The Wood Beyond

'They did the other night.'

'Yes, they did, didn't they?' admitted Sanderson ruefully. 'Trojan horse. Well, Trojan skeleton anyway. It won't happen again. By the way, I suppose you have considered the possibility that they brought the bones along themselves? Sorry. That was crass. Teaching my grandmother.'

'Aye,' agreed Dalziel. 'Another possibility we're still considering is that when the remains were disturbed during the clearance last summer, either the contractors, or mebbe you yourself, noticed them and decided it were simpler just to pile a bit of muck on top of 'em rather than have the whole operation held up by an investigation.'

'I suppose that would be what you might call a grave offence?' said Sanderson.

Dalziel didn't return his smile.

'Worse than that,' he said.

'Then I'm glad that for once I can plead complete innocence.'

To his surprise, Dalziel found he was inclined to believe him.

Sanderson was looking at his watch.

He said, 'Time marches on. I sometimes pop along to the Green Tree in the village. Reasonable pint. Care to join me?'

Dalziel hesitated. At least he thought he was hesitating. But if he was someone in a pretty good imitation of his voice was saying, 'No thanks. I've got a lunch appointment.'

Interestingly, having once said it aloud, he had no more thoughts of not turning up. Indeed he couldn't even imagine why he should have had them in the first place.

'Hello,' she said in the doorway. 'Glad you could make

it.'

He didn't reply but took her in his arms and kissed her.

'Before lunch?' she said breathlessly when she finally got unstuck.

'If it's yon toffee again, I'll need to work up an appetite,' he said.

Afterwards he paid her the ultimate Yorkshire compliment.

'Ee, that were grand,' he said.

'Yes, it was rather. Pour us a drink. There's some whisky on the sideboard.'

He wouldn't have quite put it like that. It was a bottle of the same enamel-unfriendly brew he'd sampled yesterday. She'd probably got an offer at the supermarket. He might have to speak to her about that, but not yet. It was possible to have a good fuck and a vegetarian lunch on a casual just-happened-to-be-passing basis, but asking a woman to change her whisky implied a long-term commitment.

She'd pressed a button on her CD player and a man and a woman started singing. They didn't sound happy which to Dalziel's ears was not surprising as the words were foreign, probably kraut, which must be like singing and chewing celery at the same time.

'Is this going to be Our Tune?' he asked. 'Me, I think I'd rather go for the Grimethorpe Band playing "Blaze Away"!'

She smiled and said, 'I might have known you wouldn't go in for postcoitaltristesse, I'll find something livelier.'

'Nay, leave it. What's it all about any road?'

'It's a boy off to the wars saying goodbye to his girl and telling her if she wants to find him, he'll be in a house of green turf where the beautiful trumpets are playing.'

'Jesus,' said Dalziel. 'Your lad's in the army, you said? That him there?'

He nodded at a photo on the mantelpiece. A young officer, smart and bemedalled, smiled out at him.

'That's right. I was once told he was missing, believed killed.'

'Oh aye? And did you hear beautiful trumpets?'

'Not that I noticed.'

She spoke quietly, undramatically, but he felt there was stuff here he wasn't quite ready to hear yet. Telling him would be her equivalent of his complaining about the Scotch.

They listened to the end of the song in silence. He admitted its melancholy force, but even in that line he still preferred something a bit more catchy, like 'Oh Where, tell me, Where has my Highland Laddie gone?' which his old Scots gran used to sing when she'd taken a wee drappie against the cold.

'Do you see a lot of your lad? You said you had dinner with him.'

'Did I? Oh yes, the alibi.' She smiled. 'Yes, we meet from time to time.'

In fact more often latterly than in the days immediately after her defection. Perhaps she had come to a more generously balanced assessment of the world according to the Pitt-Evenlodes. Also she suspected that Piers the Hero had come to understand, though he would never be able to admit, that his father was a bit of a prat.

'In the Wyfies, isn't he? Or whatever they are now.'

'The Yorkshire Fusiliers. Yes. How did you know?'

'The cap badge,' he said, nodding at the photo. 'Kept the old rose and lily. Ever mention a Captain Sanderson? Or Sergeant Patten?'

'Patten? Wasn't that the name of that awful security man?'

'That's right. Sanderson's his partner. Both ex your lad's mob. It'd be helpful to get a bit of background.'

'What on earth for?'

'My sergeant's got a notion there's something not right with their outfit,' he said.

'Your sergeant? A notion?' she said with the faint scorn of one whose democratization had not reached quite as far as NCOs.

'That's right,' said Dalziel. 'My sergeant. And if he told me he'd got a notion Linford Christie had a wooden leg, I'd take a closer look.'

'And you want me to talk to my son to see if there's any gossip about these two, is that it? I presume you'd want me to do this without revealing that I am a police. . what-do-you-call-it? … a snout!'

She had a nice line in indignation. He finished his drink, grimaced, and said plaintively, 'I had a mam too, tha knows.'

'Indeed? I thought you probably leapt out of Robert Peel's head, fully armed.'

'Him with the hounds in the morning? Didn't think you lot 'ud be into that sort of thing. No, what I were going to say is, my mam had this picture on her parlour wall. This lass sitting on a bench in the garden wi' her head bent forward, looking right miserable, and this skinny lad wi' a droopy 'tash sort of skulking in the shrubbery behind her. It were called Their First Quarrel.'

She stared at him hard then said, 'Apart from the absence of a bench, a garden shrubbery, and a moustache, not to mention misery or skulk, I can see precisely how such a picture might have forced itself into your consciousness. As it happens I'm meeting Piers this very evening. So tell me, Andy, if I were doing you this service on a professional basis, how much would you pay?'

'Depends which service you had in mind, luv,' said Dalziel, grinning.

She flung a punch at his ribs which he absorbed with scarcely a grunt and countered by grabbing her arm and locking it behind her back in the classic arrest mode. Lunch might have been postponed once more but the telephone started ringing and she grabbed it with her free hand.

'Hello,' she said. 'Yes. All right, calm down.. yes.. yes.. I'll come at once.'

She put down the receiver. She had gone pale and he felt her sway slightly. He released her arm and took her shoulders to steady her.

'Trouble?' he said.

'Yes,' she said in a voice barely under control. 'It's awful. That was Jacksie, Annabel Jacklin, you remember her, the nice-looking blonde girl? She works at the infirmary. And she says they've just brought Wendy Walker in. She's been knocked off her bike, and they think she'll probably die.'

vii

Once Kirkton must have been a separate entity, a small Yorkshire village with its own life and a big enough span of open country between it and Leeds to make the pre-motorized journey a matter of some moment.

The nineteenth century had brought the city closer and the twentieth had completed the job, with tentacles of urban sprawl running out like rivulets of Vesuvian lava, threatening, touching, consuming, and finally passing on, leaving a dead and dusty landscape in their wake.

Residential development had been mainly at the lower end of the market, long dark terraces rising steeply from narrow pavements still running like scars between later, more enlightened attempts at council housing in redbrick blocks of four, with some pebble dashing and three almost distinguishably different designs. In the middle of this, traces of the original village remained — a church and a crowded graveyard, an old village cross and several whitewashed cottages flanking a cobbled street. This probably owed its preservation to its descent from the importance signalled by the name plate at its opening, High Street, to the status of a mere cul-de-sac, formed by dropping a huge factory wall across the far end.