On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill

out making violent falling gestures.
    Skippers and swingers alike keep up a constant chant.
    "One foot! Two foot! Black foot!
    White foot! Three foot! Four foot! Left foot! Right
    foot! No one runs as fast as Benny Lightfoot! OUT GOES SHE!"
    Tony calls out, "Sally!"
    Sally Breen, a stout little girl who lives two doors up, says, "Yes, Mr. Dacre?"
    "You seen our Lorraine?"
    "No, Mr. Dacre."
    "Anyone seen her?"
    The chanting fades away as the girls look at each other. They shake their heads.
    Tony goes back into the house. Elsie is upstairs making the beds. He calls up the stairway, "Just going for a stroll, luv. I want a word with old Joe about the bowling club."
    He goes out of the back door, through the yard, across the common. He's been walking with his daughter often enough to know her favorite route. Soon he is by the dried-up beck and climbing steadily along its bank up the dale.
    After a while when he is sure he is out of earshot of Liggside, he starts calling her name.
    "Lorraine! Lorraine!"
    For a long time there is nothing. Then he hears a distant bark. Tremulous with relief he presses on, over a fold of land. Ahead he sees Tig, alone, and limping badly, coming toward him.
    Oh, now the skylarks like aery spies sing, She's here! she's hurt! she's here! she's hurt! and the dancing butterflies spell out the message She's gone forever.
    He stoops by the injured dog and asks, "Where is she, Tig? SEEK!"
    But the animal just cringes away from him as though fearful of a blow.
    He rushes on. For half an hour he ranges the fellside, seeking and shouting. Finally, because hope here is dying, he invents hope elsewhere and heads back down the slope. Tig has remained where they met. He picks him up, ignoring the animal's yelp of pain.
    "She'll be back home by now, just you wait and see, boy," he says. "Just you wait and see."
    But he knows in his heart that Lorraine would never have left Tig alone and injured up the dale.
    Back home, Elsie, already growing concerned, without yet acknowledging the nature of her concern, goes through the motions of preparing Sunday lunch as though, by refusing to vary her routine, she can force events back into their usual course.
    When the door bursts open and Tony appears, the dog in his arms, demanding, "Is she back?" she turns pale as the flour on her hands.
    All the windows of the house are open to move the heavy air. Out in the road the girls are still at their game. And as husband and wife lock gazes across the kitchen table, each willing the other to smile and say that everything's right, the words of the skipping chant come drifting between them.
    "One foot! Two foot! Black foot!
    White foot! Three foot! Four foot! Left foot! Right
    foot! No one runs as fast as Benny Lightfoot! OUT GOES SHE!"
    5
    Danby, according to a recent Evening Post feature, was that rarest of things, a rural success story.
    Bucking the usual trend to depopulation and decline, new development, led by the establishment of a Science and Business Park on its southern edge, had swollen the place from large village to small town.
    It ain't pretty but it works, thought Pascoe as they drove past the entrance to the park on one side of the road and the entrance to a large supermarket backed by a new housing development on the other.
    It takes more than the march of modernity to modify the English provincial sabbath, however, and the town's old center was as quiet as a pueblo during siesta. Even the folk sitting outside the three pubs they passed, with no more than a faint longing sigh from Dalziel, looked like figures engraved on an urn.
    The main sign of activity they saw was a man scrubbing furiously at a shop window on which, despite his efforts, the words BENNY'S BACK! remained stubbornly visible, and another man obliterating the same words with black paint on a gable end.
    Neither of the detectives said anything till open countryside, moorland now, not pastoral, began to open up ahead once more.
    "This Liggside's right on