The Body in the Dales
OTHER TITLES BY J. R. ELLIS
The Quartet Murders
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017, 2018 by J. R. Ellis
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously self-published as The Body in Jingling Pot in Great Britain in 2017. This edition contains editorial revisions.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503903111
ISBN-10: 1503903117
Cover design by Ghost Design
To Jackie
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
Unless tha’s careful on thi ways,
Providence Pot will end thi days.
Deep under the Yorkshire Dales, cavers were scrambling along dark passageways. Apart from the eerie echoing of their voices, the only sounds came from water dripping on to their heads and gurgling down the shallow streams. There was the distant roar of an underground river. The dancing lights from their helmets illuminated the rocky walls and cast huge shadows into the heights above them.
They were walking through a strange underground world of rock, mud and slime where the temperature remained at the same chilly level throughout the year and intricate systems of interconnecting tunnels plunged hundreds of feet below the surface. The slow action of water dissolving limestone over thousands of years had sculpted shapes like the cave art of a strange subterranean civilisation: long fingers of stalactites hung from the cavern roofs and stalagmites thrust in opposition from the floor.
The cavers were still only halfway through the system. They were entering a long and fairly straight passage with a shallow stream in the bottom, about twenty feet high with rocky, uneven walls.
The leader called back, ‘Easy bit here. We’ll stop for a rest soon.’
Echoing replies reached him in his forward position. As he splashed down the tunnel, he calculated the time and distance. Two and a half hours to get here, stop for food, another two and a half hours to get through to the end. It was a big responsibility, leading an inexperienced party like this. So many things could go wrong. People fell and broke limbs and it was hours before Cave Rescue could reach them. Reckless amateurs got lost in the labyrinth of passages and sometimes died of exhaustion and hypothermia.
Suddenly his foot struck something and he tripped forward. His first thought was how stupid he’d been to allow himself to get distracted. He’d be the one who broke his ankle, and then they’d all be in serious difficulties. Whatever he’d stumbled against had moved and seemed soft. He looked down to illuminate the object and staggered back in shock. His lamp was shining on to a human head. The body of a man lay across the floor of the passage. Congealed blood covered the matted hair and the skull was smashed at the back. Two facts immediately struck the caver.
First: the dead man was not wearing any caving gear.
Second: he knew who it was.
One
Watch out when striding over th’ill,
Especially near to Gaping Ghyll.
Detective Sergeant Andrew Carter would never forget his first day with the Harrogate Division of West Riding Police. It was a sunny day after heavy rains and he arrived early, smartly dressed in an Italian designer suit and his favourite Armani shoes. He was tall with a handsome face and a dazzling smile. He had short blond hair and was powerfully built, with a slight tendency to be overweight.
Carter hesitated outside for a while, fiddling with his tie before finally going through the door. Inside, everything seemed quiet compared to the bustle of the Met. There was a reception desk with a middle-aged female officer, who smiled at him in welcome.
He was filling in a form for his security pass when he heard a voice call out in a strident northern tone.
‘Ah, the lad from the Great Smoke!’
Carter turned to see a figure walking purposefully towards him down the corridor. It was a man wearing what looked to Carter like a battered old anorak and heavy boots. He stopped and looked the new boy up and down with grey eyes that were both warm and penetrating.
‘Come on, then, no time to lose, do your form filling later. And we’re going over rough ground; I’m afraid that smart suit could get crumpled.’ With that, he walked off towards the door, calling back, ‘As for those shoes!’ He laughed as he disappeared out of the building.
Carter gave the receptionist a bemused look. She laughed too.
‘You’d better follow him; that’s Chief Inspector Oldroyd. Here, take this.’ She handed him a temporary pass. ‘Just fill in your name.’
Carter’s eyes widened. Detective Chief Inspector Oldroyd was his new boss. Hastily he put the pen down, apologised, stuffed the temporary pass in his pocket and rushed out of the door.
Oldroyd was already starting the engine of a shabby old Saab saloon. Carter got in and they drove off through the gated entrance.
‘DCI Oldroyd, lad; pleased to meet you. We’ll shake hands later. It’s Andrew Carter, isn’t it? Do you go by Andy?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Well, Andy, this is going to be a very interesting first case for you. I’ve just had a call from Inspector Craven from the Skipton station; a body has been found down Jingling Pot.’
‘In a pot, sir?’
‘A pot ’ole.’
Carter looked bemused. Oldroyd shook his head.
‘Come on, lad, frame thisen.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘Tha’s come to t’county o’ t’broad acres, so don tha thinking cap and get thisen ackled.’
Carter had a strange feeling of dislocation: was his hearing scrambled or was his new boss a lunatic? He opened his mouth to reply when Oldroyd burst out laughing.
‘Sorry, it’s my little joke, just a bit of Yorkshire dialect. They call me “Yorkshire” Oldroyd round here but don’t worry, people don’t speak like that much any more. More’s the pity.’
Carter was still confused. ‘Right, sir, but, er, what were you saying?’
‘Just teasing. The important thing is that the body was discovered in a pothole; that’s an underground cave system. That’s not a very common occurrence, even round here where there’re hundreds of caves. I’ve got a feeling we might have something unusual on our hands.’
Carter hadn’t thought of Yorkshire as a place full of caves. He looked out of the window on to the landscape. After a while, the picturesque countryside around Harrogate, which reminded him of some parts of Surrey or Kent, started to change into something much more unusual. The hedgerows were replaced by rough stone walls that criss-crossed intensely green fields full of cows and sheep. Dotted in the fields were squat rectangular stone buildings. Oldroyd slowed as the road narrowed between walls at either side. Carter saw a sign with the words ‘Yorkshire Dales National Park’ and a sheep’s head.
‘This is Wharfedale, Andy, and we’re now in the Dales National Park – oops, better slow down.’
‘They can be a nuisance if you’re in a hurry but we all love them, really. They keep the landscape looking the way it is.’
The sheep started to disappear through a gate. Oldroyd waved to the farmer as the car sped on past one of the collie dogs, crouched in the road blocking the path of any sheep considering escape.
The road undulated up the fellside and then down.
‘I’ll slow down here so you can see the view.’
A spectacular landscape spread out before Carter’s gaze. Grey stone cottages clustered around a village green. There was an old church by a bridge. In the distance, the landscape looked even wilder. The river was still very swollen after the recent rains and some of the low-lying fields were flooded.
‘That’s Burnthwaite and Upper Wharfedale in the distance.’
‘Not bad that, sir.’
Oldroyd laughed.
‘You’d better watch it, lad, or you’ll fall in love with it. Alf Wight was hooked the first day he saw this landscape.’
‘Alf Wight, sir?’
‘James Herriot to you. He lived way over those fells in the town of Thirsk.’
‘He wrote those vet books, didn’t he?’
‘That’s right.’
Carter had never spent much time in the countryside and he had a clichéd view of it: just a lot of fields stinking of cow muck and ‘local yokels’ grunting ‘oo-aa’ as they downed their cider. But there was something about this that was different, something grand and sweeping in the landscape.
The car went through the village and past two police cars, the first sign that something was happening. After about a mile up a steep road, Carter could see more police cars squashed by the wall, and a van that had ‘Wharfedale Cave Rescue’ on the side. He noted that the police cars here were Range Rovers, a model more suited to rough terrain than fast pursuits through the city. As they stopped, a police officer came over.
‘This is the local inspector, Bob Craven. We pull his leg about this area being called the Craven District.’ He opened the window and mimicked an upper-class English accent. ‘Ah, Lord Craven of Craven. I hear nasty things are happening in your patch today?’
Craven grinned. He had a large red face and looked like a weather-beaten farmer.
‘Hello, Jim, good to see you. You’re right there and I’ll tell you something, I’ll bet even you’ve never seen one like this; it’s a real puzzler.’
‘We’d better get out and have a look at it then.’
He introduced Carter and the three men climbed over a stile and walked along a path across the field, Craven looking rather quizzically at Carter’s expensive suit and shoes.
‘So fill me in then, Bob.’
Craven consulted his notes.
‘The victim was male, late thirties; found by the leader of a party of potholers, a Geoffrey Whitaker.’
‘A party of what?’ asked Carter.
‘Potholers are cavers. This lad’s from the south, Bob; don’t assume anything. Carry on.’
‘The body was lying across the passage with the water flowing around it.’
‘Couldn’t it have been an accident? A fall?’
‘Very unlikely, Jim. The deceased wasn’t wearing any caving gear and he’d no equipment. The wounds suggest he was hit on the back of the head with something fairly small and sharp, like a hammer. Not the kind of wound you get from a fall.’
‘So someone murdered him and dumped the body in the pothole?’
‘So it seems, but the point is, the cavers found the body when they were about halfway through. It takes over two hours from either end of the system to reach that point. Why would anybody take a body down so far and then just leave it where the next time anybody passes through they’re going to walk straight into it? It doesn’t make sense.’
Oldroyd frowned; it was an unlikely scenario.
‘But that’s not all, Jim. Listen to this. Two of the blokes who went down to help to retrieve the body swear they went through the same place only three days ago and saw nothing.’
‘So?’
‘But when you see the body I think you’ll agree that it’s been in the cave much longer than that.’
‘I see what you mean. Well,’ he rubbed his hands together, ‘this sounds like the kind of case I like, plenty to think about. What do you say, Andy?’
Carter had been looking around at the grassy fells rising up; he felt the breeze on his face and saw the white clouds moving across the blue sky. The earth was so firm; it was difficult to believe that beneath their feet was a dark underworld. Now he was thinking fast, eager to make a good impression on his first day.
‘I know this sounds obvious, sir, but couldn’t he have been murdered down there? Why are we assuming he was killed elsewhere and the body taken down the pot?’
‘Pothole,’ corrected Oldroyd.
‘That’s extremely unlikely,’ said Craven, consulting his notes again. ‘The victim’s already been identified as David Atkins of Burnthwaite, apparently a very experienced caver, so the chances of him going so far down a cave system without any equipment are nil, I would say.’
‘So that rules out him being murdered on a descent with someone else?’
‘I’d say so, yes.’
‘But he could have been forced down the cave by somebody at knife point or something and then killed,’ continued Carter, ‘and he could have had all his gear removed after he was murdered.’
‘That’s not impossible,’ conceded Oldroyd, ‘but it’s very unlikely. You’d be struggling for a long time, forcing somebody along narrow passages. Then you kill them, then you remove all their climbing gear and carry it all out again. Why bother?’
The path entered a steep and gloomy valley. Carter shook his head. ‘No,’ he concluded. ‘I agree; it doesn’t make sense.’
They turned a sharp corner and suddenly Carter could see their destination. About halfway up the fellside was the dark opening of a cave.
‘That cave is the entrance to the Jingling Pot system,’ said Oldroyd, ‘and I see the body. Come on.’
In front of the cave was a collection of boulders of various sizes and piles of scree tumbling down to a stream in the valley bottom. Carter imagined this was normally a lonely place but today a large group of people had gathered at the mouth of the cave, some wearing helmets and waterproof clothing. Attention seemed to be focussed on a stretcher laid on the ground covered with a plastic sheet.
The narrow path drifted up the fellside and Oldroyd walked at a surprising pace, obviously eager to see the evidence for himself. Carter began to see why Oldroyd was wearing his boots. The path was wet and muddy. His shoes were already caked with mud and he kept skidding off the path.
At the mouth of the cave, a group of men dressed in caving gear were sitting on the grass or the rocks looking exhausted. Some had removed their helmets and one was drinking hot tea from a thermos flask.
‘I could do with something a bit stronger after that,’ he remarked to the others.
‘Aye,’ a few mumbled in reply. Their faces were filthy with mud, their gear wet and grimy. They looked dazed.
Two police constables were standing by the stretcher and Craven went over to them.
‘OK, you’ve met Chief Inspector Oldroyd before and this is Detective Sergeant Carter.’
The constables nodded and acknowledged Oldroyd with a brief ‘Sir’.
‘Let’s have a look then,’ said Oldroyd. He put on plastic gloves and gave a pair to Carter, then pulled back the sheet covering the stretcher.
The body of a medium-sized but powerfully built man with dark hair and beard was revealed. He was dressed only in a blood-splattered T-shirt, jeans and trainers. His skull had been crushed at the back and his hair was clotted with a blacken
ed mass of blood. The wetness was the most striking thing about the body. Everything, from the head to the clothes, was damp and when Oldroyd touched the skin it had an unusual texture. It was not icy but clammy. In many ways it was like bodies dragged out of lakes and yet not quite. It had not been cleaned by submersion in water, but was as grimy and muddy as the Cave Rescue men who’d brought it out. Oldroyd covered it up again and frowned.
‘Found two hours into a cave system in jeans and T-shirt and he’s been down there a while if I’m not mistaken. Any more ideas, Andy?’
Carter was perplexed. Just my luck, he thought, to come up against a case like this on my first day. The whole thing was bizarre. He decided rightly that there was no point trying to pretend to the chief inspector.
‘I don’t know, sir; it’s right outside my experience. We don’t have caves and potholes in London.’
‘Come on then, you’ll have to use your imagination. Anyway, don’t bodies occasionally turn up in the sewer systems down there?’
‘I’m sure they do, sir, but I haven’t seen one.’
‘No.’ Oldroyd’s brief and distracted reply seemed more to himself. He looked down at the stretcher again and shook his head. There was a pause as all three men went quiet, reflecting on the puzzle.
Craven went over to the rescuers; Oldroyd and Carter followed.
‘Thanks for your help. We couldn’t have done this so quickly without you. A bit of a nasty job though. Who’s been leading?’
‘That’s me. Williams, Alan Williams,’ one of the group replied, wiping drops of tea from his grimy beard, ‘and you’re right; we’re used to bringing people out on stretchers and sometimes they’re dead, but not murdered. But it’s only to be expected, Inspector; these caves are always likely to spring a nasty surprise on you.’
He turned to look at the black mouth of the entrance and his face took on an expression of reverence. ‘They’ve been feared for centuries, well before they were explored. People thought there were creatures from hell down there; if you went too far in you’d be caught in their lair and never get out again.’ He looked down at the body. ‘If you don’t show respect, well . . .’