13. THE DISC

One disappointment after another for Rosie Baur....

Twelve Trees Park was suddenly quiet after the morning’s excitement.

The site owners, the Bingley’s, were not yet back from a visit they made at the end of the previous day to friends the other side of Seaholme, Jerry and Cat Bingham had taken the twins to the beach with a metal detector, the body of June Coppleby was on its may to the mortuary where it was due to undergo a post mortem examination and her husband Tom was being accompanied by the police for in-depth questioning.

Detective Inspector Rosie Baur was around, though. She was on a kind of unofficial loan to the local force and had a job to do. She needed to find evidence that might lead her to understand who the skeletal body in the woods might belong to, and she thought the answer stood a chance of being discovered in Tom Coppleby’s exploded caravan.

So with no more hesitation than it took for her to dress appropriately (the sun was going to emerge and the forecast was for hot) she appeared in a short summer dress and not much else.

There might have been an explosion in the caravan, but it had done surprisingly little damage and the one fire it had ignited had been swiftly put out by herself. The roof of the van had been dislodged, though, and she thought that any rain that chanced to fall would have little difficulty in finding its way in. That didn’t trouble her so much as the thought that evidence might be destroyed by stray water and what might be dissolved in it.

Her search was thorough. She was, by nature, meticulous, and whilst at work she applied this side of her personality to the tasks in hand. Yet she left very little sign that her hands had passed through doors and cupboards. She didn’t want to upset Tom more than she needed to even though he had been quite offensive to her and displayed an unsuspected racist side of his personality, a side that he had hitherto kept under wraps to the extent of being friendly towards her and her twins.

It didn’t take long to find the one piece of evidence she had prayed would be there, or would have prayed had she a tendency to believe in something to pray to.

She opened a small and inconspicuous cupboard door next to the microwave oven. Inside that drawer were the simple electronic controls for the caravan, mostly switches and a dial that displayed the input from a solar panel mounted on its roof. But in addition there was a leather wallet, green and well-handled, and inside the leather wallet was a single computer disc, but of a size and type she didn’t recognise.

But despite that ignorance she knew where it fitted. It belonged to the Amstrad 6128 computer that hasd been taken from the derelict caravan in the woods to her own caravan.

The rest of the search revealed nothing of any interest to her. She had been hoping to find the vehicle registration plate that had been removed from the van in the forest recently, but there was no sign of it. So when she had looked everywhere she could think of looking she took the precious disc with her and returned to her own caravan.

She inserted the disc carefully into the ancient computer and switched it on. The screen glowed with the words Drive a: disc missing.

She removed the disc, peered at it, decided that there couldn’t be anything wrong with it, and re-inserted it. The result was the same. Drive a: disc missing.

“Sod it,” she muttered to herself, and rang her station in Brumpton, and asked for her sergeant Peter Jenson. He had a vast repository of random knowledge inside his head as well as a fascination with all things archaic, and she thought there was an outside chance he might know what she could do.

“I knew those beasts years ago and recognise the problem,” he told her, “It’s the drive belt, it will have perished over the years. You’ll have to hang on and when my shift’s over I’ll come and see to it for you. Daft idea, having rubber belts making a disc drive operate. After all, rubber perishes. Most don’t, but they do.”

“And you think that’ll cure it?” she asked.

“Most likely. But if it doesn’t I’ll see what else I can do. Until then you’ll have to chew pencil-ends and keep patient, ma’am.”

“You know me too well, Peter,” she muttered, and hung up.

After a cup of coffee that tasted strong enough to melt lead she decided that the second thing she’d hoped to find was the number-plate. She had seen it on Jill’s mobile phone photo, but the image was too blurred to make out any of its probably faded characters.

What would I do if I’d taken that number-plate? she asked herself thoughtfully, Let me see, I’ve just eased it off the back of the caravan that’s got a body in it and I want to get rid of it? There are plenty of places in the forest where chances are it would remain lost from human eye for ever, thickets and even rabbit holes, secret places, and I wouldn’t want to be discovered carrying it, would I? So I’d keep hold of it for as short a time as possible and dispose of it at the first opportunity, especially if I was afraid that a pair of young pesky twins might be coming my way with eyes that see anything…

It made sense. After all, it had been the twins who had discovered the caravan in the first place. They may well have been expected to wander that way again out of curiosity, and they would certainly notice something like a number-plate if it was being carried by a person passing that way. It wasn’t the kind of thing they’d be expecting to be in anyone’s hands, was it?

She decided to go and look for it. The computer wasn’t going to tell her anything until it was fixed and even then it might not tell her much unless, and this was her fear, unless there was software on the disc to help her read it. It might contain a whole lot of interesting information, but unless there was the kind of software that would display that information on the screen then it might turn out to be of very little use. That type of computer had long been discontinued and she doubted many people even knew how to operate this model any more.

She decided to use the most direct route rather than the one the twins had marked out with chalk on trees. The path through the woods was the same as it had been, with dappled sunlight reaching through it to almost hypnotise her as she cast her eyes from side to side.

Now where would I sling it? she asked herself. If I wanted to lose it for good and all, where would I dispose of it?

She saw the thicket almost immediately. It was as if good fortune had arranged it to be there for her, to nullify the effects of her earlier disappointment with the computer disc.

But it was virtually inaccessible surrounded by a crown of sharp prickles and wafting nettles, and all she was wearing was a thin cotton dress with nothing underneath, a minimum of clothing that any passing thorn would delight in penetrating.

I need jeans, she growled to herself, and looked around her.

There was nothing for it. She would have to return to her van and dress more appropriately for the wilds. She needed to cover her legs and lower body at least with something less easily penetrable than diaphanous cotton.

So she picked up a few twigs that she hoped she would recognise again and, using them, made a cross at the side of the path to mark her position before returning the way she had come, quite down-hearted.

TO BE CONTINUED

© Peter Rogerson 02.04.17