have halted. Recognizing that a lot of people would be tempted to stop here for the view, the council, when they improved the road in response to Danby's growing prosperity, had put down some hardstanding to make a small informal parking lot complete with rubbish bin.
Are we the only race in the world, she wondered, who if they visit a place of great natural beauty where there isn't a rubbish bin, would just dump their litter all over the ground?
She got out of the car and viewed the view. It was worth looking at in every direction. She had a pair of binoculars with her, and through them she scanned the peaceful roofs of Danby, gray and blue slated, red, yellow, brown, and ochre tiled, basking and baking far below. Then she followed the winding line of Ligg Beck up the valley. She began to feel her good feeling drain out of her as she reached a police Range Rover and remembered why she was here.
She picked out Maggie Burroughs, wearing a very unofficial straw sunbonnet as she pored over a map on the open tailgate and talked into a radio. And standing a little apart in deep conversation with Sergeant Clark was Peter Pascoe, shirtsleeved, his fair skin pinking, looking very like a young gent from the twenties out on a walking tour.
She continued her sweep up the valley, moving over the double line of searchers advancing slowly a half mile ahead of the Range Rover, till the slight eastward twist put the valley head out of her vision.
And finally she came full circle and looked at the closest section, that which fell away immediately beneath her feet.
Now, this was interesting. The valley narrowed the farther up it you went, and this, plus the location of the viewpoint on a spur of ground, meant that the deep gash which marked the beck's course in the upper reaches was relatively close here. Of course the tucks and folds of the terrain meant a lot remained hidden. But a man standing up here and glimpsing a child walking along the path beside the gill, say at that point there, would have no problem moving down the valley flank, far less steep on this side than on the Neb, and cutting her off, say there.
She lowered the glasses and studied the scene without them. Now it all looked a lot farther off. Well, it would, wouldn't it? But no reason someone stopping here shouldn't have a pair of binoculars. And with them it would be all too easy to establish that what you were looking at was one small girl, alone, except for one equally small dog…
All theory, of course. Not to be paraded naked before the skeptical gaze of the Holy Trinity. But clothe it with a couple of relevant facts…
She scanned the ground at the edge of the hardstanding in hope of seeing something to show that someone had headed down the slope. Rapidly she realized it was not a very profitable way of spending her time. She was no Chingachgook to read in bent and heather who had passed this way and when. Also probably every kid in every family who'd ever stopped here had run a little way down the fellside.
She went to the car, found a pair of plastic gloves, and removed the inner liner of the rubbish bin. It was packed full. This would have been a popular stopping place yesterday as the day wore on, and the presence of a Sunday tabloid on the top indicated it hadn't been emptied since. She tipped the contents onto the ground and began to sift through the lower strata. From her convent-school Latin lessons the word haruspex popped into her mind; a soothsayer who based his prognostications on the entrails of animals. Good name for those FBI investigators she'd read about who specialized in the interpretation of trash. Could be Scotland Yard or MI5 had a few, too, but it didn't rate high in the Mid-Yorkshire training program. Possibly an expert could have made much of the food containers and wrappings which made up the greater part of the rubbish, but Novello concentrated on the rest and after a few minutes she had isolated a lithium 3V battery of the type used in some cameras, an empty Marlboro Lite cigarette pack, two Sunday papers (one broadsheet, one tabloid), a broken earring, and a tissue with a brown stain that might be blood.
These she bagged separately. The rest she replaced in the plastic liner, which she sealed with tape and placed in the trunk of her car. She had no real hope that any of it would have anything to do with the case, but if it did, she didn't want to have to tell Dalziel that the rest of the potential evidence was in some municipal dump.
Now she scanned her map. There were four farms worth visiting. Her hopes were high. She felt things were going well.
A couple of hours later, things were grinding to a halt. Finding the farms was easy. Finding all the folk who might have been around on Sunday morning was less so. Soon, as she tramped across tussocky heather and grazed her knees and elbows clambering over drystone walls, all that was left of the famous 'feeling' was aching muscles and the beginnings of a heat rash under her arms.
But she was determined that whatever other accusation might be aimed at her, halfheartedness wasn't going to be on the agenda. Thoroughness, an old teacher had once told her, was its own reward. Which was just as well, as by the time she crossed off the last farm, she had to acknowledge she had reaped no other.
So finally she came down to the Highcross Inn.
There was a RESIDENTS PARKING only sign at either end of Holyclerk Street.
Dalziel nipped into a spot ahead of an old lady who scanned his screen furiously for sight of a resident's disc, found none, started to get out of her car to remonstrate, glimpsed that huge face regarding her with a Buddha's benevolence, felt her road rage evaporate, and drove on.
Had she followed her first instinct and dropped a lighted match into his gas tank, Holyclerk Street would not have been surprised. There was very little of human emotion and appetite it hadn't seen during its long history.
Its name pointed its link with the great cathedral which loomed over the human dwellings like an oceangoing liner over a fleet of bumboats. It stood 'within the bell,' which meant that anyone living here could set out at a brisk pace on the first note of any summons and guarantee being in his place by the last. Nowadays a house 'within the bell' usually cost at least twenty percent more than a comparable house without, but it was not always thus.
The original medieval street containing the seminary from which it derived its name had by the reign of Queen Anne fallen almost completely into disrepair and disrepute. The timbered buildings had developed such alarming lists and been so often patched and propped, they looked like a file of drunken veterans staggering home from a very hard war. No person of wealth or standing would have dreamt of occupying one, and they had declined to low taverns, verminous lodging houses, and brothels.
That such a civic sore should pustulate within pissing distance of the cathedral was regarded by many good burghers as an offense against both God and man. But as a substantial number of the said good burghers actually owned the houses and shared in their profits, man delayed so long in providing a remedy that God grew impatient, and one dark September night, having first ensured the wind was in the right quarter, He tripped a drunken punk and her geriatric jo as they climbed the stairway to her reechy bed and sent their link flying like a meteor through a hole in the rotten boards down into the cellar, where it landed in an open cask of illicit brandy.
The resultant fire left an ashen scar which for many years was regarded as lively evidence of the wrath of the living God, but when a combination of shantytown and Paddy's market looked to be developing there, the city fathers this time preempted the Deity by sweeping the area clean of undesirables and initiating a building program of dwellings fit for dignitaries of the church.
It was these elegant residences that now lay before Dalziel's unimpressed eye. He knew little of medieval history and eighteenth-century fires, but he could look back to a period when the well-to-do had demonstrated their well-to-do-ness by migrating to the Green Belt, leaving the likes of Holyclerk Street to fragment into student flats and fly-by-night offices. But the Church had flexed its financial muscle (this was before its commissioners had demonstrated their inability to serve either God or Mammon by losing several millions), purchased and refurbished, then made a killing when a hugely successful tele-adaptation of the Barchester novels cast a romantic glow over cathedral closes and made living 'within the bell' once more the thing.
The sun was laying its golden blade right down the center of the street so there was no shade to be found. Dalziel thought of following the example of the owner of the white convertible parked in front of him which had been left with its top down and its expensive hi-fi equipment on open offer. Surely in these ecclesiastic surroundings such confidence was justified? He wound his window down an air-admitting fraction, walked a step or two away, remembered the church commissioners, and returned to wind the window up as far as it would go.
This second passing of the white convertible registered that it was a Saab 900, the property of a national rental car company. He checked the resident's parking disc. It was marked temporary and the address on it was 41 Holyclerk Street. The Wulfstan house.
