The Wood Beyond (17 page)

'Yeah, maybe,' said Howard. 'Anything more I can do for you, sarge?'

Wield regarded him thoughtfully at the same time doing his bit for world health by bending the flimsy spoon in half and tying a knot in it.

His problem was, he didn't really have any idea what Howard might be able to do for him. He had a feeling about TecSec, but he was willing to admit to that prejudice against private security firms which Dalziel embodied and most professional coppers shared. Wanting to find something iffy was a bad starting place for looking. It made it easy to elevate a certain wariness he'd detected in both Patten and his subordinate to the status of suspicious behaviour. Nothing to do but like in a fight, keep prodding till finally if the defences weren't sound, you saw the skin split and the claret start flowing, and then you found what kind of opponent you were really up against.

He said, 'Don't think so, Jimmy. Might be able to do something for you, but.'

'What's that?'

'Keep you straight,' said Wield.

'Now hang about.. .'

'You hang about and I'll tell you what I mean. Mr Dalziel's got this thing going...’

That had his attention. Like at nursery school, if you want to get their little darlings really listening, skip Red Riding Hood and get straight through to the Big Bad Wolf.

'. . . he's been told off to vet all private security companies on our patch, dig out any stinkweed.'

'Are you saying that TecSec's iffy?' demanded Howard.

'Are you saying it's not?' asked Wield.

'Yes, I mean, no ... I mean, I've only been there since September, sarge, and I can put my hand on my heart and say that since I joined, I've not noticed anything dodgy.'

'Probably because there's nothing to notice,' said Wield. 'But if anything did come up, well, think on, Jimmy. You know the score from your time in the Force. With information, there's
before
and
after.
Before, and you're on the side of the angels. After, and you're just another lowlife trying to cut a deal.'

Wield was glad Pascoe wasn't here to hear him talking like something out of an American cop movie.

'Well, I know nowt,' said Howard firmly. 'There's been nowt, not since September when I joined. And if there was, I'd get in touch, sarge, you can rely on it. Once a cop, eh?'

'Right,' said Wield. 'Hurry and you'll make the second race, Jimmy.'

He sat a little longer, staring into the murky depths of his untouched tea. The café prop, came over and looked angrily at the twisted spoon.

'What the hell happened to that?' he demanded.

Wield looked at him coldly, still not out of his tough guy role.

'It got knotted,' he said. 'Why don't you do the same?'

v

Peter Pascoe was a conscientious man, but there were several factors which made him able to head for Kirkton via the unlikely route of the University Staff Club without too bruising a moral struggle.

Firstly, as Ellie could testify with some bitterness, the job owed him for uncountable hours, days, even weeks of unpaid overtime.

Secondly, he had a strong suspicion based on a certain evasiveness of speech that Dalziel's alleged 'interrogation' was taking place between consenting adults without reference to the rules of PACE.

Thirdly, though his criminological acquaintance with patterns of obsessional behaviour kept nagging at his mind, he couldn't escape the feeling of being guided, or perhaps pushed, if not by an external divinity, then at least by personal intuitions whose roots lay too deep for rational excavation.

So when he'd rung the History Department to leave a message for Professor Pollinger and the antipodally twanged respondent had announced she
was
Andrea Pollinger and if he wanted to talk to her it had better be in the next couple of hours as she'd be away from campus for a week or so starting that afternoon, he hadn't hesitated to make a date.

As he entered the Staff Club, a small man with a heavily nicotined moustache said, 'Peter, hello, not looking for me, are you?'

This was Dr Pottle, Head of the Psychiatry Unit at the Central Hospital and occasional lecturer at the university. Pascoe had a double-pronged relationship with him - first as a professional consultant to the police, and second as a personal consultant to himself. Some weeks had passed since contact in either mode had been necessary.

'No,' said Pascoe. 'Should I be?'

'That's for you to say and me to confirm,' said Pottle. He smiled as he spoke but his shrewd eyes were quartering Pascoe's face.

'I'm just meeting someone here. Sorry, don't have time to talk.'

'Me neither, not now,' said Pottle. 'But if you did fancy a chat, I think I've got a window between say four and five. Take care.'

He was gone. Damn the man, thought Pascoe. It's really come to something when the psychiatrists are drumming up business in the street!

He went in search of Pollinger.

Ellie had prepared him to some extent but the professor still surprised. Clad as though for a safari in a bosom-billowed khaki shirt and floppy shorts out of which erupted a positive torrent of leg, she invited him to join her in a glass of lager in terms which suggested refusal would be injury and any alternative drink insult. She should have been a parody, but how could anyone be a parody who was so exuberantly herself?

'Ellie, my wife, whom you met last night. . .' began Pascoe.

'Great girl. No bullshit. You got yourself a gem there, Pete.'

She'd already instructed him to call her Poll. He tried it now.

'Yes, er, Poll, I know it. Ellie tells me you're writing a book about the Passchendaele campaign, Third Ypres?'

'That's right. You interested in that particular cockup?'

'In a way. More specifically in World War One military executions. I wondered if you might have any specialized knowledge in that area?'

She wasn't looking quite so friendly now.

'Well, I know what everyone knows, that you bastard Poms shot an average of one of your own men every week of the war. Maybe if they'd shot a fucking staff officer a week too, the war would have been over a lot sooner, but I doubt it. Seems to be an inexhaustible supply of dickheads from your officer classes.'

'Indeed,' said Pascoe, glancing round the Staff Club to see how this academic analysis was going down. Fortunately the few other inmates seemed to be in that state of intellectual contemplation which a non-initiate might have mistaken for sleep.

'So spit it out, Pete. Why exactly do you want to talk to me?' she asked.

'Well, it's in reference to a sort of private investigation I'm engaged in - is something the matter?'

She definitely had the look of a sunbather who has noticed a crocodile in the swimming pool.

'This is the way I always look when I find some jackaroo sniffing around to pick the titbits out of my hard-sweated research,' she said. 'By a peculiar coincidence, I'm thinking about doing my next book on Great War court martials. Did I maybe let this slip to Ellie last night? And this private investigation of yours, is that maybe cop-speak for writing a book? Ellie said you were a jack, but I don't suppose you've still got a case open eighty years on.'

Pascoe had forgotten how neurotic academics could be about their research. They made the world of industrial espionage seem like shoplifting from Woollies.

He said, 'This really is private and personal. I've just discovered that my great-grandfather was one of the poor bastards you mentioned. I'd like to find out the details but if this is going to cause you some professional difficulty . ..'

'Don't get your Y-fronts in a twist,' she said. 'This is sensitive stuff we're talking about here. I just about had to sell my body to get sight of it, and a nice sensational story in the tabloids traceable to me would slam all kinds of doors on my tits.'

'Isn't it in the public domain then?'

'Sure. Like Prince Charlie's dong's in the open air when he goes for a slash, but that doesn't mean we're all going to get a look at it. So why exactly do you want to get hold of these details, Pete?'

'Oh you know . . . family interest...'

'Yeah, yeah, I know that one. Look up the family tree and see who's hanging there. You'll need to do better than that.'

Pascoe sipped his lager, then said, 'I'm sorry. I'm not sure I really know why ... or what I want to do . . . Like I said, I've only just found out, but since I found out, I've hardly been able to think about anything else. I suppose I want to understand how .. . why .. . and if there was a miscarriage of justice . ..'

'You for capital punishment, Pete?' she interrupted.

He looked at her in surprise, then tried to answer.

'No, it's barbarity. But it's a barbarity that has been written into our legal system from time to time and while I'm glad it's behind us, I wouldn't use its existence to argue that men should get away with murder.'

'Nicely fielded, Pete. And if that's the way you think, your worries are over. Your own beloved PM has said as much in Parliament. No grounds for issuing retrospective free pardons to any of those poor bastards 'cos whatever we may think about the punishment, that's what they had coming to them under the laws and conditions of service prevailing at the time. Go down that road, he implied, and you end up pardoning a hell of a lot of sheep stealers. You go along with that, Pete?'

'The Law is sometimes an ass,' said Pascoe carefully. 'At certain times and in certain places, the Law is more than an ass, it is a hyena and feeds on human flesh. But when a man is hung for a sheep he did not in fact steal, then the Law, whether ass or hyena, has been abused. That is a miscarriage of justice which may not be shrugged off even if it happened a thousand years ago.'

She regarded him with comic-book amazement.

'You sure you're a cop, Pete? And your bosses let you roam the streets by yourself? There may be hope for this benighted country yet. OK. You've almost got me persuaded. Give me the full pitch.'

So Pascoe told her the story. She made notes as he spoke and when he'd finished, she said, 'So there's still some doubt this Sergeant Pascoe really was your great-granddad?'

'There's a mystery, certainly, but not much doubt. My little girl took one look at the photo and asked what I was doing in fancy dress. I can't see the resemblance as clearly as that, I'm afraid, but then I've always thought I'm a dead ringer for Rudolph Valentino.'

She looked at his thin mobile English face with its untidy mop of fair brown hair and smiled.

He smiled back and said, 'So if Sergeant Pascoe rings a bell. . .'

'Hey, this isn't the servants' hall in here. I don't have three hundred plus bells all nicely labelled. Also my interest, which is still at the preliminary stage, is in
all
FGCM death sentences, not just the ones confirmed ...'

'Sorry?' said Pascoe. 'FGCM?'

'Field General Court Martial. Different from a General Court Martial which needed at least five officers and a legally qualified judge-advocate to advise them. In battlefield conditions this wasn't always convenient, unless it was an officer being tried. Your common or garden squaddie got an FGCM, only three officers needed with hardly a judge-advocate in sight. You can see the thinking. Made life - or death - a lot easier when you were up the Front.'

'And what do you mean, confirmed?'

'After sentence the verdict was passed up the line of command so's everyone could put in their two cents' worth till it landed in the C-in-C's lap. If he confirmed the sentence, that was it. Army's line of defence is that only ten per cent of the death sentences were actually confirmed. Makes them sound like a bunch of crypto-conchies, doesn't it? Then you work out that three hundred plus executions from 1914 to 1918 means three thousand plus death sentences .. . makes you wonder about the old military grey matter, doesn't it?'

'But surely not all are necessarily in dispute,' said Pascoe, reluctant to abandon totally his ur-faith in the protective power of the Law.

'You mean like if a crime was capital under civvy law, the same penalty should apply under military? Fair enough. If my memory serves me right, there were about thirty done for murder, and even then they didn't get the access to legal defence that a civilian court would have given. And that leaves about three hundred guys who got theirs for terrible crimes like being shell-shocked, or scared, or completely knackered, or losing their rags and punching some pompous brass hat up the hooter. That's no Law. That's fucking Licence!'

Pascoe smiled and murmured, 'Well, I'm glad to see you're approaching your subject in a proper spirit of pure academic objectivity.'

'Don't go all Anglo-superior on me, Pascoe,' she snapped. 'You Poms should never forget we've got the moral high ground here. Despite all pressure from your High Command, the Oz government refused to apply your primitive military legal system. For an Australian soldier, if it wasn't a capital crime in civvy street, it wasn't a capital crime in the army. Just as well, or maybe I wouldn't be here.'

'Why's that?'

'My great-grandfather was at Gallipoli, they used to call him Jolly Polly when he got back. During some mix-up he came under the command of one of you lot who ordered him and some other guys to advance in broad daylight over bare rocky terrain which the Turks had covered by half a dozen machine guns. He said, "You set off, mate, and I'll catch you up when I've finished plucking my nose hairs." The Pom officer wanted him court-martialled for cowardice, refusing to obey an order, all kinds of things that were topping offences in your mob. His own CO put him on shit-shovelling duties for two days which no one minded as it kept you out of the line.'

Pascoe laughed and said, 'Nice. I'm glad he made it home to sow his seed.'

'Jesus. The way you guys talk! But because I'm a sentimental cow and we both had great-granddads who helped make a world fit for heroes like us, I'll ignore the fact that you're a stuck-up Pom and a fascist jack to boot. Do you have an address or do you just roam the streets looking for crime?'

Pascoe pulled out a card with his home number.