The Wood Beyond Read online

  Rebuke? What she’d actually said according to Myra was, ‘Sod off, ghoul.’ Which message it might appear he was passing on to this well-poppied congregation. Ah well. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

  ‘But Ada did not let the past destroy her present. She joined one of the accelerated teacher training courses after the war and despite her late start, she climbed high, finishing as Head of Redstones Junior which I myself had the privilege of attending. As you can imagine, having your gran as head teacher was a mixed blessing. Certainly in school I got no favours, just a first-class education. But outside, I got all the love and indulgence a growing boy is entitled to expect from his gran.’

  He caught Myra’s eye again and read the message clearly. Favourite! So what? Boy with two bossy elder sisters needed an edge somewhere. Another eye was catching his, the crem. super’s, reminding him of his warning that despite the nanny state, dank Novembers still meant frequent hearses and any overrun could quickly blacken up the bypass. Time to wrap it up. Pity. He just felt he was getting into his stride.

  ‘Even after retirement, she remained at the centre of things, as a school governor, a member of innumerable committees, and a tireless campaigner in the corridors of power and on the pavements of protest.’

  Now he was really motoring! Great phrase, that was. Even though getting the rhythm right meant a solecistic drift from the nounal trochee to the verbal iamb. How old Ada would have rapped his knuckles. The crem. super too looked close to physical violence. Big finish!

  ‘I doubt if she went gentle into her good night, but gone she has, and the world is a sadder place for her going. But she left it a better place than she found it, and that would have been the only epitaph she wished.’

  Big finish nothing. Big cop-out was more like it. Ada had had no illusions about progress. Watching the telly peepshow of famine and disaster and war, she used to rage, ‘They’ve learned nothing. Absolutely nothing!’ Oh well. At least he’d taken his poppy out.

  Time for the final music. Myra had gone for Elgar’s Enigma which to Ada’s tin ear probably sounded like bovine eructation. The crem.’s alternatives were all just as classically solemn. Then Pascoe had recalled the one time Ada ever talked about her father, the day he found the photo in the secretaire, and he’d rummaged through the tapes in his car and come up with Scott Joplin. He saw the shock on Myra’s face as ‘The Strenuous Life’ came floating out of the speakers. He’d explain later, sharing his secret knowledge that Ada’s sole recollection of her father – indeed her first recollection of anything – had been of a shadowy figure sitting at an upright piano picking out a ragtime melody.

  So the circle closes … so the circle closes.

  iv

  ‘At his grandmother’s funeral?’ said Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel. ‘You’d think a bugger wi’ letters after his name could come up with a better excuse than that.’

  ‘He did tell you about it, sir,’ said Sergeant Wield, shouting to make himself heard above the lashing rain.

  Dalziel viewed him gloomily through the bespattered car window which he’d lowered by half an inch in the interests of more efficient communication. He was not a man totally insensitive to the comforts of his inferiors, but the sergeant was swathed in oilskins and the Fat Man could see no reason why the torrents niagaraing around their folds should be diverted to his vehicle’s upholstery.

  ‘Aye and my gran told me not to mess around wi’ mucky women and I paid no heed to her either,’ he said. ‘Still, last time he were here, he wasn’t much use, was he? OK, lad. Let’s have it. What’ve we got?’

  ‘Remains, sir.’

  ‘Man? Woman? Child? Dog? Politician?’

  ‘Remains to be seen,’ said Wield.

  Dalziel groaned and said, ‘I hope you’re not letting happiness turn you humorous, Wieldy. You’ve not got the face for it and I’m not in the mood. I were driving home to a warm bed when I were silly enough to switch me radio on and pick up the tail end of this shout. All Control could tell me was there was a body and there was a bunch of animal libbers and it was out at Wanwood. So is this another Redcar or what?’

  Six months earlier in May there’d been an animal rights raid on the laboratories of Fraser Greenleaf, the international pharmaceutical conglomerate, located near Redcar on the North Yorkshire coast. As well as releasing the experimental animals, the raiders had vandalized the premises and, most seriously of all, left security officer Mark Shufflebottom, father of two, lying dead with severe wounds to the head. Several weeks later there’d been another raid, bearing all the hallmarks of the same group, on the research labs of ALBA Pharmaceuticals located on Mid-Yorks territory in a converted mansion called Wanwood House. Happily this time no one had been injured. Unhappily neither the Teeside CID in whose jurisdiction Redcar fell, nor the Mid-Yorkshire team led by Peter Pascoe, had met with any success in tracking down the culprits.

  ‘No, sir. This body’s been here long enough to turn into bones. That’s not to say this couldn’t be the same lot as were here in the summer, though of course it was never established for certain they were the same bunch that raided FG.’

  Wield was a stickler for accuracy, a natural bent refined paradoxically by years of deception. Concealing you were gay in the police force meant weighing with scrupulous care everything you said or did, and this habit of precise scrutiny had turned him into one of the most reliable colleagues Dalziel had.

  But sometimes his nit-picking could get on your wick.

  ‘Just tell us what happened, Wieldy,’ sighed the Fat Man long-sufferingly.

  ‘Right, sir. This group – I gather they call themselves ANIMA by the way – the name’s known to us but not the personnel – sorry – they entered the grounds with the clear intention of breaking into the labs and releasing any animals they found there. But if they were the same lot who were here in the summer, they must have got a bit of a shock as ALBA’s taken some extra precautions since then.’

  ‘Precautions?’

  ‘You’ll see, sir,’ said Wield not without a certain well-concealed glee. ‘And on their way through the grounds they sort of stumbled across these bones.’

  ‘Couldn’t have brought them with them just to get a bit of publicity?’ said Dalziel hopefully.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it, sir,’ said Wield. ‘They kicked up such a hullabaloo that the security guards finally took heed and came out. When they realized what was going off, they took the demonstrators inside. Gather there was a bit of trouble then. They got loose and ran riot for a bit before they were brought under control.’

  ‘Violent, eh? So there could be a link with Redcar?’

  ‘Can’t really comment, sir. Mr Headingley’s up at the house interviewing them. He told me to sort things out down here.’

  ‘Good old George,’ said Dalziel. ‘Perk of being a DI, Wieldy. Start taking an interest in your promotion exams and you could be up there in the dry and warm.’

  Wield shrugged indifferently, his features showing as little reaction to horizontal sleet as the crags of Scafell.

  He knew you didn’t learn things from books, you learned them from people. Like that other George, Creed. He’d pay a lot more attention to his weather forecasts from now on in! Also he knew for a fact that not all the elevated rank in the world was going to keep the Fat Man dry and warm.

  He said, ‘Yes, sir. I expect you’ll be wanting to view the scene before you head up there yourself.’

  It was a simple statement of fact not a challenging question.

  Dalziel sighed and said, ‘If that’s what you expect, Wieldy, I expect I’d better do it. Get me waterproofs out of the boot, will you, else I’ll be sodden afore I start.’

  Watching Dalziel getting into oilskins and wellies through the streaming glass, Wield was reminded of a film he’d seen of Houdini wriggling out of his bonds while submerged in a huge glass jar.

  The car gave one last convulsive shake and the Fat Man was free.

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; ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Where’s it at?’

  ‘This way,’ said Wield.

  At this moment Nature, with the perfect timing due to the entry of a major figure on her stage, shut off the wind machine for a moment and let the curtain of sleet shimmer to transparency.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Dalziel with the incredulous amazement of a Great War general happening on a battlefield. ‘They had Dutch elm disease or what?’

  On either side of the driveway a broad swathe of woodland had been ripped out and this fillet of desolation which presumably ran all the way round the house was bounded by two fences, the outer a simple hedge of barbed wire, the inner much more sophisticated, a twelve-feet-high security screen with floodlights and closed-circuit TV cameras every twenty yards.

  Neither light nor presumably cameras were much use when the wind, as it now did once more, drove a rolling barrage of sleet and dendral debris across this wilderness.

  Wield said, ‘These are the precautions I mentioned, sir. We’ve got duckboards down. Try and stay on them else you could need a block and tackle.’

  Was he taking the piss? The Fat Man trod gingerly on the first duckboard and felt it sink into the glutinous mud. He decided the sergeant was just being typically precise.

  The wooden pathway zigzagged through the mire to avoid the craters left by uprooted trees, finally coming to a halt at the edge of one of the largest and deepest. Here there was some protection from a canvas awning which every blast of wind threatened to carry away along with the two constables whose manful efforts were necessary to keep its metal poles anchored in the yielding clay.

  At the bottom of the crater a man was taking photographs whose flash revealed on the edge above him, crouched low to get maximum protection from the billowing canvas, another figure studying something in a plastic bag.

  ‘Good God,’ said Dalziel. ‘That’s never Troll Longbottom?’

  ‘Mr Longbottom, yes, sir,’ said Wield. ‘Seems he was dining with Dr Batty, that’s ALBA’s Research Director, when the security staff rang him to say what had happened. Dr Batty’s up at the house.’

  ‘And Troll came too? Must’ve been losing at cards or summat.’

  Thomas Roland Longbottom, consultant pathologist at the City General, was notoriously unenthusiastic about on-site examinations. ‘You want a call-out service, join the AA,’ he’d once told Dalziel.

  His forenames had been compressed to Troll in early childhood, and whether the sobriquet in any way predicated his professional enthusiasm for dead flesh and loose bones was a question for psycholinguistics. Dalziel doubted it. They’d played in the same school rugby team and the Fat Man claimed to have seen Longbottom at the age of thirteen devour an opponent’s ear.

  He gingerly edged his way round the rim of the crater and drew the consultant’s attention by tugging at the collar of the mohair topcoat he was wearing over a dinner jacket.

  ‘How do, Troll? Good of you to come. Needn’t have got dressed up, but. You’ll get mud on your dicky.’

  Longbottom squinted up at him. Time, which had basted Dalziel, had wasted him to an appropriate cadaverousness.

  ‘Would you mind staying on your own piece of board, please, Dalziel? Facilis est descensus, but I’m choosy about the company I make it in.’

  Education and high society had long eroded his native accent, but he had lost none of the skill of abusive exchange which form the basis of playground intercourse in Mid-Yorkshire.

  ‘Sorry you got dragged away from your dinner, but I see you brought your snap,’ said Dalziel peering at the plastic bag which contained a cluster of small bones.

  ‘Which I shall need to feast on at my leisure.’

  ‘Looks like slim pickings to me,’ said Dalziel. ‘So what can you give me off the top of your head? Owt’ll do. Sex. Age. Time of death. Mother’s maiden name.’

  ‘It’s a hand, and it’s human, and that’s all I’m prepared to say till I’ve seen a great deal more which may be some time. This one, I fear, like Nicholas Nickleby, is coming out in instalments.’

  ‘Can’t recall him,’ said Dalziel. ‘What did he die of?’

  Longbottom arose with a groan which comprehended everything from the joke to the stiffness of his muscles and the state of the weather.

  ‘Just look at my coat,’ he said. ‘Do you know how much these things cost? I shall of course be making a claim.’

  ‘I’d send it to ALBA then. Your mate, Batty. Do you reckon he keeps anything to drink up there?’

  ‘I should imagine there’s a single methanol in the labs.’

  ‘That’ll do nicely,’ said Andy Dalziel.

  v

  Peter Pascoe could have done without the funeral meats but felt he’d gone as far as he dared in disrupting his sister’s arrangements. In fact it worked out rather well as under the influence of cups of tea and salmon sandwiches the wrinkly clones turned into amiable, intelligent individuals, several of them well below retirement age. Some even went out of their way to compliment him on his address, saying how pleased Ada would have been with the service and how much they’d like something like that when their turn came.

  Myra clearly took all this in because when they’d waved the stragglers goodbye, she said, ‘OK, so as usual you were right.’

  He smiled at her but she wasn’t ready for that yet, and turned back into the old cottage which had been Ada’s home for fifty years.

  ‘Only room for one in that kitchen,’ she said. ‘I’ll do the washing up. You can carry on with your inventory.’

  When she came back into the living room, he was manoeuvring an old mahogany secretaire through the doorway.

  ‘You’re taking that old thing then?’

  ‘Yes. I thought I’d get it on the roof rack now so I can make a quick getaway in the morning. Don’t worry. It’s on the inventory. I’ll get it valued and make sure it goes into the estate.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that … oh think what you will, you always did.’

  She turned away, angry and hurt.

  Oh shit, thought Pascoe. Whatever happened to old silver tongue?

  He reached out and caught her arm and said, ‘Sorry. I was talking like an executor. Maybe a bit like a cop too. Listen, you don’t have to say anything but anything you do say will be taken down.’

  She stared at him blankly and for a second he thought she’d forgotten the grubby little schoolboy joke he’d tried to embarrass her with all those years ago.

  Then she smiled and said, ‘Knickers,’ and through the eggshell make-up he glimpsed the girl who’d been his closest ally in the long war of adolescence. OK, so her motivation had a lot to do with resentment that Sue, the eldest, could get away with shorter skirts, thicker lipstick, and later hours than herself. Whatever the reason, their closest moments within the family had been together.

  ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘Isn’t there anything you’d like?’

  ‘Far too old-fashioned for our house,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Something small, as a memento,’ Pascoe urged.

  ‘No need for that. I’ll remember,’ she said.

  There was something in her tone, not acerbic exactly, but certainly acetic. She’d never been anyone’s favourite, Pascoe realized. Susan had been the apple of their parents’ eye, would perhaps have been their only fruit if their chosen method of contraception had been more efficient. He himself had been Ada’s favourite – or, as he sometimes felt, target. Driven by the loss of two men in her life (three if you counted the disappointment of her own son) she’d focused all her shaping care on her male grandchild, leaving poor Myra to find her own way.

  It had led to marriage with Trevor, the kind of financial advisor who bores clients into submission; an ultramodern executive villa in Coventry, a pair of ultra-neanderthal teenage sons in private education; and a resolve to show the world that what she’d got was exactly what she wanted.

  So, no appetite-spoiling bitterness this, just a condiment sharpness.

  Pascoe s
aid, ‘About the music …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Pete. I’ve said you were right.’

  ‘No, I’d like to explain. Here, let me show you something.’

  He opened the drawer of the secretaire, reached inside, pressed a knob of wood, and a second tiny drawer, concealed by the inlay pattern, came sliding out of the first.

  ‘Neat, eh?’ he said. ‘I found it when I was ten. No gold sovereigns or anything. Just this.’

  From the drawer he took a dog-eared sepia photograph of a soldier, seated rather stiffly with his body turned to display the single stripe on his sleeve. His face, looking directly into the camera, wore the solemn set expression demanded by old technique and convention, but there was the hint of a smile around the eyes as if he was feeling rather pleased with himself.

  ‘Know who this is?’

  ‘Well, he looks so like you when you’re feeling cocky, it must be our great-grandfather.’

  Pascoe couldn’t see the resemblance but felt he’d probably earned the crack. He turned the picture over so she could see what was written on the back in black ink faded to grey.

  First lance corporal from our draft! December 1914.

  Then Pascoe tipped the photo so that it caught the light. There was more writing, this time in pencil long since been erased. But the writer had pressed so hard the indented words were still legible. Killed Wipers 1917.

  ‘All those years and she couldn’t bear to have it on display,’ mused Pascoe.

  ‘All those years and you never mentioned it,’ accused Myra.

  ‘I promised Gran,’ he said. ‘She caught me looking at it. She was furious at first, then she calmed down and made me promise not to say anything.’

  ‘Another of your little secrets,’ she said. ‘The Pascoes must have more of them than MI5.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, trying to keep things light. ‘Anyway, that was when she told me her only recollection of her father was of him playing on their old piano. Her mother must’ve told her it was ragtime, I doubt if Ada could tell Scott Joplin from Janis Joplin. And that’s what made me think of that tape.’