The Wood Beyond

'She seems to recognize the name,' said Pascoe.

'You reckon? Well, I live with her and I tell you she recognizes nowt. See this little bit of street here? Same as it was a hundred years back. That she recognizes, 'cos that's where she's lived all of her life. Take her fifty yards down the road to where it's all changed and she starts screaming like she's dropped off the end of the world. So if she recognizes the name it's because it belonged to someone who's long gone and likely long dead.'

'Nonetheless,' said Pascoe. The word affected the woman in much the same way as it affected Dalziel, bringing on a look of irritated resignation.

'If you've got time to waste, that's up to you. Me I've got work to do. See you don't let her out!'

So saying, she turned and retreated to the kitchen leaving Pascoe uncertain whether he'd been invited in or was expected merely to remain as guardian of the port.

He compromised by stepping over the threshold but remaining in the open doorway.

'Do you recall a family called Pascoe?' he said gently to the old lady.

'In trouble are they?' said Mrs Quiggins.

There was a note of hope in the old woman's voice which made him think that confirmation was more likely to move him forward than reassurance.

'I'm afraid so. We need to get hold of them urgently. So anything you can tell us about their whereabouts …'

She shook her head vigorously and said, 'Find that whore and you'll find him. All rotten, every last one on them.'

'That whore? Who do you mean?' he asked.

'Her! That cow! The one who was married to the other, the windy one who ran away and let his men get killed so they tied him up and shot him. All the same, it's in the blood, a bad lot.'

She was a crazy old woman, her mind as crooked as her body, Pascoe told himself. And I'm almost as crazy to be standing here, listening to her ramblings. Call it a day. Go home. Cultivate your garden. Play with your kid. Make love to your wife.

He said steadily, 'Would that be Peter you mean?'

'Aye, that's the one. Stuck-up bugger. Ideas above his station. And his mam no better than she ought to have been. And that other cow, so proud he were a sergeant, and all the time him plotting to kill the king!'

This was very lunacy! But he couldn't turn away from it now.

He said, 'And the other, the one who ran off with the. . whore?'

'Uncle bloody Steve, of course! Just upped and offed wi' her. Never a word more to Auntie Mary. Never a thought for the young 'un though he turned out as bad wi' that blood in him. The army said he'd gone to America, but we knew where he was. Oh yes, we knew!'

He had to get it absolutely clear. Even malicious craziness needs to be recorded if it is to be refuted.

He said, 'And the. . whore as you call her, she was the cousin's wife, Peter Pascoe's wife?'

'That's right. Alice Clark as was. She knew how to pick 'em, didn't she? Spreading her legs to one stinking deserter while t'other she's married to is getting shot by his own side!'

The daughter had emerged from the kitchen and was standing watching Pascoe with growing puzzlement.

'You did take in what I said, didn't you?' she interposed. 'All these ramblings of hers are stuff that happened a lifetime ago?'

'You've heard them before?'

'I could join in word for word! This and a dozen other tales she comes out with six times a day like it just happened yesterday.'

'You said you didn't know any Pascoes?'

'Nor I do, not living. Nor her either if truth be told. She were a kid when all this were happening, if it did happen. She picked it all up from letting her lugs flap and keeping her mouth shut. When I first heard it way back, her Aunt Mary weren't the virgin white she's become since, but the older she gets, the older her memories get too, and all she recalls now is what she picked up when she were six or seven.'

'You shut up, our Madge,' ordered the old woman. 'I know more than I ever let on.'

'I don't know about that, Mother, but you certainly let on a lot more than most on us want to know. Are you done, mister? 'Cos if you are, I'll shut that door and try to hang on to the bit of heat you've not let out already.'

Pascoe let the injustice of this pass and said, 'So you can confirm at least from your own recollections of family tradition the truth of what your mother says?'

'That was the tale in our family. Auntie Mary's man had run off with the wife of his cousin who got shot for a coward or something in the war. But there wasn't a Pascoe around here when I was a girl, and there's none now to my knowledge. You never let on it was history you was after.'

She was now openly suspicious. It was, Pascoe felt, time to go. He couldn't resist one last question, suggested mainly because of the confusion of names in his own family.

'Why is your mother called Mrs Quiggins? I mean, shouldn't that be her maiden name?'

It was a mistake he saw at once, implying knowledge there was no reason for him to have.

The daughter looked at him coldly for a moment then said, 'Not that it's any business of yours, but she managed to have me without benefit of clergy, so the "Mrs" is sort of honorary, ain't that right, Mother? Never had much luck with men, the Quigginses. Now, are you done?'

'Yes,' said Pascoe. 'I'm done. Thank you for your help.'

He stepped back into the cobbled street, feeling the damp cold air like a blessed relief.

Behind him, as if resenting the escape of her audience and trying to lure him back with juicier bait, the old woman's voice screeched, 'I could tell you stories about them Pascoes! Should have shot the whole lot on 'em! Bad blood, that's what they were. Bad blood!'

And even with the door closed and the distance between them growing with each step, he could still hear the woman's eldritch screech as he got into his car.

'Bad blood! Bad blood!'

x

The sluices of Death filtered slowly, but they filtered exceeding small, and Gentry displayed his trawl with a smile of satisfaction like moonlight on the Aral Sea.

'Doesn't look much,' said Dalziel.

He was right. On the table were four dishes, three containing coins and one containing some small pieces of metal.

'You are right,' said Gentry, 'though the paucity of material may be in itself as significant as a plenitude.'

'Eh?' said Dalziel with the scornful suspicion of a man being offered a cut-price diamond tiara at a car-boot sale.

'First, the coins,' said Gentry. 'Quite a span. Here we have a real antiquity, a Jacobean groat, that is, a four-penny piece, possibly quite valuable. And here at the other end of the temporal scale, a 1955 penny with, in between and perhaps most interesting of all, seven gold sovereigns.'

He paused for effect.

Dalziel said, 'Fucking marvellous. I'll get on to Missing Persons and see if they've got owt on a 300-year-old miser who's gone walkabout.'

Gentry, whose established response to Dalziel's sarcasm was to take it literally, though whether this was a gambit or just natural pedantry no one had ever determined, said, 'To assume that all these coins, or indeed any of them, spilled from the pockets of the deceased wouldbe rashly predicative. Particularly in view of the evident absence of any pockets.'

'You what?'

'The search of the telluric material continues, but I think I can confidently predict that we are not about to find any traces of the various fibres and fasteners invariably present in human attire, not even any of the nails, leather or lace-eyelets component in footwear.'

Dalziel digested this then said, 'Champion! So it's a very old miser who went around bollock naked and presumably kept his money up his jacksie!'

'Eductions are your department, superintendent,' said Gentry. 'I merely present discoveries and facts.'

'Oh aye? What's these facts then?' said Dalziel peering down at the final dish.