“You seem to be an expert, but you don’t sound as if you come from these parts.”

“I don’t. I read up on the area when I came here. It’s got quite an interesting history. Anyway, the flax mill started to lose business – too much competition from bigger operations and from abroad – then old Lord Clifford died and his son wanted nothing to do with the place. This was just after the Second World War. Tourism wasn’t such big business in the Dales back then, and you didn’t get absentees buying up all the cottages for holiday rentals. When someone moved out, if nobody else wanted to move in, the cottage was usually left empty and soon fell to rack and ruin. People moved away to the cities or to the other dales. Finally, the new Lord Clifford sold the land to Leeds Corporation Waterworks. They rehoused the remaining tenants, and that was that. Over the next few years, the engineers moved in and prepared the site, then they created the reservoir.”

“Why that site in particular? There must be plenty of places to build reservoirs.”

“Not really. It’s partly because the other two were nearby and it was easier for the engineers to add one to the string. That way they could control the levels better. But mostly I imagine it’s to do with water tables and bedrock and such. There’s a lot of limestone in the Dales, and apparently you can’t build reservoirs on that sort of limestone. It’s permeable. The Rowan Valley bottom’s made of something else, something hard. It’s all to do with faults and extrusions. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of my school geology.”

“Me, too. When did you say all this happened?”

“Between the end of the Second World War and the early fifties. I can check the exact dates back at the station.”

“Please.” Banks paused and tasted some beer. “So our body, if indeed there is one, and if it’s human, has to have been down there since before the early fifties?”

“Unless someone put it there this summer.”

“I’m no expert, but from what I’ve seen so far, it looks older than that.”

“It could have been moved from somewhere else. Maybe when the reservoir dried up, someone found a better hiding place for a body they already had.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Whatever happened, I doubt that whoever buried it there would have put on a frogman’s outfit and swum down.”

“Whoever buried it?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I’d say it was buried, wouldn’t you?”

Banks finished his pie and pushed the rest of the chips aside. “Go on.”

“The stone slabs. Maybe the body could have got covered by two or three feet of earth without much help. Maybe. I mean, we don’t know how much things shifted and silted down there over the last forty years or more. We also don’t know yet whether the victim was wearing concrete wellies. But it beats me how a body could have got under those stone slabs on the outbuilding floor without a little human intervention, don’t you think, sir?”

It was a blustery afternoon in April 1941, when she appeared in our shop for the first time. Even in her land girl uniform, the green V-neck pullover, biscuit-colored blouse, green tie and brown corduroy knee breeches, she looked like a film star.

She wasn’t very tall, perhaps about five foot two or three, and the drab uniform couldn’t hide the kind of figure I’ve heard men whistle at in the street. She had a pale, heart-shaped face, perfectly proportioned nose and mouth, and the biggest, deepest, bluest eyes I had ever seen. Her blond hair cascaded from her brown felt hat, which she wore at a jaunty angle and held on with one hand as she walked in from the street.

I was immediately put in mind of Hardy’s novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which I had read only a few weeks previously. Like Elfride Swancourt’s, this land girl’s eyes were “a sublimation of her.” They were “a misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface… looked into rather than at.” Those eyes also had a way of making you feel you were the only person in the world when she talked to you.

“Nasty out, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you’ve got five Woodbines for sale, have you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “We don’t have any cigarettes at all.” It was one of the toughest times we’d had in the war thus far: the Luftwaffe was bombing our cities to ruins; the U-boats were sinking Atlantic convoys at an alarming rate; and the meat ration had just been dropped to only one and tenpence a week. But here she was, bold as brass, a stranger, walking into the shop and without a by-your-leave asking for cigarettes!

I was lying, of course. We did have cigarettes, but what small supply we had we kept under the counter for our registered customers. We certainly didn’t go selling them to strange and beautiful land girls with eyes out of Thomas Hardy novels.

I was just on the point of telling her to try fluttering her eyelashes at one of the airmen knocking about the village – holding my tongue never having been my strongest point – when she totally disarmed me with a sequence of reactions.

First she thumped the counter with her little fist and cursed. Then, a moment later, she bit the corner of her lower lip and broke into a bright smile. “I didn’t think you would have,” she said, “but it was worth asking. I ran out the day before yesterday and I’m absolutely gasping for a fag. Oh, well, can’t be helped.”

“Are you the new land girl at Top Hill Farm?” I asked, curious now, and beginning to feel more than a little guilty about my deceit.

She smiled again. “Word gets around quickly, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a small village.”

“So I see. Anyway, that’s me. Gloria Stringer.” Then she held her hand out. I thought it rather an odd gesture for a woman, especially around these parts, but I took it. Her hand was soft and slightly moist, like a summer leaf after rain. Mine felt coarse and heavy wrapped around such a delicate thing. I always was an ungainly and awkward child, but never did I feel this so much as during that first meeting with Gloria. “Gwen Shackleton,” I muttered, more than a trifle embarrassed. “Pleased to meet you.”

Gloria rested her hand palm-down on the counter, cocked one hip forward and looked around. “Not a lot to do around here, is there?” she said.

I smiled. “Not a lot.” I knew what she meant, of course, but it still struck me as an odd, even insensitive, thing to say. I got up at six o’clock every morning to run the shop, and on top of that I spent one night a week fire-watching – a bit of a joke around these parts until the Spinner’s Inn was burned down by a stray incendiary bomb in February and two people were killed. I also helped with the local Women’s Voluntary Service. Most days, after the nine-o’clock news, I was exhausted and ready to fall asleep the minute my head hit the pillow.

I had heard how hard a land girl’s job was, of course, but to judge by her appearance, especially those soft hands, you would swear that Gloria Stringer had never done a day’s hard physical labor in her life. My first thought was an uncharitable one. Knowing farmer Kilnsey’s wandering eye, I thought that, perhaps, when his wife wasn’t around, he was teaching Gloria a new way of plowing the furrow. Though I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, being only sixteen at the time, I had heard more than one or two farmers use the phrase when they thought I was out of earshot.

But in this, as in most of my first impressions about Gloria, I was quite wrong. This freshness in her appearance was simply one of her many remarkable qualities. She could spend the day hay-making, threshing, pea-pulling, milking, snagging turnips, yet always appear fresh and alive, with energy to spare, as if, unlike the rest of us mere mortals, she had some sort of invisible shield around her through which the hard diurnal toil couldn’t penetrate.

On first impressions, I have to confess that I did not like Gloria Stringer; she struck me as being vain, common, shallow and selfish. Not to mention beautiful, of course. That hurt, especially.