Going back up, carrying a child, that was something else. Twenty minutes… probably thirty, depending how fit you were. Turnbull looked strong enough in the shoulders to carry the girl, but how much exercise did those legs get?
In any case it was a hell of a risk to take.
But, seeing the girl down here, alone and vulnerable, what would such a sick mind as this man must have reck of risk?
Wield was brought out of his reverie by the sound of Tig barking.
It seemed to be coming from the bowels of the earth, and his first thought was that the daft animal had gone down a rabbit hole. Then he realized the noise was coming from the ghyll.
Tig was down there somewhere, and he sounded as if he'd found something.
Getting down the ghyll proved fairly easy. A narrow sheep trod angled down the slope, offering little problem to a man who kept himself in trim. He soon found himself in shade but any hope that this would be better than the heat of the sun soon vanished. It was like descending into a sludge of warm air, and what was worse the atmosphere was foul with the stink of corruption.
Dogs, men, thermal image cameras-they couldn't possibly have missed this, thought Wield.
And now he saw that of course they hadn't. The trod ran across the bottom of the ghyll and up the other face till it was blocked by a slab of rock resting at an angle of about thirty degrees, where it turned back on itself and zigzagged up the remaining slope.
Across the path by the slab lay the remains of a sheep. The scavengers had been here and there were bones lying apart from the main carcass. But decay had been rapid enough in this heat to quickly rot the flesh to a state not even a hungry fox found appetizing, and the body had been left to the depredations of flies, which rose like wind-tugged pall each time Tig barked.
'Come away, boy!' called Wield.
The dog turned, took an uncertain step toward him, then turned back.
'For Christ's sake, didn't that vet feed you?' demanded the sergeant. 'You've got to be desperate to want to stick your gob into that lot!'
He took a deep breath and held it as he crossed the streambed and started up the other side, planning to grab Tig and keep going to the top.
The dog struggled as it felt Wield's hands seize it and whimpered piteously as he lifted it up to his chest.
Got to be desperate… His own words echoed in his head.
He stopped and had to take a breath. But now he ignored the stench. He was looking at the spot where the carcass lay. Directly above it, the side of the ghyll was almost sheer. It was easy to see how the sheep, grazing too near the edge and stretching down in search of the not-so-sun-scorched vegetation growing between the rocks, could have lost its footing and plunged to the bottom, breaking its back.
But surely it would have been to the bottom of the ghyll, not this angle of the trod, which was barely more than a six-inch ledge on the steep slope?
The dog lay dormant in his arms now, as if sensing that he was no longer the object of reprimand.
Wield went back down to the streambed. There was a rock there with some wool on it and a brown stain which might be blood. He looked up toward the carcass. The grass on the bank of the almost dried-up stream was slightly flattened and some of the ferns were snapped. As if something had been dragged. And there were more traces of wool up the rocky slope to the trod.
He put the dog down and climbed back up to the carcass. The ground was too rocky to bury anything here. But that rock slab, the way it lay, there could be a space beneath in the angle it made with the ghyll wall.
He would need to move the sheep to see.
Not even the heat of the chase could make him contemplate taking his hands to that task. He found a large flat piece of stone which he used as a shovel, and gagging from the foulness directly beneath his nose, he began to lever the rotting corpse away from the slab. It came to pieces as he pushed, and fell in stinking gobbets to the streambed below. Flies rose in a fetid, humming spiral around his head, which he shook like an irritated bullock. Tig, dodging the descending bones, was now by his feet as the gap beneath the slab was revealed. Only, there wasn't a gap. It was choked with stones and turf and wads of heather. But that hadn't got there naturally, that hadn't grown there. Using his hands now that it was just good, honest rock and vegetation he had to deal with, he began to unplug the hole. Suddenly his hand was through into space. He withdrew it. The hole was big enough to admit a rabbit. Or a small dog. Before Wield could grab him, Tig was through, barking fiercely for a moment; then, perhaps the most terrible noise Wield had ever heard, the bark died to an almost inaudible whimper.
Wield tried to proceed systematically but despite himself he found he was tearing at the remaining debris with a ferocity which brought sweat streaming down his face and blood from his fingernails.
Finally he stopped. He hadn't got a flashlight. Mistake. Man should never go anywhere without a length of string, a cutting blade, and a flashlight.
He knelt on the trod, heedless that his knees were resting on ground stained by the juices of the decomposing sheep.
He kept his head a little way back from the hole to permit as much light as possible to enter. And he waited.
At first he could see nothing but the vaguest of shapes. Then gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he saw the light gently run over the outlines of things. As he'd guessed, there was a triangular space in here, almost tentlike, about two and a half feet wide, three feet high, and six feet deep. In the middle of it, a hump, difficult to make out, perhaps because his mind didn't want to make it out. The first thing he really identified was the gleam of Tig's eyes, and then his teeth as his lips drew back in a soundless snarl.
The dog was lying up against something. Wield knelt there straining his eyes, till slowly, inexorably, he was forced to see what he had known for some minutes he was going to see.
He rose unsteadily to his feet and reached into his pocket. Flashlight he might not have, but he hadn't forgotten his mobile.
'Stay, Tig,' he said unnecessarily.
Then, telling himself it was to improve reception, but knowing that he wanted above all things to be out of this dark and noisome canyon and back into the bright light and fresh air, he climbed up from the ghyll, pressed the necessary buttons, and began to speak.
The woman's name was Jackie Tilney. She was overweight, overworked, over thirty, and so pissed off with having told her story to three different sets of cops that she was ready to tell the fourth to take a jump.
Only, the fourth wasn't a set, though possessed of enough flesh to make two or three ordinary bobbies, and if he'd taken her putative advice and jumped, she feared for the foundations of the public library, where she worked.
So she told her story again.
She had definitely seen the man in the photograph. And she had spoken with him. And he had an Australian accent.
'The first time was-'
'Hang about. First time?' said Dalziel. 'How many times were there?'
'Two,' she retorted. 'Don't your menials tell you anything?'
Dalziel regarded her thoughtfully. He liked a well-made feisty woman. Then he recalled that in Cap Marvell, he'd got the cruiser weight Queen of Feist, smiled fondly, and said, 'Nay, lass, I don't waste time with tipsters when I can go straight to the horse's mouth. Go on.'
Deciding there had to be a compliment in there somewhere, Jackie Tilney went on.
'The first time was last Friday. He came to the reference desk and asked if we had anything about the building of the Dendale Reservoir. I told him that he could look at the local papers for the period on our microfiche system. Also this book.'
She showed him the volume. It was called The Drowning of Dendale, a square volume, not all that thick. He remembered it vaguely. It had been written by one of the Post journalists and contained more photographs than text, basically a before-and-after record.
'He asked me to do a couple of photocopies,' Tilney went on. 'These maps.'
She showed him. One was of Dendale before the flooding, the other after.
