‘Did he have a case?’ enquired Pascoe.
Dalziel gave him a cold stare, but Pascoe met it unblinking. Hidden rage had its compensations, one of them being an indifference to threat.
‘There were this local in the frame,’ said the Fat Man abruptly. ‘I never really fancied him, two sheets short of a bog roll, I reckoned, but we pulled him in after the second lassie. Nothing doing, we had to let him go. Then Mary Wulfstan vanished and her old man went bananas.’
‘And the local?’
‘Benny Lightfoot. He vanished too. Except for one more sighting. Another girl, Betsy Allgood, she got attacked, but that was later, weeks later. Said it were definitely Lightfoot. That did it for most people, especially bloody media. In their eyes we’d had him and we’d let him go.’
‘You didn’t agree?’
‘Or didn’t want to. Never easy to say which.’
This admission of weakness was disturbing, like a cough from a coffin.
‘So you went looking for him?’
‘There were more sightings than Elvis. Someone even spotted him running in the London Marathon on telly. That figured. Lived up to his name, did Benny. Light of head, light of foot. He could fair fly up that fellside. Might as well have flown off it for all we ever found of him. Or into it, the locals reckoned.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Into the Neb. That’s what they call the fell between Dendale and Danby. It’s Long Denderside on the map. Full of bloody holes, specially on the Dendale flank. Different kind of rock on the Danby side, don’t ask me how. So there’s lots of caves and tunnels, most on ’em full of water, save in the drought.’
‘Did you search them?’
‘Cave rescue team went in after the first girl vanished. And again after the other two. Not a sign. Aye, but they’re not Benny Lightfoot, said the locals. Could squeeze through a crack in the pavement, our Benny.’
‘And that’s where he’s been hiding for fifteen years?’ mocked Pascoe.
‘Doubt it,’ said Dalziel, with worrying seriousness. ‘But he could have holed up there for a week or so, scavenging at nights for food. Betsy Allgood, that’s the one who got away, she said he looked half-starved. And sodden. The drought had broken then. The caves in the Neb would be flooding. I always hoped he’d have gone to sleep down there somewhere and woke up drowned.’
The radio crackled before Pascoe could examine this interesting speculation in detail and Central Control spilled out an update on the case.
Lorraine Dacre, aged seven, was the only child of Tony Dacre, thirty, Post Office driver, no criminal record, and Elsie Dacre, née Coe, also no record. Married eight years, residence, 7 Liggside, Danby. Lorraine did not appear on any Social Service or Care Agency list. Sergeant Clark, Danby Section Office, had called in his staff of four constables. Three were up the dale supervising a preliminary search. Back-up services had been alerted and would be mobilized on Superintendent Dalziel’s say-so. Sergeant Clark would rendezvous with Superintendent Dalziel at Liggside.
The Fat Man was really reacting strongly to this, thought Pascoe. Old guilt feelings eating that great gut? Or was there something more?
He brooded on this as they ate up the twenty or so miles to Danby. It was a pleasant road, winding through the pieced and plotted agricultural landscape of the Mid-York plain. As summer’s height approached, the fields on either side were green and gold with the promise of rich harvest, but on unirrigated set-aside land blotches of umber and ochre showed how far the battle with drought was already engaged. And up ahead where arms of rising ground embraced the dales, and no pipes or channels, sprayers or sprinklers, watered the parching earth, the green of bracken and the glory of heather had been sucked up by the thirsty sun, turning temperate moor to tropical savannah.
‘It was like this fifteen years ago,’ said Dalziel, breaking in on his thought as though he had spoken it aloud.
‘You’re thinking heat could be a trigger?’ said Pascoe sceptically. ‘We’ve had some good summers since. In fact, if you listen to Derek Purlingstone, the Sahara’s had more rain than Mid-Yorkshire in the past ten years.’
‘Not like this one. Not for so long,’ said Dalziel obstinately.
‘And just because there’s a drought and Danby is the next valley over from Dendale …’
‘And the place where most of the Dendale folk were resettled,’ added Dalziel. ‘And there’s one thing more. A sign …’
‘A sign!’ mocked Pascoe. ‘Let me guess. Hearing the name Wulfstan on the radio? Is that it? My God, sir, you’ll be hearing voices in the bells next!’
‘Any more of your cheek, I’ll thump you so hard you’ll be hearing bells in the voices,’ said Dalziel grimly. ‘When I say a sign, I mean a sign. Several of them. Clark rang me direct. He knew I’d be interested. Hold on now. There’s the first on ’em.’
He slammed on the brake with such violence Pascoe would have been into the windscreen if it hadn’t been for his seat belt.
‘Jesus,’ he gasped.
He couldn’t see any reason for the sudden stop. The road stretched emptily ahead under a disused railway bridge. He glanced sideways at the Fat Man and saw his gaze was inclined upwards at an angle suggestive of pious thanksgiving. But his expression held little of piety and it wasn’t the heavens his eyes were fixed on but the parapet of the bridge.
Along it someone had sprayed in bright red paint the words BENNY’S BACK!
‘Clark says it must have been done last night before the kiddie went missing,’ said Dalziel. ‘There’s a couple more in the town. Coincidence? Sick joke? Mebbe. But folk round here, especially them who came from Dendale, seeing that and hearing about Lorraine, especially folk with young kiddies of their own …’
He didn’t complete the sentence. He didn’t need to. He thinks he’s failed once and he’s not going to fail again, thought Pascoe.
They drove on in silence.
Pascoe thought of little children. Of daughters. Of his own daughter, Rosie, safe at the seaside.
He found himself thanking God, whom he didn’t believe in, for her presumed safety.
And Lorraine Dacre … he thought of her waking up on a day like this … How could a day like this hold anything but play and pleasure beyond computation for a child?
He prayed that the God he didn’t believe in would reproach his disbelief by having the answer waiting in Danby, little Lorraine Dacre safely back home, bewildered by all the trouble she’d caused.
At Pascoe’s side, the God he did believe in, Andy Dalziel, was thinking too of answers that awaited them in Danby, and of the little girl waking up perhaps for the last time on a day like this …
Little Lorraine wakes early, but the sun has woken earlier still.
These are the long summer days which stretch endlessly through all happy childhoods, when you wake into golden air and fall asleep a thousand adventures later, caressed by a light which even the tightest drawn of curtains can only turn into a gentle dusk.
There is no sound of life in the cottage. This is Sunday, the one day of the week when Mam and Dad allow themselves the luxury of a lie-in.
She gets out of bed, dresses quickly and quietly, then descends to the