The Wood Beyond

There. Now let’s see if the chicken still crossed the road.

The phone started ringing.

‘Could be for me,’ said Dalziel. ‘I left ’em your number. Or it could be News at Ten.’

‘Shall I answer it?’

‘Up to you. You’re a free agent.’

‘Yes, I am,’ she said seriously. ‘How about you, Andy? How’s the moral code?’

Dalziel didn’t mind a bit of obliquity but this was beginning to sound … what was that word Pascoe sometimes came out with? … sphincteresque? Summat like that. Any road, enough was enough.

He stood up and started taking his tie off.

‘Moral code? he said. ‘You’ve just cracked it.’

xi (#ulink_9ddac4c1-d408-5d4a-ba15-9cf9ed7c723b)

‘That, I hope, is the secretaire you mentioned. Or have you gone into the funeral business?’ said Ellie Pascoe.

Pascoe, reluctantly acknowledging that the passionate welcome-home embrace was over, followed her gaze to the sheet-shrouded cargo on his roof rack.

‘Have no fear,’ he said. ‘Ada is safely scattered as per wishes, more or less. It was quite entertaining in a macabre way. Give me a hand with this, will you? How’s Rosie?’

‘At school. Memory that it was her friend Sarah’s birthday today coincided with a miracle recovery.’

‘Ah,’ said Pascoe.

‘Ah what? She really wasn’t fit to go yesterday.’

‘I know she wasn’t,’ said Pascoe mildly, thinking that such a hint of defensiveness in a suspect would have had him chiselling at the weakness till it gave. ‘Here we go. You’ve got that end? Right … just let it slide. Great. Et voila!’

Dramatically he whipped the sheet off the secretaire. Ellie regarded it in silence.

‘You are dumbfounded with admiration?’ he said hopefully.

‘You said it was Sheraton.’

‘After Sheraton,’ said Pascoe.

‘About eighty long hard years after.’

Pascoe couldn’t argue. Out of the friendly shadows of Ada’s living room, the secretaire had lost much of its antique charm and stood forlorn and rather shabby in the cruel November sunlight.

‘It’s got a secret drawer,’ he pleaded.

He opened it and showed her the photo. She studied it with interest.

‘Poor devil,’ she said. ‘Gosh, doesn’t he look like you?’

Pascoe took the picture from her and looked at it again. He still couldn’t see it but something in those eyes spoke to him.

‘It’ll look better inside,’ he said, dropping the photo back into the drawer. ‘Unless this is the day you’ve got the Beautiful Homes photographers coming round?’

It was a low shot but she had it coming. Ellie was savage in her mockery of the Good Taste Theme Parks which gleamed at you out of the glossies, but this didn’t stop her from being pretty finical about what stood on her floors and hung on her walls.

They carried the secretaire into the house and set it down in the hallway.

‘Leave it there for the time being,’ said Ellie. ‘Hopefully it’ll find its own place. Let’s have a coffee and you can tell me all about everything.’

She listened alertly to his narrative, laughing aloud from time to time and asking the occasional pertinent question.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Ada ended up as part of a military tableau. Not her intention, I presume.’

‘No. I think on the whole she’d have been happier messing up one of the tidier exhibits,’ Pascoe admitted. ‘She was a lot like you, wanting people to be quite clear what she thought, I mean.’

Ellie considered this. She rarely talked about Peter’s family, not because she disliked them (which on the whole she did) but because Peter himself had made them a no-go area. On the surface Ada was the one she had most in common with, but when strong wills clash, common ground can often be a battlefield. Neither was happy about Peter’s career in the police force but Ada’s objections were the deeper. Ellie had married him because she loved him despite the fact he was a policeman, while Ada felt that all her love and care and hopes for her grandson were betrayed by his choice of career. Ellie, she implied, being the new responsible woman in his life, must bear some of the blame. Such an accusation was an irony which amusement might have rendered barbless had not Ellie surprised in herself a strong resentment which boiled down to simple jealousy that anyone else should dare to imagine they shared her right to criticize her husband! Self-knowledge, she now realized, may bring about changes in the head, but the heart doesn’t give a toss for psychology.

The two women had settled into a polite neutrality easy to maintain as contact between them was minimal. Nevertheless Ellie had encouraged Peter in his attempts to re-establish his old closeness with his grandmother, sensing that Ada was the source of most of the family warmth in his upbringing, but hope of any real rapprochement had died with the old lady’s reaction to Rosie’s birth.

‘A girl,’ she said. ‘You planning any more?’

‘We’ll have to see,’ said Pascoe.

‘Doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s best you should be the last of the Pascoes. I sometimes wonder if Mother didn’t have the right of it after all.’

Slightly enigmatic this last comment might have been, but the general tenor of her indifference to the birth of her great-granddaughter was unmistakable and, in Pascoe’s proudly paternal eyes, unforgivable. Hereafter contact was intermittent and formal, which didn’t stop him from feeling a tremendous upsurge of guilt at the news of her death and the realization that he hadn’t seen her for almost two years.

Ellie had felt neither the indignation nor the guilt. And she would definitely have gone to the funeral, she assured herself, if Rosie’s cold hadn’t interfered.

Or maybe, she added with that instinctive honesty which kept her certainties this side of fanaticism, maybe I’d have found some other reason, like cleaning an old tennis shoe.

‘It really got to her, didn’t it?’ she said. ‘Losing her dad like that in the war. It dominated her life. I hope I’m not that obsessive?’

‘We’d better ask Rosie in twenty years or so,’ said Pascoe lightly. ‘Any calls by the way?’

‘From on high, you mean? Yes, naturally. His Fatship rang first thing this morning, asked if you were back yet. Implied that you were an overeducated rat swimming away from an overloaded ship. Something about animals rights and finding bones in a wood?’

‘Wanwood House, ALBA Pharmaceuticals, I was there in the summer, remember? I heard on the news some activists had got in the grounds and discovered human remains. So he’s missing me? Good! What did you tell him?’

‘I said that your family and fiduciary duties were such as would probably detain you in Warwickshire until late this evening at the earliest.’

‘Excellent,’ said Pascoe. ‘Many thanks.’

‘For what?’

‘For lying for me.’