The Hanging Valley (2 page)

Refreshed—indeed, feeling as if he had been born anew—Neil wiped his eyes and put on his glasses again. Looking around, he noticed a wild flower in the woods across the water. It seemed, from where he was, to be about a foot high, with red-brown sepals and pale yellow petals. Thinking it might be a rare lady’s slipper orchis, he decided to cross over and have a closer look. The beck wasn’t very wide, and there were plenty of fortuitously placed stepping-stones.

As he neared the flower, he became aware of another smell, much more harsh and cloying than the garlic or loam. It clogged his nose and stuck to his bronchial passages. Wondering what it could be, he looked around, but could see nothing unusual. Near the flower, which was definitely a lady’s slipper, some branches fallen from a tree lay on the ground and blocked his way. He started to pull them aside to get a better view.

But he didn’t get very far. There, under a makeshift cover, lay the source of the smell: a human body. In the instant before he turned to vomit into the shrubs, Neil noticed two things: that it had no face, and that it seemed to be moving—its flesh was literally crawling.

Pausing only to wash his face and rinse out his mouth in the beck, Neil left his rucksack where it was and hurried as fast as he could back to Swainshead.

II

Disgusting, thought Katie Greenock, turning up her nose as she emptied the waste-bin of room three. You’d think people would be ashamed to leave such things lying around for anyone to see. Thank God they’d left that morning. There always had seemed something unwholesome about them anyway: the way they kissed and canoodled at the breakfast table, how it was always so long before they set off for the day and so early when they returned to their room. She didn’t even believe they were married.

Sighing, Katie brushed back a strand of ash-blonde hair and emptied the bin into the black plastic bag she carried with her on her rounds. Already she was tired out. Her day began at six o’clock, and there were no easy rustic mornings of bird-song and dew for her, just sheer hard work.

First she had to cook the breakfasts and co-ordinate everything so that the eggs weren’t cold when the bacon was ready and the tea was fresh for the guests as soon as they decided to come down. They could help themselves to juice and cereal, which she had put out earlier—though not too early, for the milk had to be chilled. The toast could get as cold as it liked—cold toast seemed to be a part of the tradition of an English breakfast—but Katie was pleased when, as sometimes happened, she succeeded in serving it warm at exactly the right time. Not that anyone ever said thank you.

Then, of course, she had to serve the meals and manage a smile for all the guests, whatever their comments about the quality of the
food, and no matter what their sweet little children saw fit to drop on the floor or throw at the walls. She was also often asked for advice about where to go for the day, but sometimes Sam would help with that part, breaking off from his usual morning monologue on current events, with which he entertained the visitors daily whether they liked it or not.

Next, she had to clear the tables and wash the dishes. The machine Sam had finally bought her helped a lot. Indeed, it saved her so much time that she could hurry down to Thetford’s Grocery on the Helmthorpe Road and take her pick of the morning’s fresh produce. Sam used to do that before he had installed the machine, but now he had more time for the sundry business matters that always seemed to be pressing.

When Katie had planned the menu for the evening meal and bought all the ingredients, it was time to change the sheets and clean the rooms. It was hardly surprising, then, that by noon she was almost always tired. If she was lucky, she could sometimes find a little time for gardening around mid-afternoon.

Putting off the moment when she would have to move on to the next room, Katie walked over to the window and rested her elbows on the sill. It was a fine day in a beautiful part of the world, but to her the landscape felt like an enormous trap; the fells were boulders that shut her in, the stretches of moorland like deserts impossible to cross. A chance of freedom had offered itself recently, but there was nothing she could do about it yet. She could only wait patiently and see what developed.

She looked down on the grassy banks at each side of the fledgling River Swain, at the children sitting patiently with their homemade fishing-nets, a visiting couple having a picnic, the old men gossiping as usual on the small stone bridge. She could see it all, but not feel the beauty of any of it.

And there, almost dead opposite, was the White Rose, founded in 1605, as its sign proudly proclaimed, where Sam would no doubt be hob-nobbing with his upper-class chums. The fool, Katie thought. He thinks he’s well in, but they’ll never really accept him, even after all these years and all he’s done for them. Their kind never does. She was sure they laughed at him
behind his back. And had he noticed the way Nicholas Collier kept looking at her? Did Sam know about the times Nicholas had tried to touch her?

Katie shuddered at the thought. Outside, a sudden movement caught her eye and she saw the old men part like the Red Sea and stare open-mouthed as a slight figure hurried across the bridge.

It was that man who’d set off just a few hours ago, Katie realized, the mild-mannered clerk from Castleford, or Featherstone, or somewhere like that. Surely he’d said he was heading for the Pennine Way? And he was as white as the pub front. He turned left at the end of the bridge, hurried the last few yards and went running into the White Rose.

Katie felt her chest tighten. What was it that had brought him back in such a state? What was wrong? Surely nothing terrible had happened in Swainshead? Not again.

III

“Well,” Sam Greenock was saying about the racial mix in England, “they have their ways, I suppose, but—”

Then Neil Fellowes burst through the door and looked desperately around the pub for a familiar face.

Seeing Sam at his usual table with the Collier brothers and John Fletcher, Neil hurried over and pulled up a chair.

“We must do something,” he said, gasping for breath and pointing outside. “There’s a body up on the fell. Dead.”

“Calm down, mate,” Sam said. “Get your breath, then tell us what’s happened.” He called over to the barman. “A brandy for Mr Fellowes, Freddie, if you please. A large one.” Seeing Freddie hesitate, he added, “Don’t worry, you bloody old skinflint, I’ll pay. And get a move on.”

Conversation at the table stopped while Freddie Metcalfe carried the drink over. Neil gulped the brandy and it brought on a coughing fit.

“At least that’s put a bit of colour back in your cheeks,” Sam said, slapping Neil on the back.

“It was terrible,” Neil said, wiping off the brandy where it had dribbled down his chin. He wasn’t used to strong drink, but he did approve of it in emergencies such as this.

“His face was all gone, all eaten away, and the whole thing was moving, like waves.” He put the glass to his thin lips again and drained it. “We must do something. The police.” He got up and strode over to Freddie Metcalfe. “Where’s the police station in Swainshead?”

Metcalfe scratched his shiny red scalp and answered slowly. “Let me see . . . There aren’t no bobbies in T’Head itself. Nearest’s Helmthorpe, I reckon. Sergeant Mullins and young Weaver. That’s nigh on ten miles off.”

Neil bought himself another double brandy while Metcalfe screwed up his weather-beaten face and thought.

“They’ll be no bloody use, Freddie,” Sam called over. “Not for something like this. It’s CID business, this is.”

“Aye,” Metcalfe agreed, “I reckon tha’s right, Sam. In that case, young feller mi’lad,” he said to Neil, “it’ll be that chap in Eastvale tha’ll be after. T’one who were out ’ere last time we ’ad a bit o’bother. Gristhorpe, Chief Inspector Gristhorpe. Years back it was, though. Probably dead now. Come on, lad, you can use this phone, seeing as it’s an emergency.”

IV

“Chief Inspector” Gristhorpe, now Superintendent, was far from dead. When the call came through, he was on another line talking to Redshaw’s Quarries about a delivery for the dry-stone wall he was building. Despite all the care he put into the endeavour, a section had collapsed during an April frost, and rebuilding seemed a suitable spring project.

The telephone call found its way, instead, to the office of Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who sat browsing through the
Guardian
arts page, counting his blessings that crime had been so slack in Eastvale recently. After all, he had transferred from London almost two years ago for a bit of peace and quiet. He liked detective work and couldn’t imagine doing anything else, but the
sheer pressure of the job—unpleasant, most of it—and the growing sense of confrontation between police and citizens in the capital had got him down. For his own and his family’s sake, he had made the move. Eastvale hadn’t been quite as peaceful as he’d expected, but at the moment all he had to deal with were a couple of minor break-ins and the aftermath of a tremendous punch-up in The Oak. It had started when five soldiers from Catterick camp had taunted a group of unemployed miners from Durham. Three people ended up in hospital with injuries ranging from bruised and swollen testicles to a bitten-off earlobe, and the others were cooling off in the cells waiting to appear before the magistrate.

“Someone asking for the super, sir,” said Sergeant Rowe, when Banks picked up the phone. “His line’s busy.”

“It’s all right,” Banks said, “I’ll take it.”

A breathless, slightly slurred voice came on the line. “Hello, is that Inspector Gristhorpe?”

Banks introduced himself and encouraged the caller, who gave his name as Neil Fellowes, to continue.

“There’s a body,” Fellowes said. “Up on the fells. I found it.”

“Where are you now?”

“A pub. The White Rose.”

“Whereabouts?”

“What? Oh, I see. In Swainshead.”

Banks wrote the details down on his scrap pad.

“Are you sure it’s a human body?” he asked. There had been mistakes made in the past, and the police had more than once been dragged out to examine piles of old sacks, dead sheep or rotten tree trunks.

“Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”

“Male or female?”

“I . . . I didn’t look. It was—”

The next few words were muffled.

“All right, Mr Fellowes,” Banks said. “Just stay where you are and we’ll be along as soon as possible.”

Gristhorpe had finished his call when Banks tapped on the door and entered his office. With its overflowing bookcases and dim lighting, it looked more like a study than part of a police station.

“Ah, Alan,” Gristhorpe said, rubbing his hands together. “They said they’ll deliver before the weekend, so we can make a start on the repairs Sunday, if you’d care to come?”

Working on the dry-stone wall, which fenced in nothing and was going nowhere, had become something of a ritual for the superintendent and his chief inspector. Banks had come to look forward to those Sunday afternoons on the north daleside above Lyndgarth, where Gristhorpe lived alone in his farmhouse. Mostly they worked in silence, and the job created a bond between them, a bond that Banks, still an incomer to the Yorkshire Dales, valued greatly.

“Yes,” he answered. “Very much. Look, I’ve just had a rather garbled phonecall from a chap by the name of Neil Fellowes. Says he’s found a body on the fell near Swainshead.”

Gristhorpe leaned back in his chair, linked his hands behind his head and frowned. “Any details?”

“No. He’s still a bit shook up, by the sound of it. Shall I go?”

“We’ll both go.” Gristhorpe stood up decisively. “It’s not the first time a body has turned up in The Head.”

“The Head?”

“That’s what the locals call it, the whole area around Swainshead village. It’s the source of the River Swain, the head of the dale.” He looked at his watch. “It’s about twenty-five miles, but I’m sure we’ll make it before closing time if I remember Freddie Metcalfe.”

Banks was puzzled. It was unusual for Gristhorpe to involve himself so much in an actual field investigation. As head of Eastvale CID, the superintendent could use his discretion as regards his role in a case. Theoretically, he could, if he wanted to, take part in searches and house-to-house enquiries, but of course he never did. In part, his job was administrative. He tended to delegate casework and monitor developments from his office. This was not due to laziness, Banks realized, but because his talent was for thinking and planning, not for action or interrogation. He trusted his subordinates and allowed them far greater leeway with their cases than many superintendents did. But this time he wanted to come along.

They made an incongruous couple as they walked to the car-park out back: the tall, bulky Gristhorpe with his unruly thatch of grey hair, bristly moustache, pock-marked face and bushy eyebrows; and Banks, lean, slight, with angular features and short, almost cropped, black hair.

“I can’t see why you keep on using your own car, Alan,” Gristhorpe said as he eased into the passenger seat of the white Cortina and grappled with the safety belt. “You could save a lot of wear and tear if you took a department vehicle.”

“Have they got tape-decks?” Banks asked.

“Cassettes? You know damn well they haven’t.”

“Well, then.”

“Well, what?”

“I like to listen to music while I’m driving. You know I do. It helps me think.”

“I suppose you’re going to inflict some on me, too?”

It had always surprised Banks that so well-read and cultured a person as Gristhorpe had absolutely no ear for music at all. The superintendent was tone deaf, and even the most ethereal Mozart aria was painful to his ears.

“Not if you don’t want,” Banks said, smiling to himself. He knew he wouldn’t be able to smoke on the way, either. Gristhorpe was a non-smoker of the most rabid kind—reformed after a twenty-year, pack-a-day habit.

Banks pulled into the cobbled market square, turned left onto North Market Street, and headed for the main Swainsdale road, which ran by the river along the valley bottom.

Gristhorpe grunted and tapped the apparatus next to the dashboard. “At least you’ve had a police radio fitted.”