The Wood Beyond

iii

By the time they reached the lab area it was as if Noah's Ark had struck an iceberg. There were terrified animals everywhere and through the open windows a rising gale was hurling blasts of icy air and volleys of horizontal hail. A couple of TecSec men, roused by the alarm, had arrived simultaneously.

'Don't just stand there,' screamed Patten. 'Grab those bloody things!'

'But take care,' admonished Wield. 'You never know what they've got.'

The men, galvanized into activity by their boss's parade-ground bellow, slowed visibly as the implications of Wield's warning struck them.

Patten shot him a furious glance and yelled, 'It's OK. There's nothing communicable, Dr Batty's word on it.'

'Is that right or did you make it up?' asked Wield, the policeman in him reluctantly taking over. If any of the escaped beasts did have a communicable disease, then there could be a serious problem.

'Any that need special precautions when they're handled are kept in there,' said Patten indicating another door. 'And it doesn't look like she's been in.'

Wield tried the handle. It was still locked. Through the glass panel the cages appeared untampered with, though their inmates were setting up a tremendous racket as if in sympathy with their fleeing fellows.

'Well at least she's got some sense,' said Wield.

'More likely the bitch simply doesn't have a key,' snarled Patten. 'Come on, let's find her. Where the hell are you going?'

'To the car park,' said Wield. 'First off, I need to radio this in. And second, unless she's planning to walk all the way back to town, that's where the lass'll be heading too.'

That was the trouble with the army, he thought. Good at doing things, not so good at thinking. Even Jimmy Howard would have worked this one out.

Which reminded him.

'You see anything of Jimmy Howard?' he asked as they hurried out of the building.

'Not since you arrested him. Isn't he still banged up then?'

Funny, thought Wield. Tony Beasley, the TecSec brief, had rung last evening to check that his client was being released as the law required. Perhaps he only communicated with Captain Sanderson.

'No, we had to let him go.'

'Another police cockup then? Done a runner, has he? Don't blame him. Once you lot get your teeth into someone, you'll keep crunching till you draw blood. Jimmy would know that.. there she is. Stop, you fucking bitch!'

Ambler was opening the door of the white Polo. She saw them coming, chucked her holdall onto the passenger seat, scrambled in after it and with a speed which won Wield's admiration got her key in the ignition and started the engine. Even so Patten had moved fast enough to get his hand on the door handle. Ambler banged down the locking pin and accelerated away. The TecSec man ran alongside, letting his grip on the handle tow him to Olympic sprint speed before he had to decide whether to let go or be dragged. He let go, but kept on running, shouting something over his shoulder. The wild wind whipped his words away, but Wield caught, '.. gates…' Presumably he meant the two security gates across the drive completing the boundaries of the cordon sanitaire. If these had been closed, they could still overtake the woman. Reluctantly he broke into a jog. He was still, thank God, wearing his light topcoat, but it didn't feel like it was going to offer any long-term protection. He wasn't motivated by any burning desire to arrest Ambler, but it didn't seem a good idea to leave the task to Patten, not the way he was acting.

He rounded the top bend of the drive and saw that the gates were shut. Presumably the man responsible had shut them as soon as he heard the alarm. But where was he? Chances were the stupid sod had then abandoned his Post to help in the roundup of the animals.

Security companies … as much protection as a crocheted condom!

The Polo had screeched to a halt and Ambler was out, pulling at the bolt on the first gate and throwing her whole weight against it. Slowly it swung open. She ran back towards the car, hesitated, looked back towards the second gate.

She's had it, thought Wield. No way she can get the other gate open before Patten, who was thundering down the drive, reached her. He slowed down, thinking she might use the TecSec man's speed to dodge round him, in which case he'd have the job of acting as backstop.

Instead she turned and ran. There was nowhere to go. The gate ahead was unclimbable and on either side stretched that wide swathe of desolation which TecSec had ripped through the noble old wood. Even dry it would have been unattractive terrain, but drenched by the autumn rains, its surface a morass of glutinous mud pocked with water-filled craters, only a madman, or one under threat from a madman, would advance across its treacherous surface.

Ambler paused and glanced back. Perhaps she was contemplating surrender. But whatever she saw in Patten's face persuaded her that an insane valour is sometimes the better part of a dangerous discretion.

She turned and ran into the wasteland.

For a second Wield thought that like some story-book fay she was skimming lightfoot across the gelatinous mud, leaving nothing more than the merest splash of water vapour to mark her path. Then he realized that she must be following the line of unretrieved, perhaps unretrievable, duckboards laid to facilitate passage to the crater where Wendy Walker had encountered the bones.

This was serious. With the removal of so much material for Dr Death's sluices, the crater now was huge and immersion there could lead to a fate far worse than George Headingley's heavy cold.

Interestingly, the same thought seemed to have occurred to Patten. Rage drained from his face to be replaced by real concern, and he called after the fleeing woman, 'Jane, don't be daft, lass. There's nowhere to go. Take care. Come on back, no one's going to harm you.'

It was impossible to tell if the woman heard him above the howl of the storm. Wield came alongside and added his voice to the plea.

'Miss Ambler,' he bellowed, at almost Dalziel decibel level. 'It's OK. We know you've had real provocation. There's no real harm done. Head on back here and we'll soon sort it out.'

The woman had stopped, whether because she'd heard or merely reached the limit of the duckboards was impossible to say. The surviving trees of Wanwood, pressing like caged football supporters against the nethermost security fence, rocked and surged in a fury of sound which a fanciful mind might have heard as a protest against the death of their fellows. A tremendous blast unsteadied the woman. She staggered, recovered, staggered again. Then she was gone.

'Jesus!' exploded Patten. Then he was running along the duckboards, followed more cautiously by Wield.

The excavations had turned the crater into a small tarn filled with impenetrably brown water. As they reached its edge, the woman surfaced gasping for air and flailing her arms wildly. There was seven or eight feet of water beneath her, Wield guessed, bottomed by God knew what depth of sucking, clinging mud. That would be the killer. Get your feet stuck in that and there'd be no kicking free.

'Float,' he yelled. 'On your back. Just float!'

Perhaps she heard him, perhaps it was just exhaustion and the paralysing effect of the cold water, but she stopped flailing and lay backwards on the surface. Patten, on one knee like a Victorian suitor, reached out his right hand. Wield grabbed the other to give him support. Ambler saw the outstretched hand, reached for it, their index fingers touched like God's and Adam's, then the wind drove a small wave into her gasping mouth and she choked and vanished under once again.

Seconds passed. One. Two. Three..

'Shit,' said Patten. 'I'll have to go in.'

He began kicking his shoes off. Thank God for action man! thought Wield fervently, withdrawing all his previous reservations about the breed. Then right in the centre of the tarn he saw a movement in the waters, like the turbulence in the pool at Lourdes which presages the moment of miracle.

'There she is!' he screamed.

And next moment like some creature of the deep too violently aroused from its age-long slumber, Jane Ambler burst upwards with such force that it seemed as if she was ambitious to stand on the surface of the water. It was a manoeuvre to win a gold medal at synchronized swimming; and incredibly, horribly, she was not disqualified by lack of a partner. In her arms was the figure of a man, his head flopping backwards like a chrysanthemum on a broken stalk, and as the brown water drained through the sodden locks, Wield recognized Jimmy Howard.

He only had a split second to register the knowledge and the reason it gave for Patten's concern at seeing the girl plunging into the water. Then a clenched fist caught him on the back of his neck and he tumbled forward into the muddy depths.

As he sank, he thought, I should have worked harder to get Edwin out of his bad temper this morning. He'll think I got myself drowned on purpose just to spite him!

The thought was so absurd he might have laughed if that wouldn't have involved imbibing another gallon of this foul liquid. Instead he kicked out and burst to the surface, gasping in great mouthfuls of windy air. Jane Ambler was quite close. He was pleased to see she had jilted her grisly escort, and he reached out and took her in the prescribed life-saving hold. Shock seemed to have rendered her catatonic and she made no attempt to struggle.

He glanced towards the duckboards. Patten was crouched there, his gaze fixed on them. It didn't need a novelist's imagination to read what was going through his mind. Was there any chance of getting away with sending them to join Jimmy Howard at the bottom of the crater? And with one down, what did it matter how short the odds were anyway? That was the military mind. Limited by its elevation of death to a first rather than a last option.

He paddled to the far side of the crater and tried to get a supporting grip on the wall. Muddy clay came away in his hand. There was neither exit nor support there. The water was bitterly cold. He couldn't keep the pair of them afloat for long. It would have to be the duckboard and the hope that Patten's mind still had some hold on the realities of the situation.

The man had stood up and was looking back towards the drive. Perhaps he's just going to make a run for it, thought Wield hopefully. But no, he was kneeling down again, reaching out a threatening hand as Wield got closer. Grab it and jerk him into the water? thought the sergeant. Then drown the bastard!

He might have a chance. But he doubted if Ambler could survive if he let her go.

He was very close now.

Too close. As he opened his mouth to start the unpromîsing reasoning process, the hand shot out the extra inches and seized him by the collar. He drew in a huge breath of air, but instead of the expected thrust into the drowning depths, he felt himself being pulled alongside the duck-boards.

God is all powerful, he thought. He can make even the military mind see reason.

Then he turned his head sideways and saw that it wasn't seeing reason that had made Patten change his plans, it was the sight of Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe advancing along the boards like gods out of a machine.

Back on terra firma, with Patten cuffed and on his way to a cell, Wield, showered and dried and wearing the only clothes available which were the hated TecSec uniform, drank a cup of tea liberally laced with Batty's Glenmorangie which Dalziel had liberated from the doctor's sideboard.

'He won't mind,' said Dalziel. 'Soul of generosity, that fellow.'

'Has he been told what's gone off?' asked Wield.

'Not yet,' said Dalziel. 'Thought I'd leave it till I see if we've got enough to nick him, then I won't need to be polite to the sod any more.'

He filled Wield in on the hypothesis he and Pascoe had put together.

'But it's not going to be easy to prove without an admission,' he concluded.

'Or hard evidence.'

'Oh aye. Or hard evidence.' He regarded Wield shrewdly. 'Got anything in mind?'

'Jane Ambler could be worth talking to,' said Wield.

He hadn't had time yet to go into the details of the woman's sabotage.

'You reckon? Then let's go see her. She's lying down in the medical room with Novello waiting for the ambulance.'

'I'll catch you up,’ said Wield. 'Something I need from the car.'

He went outside. Ambler's Polo had been driven back up to the house to clear the drive. He opened the passenger door and started searching through the holdall on the seat. There wasn't a great deal in it — obviously 'collecting her things' had merely been a ruse to get back inside Wanwood — and there was only one envelope. Handling it carefully, he glanced inside. It contained half a dozen film negatives. He held them up to the light and saw lines of type far too small to decipher. Replacing them he started to close the car door and as he did so, he sensed rather than saw a movement beneath the seat.

Cautiously he stooped and peered under. A pair of bright small eyes peered fearfully back. He reached down and a tiny paw clutched at his outstretched finger. Gently he drew out a tiny monkey which could have been the one he'd seen Ambler injecting on their first meeting.

It must have crept into the car when the woman abandoned it at the first gate.

'Good move,' said Wield. 'You almost made it.'

Suddenly it wriggled out of his grasp but didn't try to escape. Instead it jumped onto his shoulder and wrapped its arms round his neck, nuzzling at his ear.

Wield glanced around. No one in sight. He went quickly to his own car and opened the boot.

The little animal protested when he prised it free from his shoulder and set it down on an old travelling rug.

'You prefer a cage and hypos on the hour, you just say so,' he said sternly.

The monkey went quiet and snuggled down into the rug.

'Right. I'll see you later,' said Wield gently closing the boot.

As he went back inside he heard a distant ambulance bell.

In the medical room he found Jane Ambler also wearing a TecSec uniform and looking reasonably well, considering what she'd been through. DC Novello was sitting watchfully at her side while the looming figure of Dalziel blocked the light from the window.

She looked pleased to see him. With Dalziel doing his Hannibal Lecter at the Health Farm impression, she'd probably have looked pleased to see King Kong.

'I want to thank you,' she said weakly.

'My pleasure,' said Wield. 'Listen, luv, all this stuff you did to get your own back on Batty, I want you to know I've been there, I understand what you were feeling.'

As he spoke he moved to put himself between the woman and the Fat Man.

'I reckon the court could understand that too,' he went on. 'Spur-of-the-moment revenge, anyone could do it. But taking them negatives, that's a bit different.'

He held up the envelope.

'That could look like you were going to try a bit of blackmail,' he said. 'And once the court gets a sniff of premeditation

'I just wanted to frighten him,' she said.

Wield dug his finger into his ear as if he hadn't quite caught the remark.

He said, 'Of course if you'd been uneasy for some time that something not quite right was going off at ALBA, and you decided that as this was probably your last chance to get hold of the evidence, it was your duty as a good citizen to make sure these negatives came into our hands …'

He could see her like a chess champion working out all the moves and their implications. He moved slightly to one side to reopen her view of Dalziel, which was a bit like Kasparov drawing an opponent's attention to the presence of a KGB bodyguard with his hand on his gun butt.

It clearly concentrated the mind wonderfully.

She said, 'OK. This is the way it was. David Batty and I were very close. It was his idea, he started it, but I admit I was happy to go along. He's a good-looking guy and I was flattered, young research assistant making it with the department chief. But eventually I started getting worried by some of the things he let slip about some aspects of our work.'

'What aspects?' said Wield.

'Our main project ever since I joined has been work on a new treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. You should understand that the first company to make a break-through there is guaranteed billions. There are always plenty of rumours flying around and word started to get out that Fraser Greenleaf were way ahead. David was really narked about this, particularly as the researcher I'd replaced had been head-hunted by FG about eighteen months ago. Of course he was legally tied not to communicate anything he'd been working on here, but it's almost impossible to enforce that, and David had convinced himself that FG's breakthrough, if it came, would really be ALBA's.'

She paused.

'So?' prompted Wield.

'So a few months back, in the summer, suddenly the direction of our research took a dramatic change,' she said. 'I couldn't see why. It didn't follow naturally out of what had gone before. And when I asked David why …'

She paused again, then looking past Wield to Dalziel she said, 'I want it to be clearly understood that I have no firm knowledge of anything, only some guesses based on hints dropped by David Batty during the course of our. . work. Unless I'm convinced you understand and accept this, I don't think I have anything more to say.'

'I think mebbe you've said enough already,' said Dalziel, giving her a hungry grin.

She grinned back and said, 'Not under caution, I haven't. And I certainly won't sign anything. Or give evidence in court. Not unless I see it in black and white that it's clearly understood that I am entirely an innocent party in all this.'

'All what?' enquired Dalziel.

'How should I know, being entirely innocent?' she replied.

She was, acknowledged Wield, a real gladiator.

Suddenly Dalziel's hungry grin turned to Santa Claus beam.

'Nay, lass, tha's so squeaky clean it makes my eyes hurt just to look at you. Never fear, I'll stand up and tell the court you're the Virgin Mary. So what did Dr Batty answer when you asked him about the new research?'

'He took some photographic negatives out of his desk, waved them in the air and said, "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform, and so do I!" He was a bit drunk at the time.'

'And what did you understand by this?'

'That somehow he'd got information from somewhere about someone else's research.'

'But you'd no idea how or whose?'

'None whatsoever. All I knew was that after he fired me, if I didn't take this last chance to get hold of those negatives, I might never find out the truth. I was of course going to hand them over to the authorities at the first opportunity.'

'Which is right now, lass. And don't think we're not grateful,' said Dalziel.

The door opened and Pascoe came in.

'Ambulance is here, sir.'

'Grand. You fit enough to travel up front, miss?'

'I think so. Why?'

'Then we can get them to put Jimmy Howard in the back, saves a double journey,' said Dalziel genially. 'Got to watch NHS finances these days, haven't we? Novello, you go with the lady. See she's taken care of.'

The door closed behind them.

'There goes a real piece of work,' said Dalziel not unadmiringly.

'Why? What's happened?' said Pascoe.

They told him. He said, 'So you reckon these negatives are photos of Fraser Greenleaf research papers, taken during the Redcar raid?'

'I'd put money on it. One way to find out. We'll get 'em printed then ask someone from FG to take a look. Have we got hold of Captain Sanderson?'

Pascoe shook his head.

'They just called in to say that there's no sign of him at his flat or at TecSec HQ.'

'Bugger,' said Dalziel. 'I'd have liked to finger his collar before he got wind that owt's gone wrong. What about Batty?'

'Blank there too, sir. Thought the simplest thing to do was ring his home and tell him a few of the animals had got loose and invite him out here, but all I got was his wife who said she didn't know where he was. Didn't sound as if she cared much either, though I got the impression there was someone there.'

Wield coughed and said, 'Could be that Mrs Batty's chucked her husband out. Could even be that Captain Sanderson's round there, comforting her.'

Dalziel looked thoughtfully at the sergeant and said, 'Total immersion turned you psychic or what, Wieldy?'

'No, sir. Just something Patten said.'

'Oh aye. Give you any ideas where the doctor might have ended up?'

'Gone home to Mummy, he thought.'

'Where else?' laughed the Fat Man. 'Right, I'll go and see if I can catch the captain on the job; you, Wieldy, see to them photos then get yourself down to the hospital and take Ambler's statement. She seems to fancy you. Oh and while you're down there, get yourself checked out. I know since the Water Board got privatized, we've not had to be too choosy about what we drink, but I think even the chairman would think his millions hard-earned if he had to share his bath with Jimmy Howard.'

'What shall I do, sir?' asked Pascoe.

'You, Pete? Why, I'd have thought you'd have signed off by now, having spared us a good couple of hours of your time today. Tell you what. You were going on about wanting an excuse to ask Tom Batty some more questions. Why don't you pop out to Kirkton and if you see your way to fitting it in, pick up Dr David and bring him back for questioning? But only if it's not going to interfere with your own plans of course.'

Dalziel's ironic touch made Ian Paisley sound like Jane Austen.

'I'll do that, sir,' said Pascoe.

'I'd be grateful. And do us a favour, lad. Try to keep at least one foot in the nineties!'

'I'll try,' said Peter Pascoe.