At least, being the eastern flank of the Neb, it was out of reach of the declining sun, though he managed to produce sweat enough by the time he laboured up to the sunlit ridge.
‘Forty-five minutes,’ said Dalziel, sitting at his ease against a boulder. ‘I’d have thought a fit young shag like you ’ud have done it in half an hour.’
Pascoe sagged to the ground beside him, trying not to pant too audibly.
‘Gi’s the sack then,’ said the Fat Man.
Pascoe wriggled it off his shoulders and handed it over.
Then he turned his attention to Dendale.
It was only now, looking down, that he realized how much of a real frontier the Neb must have seemed to the old dalesmen. The fell on this side was much steeper and the sinuous curves of the Corpse Road on the Danby side turned into sharp zigzags beneath him. Also, while Danby had one foot and half its soul in the great fertile agricultural plain of Mid-Yorkshire, the narrow glaciated valley of Dendale belonged completely to the county’s wild moorlands.
It was, he supposed, this wildness and steep enclosure which had made the dale so attractive to the grey suits in search of a reservoir site. He knew nothing of their search and final selection, but guessed it contained much that was unedifying, with references to the greater good of the greater number and the difficulties of making omelettes without breaking eggs flowing like hot lava, destroying all lives and homes that lay in its path.
Doubtless there’d been an Enquiry. There always was. Some linguistic archaeologist of the next age, putting together a lexicon of late twentieth-century usage would probably conclude that the space between choosing a site and starting work on it was for some arcane reason called ‘The Public Enquiry’.
So the inevitable had happened and the valley had changed. Beyond recognition? Possibly. Beyond redemption? Probably. In one sense it was wilder now than before, because human beings no longer lived and worked here.
But the stamp of man’s presence was visible beyond disguise in the shape of the long curve of the dam wall.
Nature, though, is a tough cookie. Through his art man tries to perfect her, and through his science to control her. But always she will shrug her shoulders and be herself again.
So here it was, the famous reservoir, built out of public money for the public weal in the days when privatization of public utilities was still a lurid gleam in a pair of demon eyes. Now of course it was a key feature in the master plan by which Mid-Yorkshire Water plc hoped to keep its consumers (sorry; customers) wet and its shareholders wealthy for the next hundred years.
And Nature, simply by opening her great red eye in the sky for a couple of months, had set all the plans at nought.
Around the dark waters of the reservoir ran a broad pale fillet of washed rock and baked mud across which ran the lines of ancient walls and on which stood piles of shaped and faced stone showing where bits of the drowned village had come gasping up for air again.
‘You want this beer or not?’ said Dalziel.
Pascoe turned to find the Fat Man was proffering a can of bitter.
‘Well, I carried it up,’ said Pascoe. ‘I might as well carry it down.’
He took a long satisfying pull. Dalziel meanwhile had put down his own can and extracted from the knapsack a pair of binoculars with which he was scanning the valley.
What else did I lug up here? wondered Pascoe. A kitchen sink?
‘This is where it all started, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘This is what I wanted you to see.’
‘Thank you for the thought, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘Is there anything in particular I should be looking at, or is it just the general aesthetic I should be drinking in?’
‘Is that what they call irony?’ wondered Dalziel. ‘That’s sarcasm for intellectuals, isn’t it? Lost me. I just want you to have some idea what it used to be like down there, what it must have felt like fifteen years back when they were told they had to get out. I reckon it pushed one of the buggers over the edge. Now I know you think I’ve been brushing my teeth in home-brew or something, but if I’m going to be tret like a half-wit, I’d like to be tret like a half-wit by some half-wit who’s got half an idea what I’m talking about. You with me, lad?’
‘Trying to be, sir.’
‘That the best you can do?’
‘I’ve always felt that if Satan took me up to a high place, I’d be inclined to go along with most anything he said till I got down safe,’ said Pascoe. ‘So fire away. Give me a guided tour.’
‘No need,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ve got a map. It was in the file. I’ve got the rest of the file down in the car. You can take it home tonight and have a good read. Here.’
He passed over a sheet of cartridge paper. Pascoe looked at it and smiled.
‘I recognize this fair hand, surely? Yes, there they are, the magic initials E.W.’
‘Aye, it’s one of Wieldy’s. Thing you’ve got to remember is that what he’s marked as houses are nowt but piles of rubble down there.’
‘Was that the action of the water?’ wondered Pascoe.
‘No. The Water Board bulldozed them. They reckoned if they left buildings standing underwater, they’d be paying off sub-aqua freaks’ widows for evermore. Even the houses that weren’t going to be submerged they knocked down. Didn’t want anyone trying to sneak back and take possession.’
Pascoe studied the map. Dalziel passed him the glasses.
‘Start at the main body of the village,’ said Dalziel. ‘If you follow the Corpse Road down, you’ll see it ends at a bloody great rock. Shelter Crag, that is. So called ’cos that’s where they used to lay their dead ’uns, all wrapped up nice and cold for their trip over the hill to St Mick’s. When they got their own church, that seemed obvious place to build it, and that’s what that big pile of stones was.’
Slowly Dalziel guided Pascoe round the ruined valley with the care and precision of a courier who’d made the trip too often ever to forget. The main body of the village was easy enough to sort out once he’d got the church located. In any case, its relicts were substantial enough to be immediately obvious. Buildings which had stood apart weren’t so easily identified. Hobholme, the farm where the first girl had lived, wasn’t too difficult, but the Stang, site of the dale joinery, seemed to have been scattered far and wide. Heck, the Wulfstans’ house, had re-emerged as a substantial promontory of stones running out from the new shore to the edge of the shrinking mere, and on the far side it was easy to spot the long rounded hillock alongside which had stood Low Beulah, the home of the girl who had survived.
But Neb Cottage, home of prime suspect Benny Lightfoot, and scene of that last attack, perhaps because it was high enough up the fell not to have spent the last fifteen years under water, was very hard to spot. Perhaps, like the man himself, it had re-entered the earth from which its stones had been prised.
He didn’t share this fancy with the Fat Man but swung the glasses to bring the dam wall into view.
Somewhere there was a valley – the Lake District was it? – whose naive inhabitants according to legend built a wall to keep the cuckoo in and so enjoy spring forever. Here the purpose had been scientifically sounder, but not all that much more successful. With two-thirds of its footing in dried-up clay and the middle third lapped by sun-flecked wavelets that wouldn’t have swamped a matchbox, the dam wall looked as awkward as a rugger forward at a ballet school.
He ran his gaze up the gentle concavity of its front to the balustraded parapet. There was someone there, a man, strolling along, very much at his ease. From this distance and angle