4. FORENSICS

A small party set out to find the old van in the woods.

“Excuse me!”

It was a new voice, coming from the direction of the bungalow in which the site owner, Gerald Bingley, his wife Jackie and son Richard lived. It was at the sharp end of a longish, narrow field and tucked to the right, into a cleared part of the old woodland that had produced such a sudden burst of interest.

“Gerald?” responded Eggy, “Good to see you up and about!”

Gerald Bingley was the owner of Twelve Trees Park, and it was known he had not been in particularly robust health for some time and consequently the day-to-day running of the site was left to Richard who had a full-time job as a salesman for an electrical chain but who managed to find an hour or two every day to dig his father out of any difficulties that came his way. It was widely expected that he would take over fully running the site from his elderly father sooner or later. Running a twelve-van caravan site is hardly a full-time job and he could quite easily take over the reigns completely without packing in the job that represented his real income.

“What’s going on?” asked Gerald as a police car, still festooned with an array of blue flashing lights, left the main road and almost raced into sight.

“There’s been summat found in the woods,” replied Farmer Croft aka Eggy, “An old van with a cove sitting in it gathering cobwebs, by all accounts.”

“It’s nothing, I reckon,” growled Tom.

“Are you insinuating that my son doesn’t know fact from fiction or truth from lies, Tom?” asked Rosie, beginning to feel frustrated by the other’s cynicism.

“Well, I’ve been coming here for above thirty years and I’ve never heard of such nonsense before!” declared Tom Coppleby, defensively.

“There have been things said before,” murmured Gerald, “I’ve heard tell that some who go wandering in that old patch of woodland talk of a ghostly caravan surrounded by the spirits of the dead, and ghosts walking where no ghosts have any right to be, but it’s just old wives’ gossip, no more than that I reckon.”

“I saw it, mister,” said Jack, “and so did my sister Jill, and we know what we saw.”

“It’s a filthy old thing with a skellington in it,” contributed Jill, producing her phone, “you can look if you want to,” she added, proffering the phone to Gerald, who took it and couldn’t make out anything because the sunlight was brighter than any digital image might be. He ducked into Tom’s sheltered awning and peered at the tiny screen.

“I’ve seen a van like that before,” he murmured, scratching his head as he offered the phone back to Jill. “Used to come here regularly, I seem to recall, but who was in it’s gone from my mind altogether. I’ve got more of a memory for caravans than for people!”

By then a policeman had climbed from his car, and with his colleague was walking towards them.

“I’m looking for Inspector Baur or Bower or something like that,” he said.

Gerald was about to say there were no inspectors there when Rosie smiled and said “That’s me, officer. Baur, from Brumpton.”

“Your reputation comes here before you, ma’am,” grinned the officer, bearing a sergeant’s stripes. “What’s this about a body in the woods?”

Rosie explained the twins’ discovery, and once again Jill’s phone was consulted, and fortunately the sun had suddenly disappeared behind a cloud and the officer could just about make out the image on its small screen when he shielded it with his hand.

Then he looked at the image taken through the caravan’s window, and he expanded it on the screen.

“That looks most unpleasant,” he said, “it’s a figure and it’s clearly deceased so we’d better go and take a look.”

“I can show you the way,” said Jack eagerly. “I bet you couldn’t find it without being shown!”

Sergeant Green looked at Rosie. “Would that be all right, ma’am?” he asked.

Rosie nodded. “And I’ll come too,” she said, “after I’ve put on something more protective than these shorts!”

“We change, too,” added Jill, including herself in the party. “There’s loads of prickles on the way to where we saw it,” she added.

Rosie and the twins returned to their caravan to change.

“Now you two, keep out of the way and don’t go too close to the old van,” she advised, “if the sergeant opens the door there might be all sorts of nasties inside it, ready to attack nosey children!”

“Like bats with giant wings?” asked Jill, “I’ve never seen a real bat,” she added, “just those on films on the telly. I don’t fancy being attacked by a vicious man-eating bat!”

“It won’t be that big!” replied Jack scornfully, “after all, a bat big enough to gobble you up wouldn’t fit into a small caravan like the old one in the woods!”

“Are you calling me fat?” asked his sister indignantly.

It didn’t take them long to be ready, their legs covered now they were no longer wearing shorts. The sun had reappeared and the sky above was a clear, summery blue with hardly a cloud in sight now that the big one that had covered the sun minutes earlier had melted away.

“This way!” instructed Jack, and he, his twin, his mother and two uniformed police officers made their way into a narrow gap that passed almost invisibly into the patch of ancient woodland. It may have been an animal track, but the animals that made it were surely small.

“It’s dark in here,” muttered the constable, an affable young man by the name of Danny Allsop who sported a mop of bright ginger hair and a seemingly perpetual grin.

And it was. The summer foliage of the sometimes sparse trees still managed to meet overhead forming a living roof that the sunlight could barely penetrate, and when it did, when a finger of it found a gap between the interwoven branches above their heads, the light where it touched seemed dazzlingly bright.

“I wouldn’t like to be lost in here,” muttered constable Danny Allsop, “are you sure you know the way, young man?”

“I marked the trees,” grinned Jack, “look.”

A tree just ahead had the chalk mark “JB” on it, at the height a ten year old might be expected to scribble. “That’s JB for Jack Baur,” he added.

“Or Jill Baur,” put in his twin sister.

The route to the caravan might have been a great deal shorter, because the twins had been exploring in a higgledy-piggledy fashion when they had found it rather than going directly to something they knew about, but it still didn’t take more than half an hour for them to reach it.

“Here we are!” announced Jack.

The caravan was covered with the detritus of the years when they stood stock still and stared at it. It was a depressing sight, obviously on its last legs, with flat tyres and there was a general air of decay permeating the small clearing. Ahead, at the front end of the van, there came a rustling sound.

“A fox?” asked Jill.

“Or a grizzly bear,” murmured Jack.

“Or just a squirrel,” grinned Sergeant Green, pointing where he thought the sound had come from.

“Someone’s been here!” shouted Jill suddenly, pointing, “look: it’s changed!”

“What has?” asked Jack, puzzled.

“Can’t you see?” exclaimed Jill, still pointing at the wreck of a caravan. “Look! When we were here last there was a number plate on the caravan, the number of the car that must have towed it, and now it’s gone!”

They all stared.

Jill was right. They were staring at the back of the caravan, and there was a paler rectangle on its tarnished skin where a number plate must have been been until very recently.

“We need forensics!” suggested Rosie, “someone is obviously worried about us finding out more than we should! And that someone must know that the twins have been here and that they saw what they saw inside the van!”

TO BE CONTINUED…

© Peter Rogerson 23.03.17