Free On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill Page B

was that sort of man. Charismatic, I suppose they'd say nowadays. Or what the young girls would call a hunk."
    Pascoe smiled and glanced surreptitiously at his watch. Local history was fine, but he had responsibilities in the here and now which wouldn't wait.
    "I'm sorry, I'm holding you back," said Mrs. Shimmings.
    He'd forgotten she was a head teacher with an eye long trained for the telltale minutiae of behavior.
    "Nothing I can do till my men arrive," he assured her. "Please, carry on."
    "Well, Marion, that's Benny's mother, and old Mrs. Lightfoot never really got on. She wasn't a country lass, Saul had met her at a dance in town, and now with him gone, there was nothing to keep her in Dendale. It was no surprise when she got a job in town and took the children off. Benny came back from time to time to see his gran. I gathered he wasn't happy. Not that he spoke much to anyone, he was becoming more and more withdrawn. Then it seems his mother met up with a new man. He moved in. I think that ultimately they got married, but only because they'd decided to emigrate, Australia, I think it was, and being married made things easier. Benny didn't want to go. The night before they were due to leave, he took off and came to his gran's. Marion came looking for him. He refused point blank to go back with her and old Mrs. Lightfoot said he could stay with her. So that's what happened. I daresay there were a great number of other things said that shouldn't have been said. Net result was the family left and Benny settled in at Neb Cottage. As far as I can make out, he dropped right out of school. The truancy officer came round several times, and the Social Services, but at the first sight of anyone vaguely official, indeed anyone he didn't recognize, Benny would take off up the Neb, and in the end they more or less gave up, though I'm sure they found some face-saving formula to regularize the situation."
    "How do you regularize truancy?" wondered Pascoe.
    "You don't. Time does that," said Mrs. Shimmings. "I think they must have heaved a mighty sigh of relief in the Education Office when Benny passed his sixteenth birthday. But the psychological damage was done. Benny was wary, elusive, introverted, solitary, devoid of social skills--in other words, in the eyes of most people, plain simple."
    "And could he have been responsible for the disappearances?" he asked.
    "Sex is a strong mover in young men," she said. "But before the attack on Betsy Allgood, I had serious reservations. After that, however ..."
    She shook her head. "You were quite right what you said before. In the end I think a lot of folk were glad to get out of Dendale, glad to see it go underwater. The more biblically inclined saw it as a repeat of the Genesis flood, aimed at drowning out wickedness."
    "Nice thought," said Pascoe. "But wickedness is a strong swimmer. And how did you feel, Mrs. Shimmings?"
    It seemed an innocent enough question, but to his distress he saw her eyes fill with tears, even though she turned away quickly to hide them and went to the teacher's desk.
    "Funny," she said, "while I was waiting for you I went into our little library, and this was the book I picked out."
    She took a book from the desktop and held it up so he could see the title.
    It was The Drowning of Dendale.
    "I know it," said Pascoe. "My wife has a copy."
    It was, as he recalled, a coffee-table book, square shaped and consisting mainly of photos with very little text. It was in two parts, the first entitled "The Dale," the second "The Drowning." The first photograph was a panorama of the whole dale, bathed in evening light. And the epigraph under the subtitle was A happy rural seat of various view.
    "Paradise Lost," said Mrs. Shimmings. "That's how I felt, Mr. Pascoe. It may have been spoiled, but it was still like leaving Paradise."
    A horn blew outside. Glad of a diversion from this highly charged and, he hoped, totally irrelevant display of emotion, Pascoe went to the window.
    They