On Beulah Height. Reginald Hill

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СКАЧАТЬ fine. Sorry. It’s just being here at the school, the incident room … suddenly it’s really happening. I think up till now I’ve been trying to pretend it were different from last time, over in Dendale, I mean. Not that it wasn’t the same then to start with, telling ourselves that at worst there’d been an accident and little Jenny Hardcastle ’ud be found or manage to get back herself …’

      ‘Then you’ll know how these things work,’ said Pascoe harshly. ‘One thing we’ll need to get sorted quickly is this Benny business. Someone’s responsible for these graffiti. We need to find out who, then we can start asking why. Any ideas?’

      ‘I’m working on it,’ said Clark. ‘Has to be a stupid joke and a lousy coincidence, hasn’t it, sir? I mean, it were done last night and Lorraine didn’t vanish till this morning. And the perp wouldn’t do it in advance, would he?’

      ‘Less chance of being caught,’ said Pascoe.

      ‘But that ’ud mean the whole thing were planned!’

      ‘And that’s worse than impulse? Well, you’re right. Worse for us, I mean. Impulse leaves traces, plans cover them up. Either way, we need the spray artist.’

      ‘Yes, sir,’ said Clark. ‘Sir …’

      ‘Yes?’ prompted Pascoe.

      ‘Benny. Benny Lightfoot. Anything you know that I don’t? I mean, there could be information that reached HQ but you felt best not to pass on down here, for fear of opening old wounds …’

      ‘You mean, could Benny really be back?’ said Pascoe grimly. ‘From what I’ve heard, I doubt it. But the very fact that you can ask shows how important it is to finger this joker’s collar. Get to it.’

      He walked across the playground to the school. He could see the figure of the head teacher at the window of a classroom he guessed would be Lorraine’s. She’d been standing at the main entrance when they arrived, but after a brief exchange, he’d cut the conversation short and headed into the hall.

      Now he joined her in the classroom and said, ‘Sorry about that, Mrs Shimmings, but I had to get things rolling.’

      ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I know how these things work.’

      He recalled then that like Clark, she too had been here before. Looking at her closely, he detected the same symptoms of re-entry to a nightmare she thought she’d left behind.

      She was a slimly built woman with greying chestnut hair and candid brown eyes. Late forties. Thirty-plus when Dendale died.

      She said, ‘So you think the worst?’

      ‘We prepare for the worst,’ said Pascoe gently. ‘Tell me about Lorraine.’

      ‘She was … is a bright, intelligent child, a little what they used to call old-fashioned in some ways. It doesn’t surprise me to hear that she got up early and decided to take her dog for a walk all by herself. It’s not that she’s a solitary child. On the contrary, she’s extremely sociable and has many friends. But she never has any difficulty performing tasks by herself and on occasion, if given a choice, she will opt for the solitary rather than the communal activity.’

      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 СКАЧАТЬ