter's told you what happened with yon poor lass. It were dreadful, but it were an accident. So why don't I call his solicitor, we'll all go round to the cop shop, you take his statement, then we can all go home. I mean, this is a waste of time, isn't it? I haven't heard any cautions, I don't see any tape recorders. I'm off to Italy tomorrow, and I'd like to get a good night's sleep."

Dalziel looked at her, and smiled, and shook his head, and murmured, "Little Betsy Allgood. Who'd have credited it? Little Betsy Allgood turning into a star."

She scratched her bald head and said, "Nay, Andy, I've a ways to go yet."

"Aye, but you'll get there, lass," he said. "You've come this far, what's going to stop you now?"

"You, mebbe, if you keep us here all bloody night," she retorted.

"Nay, you're free to go anytime, Betsy," he said. "What's to keep you here? You've done what you set out to do. Come back. Sung your songs. Made your peace. But afore you go, there's a little matter you could help us with."

He held up his hand. Wield, with that almost telepathic sense of cue which was a necessary survival technique for the Fat Man's acolytes, dipped into the files and papers he was carrying and produced the handwritten blue sheets.

Reactions: Wulfstan indifferent, hardly registering; Krog, blue-eyed, blank-faced innocence; Elizabeth, frowning, gaze flickering over the others as if assessing how the sheets had got into Dalziel's hands; Chloe, head back, eyes closed, the position she'd assumed after her faint denial of the possibility of her husband's involvement; Inger Sandel, on the piano stool, apparently more interested in the keyboard than the conversation…

"Seems you thought later you might have got a bit confused about what happened that night you went after your cat," said Dalziel. "Nice to get the record straight."

"Should've thought, after what we've just heard, you'd got the record straight as you're ever likely to get it," said Elizabeth.

"There's nowt like hearing it from the horse's mouth."

She flashed one of her rare smiles.

"That's what you think of my singing, is it?"

"I think you hoped you could close things off here with your singing," said Dalziel. "That was the idea, wasn't it? Come back, get it out of your system, quick march into the rest of your life? But the past's like people, luv. They need to be properly buried, else they'll keep coming after you forever. Benny really is back now, so we can give him a proper sendoff. But what about them others? You think some miserable Kraut songs in a disused chapel will do the trick? I don't think so. Ask the Hardcastles. Ask the Telfords. Ask Chloe and Walter here, who've tret you like their own daughter all these years."

"And she's been a good daughter to me," proclaimed Chloe Wulfstan, suddenly fully awake. "A second chance. More perhaps than I deserved. Grief makes you selfish… Oh, God, when I think of the pain she put herself through… Betsy, I'm sorry, I've tried to make amends…"

She was gripping the younger woman's hand and looking at her with desperate appeal to which Elizabeth, however, responded only with a frown.

Pascoe coughed gently. Dalziel glanced at him with something like relief and nodded. They had worked together long enough to have sketched out faint demarcation lines. In Dalziel's words, "I'll kick 'em in the goolies if you'll shovel the psycho-crap."

Pascoe said, "I don't think you need be too hard yourself, Mrs. Wulfstan. You see, I don't think that Betsy's anorexia and bleaching her hair was really an attempt to turn herself into Mary. Or if it was, it wasn't for your sake, certainly not just for your sake. No. It was to turn herself into the kind of daughter she thought her own father would have preferred. Fair haired, slender, attractive, graceful. Everyone thought the short-cropped hair and boyish clothes were sops to her father's disappointment at not having a son. But I don't think so, Elizabeth. I think they were your mother's deliberate attempt to make you as ungirllike as possible. She wanted to make you invisible to him. But you, what you wanted was visibility. Even after he was dead. Perhaps you thought it was because of the way you looked that he died. You blamed yourself for not being what he wanted. Which bring us to the question, how did you know what he wanted? How your mother knew… well, I think a wife has an instinct. There may be deep layers of pretense which will never permit a public acknowledgment, but she knows. And sometimes the knowledge becomes unbearable. But a little girl… Could be it was your sheer invisibility which was the trick. I bet you followed him around… I bet you could spot him half a mile away in a good light. Just the merest glimpse up the fell would be enough. Yes, I bet that was it, Betsy. I bet that was it."

It wasn't working. He'd kept going at such length in the hope of seeing some cracks appearing, but there was nothing on the woman's face except that same frown of concentration. The others more than made up for it, however, as the implications of what he was saying got through. Wulfstan had emerged from his dark inner world, Krog's features had been surprised by a natural feeling. Sandel looked up from her piano amazed, and Chloe's grip on her daughter's hand came close to being an armlock.

She said, "Betsy, please, what's he mean? What is he trying to say?"

"Pay no heed," said Elizabeth harshly. "Load of riddles. It's the way these buggers talk when they've got nowt to say."

"Betsy, we can't pursue the dead, however guilty," said Pascoe. "But the living need to speak out. Think of the pain your silence has caused. Okay, a mixed-up child can't be blamed for keeping quiet, but you did more than keep quiet, didn't you? You misdirected. Think of the consequences. Think of that poor man drowning in a cellar. Think of little Lorraine. All these spring from your silence. There has to be an end."

"Aye," she said dragging her arm free from Chloe's grip. "And I've reached it. I've had enough of this. I'm off first thing in the morning and I'd like a good night's sleep, if no one else would. Walter, I'm sorry the way things have worked out, but they can't do much to you for an accident. Chloe…"

In one last desperate appeal, Chloe said, "Elizabeth, if you know anything, please, please, tell us."

"Know what? What should I know?" cried Elizabeth.

"Where she is. Where my daughter is! Tell me. Tell me!"

Last chance, thought Pascoe. But to admit she knew would be to admit everything. Not least that she had let the suffering of her adoptive parents stretch out over all those years. Would she have the strength? He could see it was tearing her apart.

He murmured something to Wield, who delved into the files he was carrying and came up with the map he'd drawn of Dendale fifteen years earlier. He gave it to Pascoe, raising his eyebrows interrogatively. Pascoe took it in his left hand, at the same time showing Wield what he held in his right.

Instantly Wield was back on the sunlit fellside, the dale spread out below him like the Promised Land, behind him the fold built from stones first raised into walls here four thousand years before, beside him the dark, wiry shepherd, his dogs obedient at his feet, and in the gloaming air the song of larks and the bleating of the folded sheep.

…

You bastard! thought Wield, recalling his thoughts when he realized the dead sheep had been used to hide the missing child's whereabouts. Different man, but, yes, the same trick!

And Pascoe, like a conjurer, held up the map and CD, then turned the latter through forty-five degrees so that the silhouetted face became the outline of the Dendale fells with a formalized sun arrowing its rays down into what had been the girl's mouth.

He knew now what the notes coming out of her mouth signified. Ellie had recalled the hosts discussing it on the record review program she had been listening to that Sunday morning, which now seemed a million light-years away.

"Mahler's Second is known as the Resurrection Symphony," she'd said. "It's about the awakening of the dead, and judgment, and redemption. These bars are a quote from the first sounding of the resurrection theme, and there was a lot of speculation why she'd used them instead of a quote from the lieder themselves."

Well, the speculation was over.

He held the disc cover close to the singer's eyes.

"I think you've told us where Mary and the others are already, Betsy," he said. "I think you've been longing to tell somebody for ages. You want it to be finished, you want to start moving forward, don't you? But you know there can't be any hope of redemption and renewal without resurrection. That's what you want to tell us, isn't it, Betsy? We'll catch up with them on Beulah Height. In bright sunlight. The weather's bright on Beulah Height."

And though very little physical change was possible, it was as if they saw Elizabeth Wulfstan shrink to Betsy Allgood as she sat heavily on her chair and began crying.

Though he'd only heard them once, Pascoe could not get the words of the song out of his mind. They sounded there as he lay in bed and they were still with him next morning as he toiled up the fell.

Oh, yes, they've only gone out walking, Returning now, all laughing and talking.

There was no laughing and talking among the men who labored up the hillside with him. It was already warm enough to make them sweat under the burden of picks and shovels, even though the sun had not yet risen high enough to fill the valley. But up ahead the eastern flanks of the double peak were already washed with gold.

We'll catch up with them on Beulah Height In bright sunlight. The weather's bright on Beulah Height.

Now they were close enough to see the sheepfold, a semicircle of drystone wall built against the craggy face of the saddle.

Still no one spoke. Like men in a dream they moved, needing no instructions when they reached the fold, but advancing on the crag as if to some well-rehearsed choreography, and swinging their picks in unison as they probed for the weakness they knew must be present in its apparently solid facade.

Three times they swung and three times they struck, and at the third blow a strange thing happened.

Sparks flew as metal clashed against granite and all at once the air seemed to ignite as a bright lava of sunlight poured down the ridge into the hollow of the fold.

At the same time a huge slab of rock swung open like the gates of a fortress.

The men stepped back, amazed. And fearful too. Only Pascoe held his ground, straining his eyes to see into that black cavern, straining them so much that after a while his fancy created the impression of movement.

Fancy? This was no fancy. There was movement in there. He could see shapes in the darkness, small forms advancing slowly toward the light.

And now the first was close enough for the sun to give detail to the uncertain outline. Oh, Christ! It was a child, a girl with long blond hair, blinking her eyes against the unaccustomed light and bearing in her arms a bouquet of fresh-picked foxgloves. Behind her came another child, also carrying flowers. And another… Oh, sweet Jesus. He recognized these children from their photographs. The first was Jenny Hardcastle, the second Madge Telford. And the third Mary Wulfstan, her mother's features unmistakable in the small solemn face.

How to account for this Pascoe did not know. Nor did he care. His heart was swelling with such joy, he could hardly breathe. So this was how it ended. All that pain and grief and despair hadn't been for nothing. They were alive, alive, alive…

But the miracle wasn't over. Another figure came forward. He looked and did not dare believe. Lorraine. Lorraine Dacre, holding her flowers in one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other, as though just awoken from sleep.

And behind came another…

Now it wasn't joy that pumped Pascoe's heart, it was fear. He was choking. Not with fear of the child he was seeing, but fear of the knowledge that came with her-the knowledge that she had no place in this wild, high landscape, that it was only his imagination that could have put her there…

The fifth figure was Zandra Purlingstone.

He threw back his head and shrieked his rage and despair to the empty sky. For a second it seemed he stood alone on the bare hillside. Then even that illusion was gone. He was lying in his bed with the pearly light of dawn turning his window into a magic lantern screen against which moved the slender boughs of the silver birch which grew at the bottom of his garden.

He rose and dressed swiftly. He had plenty of time to keep his first appointment of the day, but there was something else he needed to do which took him in quite the wrong direction. Not pausing for breakfast, he got into his car and drove through the still-empty streets into town.

At the hospital, a security man advanced to challenge him, recognized him, and called a greeting. Pascoe raised a hand but did not pause. Lightly he ran up the stairs, waved a hand at a surprised Sister, and went into the small room where Rosie lay.

Late last night he'd spoken to Ellie on the phone, told her what had happened, where he needed to be the following morning. Dalziel had assured him his presence would not be necessary. Pascoe hadn't argued, simply said he'd be there. Ellie had understood, told him to go home, get what rest he could, assured him that Rosie was doing marvelously well.

Last night Ellie's voice, her reassurance, had been enough. This morning he needed to see for himself.

Ellie had had her bed brought into the room so she could be at her daughter's side. She stirred as Pascoe entered but did not waken. He smiled down at her, then tiptoed past to Rosie's bed.

She had thrown the top sheet off and lay there curled with one fist pushed up against her chin, like Rodin's Thinker.

Think on, my love. But not too much. Not yet. Time enough to wrestle with life's problems. Time enough.

Gently he drew the sheet over her. It would be nice to kick off his shoes and lie down here with his wife and child, and wake with them in a little while. But there was work to be done. A debt to be paid. What had Ellie called him? Pious Aeneas, always on his way to the Lavinian shore.

How the gods must love irony to let the sight of those he loved most both tempt him from his duty and give him the strength to do it.

He brushed Rosie's brow with his lips, then stooped over Ellie.

A writing pad lay by her side, half hidden by the duvet. She still clutched a pencil in her hand. She'd started writing again. She was indomitable! For her, a huge crisis endured gave her strength to turn away and confront all the smaller crises put on hold. Indomitable!

Guiltily he peeked at the penciled scrawl. Suppose it wasn't a new book, but something intensely personal… but no, there were the reassuring words Chapter One. He read the opening lines.

It was a dark and stormy night. The wind was blowing off the sea and the guard commander bowed into it with his cloak wrapped around his face as he left the shelter of the grove and began to clamber up to the headland.

Ellie stirred. He looked down at her with love and admiration. Indomitable. A new tune, she'd said. I think we'll all be ready for some new tunes after this. And with typical boldness she'd chosen as her fanfare the corniest opening line in literature!

With a woman like this by his side, a man could go anywhere.

But first he had somewhere to go by himself.

He kissed her gently and went out of the room.

The breeze which had stirred the birch tree at dawn was stronger now, pulling at his hair, portending change. As he sped north he saw for the first time in weeks the smooth blue ocean of sky break against the far horizon in a faint spume of silver cloud.

The gate across the reservoir road was thronged with grim-faced policemen who checked his warrant even though they knew him. Today was by the book.

Despite his efforts at speed, his diversion had made him late and he saw the others waiting for him at the head of the mere. Greetings were short and muted. They watched in silence as he pulled on his boots.

Finally he was ready. At a grunted signal from Andy Dalziel, they turned their faces to the rising fell and went to keep their rendezvous on Beulah Height.