'By no foul storm confounded,'
Elizabeth's head was back, her gaze fixed high over the heads of her audience.
'By God's own hands surrounded,'
Krog couldn't see her face but he knew it would be radiant as a saint's at that moment of martyrdom when the gates of heaven are seen to open.
'They rest…'
They rest. Let them rest. Requiescat… That was what this was. A requiem.
'They rest…'
Perhaps she was right, he was wrong. If only the police weren't there… and whose fault was that? Would Pascoe be discreet about the source of the transcripts? Not that it mattered. Chloe would know. Without being told, she would know.
'… as in their father's house.'
Father's? Mother's surely? A slip? Perhaps. But who was noticing?
The piano wound its way through the long, melancholy coda which set its seal of calm acceptance on all the turbulence of loss and sorrow which had gone before. When it finished, no one spoke. No one applauded.
This was how it should be. Now they should all simply rise and go home.
Then came a noise like a thunderclap. And another. And another.
It was the fat policeman, the abominable Dalziel, standing there like the Spirit of Discord, bringing his huge hands together in what came close to a parody of applause.
Six times he did this. Heads turned but no one joined in. The young woman in the group looked at the Fat Man with mingled amazement and admiration. The younger man's eyes closed momentarily in a spasm of embarrassment, then he picked up a CD and found it necessary to examine it closely. Only the third man, the ugly one called Wield, showed no reaction but kept his gaze fixed unblinkingly on Elizabeth.
After the final clap, Dalziel spoke.
'Eee, that were grand, lass,' he said, beaming. 'I do like a good ballad when it's sung with feeling. Is it the tea break now? This weather, eh? I've got a throat like a dried-up culvert.'
'What is truth?' asked Peter Pascoe.
Sometimes it hangs before you, bright as a star when only one is shining in the sky.
Sometimes like a very faint star in a sky full of brilliant constellations, you can only glimpse it by looking aside.
Sometimes you get close enough to reach out your hand to grasp it, only to find your fingers scrabbling at a trompe l'oeil.
And sometimes a simple shift of perspective can turn a wild goose into a trapped rabbit.
The real trick was to recognize it when you saw it and not confuse the part with the whole.
Dalziel was a gut detective, working through animal instinct. Wield used logic and order, arranging and rearranging things till they made sense. Pascoe saw himself as a creature of imagination, making huge leaps, then waiting hopefully for the facts to catch up with him.
And Shirley Novello…?
In the Range Rover she'd finally got hold of the transcripts.
She read through them as the vehicle moved at uncomfortable speed along the narrow country roads. The blue sheets she read twice.
After the second reading she sat back and closed her eyes tight, as if in darkness she had better hope of illumination.
She was recalling the confused and fragmented feelings of her own early adolescent years. But that had been a period of halcyon calm compared with this. And Betsy Allgood's trauma hadn't just started with the onset of adolescence, but much much earlier. A plain, unloved child, starved of affection by a work-obsessed father and an emotionally unstable mother, with what envy she must have regarded her prettier, happier, cared-for, and cosseted friends, and in particular Mary Wulfstan, who materialized only during holidays to take her place in the Dendale hierarchy like a little princess.
Yet Mary's mother was only an Allgood, like Betsy's own dad. So this special quality, this enviable, desirable 'otherness,' must spring from her father, the powerful, enigmatic Walter Wulfstan.
How much did these men understand of this? Pascoe there, after what he'd been through, after all that business of the imaginary friend and the realstunreal nix, surely he must have some inkling of the looking-glass world young girls could wander in and out of, hardly noticing? And Wield, how much did he partake of those qualities of sensitivity and empathic insight conventionally attributed to gays in literature? Or were they just part of a picture as false as that still more prevalent in police circles, which painted gays at best as sad and sordid shirt lifters, at worst as potential child-molesters?
And the awful Dalziel… God, he was speaking to her. Let no dog bark!
'You asleep, Ivor, or wha'? I were asking what you reckoned to all this now you've read that trick-cyclist crap?'
Here I am, she thought, stuck in a machine with my three-personed God, sticking out like the fourth corner on a triangle, and they're waiting to hear my opinion! Chance to shine? Or chance to eclipse myself forever? Wise move might be to box clever, check what these great minds think, then go along with them, so that at worst, if they turn out completely wrong, you're all in the same clag together.
Pascoe turned in the front seat and smiled at her.
'No need to worry,' he said. 'No Brownie points on offer here. It's about a dead child, four dead children perhaps, and perhaps one ruined one. It's only the truth that matters. Not personal ambition. Or personal troubles. I know you understand that.'
Shit, thought Novello. The mind-reading bastard's reminding me I went clod-hopping into his life when he was sitting by his daughter's sickbed, and he's saying, that was all right if it was for the job but not if it was just for me. Who the hell does he think this is? Gentle bloody Jesus?
But she knew her indignation was partly based on guilt. And there was something else, too, something worse because it ran counter to all her private resolve to make her way to the top of this masculine world without paying the price of becoming part of it. It was a feeling of pleasure that maybe she'd got her geometry wrong, maybe this Holy Triangle was really a Holy Circle which had just been drawn wider to include her in…?
I won't be caught like that either! she assured herself, then gasped as the car went into a skid.
Dalziel had braked to avoid a dog which had emerged from the hedgerow. It was a small indeterminate creature which went on its way with a jaunty indifference to lesser beings whose shortage of legs required them to can themselves like dog meat in order to travel.
The incident took only a moment, then the car was back under the Fat Man's control. But Novello found herself thinking of Tig, Lorraine's pet. She hadn't seen the beast. She hadn't seen Lorraine either. Alive or dead.
But Dalziel had, and Wield too.
Suddenly she wanted to cry, but this was a feeling she'd long since got used to dealing with.
She said briskly, 'Clearly Betsy was very disturbed, but I'm not so sure she was confused. She obviously wanted Wulfstan to know she remembered the real version of what happened that night. In other words, she was protecting him. But suppose her obsession with Wulfstan went back a lot farther, and her protection of him too? I noticed when I read the file that on every occasion it was Betsy who said she'd seen Lightfoot hanging around. Perhaps she'd already started protecting Wulfstan then, so when she saw Benny chained up in the Heck cellar, it was instinctual for her to relocate him at Neb Cottage.'
There, she'd done it, suggested that fifteen years back, when she herself was little older than the lost girls, these men had been getting things badly wrong and letting a child run rings around them.
Dalziel said, 'Bloody hell, lass. I know you lot think with your hormones, but could a seven-year-old really be jerking us off like that?'
She smiled to herself, finding the blast of Dalziel's breezy crudities refreshing after the teargas of Pascoe's pieties.
She said, 'I don't think we're talking carefully worked-out strategies here, sir. She must have been really frightened and confused the night she met Benny. Maybe because she was found near Neb Cottage and everyone assumed that's where Benny had attacked her, she just went along with it, even came to believe it, or at least
