though the same certainly can’t be said for his attitude. Geoff has always been a man’s man, and I suppose by that I mean energetic, self-assured, cocky, confident and, generally speaking, a good provider for his wife and children. But at the same time he can be domineering, insensitive, occasionally boorish (when the drink is on him), and mildly selfish where the non-material needs of his loved ones are concerned. I can’t fault him for any of that, I suppose – the modern male isn’t nearly so progressive an animal as people like to imagine; the main difference between him and the old-fashioned model is that he makes a pretence of putting others first, but it only goes as far as that. Maybe, in that respect, Geoff is like me, however. When my family were growing up, I never saw a great deal of them, and even though that was because of work, I wasn’t half as astute at my job as Geoff currently is in the computer business he runs. At least, I didn’t make it pay as well, so at the end of the day, you may ask, what was it all for?
He senses me watching him and glances up. “Okay?”
I nod and half-smile. “Fine. Just running over a few things.”
“Once a copper, eh?”
I nod again. “Back in five, okay?”
“No problem,” he says, getting back to his reading.
*
All over Britain, I guess, and probably in other countries too, parents these days seem to be more mindful of where their children are and what they’re getting up to. The tabloids and daily newsreels are too filled with lurid, ghoulish stories to render them anything else. In the UK, the murders of children by strangers are said to be lower in number now than they were in the mid-1970s, but that must be because grown-ups are simply more vigilant, less prepared to let their very young go out and play unsupervised, and especially wary of scenic but isolated spots like the Dell. In that respect, the Andrew Conroy case won’t be the only reason why kids don’t hang out around here anymore, but it certainly can’t have helped.
As I perambulate downhill, it strikes me as immensely sad how modern children are denied the youth of wild adventure that Geoff and others like him enjoyed. A wood like the one at the bottom of the Dell should not be silent and filled with undisturbed shadows; courting couples sneaking off into its undergrowth should not go unspied upon; tadpole-filled ponds like the one deep in the middle here should not remain unplundered.
But that is the way of it these days. And with good reason.
The murder of Andrew Conroy was really quite horrible. More so from my point of view, perhaps, because I knew the kid personally. He was a contemporary of Geoff’s … went to the same school and scout troop, was a member of the same swimming club. Don’t ever believe it if someone tells you that police detectives get hardened to the slaughter of the innocents. Especially don’t believe it if those police detectives happen to work in their home town.
It was his eleventh birthday, and young Andrew had gone down to the Dell to see if any of his pals were around. That was all anyone really knew about it. His body was discovered seven hours later, under a bush and covered with leaves. He’d been bludgeoned to death with a brick, then sexually interfered with. We made fingertip searches through those woods for the next three weeks, ran door-to-doors throughout the district, questioned every ‘possible’ in the town, and their families – over and over again. But to no avail. This happened in 1975, still nine years before the first DNA breakthroughs would be made, but even if we’d had that level of crime-busting technology available, it’s unlikely we’d have made progress. The killer was either too clever or too lucky. There was minimal evidence to go on. The murder weapon, which we recovered, had been thrown into the pond and thus was washed clean of fingerprints; it had been a dry summer day – the ground firm, the turf lush and springy, which meant there were no footprints; nobody living in the nearest houses had seen or heard anything untoward; public appeals for information drew a blank. No-one, it seemed, knew a damn thing.
I headed up the investigation, being already a seasoned detective. And if I couldn’t make ground on the murderer, nobody could, people said. They usually said that while giving me a conciliatory slap on the shoulder. I still remember those slaps, though I remember them more these days like the blows of a whip.
I reach the bottom of the slope – not without some huffing and puffing, because meadow-grass grows deep and tussocky at this time of year, and tends to be liberally laced with cocksfoot and creeping thistle, and as I’ve already hinted, I’m not the sprightliest sixty-seven-year-old. Anyway, I reach the bottom and the wood stands before me. Not that there is anything dark or sinister about it. Sunlight slants through its open spaces; its leaf canopy whispers in the breeze; somewhere in the higher boughs, a woodpecker jackhammers away. Rural idyll – it bespeaks pure rural idyll. Mind you, it probably did the same on that fateful day in 1975.
I press on in, having to tread carefully. Various pathways once wound back and forth through the miniature coppice; clear, well-trodden routes that served as ably for bicycle tyres as they did for sneakered feet. The fact that they are now largely invisible, submerged under dense profusions of thorns and bracken, tells its own story. There are sections of them I have to beat my way through, using my stick like a machete. Here and there my trousers snag, strands of briar conspire to tangle my ankles and try to trip me. But I am resolute; I will keep going – because all the way through there are melancholy reminders of what this place once meant. In a high elm quite close to the centre of the wood, a few mildewed planks lie balanced between the branches, one hanging loose from a rusted nail. These are all that remain of a carefully constructed treehouse. It hailed from an era long prior to my son’s, but consecutive generations adopted it as their own, each one making its own renovations and improvements. I remember Geoff telling me how he and his cronies put a carpet up there and cushions, and hung a polythene roof over the top of it. There was even a rumour that someone provided a stash of girlie magazines for it, snaffled from the barber’s shop by an understanding older brother.
Further along, I come to the pond itself. It occupies a low, shady hollow in the very centre of the wood, and at this time of year is only just filling up again, recovering from the annual dry season that is August. Already though, it has scummed over; it looks soup-like, stagnant – clearly no-one has been fishing here, or even poking about in it. One particularly wet year, when the surface of this pond had risen a foot or so higher than usual, Geoff and other kids like him – Andrew Conroy amongst them, I expect – built themselves a raft and spent the entire summer poling their way barefoot from one end of it to the other. High above it and now out of reach, a ravel of rotted strings are all that is left of the once infamous rope swing; more than a few youngsters came splashing down from that in their time, thankfully none injuring themselves seriously. These days, I imagine the weight of a squirrel would suffice to break it.
I carry on, hacking my way through swathes of vegetation, and sense the trees close in behind me, blotting out all visible traces of the grassy slope and the neat row of houses at the top. Just ahead, what was once the path will soon split into two, the left-hand route bending back on itself to loop around the other side of the pond, the right-hand route meandering deeper and deeper between the ranks of ash and juniper, finally terminating at the fence on the edge of the horses’ paddock. As I understand it, this was once the place for youngsters to come to if they’d wanted to watch the prize-winning animals get put through their paces, or to feed them lush tufts of elephant grass. Unfortunately, it has different connotations now.
I never cease to feel a cold breath on my neck as I approach this spot. You’ll understand if I explain that the first time I personally came here was to view a wide, taped off area with a police tarpaulin erected over it as a rainproof tent.
No evidence of that remains now, but the atmosphere is the same. In fact, in some respects it is worse, because the spiky hawthorn bush under which Andrew Conroy’s battered, violated body had been stuffed, has now grown up and out, turning into a young tree. This in itself is enough to create a menacing shadow in the once sunny glade, but to make matters worse, the small embankment along which the barbed wire fence was erected proved an insufficient anchorage for the growing tree’s spreading root system. As such, it tore loose from the ground some time ago and now leans backward across what was left of the open space,