The Wood Beyond

ii

Peter Pascoe stood and looked at the mud.

Where the water hit, it seethed and surged and wrinkled and writhed as if alive. He imagined being caught in its glutinous embrace, wrapped round, caressed, held fast and finally drawn down into dark slow-stifling depths. .

He turned away and found himself facing Death.

'Ingenious, though I say it myself,' said Arnold Gentry with a rare flush of enthusiasm. 'Three tanks with graduated filters. This first one is wide mesh. It will catch anything bigger than a half-brick. The second smaller, pebble-size. The third superfine, textile fragments, fingernails, hair even.'

'Great,' said Pascoe whose genuine interest in and admiration for Death's work had established a relationship particularly useful in view of Dalziel's ill-concealed abhorrence of the man. 'There's quite a lot of material to get through though, isn't there?'

He turned his gaze on the great mound of earth brought from Wanwood House and deposited alongside Dr Death's patent sluice.

'We will get through it much more quickly than half a dozen constables crawling around with garden hoes,' said Gentry bridling. 'And infinitely more thoroughly.'

'Yes, yes, of course,' soothed Pascoe. 'My point exactly. I wanted you to know how much we appreciate you taking it on and releasing our men for other enquiries.'

It was his emollient skills that had got him here. He'd turned up at the station that morning in good time, in fact a few minutes early, but any hope he might have nurtured of gaining a few Brownie points vanished when he read the scrawled note on his desk.

Nice of you to show up, especially as we're short-handed. George Headingley fell in a puddle and got himself on the panel with a cold in the head which must be pretty small to get in there beside the bone. If you can spare a moment from your mourning, you might take yourself down to the lab and see what yon mate of yours is doing with the muck from Wanwood. I'm off to see Troll down the knacker's.

Dalziel assumed his subordinates knew everything about all current cases.

Like many of his assumptions, it was self-fulfilling. Pascoe had managed to catch Sergeant Wield on his way out and get a quick update. Wield's résumés were famously more informative than other people's disquisitions. 'Let that bugger run Parliament,' Dalziel had once remarked, 'and they could all go home on a Tuesday, which most on 'em probably do anyway.'

In exchange Pascoe had offered the to him still incredible news that Dalziel might have found himself a lady love. 'You mean yon animal woman?' Wield had interrupted. 'Aye, I thought he fancied her. Mebbe she reckons he's an endangered species. Gotta dash. See you.'

So, reflected Pascoe, might Pheidippides have felt as he staggered through the gates of Athens to see a news placard reading: GOTCHA! Persians Stuffed at Marathon.

He and Gentry stood in companionable silence for a while, watching the water jets wash the first load of earth through the first filter. The level was getting low and various large stones and pieces of wood were becoming visible in the now almost liquid mud. Then something a bit whiter … in fact as the water hit it, very much whiter. . smooth. . bowl-shaped..

'Hold on,' said Dr Death excitedly. 'There's something, let me see..'

He picked up a long bamboo pole with a metal circle and a net on the end and with the expertise of a gillie slipped it beneath the object and lifted it out.

'There we are,' he said with pale delight. 'That should please Mr Longbottom and even Superintendent Dalziel too.'

'Yes,' said Pascoe looking down with a marked lack of pleasure at the human cranium in the plastic mesh. 'I suppose it should.'