Reginald Hill: The Wood Beyond

'Well, at least now you're here, perhaps you can tell the bunch of incompetents who've preceded you to get their fingers out and start imposing some sort of order on this mess.'

'I'll do my best,' said the Fat Man mildly. 'Talking of messes, sir, that's a right one you've got out there. Looks like a health hazard to me.'

'On the contrary, it's a cordon sanitaire,' said Batty. 'After the damage those lunatics did last summer, it was quite clearly beyond the police force's competency to protect us, so we took steps of our own to thwart these criminals.'

'Criminals,' echoed Dalziel as if the word were new to him. 'You'll be prosecuting then, sir?'

Batty said, 'If it's left up to me, we will! Normally we don't care to give these lunatics the oxygen of publicity, but I suspect in this case, some exposure is already unavoidable?'

'Aye,' said Dalziel. 'Having a body dug up in your back yard usually gives off a lot worse stink than oxygen.'

'As I feared, though I suppose the exact nature of the publicity depends on how diplomatically things are handled. Troll, what can you tell us?'

Dalziel gave the pathologist a look which dared him to speculate an inch further than he'd done on the edge of the crater.

'Early days, David, early days,' murmured Longbottom.

'And getting close to early hours,' said Dalziel looking at his watch. 'Mebbe I could see the witnesses now …?'

'Yes, I suppose so. Patten will take you along. Troll, let's try to get your outside dry and your inside suitably wetted.'

With an apologetic mop and mow at Dalziel, the pathologist let himself be led away. Dalziel who kept his slates as carefully as any shopkeeper, chalked up another small debt against Batty's name and followed the security man through one of the hessian doors and down a long corridor.

'We've got them locked up down here,' he said.

'Locked up?'

'They are trespassers, and once they got into the building, they ran amok. One of my men got hit in the stomach, I was threatened …'

'Oh aye?' said Dalziel, interested. Mebbe this could have some connection with Redcar after all. 'Anyone get really hurt?'

'More dignity than owt else,' said Patten enigmatically. 'That's where they are.'

They'd turned left at a T-junction in the corridor. Ahead, Dalziel had already observed another TecSec man slouching against a door, his head wreathed in smoke. As soon as he became aware of their approach, he straightened his uniform and snapped to attention. There was no sign of a cigarette. Dalziel admired the legerdemain and bet on the big front pocket of the dark green trousers.

'At ease, Jimmy,' said Patten. 'This is Superintendent Dalziel.'

'I know,' said the man. 'How do you do, sir.'

Dalziel was used to being recognized but liked to know why.

'Do I know you?' he said.

'Not exactly, sir. But I know you. I was at Dartleby nick till I took the pension. Uniformed. PC Howard, sir.'

'Jumped ship, did you? All right, lad. You can piss off now.'

The man looked unhappily at Patten who said, 'We do have our orders..'

'That's what Eichmann said, and they hanged him. So bugger off. And by the way, Howard.. '

'Yes, sir?'

'Your cock's on fire.'

Leaving the ex-policeman beating at his pocket, Dalziel stepped into the room and halted dead in his tracks.

'Bloody hell,' he said.

Gently steaming against a big radiator were eight women, each mucky enough to have set Dalziel's granny spinning in her grave.

That Wield, he swore to himself. He kept quiet on purpose. I'll punch the bugger handsome!

One woman detached herself from the huddle and came towards him, saying, 'Thank God, here's t'organ grinder. Now mebbe we can get shut of the monkeys.'

She glared towards Patten as she spoke. He returned the glare indifferently. Dalziel on the other hand studied the woman with the intense interest of a gourmet served a new dish. Not that there was much to whet the appetite. She had less meat on her than a picked-over chicken wing and her cheeks were pale and hollow as wind-carved limestone.

Memory stirred. That business down the mine when Pascoe got hurt. .

He said, 'You're one of them Women Against Pit Closures lot from Burrthorpe. Walker, isn't it? Wendy Walker?'

She stepped by him and slammed the door in Patten's face. Then she said, 'That's right. Got a fag?'

He pulled out a packet. He rarely smoked now, not because of health fears, still less because of social pressures, but because he'd found it was blunting his ability to distinguish single malts with a single sniff. But he still carried fags, finding them professionally useful both as ice-breakers and cage-rattlers.

'You're a long way off the coalface, luv,' he said, flicking his old petrol lighter.

'Coal?'

She drew the word into herself with a long breath that reduced the cigarette by an inch of ash.

'What's that?' she said on the outgoing puff. 'They shut Burrthorpe last year like they've shut most on t'others. Them bastards made a lot of promises they didn't keep, but when they said they'd pay us back for the Strike, by God they kept that one!'

'It's still a long way from home.'

'Home is where the hate is, and there's nowt left to hate in Burrthorpe, just an empty hole in the ground where there used to be a community.'

'I'm sorry to interrupt this reunion and the Channel 4 documentary, but you, whoever you are, how long are we to be restrained by these thugs in these disgusting conditions?'

The voice, as up-to-Oxford county as Walker's was down-to-earth Yorkshire, belonged to a small sturdy woman, her short-cropped black hair accentuating the determined cast of her handsome features. This one too brought a memory popping up in Dalziel's mind, hot as a piece of fresh toast, of a woman he'd known and liked — more than liked — down in Lincolnshire after Pascoe's wedding … He hadn't thought about her for years. What could have pressed that button? he wondered as he stared with undisguised pleasure at the way this woman's wet sweater clung to her melopeponic breasts.

'Nay, lass,' he said. 'No one's restraining you, whoever you are. You can bugger off any time you like, once you've made your statement. You have been asked to make a statement, Miss er. .?'

'Marvell. Amanda Marvell. Yes, we've been asked but most of us are refusing till such time as we have proper representation.'

She glared accusingly, and in Dalziel's eyes, most becomingly, at Wendy Walker who snapped, 'Yeah, I've made my statement. In fact, when it comes down to it, I'm the only one who's really got owt to state. Mebbe more than you'll care to hear, Cap. All I want is to get out of here.'

'You surprise me, Wendy,' said Marvell, all cool control. 'What happened to all the big talk about going for the jugular and taking no prisoners? First sign of trouble, and you're all for breaking ranks.'

'Yeah? Mebbe I should have been more choosy who I formed ranks with in the first place,' snarled Walker.

'Really? You mean we don't match up to the standards of your mining chums? Well, I can see that. Once they encountered real opposition, they pretty soon crumbled too, didn't they?'

There was a time when a provocation like this to a Burrthorpe lass would have started World War Three, and indeed a small red spot at the heart of those pallid cheeks seemed to indicate some incipient nuclear activity. But before she could explode, a round-faced blonde who looked even wetter and more miserable than the rest said, 'Wendy's right, Cap. This is serious stuff. It was bones we found out there, a body. Let's just make our statements and go home. Please.'

Marvell's et-tu-Brute look was even more devastating than her j'accuse glare, and Dalziel was experiencing a definite wringing of the withers when the door opened and George Headingley's broad anxious face appeared.