The Wood Beyond

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.

'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.