The Wood Beyond

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The sluices of Death filtered slowly, but they filtered exceeding small, and Gentry displayed his trawl with a smile of satisfaction like moonlight on the Aral Sea.

'Doesn't look much,' said Dalziel.

He was right. On the table were four dishes, three containing coins and one containing some small pieces of metal.

'You are right,' said Gentry, 'though the paucity of material may be in itself as significant as a plenitude.'

'Eh?' said Dalziel with the scornful suspicion of a man being offered a cut-price diamond tiara at a car-boot sale.

'First, the coins,' said Gentry. 'Quite a span. Here we have a real antiquity, a Jacobean groat, that is, a four-penny piece, possibly quite valuable. And here at the other end of the temporal scale, a 1955 penny with, in between and perhaps most interesting of all, seven gold sovereigns.'

He paused for effect.

Dalziel said, 'Fucking marvellous. I'll get on to Missing Persons and see if they've got owt on a 300-year-old miser who's gone walkabout.'

Gentry, whose established response to Dalziel's sarcasm was to take it literally, though whether this was a gambit or just natural pedantry no one had ever determined, said, 'To assume that all these coins, or indeed any of them, spilled from the pockets of the deceased wouldbe rashly predicative. Particularly in view of the evident absence of any pockets.'

'You what?'

'The search of the telluric material continues, but I think I can confidently predict that we are not about to find any traces of the various fibres and fasteners invariably present in human attire, not even any of the nails, leather or lace-eyelets component in footwear.'

Dalziel digested this then said, 'Champion! So it's a very old miser who went around bollock naked and presumably kept his money up his jacksie!'

'Eductions are your department, superintendent,' said Gentry. 'I merely present discoveries and facts.'

'Oh aye? What's these facts then?' said Dalziel peering down at the final dish.

'As you can see there are two pieces of metal. This one is quite clearly part of the clasp of a small purse or wallet or some such receptacle. The other is a mere shard, of what it is not possible to say, though a preliminary examination suggests it may have become fragmented from its original mass by explosive pressure.'

'You mean, like part of a bullet or something?' said Dalziel without enthusiasm.

'If I had meant that, I would have said that,' said Gentry. 'The only other discovery that may or may not be pertinent is of various pieces of masonry which were removed separately, of course, not sluiced. Preliminary examination of the remnants of mortar suggests a structure of some antiquity.'

'Haven't come across an inscription, have you?' asked Dalziel hopefully. 'Something like, "Here Lies Old Tom, God Rest His Rotten Soul"?'

'An interesting speculation but no, we have seen nothing to suggest this was a tomb.'

'And that's the lot?'

'Except of course for the bones.'

'Bones? I don't see no bones?'

'As instructed, I dispatched all osseous and organic matter directly to Mr Longbottom,' said Gentry frostily.

'Did that include a jawbone?'

'Indeed it did.'

'Well, thank God for small mercies. You got a phone?'

He rang the Path. Lab. but all he got via an assistant who'd been instructed to pass it on verbatim was the message that he would be told what there was to tell as soon as there was anything to tell, and that was likely to be later rather than sooner if the necessary work was further interrupted by unnecessary phone calls.

'Tell him, up yours too,' said Dalziel banging down the phone and glowering at Gentry. His inclination was to exit on a piece of fine abuse but he didn't bother. Why fire Parthian shots at a brick wall?

He went back to his office, finding occasion to shout at nearly everyone he met on his route through the building which wasn't a great number as the first bellow created a shock wave which sent all who heard it scurrying for cover.

Why was he in such a foul mood? he asked himself. A possible murder case that was moving too slow for his liking? Hardly. He'd had far more fretful cases than this, with Desperate Dan on his back and blood and guts everywhere! In fact at the moment, Wanwood apart, there was precious little of any import apart from the usual break-ins, muggings, and assaults, on CID's books.

So what was the problem?

Cap Marvell was the problem, just as she'd been this morning. Then he'd resolved not to go round to her flat for lunch, but somehow he'd ended up going, and he'd got his jollies which he had no complaint about — which in fact were of such a quality that a man might spend a long weekend in Bangkok without finding their equal — but also, without intending to, against all his intentions, and despite his continued silence on the subject of her whisky, he'd got in deeper.

In a way, that bloody Walker lass was to blame. Without her intervention, it would have been interesting to see if the after-bed afterglow would have survived another vegetarian lunch. Instead he'd finished up at the hospital being given orders like he was a.. what? Husband? … Hardly! Toy boy?.. Jesus!.. Partner?.. That's what they called 'em nowadays, wasn't it?. . Sounded like some tax-fiddling dodge in an iffy company … How about friend?

Nowt wrong with that, was there? A man needed friends. What was he making all the fuss about any road? Two mature people — she were near on old as he was — both knowing the score — no need to be mooning around like some kid whose balls had just dropped.

He found he was feeling guilty now about his uncharitable thoughts towards Wendy Walker. Where the hell was all this guilt coming from? If I go on like this I'll be kissing the Pope's ring, he told himself.

It seemed easier to salve the sore by picking up the phone and ringing the hospital to see how Wendy was.

Still hadn't recovered consciousness, they told him. Prognosis unchanged, except that the longer the worse. Next he got hold of Dennis Seymour who also had little to report except the possibly significant negative that there were no signs of hard braking on Ludd Lane, suggesting whoever hit her hadn't responded at all to the contact.

'Could be he was so well pissed he didn't even notice,' said Seymour.

'That makes it better, does it?' growled Dalziel. 'Keep me posted.'

An hour later the CID fax machine pumped out Troll Longbottom's preliminary report on the Wanwood bones.

Aided by Dr Death's sluices, he had got together an almost complete skeleton with the exception of the left fibula, the right ulna and various phalanges, the absence of which was probably down to the depredation of the local fauna.

The skeleton was of a man, five feet eight or nine inches tall, slight build, in his twenties, with some evidence of calcium deficiency suggesting dietary limitations in childhood but stopping well short of the level of deprivation which would have caused rickets.

The skull fracture already noted was confirmed as a possible cause of death, though by no means certain. There was evidence of other recently healed damage to the left leg, ribcage and shoulder such as may have been occasioned by a severe beating, but which was certainly not cotemporal with death. The damage to the shoulder was such as would have severely limited movement of the left arm.

The jawbone was less helpful than might have been hoped. There had been three extractions and there was some sign of decay in one or two of the surviving teeth, but no filling work which would have helped with the dating. This suggested that the man had lived in an era, and possibly a class, in which extraction was the first rather than the last option when toothache struck.

On the basis of the general condition of the bones and such other evidence as they presented, Longbottom put the date of death at somewhere between forty-five and ninety years.

'Shit and derision!' exclaimed Dalziel. 'The bugger's doing it on purpose!'

He rang the lab again and this time refused to be fobbed off.

'What the devil do you want now, Andy?' demanded the pathologist. 'You've got my report.'

'Preliminary, it says.'

'There are other tests, but I don't anticipate any major changes.'

'Not even the lower limit. Up it from forty-five to fifty say? Or better still, sixty? Or cause of death. Couldn't you be even vaguer? Mention the possibility of natural causes?'

'Andy, I can understand your anxiety to shift this one out of the realm of the investigable, but at the moment that's really the best I can do. Hasn't Gentry come up with anything which could point to a more precise date?'

Glumly Dalziel described Dr Death's findings.

'Interesting,' said Longbottom. 'You know it used to be claimed that in I think it was King Alfred's time a naked virgin carrying a bag of gold could walk the length of England unmolested. Perhaps this chappie was trying to repeat the experiment and made it as far as Mid-Yorkshire before he failed. Wouldn't be the first refugee from the South it happened to.'

'Very funny,' said Dalziel. 'Except that, if the sovereigns are his, he didn't fail, did he? I mean, he wasn't robbed. And it doesn't look as if he had them concealed about his person.'

'True. Well, there's your line. If the sovs were his, that could help date him. If I'm right, they had gone out of general circulation by the twenties, so we'd be getting to the far end of my limits. And if he wasn't robbed, then one motive for fatal assault goes. Perhaps he was a naturist bathing in some woodland pool when he had an accident. Perhaps he'd been up at the big house rogering the mistress when the master came home. Wouldn't be the first Jack the Lad to exit in the buff, clutching the family jewels in one hand and whatever he valued second highest in the other.'

'You've been reading too many dirty books,' said Dalziel. 'Dental records, they'd help, right?'

'To confirm identification, of course they would. Except that you don't have any identification to confirm, and in any case, if as seems probable this chap is prewar, I doubt if his records are still lying about, even supposing he didn't just have his extractions done by the local vet in the first place.'

'Thanks a lot,' said Dalziel. 'I can see why you specialize in dead 'uns, Troll. Don't have to worry about cheering them up.'

He put down the phone. It rang almost immediately.

'Seymour, sir. We've just had word on Walker's bike from Forensic. No sign of any paint or other traces from the contact vehicle, but the front wheel had damage consistent with being run over by a car wheel.'

'Great, that helps a lot,' said Dalziel.

'Yes, sir. I mean, no. I mean, maybe. . look, the thing is, sir, if the car actually ran over the bike, how come we found it in the dyke thirty feet away from the woman?'

'Bugger who hit her hoyed it there so's anyone else passing wouldn't notice the accident,' suggested Dalziel.

'Yes, sir. Except that, as I explained earlier, there aren't any traces on the road of a car braking violently. And if the vehicle did actually run over the bike, it would have been dragged along the surface, leaving very distinct marks in the tarmac.'

'So what is it you're suggesting, lad?'

'Well, maybe Wendy Walker was knocked down somewhere else and the driver decided he'd rather she were found a lot further away from his home, say. Or.. '

'Let's have it, lad.'

'Or she wasn't knocked down at all, but someone would like it to look like that.'