'Oh, aye. One of your spiders on the worldwide web.'
'Thank you for that, Andy. Well, she rang, and during the course of our conversation I quite naturally mentioned Elizabeth Wulfstan-'
'You pumped her!' exclaimed Dalziel delightedly. 'I always knew you were a natural!'
'In its Elizabethan sense, I think I must be,' said Cap. 'What she told me was of great interest. And as I cannot see how it can be relevant to your inquiries and therefore qualifies as simple gossip, I shall not hesitate to pass it on. Of Elizabeth's early history Beryl knew nothing, except that she was in fact distantly related to Chloe Wulfstan… what's the matter?'
'Durdum,' said Dalziel.
'Sorry?'
'Durdum. Means a lot of noise and fuss. I heard this farmer use it tonight. He's from Dendale. It rang a bell. That's the only place I've heard it used.'
'Philology now,' said Cap impatiently. 'Shall I go on?'
'The Wulfstan girl used it too,' said Dalziel. 'And glorrfat. Another Dendale word. She called me a glorrfat. Either she's really turning the screw or she's from Dendale! And related to Chloe, you say?'
His mind was trying to superimpose an image of a tall, slim woman with shoulder-length blond tresses on an image of a small chubby child with cropped black hair. Nothing matched… except mebbe those dark, unblinking eyes…
'Shall I go on?'
'Yeah. What happened?'
'Well, it was all very sad, really, though happily it seems to have worked out more or less all right. It seems that when she first came to the school, Elizabeth was a rather unprepossessing, chubby child with short black hair… Andy, I wish you wouldn't twitch. Is it a revival of sexual passion or merely the DT'S?'
'Just keep talking,' he urged.
'Best offer I've had all night,' she said. 'But a change took place. Tell me, was the Wulfstans' real daughter, the one who went missing, a slim blond child?'
'Aye, were she,' said Dalziel. 'Pretty as a picture.'
'Well, it was that picture which probably got into Elizabeth's head. That's what they all guessed she was trying to do. Turn herself into the child her adoptive parents had lost. She started to lose weight, but no one paid much heed. Adolescent girls do go through all kinds of changes. And she let her hair grow. Only, of course it was the wrong color. And that's where the tragedy, or near tragedy, happened. It seems one night she shut herself in the bathroom with a bottle of bleach and set about trying to turn her hair blond. The results were devastating. Fortunately Chloe heard her screams and got her under the shower. But her scalp was badly damaged. She was lucky not to have got any in her eyes. And while she was in hospital they realized that far from just losing puppy fat, the girl was severely anorexic.'
'I knew it!' exclaimed Dalziel. 'From the start. First off I thought she were taking the piss with the way she spoke. Even when I realized she weren't, I still had this feeling she were having a secret laugh. It were because I didn't recognize her.'
'You knew her? When? How?'
'Back in Dendale,' said Dalziel. 'She were the last of the girls to get attacked, the only one to get away. She were little Betsy Allgood.'
Betsy Allgood [PA/WWST18-6-88]
Transcript 3 No. 2 Of 2 Copies
Like I said, I thought everything were going to be all right forever.
If things worked out, sheep would have gum boots, my dad used to say.
But they don't. And Dad didn't get Stirps End either.
When we heard that Mr. Hardcastle had got it, Dad wanted to rush off and speak to Mr. Pontifex straight off. But Mam got in front of the door and wouldn't let him pass. She didn't often stand up to him when he were ireful, but this time she did, and told him he'd best sleep on it, and she knew it weren't right and Stirps End been good as promised, but she reckoned Mr. Pontifex had given it to Cedric Hardcastle out of guilt.
Guilt over what? yelled my dad.
''Cos he thinks it were him selling land to the Water Board that set things off back there in Dendale, so he's given Ced the farm 'cos they lost Madge, which makes us the lucky ones, 'cos we might not have Stirps End but we've still got our Betsy!'
And when she said this, I saw my dad's eyes turn to me, and they were black as grate lead, and I knew he were thinking he'd rather have the farm.
Well, he held off seeing Mr. Pontifex till next morn, but it didn't do much good from all accounts, and he came back saying we'd best pack as he'd told Mr. Pontifex to stuff his job, and likely the old sod would be coming with the bum-bailiffs to turn us out of our cottage afore nightfall.
Mr. Pontifex did turn up later that day, but he were on his lone and he talked a long while with my mam first, 'cos Dad went out into the backyard when he came through front door, then he talked to them both together, and upshot was Dad stayed on as his sheep man with a bit more brass besides and the promise of first refusal on the next farm to come up. But that would be like waiting for a drink from a Methodee, said Dad, seeing as all the farms on the Pontifex estate were let to families who'd got sons to carry on the tenancies. And though he didn't look at me this time, I knew he were thinking of me again.
So everything were spoiled now. I thought for a bit after we left Dendale that it was all going to be all right, but now it were back to what it had been before but worse, with Mam taken badly again and Dad walking round like he had come to the end of things but just couldn't stop moving.
That's how it were, you see, for all of us, I mean. It's funny how you can know inside that everything's knackered, that there's no point in owt, but outside you just carry on living like nothing was different, like it made some sense to be going to school and doing your lessons and learning stuff by heart to help you for the future.
I don't know how long this went on. It could have gone on forever, I suppose. Some folk have been dead forty years before they get buried, Dad used to say. I know I were in the top class and next year I'd be moving on to the secondary. I remember thinking mebbe that would change things somehow for me. They gave us a lot of stuff about it at school one day and I went home with it to show Mam.
And I found her dead.
No, I don't want to talk about it. What's to talk about? She'd lived, now she were dead. End of story.
Which left me and Dad.
They wanted to take me away and put me with someone. They wanted to write to Aunt Chloe straight off and see if she could help.
But I said no, I were going to stay at home and look after Dad. Someone had to look after him now, didn't they? And what with Mam being so ill for such a long time, I'd been doing most things round the house anyway, so where was the difference? They said we'd need to have someone from Social who'd come in to help and I said that would be okay even though I didn't want them, 'cos I could see this was the only way they were going to agree.
So that's what we did and it was okay for a bit and it would have been okay forever if only Dad could have got his farm and if only Mam hadn't died like she did and if only…
Any road, he went off one morning and I never saw him again. They said he went up over the Corpse Road and down into Dendale, and over to the far side of the reservoir closest to where Low Beulah used to be. Then he filled his pockets with rocks and walked into the watter so that when the divers found him, he were lying close by the pile of rubble which they'd made out of the old house.
I said it weren't so, he weren't dead, he'd just gone away and he'd come back for me one day. They wanted me to look at his face afore they closed up the coffin and buried him, but I wouldn't. Of course I know that he's dead but that's not the same as knowing for sure, is it? That's what Dad used to say. There's knowing and there's knowing for sure and there's space between the two of them for a man to get lost in. That's where he is for me, in that space. Lost.
And after that? After I came to live down here with Auntie Chloe? I had to do something, you can see that. Things don't just stop and start again, like nothing had happened before. But things can be changed. I read in this book about yon singer called Callas, how she changed herself from being plain and glorrfat, so that's what I was
