Free Malice On The Moors by Graham Thomas Page B

sort of spiritual application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. For the North York Moors, now considered one of Britain's beauty spots, is in reality a devastated wasteland, despoiled bythe same hands that built the first and greatest of the Cistercian abbeys at Rievaulx.
    Starting with the first modest efforts of Bronze Age hunters who began clearing the forests to make hunting easier, followed by Iron Age craftsmen who needed wood to stoke their primitive blast furnaces, the process of deforestation was greatly accelerated by the monks of Rievaulx Abbey who cleared the valleys for cultivation and turned vast herds of sheep loose on the uplands. The great forests were eventually replaced by grass, heather, and bracken—the only plants capable of growing on the impoverished, acidified soils. Nowadays the moors are actively maintained in this condition by a few wealthy landowners for the benefit of sheep and grouse.
    Powell had learned from Robert Walker that the Blackamoor estate comprised some forty-five hundred acres, which included upper Brackendale, most of the village, and two thousand acres of grouse moors. There were a dozen or so tenant farmers like Frank Elger, each farming two hundred or so acres in the dale and grazing their sheep on common moorland. He got the impression from Katie Elger that the position of the tenant farmers was a bit dodgy, depending as it did on general economic conditions as well as the inclinations of the landlord.
    Dickie Dinsdale had, according to Walker, run the estate into the ground through mismanagement, while at the same time raising the rents of his tenants to the point, if one believed Katie, where good farmers were finding it difficult to survive. Hardly a recipe for social harmony. Then Dinsdale turns up dead under circumstancesthat could be considered highly unusual, to say the least.
    Such were Powell's thoughts as he mounted the broad stone steps of Blackamoor Hall. The black-haired woman who answered the door could have been any age from thirty to forty. She had a cadaverous complexion with dark, nervous eyes and spoke with a Spanish accent.
    “Mrs. Dinsdale is expecting me,” Powell said.
    The woman averted her eyes. “Yes, sir. Please come this way.”
    Powell followed her from the entrance hall, through a large high-ceilinged and oddly shabby-looking room— which he guessed had served as a ballroom in better days, complete with spiral staircase—then down a long passage leading to the Tudor wing.
    The woman stopped at a door on the left side of the corridor, knocking lightly before opening it. “Chief Superintendent Powell, madam,” she announced.
    Another woman's voice answered, “Thank you, Francesca.”
    As Powell entered the room—either a large study or a small library—a razor-thin woman with a bouffant hairstyle rose from her writing table to greet him. Behind her, a large window provided a splendid view of the dale below. She extended her hand and smiled pleasantly. “Welcome to Blackamoor Hall, Chief Superintendent. I'm Marjorie Dinsdale.” A trace of an accent indicated that she was no stranger to the sound of London's Bow bells.
    Powell took a seat across the table from his host. Immaculately coiffed and made-up—quite striking in an ostentatious sort of way—Marjorie Dinsdale looked tobe in her late fifties and obviously spent a considerable amount of time and effort on her appearance. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice, Ms. Dinsdale,” he began. “I wish to offer my condolences. I know this must be a difficult time for you—”
    “It's Mrs.,” she interrupted. “I'm not one for political correctness, Mr. Powell.”
    Powell smiled fleetingly. “One has to tread carefully these days, Mrs. Dinsdale,” he said. “I'll try to make this as brief as possible. As I explained on the telephone, due to the unusual nature of your son's accident, I've been sent up from London to assist the local police with their inquiry