The Wood Beyond

iv

Last time Pascoe had been at Wanwood House the old woodland had been whole. Nothing he'd heard about the cordon sanitaire had prepared him for the swathe of muddy desolation now ripped through its heart.

He stopped the car and got out to take a closer look, venturing onto a duckboard, but starting back sharply as it threatened to sink beneath him.

"Morning, sir,' said a voice.

He turned to find a man in TecSec's green uniform watching him.

"Morning,' said Pascoe. 'My God, did we really send men to fight in this?'

'Aye, and things haven't changed so much in eighty years that the bastards wouldn't do it again if the need arose. Thank God for choppers and tactical nukes, say I.'

Pascoe looked with interest at this man who'd so easily picked up his reference. The scarred face returned his gaze unblinkingly.

'DCI Pascoe, here to see Dr Batty,' he said offering his hand.

'Yes, I know. They rang from the gate. Patten, in charge of security. When you didn't show in half a minute, I thought I'd better check.'

'In case I got bogged down?' smiled Pascoe disengaging from the handshake which threatened to become macho. 'You interested in the Great War? I noticed you picked up the reference to Passchendaele.'

'Kigg. General Kiggell, Haig's CGS,' said Patten. 'My granddad quoted it so often, I'd be ashamed not to know it. Ended up claiming he was actually there when it was said, but I doubt it. He was certainly in the battle though, if that's what you can call it.'

'Which mob?'

'Wyfies.'

'Good lord. My great-grandfather too.'

'Oh yes? Mebbe they knew each other,' said Patten indifferently. 'Dr Batty's in a staff meeting just now but shouldn't be long. Wondered if you'd fancy a coffee with me and my partner, Captain Sanderson.'

'That would be nice,' said Pascoe as they got into the car. 'Captain, you say. Military or naval?'

'Army. Same mob as me.'

'Would that be the Wyfies too? I mean the Yorkshire Fusiliers since the reorganization.'

'That's right,' said Patten.

'So you're keeping up the family tradition, Mr Patten?'

'Aye. Fourth generation of service. Not that it counted for much when they started slimming down. Loyalty's still one-way traffic, Mr Pascoe. Like it was at Passchendaele.'

'Wasn't it always so?'

'No. Time was when soldiers loved their generals. Alexander, Caesar, the old Iron Duke even, and he was a right bastard by all accounts. Not because they didn't get the lads killed, or have them lashed, or feed them weevils, but 'cos when push came to shove, the generals were on the same side as the men, often at their side, up to their knees in the same fucking mud.'

'And they weren't in the Great War?' prompted Pascoe.

'Not the way my granddad told it, and not the way the old boys at the reunions remembered it. Politicians and profiteers ran that show, and the generals, most on 'em, were in their pockets, or too damn scared or stupid to stand up and say, enough's enough. After it were over, they made Haig an earl and gave him a hundred thousand pounds. A florin a head for the lads who were dead, my granddad used to say. He was no politician, old Doug, but by Christ he made his profit.'

'But lessons were learned, weren't they?' urged Pascoe curious to see how far this ex-soldier's resentment would take him.

'Some,' admitted Patten grudgingly. 'Last lot were better by all accounts. But it's still the politicos that call the shots. Or when they need us, like the Falklands, it's all Land of Hope and Glory and thank you, Mr Atkins, but two minutes' peace and the word comes from Westminster, start sacking the sods.'

'Being made redundant and being sent over the top in the Salient aren't quite the same thing,' said Pascoe gently.

'Same kind of people not giving a fuck who gets hurt or how many,' retorted Patten. 'If they'd tried it on with the Iron Duke, he'd have sent the Guards down Whitehall with bayonets fixed. Nothing like cold steel when there's a shortage of backbone. Might still work too, if only we had someone with the guts to try it.'

Pascoe made a mental recording of all this for later retailing to Ellie as yet another example of how an apparently shared indignation could lead to such disparate ends. Patten's revulsion at the unnecessary slaughter of Passchendaele led him to advocate a military dictatorship! While his own led him to. . what? Pacifism? No. He believed he would fight in a just cause. Antimilitarism then? Certainly, but not of the kneejerk variety. The country needed its armed forces, so long, of course, as they were kept under the control of the democratically elected government. In other words, politicians. In other words, the kind of 'control' which, in Patten's eyes, led directly to the carnage at Passchendaele..

'We're here, sir,' said Patten.

They had arrived at the front of the house. Pascoe realized he had parked the car on automatic pilot and was now sitting staring vacantly out of the window and into his thoughts, while the TecSec man stood waiting by the open door.

'Yes, of course. Sorry.' He got out and looked up at the lowering façade. 'Not a very welcoming place, is it? I can see why it didn't survive as a private hospital. Perhaps that's where those bones came from. Patient trying to escape.'

'Anything more on that, sir?'

'Oh, enquiries are proceeding,' said Pascoe vaguely.

'Oh yes?' Patten smiled cynically. 'Used to get that kind of bromide in the army, usually meaning we're lost.'

'I wouldn't say lost,' said Pascoe. 'But certainly still feeling our way.'

'Well, if you're serious about that body mebbe having something to do with the hospital, then you've come to the right spot,' said Patten leading him round the side of the house.

'I doubt it. Not unless you've got their records stashed away in a cellar.'

'That's more or less what I do mean,' replied Patten to his surprise. 'Can't swear it's the records, but I do know that when we were checking the place over last summer with a view to making it secure, I found a cellar full of rusty old filing cabinets jammed full of junk.'

'Really?' said Pascoe. 'Now that I would like to see. If it could be arranged.'

'No problem. But let's have that coffee first.'

He ushered Pascoe through a side door and into the TecSec office where a rather old-fashionedly smooth man he guessed to be Captain Sanderson was sitting behind a desk. He rose smiling and offered his hand.

'Peter Pascoe, I presume. Heard about you. Had the pleasure of meeting your boss yesterday. Broke the mould making him, I should think.'

He raised one eyebrow quizzically, a trick Pascoe guessed he practised in front of the mirror.

'Mr Dalziel, you mean? He is certainly unique.'

'And you're certainly diplomatic,' laughed Sanderson. 'Des, why don't you rustle us up some coffee?'

Partners they might be, but it was still the sergeant who brewed up, Pascoe noted.

'Take a seat, Mr Pascoe. Tell me, does a visit from a superintendent one day and a chief inspector the next mean that things are getting better or worse?'

'Depends what things you had in mind,' said Pascoe.

'Bones-in-the-wood sort of things,' said Sanderson.

'I see. Then it depends what you mean by better and worse.'

'Well, from my point of view, having the contract for security here at Wanwood, better would be if you told me that you'd decided the bones belonged to some old tramp who'd dossed down in the wood and passed away from natural causes. Worse would be if you decided there was a crime here which needed investigation. And worst of all would be if you suspected there might be more bodies out there and were planning to instigate a full-scale excavation programme.'

Patten put a cup of coffee in front of Pascoe and offered him milk and sugar. He shook his head and sipped the bitter black liquid.

'In other words, the less publicity the better?'

'You've got it.'

'Why worry? I should have thought that your only real quarrel was with the animal rights people, and from that point of view, ALBA's little secret has been out since the raid in the summer.'

'True,' said Sanderson. 'But as you probably know from police experience, there's a difference between a target and a symbol. Aldermaston, Porton Down, Greenham Common, none of them unique in what went on there, but they each became a symbol for the whole and thus the object of continuous attention from the protesters. We can deal with the occasional hassle, but we don't want to end up as everyone's favourite target.'

'I'm pleased to meet such concern for an employer,' murmured Pascoe. 'A more cynical approach might have been to rub your hands and say, the more hassle ALBA get, the more they'll need to shell out on security. After all there's still a fair stretch of ground untouched out there. Plenty of room for a moat, say. Or a hundred-foot wall.'

'Oh dear. Do I detect disapproval of what we've done to the wood?' said Sanderson smiling.

'I'm fond of trees,' admitted Pascoe.

'And animals too, I daresay. How do you feel about their use in medical research, chief inspector? I only ask because as an old army man, I appreciate how difficult it can be sometimes when there's tension between personal feelings and official orders.'

The tone was sympathetic and sincere but nonetheless Pascoe knew he was being mocked.

He finished his coffee and said carefully, 'Such a question might have been pertinent last summer when I was here investigating the raid on the labs which resulted in your firm's employment, Captain Sanderson. But as my present investigation is concerned only with the remains discovered in the wood, and the head of ALBA himself has assured me he has no wish to prosecute the animal rights group involved, your question is, in one sense at least, impertinent.'

'Slap goes my wrist,' said Sanderson, untroubled. 'But we mustn't keep you from your duties, chief inspector. Are you looking for Dr Batty? He seems a trifle busy just now.'

He glanced at the bank of TV screens on one of which Batty could be seen at work with several other white-coated figures in a lab.

'No hurry,' said Pascoe. 'Mr Patten, you said something about a cellar. .?'

Sanderson shot Patten an enquiring glance.

'Them old filing cabinets,' explained the ex-sergeant. 'Mr Pascoe's interested in the place when it were a hospital.'

'Ah yes. Because of the bones. Good thinking, though I fear you'll find it dusty work. Perhaps you'd care to borrow one of our uniforms?'

'No, thanks,' said Pascoe. 'I tend to think more clearly in plain clothes.'

Ten minutes later he was regretting his smart answer; in fact he was regretting that Patten had ever mentioned the cabinets. He'd feared the worst when the man had led him via progressively deteriorating corridors out of the hi-tech reconstructed regions of the house into what was a pretty well untouched Victorian back kitchen overlooking a bin-strewn yard. Memories of the Wyfies museum in Leeds came to his mind, and when the TecSec man pushed open a cellar door, he wouldn't have been surprised to hear the crump of shells and the stutter of machine-gun fire drifting up the dark steps. In the event he found himself surrounded by the past in a different form, a henge of rusty filing cabinets coated in dust, debris and spiders' webs, and lit by a single bulb in a low ceiling.

He took a deep breath of the dank air in an effort to control his incipient claustrophobia. Patten had promised to tell him as soon as Batty became available. He hoped to hell it wouldn't be long.

He pulled open a drawer at random and found himself looking at a pile of shredded paper. This cabinet had rusted so badly that mice or, worse, rats had been able to force a way through the decaying metal and chew away to their hearts' content. He turned to another. The same. Ah well, he thought, at least I tried. One more like this and I'm out of here.

But the third, alas, had held fast and the files were complete. He opened one and read: Major Quinnel David Andrew. Admitted August 30th 1916.

Jesus wept! he thought. Did everything lead back to this fucking war?

He read on. These were case notes. The major had received severe damage to both legs in a shell blast near Albert, been treated first at a field hospital, then transferred to a base hospital near Boulogne for preliminary surgery, returned to London for more work at the Charing Cross, and finally been shipped up to Yorkshire for post-operative treatment and convalescence.

All the other notes were concerned with injured officers too and Pascoe had guessed what the situation was even before he hit upon the earliest files of them all.

One of the many areas of unpreparedness in the Great War had been in medical provision. Not even the most Jeremianic of prophets had foreseen the tidal wave of wounded men which would swamp the country for four long years. All over the British Isles the upper classes had seen where their patriotic duty lay and had offered their second, and even their third, though rarely their fourth, houses as temporary hospitals, clinics and rest-homes. And not just the upper classes. The nineteenth century had seen the rise of a new and powerful class, the captains of industry who, having imitated their betters in the purchase or construction of their own country houses, were not slow to follow this new aristocratic example.

One noble art they had not yet learned, because its breeding ground is assurance rather than aspiration, was that of doing good by stealth, and all the early correspondence on the transformation of Wanwood House from country seat to hospital for wounded officers contained a modest reference to the generosity of its owner.

'Well, well, well,' said Peter Pascoe as he read the owner's name.

'Indeed I hope that's how I find you, detective chief inspector,' said a voice from the doorway.

Startled he turned, and found himself looking into the smiling face of David Batty.

'They told me you were down here,' said the doctor. 'So I thought I'd descend and see if I could help you.'

'Not unless you've been superefficient and had all the info on these files transferred to discs.'

'Sorry. Nothing to do with us, this lot. I've been meaning to get these cellars cleaned out ever since we got established here. We could do with the storage space.

What are you hoping to find anyway? Reports of a missing patient who might have wandered off and snuffed it in the woods?'

'Something like that. But I think I'll leave it to someone with a more clerical cast of mind and less fear of dark confined places.'

He pushed the drawer shut and joined Batty at the door. As they went up the stairs, the doctor said, 'You did sound as if something had caught your attention just now. All those wells.'

'Just a name. Funny, you come across a name you haven't heard before, then lo and behold, up it pops again almost immediately.'

'And the name?'

They had emerged into the stone-flagged rear hallway from which the cellar steps descended. A shaft of daylight streamed through a high window and Pascoe positioned himself beneath it like a pitman stepping into a shower.

'Grindal,' he said. 'Arthur Grindal. Your great-grandfather, I believe.'

'Old Arthur. Ah yes, of course, you were talking to my father yesterday, weren't you? And you came across the name again in those files? How interesting, though not perhaps all that surprising in the circumstances.'

'The circumstances being that Wanwood belonged to Arthur Grindal before it became a hospital? You don't seem to have mentioned this to anyone. And your father certainly never mentioned it to me yesterday.'

Batty took his arm and gently urged him out of the hallway into the renovated part of the house.

'For my part, there's been no occasion to mention it. Why should I? It's got no significance, has it? As for Father, he belongs to the old Yorkshire school of thought which recommends keeping yourself to yourself, especially when it comes to family matters.'

'Is that so? He spoke fairly freely about the family, if I remember right.'

'Only what he saw no harm in telling you, I expect,' chuckled Batty, pushing open the door of his office. 'Have a seat. Care for a coffee? Or do your tastes follow your leader's?'

He flourished a bottle of Glenmorangie.

'No thanks. Nothing for me. So what harm could there be in telling me about the family connection with the house?'

'No harm, in any immediate sense. But it's a tale which doesn't altogether redound to the family credit. If you've the time and the inclination, I'll tell you it, though of course I shall deny having uttered a word if my father ever gets wind of my indiscretion.'

He sat down and poured himself a little whisky.

'Hope you don't mind, but a good story deserves a good telling. Just say if you change your mind. Cheers.'

He tossed the drink back and smiled. He was, thought Pascoe, a rather attractive guy, easy to talk to once you established that you weren't hired help to be ordered around, not bad looking, very outgoing. Yet there was that something — he recalled it from their previous encounters during the summer — that made him feel just a touch uneasy, like a dog on the edge of a thunderstorm.

'Right. Here goes. Sure you want to hear this? OK. Old Arthur founded the family fortunes on that old Yorkshire staple, wool. You'll have seen the remnants of the old mill at Kirkton yesterday.'

'Yes, and your father did tell me how the two interests of the family came together, the Batty medical innovations and the Grindal entrepreneurship.'

'Oh yes, he would. Not above a bit of discreet boasting. But there would be things he kept quiet about. Old Arthur's social ambitions, for one thing. He belonged to the Yorkshire school of economics which believes you can buy owt if you've got the brass. He bought the Wanwood estate and boasted he got his money back by chopping down most of what was left of the ancient Wanwood Forest except the bit immediately around the house, and selling off first the timber, then the cleared land. The old Elizabethan manor was in a state of disrepair so he knocked that down and built his own baronial hall. And he sat back and waited for the county set to treat him like they treated the old Truman family who'd been here for five hundred years.'

'What happened to them?'

'Fell on hard times. Great War wiped the last two out, I believe, but the parish church is full of mentions both inside and out, which can't have improved Arthur's state of mind as it dawned on him that the county wasn't going to come calling. Bought another place in London and one at Cromer when that turned fashionable, and used Wanwood less and less. But he still had his eye on making a social mark, getting some kind of title if he could, and when he caught on that top people were offering their country houses for hospitals in the war, he jumped on that bandwagon.'

'You make it sound very cynical.'

'Do I? Well, I rather think it was. It got him noticed and also provided somewhere for my other great-grandfather, Sam Batty, to try out his medical innovations without too much comeback if they went wrong.'

'So even then the Battys were into animal experiments at Wanwood,' said Pascoe.

'Very sharp,' laughed Batty. 'Yes, I recall last time we met thinking, here's a one to watch. Does it help if I tell you that the animals being experimented on back then were exclusively officer class? Old Arthur reckoned that by sticking to officers there was more chance of winning the notice and gratitude of families with influence. Don't misunderstand me. The old boy was as virulently patriotic as everyone else was in those days. He wanted to do his bit, and more than his bit. But he reckoned the labourer was worthy of his hire and he estimated his own worth as a knighthood. I can just imagine what he felt like when his name appeared with hundreds of others in the new honours list, and he found he'd got an OBE!'

'Devastating,' observed Pascoe.

'The family story is he wanted to tell them to stuff it, but calmer counsel prevailed and he set about getting in peace what he hadn't managed in war. Contributions to party funds, being in the right places on the right committees at the right times — he even gave Wanwood to the nation as a hospital. That made a big splash.'

'That was generous,' admitted Pascoe.

'Not really,' smiled Batty. 'What actually happened was some of the medical staff who worked there during the war approached him with a view to making it a permanent clinic. He didn't much care for the place any more, it was going to cost a bomb to refurbish it to domestic habitability, so he did a deal and sold them a ninety-nine- year lease. Only somehow it came out in the papers that he'd given the place away.'

'And it was a private clinic, right? Hardly a gift to the nation.'

'There were public beds for qualifying locals. It did quite well, I believe, till the NHS got under way. Then it might have gone under if an independent company hadn't taken it over. A company in which, purely by chance, old Arthur had a controlling share.'

He watched Pascoe's reaction almost gleefully. Why's he doing this? wondered Pascoe. Paying off some old score against his dad who clearly wanted to keep all this under his hat? And what's it got to do with anything anyway?

He said, 'Dr Batty. .'

'David. Do call me David. Your elephantoid boss does and I see no reason why I should be on less familiar terms with the civilized face of policing than with its rump.'

Pascoe smiled, not just at the joke though it wasn't bad, but at the value judgment it contained. You'd think a doctor of all people would know the dangers of under-estimating a rump.

'David, this is all very interesting, but the fact that your great-grandfather was a wily old bird hardly seems relevant to my enquiries. Though of course if what you're saying is that somehow ALBA bought what it in fact owned already, the DTI might be interested

'I thought I made it clear. ALBA didn't own it. This other company did. True, old Arthur's shares in it were inherited by my.. mother, so when the company, that's ALBA, decided that Wanwood would make an ideal site for its research centre, there was little problem about putting the clinic, which was already in terminal decline, into liquidation. It was all perfectly legal and above board. You saw the papers yourself.'

Pascoe had registered but could see no significance in the curious little hesitation about Mrs Batty's ownership of the controlling share. Perhaps that's where the weakest point of the fiddle lay. Not that he believed there was one chance in a million of proving an illegality. This was peanuts compared with the billions that vanished every year in the great world of commerce, leaving no trace but the anguish of impoverished shareholders and the frustration of the Serious Fraud Squad. But for all that, he knew what common sense, not to mention common decency, told him, that there had been a fiddle.

'Yes, I saw the papers. But I saw nothing there to indicate ALBA was buying what the wife of its chairman owned already and had helped put into receivership in order to facilitate her husband's acquisition,’ said Pascoe coldly.

'Well, you wouldn't, would you? As for my father, he's got rather the same ambitions as old Arthur, and this is one skeleton he prefers to keep buried deep in the family cupboard. Why he should worry I don't know. In the present climate a history of good old honest sleaze is probably a recommendation!'

'Sleaze? Would you care to be a little more specific without of course incriminating yourself?'

'Nice one, Peter,' said Batty chuckling. 'Well, you see, by 1930 Arthur was becoming really impatient. He reckoned he'd dropped enough strong, and expensive, hints. So he entered into direct negotiation for what, after all, he truly believed was no more than his due. And everyone was at it. Alas, he'd waited too long. He got caught up in the wave of indignation and investigation which ended up with Maundy Gregory's conviction in '33 for touting honours. That was it. He escaped prosecution, but his name was tainted for evermore. You can see why my father would prefer that old story wasn't dredged up when he's so close to the short list himself.'

No, thought Pascoe. I can't really. And I can't see why I've spent so much time sitting here listening to this sordid saga of life in the commercial fast lane.

He said, 'Will you have any objection to one of my men coming along and taking a closer look at those files in your cellar?'

'No, of course not,' said Batty. 'If you care to take them away and burn them when you're finished I'd have no objection to that either. So tell me, Peter, what was it you actually wanted to see me about?'

'Well, about the files, I suppose,' said Pascoe.

'But you didn't know the files existed till you got here,' said Batty amused.

Pascoe smiled too.

'ESP,' he said. 'I'm famous for it, didn't you know?'