Chapter One #2
Stock twisted to say over his shoulder, “There’s a ride—a bridleway—just a hundred yards farther on, sir. It’s wide enough to drive, easy.”
“Curves off in the wrong direction. ’Sides, like as not you’d get stuck in the mud. And the brook’s up. There’s a footpath here, sir. I’ll show you the way.”
“We’ll walk,” said Alec, closing the window and opening the door. He settled his trilby more firmly on his head, turned up the collar of his mac, and started to get out.
“Hold on, Chief!” Ernie Piper was behind the car already, reaching into the boot for their umbrellas and Wellingtons.
“You don’t want to get out till you’ve got these on.
Knee-deep in mud before we even get into the Forest.” A thoroughgoing city-dweller, he sounded disgusted, and had come prepared, having put on his boots while still in the car. He squelched round to hand Alec his.
Pulling them on, Alec said, “Stock, we’ll go ahead. You’d better drive on a little and pull the car off the road, out of the way, though I don’t imagine this road sees much traffic in this sort of weather.”
“You don’t want me to stay with the car, sir?”
“No, you can follow us, if you think you can find the way.”
“I’ll find you, sir, don’t you worry.”
The footpath was less muddy than the lane, being carpeted with last year’s fallen leaves on top of a thick mulch of the leaves of centuries.
Epping Forest had been a Royal hunting preserve, never set to the plough, though local villagers had always been allowed to coppice the trees.
When the City of London took it over in the middle of the nineteenth century, the coppicing had been stopped.
As a result the older hornbeams, beeches, and oaks were strange creatures with short, thick boles sprouting branches like Struwwelpeter’s hair.
Between these had grown up an underlayer of their offspring mixed with hawthorn, holly, and service tree.
A carpet of bluebells suggested that the sky had come down to earth, leaving a grey gloom above.
Squirrels dashed up trees to chitter at the invaders, but the birds were too busy feeding nestlings to fall silent as they passed, in spite of the warning screech of a jay.
On fine weekends and holidays, well served by omnibuses and several tube stations, the Forest swarmed with escapees from the city. These tended to stick to the established trails and clearings, leaving much of the rest a practically impenetrable tangle of vegetation.
Squishing along the footpath on the heels of the local constable, Alec eyed the dripping jungle on either side with deep misgivings.
“Strewth!” said Tom, behind him. “How did anyone manage to lug three bodies off the beaten path through that lot?”
“And find enough clear ground to bury ’em!” Piper added from the rear.
“I imagine it was a dog that found the first grave, Elliot?” Alec asked.
“That’s what I heard, sir. A Mr. Webster’s Jack Russell.”
“It’d take a Jack Russell to get in there,” Tom muttered.
“Presumably Webster went to see what his dog had found,” Alec pointed out, “and the local coppers, too. The site must be accessible, though perhaps not to someone of your size.”
“That’s all right, Chief. I’ll stay on the path and you can tell me all about it later.”
“There’s plenty of room, sir,” said Elliot. Tom sighed. “It’s not in the thickest part—stands to reason or they couldn’t’ve buried them—and a lot got trampled down when we was searching.”
Alec echoed Tom’s sigh. It was inevitable, nothing more than he had expected, but he wondered how many clues had disappeared into the leaf-mould.
The local detectives who so resented the Yard being called in seldom considered the difficulties of coming to a case where evidence had already been mishandled or lost, witnesses antagonised, suspects alarmed.
The path they were on at one point ran near the swollen stream Elliot had warned of. Brown and turbulent it raced down the slope towards the Lea.
“Good job your pal didn’t try to drive us through that,” Tom remarked to Piper. “We’d’ve been stuck for a month of Sundays, if it didn’t wash us down to the Thames.”
“Don’t like the look of it myself,” Piper agreed.
Constable Stock caught up with them in time to hear this. “It’ll go down fast soon as this rain stops,” he said, sounding a bit resentful.
“It’s not coming down as hard,” Tom said peaceably.
What could be seen of the sky through the trees was now light grey instead of dark grey. Leaves still dripped and occasional cascades descended on them, but as they emerged into a grassy glade, it was obvious that the worst was over.
A wide ride, more cart-track than bridleway, entered the clearing at an angle to their path.
Muddy ruts filled with water suggested that it was occasionally used by vehicles.
The ruts crossed the clearing and ran into the woods opposite.
The footpath petered out, as if, having brought its followers to the glade, it abandoned them to decide for themselves which way to go.
“That way.” Elliot pointed at a caped constable standing on the edge of what looked like an unbroken wall of greenery.
They altered course to trudge in his direction.
“Blimey,” said Tom, at Alec’s side, “I’d’ve left the perishing dog to find its own way home.”
“It can’t be as bad as it looks from here. Someone had already lugged three bodies through, remember.”
“’Less they came from the other side,” Piper suggested.
“Nah,” said Elliot, “Inspector Gant reckons it’d be impossible.”
“Ah,” said Tom, at his most inscrutable.
They reached the cross-track. Alec stopped to study the ruts.
“Horse and cart,” said Tom, “not a motor vehicle. The most recent, at any rate.”
“Yes, a heavy one. And we won’t get much more than that after all this rain.”
“You reckon it’s how the bodies were brought here, Chief?” Piper asked.
“More likely than that someone carried ’em one by one over his shoulder from the lane,” Tom responded. “That’s quite a way.”
“But let’s not jump to conclusions. The cart may have nothing to do with the case. We don’t even know whether the three burials took place at or near the same time. The report I was given was singularly uninformative.”
“They didn’t, sir,” said Elliot. “What I heard is, the doc says the one the dog found is not too old, maybe a week or thereabouts. Then the one they found when they started searching, that’s more like a few months.
After that, they started looking for more and they found a sort of dip, like, where the ground had settled, but they hadn’t hardly started digging—just enough to be sure there really was a body, when the chief constable heard about it and called in the Yard, sir, so they stopped. ”
The mild irritation Alec had been feeling about the inadequate report blossomed into fury.
This was essential information that he should have been given by the detective in charge, not by a uniformed constable who happened to know.
Naturally DI Gant was annoyed at having the case taken from him, but such unprofessional conduct was inexcusable.
At least, he’d better have an excellent excuse, such as having dropped dead on the spot.
Elliot was not to blame. With difficulty keeping his voice even, Alec thanked the man. Tom, well acquainted with both protocol and his chief, shot him a shrewd glance, but the constable just looked pleased with himself.
“Piper, follow the tracks in both directions. See if there’s anything else they can tell us, and get any measurements you can.”
“Right, Chief.”
The stretch of grass from the ruts to the waiting constable showed nothing more than the trampling of a great many police boots. Beyond him the trampling continued, with broken branches and crushed shrubs thoroughly obliterating any marks the murderer might have left.
With a sigh, Alec acknowledged to himself that the past few days of torrential rain probably had destroyed anything useful long before Detective Inspector Gant arrived on the scene.
They followed the trail, winding between trees for twenty yards or so.
It ended at a fallen beech, one of the once-coppiced monsters, stretched out like a stranded giant squid.
It couldn’t have been downed more than a year or two ago because some branches were still putting out new growth, reaching upwards.
Where the shallow root system had torn out of the earth, the soil was disturbed.
Seeds of many different plants had sprouted, grasses, bracken, rosebay willowherb, and some small shrubs.
Amid this evidence of vigorous life gaped three ominous trenches.