The Wood Beyond

xi

'That, I hope, is the secretaire you mentioned. Or have you gone into the funeral business?' said Ellie Pascoe.

Pascoe, reluctantly acknowledging that the passionate welcome-home embrace was over, followed her gaze to the sheet-shrouded cargo on his roof rack.

'Have no fear,' he said. 'Ada is safely scattered as per wishes, more or less. It was quite entertaining in a macabre way. Give me a hand with this, will you? How's Rosie?'

'At school. Memory that it was her friend Sarah's birthday today coincided with a miracle recovery.'

'Ah,' said Pascoe.

'Ah what? She really wasn't fit to go yesterday.'

'I know she wasn't,' said Pascoe mildly, thinking that such a hint of defensiveness in a suspect would have had him chiselling at the weakness till it gave. 'Here we go. You've got that end? Right.. just let it slide. Great. Et voilai'

Dramatically he whipped the sheet off the secretaire. Ellie regarded it in silence.

'You are dumbfounded with admiration?' he said hopefully.

'You said it was Sheraton.'

'After Sheraton,' said Pascoe.

'About eighty long hard years after.'

Pascoe couldn't argue. Out of the friendly shadows of Ada's living room, the secretaire had lost much of its antique charm and stood forlorn and rather shabby in the cruel November sunlight.

'It's got a secret drawer,’ he pleaded.

He opened it and showed her the photo. She studied it with interest.

'Poor devil,' she said. 'Gosh, doesn't he look like you?'

Pascoe took the picture from her and looked at it again. He still couldn't see it but something in those eyes spoke to him.

'It'll look better inside,' he said, dropping the photo back into the drawer. 'Unless this is the day you've got the Beautiful Homes photographers coming round?'

It was a low shot but she had it coming. Ellie was savage in her mockery of the Good Taste Theme Parks which gleamed at you out of the glossies, but this didn't stop her from being pretty finical about what stood on her floors and hung on her walls.

They carried the secretaire into the house and set it down in the hallway.

'Leave it there for the time being,' said Ellie. 'Hopefully it'll find its own place. Let's have a coffee and you can tell me all about everything.'

She listened alertly to his narrative, laughing aloud from time to time and asking the occasional pertinent question.

'So,' she said. 'Ada ended up as part of a military tableau. Not her intention, I presume.'

'No. I think on the whole she'd have been happier messing up one of the tidier exhibits,' Pascoe admitted. 'She was a lot like you, wanting people to be quite clear what she thought, I mean.'

Ellie considered this. She rarely talked about Peter's family, not because she disliked them (which on the whole she did) but because Peter himself had made them a no-go area. On the surface Ada was the one she had most in common with, but when strong wills clash, common ground can often be a battlefield. Neither was happy about Peter's career in the police force but Ada's objections were the deeper. Ellie had married him because she loved him despite the fact he was a policeman, while Ada felt that all her love and care and hopes for her grandson were betrayed by his choice of career. Ellie, she implied, being the new responsible woman in his life, must bear some of the blame. Such an accusation was an irony which amusement might have rendered barbless had not Ellie surprised in herself a strong resentment which boiled down to simple jealousy that anyone else should dare to imagine they shared her right to criticize her husband! Self-knowledge, she now realized, may bring about changes in the head, but the heart doesn't give a toss for psychology.

The two women had settled into a polite neutrality' easy to maintain as contact between them was minimal. Nevertheless Ellie had encouraged Peter in his attempts to re-establish his old closeness with his grandmother, sensing that Ada was the source of most of the family warmth in his upbringing, but hope of any real rapprochement had died with the old lady's reaction to Rosie's birth.

'A girl,' she said. 'You planning any more?'

'We'll have to see,' said Pascoe.

'Doesn't matter. Maybe it's best you should be the last of the Pascoes. I sometimes wonder if Mother didn't have the right of it after all.'

Slightly enigmatic this last comment might have been, but the general tenor of her indifference to the birth of her great-granddaughter was unmistakable and, in Pascoe's proudly paternal eyes, unforgivable. Hereafter contact was intermittent and formal, which didn't stop him from feeling a tremendous upsurge of guilt at the news of her death and the realization that he hadn't seen her for almost two years.

Ellie had felt neither the indignation nor the guilt. And she would definitely have gone to the funeral, she assured herself, if Rosie's cold hadn't interfered.

Or maybe, she added with that instinctive honesty which kept her certainties this side of fanaticism, maybe I'd have found some other reason, like cleaning an old tennis shoe.

'It really got to her, didn't it?' she said. 'Losing her dad like that in the war. It dominated her life. I hope I'm not that obsessive?'

'We'd better ask Rosie in twenty years or so,' said Pascoe lightly. 'Any calls by the way?'

'From on high, you mean? Yes, naturally. His Fatship rang first thing this morning, asked if you were back yet. Implied that you were an overeducated rat swimming away from an overloaded ship. Something about animals rights and finding bones in a wood?'

'Wanwood House, ALBA Pharmaceuticals, I was there in the summer, remember? I heard on the news some activists had got in the grounds and discovered human remains. So he's missing me? Good! What did you tell him?'

'I said that your family and fiduciary duties were such as would probably detain you in Warwickshire until late this evening at the earliest.'

'Excellent,' said Pascoe. 'Many thanks.'

'For what?'

'For lying for me.'

'Isn't that a wife's duty, lying for her husband, vertically and horizontally?'

'Well, yes, of course,' said Pascoe. 'Tell me, how dutiful are you feeling?'

Before Ellie could reply the doorbell rang.

'Shit,’ said Pascoe. 'If it's him, tell him I'm still fiducing.'

'And your car came back by itself? Good trick.'

Through the frosted panel of the front door, Ellie could see at once it wasn't Dalziel. With a bit of luck it would just be a Jehovah's Witness who could be told to sod off with utmost dispatch. She was feeling pleasantly randy and there was a good hour or more before she needed to think about picking up Rosie from school.

It wasn't a Witness, it was Wendy Walker, looking like a good advert for the afterlife.

'Hi, Ellie,' she said. 'Spare a mo for a chat?'

'Yes, of course,' said Ellie brightly. 'Come in.'

Wendy moved past her and stopped by the secretaire.

'Nice,' she said.

'Make me an offer,' said Ellie. 'Come into the kitchen.'

They sat opposite each other at the stripped pine table.

'Coffee?' said Ellie.

'No thanks. OK if I smoke, but?'

There were several reasons why it wasn't, each of them absolute.

On the other hand, to be asked permission by someone who would have lit up in Buck House without reference to the Queen was a flattery it seemed churlish to deny.

She said weakly, 'All right but I'll open a window.'

It was a counterproductive move, merely adding the risk of primary pneumonia to that of secondary cancer.

Drawing a curtain to cut down the draught, she said, 'Sure you wouldn't like a coffee?'

'To sober me up you mean?' said Wendy aggressively.

'No, I didn't, actually. But do you need sobering up?'

'No. Sorry I snapped. Did have a couple at lunch time but that doesn't make me a drunk.'

'No, of course it doesn't. Was there something particular.. ?'

'We went on a raid last night.'

'Wanwood House? Was that you?'

'You know about it?'

'Only what I heard on the news and that wasn't much.'

'Yeah, I think that fat bastard's put the muzzle on.'

'That won't please Cap.'

'Goose feather up the arse wouldn't please her.'

'I'm not sure it would do much for me either,' said Ellie. 'There was something about a body..'

Wendy told the story quickly, dismissively, scattering more ash than Etna.

Ellie said, 'Good God, Wendy, no wonder you're shook up.'

'Who says I'm shook up?' demanded the smaller woman.

'Well, if you're not, you ought to change your make-up,' said Ellie spiritedly.

'What? Oh yeah.' She managed a faint smile, then went on, 'No it wasn't that, something else. . when they took us inside and Cap ran riot.. look, Ellie, I need an ear. . someone to tell me if I'm being stupid or what … and you said, anything came up, I should let you know, right? Or was that just one of the things you lot say to keep us lot happy?'

'Wendy,' said Ellie dangerously. 'That you lot crap only works when you're up in the fighting line and I'm with a bunch of noncombatants shouting encouragement from the back. This is about friendship or it's about nothing.'

'Yeah, sorry,' said Wendy. 'It's just with your man being a bobby.. he's not at home, is he? I'm not ready…’

As if in answer the door opened and Pascoe appeared.

'Peter,' said Ellie brightly. 'You remember Wendy, don't you? Wendy Walker, from Burrthorpe?'

Burrthorpe. Where he'd almost lost his life down a mine. And almost lost his wife to a young miner.

'Yes, of course. Hi. Keeping well, I hope?'

'Fine,' said Wendy Walker. 'Hey, look at the time. I'd better get going.'

She stubbed her fag in a saucer and stood up.

Pascoe said guiltily, 'Don't rush off on my account.'

She said, 'No, my timing's bad today. Ellie, are you going to the party tonight? Thought I might cadge a lift home afterwards if you were. Buses stop at ten and the bike's a menace when you're pissed.'

'Party?' said Pascoe.

'You know, the Extramural Department's do.'

'But I thought..' He changed his mind about uttering the thought.

Wendy flashed a bright smile and said, 'Cheers then,' and went past him into the entrance hall. Ellie caught up with her on the doorstep.

'You haven't said what you want to talk about,' she said.

'Probably all in my imagination,' said Wendy unconvincingly. 'Look, we'll have a chat at the party, OK? You will be there, won't you?'

She fixed Ellie with those bright unblinking eyes, like a hungry whippet that doesn't know how to beg.

'Yes,' said Ellie reluctantly. 'I'll definitely be there.'

She watched as Walker mounted the dilapidated mountain bike which was her urban transport and stood on the pedals to accelerate away.

'Shit,' said Ellie.

The party in question was basically a celebration of the University Extramural Department's twenty-fifth year of running day-release courses for the National Union of Miners. Ellie had taught on the course briefly, and it was here that had begun the relationship which had caused so much pain. She'd backed off any further involvement in the course after that. Peter had urged her to go to the party, particularly as it wasn't just a celebration but a wake. The present course was the last. After Christmas the NUM wouldn't have enough miners left to make day-release viable. Samson had been brought low. The triumph of Dagon was complete.

But despite her husband's urgings, or perhaps because of them, Ellie had resolved not to go, a decision confirmed by the coincidence of his return from Ada's funeral this same day.

Now the case was altered but not in any way she could explain.

It would be nice, she thought, just now and then, to be like one of those bright-eyed brain-deads in the telly ads who never had a problem more pressing than which pack of chemical crap washed whiter.

But that wasn't an option she had been programmed for.

She turned back into the entrance hall and banged her shin against Ada's secretaire.

'And up you too!' said Ellie Pascoe.