The Wood Beyond (25 page)

It were funny - when news reached the remnants of the platoon that he should be OK though hed got a Blighty one he quickly changed from poor bastard to lucky bastard. What really caught the lads interest was our encounter with the Huns - as word got around about this - I found men from other platoons were coming up to me and asking me about it - out here we never hated the Hun like they do back home - too much sense that hes in the same bleeding boat - and this story of mine mebbe set them dreaming that somehow wed do out here what clearly they couldnt do back there and strike our own private peace.

I didnt know how I was going to react when I saw Gertie - or how he was going to react when he saw me. The way Steve told it he could have genuinely believed Jammy and him were both dead - so I gave him the benefit of the doubt - and he looked me straight in the eyes and said how glad he was hed been wrong about Steve - and how sad he was about Jammy - then he told me to sew another stripe on as he was recommending I got made up to sergeant in Jammys place.

Only once did I let my control slip - back in rest again I was sorting out the days Orders with him when he said  - Word of advice sergeant - go easy on spreading tales about friendly Huns - adjutant must have heard something - told me very pointed this morning that fraternizing with the enemy is regarded very seriously back at Base.

I said - Fraternizing? - They saved our fucking lives!

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And he said - Exactly - so how do you feel about shooting Germans now? - And I said - Them Germans?

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If I knew it was them Id not shoot - in fact theres a lot of our own lot back at Base Id sooner shoot than any of them Germans! Gertie said - For Christ sake Peter be careful what you say - you know how they feel about agitators just now - anyone else hears you talking like that and youre in real trouble - mutiny trouble - weve got to do our duty - follow orders - theres no other way - dont you see?

Well hes right of course - and the brass are right - and that German officer was right - and Im right too - and if every buggers so bloody right why arent we all back home moaning about the price of ice cream on a Bank Holiday instead of being stuck in the middle of this stinking mud hole where everythings so fucking wrong?

Why? Why? WHY?

The rain was slackening off just as it had slackened off early in September all those years ago, to be replaced by a gusty wind drying up the ground and with it any hopes that the brass might decide that the fixture was rained off. Not that, on past performance, there'd ever been much chance of that anyway.

Pascoe looked up at the trees, almost leafless now in November, but still tall and shapely with all the latent promise of spring's renewal in the supple swaying of their boughs. As he looked, his inward eye which was the curse of solitude stripped them of everything till they were mere black lifeless stumps. Through Glencorse and into Polygon. Every small advance doing nothing but put a few more yards of ravaged ground between you and whatever mockery of peace remained to the rear. And after Polygon, with the winter rains settling in, weeks more of the endless crawl through the yellow mud up the shallow ridge where stood, or rather lay, the ruined village of Passchendaele.

Pascoe forced himself back to the present by looking at his watch till at last the time registered. What had Pottle said? A window between four and five?

That's what I need, thought Pascoe. A window, nice and high, looking out across a sunlit pastoral landscape.

He was getting the sun at least. The storm had over-taken him and was moving east. Westward the dying sun rimmed the horizon with red and the sky was clear. Could be a frost tonight, he thought. Always something to look forward to.

He started the engine and went in pursuit of the retreating clouds.

part three

POLYGON

I have a Garden of my own,

But so with Roses overgrown,

And Lillies, that you would it guess

To be a little Wilderness.

i

Edgar Wield looked out of the frost-crazed kitchen window as he waited for the kettle to boil and recalled his certainties of an endless Indian summer just a couple of mornings earlier.

Never bet with a farmer about weather, a woman about weddings, or a miner about whippets. Where did that bit of homely advice spring from? Someone who knew his stuff so it couldn't have been a CID sergeant.

He was passing through an uncharacteristic period of self-doubt, swinging between suspicion that he was wasting his time with his blind-man probings of TecSec and certainty that he was missing something as obvious as a drunk at a church fête. Curiously this doubt didn't make him unhappy. These last few months he had spent living in Corpse Cottage in Enscombe had relaxed and released him somehow, bringing the whole spectrum of emotional coloration within his reach for the first time in more years than he cared to remember. And if at one end dark self- doubt was the price he had to pay for bright self-awareness at the other, then that was OK. More than OK, a real bargain.

The kettle was boiling. He mashed the tea, some odd Chinese blend that Edwin insisted on. It was, he had said rather sniffily, an acquired taste. So, Wield had pointed out, was the strong stewed stuff he preferred - acquired through years of no choice - and he saw no cause to brag about that.

So they danced and fenced and sometimes fought around each other, every encounter a learning process, most outcomes leaving them a little bit closer.

He set the tray with two china mugs, a fresh-sliced lemon, a bowl of sugar, and carried it upstairs.

Edwin Digweed was sitting up in bed reading. It sometimes seemed to Wield that where'er his partner walked, old books immediately crowded into a shade. He looked suspiciously at the pile on the bedside table. It appeared to be at least three volumes higher than the previous morning. Digweed's second-hand and antiquarian bookshop in the village was often quite audibly groaning beneath the weight of words piled high on every surface. When he'd moved out to Corpse Cottage, the books had rushed in to occupy what had previously been his living space above the shop, like water into a foundering ship. This was the one uncrossable line Wield drew. Books on bookshelves he didn't mind. But books on sills and stairs, in kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets, under sinks and over wardrobes, books breeding books in every nook, cranny and empty space, was not his idea of interior decoration. A good book might be the precious Iifeblood of a master spirit, but that didn't mean you wanted to drown in the stuff.

'You're up early,' said Digweed. 'Bad conscience?'

'Not so's you'd notice,' said Wield climbing back into bed. 'Just this TecSec thing.'

His first impulse when he and Edwin had joined forces was to continue what had been his iron rule for twenty years - to keep his professional and private lives completely separate. But he had discovered in himself a great weariness for living out of compartments, so he had started talking about his work, not even making a big thing about confidentiality. In his experience a man you needed to swear to secrecy was the last person on earth to share anything with.

He didn't tell everything, but if anything was so adhesive that the drive up the valley of the Een didn't wash it off, then he felt Digweed was entitled to know. Not that his partner gave any sign of feeling this was a right worth demonstrating over, his interest frequently being engaged by elements that were peripheral if not eccentric.

'Wanwood,' he had said when Wield first aired his obsession (for so he acknowledged it to himself) about TecSec. 'After Wanwood Forest, no doubt. Let me see.'

And yet another book had appeared to be pored over before being discarded on one of the rampant piles.

'Yes, here we are. Wanwood House, originally a hunting lodge in the royal forest of Wanwood which in medieval times stretched from Mid-Yorkshire almost as far south as Doncaster. Given with land by Henry Seven to Sir Jeffrey Truman for loyal service at Bosworth. Family prospered during next three centuries but went into decline in eighteenth. House currently ruinous - and this was written, let me see, in 1866. What does it look like?'

'The house? Big and square. Like an old railway station.'

'Victorian, you mean? Probably a nineteenth-century rebuilding. And you say the woodland surrounding it has been ripped up for security reasons? One of the last remnants of the old forest of Wanwood? My God, that's really criminal!'

But occasionally Digweed's long-submerged training as a lawyer surfaced and he expressed a proper forensic interest.

'Ah yes,' he said now, putting a thin slice of lemon into his tea and wincing histrionically as Wield shovelled sugar into his. 'Your intuition. Or to put it another way, your irrational unsubstantiated gut feeling. How do you intend to proceed?'

'Don't know. Another go at Patten maybe.'

'What about his partner?'

'Captain Sanderson? No, Mr Dalziel's getting the dirt on him.'

'I see. Class divide. Sergeants investigate sergeants, captains are left to the brass.'

Wield laughed.

'Don't think either Sanderson or Fat Andy 'ud thank you for lumping them in the same class,' he said.

'No. Now I bring your great leader to mind, or at least as much of him as I can cram into my fairly elastic imagination, I see what you mean. By "have another go" do you mean electrodes on genitals or just the wet knotted towel?'

'Psychological pressure we call it when it doesn't leave marks,' said Wield.

'Really? Fascinating. We really must consider bringing out a small booklet of police definitions. Now don't look offended.'

'I wasn't. And how would you know?' said Wield. 'Any road, this must be a big bore when you've got a book on early American presses in your hand.'

'No, honestly, far from being bored, I'm fascinated. Let me prove it. It seems to me that two things occurred which, if connected, may give body to your somewhat ethereal suspicions. Firstly, the man Patten joined the firm. Secondly, the firm got its first substantial contract, working for ALBA.'

'And if there's no connection?'

'Then I should concentrate on helping old ladies across the road.'

'Well thanks a lot,' said Wield. 'That's a big help. No, I mean it.'

'You mean you mean to be kind rather than satirical, perhaps. But I'm not finished. Once engage the attention of Sherlock Holmes and he applies the full might of his intellect to even the most trivial of details. A detail which may or may not be trivial seems to me to be the matter of what Patten was doing in the months between pouring his severance pay into the pockets of the bookmakers and becoming Captain Sanderson's partner.'

'Yeah, I know. In fact I think I said that to you myself,' said Wield.

'Hoity toity,' said Digweed. 'Yes indeed you did. But what you said was that you'd like to know what possibly nefarious activity Patten had got up to which earned him enough money to buy in. I think perhaps you ought to be asking why he should want to buy in? Or perhaps why Sanderson would want to let him buy in? Or even whether indeed he bought in at all in the strictly financial sense?'

'Eh? You're losing me.'

'I do hope not. All right, let me put it simply. Suppose Patten bought in with blackmail? He knew something about Sanderson's past which the good captain preferred kept out of the papers? Or suppose he bought in with information? He knew something about ALBA which would help TecSec get taken on there?'

Wield sought for a reply that wouldn't be a put down. These were the kind of airy-fairy speculations he was happy to take from Peter Pascoe because he knew that behind them all was a real cop's mind, centred on the need for proof.

'Not a great deal I can do to check them ideas out, but,' he said. 'Thanks all the same.'

'You could check out whether in fact Patten during his dead time took a perfectly ordinary job to keep the wolf from the door,' suggested Digweed. 'It sometimes seems to me that you chaps are so busy digging the dirt that you forget to look around you at clear eye level.'

Having delivered himself of this Holmesian utterance, Digweed returned his attention to his book.

Wield supped his tea and grimaced. Still had a lot of acquiring to do. But Edwin had a point about the job. Not that it would help much if it turned out Patten spent six months on a checkout at Sainsbury's. But if, as Wield suspected, there was a complete blank, then that would prove . .. nothing. But it would be a big encouragement!

Bravely he swallowed the rest of his tea and got out of bed again.

'Off so soon?' said Digweed.

'Aye, I've got some checking to do. And before you start looking so smug, think on. I've counted the books in that pile. There's nine counting the one you're reading. Gets to double figures and it's bonfire time. Right?'

'You're a hard man, sergeant. And don't forget that this is a meatless day.'

This was a weekly lowlight of the Corpse Cottage dietary regime.

'I didn't know what unnatural practices meant till I met you,' said Wield.

Once he got to the station his checking didn't take long, which was just as well as the outcome didn't seem worth waiting for. He'd short-cut official channels by ringing a contact in Social Security Investigations and asking her to punch up Patten's National Insurance Number and checking on employment from November the previous year till June this. The answer was so obvious that Wield felt a pang of resentment towards Digweed as if his partner had deliberately wasted his time.

Patten, feeling the pinch when his gambling had emptied his account, had looked for a job to suit his talents and training, and been taken on by Task Force Five, the Manchester-based security firm who, from small beginnings in 1979, had burgeoned with the eighties crime figures into one of the top three national firms.

'So he's done their training course, and had seven months to see how they get things done, when he runs into Sanderson who's got a business he'd like to turn into the next TFF,' growled Dalziel. 'Makes him a good man to hire.'