To Johnny and to the circle of his professional colleagues who had been pressed through a similar mould, ‘peace women’ came straight from hell, dangerously individualistic, impossible to neutralize by romance – the rocky outcrops above the ground that connected straight to their most deeply buried prejudice. They stereotyped them and derided them and so had he.
Until now.
These two didn’t fit the preconception. They were both funny, smart and well informed. He enjoyed talking to them, Margo with her slightly cynical wisdom and Heather with her flashes of burning conviction. Heather in particular, he would have to admit. He found, in a reverse of the usual process, that he was dressing her mentally in some expensive high-fashion silk creation with an extravagant hat for Ascot or Cheltenham, decorating her face in Knightsbridge make-up, creating a more familiar illusion and then snapping back to reality to find he preferred her as she was in jeans and a floppy sweater.
‘Jesus Christ! Have you read this?’ Margo said savagely, sitting up and holding out the paper. ‘Criminal trespass. They’re bloody well talking about tightening it up all over again, so anyone who trespasses on anyone else’s land at any time runs the risk of being arrested. Forget all that cant about “disrupting legal activity”, they want to make it into a blanket ban. Can you believe it?’
She held it out to Heather who read rapidly through it, exclaimed in indignation and passed it to Johnny. He looked at it with suitable expressions of outrage, was starting to hold it out to give back when a name jumped out at him from the article under it and he looked at it again.
TOP SCIENTIST FOUND DEAD the headline read, then underneath followed a story which drew his eyes to it, hypnotizing him and seeming to suck the surrounding noise out of the air so that he and the paper existed in a tiny cold vacuum.
The body of top chemist Jean Davies, 45, was found in her car yesterday at a well-known Lancashire beauty spot. A hose led in through the car window from the exhaust pipe. Miss Davies, who was employed by PBD Biosystems of Flaxmore, a subsidiary of GKC International, was one of Britain’s leading specialists in food technology. Police said there were no suspicious circumstances.
Johnny saw again in his head a letter – a letter he had taken from Matthew Quill’s files at Queen Victoria College, a letter that started ‘Dear Matthew’ and went on to say: ‘If I find any evidence here that your suggestion has any basis in fact, I will certainly help you with your investigation.’
‘What did you see?’ said Heather, curiously, as he gave the paper back to Margo.
‘Oh… I thought I saw a name I knew, but it wasn’t.’
It was another fine day and they left the pub after a good breakfast, Heather looked longingly at the track leading north.
‘It’s almost irresistible,’ she said, ‘Wensleydale and all that. I wish we had a week.’
‘Come on,’ said Margo, ‘you’re on duty tonight.’
‘Don’t remind me.’
‘Is it hard work?’ said Johnny.
‘At the Hall? You could say that. These are kids who’ve been in more trouble than you’d believe. They only get sent to us if everyone else has given up. You have to have your wits about you.’
‘Sounds like they need a good thrashing,’ he said and he was aware as soon as the words were out of his mouth that this was just the sort of thing he shouldn’t be saying.
‘Nooo,’ said Heather, putting at least two syllables into the word and looking puzzled. ‘That’s certainly not what they need.’
It was the same look she’d given him the previous evening when they’d sat down at the table and he had ushered them both into their seats just as he would have done with some vapid Honourable at Simpsons.
‘Only joking,’ he said.
Margo was slightly ahead, swinging along, retracing yesterday’s footsteps. Heather wondered if she was leaving them together on purpose. ‘It’s the thrashings that probably started it. We have to break the cycle.’ She studied him and he looked eager, ignorant, trying to understand. ‘Why are you here?’ she said. ‘Why are you bothering with us?’
He looked startled and suddenly vulnerable and she thought: Perhaps Margo’s right. Perhaps he is just lonely.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘that wasn’t called for. Don’t start getting at my boys, though.’
They walked in silence for a while.
‘They come from families which were never families the way you know them,’ she said in the end when he made no move to change the subject. ‘All their roads are closed. There’s no reality outside crime and the dole and if it’s OK for your dad to thrash you, it’s OK for you to do some thrashing too. So don’t try to tell me there’s no link between crime and unemployment.’
It jarred with everything he’d ever been given to believe. As soon as he had been old enough to read long words, Lady Viola had made him read her Telegraph front page stories – questioning him to ensure he drew the proper inferences, seeking to graft its opinions directly into what she regarded as his inadequate brain. What Heather had just said was anathema to that version of him, but her sincerity carried him along and somewhere inside him a suppressed person opened long closed ears and gave a small cheer. That surprised and disconcerted him and, dealing with that, he didn’t answer.
They stopped for a breather back on the top of Pen-y-ghent and Margo sat next to Heather. ‘I forgot to tell you. Dorrie and Mo both said they’d seen new footings being dug the other side of the Saddlebush bunker,’ she said.
‘What sort of size?’
‘They couldn’t tell, there’s no easy way through there because there’s three cameras looking at it and they’ve got vibration alarms all over that middle fence.’
‘So we can’t see,’ Heather mused. ‘That’s a shame.’
Johnny said, ‘What is?’ without putting too much interest into his voice.
‘Nothing much. Just Ramsgill Stray business.’
‘I’d really like to see it,’ he said, and Heather almost giggled, trying to imagine what the other women would think of this correct, polite, expensive intruder in their midst. A sports car, Ray-Bans and a flying jacket. Still, she supposed, the last two were things he maybe actually needed, being a pilot.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘how badly do you want to see it?’
‘You’ve got me interested. I could come up next weekend maybe. Perhaps during the week even. I haven’t got much on right now.’
‘Tell me, Johnny. What happens if you try and fly over a place like the Stray?’
Chapter Eight
Two cars and three people backtracked out of Malham, winding down the valley back into a lower and more complicated world. In the Citroen, as soon as they were out on the road, seeing Johnny accelerating away with a wave, Margo said: ‘Well? What do you think of him?’