After the initial slip, she had kept determinedly, almost pedantically to the present tense. As she talked, Pascoe let his gaze wander round the classroom. Bringing up Rosie had honed his professional eye to the school environment. Now he found himself assessing the quality of wall displays, the evidence of thought and order, the use of material that was stimulating aesthetically, intellectually, mathematically. In this classroom everything looked good. This teacher hadn’t shot away on Friday afternoon but had stayed behind after the children had gone, to refine their efforts at tidying up and make sure the room was perfectly prepared for Monday morning. This teacher, he guessed, was going to be devastated when she discovered what had happened to one of her pupils.
He said, ‘Would she go off with a stranger?’
‘Someone offering her sweets in the street, asking her to get into a car, no way,’ said Mrs Shimmings. ‘But you say she’d gone up the dale for a walk? Things are different up there, Mr Pascoe. Do you do any walking yourself?’
‘A little,’ said Pascoe, thinking of Ellie cajoling her rebellious husband and daughter into completing the Three Peaks Walk last spring.
‘Then you’ll know that, in the street if a complete stranger says “Hello” to you, you think there’s something wrong with him, but up there on the hills if you meet anyone, you automatically exchange greetings, sometimes even stop and have a chat. Not to say something would be the odd thing. Yes, I think that nowadays we’ve all got our children trained to regard strangers with the utmost suspicion, but they learn by example more than precept, and out in the country the example they get is of strangers being greeted almost like old acquaintance.’
‘So she might stop and talk.’
‘She wouldn’t be surprised if someone spoke to her and she wouldn’t run. Indeed, up there, what would be the point? Didn’t she have her dog with her, though?’
‘Dogs are an over-rated form of protection,’ said Pascoe. ‘Unless they’re so big and fierce, you wouldn’t let a little girl take it out alone anyway. This one may have tried. It got badly kicked about for its pains. Any of these Lorraine’s?’
He was looking at a display of paintings with the general heading ‘My Family’.
Even as he asked, he saw the neatly printed label LORRAINE’S FAMILY under a picture of a man and a woman and a dog. The human figures were of roughly equal size, both with broad slice-of-melon smiles. The dog was, relatively, the size of a Shetland pony. Psychologists would probably say this meant she had no hang-ups with either parent, but was really crazy about Tig. Just what you’d hope to find in a seven-year-old girl. He recalled his own sinking feeling a little while back when, without comment, Ellie had shown him a painting of Rosie’s which had her standing there like the fifty-foot woman and himself a mere black blob in a car moving away fast.
‘Happy family?’ he said.
‘Very happy. I’ve known the mother since she was a girl.’
‘Of course. You used to teach in Dendale back before they built the reservoir, I gather.’
‘That’s right. Like everyone else, I had to move out. Part of the price of progress.’
‘But in the end, some people were probably glad to go, even to see the valley under water?’ he probed.
‘You think Lorraine’s disappearance may have something to do with what happened back then?’
‘You tell me, Mrs Shimmings,’ said Pascoe. ‘I wasn’t around then. You’ve heard about these painted signs? “Benny’s Back”?’
She nodded.
‘So, could he be back? And if so, where’s he been? I heard he was a bit simple.’
‘He could have been living with people who don’t ask questions or make judgements,’ she offered. ‘Like these New Age travellers. Anyway, Benny wasn’t simple. In fact, he was very bright.’
‘I’m sorry. I was told he’d had an accident … something about a plate in his head …’
‘Oh, that,’ she said dismissively. ‘I taught Benny both before and after that accident, Mr Pascoe. And he was just as sharp after it as before. But he was always different, and folk in Yorkshire confuse different with daft just as readily as anywhere else. No, he wasn’t simple, but he was … fey, I think that’s the word. I taught him till he was old enough to go to the secondary. That meant taking the bus out of the dale and he wasn’t keen. But his father told him to go and do his best, and Benny paid a lot of heed to Saul, his dad. Then, when Benny was twelve, Saul Lightfoot died.’
‘How?’ asked Pascoe. The policeman’s question.
‘He drowned. He was a fine athletic man,’ said Mrs Shimmings, with what a romantic observer might have called a faraway look in her eyes. ‘He used to go swimming in the mere. He was a good strong swimmer, but they think he got tangled up with a submerged tree branch. It devastated poor Benny. The family all lived with old Mrs Lightfoot, Benny’s gran, in Neb Cottage. It must have been a tight squeeze, there were three kids: Benny, and his younger brother and sister, Barnabas and Deborah. But it worked all right as long as Saul was around. He was that sort of man. Charismatic, I suppose they’d say nowadays. Or what the young girls would call a hunk.’
Pascoe smiled and glanced surreptitiously at his watch. Local history was fine, but he had responsibilities in the here and now which wouldn’t wait.
‘I’m sorry, I’m holding you back,’ said Mrs Shimmings.
He’d forgotten she was a head teacher with an eye long trained for the tell-tale minutiae of behaviour.
‘Nothing I can do till my men arrive,’ he assured her. ‘Please, carry on.’
‘Well, Marion, that’s Benny’s mother, and old Mrs Lightfoot never really got on. She wasn’t a country lass, Saul had met her at a dance in town, and now with him gone, there was nothing to keep her in Dendale. It was no surprise when she got a job in town and took the children off. Benny came back from time to time to see his gran. I gathered he wasn’t happy. Not that he spoke much to anyone, he was becoming more and more withdrawn. Then it seems his mother met up with a new man. He moved in. I think that ultimately they got married, but only because they’d decided to emigrate – Australia, I think it was – and being married made things easier. Benny didn’t want to go. The night before they were due to leave, he took off and came to his gran’s. Marion came looking for him. He refused point-blank to go back with her and old Mrs Lightfoot said he could stay with her. So that’s what happened. I daresay there were a great number of other things said that shouldn’t have been said. Net result was the family left and Benny settled in at Neb Cottage. As far as I can make out, he dropped right out of school. The truancy officer came round several times, and the Social Services, but at the first sight of anyone vaguely official, indeed anyone he didn’t recognize, Benny would take off up the Neb, and in the end they more or less gave up, though I’m sure they found some face-saving formula to regularize the situation.’
‘How do you regularize truancy?’ wondered Pascoe.
‘You don’t. Time does that,’ said Mrs Shimmings. ‘I think they must have heaved a mighty sigh of relief in the Education Office when Benny passed his sixteenth birthday. But the psychological damage was done. Benny was wary, elusive, introverted, solitary, devoid of social skills – in other words, in the eyes of most people, plain simple.’
‘And could he have been responsible for the disappearances?’ he asked.