The Body in the Dales Read online

  ‘Got it!’ The other arm turned the handle and the door opened.

  ‘Thank God for that; let’s get in quick.’

  Both figures entered the house and closed the door quietly behind them. They moved into the small hall and away from the door. A torch was switched on which revealed the faces of Gary and Carol from next door. As Gary held the torch, he was sucking the wrist he had scraped on the jagged glass.

  ‘Oh shit, Gary, this is bloody awful, let’s get on with it.’

  ‘Calm down, you silly bitch. We’ve got to search a bit.’

  ‘I thought you knew where Dave kept it?’

  ‘I’ve a good idea but I can’t be sure.’

  ‘What? That’s not what you said when I agreed to do this.’

  ‘Keep your bloody voice down!’ Gary hissed in a harsh whisper. ‘And get your torch out.’ Carol fumbled in her pockets.

  ‘What if the police found it? We don’t know if it’s still here.’

  ‘Well, let’s get looking then. You look in that cupboard in the hall, right at the bottom. I have an idea about upstairs.’

  Reluctantly, Carol opened the hall cupboard while Gary’s fat frame plodded up the stairs. After a few minutes of prodding, poking, bumping into things and cursing, Gary called down in a stage whisper.

  ‘Up here, I think I’ve found it!’

  ‘Bring it down then and let’s have a look!’

  Gary came back down the stairs and Carol pronounced herself very satisfied with what he had found.

  ‘Come on, then, let’s get out. Oh, shit! Turn off your torch quick!’

  Everything went dark again and they both froze as they heard a sound outside. Someone was approaching the door! Then they heard a voice.

  ‘What the hell! It’s bloody open,’ and then footsteps in the hall. They had no time to hide before a torch came on and a deep voice laughed.

  ‘Looks like someone’s bloody beaten me to it.’

  In the dim light they saw the bearded face and bulky figure of Sam Cartwright. He peered at the sheepish-looking pair.

  ‘You two live next door, right? You burn them joss sticks and crap like that, don’t yer?’

  Gary turned his torch back on and shone it at the new intruder. Any desire to remonstrate was stifled by the sight of Cartwright’s huge frame and the compromising situation in which they found themselves. The silence seemed to encourage Cartwright. He shone his torch in Carol’s face.

  ‘Hey, watch it!’ she complained.

  ‘Look at you love, you’ve got more pins in your face than my mother used to put our nappies on.’ He gestured with the torch towards Gary. ‘Does it turn him on then? Where else have you got things stuck through you then?’ He broke into lewd guffawing laughter.

  ‘Look,’ began Gary but Cartwright went on.

  ‘Anyway, what yer doing in here?’

  ‘We could ask you the same question,’ retorted Gary, trying to go on to the offensive.

  ‘Aye well.’ Cartwright became more subdued. ‘That bugger Atkins died owing me money, so I thought I’d come here and try and find some. I’m not paying some bloody grasping solicitor to get it for me. I suppose t’coppers have taken everything out.’

  Carol and Gary glanced at each other and saw a way out of the situation.

  ‘Same here, Atkins owed us money as well.’

  ‘Have yer found owt then?’

  ‘Not a penny, honest, you can search round if you want.’

  Cartwright shook his head.

  ‘No point; I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been others here before us. I’ll bet the bugger owed brass all over.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carol. ‘Look, if you don’t say anything about this, we won’t. Is it a deal?’

  ‘Aye, you won’t catch me blabbing owt to t’police.’

  With that he turned and walked out of the house leaving Carol and Gary both heaving a sigh of relief. As he walked out of the small garden, Cartwright thought he saw a figure hiding in the bushes across the lane. He decided not to investigate, as he was in too incriminating a position himself to confront any other interlopers.

  Steph Johnson drove herself home from West Riding Police HQ in her Mini Cooper. Although she loved Harrogate, she’d decided to move out and away from her family when she had the means, and she’d bought a small flat for an exorbitant price in one of the new waterfront developments in Leeds. The fifteen-mile distance was enough for her to establish her independence without losing contact with her mother and sister, with whom she was close.

  This closeness was partly the product of adversity. When she was twelve years old and her sister Lisa only ten, her father had left the family after years of drunkenness and violence. Even now, she didn’t like to think about the three years before he went, particularly the nights. She and Lisa would be in their bedroom waiting terrified for him to come home and wondering what sort of mood he would be in. Sometimes he would be all sentimental and would cover them both with slobbering kisses, his breath stinking of beer. A wave of anxiety flooded over her at the memory. At other times, the outside door would crash open and the shouting would begin almost as soon as he entered the house. When this happened, they pulled the bedclothes over themselves, partly out of fear and partly to pretend they were asleep so he wouldn’t hit them.

  In truth, he seldom did, but with their mother it was different. They got used to seeing the bruises on her arms or face the next morning, but she would never say much about it other than to tell them not to worry, Daddy loved her really; it was just that he got a bit angry when he’d had a drink.

  One night Steph heard loud cries and, telling Lisa to stay, she crept downstairs, unable to bear it any longer. In the kitchen there was a terrible struggle; her mother, with a cut lip, was pulling at her husband’s arm and crying.

  ‘Don’t, Kevin!’

  Steph saw that her father was holding a kitchen knife and seemed about to use it. She screamed and both adults abruptly turned to her and froze in a terrible tableau that she would never forget. The shock seemed to bring her father to his senses. He threw down the knife, brushed roughly past her and went straight upstairs to bed. Her mother collapsed sobbing on the floor. Steph wanted to go to her, but was so horror struck by what she’d seen that she also turned and went quickly back up to bed. She told Lisa everything was OK, turned out the light and lay crying silently until the early hours, when she finally fell asleep, exhausted.

  She still felt guilty about that night. She kept telling herself that she was only twelve at the time and couldn’t cope with the situation, but she felt she’d let her mother down, not gone to her when she most needed her. By suddenly appearing, of course, she might have saved her life, but it had put a barrier between them for many years: that night and the awful possibility of what could have happened was literally unspeakable. Even now, she had not really talked in depth with her mother about how she felt about those times, but at least it was not a totally taboo subject any more.

  Less than a year after that incident, her father had left and they’d had very little contact with him since, other than cards and presents at Christmas and birthdays. He had disappeared back to London to the relief of them all.

  Steph had been deeply scarred by the experience. At the age of twenty-five she’d had no long-term relationships with men and she knew it was because she didn’t trust them. She tended to see her father in them and had always ended a relationship when it threatened to become serious. Deep down she felt that she would end up being hurt like her mother.

  As she drove up the hill past Harewood Castle and into Harewood village, she thought with a combination of guilt and frustration about Andy and how she had treated him since he had arrived. She liked him a lot. He was good-looking but not arrogant about it. He had a sense of humour and could take a joke against himself. Unfortunately, he reminded her all too much of her father: another handsome blond-haired Londoner.

  This was why she had gone cold and remote on Andy and it wasn�
��t his fault. He must be extremely confused; she couldn’t respond to someone who was so like the man who had made her life miserable for so many years. But she did like him and the situation made her angry and frustrated. Now her behaviour had pushed him away and he was turning his attention elsewhere.

  She reached Alwoodley Gates and the rural scene abruptly changed as she entered the suburban outskirts of Leeds. She sighed and tried to think positively. One thing was that her experiences were in a big part responsible for her deciding to join the police force. The burning sense of injustice that she felt about her mother’s suffering and the terrible power she saw that the strong wielded over the weak. Maybe she was living out her family battles in her work. So what? She loved the job and she knew she was good at it. Chief Inspector Oldroyd thought so too. She had a great respect for his ability and was slightly in awe of him, as everyone was. But she’d worked with him long enough now to have seen the more vulnerable side beneath the surface of the charismatic detective. She was fond of him and tended to think of him as a father figure.

  She hit heavy traffic by the West Yorkshire Playhouse, but soon she was parking in the basement of the converted warehouse that contained her flat. Once inside, she put on some music and made some coffee, which she sipped as she looked out of her window across the River Aire. The evening light illuminated the river and the people sitting outside at cafés. It might not be Venice, but it looked surprisingly good for a stretch of river that had been filthy and derelict only a few years before.

  She thought about Andy again. This felt like a big opportunity, so what was she going to do about it?

  That evening Oldroyd opened a bottle of red wine and put a Marks and Spencer’s lasagne in the microwave. Although he liked good food, he’d never developed any culinary skills, something which, living alone, he now regretted. He could manage a bit of salad: tomato, rocket, cucumber and red onion, and he’d called for a small baguette on the way home.

  He finished his solitary meal quite quickly; he found it difficult to eat slowly when there was no one to talk to. Half the pleasure in eating was in the conversation. As his waistline seemed to be thickening, he’d recently given up desserts, but he found it hard to cut down on the red wine. He poured himself another glass and took it into the living room with the book he’d borrowed from Gilbert Ramsden.

  He put on a CD of Mozart piano sonatas, which created a relaxing background as he began to examine the book carefully. The sense of age was intensified by the weight of the binding and the thickness of the pages compared with contemporary books. Oldroyd had always liked browsing through old bookshops as much for the atmosphere as for anything else. He remembered the old Thornton’s second-hand bookshop in Broad Street in Oxford, which had a positively Dickensian atmosphere and was full of impressive-looking old volumes just like this.

  He opened it at the first page, which contained a Preface written in typically elaborate Victorian prose.

  Whereupon it has seemed to me that the subterranean explorations of recent times in the Caves of Yorkshire should be recorded for posterity, I have, in a manner which I hope will be deemed modest and of the utmost moral earnestness, taken it upon myself to undertake and present to the world the aforementioned recording.

  And so it went on in its near impenetrable circumlocutory formality, much to Oldroyd’s amusement; he loved this leisurely manner redolent of a much slower age. He read on selectively through verbose and flowery descriptions of the Yorkshire Dales countryside. His description of Gordale Scar was typical:

  The visitor must walk up a path alongside a stream which can be exceedingly muddy in wet weather, but if he persists he will be rewarded, as he turns a sharp corner, with a truly dramatic view, one which has inspired both the poet William Wordsworth and the painter JW Turner. Awe inspiring rocky cliffs dripping with water, overhang a darkening and narrowing path and ahead water cascades through a hole in the rock and over a huge boulder on the floor of this collapsed cavern, for so it is and the imagination is thrilled to contemplate how the stream must once have passed through an enormous dark tunnel to emerge further down into the pleasant grassy fields full of light and tranquillity after its gloomy journey through the depths of the underworld.

  Well, the old boy certainly had some imagination himself, thought Oldroyd, and tremendous enthusiasm. Further on, he found the section where Sir William began to describe the caves of the region in a manner that suggested they were not very well known to the outside world at that time.

  These caves or ‘potholes’ as they are often described in this region, have been known to local people for centuries and held in some fear as the haunt of fairies, goblins or as entrances into the nether regions. Many do not have horizontal entrances, but terrifying vertical openings on the fell sides. These shafts are often concealed by thick moorland grasses and by stunted trees and the unwary traveller can come within a few feet of a shaft dropping hundreds of feet into the darkness without ever realising it.

  He then gave an account of how the speleological endeavours or subterranean explorations, as he called them, began, and prominent in this was Joseph Haverthwaite.

  Haverthwaite, it seemed, was a local blacksmith who was employed by Sir William in his stables and to repair ironwork around the estate. The Victorian gentleman clearly had a high opinion of the skilled worker.

  My admiration for Mr Haverthwaite is of the highest order. His abilities in several fields are most remarkable; not only in his trade as a blacksmith in which he is very skilled but also in cave exploration in which his courage and fortitude are unsurpassed. He is also, in my opinion, a gifted poet. His verse would not be acceptable to many in the established literary circles because he writes using the dialect language spoken in this part of the world by the ordinary people. Notwithstanding this, and in fact because of it, his verse contains an unusual power and verisimilitude and I have included several examples in the present volume.

  Oldroyd applauded Sir William’s defence of the local poet as he carried on his search for material that could help him in the case. Eventually, in the middle of a description of the basic equipment the early explorers used, Oldroyd found what he was looking for.

  Mr Haverthwaite was always indefatigable in inventing solutions to the ever present need for devices which would enhance our speleological endeavours. On one occasion he produced a small iron contrivance, curved to form the appearance of a thick hook. Mr Haverthwaite used these to support ropes in a manner which enabled an explorer to use longer ropes in greater safety. This involved attaching these iron pieces to the wall of a cave and tying the ropes to them. When arranging a steep descent, he would attach a ladder to the hook and a safety rope in case the ladder failed.

  Oldroyd got up and went to his jacket in the hall. He searched in the pocket and brought out a plastic bag. He opened it and handled again the rusty piece of iron recovered from the crime scene. He had carried it around with him since that day, convinced that it was an important clue. Surely this was an example of Haverthwaite’s ‘iron contrivance’? But how did it get into Sump Passage? Oldroyd read on, and luckily the answer was not long in coming.

  Mr Haverthwaite first used these implements in his exploration of Winter’s Gill Hole.

  Oldroyd’s pulse raced. He had discussed Winter’s Gill Hole with Simon Hardiman: it was the adjacent system to Jingling Pot.

  This exploration ended tragically with the death of Mr Alfred Walker. Sadly he was not the only one to die. A year later Mr Harold Lazenby also met his death. Neither body was ever recovered. I was never a party to these explorations of Winter’s Gill Hole. Mr Haverthwaite advised me against it, insisting that it was too dangerous and I believe that, in the end, this cave was abandoned by all explorers, even the most redoubtable.

  Oldroyd paused and laid down the book. That was curious. He realised now what Ramsden had been implying.

  Unfortunately, that seemed to be the end of Sir William Ingleby’s comments on Winter’s Gill. But there must
be more. What about Haverthwaite’s poems? Oldroyd turned back to the section that contained Haverthwaite’s dialect verse. These turned out to be an odd miscellany of ode-like celebrations of the Dales landscape, eccentric bits of dialogue in dialect such as a conversation between a shepherd and a sheep that didn’t want to graze on a certain fell. Then he found a terrifying poem about what it must have been like to go down a deep shaft on the precarious wood-and-rope ladder which Sir William had described, with only one of Haverthwaite’s ‘safety ropes’ to save you if the ladder snapped.

  Dangling on t’Rope

  If thi ladder breaks

  Thi only hope,

  Is to cling on hard,

  To thi safety rope.

  W’i out that ladder,

  Tha’ll swing and dance,

  Out o’er darkness,

  To take thi chance.

  Will that rope hold thi firm

  And save thi precious breath?

  Or will it be a hangman’s noose

  On which tha’ll meet thi death?

  Will thi mates haul thi up

  While tha swings around?

  Grab tha and pull tha

  On to safe, firm ground?

  Or will tha slip into t’blackness,

  Screaming out a long cry,

  As tha falls on to t’jagged stones

  On which tha’ll die?

  It makes tha pause on t’ladder,

  And move on quickly in th’ope,

  That tha’ll not be left th’ere,

  Danglin’ on t’rope.

  Oldroyd felt positively dizzy after reading this. It seemed to carry you out over the void in a startling way. There was something powerful about its rough rhymes and bluntly expressed images.

  Doggedly, he kept on turning the thick leaves of paper and scanning the brown musty pages for information relevant to his theory, and after a while he was rewarded with the discovery of a curious short riddle-like verse.

  Some men say and it maht be true,

  That t’Devil’s Passage can get tha through,

  From Winter’s Gill Hole to Jingling Pot,