The Wood Beyond (29 page)

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.

One noble art they had not yet learned, because its breeding ground is assurance rather than aspiration, was that of doing good by stealth, and all the early correspondence on the transformation of Wanwood House from country seat to hospital for wounded officers contained a modest reference to the generosity of its owner.

'Well, well, well,' said Peter Pascoe as he read the owner's name.

'Indeed I hope that's how I find you, detective chief inspector,' said a voice from the doorway.

Startled he turned, and found himself looking into the smiling face of David Batty.

'They told me you were down here,' said the doctor. 'So I thought I'd descend and see if I could help you.'

'Not unless you've been superefficient and had all the info on these files transferred to discs.'

'Sorry. Nothing to do with us, this lot. I've been meaning to get these cellars cleaned out ever since we got established here. We could do with the storage space.

What are you hoping to find anyway? Reports of a missing patient who might have wandered off and snuffed it in the woods?'

'Something like that. But I think I'll leave it to someone with a more clerical cast of mind and less fear of dark confined places.'

He pushed the drawer shut and joined Batty at the door. As they went up the stairs, the doctor said, 'You did sound as if something had caught your attention just now. All those wells.'

'Just a name. Funny, you come across a name you haven't heard before, then lo and behold, up it pops again almost immediately.'

'And the name?'

They had emerged into the stone-flagged rear hallway from which the cellar steps descended. A shaft of daylight streamed through a high window and Pascoe positioned himself beneath it like a pitman stepping into a shower.

'Grindal,' he said. 'Arthur Grindal. Your great-grandfather, I believe.'

'Old Arthur. Ah yes, of course, you were talking to my father yesterday, weren't you? And you came across the name again in those files? How interesting, though not perhaps all that surprising in the circumstances.'

'The circumstances being that Wanwood belonged to Arthur Grindal before it became a hospital? You don't seem to have mentioned this to anyone. And your father certainly never mentioned it to me yesterday.'

Batty took his arm and gently urged him out of the hallway into the renovated part of the house.

'For my part, there's been no occasion to mention it. Why should I? It's got no significance, has it? As for Father, he belongs to the old Yorkshire school of thought which recommends keeping yourself to yourself, especially when it comes to family matters.'

'Is that so? He spoke fairly freely about the family, if I remember right.'

'Only what he saw no harm in telling you, I expect,' chuckled Batty, pushing open the door of his office. 'Have a seat. Care for a coffee? Or do your tastes follow your leader's?'

He flourished a bottle of Glenmorangie.

'No thanks. Nothing for me. So what harm could there be in telling me about the family connection with the house?'

'No harm, in any immediate sense. But it's a tale which doesn't altogether redound to the family credit. If you've the time and the inclination, I'll tell you it, though of course I shall deny having uttered a word if my father ever gets wind of my indiscretion.'

He sat down and poured himself a little whisky.

'Hope you don't mind, but a good story deserves a good telling. Just say if you change your mind. Cheers.'

He tossed the drink back and smiled. He was, thought Pascoe, a rather attractive guy, easy to talk to once you established that you weren't hired help to be ordered around, not bad looking, very outgoing. Yet there was that something - he recalled it from their previous encounters during the summer - that made him feel just a touch uneasy, like a dog on the edge of a thunderstorm.

'Right. Here goes. Sure you want to hear this? OK. Old Arthur founded the family fortunes on that old Yorkshire staple, wool. You'll have seen the remnants of the old mill at Kirkton yesterday.'

'Yes, and your father did tell me how the two interests of the family came together, the Batty medical innovations and the Grindal entrepreneurship.'

'Oh yes, he would. Not above a bit of discreet boasting. But there would be things he kept quiet about. Old Arthur's social ambitions, for one thing. He belonged to the Yorkshire school of economics which believes you can buy owt if you've got the brass. He bought the Wanwood estate and boasted he got his money back by chopping down most of what was left of the ancient Wanwood Forest except the bit immediately around the house, and selling off first the timber, then the cleared land. The old Elizabethan manor was in a state of disrepair so he knocked that down and built his own baronial hall. And he sat back and waited for the county set to treat him like they treated the old Truman family who'd been here for five hundred years.'

'What happened to them?'

'Fell on hard times. Great War wiped the last two out, I believe, but the parish church is full of mentions both inside and out, which can't have improved Arthur's state of mind as it dawned on him that the county wasn't going to come calling. Bought another place in London and one at Cromer when that turned fashionable, and used Wanwood less and less. But he still had his eye on making a social mark, getting some kind of title if he could, and when he caught on that top people were offering their country houses for hospitals in the war, he jumped on that bandwagon.'

'You make it sound very cynical.'

'Do I? Well, I rather think it was. It got him noticed and also provided somewhere for my other great-grandfather, Sam Batty, to try out his medical innovations without too much comeback if they went wrong.'

'So even then the Battys were into animal experiments at Wanwood,' said Pascoe.

'Very sharp,' laughed Batty. 'Yes, I recall last time we met thinking, here's a one to watch. Does it help if I tell you that the animals being experimented on back then were exclusively officer class? Old Arthur reckoned that by sticking to officers there was more chance of winning the notice and gratitude of families with influence. Don't misunderstand me. The old boy was as virulently patriotic as everyone else was in those days. He wanted to do his bit, and more than his bit. But he reckoned the labourer was worthy of his hire and he estimated his own worth as a knighthood. I can just imagine what he felt like when his name appeared with hundreds of others in the new honours list, and he found he'd got an OBE!'

'Devastating,' observed Pascoe.

'The family story is he wanted to tell them to stuff it, but calmer counsel prevailed and he set about getting in peace what he hadn't managed in war. Contributions to party funds, being in the right places on the right committees at the right times - he even gave Wanwood to the nation as a hospital. That made a big splash.'

'That was generous,' admitted Pascoe.

'Not really,' smiled Batty. 'What actually happened was some of the medical staff who worked there during the war approached him with a view to making it a permanent clinic. He didn't much care for the place any more, it was going to cost a bomb to refurbish it to domestic habitability, so he did a deal and sold them a ninety-nine- year lease. Only somehow it came out in the papers that he'd given the place away.'

'And it was a private clinic, right? Hardly a gift to the nation.'

'There were public beds for qualifying locals. It did quite well, I believe, till the NHS got under way. Then it might have gone under if an independent company hadn't taken it over. A company in which, purely by chance, old Arthur had a controlling share.'

He watched Pascoe's reaction almost gleefully. Why's he doing this? wondered Pascoe. Paying off some old score against his dad who clearly wanted to keep all this under his hat? And what's it got to do with anything anyway?

He said, 'Dr Batty . . .'

'David. Do call me David. Your elephantoid boss does and I see no reason why I should be on less familiar terms with the civilized face of policing than with its rump.'

Pascoe smiled, not just at the joke though it wasn't bad, but at the value judgment it contained. You'd think a doctor of all people would know the dangers of under-estimating a rump.

'David, this is all very interesting, but the fact that your great-grandfather was a wily old bird hardly seems relevant to my enquiries. Though of course if what you're saying is that somehow ALBA bought what it in fact owned already, the DTI might be interested

'I thought I made it clear. ALBA didn't own it. This other company did. True, old Arthur's shares in it were inherited by my.. . mother, so when the company, that's ALBA, decided that Wanwood would make an ideal site for its research centre, there was little problem about putting the clinic, which was already in terminal decline, into liquidation. It was all perfectly legal and above board. You saw the papers yourself.'

Pascoe had registered but could see no significance in the curious little hesitation about Mrs Batty's ownership of the controlling share. Perhaps that's where the weakest point of the fiddle lay. Not that he believed there was one chance in a million of proving an illegality. This was peanuts compared with the billions that vanished every year in the great world of commerce, leaving no trace but the anguish of impoverished shareholders and the frustration of the Serious Fraud Squad. But for all that, he knew what common sense, not to mention common decency, told him, that there had been a fiddle.

'Yes, I saw the papers. But I saw nothing there to indicate ALBA was buying what the wife of its chairman owned already and had helped put into receivership in order to facilitate her husband's acquisition,’ said Pascoe coldly.

'Well, you wouldn't, would you? As for my father, he's got rather the same ambitions as old Arthur, and this is one skeleton he prefers to keep buried deep in the family cupboard. Why he should worry I don't know. In the present climate a history of good old honest sleaze is probably a recommendation!'

'Sleaze? Would you care to be a little more specific without of course incriminating yourself?'