‘Anyway,’ Gristhorpe went on, ‘Rawley Force is only about ninety feet high. If we can get in touch with the Mountain Rescue post at Helmthorpe and they’re willing to rig up a winch, we’ll be able to get the team up and down without much trouble. I can hardly see Glen-denning, for one, walking the way we did. There’ll be a lot of coming and going. And we’ll have to get the body down somehow, too. A winch just might be the answer. It should be easy enough. The Craven and Bradford pothole clubs put one up at Gaping Gill for a few days each year to give the tourists a look, and that’s a hell of a lot deeper.’
‘It sounds good,’ Banks said dubiously. He remembered swinging the three hundred feet down Gaping Gill, which opened into a cavern as huge as the inside of York Minster. It was an experience he had no wish to repeat. ‘We’d better get cracking though, or it’ll be dark before they all get here. Should we get Sergeant Hatchley in on this, too?’
Gristhorpe nodded.
‘DC Richmond?’
‘Not just yet. Let’s see exactly what we’ve got on our hands before we bring in all our manpower. Richmond can hold the fort back at the station. I’ll stay here while you go back to the car and radio in. You’d better let the doctor know what state the body’s in. He might need some special equipment.’
Banks glanced towards the corpse, then back at Gristhorpe.
‘Are you sure you want to stay here?’
‘It’s not a matter of wanting,’ Gristhorpe said. ‘Somebody should stay.’
‘It’s been here alone long enough. I doubt that another half-hour will make any difference.’
‘Somebody should stay,’ Gristhorpe repeated.
Banks knew when to give up. Leaving the superintendent sitting like Buddha under an ash tree by the beck, he set off back through the woods to the car.
‘What’s wrong?’ Katie Greenock asked as Sam and Stephen staggered in with Fellowes between them.
‘He’s had a bit too much to drink, that’s all,’ Sam said. ‘Out of the way, woman. Is number five still vacant?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Don’t worry, he’s not going to puke on your precious sheets. He just needs sleep.’
‘All right,’ Katie said, biting her lip. ‘Better take him up.’
Stephen smiled apologetically at her as they passed and struggled up the stairs. Finally, they dumped their burden on the bedspread and left Katie in the room with him. At first she didn’t move. She just stood by the window looking at Fellowes in horror. Surely Sam knew how much she hated and feared drunks, how much they disgusted her. And Mr Fellowes had seemed such a nice sober man.
She couldn’t really picture her father clearly, for he had died along with her mother in a fire when Katie was only four, but he had certainly been a drunk, and she was sure that he was at the root of her feelings. The only vague image she retained was of a big vulgar man who frightened her with his loud voice, his whiskers and his roughness.
Once, when they hadn’t known she was watching, she saw him hurting her mother in the bedroom, making her groan and squirm in a way that sent shivers up Katie’s spine. Of course, when she got older, she realized what they must have been doing, but the early memory was as firmly established and as deeply rooted as cancer. She also remembered once when her father fell down and she was afraid that he’d hurt himself. When she went to help him though, he knocked her over and cursed her. She was terrified that he would do the same thing to her as he had done to her mother, but she couldn’t remember any more about the incident, no matter how hard she tried.
The fire was a memory she had blocked out too, though strange tongue-like flames sometimes roared and crackled in her nightmares. According to her grandmother, Katie had been in the house at the time, but the firemen had arrived before the blaze reached her room. Katie had been saved by the grace of God, so her granny said, whereas her parents, the sinners, had been consumed by the flames of hell.
The fire had been caused by smoking in bed, and her grandmother had seemed especially satisfied by that, as if the irony somehow marked it as God’s special work, an answer to her prayers. It had all been God’s will, His justice, and Katie was obliged to spend her life in gratitude and devoted service.
Katie took a deep breath, rolled Fellowes over carefully and pulled back the sheets — they could be washed easily, but not the quilted spread. Then she unlaced his walking boots and put them on some newspaper by the bed. They weren’t muddy, but fragments of earth had lodged in the ribbed treads.
‘Cleanliness is next to godliness,’ her grandmother had drilled into her. And a lot easier to achieve, Katie might have added if she had dared. Apart from an unusually long list of its attributes — mostly ‘thou shalt nots’, which seemed to include everything most normal people enjoyed — godliness was an elusive quality as far as Katie was concerned. Lately, she had found herself thinking about it a lot, recalling her grandmother’s harsh words and ‘necessary’ punishments: her mouth washed out with soap for lying; a spell in the coal hole for ‘swaying wantonly’ to a fragment of music that had drifted in from next door’s radio. These had all been preceded by the words, ‘This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you.’
Fellowes stirred and snapped Katie out of her reverie. For a second, his grey eyes opened wide and he grasped her hand. She could feel the fear and confusion flow from his bony fingers through her wrist.
‘Moving,’ he mumbled, falling back into a drunken sleep again. ‘Moving…’
Spittle gathered at the edges of his lips and dribbled down his chin. Katie shuddered. Leaving him, she hurried back downstairs. There was still the evening meal to prepare, and the garden needed weeding.
Banks leaned over the edge of Rawley Force and watched Glendenning coming up in the winch. It was an amusing sight. The tall white-haired doctor sat erect, trying to retain as much dignity as he could. A cigarette dangled from the left corner of his mouth, as usual, and he clutched his brown bag tightly against his stomach.
Luckily there had been hardly any rain over the past two weeks, so the waterfall to the doctor’s right was reduced to a trickle. The staff at the Mountain Rescue post had been only too willing to help and had come out and set up the winch in no time. Now the police team were ready to come up slowly, one at a time, and Glendenning, as befitted his status, was first in line.
Puffing, as he struggled out of the harness, the doctor nodded curtly at Banks and straightened the crease in his suit trousers. Banks led him half a mile along the wooded valley to the scene, where Gristhorpe still sat alone.
‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ the superintendent said to Glendenning, getting up and dusting off his seat. Everyone in Eastvale Regional Police Headquarters found it paid to be polite, even deferential, to the doctor. Although he was a crusty old bugger, he was one of the best pathologists in the country and they were lucky he had chosen Eastvale as his home.
Glendenning lit another cigarette from the stub of his old one and asked, ‘Where is it, then?’
Gristhorpe pointed towards the pile of branches. The doctor cursed under his breath as he tackled the stepping stones, and Gristhorpe turned to Banks and winked. ‘Everyone here, Alan?’
‘Looks like it.’
Next the young photographer, Peter Darby, came hurrying towards them, trying to head off Glendenning before the doctor could get to work. To Banks he always looked far too fresh-faced and innocent for his line of work, but he had never been known to bat an eyelid, no matter what they asked him to photograph.
After him came Sergeant Hatchley, red-faced after his short walk from Rawley Force along the hanging valley. The fair-haired sergeant was a big man, like Gristhorpe, and although he was twenty years younger, his muscle was turning quickly to fat. He resembled a rugby prop forward, a position he had indeed played on the local team until cigarettes and beer took their toll on his stamina.