Gently in Trees (8 page)

‘Turn it on!’ Gently called.

Metfield operated the valve. From the hose came a faint, serpent-like hiss and a garlic smell that seemed to scratch at the brain.

Metfield turned it off and came round to the side-door.

‘Is that the original bottle?’ Gently asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Metfield said. ‘It still had some gas in it. Larling turned it off when he found the van.’

‘What can the suppliers tell us about that?’

‘Well, not very much, sir,’ Metfield admitted. ‘We don’t know if the bottle started full or if the valve was turned full on.’

‘But if it was full, and full on?’

‘They reckoned five hours, which would put the time it was turned on at two-thirty a.m. And that’s about what you’d expect, sir. Chummie would have had to let Stoll settle down.’

Metfield next proceeded to demonstrate the gas stove, which popped up from behind the front passenger-seat; it had been found folded, but could not be folded unless a safety-tap was first turned off. A complete irrelevancy. All that signified was that green pipe dangling from the ventilator. Cheap, easy, non-violent: and with a little care, untraceable. A method for an amateur, for a squeamish operator; for a woman. Or a womanish man.

‘Just thought I’d show you, sir,’ Metfield said. ‘You wouldn’t need to go further, if you were planning suicide.’

‘Put it away,’ Gently shrugged. ‘What I want to see now is where it was done.’

He left his Lotus in the yard and they drove out in a police Wolseley. Metfield was a careful, methodical driver who followed precisely the drill in the manual. They left Latchford by the Cross road and stole ahead at a steady fifty. Very soon they were clear of the houses and entering the fenceless stretches of the brecks.

‘Would this have been Stoll’s route?’ Gently asked.

Metfield nodded. ‘Coming in from London. I haven’t found anyone yet who saw him, but any other way would put on miles.’

‘He would have been going through Latchford at around ten.’

‘That’s when a lot of traffic would have been leaving. But not so much of it going this way. He could have slipped by without anyone noticing.’

‘What’s over to the left?’

‘That’s the Battle Area, on the far side of those trees.’

‘Was anything going on there at the weekend?’

Metfield shook his head. ‘The Camp is closed for repairs.’

And if the military were absent there would be nobody else on those wide, wasted acres, where cottage and farmhouse rotted and collapsed, and the roads were vanishing again, into the brecks.

They passed a straggle of native pines, their flaky boles purplish-red, and headed for the long palisade of the forest, lying trim and alert under the sun. The mass of the trees were evergreen conifers, Scots, Corsican and Douglas, but they were skirted with deciduous saplings, beech, maple, larch and sycamore. Then, as the Wolseley left the main road, they entered an avenue of great oak and beech trees, arboreal patriarchs, set wide apart, so that each followed each in majestic spectacle. Their sheer size and complexity of foliated architecture was a surprise and an astonishment: one felt one had never really seen trees till now, and that now one was seeing too many too quickly.

‘You should come here in the autumn,’ Metfield murmured complacently. ‘I usually make a trip or two out here, then. Some of the colours you wouldn’t believe, much less put a name to. It’s a different world.’

The road here was spaced with wide verges, letting in sun and a fret of sky. But beyond the great trees lay the regiments of pines, dim, motionless and enclosing. Truly a different world. Their deep, pillared glades had an electric presence. At their feet grew dull snowberry and purple-leaved bramble, with the occasional pallor of white campion. And the dividing rides, with their painted signatures, also departed into enclosed dimness, with verges rough with tangled grass, and flecked with campions, and the chalked blue of bugloss. Here, no doubt, the deer lived, though the forest offered no sight or sound of them. It was simply still, and silent, with its own silence; where the trees lived, in tree time.

They turned left into Warren Ride, along which ran a regular though bumpy track. Metfield slowed the Wolseley, not so much because of the bumps as to avoid raising a cloud of soft, reddish dust. A car approaching them without this precaution was trailing a dense and billowing banner; after it passed, for the next hundred yards, they were seeing the trees through a rusty haze.

‘The bastard!’ Metfield exclaimed. ‘One day I’ll do a joker for that.’

‘It’ll be chalk dust,’ Gently said. ‘Coloured with iron. Does it occur anywhere else round here?’

Metfield pondered a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The tracks are mostly marl or gravel.’

‘There was orange stain on the tyres of the caravette.’

Metfield nodded. ‘There’d been rain,’ he said. It was still puddly on Sunday, along by the fence.’

‘Just along there?’

Metfield kept nodding. ‘And I need my backside kicking, sir,’ he said. ‘But perhaps it isn’t too late now. We haven’t had any rain since.’

‘It’s too late for Walling,’ Gently said. ‘I saw his car in town yesterday. It had been recently washed and polished. Though that could be a pointer, too.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Metfield said, through his teeth. And went on nursing the car down the ride.

On the wide verge to the left a number of cars and caravettes were parked, and now and then, as they passed a cross-ride, they caught glimpses of distant strollers; then the verge ended, the trees encroached, and the track became even rougher, ending at last in a thinned-out glade, where two or three other cars had penetrated.

‘This is where we turn off, sir.’

Metfield dropped the Wolseley into second. Short of the glade by about fifty yards was an intersecting ride to the right. At the junction was a stake marked with painted arrow-heads, which the Forestry used to indicate their trails, and recent tracks of vehicles were visible in moist leaf-mould at the entrance to the ride. Metfield turned into it. At once they were in the deep shade of the trees. On one hand were the grey boles of Douglas pines, on the other the pinker shafts of Corsicans. The track was broken by outcrops of chalk and gulches of partly-dried mud; and there were carpets of polished needles which set the Wolseley’s wheels spinning. Metfield pressed on gamely. After a few twists and turns, the track brought them to a view of the sky on the left, where a belt of majestic Scots pines stood a little clear of a meshed fence.

‘Mogi’s Belt.’ Metfield stopped the car before they bore off along the line of the fence. ‘This used to be a sporting estate, once, sir. They planted these belts to give cover to the pheasants.’

‘And behind that fence is the Battle Area?’

‘Yes, sir. It runs right through to Ickburgh. Only the army never come within a mile of this place – they hold their manoeuvres round the old villages.’

Gently grunted and stared at the fence, which was plainly not of recent origin. Rust was gnawing at the wire mesh and separating in flakes from the metal stakes. Had Stoll needed to be told it was safe to trespass here, or had he simply gone in, taking his chance? Certainly, a man who was seeking badgers might have picked up a hint from the Forestry pamphlet!

‘So where’s the gate?’

Metfield set off again. Now the track ran straight, following the fence. Within a hundred yards they came to the gate; and beside it a Land Rover, in which a man sat smoking.

‘This is Larling, sir.’

The man had got down, and was methodically stubbing out his cigarette. He was dressed in a crumpled tweed jacket and jeans, and an open-necked khaki shirt. A solid-looking man, about forty, his face tanned and roughened.

‘He’s the Forestry ranger who found the body.’

Larling came up slowly to the car. He nodded to Metfield and glanced keenly at Gently. He was shredding the cigarette-butt between thick fingers. He gestured to the pines with his head.

‘We’ve got a peeper in there,’ he said. ‘I’ve been parked here twenty minutes. I’ve caught a couple of looks at him since then.’

Metfield peered into the trees. ‘How do you mean, a peeeper?’

‘He was about when I got here,’ Larling said. ‘I heard him backing away through the section. But I could hear he hadn’t gone very far. So I just lit a fag and sat quiet.’

‘Know who it is?’

Larling shook his head. ‘He didn’t come close enough for that. I saw him once over by that snowberry, then again further this way, near the elder. A youngster, I thought. He was wearing a dark shirt, maybe blue. That’s all I can tell you.’

Metfield fingered his jowls. ‘Probably just a snooper. There’s several cars back in the Ride.’

Larling nodded. ‘I thought I’d tell you,’ he said. ‘I reckon he’ll have slid off now, with you turning up.’

They climbed out of the car into the feathered sunlight and the cool, resin odour of the pines. The gate in the fence was also rusted, and the paint of its warning notice dull. Its chain and padlock hung unshackled. Gently tested the action of the latter. The hinged arm moved very stiffly, required strength to spring it when closed. He let it dangle again.

‘Is this how you found it when you got here, twenty minutes ago?’

‘That’s right,’ Larling said. ‘I haven’t touched it. The gate was shut, but the chain was hanging.’

Gently looked at Metfield. ‘How did you leave it?’

Metfield goggled. ‘Chained, of course! That cheeky so-and-so has been poking round there. Larling must have scared him off.’

‘Interesting,’ Gently said. He gave his attention to the gate. It was constructed of welded angle-iron, about eight feet high, with the wire mesh attached to it by steel clips. The clips were inserted all round the frame and rusted points stuck out meanly. They stuck out on the opening edge of the gate. And on one was a snag of dark fibres.

Metfield, who’d been watching, sucked in breath.

‘That’ll be off chummie’s sleeve,’ he said. ‘And like as not he scratched his arm – he must have come out of there in a hurry.’

‘This wasn’t here earlier?’ Gently said.

‘No, sir,’ Metfield said. ‘We’d been all over it. So now I’m beginning to wonder if he’s just a snooper, or whether we shouldn’t be getting after him.’

Larling spat a shred of tobacco. ‘You’ll need some dogs for that,’ he said. ‘He’ll have had ten minutes’ start, anyway, and if he’s got a car he’ll be away.’

They both stared at Gently, who was stooping to examine the ground by the gate; but the ground was carpeted with matted grass: nothing useful to be had there.

‘We’ll leave it,’ he said. ‘Perhaps our friend will turn up again, if his curiosity is so keen.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Metfield said humbly.

Gently drew a plastic envelope from his wallet.

Larling showed them the badger gate, a simple contrivance that relied on the weight of the shutter for its operation, coupled with the circumstance that hares and rabbits would be shy of pushing against it, while a badger would unhesitatingly shoulder it open. Then they returned to the fence gate, and went through it into the confusion of underbrush and self-seeded saplings, from which the sunned, rosy pillars of the pines rose massively to their dark crowns of felted needles.

The tracks of the caravette were plain to follow through the snowberry and bracken. Twigs were snapped, fronds spreadeagled, and leaf-mould scattered by spinning wheels. The tracks bore right, avoiding one of the pines, and passed under a screen of young birch and elder; then they climbed over a brackeny bank and lurched down into a dell.

‘Here we are,’ Larling said. ‘Here’s the place where I found him. And I reckon he’d never have driven in here unless he’d known where he was coming.’

Gently shrugged and advanced into the dell. The extent of Stoll’s information showed here yet more plainly. There had been no manoeuvring of the caravette; it had been driven at once to its parked position. The tracks, though disturbed by subsequent trampling, remained sufficiently to tell the story, along with deep indentations in the leaf-mould at the spot to which Larling had pointed. From there they proceeded in a firm lock, showing where the police had driven the van away.

‘Where’s the badger sett?’

‘Under that beech. So like he’d have his headlights facing straight at it.’

‘Wouldn’t that upset the badgers?’

Larling shook his head. ‘Not if he was quiet. Lights don’t seem to bother them.’

The beech was old, a natural curiosity, with four stems rising from a rampart of roots; rainwater lay in a basin between the stems, and the boughs above were strangely intergrown. Around the roots grew anaemic nettles, concealing the mouth of an impregnable tunnel.

‘That’s where they are,’ Larling mused. ‘And I reckon that’s where they’ve been for a century. Nobody’s going to dig them out of that. And I’m to ask you not to mention badgers to the press.’

Gently stared at the tunnel. ‘So who would know they were here?’

‘Not nobody should, by rights,’ Larling said. ‘This is W.D. property, and nobody shouldn’t set foot in here. But we know, of course. Between you and me, we’ve been in here sizing up the timber. But we’d never mention that sett to anyone. It’d be as much as our jobs were worth.’