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. Afterward 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 favorite 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 toward 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!'
5
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 development on the other.
It takes more than the march of modernity to modify the English provincial sabbath, however, and the town's old center 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 northeast. 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 gray cottages fronting the pavement. No problem spotting No. 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.
Eighteen sixty. Year Mahler was born. Dalziel's unexpected recognition of the Kindertotenlied brought the name to his mind. He doubted if the event 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?
