Free Gently in Trees by Alan Hunter Page A

the ground by the gate; but the ground was carpeted with matted grass: nothing useful to be had there.
    ‘We’ll leave it,’ he said. ‘Perhaps our friend will turn up again, if his curiosity is so keen.’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ Metfield said humbly.
    Gently drew a plastic envelope from his wallet.

    Larling showed them the badger gate, a simple contrivance that relied on the weight of the shutter for its operation, coupled with the circumstance that hares and rabbits would be shy of pushing against it, while a badger would unhesitatingly shoulder it open. Then they returned to the fence gate, and went through it into the confusion of underbrush and self-seeded saplings, from which the sunned, rosy pillars of the pines rose massively to their dark crowns of felted needles.
    The tracks of the caravette were plain to follow through the snowberry and bracken. Twigs were snapped, fronds spreadeagled, and leaf-mould scattered by spinning wheels. The tracks bore right, avoiding one of the pines, and passed under a screen of young birch and elder; then they climbed over a brackeny bank and lurched down into a dell.
    ‘Here we are,’ Larling said. ‘Here’s the place where I found him. And I reckon he’d never have driven in here unless he’d known where he was coming.’
    Gently shrugged and advanced into the dell. The extent of Stoll’s information showed here yet more plainly. There had been no manoeuvring of the caravette; it had been driven at once to its parked position. The tracks, though disturbed by subsequent trampling, remained sufficiently to tell the story, along with deep indentations in the leaf-mould at the spot to which Larling had pointed. From there they proceeded in a firm lock, showing where the police had driven the van away.
    ‘Where’s the badger sett?’
    ‘Under that beech. So like he’d have his headlights facing straight at it.’
    ‘Wouldn’t that upset the badgers?’
    Larling shook his head. ‘Not if he was quiet. Lights don’t seem to bother them.’
    The beech was old, a natural curiosity, with four stems rising from a rampart of roots; rainwater lay in a basin between the stems, and the boughs above were strangely intergrown. Around the roots grew anaemic nettles, concealing the mouth of an impregnable tunnel.
    ‘That’s where they are,’ Larling mused. ‘And I reckon that’s where they’ve been for a century. Nobody’s going to dig them out of that. And I’m to ask you not to mention badgers to the press.’
    Gently stared at the tunnel. ‘So who would know they were here?’
    ‘Not nobody should, by rights,’ Larling said. ‘This is W.D. property, and nobody shouldn’t set foot in here. But we know, of course. Between you and me, we’ve been in here sizing up the timber. But we’d never mention that sett to anyone. It’d be as much as our jobs were worth.’
    ‘Then how
did
Stoll come by the information?’
    Larling looked blank. ‘That’s been puzzling me too. I’ve had a word with one or two of the other men, but Mr Stoll didn’t get it from them. I’m the only one he’s ever approached, and that was a time back, about the deer. I took him up eighty-four, which is a mile from here. There was no mention of Mogi’s Belt or badgers.’
    ‘Would you perhaps get poachers in here, after pheasants?’
    Larling looked doubtful. ‘That’s not very likely. The pheasants don’t breed this way any more. It’s where there’s shoots you find the pheasants.’
    ‘Yet somehow . . . he
knew
.’
    ‘That’s right,’ Larling agreed. ‘I can only reckon he nosed it out by himself.’
    ‘Except someone else knew too,’ Metfield put in stubbornly. ‘The chummie who followed him in with a gas bottle.’
    Gently took a few steps round the beech and pushed through the saplings and nettles beyond it. A dozen yards brought him to the edge of the belt and to a steep bracken-and-bramble-defended slope. Below it lay shaking bog-land, stippled with common orchids, and what