The Wood Beyond

'I wouldn't say lost,' said Pascoe. 'But certainly still feeling our way.'

'Well, if you're serious about that body mebbe having something to do with the hospital, then you've come to the right spot,' said Patten leading him round the side of the house.

'I doubt it. Not unless you've got their records stashed away in a cellar.'

'That's more or less what I do mean,' replied Patten to his surprise. 'Can't swear it's the records, but I do know that when we were checking the place over last summer with a view to making it secure, I found a cellar full of rusty old filing cabinets jammed full of junk.'

'Really?' said Pascoe. 'Now that I would like to see. If it could be arranged.'

'No problem. But let's have that coffee first.'

He ushered Pascoe through a side door and into the TecSec office where a rather old-fashionedly smooth man he guessed to be Captain Sanderson was sitting behind a desk. He rose smiling and offered his hand.

'Peter Pascoe, I presume. Heard about you. Had the pleasure of meeting your boss yesterday. Broke the mould making him, I should think.'

He raised one eyebrow quizzically, a trick Pascoe guessed he practised in front of the mirror.

'Mr Dalziel, you mean? He is certainly unique.'

'And you're certainly diplomatic,' laughed Sanderson. 'Des, why don't you rustle us up some coffee?'

Partners they might be, but it was still the sergeant who brewed up, Pascoe noted.

'Take a seat, Mr Pascoe. Tell me, does a visit from a superintendent one day and a chief inspector the next mean that things are getting better or worse?'

'Depends what things you had in mind,' said Pascoe.

'Bones-in-the-wood sort of things,' said Sanderson.

'I see. Then it depends what you mean by better and worse.'

'Well, from my point of view, having the contract for security here at Wanwood, better would be if you told me that you'd decided the bones belonged to some old tramp who'd dossed down in the wood and passed away from natural causes. Worse would be if you decided there was a crime here which needed investigation. And worst of all would be if you suspected there might be more bodies out there and were planning to instigate a full-scale excavation programme.'

Patten put a cup of coffee in front of Pascoe and offered him milk and sugar. He shook his head and sipped the bitter black liquid.

'In other words, the less publicity the better?'

'You've got it.'

'Why worry? I should have thought that your only real quarrel was with the animal rights people, and from that point of view, ALBA's little secret has been out since the raid in the summer.'

'True,' said Sanderson. 'But as you probably know from police experience, there's a difference between a target and a symbol. Aldermaston, Porton Down, Greenham Common, none of them unique in what went on there, but they each became a symbol for the whole and thus the object of continuous attention from the protesters. We can deal with the occasional hassle, but we don't want to end up as everyone's favourite target.'

'I'm pleased to meet such concern for an employer,' murmured Pascoe. 'A more cynical approach might have been to rub your hands and say, the more hassle ALBA get, the more they'll need to shell out on security. After all there's still a fair stretch of ground untouched out there. Plenty of room for a moat, say. Or a hundred-foot wall.'

'Oh dear. Do I detect disapproval of what we've done to the wood?' said Sanderson smiling.

'I'm fond of trees,' admitted Pascoe.

'And animals too, I daresay. How do you feel about their use in medical research, chief inspector? I only ask because as an old army man, I appreciate how difficult it can be sometimes when there's tension between personal feelings and official orders.'

The tone was sympathetic and sincere but nonetheless Pascoe knew he was being mocked.

He finished his coffee and said carefully, 'Such a question might have been pertinent last summer when I was here investigating the raid on the labs which resulted in your firm's employment, Captain Sanderson. But as my present investigation is concerned only with the remains discovered in the wood, and the head of ALBA himself has assured me he has no wish to prosecute the animal rights group involved, your question is, in one sense at least, impertinent.'

'Slap goes my wrist,' said Sanderson, untroubled. 'But we mustn't keep you from your duties, chief inspector. Are you looking for Dr Batty? He seems a trifle busy just now.'

He glanced at the bank of TV screens on one of which Batty could be seen at work with several other white-coated figures in a lab.

'No hurry,' said Pascoe. 'Mr Patten, you said something about a cellar. .?'

Sanderson shot Patten an enquiring glance.

'Them old filing cabinets,' explained the ex-sergeant. 'Mr Pascoe's interested in the place when it were a hospital.'

'Ah yes. Because of the bones. Good thinking, though I fear you'll find it dusty work. Perhaps you'd care to borrow one of our uniforms?'

'No, thanks,' said Pascoe. 'I tend to think more clearly in plain clothes.'

Ten minutes later he was regretting his smart answer; in fact he was regretting that Patten had ever mentioned the cabinets. He'd feared the worst when the man had led him via progressively deteriorating corridors out of the hi-tech reconstructed regions of the house into what was a pretty well untouched Victorian back kitchen overlooking a bin-strewn yard. Memories of the Wyfies museum in Leeds came to his mind, and when the TecSec man pushed open a cellar door, he wouldn't have been surprised to hear the crump of shells and the stutter of machine-gun fire drifting up the dark steps. In the event he found himself surrounded by the past in a different form, a henge of rusty filing cabinets coated in dust, debris and spiders' webs, and lit by a single bulb in a low ceiling.

He took a deep breath of the dank air in an effort to control his incipient claustrophobia. Patten had promised to tell him as soon as Batty became available. He hoped to hell it wouldn't be long.

He pulled open a drawer at random and found himself looking at a pile of shredded paper. This cabinet had rusted so badly that mice or, worse, rats had been able to force a way through the decaying metal and chew away to their hearts' content. He turned to another. The same. Ah well, he thought, at least I tried. One more like this and I'm out of here.

But the third, alas, had held fast and the files were complete. He opened one and read: Major Quinnel David Andrew. Admitted August 30th 1916.

Jesus wept! he thought. Did everything lead back to this fucking war?

He read on. These were case notes. The major had received severe damage to both legs in a shell blast near Albert, been treated first at a field hospital, then transferred to a base hospital near Boulogne for preliminary surgery, returned to London for more work at the Charing Cross, and finally been shipped up to Yorkshire for post-operative treatment and convalescence.

All the other notes were concerned with injured officers too and Pascoe had guessed what the situation was even before he hit upon the earliest files of them all.

One of the many areas of unpreparedness in the Great War had been in medical provision. Not even the most Jeremianic of prophets had foreseen the tidal wave of wounded men which would swamp the country for four long years. All over the British Isles the upper classes had seen where their patriotic duty lay and had offered their second, and even their third, though rarely their fourth, houses as temporary hospitals, clinics and rest-homes. And not just the upper classes. The nineteenth century had seen the rise of a new and powerful class, the captains of industry who, having imitated their betters in the purchase or construction of their own country houses, were not slow to follow this new aristocratic example.