'Bloody hell,' said Dalziel with the incredulous amazement of a Great War general happening on a battlefield. 'They had Dutch elm disease or what?'
On either side of the driveway a broad swathe of woodland had been ripped out and this fillet of desolation which presumably ran all the way round the house was bounded by two fences, the outer a simple hedge of barbed wire, the inner much more sophisticated, a twelve-feet-high security screen with floodlights and closed-circuit TV cameras every twenty yards.
Neither light nor presumably cameras were much use when the wind, as it now did once more, drove a rolling barrage of sleet and dendral debris across this wilderness.
Wield said, 'These are the precautions I mentioned, sir. We've got duckboards down. Try and stay on them else you could need a block and tackle.'
Was he taking the piss? The Fat Man trod gingerly on the first duckboard and felt it sink into the glutinous mud. He decided the sergeant was just being typically precise.
The wooden pathway zigzagged through the mire to avoid the craters left by uprooted trees, finally coming to a halt at the edge of one of the largest and deepest. Here there was some protection from a canvas awning which every blast of wind threatened to carry away along with the two constables whose manful efforts were necessary to keep its metal poles anchored in the yielding clay.
At the bottom of the crater a man was taking photographs whose flash revealed on the edge above him, crouched low to get maximum protection from the billowing canvas, another figure studying something in a plastic bag.
'Good God,' said Dalziel. 'That's never Troll Longbottom?'
'Mr Longbottom, yes, sir,' said Wield. 'Seems he was dining with Dr Batty, that's ALBA's Research Director, when the security staff rang him to say what had happened. Dr Batty's up at the house.'
'And Troll came too? Must've been losing at cards or summat.'
Thomas Roland Longbottom, consultant pathologist at the City General, was notoriously unenthusiastic about on-site examinations. 'You want a call-out service, join the AA,' he'd once told Dalziel.
His forenames had been compressed to Troll in early childhood, and whether the sobriquet in any way predicated his professional enthusiasm for dead flesh and loose bones was a question for psycholinguistics. Dalziel doubted it. They'd played in the same school rugby team and the Fat Man claimed to have seen Longbottom at the age of thirteen devour an opponent's ear.
He gingerly edged his way round the rim of the crater and drew the consultant's attention by tugging at the collar of the mohair topcoat he was wearing over a dinner jacket.
'How do, Troll? Good of you to come. Needn't have got dressed up, but. You'll get mud on your dicky.'
Longbottom squinted up at him. Time, which had basted Dalziel, had wasted him to an appropriate cadaverousness.
'Would you mind staying on your own piece of board, please, Dalziel? Facilis est descensus, but I'm choosy about the company I make it in.'
Education and high society had long eroded his native accent, but he had lost none of the skill of abusive exchange which form the basis of playground intercourse in Mid-Yorkshire.
'Sorry you got dragged away from your dinner, but I see you brought your snap,' said Dalziel peering at the plastic bag which contained a cluster of small bones.
'Which I shall need to feast on at my leisure.'
'Looks like slim pickings to me,' said Dalziel. 'So what can you give me off the top of your head? Owt'll do. Sex. Age. Time of death. Mother's maiden name.'
'It's a hand, and it's human, and that's all I'm prepared to say till I've seen a great deal more which may be some time. This one, I fear, like Nicholas Nickleby, is coming out in instalments.'
'Can't recall him,' said Dalziel. 'What did he die of?'
Longbottom arose with a groan which comprehended everything from the joke to the stiffness of his muscles and the state of the weather.
'Just look at my coat,’ he said. 'Do you know how much these things cost? I shall of course be making a claim.'
'I'd send it to ALBA then. Your mate, Batty. Do you reckon he keeps anything to drink up there?'
'I should imagine there's a single methanol in the labs.'
'That'll do nicely,' said Andy Dalziel.
v
Peter Pascoe could have done without the funeral meats but felt he'd gone as far as he dared in disrupting his sister's arrangements. In fact it worked out rather well as under the influence of cups of tea and salmon sandwiches the wrinkly clones turned into amiable, intelligent individuals, several of them well below retirement age. Some even went out of their way to compliment him on his address, saying how pleased Ada would have been with the service and how much they'd like something like that when their turn came.
Myra clearly took all this in because when they'd waved the stragglers goodbye, she said, 'OK, so as usual you were right.'
He smiled at her but she wasn't ready for that yet, and turned back into the old cottage which had been Ada's home for fifty years.
'Only room for one in that kitchen,' she said. 'I'll do the washing up. You can carry on with your inventory.'
When she came back into the living room, he was manoeuvring an old mahogany secretaire through the doorway.
'You're taking that old thing then?'
'Yes. I thought I'd get it on the roof rack now so I can make a quick getaway in the morning. Don't worry. It's on the inventory. I'll get it valued and make sure it goes into the estate.'
'I didn't mean that … oh think what you will, you always did.'
She turned away, angry and hurt.
Oh shit, thought Pascoe. Whatever happened to old silver tongue?
He reached out and caught her arm and said, 'Sorry. I was talking like an executor. Maybe a bit like a cop too. Listen, you don't have to say anything but anything you do say will be taken down.'
She stared at him blankly and for a second he thought she'd forgotten the grubby little schoolboy joke he'd tried to embarrass her with all those years ago.
Then she smiled and said, 'Knickers,' and through the eggshell make-up he glimpsed the girl who'd been his closest ally in the long war of adolescence. OK, so her motivation had a lot to do with resentment that Sue, the eldest, could get away with shorter skirts, thicker lipstick, and later hours than herself. Whatever the reason, their closest moments within the family had been together.
'What about you?' he said. 'Isn't there anything you'd like?'
'Far too old-fashioned for our house,' she said firmly.
'Something small, as a memento,' Pascoe urged.
'No need for that. I'll remember,' she said.
There was something in her tone, not acerbic exactly, but certainly acetic. She'd never been anyone's favourite, Pascoe realized. Susan had been the apple of their parents' eye, would perhaps have been their only fruit if their chosen method of contraception had been more efficient. He himself had been Ada's favourite — or, as he sometimes felt, target. Driven by the loss of two men in her life (three if you counted the disappointment of her own son) she'd focused all her shaping care on her male grandchild, leaving poor Myra to find her own way.
It had led to marriage with Trevor, the kind of financial advisor who bores clients into submission; an ultra-modern executive villa in Coventry, a pair of ultra-neanderthal teenage sons in private education; and a resolve to show the world that what she'd got was exactly what she wanted.
So, no appetite-spoiling bitterness this, just a condiment sharpness.
Pascoe said, 'About the music …'