On Beulah Height

She heard the front door close. She was still holding Rosie’s book. She looked down at the cover illustration, then placed the slim volume face down on the floor beside her and switched the radio back on.

The strong young voice of Elizabeth Wulfstan was singing again.

‘Look on us now for soon we must go from you.

These eyes that open brightly every morning

In nights to come as stars will shine upon you.’

THREE

Pascoe sat in the passenger seat of the car with the window wound fully down. The air hit his face like a bomb blast, giving him an excuse to close his eyes while the noise inhibited conversation.

That had been a strange moment back there, when his feet refused to move him through the doorway and his tongue tried to form the words, ‘I shan’t go.’

But its strangeness was short-lived. Now he knew it had been a defining moment, such as comes when a man stops pretending his chest pains are dyspepsia.

If he’d opted not to go then, he doubted if he would ever have gone again.

He’d known this when Dalziel rang him. He’d known it every morning when he got up and went on duty for the past many weeks.

He was like a priest who’d lost his faith. His sense of responsibility still made him take the services and administer the sacraments, but it was mere automatism maintained in the hope that the loss was temporary.

After all, even though it was faith not good works that got you into the Kingdom, lack of the former was no excuse for giving up the latter, was it?

He smiled to himself. He could still smile. The blacker the comedy, the bigger the laugh, eh? And he had found himself involved in the classic detective black comedy when the impartial investigator of a crime discovers it is his own family, his own history, he is investigating, and ends up arresting himself. Or at least something in himself is arrested. Or rather …

No. Metaphors, analogies, parallels, were all ultimately evasive.

The truth was that what he had discovered about his family’s past, and present, had filled him with a rage which at first he had scarcely acknowledged to himself. After all, what had rage to do with the liberal, laid-back, logical, caring and controlled Pascoe everyone knew and loved? But it had grown and grown, a poison tree with its roots spreading through every acre of his being, till eventually controlling it and concealing it took up so much of his moral energy, he had no strength for anything else.

He was back with metaphors, and mixing them this time, too.

Simply, then, he had come close from time to time to physical violence, to hitting people, and not just the lippy low-life his job brought him in contact with who would test a saint’s patience, but those close around him – not, thank God, his wife and his daughter – but certainly this gross grotesquerie, this tun of lard, sitting next to him.

‘You turned Trappist or are you just sulking?’ the tun bellowed.

Carefully Pascoe wound up the window.

‘Just waiting for you to fill me in, sir,’ he said.

‘Thought I’d done that,’ said Dalziel.

‘No, sir. You rang and said that a child had gone missing in Danby and as that meant you’d be driving out of town past my house, you’d pick me up in twenty minutes.’

‘Well, there’s nowt else. Lorraine Dacre, aged seven, went out for a walk with her dog before her parents got up. Dog’s back but she isn’t.’

Pascoe pondered this as they crossed the bypass and its caterpillar of traffic crawling eastwards to the sea, then said mildly, ‘Not a lot to go at then.’

‘You mean, not enough to cock up your cocktails on the patio? Or mebbe you were planning to pop round to Dry-dock’s for a dip in his pool.’

‘Not much point,’ said Pascoe. ‘We’ll be passing the Chateau Purlingstone shortly and if you peer over his security fence, you’ll observe that he’s practising what he preaches. The pool is empty. Which is why they’ve taken the girls to the seaside today. We were asked to join them, but I didn’t fancy wall-to-wall traffic. A mistake, I now realize.’

‘Don’t think I wouldn’t have airlifted you out,’ growled Dalziel.

‘I believe you. But why? OK, a missing child’s always serious, but this is still watching-brief time. Chances are she’s slipped and crocked her ankle up the dale somewhere, or, worse, banged her head. So the local station organizes a search and keeps us posted. Nothing turns up, then we get involved on the ground.’

‘Aye, normally you’re right. But this time the ground’s Danby.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Danbydale’s next valley over from Dendale.’

He paused significantly.

Pascoe dredged his mind for a connection and, because they’d just been talking about Dry-dock Purlingstone, came up with water.

‘Dendale Reservoir,’ he said. ‘That was going to solve all our water problems to the millennium. There was an Enquiry, wasn’t there? Environmentalists versus the public weal. I wasn’t around myself but we’ve got a book about it, or rather Ellie has. She’s into local history and environmental issues. The Drowning of Dendale, that’s it. More a coffee-table job than a sociological analysis, I recall … Sorry sir. Am I missing the point?’

‘You’re warm, but not very,’ growled the Fat Man, who’d been showing increasing signs of impatience. ‘That summer, just afore they flooded Dendale, three little lasses went missing there. We never found their bodies and we never got a result. I know you weren’t around, but you must have heard summat of it.’

Meaning, my failures are more famous than other people’s triumphs, thought Pascoe.

‘I think I heard something,’ he said diplomatically. ‘But I can’t remember much.’

‘I remember,’ said the Fat Man. ‘And the parents, I bet they remember. One of the girls was called Wulfstan. That’s what fetched me up short back there when I heard the name.’

‘The singer, you mean? Any connection? It can’t be a common name.’

‘Mebbe. Not a daughter, but. They just had the one. Mary. It nigh on pushed the father over the edge, losing her. He chucked all kinds of shit at us, threatened he’d sue for incompetence and such.’

‘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 …

FOUR

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 kitchen where Tig yaps an excited welcome. She hushes him imperiously and he falls silent. He’s very well trained; Dad insisted on that. ‘Only one thing worse than a disobedient dog, and that’s a disobedient daughter,’ he said. And Mam, who knows that Lorraine can twist him round her little finger, smiled her secret smile.

A quick breakfast, then up on a stool to withdraw the top bolt of the kitchen door and out into the yard with Tig eager on her heels. No need for the lead. The yard opens right on to the edge of Ligg Common. Well-trodden paths wind through furze and briar till she arrives on the bank of Ligg Beck whose once boisterous waters have been tamed by this parching weather into a barely dimpling trickle.

Never mind. The dried-up beck broadens the path running alongside, slowly climbing high up the dale where there are rabbits for Tig to chase, and butterflies to leap at, and tiny orchids for her to seek, while all around skylarks rocket from their heathy nests to sing their certainty that the sun will always shine and skies be blue forever.

Tony Dacre wakes an hour later. The sun fills the room with its light and warmth. He sits up, recalls it is Sunday, and smiles. His movement has half woken Elsie, his wife, who rolls on her back and opens her eyes a fraction. They sleep naked in this weather. She is slim almost to skinniness and the outline of her light body under the single sheet sets his pulse racing. He bends his lips to hers, but she shakes her head and mouths, ‘Tea.’ He swings his legs out of bed, stands up and pulls his underpants on. He is no prude, but doesn’t think that parents should parade naked in front of their children.

When he reaches the kitchen, a badly hacked loaf, an open jar of raspberry jam, a glass of milk half-finished, and a trail of crumbs to the back door, tell him his precautions were unnecessary. He looks out into the yard. No sign of Lorraine. He shakes his head and smiles. Then he makes some tea and takes two cupfuls upstairs.

Elsie sits up in bed to drink it. From time to time he glances sideways, taking in her small dark-nippled breasts, checking the level of her tea. Finally it is finished.

She leans across him to put the cup on his bedside table. As she straightens up, he catches her in his arms. She smiles up at him. He says, ‘All that money I wasted buying you gin when I could have had you for a cup of tea!’

They make love. Afterwards he sings in the bathroom as he shaves. When he comes back into the bedroom she has gone downstairs. He gets dressed and follows.

She frowns and says, ‘Lorraine’s had her breakfast.’

‘Aye, I know.’

‘I don’t like her using that bread knife. It’s really sharp. And standing on a stool to unlock the door. We’ll have to talk to her, Tony.’

‘I will. I will,’ he promises.

She shakes her head in exasperation and says, ‘No, I’ll do it.’

They have breakfast. It’s still only half-past nine. The Sunday papers arrive. He sits in the living room, reading the sports page. Outside in the street he can hear the sound of girls’ voices. After a while he stands up and goes to the front door.

The girls are playing a skipping game. Two of them are swinging a long rope. The others come running in at one end, skip their way to the other, then duck out making violent falling gestures.

Skippers and swingers alike keep up a constant chant.

One foot! Two foot! Black foot! White foot!

Three foot! Four foot! Left foot! Right foot!

No one runs as fast as Benny Lightfoot!

OUT GOES SHE!

Tony calls out, ‘Sally!’

Sally Breen, a stout little girl who lives two doors up, says, ‘Yes, Mr Dacre?’

‘You seen our Lorraine?’

‘No, Mr Dacre.’

‘Anyone seen her?’

The chanting fades away as the girls look at each other. They shake their heads.

Tony goes back into the house. Elsie is upstairs making the beds. He calls up the stairway, ‘Just going for a stroll, luv. I want a word with old Joe about the bowling club.’

He goes out of the back door, through the yard, across the common. He’s been walking with his daughter often enough to know her favourite route. Soon he is by the dried-up beck and climbing steadily along its bank up the dale.

After a while, when he is sure he is out of earshot of Liggside, he starts calling her name.

‘Lorraine! Lorraine!’

For a long time there is nothing. Then he hears a distant bark. Tremulous with relief he presses on, over a fold of land. Ahead he sees Tig, alone, and limping badly, coming towards him.

Oh, now the skylarks like aery spies sing She’s here! she’s hurt! she’s here! she’s hurt! and the dancing butterflies spell out the message She’s gone forever.

He stoops by the injured dog and asks, ‘Where is she, Tig? SEEK!’

But the animal just cringes away from him as though fearful of a blow.

He rushes on. For half an hour he ranges the fellside, seeking and shouting. Finally, because hope here is dying, he invents hope elsewhere and heads back down the slope. Tig has remained where they met. He picks him up, ignoring the animal’s yelp of pain.

‘She’ll be back home by now, just you wait and see, boy,’ he says. ‘Just you wait and see.’

But he knows in his heart that Lorraine would never have left Tig alone and injured up the dale.

Back home, Elsie, already growing concerned, without yet acknowledging the nature of her concern, goes through the motions of preparing Sunday lunch as though, by refusing to vary her routine, she can force events back into their usual course.

When the door bursts open and Tony appears, the dog in his arms, demanding, ‘Is she back?’ she turns pale as the flour on her hands.

All the windows of the house are open to move the heavy air. Out in the road the girls are still at their game. And as husband and wife lock gazes across the kitchen table, each willing the other to smile and say that everything’s right, the words of the skipping chant come drifting between them.

One foot! Two foot! Black foot! White foot!

Three foot! Four foot! Left foot! Right foot!

No one runs as fast as Benny Lightfoot!

OUT GOES SHE!

FIVE

Danby, according to a recent Evening Post feature, was that rarest of things, a rural success story.

Bucking the usual trend to depopulation and decline, new development, led by the establishment of a Science and Business Park on its southern edge, had swollen the place from large village to small town.

It ain’t pretty but it works, thought Pascoe as they drove past the entrance to the Park on one side of the road and the entrance to a large supermarket backed by a new housing estate on the other.

It takes more than the march of modernity to modify the English provincial sabbath, however, and the town’s old centre was as quiet as a pueblo during siesta. Even the folk sitting outside the three pubs they passed with no more than a faint longing sigh from Dalziel looked like figures engraved on an urn.

The main sign of activity they saw was a man scrubbing furiously at a shop window on which, despite his efforts, the words BENNY’S BACK! remained stubbornly visible, and another man obliterating the same words with black paint on a gable end.

Neither of the detectives said anything till open countryside – moorland now, not pastoral – began to open up ahead once more.

‘This Liggside’s right on the edge, is it?’ asked Pascoe.

‘Aye. Next to Ligg Common. Ligg Beck runs right down the valley. Yon’s the Neb.’

The sun laid it all out before them like a holiday slide. Danbydale rose ahead, due north to start with, then curving north-east. The Neb rose steeply to the west. The road they were on continued up the lower eastern arm of the dale, its white curves clear as bones on a beach.

‘Next left, if I recall right,’ said Dalziel.

He did, of course. Lost in a Mid-Yorkshire mist with an Ordnance Survey cartographer, a champion orienteer, and Andy Dalziel, Pascoe knew which one he’d follow.

Liggside was a small terrace of grey cottages fronting the pavement. No problem spotting number 7. There was a police car parked outside and a uniformed constable at the door, with two small groups of onlookers standing a decent distance (about ten feet in Mid-Yorkshire) on either side.

The constable moved forward as Dalziel double-parked, probably to remonstrate, but happily for his health, recognition dawned in time and he opened the car door for them with a commissionaire’s flourish.

Pascoe got out, stretched, and took in the scene. The cottages were small and unprepossessing, but solid, not mean, and the builder had been proud enough of them to mark the completion by carving the date in the central lintel: 1860. The year Mahler was born. Dalziel’s unexpected recognition of the Kindertotenlied brought the name to his mind. He doubted if the event had made much of a stir in Danby. What great event did occupy the minds of the first inhabitants of Liggside? American Civil War … no, that was 1861. How about Garibaldi’s Redshirts taking Sicily? Probably the Italian’s name never meant much more to most native Danbians than a jacket or a biscuit. Or was he being patronizingly elitist? Who should know better than he that there was no way of knowing what your ancestors knew?

What he did know was that his mental ramblings were an attempt to distance himself from the depth of pain and fear he knew awaited them beyond the matt-brown door with its bright brass letter box and its rudded step. Where a lost child was concerned, not even rage was strong enough to block that out.

The constable opened the house door and spoke softly. A moment later a uniformed sergeant Pascoe recognized as Clark, i/c Danby sub-station, appeared. He didn’t speak but just shook his head to confirm that nothing had changed. Dalziel pushed past him and Pascoe followed.

The small living room was crowded with people, all female, but there was no problem spotting the pale face of the missing child’s mother. She was sitting curled up almost foetally at the end of a white vinyl sofa. She seemed to be leaning away from, rather than into, the attempted embrace of a large blonde woman whose torso looked better suited to the lifting of weights than the offering of comfort.

Dalziel’s entrance drew all eyes. They looked for hope and, getting none, acknowledged its absence by dropping their focus from his face to his shirt.

‘Who the hell’s this clown?’ demanded the blonde in a smoke-roughened voice.

Clark said, ‘Detective Superintendent Dalziel, Head of CID.’

‘Is that right? And he comes out here at a time like this dressed like a frigging fairground tent?’

It was an image that made up in comprehensiveness what it lacked in detail.

Dalziel ignored her, and crouched with surprising suppleness before the pale-faced woman.

‘Mrs Dacre, Elsie,’ he said. ‘I came soon as I got word. I didn’t waste time changing.’

The eyes, mere glints in dark holes, rose to look at him.

‘Who gives a toss what you’re wearing. Can you find her?’

What do you say now, old miracle worker? wondered Pascoe.

‘I’ll do everything in my power,’ said Dalziel.

‘And what’s that then?’ demanded the blonde. ‘Just what are you doing, eh?’

Dalziel rose and said, ‘Sergeant Clark, let’s have a bit of space here. Everyone out please. Let’s have some air.’

The blonde’s body language said quite clearly that she wasn’t about to move, but Dalziel took the wind out of her sails by saying, ‘Not you, Mrs Coe. You hold still, if Elsie wants you.’

‘How the hell do you know my name?’ she demanded.

It was indeed a puzzling question, but not beyond all conjecture. Coe was Elsie Dacre’s maiden name, and an older woman who had assumed the office of chief comforter without either a family resemblance or the look of a bosom friend was likely to be an in-law.

Dalziel just looked at her blankly, not about to spoil that impression of omniscience which made people tell him the truth, or at least feel so nervous, it showed when they tried to hide it.

‘Right Sergeant,’ he said, as Clark closed the door after the last of the departing women. ‘So what’s going off?’

‘I’ve got my lads up the dale …’

‘Three. That’s how many he’s got,’ interposed Mrs Coe scornfully.

‘Tony – that’s Mr Dacre – naturally wanted to get back up there looking and a bunch of locals were keen to help, so I thought it best to make sure they had some supervision,’ Clark went on.

Dalziel nodded approvingly. The more disorganized and amateur an early search was, the harder it made any later fine-tooth combing whose object was to find clues to an abduction, or murder.

‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Little lass could easily have turned her ankle and be sitting up the dale waiting for someone to fetch her.’

Such breezy optimism clearly got up Mrs Coe’s nose, but she kept her mouth shut. It was Elsie Dacre who responded violently, though so quietly to start with that at first the violence almost went unnoticed.

‘No need for all this soft soap, Mr Dalziel,’ she said. ‘We all know what this is about, don’t we? We all know.’

‘Sorry, luv, I’m just trying to …’

‘I know what you’re trying to do, and I know what you’ll be doing next. But it didn’t do any good last time, did it? So what’s changed, mister? You tell me that. What’s bloody changed!’

Now the woman’s voice was at full throttle, her eyes blazing, her face contorted with anger and fear.

‘Nay, lass, listen,’ said Dalziel intensely. ‘It’s early doors, too early to be talking of last time. God knows, I understand how that’ll be in your mind, it’s in mine too, but I’ll keep it at the back of my mind long as I can. I won’t rush to meet summat like that, and you shouldn’t either.’

‘You remember me then?’ said Mrs Dacre, peering at Dalziel closely as if there was comfort to be fixed in the Fat Man’s memory.

‘Aye, do I. When I heard your maiden name I thought, that could be one of the Coes from over in Dendale. You were the youngest, weren’t you?’

‘I were eleven when it started. I remember those days, hot days like now, and all us kids going round in fear of our lives. I thought I’d never forget. But you do forget, don’t you. Or at least, like you say, you put it so far at the back of your mind it’s like forgetting … and you grow up and start feeling safe, and you have a kiddie of your own, and you never let yourself think … but that’s where you’re wrong, mister! If I hadn’t kept it in the back of my mind, if I’d kept it at the front where it belongs … something like that’s too important … too bloody terrible … to keep at the back of …’

She broke down in a flood of tears and her sister-in-law embraced her irresistibly. Then the door opened and an older woman came in. This time the family resemblance was unmistakable. She said, ‘Elsie, I was down at Sandra’s … I’ve just heard …’

‘Oh, Mam,’ cried Elsie Dacre.

Her sister-in-law was thrust aside and she embraced her mother as though she could crush hope and comfort out of her.

Dalziel said, ‘Mrs Coe, why don’t you make us all a cup of tea?’

The three policemen and the blonde woman went into the kitchen. It was just as well. It was full of steam from a kettle hissing explosively on a high gas ring. Mrs Coe grabbed a tea towel, used it as a mitt to remove the kettle.

‘Should make a grand cuppa,’ said Dalziel. ‘Needs to be really hot. Mrs Coe, what do you reckon to Tony Dacre?’

‘What kind of question’s that?’ demanded the woman.

‘Simple one. How do you feel about your brother-in-law?’

‘Why’re you asking, is what I want to know.’

‘Don’t act stupid. You know why I’m asking. If I can eliminate him from my enquiries, then I won’t have to take this house to pieces.’

Honesty is not only the best policy, it’s also sometimes the best form of police brutality, thought Pascoe, watching as shock slackened the woman’s solid features.

Dalziel went on, ‘Afore you start yelling at me, think on, missus. You want me to have to start asking that poor woman if her man works on a short fuse or has got any special interest in his own daughter? You’re not daft, you know these things happen. So just tell me, is there owt I ought to know about Tony Dacre?’

The woman found her voice.

‘No, there bloody isn’t. I don’t like him all that much, but that’s personal. As for Lorraine, he worships that little lass, I mean like a father should. In fact, if you ask me, he spoils her rotten, and if she set fire to the house he’d not lose his temper with her. Jesus, I’d not have your job for a thousand pounds. Aren’t things bad enough here without you looking for something even filthier in it?’