Crime stories you can actually follow.

I have been asked, more than once, why an engineer would write any of this down. The honest answer is that I am sixty-two, my hands are no longer steady enough for drawing, and there is one fortnight of my working life I have never been able to file away. It was the last fortnight of a village called Ellerdale, at the head of the Washburn, in the late summer of 1966. I was the resident engineer for the Northern Joint Water Board, and it was my job to see the valley drowned.

By the middle of August the dam was finished. It sat across the bottom of the dale like a grey wall that had always been there, a long curve of concrete with the draw-off works set into its face, and when the evening light came down the valley it turned the colour of a wet slate roof. Above it the land was already being prepared for water. The hedges had been grubbed out, the trees felled and burned, the field walls breached so the water would not trap air behind them. The graves had gone the year before, to a new cemetery on the moor. The families had mostly gone too, some to the board's New Houses at Kettle Bridge, up on the hillside, some to Leeds and Bradford, a few farther. What remained was the shell of a place, and the handful of people who had not yet been able to make themselves leave it.

I lodged in the end room of the board's site office, a timber hut by the dam. I was thirty-four. I had come from Manchester eighteen months before with a good degree, a better slide rule and no idea at all how to talk to people who had lived in one valley for three hundred years.

They were polite to me. I want to be fair about that, because what follows does not always show them in a good light. Nobody in Ellerdale was ever rude to me. They nodded in the lane and said "Mr Marsh" and asked after the weather. But nobody, in eighteen months, asked me into their house, and when I came into a room the talk always changed to something else. I was the man who had come to drown them, and they had decided, as a village, to treat me the way you treat weather you cannot do anything about.

I understood that, or I told myself I did. The board had won its inquiry in 1959. There was nothing anyone in Ellerdale could do about the reservoir, and they had done it anyway: petitions, letters to Members of Parliament, a public meeting in the chapel that went on until midnight. They had lost. Now they were being paid for it, house by house, field by field, and the man who had fought hardest for them was the man who had agreed the figures.

His name came up in every conversation I had in the valley, sooner or later. He had spoken for the village at the inquiry. He was a land agent, a chapel warden and a parish councillor, and when the fight was lost he had been the one who sat down with the board and turned grief into numbers. People said his name the way they said the name of a doctor.

I had dealt with him only by letter until that summer. On the Friday before the bank holiday a note came to the site office in a careful, old-fashioned hand. The final schedule of valuations was ready, it said. Would I care to go through it with him in his office on Monday, before it went to Leeds? The village, the note said, would rest easier if the board's own engineer had seen the figures with his own eyes.

I remember being flattered. It was the first invitation I had received in Ellerdale.