The Wood Beyond

i

Dear Mrs Pascoe

I do not know if Peter ever mentioned to you that I was his superior officer for some time. Indeed one of my last acts before I was invalided out was to confirm his promotion to sergeant. You may therefore understand with what dismay I received the tragic news of his death, and I wanted to write to you at once to say that in my opinion he was one of the finest men I had the privilege to command, and in no way does the manner of his death divert me from that judgment.

I realize that at a time like this you will scarcely feel able to look ahead, but with a young daughter to bring up, the future and its problems will all too soon demand attention. Recognizing that you may have needs which are pressing and immediate, I beg you to accept the accompanying small initial contribution and my assurance that as soon as the opportunity arises I shall take steps to ensure you and your child are cared for as Peter would have wished.

Meanwhile I remain yours in deepest sympathy,

Herbert Antony Grindal

ii

Is this thing working? Right. Here we go. Here we go, here we go … sorry. Just testing. OK, from the start. Getting into the wood were easy. Out of the ditch, over the top, and there we were. Mind you, it were like jumping into a raging sea. Wind howling, everything shaking and creaking and groaning like the whole bloody issue was alive, and so much stuff flying around you were in danger of getting your head took off. But we pressed on regardless, taking our direction from the glow up ahead. Even when you can’t see your hand before your face, there’s always that glow.

Then at the edge of the trees we hit wire, and we paused here to get our breath and count heads.

We were all present and correct, the whole eight of us, and Cap started in on the wire. You’ll have met the Captain? Useless with the cutters but won’t let anyone else have them. Sort of badge of office. Eventually there was a hole of sorts and we started through. Jacksie – that’s Jacklin, the well-made one – got snagged and swore. Cap said, ‘Keep it down,’ like someone might hear in all that din, and Jacksie said, ‘If I could keep it down, I wouldn’t have got it stuck,’ and a couple of us got the giggles. It’s easy done when you’re shit scared. Not that it mattered or Jacksie swearing either. Like I said, it were pissing with rain and blowing a gale, and you would have needed a lot more than a giggle to get noticed.

Then we were all through and the laughing stopped.

There’s nowt to laugh at out there. It’s a wasteland. Used to be trees but after the big raid last summer, they blew them all to hell, roots and all, and when it rains for a week, like it’s been doing, the holes all fill with water and the ground gets so clarty, you can feel it sucking you down. Smells too. Don’t know why it should. It were once good mixed woodland like what’s still there. But now it stinks like a ploughed-up boneyard.

Someone – don’t know who – said, ‘This is bloody stupid. We should head back.’ Seconded, I thought. But I kept my trap shut ’cos if there’s one thing guaranteed to make Cap head east, it’s hearing me speak up for west. I should’ve known better than to try diplomacy. It never works. Might as well start scrapping right off and get it over with. Cap just glowered at me as if it had been me mouthing off, and said, ‘Follow me. Keep close.’ And we were off, no pretence of a discussion. Whatever happened to universal suffrage?

God, it were hard going. Two steps forward, one back, and as for keeping close, with that rain coming down and the mist coming up, it was all you could do to see where your next step were going to land, let alone keep an eye on anybody else. So it came as no surprise when somewhere over to the left I heard a splash and yell and a voice crying ‘Oh shit!’ all spluttery. Someone had gone into a crater. My money was on Jacksie, but I didn’t waste time speculating. Even someone a lot better coordinated could drown in one of them holes as easy as the middle of the Atlantic. So I headed for the noise like everybody else. Only I must’ve been a bit more headstrong than the rest ’cos when I got there, I didn’t stop but slid right over the edge, and next thing, I were down the bleeding hole too!

For a while I thought I were going to drown, but once I got the right way up and persuaded Jacksie – I’d been right about that – to stop grabbing my hair, I realized there were only two or three feet of water down there, which was fine so long as you didn’t lose your footing. The real problem was how to get out, ’cos the walls started sloshing and crumbling every time you tried to get a hold on them.

Cap and the others had arrived by now and were reaching down to grab us. They got Jacksie first and I pushed like mad and got nowt but a faceful of boot for my pains. But eventually the useless bugger got hauled out and it were my turn. I reached up and felt someone get a hold of my right hand, I couldn’t see who, my eyes were so full of mud and water, and I thrashed around with my left till finally I found another hand to get hold of. Then, kicking my toes into the side, I started to haul myself out.

I soon caught on I were getting a lot of help with my right hand – turned out to be Cap who were doing the pulling – but nowt at all with my left. But before I could start wondering why, my feet slipped out of the hole I’d kicked in the side of the crater and my hand slipped out of Cap’s, and I started to slide back in, putting all my weight on whoever had got a hold of my left hand.

And it just came away, the hand I was holding on to I mean. And I slid right back down into that filthy water with my fingers still grasped tight around that thing, or like it seemed then, with that thing’s fingers still grasped tight round mine, and I started to scream, and some on the others started to scream too, and eventually even them buggers in the green uniforms started taking notice, and next thing there was a whole platoon of them all around us shouting and shoving and that’s how we ended up getting captured. Me ciggies are all sodden. You’ve not got a dry one, have you?

iii

Families are a fuck-up, thought Peter Pascoe.

Otherwise, how come he was standing here in a crematorium chapel with all the inspirational ambience of a McDonald’s though without, thank God, the attendant grilled burger odours, being glared at by his sister, Myra, and squinted at by a bunch of geriatric myopes, as he attempted an extempore exordium of a grandmother he hadn’t seen for nearly two years?

‘Hello. I’m Peter Pascoe and Ada was my grandmother and I’m doing this because …’

Because when he’d arrived and discovered Myra had ordered a full-fig C of E service right down to ‘Abide With Me’, his guilt had vaulted him onto a high horse and he’d gone through the arrangements like Jesus through the money changers, till at his moment of triumph Myra had brought him crashing to earth with the question, ‘OK, smartarse, just what are you going to do?’

‘… because as you probably know, Ada didn’t reckon much to organized religion. She always said that when she died the last thing she wanted was a funeral-chasing parson droning on about her unlikely virtues. So I’m doing it instead … not droning on, I hope … and not unlikely … anyway, I’m doing it.’

And a right cockup you’re making of it too. He could see Myra’s fury moderating into malicious pleasure. If only there’d been time to make a few notes. Only a fool relied on divine inspiration when he’d just dumped God!

‘Well I’m not going to make a lot of notes … I mean, fuss, because Ada hated fuss. But equally I’m not going to let the passing of this remarkable old lady pass un … er … remarked.’

This got worse! Pull yourself together. If you can brief a bunch of CID cynics and pissed-off plods, no need to be fazed by a pewful of wrinklies. What was Myra rolling her eyeballs at? Doesn’t she know a dramatic pause when she hears one?

‘Ada was born in Yorkshire though she didn’t stay there long. The event which changed her life, changed all our lives, come to think of it, was the Great War. So many died … millions … numbers too large to register. One of them was Ada’s father, my great-grandfather. After she got the news, my great-grandmother took her three-year-old daughter and headed down here to Warwickshire. I’ve no details of how they lived. I only discovered the Yorkshire connection because I was a nosy kid. Ada wasn’t one to go on about the past, maybe because there was too much pain in it for her. But I can guess that one-parent families had it even tougher in those days than they do now. Anyway here they came and here they stayed. This was where Ada grew up and in her turn got married. And in her turn she had a child. And in her turn she saw her husband, my grandfather Colin Pascoe, go off to the wars.

‘Did she know as she said goodbye that in her turn she too was never going to see him again? Who knows? But I think she knew. Oh yes. I’m sure she knew.’

That had them. Even Myra was looking rapt.

‘The child they had was, of course, Peter, my father. Naturally he wishes he could be here today. But as you probably know when he took early retirement a few years back, he decided to follow my eldest sister, Susan, and her family out to Australia, and unfortunately urgent commitments have prevented any of them from making the long journey. But I’m sure we will be very much in their thoughts at this sad time.’

He caught Myra’s eye and looked away, but not before they’d shared their awareness that any thoughts turning their way in that antipodean night would probably need the attention of an oneiromantist.

‘So in 1942 Ada got the same news from North Africa that in 1917 her mother had got from Flanders. Another young widow. Another fatherless child. No wonder she hated uniforms and wars and anything which seemed to be celebrating them. She could never look at an Armistice Day poppy without feeling physically sick, and one of her last cogent acts was to rebuke a British Legion volunteer who came round the ward selling them.’

Rebuke? What she’d actually said according to Myra was, ‘Sod off, ghoul.’ Which message it might appear he was passing on to this well-poppied congregation. Ah well. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

‘But Ada did not let the past destroy her present. She joined one of the accelerated teacher training courses after the war and despite her late start, she climbed high, finishing as Head of Redstones Junior which I myself had the privilege of attending. As you can imagine, having your gran as head teacher was a mixed blessing. Certainly in school I got no favours, just a first-class education. But outside, I got all the love and indulgence a growing boy is entitled to expect from his gran.’

He caught Myra’s eye again and read the message clearly. Favourite! So what? Boy with two bossy elder sisters needed an edge somewhere. Another eye was catching his, the crem. super’s, reminding him of his warning that despite the nanny state, dank Novembers still meant frequent hearses and any overrun could quickly blacken up the bypass. Time to wrap it up. Pity. He just felt he was getting into his stride.

‘Even after retirement, she remained at the centre of things, as a school governor, a member of innumerable committees, and a tireless campaigner in the corridors of power and on the pavements of protest.’

Now he was really motoring! Great phrase, that was. Even though getting the rhythm right meant a solecistic drift from the nounal trochee to the verbal iamb. How old Ada would have rapped his knuckles. The crem. super too looked close to physical violence. Big finish!

‘I doubt if she went gentle into her good night, but gone she has, and the world is a sadder place for her going. But she left it a better place than she found it, and that would have been the only epitaph she wished.’

Big finish nothing. Big cop-out was more like it. Ada had had no illusions about progress. Watching the telly peepshow of famine and disaster and war, she used to rage, ‘They’ve learned nothing. Absolutely nothing!’ Oh well. At least he’d taken his poppy out.

Time for the final music. Myra had gone for Elgar’s Enigma which to Ada’s tin ear probably sounded like bovine eructation. The crem.’s alternatives were all just as classically solemn. Then Pascoe had recalled the one time Ada ever talked about her father, the day he found the photo in the secretaire, and he’d rummaged through the tapes in his car and come up with Scott Joplin. He saw the shock on Myra’s face as ‘The Strenuous Life’ came floating out of the speakers. He’d explain later, sharing his secret knowledge that Ada’s sole recollection of her father – indeed her first recollection of anything – had been of a shadowy figure sitting at an upright piano picking out a ragtime melody.

So the circle closes … so the circle closes.

iv

‘At his grandmother’s funeral?’ said Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel. ‘You’d think a bugger wi’ letters after his name could come up with a better excuse than that.’

‘He did tell you about it, sir,’ said Sergeant Wield, shouting to make himself heard above the lashing rain.

Dalziel viewed him gloomily through the bespattered car window which he’d lowered by half an inch in the interests of more efficient communication. He was not a man totally insensitive to the comforts of his inferiors, but the sergeant was swathed in oilskins and the Fat Man could see no reason why the torrents niagaraing around their folds should be diverted to his vehicle’s upholstery.

‘Aye and my gran told me not to mess around wi’ mucky women and I paid no heed to her either,’ he said. ‘Still, last time he were here, he wasn’t much use, was he? OK, lad. Let’s have it. What’ve we got?’

‘Remains, sir.’

‘Man? Woman? Child? Dog? Politician?’

‘Remains to be seen,’ said Wield.

Dalziel groaned and said, ‘I hope you’re not letting happiness turn you humorous, Wieldy. You’ve not got the face for it and I’m not in the mood. I were driving home to a warm bed when I were silly enough to switch me radio on and pick up the tail end of this shout. All Control could tell me was there was a body and there was a bunch of animal libbers and it was out at Wanwood. So is this another Redcar or what?’

Six months earlier in May there’d been an animal rights raid on the laboratories of Fraser Greenleaf, the international pharmaceutical conglomerate, located near Redcar on the North Yorkshire coast. As well as releasing the experimental animals, the raiders had vandalized the premises and, most seriously of all, left security officer Mark Shufflebottom, father of two, lying dead with severe wounds to the head. Several weeks later there’d been another raid, bearing all the hallmarks of the same group, on the research labs of ALBA Pharmaceuticals located on Mid-Yorks territory in a converted mansion called Wanwood House. Happily this time no one had been injured. Unhappily neither the Teeside CID in whose jurisdiction Redcar fell, nor the Mid-Yorkshire team led by Peter Pascoe, had met with any success in tracking down the culprits.