The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  Curtis said, ‘What was the nature of the blight?’

  ‘It wasn’t vegetable or mineral,’ Abercrombie said. ‘So you tell me, brother, by simple process of elimination, what does that leave?’

  ‘The thing he’s cut the head off in the lead window at your little church?’

  ‘That’s an idealized representation,’ Francesca said. ‘He wouldn’t have been dressed that way. He’d probably have more resembled a Viking warrior to our eyes.’

  ‘I’m less concerned with his wardrobe than the creature he’s just killed,’ Curtis said. ‘Are you two honestly telling me you believe in monsters?’

  ‘It was a thousand years ago,’ Francesca said. ‘Are you prepared to completely rule out the possibility?’

  Curtis said, ‘You don’t subject a fairy tale to carbon dating.’

  ‘It isn’t a fairy tale,’ Abercrombie said. ‘And there was more than one of them.’

  ‘So they were a gang,’ Curtis said. ‘Or you’re suggesting a tribe?’

  Francesca cleared her throat. She said, ‘They were a species. They were probably of the same family.’

  ‘There’s a cave,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Or there’s supposed to be. It was their lair. In the story it extended for a long way, maybe over a mile inland. The mouth lay in the cliffs. It was approached by sea. That was how Gregory did it, according to the story.’

  Curtis said, ‘Past tense? Has this cave disappeared?’

  ‘We’ve been unable to locate it,’ Abercrombie said. ‘That’s a hell of a stretch of coast. There are reefs, rocks invisible just beneath the surface, rip-tides and all kinds of hazardous shit. Plus, finding it hasn’t been a priority.’

  Francesca looked directly at Curtis. She said, ‘Do you think there really could be a cave?’

  ‘Geologically, yes, I do,’ he said. ‘It’s plausible. If it was there then, there’s no reason to suppose it won’t be there now. It isn’t geology I have a problem believing in.’

  ‘I’m only telling you this stuff because you asked to be told it,’ Abercrombie said. ‘This location has a history.’

  ‘Tell me more about these creatures Gregory confronted.’

  ‘They were amphibious. They were large and in character they were leech-like.’

  ‘They sound charming.’

  ‘Even less charming was the individual they served and guarded. She was a powerful sorceress.’

  ‘Morgana le Fay,’ Curtis said. ‘So it really was Merlin who sent for Gregory.’

  ‘She isn’t named in the story,’ Francesca said. ‘It’s made plain by the chronicler that her name is known to him but he won’t use it. Naming her invited ill-fortune, apparently.’

  ‘She derived her power from these creatures, so Gregory killed them,’ Curtis said.

  ‘No, Tree Man, not quite. They protected her. But she derived her power from the forest. The forest was cleared to denude her of influence. That’s the story. That’s the whole shebang.’

  ‘Where are Gregory’s descendants?’

  ‘The last of his bloodline perished during the Black Death. They were wiped out by plague. They aren’t even buried here, we don’t think. There’s that tiny church at Raven Dip but there’s no family vault.’

  Curtis nodded. His mind was on the letter he’d read that morning from his daughter. He was tired. It was later than he wanted it to be. It was eight thirty in the evening and dusk was descending on the terrace. The beer was cold, his host avuncular, Francesca luminescent and beautiful in the last of the light.

  But he’d spent the first part of the morning within touching distance of Charlotte and hadn’t seen her, let alone hugged her or spoken to her. He’d been delayed by a traffic accident on the tedious drive back. He’d unpacked irascible and weary after a day that felt long, eventful, frustrating and ultimately wasted. There was an awful lot to accomplish.

  ‘Where’s Freemantle?’

  ‘Off on some errand,’ Abercrombie said.

  ‘He’s decided his shotguns don’t pack enough power,’ Francesca said, fiddling with her wristwatch. ‘He’s gone to fetch an anti-tank missile.’

  ‘Don’t need to shop for those, honey,’ her father said. ‘These days you can order those on eBay.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Curtis asked again.

  Abercrombie shrugged. ‘Wherever he is, he took a Land Rover. He tried to call me several times this morning, but I wasn’t picking up. He’s probably gone to get supplies of something. He’s a grown-up. Be cool. He’ll be back soon enough.’

  ‘Once it’s mission accomplished,’ Francesca said.

  ‘You don’t like him.’

  ‘Human nature,’ Francesca said. ‘We can’t all like everyone.’

  ‘What’s bugging you, Tree Man?’

  ‘I met with Charlotte’s mother this morning. It didn’t go encouragingly.’

  ‘You tried to bribe her.’

  ‘You’re very astute.’

  ‘Didn’t need to be to work out that one, brother. What’s your next move?’

  Curtis sipped beer. ‘I’m going to plant a forest,’ he said. ‘I’m going to concentrate fully on that not inconsiderable task.’

  Francesca said, ‘And risk bringing our sorceress back?’

  ‘She won’t be ours,’ Abercrombie said. ‘She’ll likely be her own woman.’

  ‘It’s a chance I’ll take,’ Curtis said. He looked out at the darkening land, at the sun descending in the western sky over to his left, thinking about the dank things that grow in the permanent gloom of the leaf canopy, unhindered by light and warmth.

  Francesca left them not long after that. Saul and Tom talked logistics. They discussed where the accommodation block for the workforce would be built. Freemantle had arranged for some ex-Royal Engineers to arrive in the morning with the materials needed to build a landing strip for cargo planes and a concrete helipad where choppers could put down. They talked about the excavation machines Curtis had already ordered from a specialist plant-hire firm in Düsseldorf.

  They would arrive in Fishguard harbour aboard a convoy of ships the following day. There were three of them; they were vast and would be manned by a team of nine drivers working eight-hour shifts in tandem. Much of their work would be floodlit. Once started, the job would not stop until the moment it reached completion.

  They talked about the first tree shipments and Curtis briefed Abercrombie on the characters of his principal lieutenants, Dora Straub and Pete Mariner. He seemed more intrigued by the former than the latter, which Curtis thought understandable.

  Everything had been thought of, from the small lab they would need to ensure none of their trees were contaminated to the banks of portable latrines the on-site workforce would require. Curtis had done all of this stuff before, just never on such a gigantic scale.

  ‘They won’t all be of a piece, Saul.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘A mature forest is a constant cycle of decline and death and regeneration. Each species of tree possesses a lifespan.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘We’ll be planting everything from fully mature oaks to silver-birch saplings. It won’t be neat and uniform, like a plantation of farmed conifers.’

  ‘But it will look real?’

  ‘It will, inevitably, because it will be real, totally authentic, exactly as in nature.’

  ‘Cool. I got the right guy when I got you, Tree Man. I know I did. I should congratulate myself.’

  Eventually, Saul Abercrombie tired. There was still no sign of Sam Freemantle. He smiled, rose stiffly and nodded a goodnight. Curtis smiled back and looked at the pale suds in the bottom of his beer glass on the table they’d shared, then glanced up at the dark vista before him, thinking of the violent, epic upheaval to which this quiet wilderness would be subjected over the coming days, weeks and months.

  He didn’t feel regretful about it. He didn’t even feel ambivalent. There was something unlovely about the acreage Abercrombie owned
, a baleful quality beyond its vastness. It was a place where things seemed to lurk and hide and to have qualities other than those they ought rightfully to possess.

  That was true of the cairn of stones at Puller’s Reach. It was true of the iron sign signalling the route to nowhere at Loxley’s Cross. It was true of the church at Raven Dip, where the interior felt as soullessly cold as the stone of its ancient walls and flagged floor. It was truest of all perhaps at Gibbet Mourning, where that fibrous, cantankerous cluster of thorns had stretched and swollen to such monstrous dimensions. This was a blighted place, and churning it up and transforming it could only improve its character.

  Mature trees were stately and serene. Nothing in nature possessed their quiet, stoic dignity. They were beautiful and benevolent. The forest would be grand and varied, and its woodland wildlife would thrive unhindered through the decades and even the centuries to come. It would be a place, despite its great size, of peace and reflection.

  He thought about Gregory of Avalon. Had there ever been such a person, a slayer of dragons, deliberately seeking the mouth to the cave where the monsters dwelt on his approach from the sea? And he remembered the thing he had sensed on the shore below him in the mist as he clung to tussocks of grass at the edge of the cliff. He remembered the flop on the shingle of its blind progress and the assaulting stink of it in his nostrils.

  A wildlife issue, he’d told Saul Abercrombie an hour or so afterwards.

  The beast of Bodmin Moor, Abercrombie had joked, which he’d known full well it wasn’t.

  They’d told him everything and nothing tonight. Except he didn’t think they’d told him everything they knew and he knew they’d told him nothing he could quite believe in. He looked at his wristwatch and saw that the time was a quarter past eleven. It was curious that Sam Freemantle was coming back so late. A pint enjoyed in a village pub en route, maybe. He was a grown man and entitled. Curtis reached for his own beer glass, which he would rinse in the kitchen before retiring to his room and a peaceful sleep.

  Francesca had admitted that she didn’t like Sam. Not in so many words, but the meaning had been plain. Did it also mean by implication that she liked him? It was flattering if she did, but no more than that. Whatever his motive in offering it, Curtis thought Freemantle’s advice over any dalliance with the boss’s daughter basically sound. Anyway, he had no appetite for romance.

  David Baxter rose early and did his daily search for Tom Curtis as soon as his laptop had powered up. His assignment had been completed formally the previous day when he’d written up his report on Isobel Jenks and her version of events concerning the affair she’d had with Curtis and its fall-out.

  He’d emailed that as a Word document to his employer. The fee for the job had cleared in his account. But curiosity informed much of what he did and he was still curious to know what it was that connected a tree expert so closely to Abercrombie Industries that Saul Abercrombie had felt the need to have the man so thoroughly investigated.

  He got his answer after an hour of Internet probing. Three machines were en route from the docks at Hamburg to the Welsh port of Fishguard. They were gigantic contraptions, excavators generally used for the laying of pipelines deep under the earth when security or environmental concerns deemed the need for their concealment. They were so large that a separate cargo vessel had been chartered to carry each of them.

  The name on the bills of lading was that of Tom Curtis. And Curtis had been busy elsewhere outside of Europe. He’d been active in North America and Canada where he’d been quoted prices for deciduous trees. The quotes looked competitive to Baxter’s untrained eye. You could get quite a lot of tree for your dollar. Even more surprising were the quantities. Curtis was inquiring about hundreds of thousands of tons of live lumber.

  Baxter was quite good at putting two and two together. But as the scale of the project began to become clear to him, he was also slightly incredulous. It was a mad scheme, a megalomaniac’s folly. It was also a sensational story waiting to be written because he was damn sure he hadn’t read a word about it so far in a single newspaper.

  He had a contact in the newsroom of the Mirror. It was a relationship he was careful to nurture. Will Davies was a good reporter with a journalist’s belligerent instinct for protecting his sources. Baxter could do Davies a favour confident that the tip-off would never be sourced back to him. Confident also that Davies would one day reciprocate.

  He used his pay-as-you-go phone to call Davies and outlined what he’d discovered. He gave him the human-interest stuff he’d learned about Curtis too.

  ‘Just colour, Will, but worth knowing, I reckon. It’s not redundant information.’

  ‘There’s no such thing, mate,’ Davies said.

  ‘Watch out for a bloke called Freemantle if you do any door-stepping down in Pembrokeshire. He did five years for armed robbery and has a coke habit I don’t reckon is quite as far behind him as his boss would like to believe.’

  ‘Do you have a contact number for Isobel Jenks?’

  ‘I do, as it goes. You’re going to talk to her?’

  ‘Pursue every angle, mate. This is a biggie. I owe you large if it’s got the legs I think it has.’

  It was funny, Baxter reflected, when he ended the call. Two privately educated middle-class men obliged by fashion to communicate like the bastard offspring of extras from an episode of The Sweeney. Such were the paradoxes of the modern world. He shut down his computer, put on his kit, strapped on his heart-rate monitor and ran around Richmond Park for an hour.

  Twice, he thought he saw Isobel Jenks. The first time her pale and sinewy little body and bleached crop receded into a ripple of reeds atop a pond so he didn’t need to convince himself it was a trick of light and shade. And preoccupation, he thought. Some tricks were played in the mind.

  The second sighting was more disturbing. She resolved herself out of a smudge as he approached a tree uphill, leaning against the trunk and smoking in a parka with the hood up, framing her pert features as she stared hard at him. He paused to wipe a stinging droplet of sweat from his eye and when he looked again, still a hundred feet away, she had vanished.

  He was a student to her from Richmond. She couldn’t be stalking him, could she? He had given her no address at which to reach him and she’d have been going on a false identity. Had it been her, she would have confronted him, wouldn’t she? What was the point of seeking someone out and then being too timid to communicate? She hadn’t exactly struck him as shy.

  He had showered and changed by the time he noticed that he’d had a call while he was out on the pay-as-you-go. No message had been left but he recognized the number. It was Will Davies’ cellular.

  ‘Mate,’ he said.

  ‘How close were you to Isobel Jenks, Dave?’

  Neither tone nor tense struck Baxter as right. He swallowed. His skin felt cold and tingled. The phone shook slightly, responding to a sudden tremor in his grip. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t close to her at all. Why?’

  ‘She topped herself last night. Hanged herself by a bootlace from a hook in her college room. She left a note, the contents not divulged, obviously.’

  ‘You don’t know what it said?’

  ‘Not officially, no. Someone would have had to tell me and that would have been a breach of protocol because it’s privileged information.’

  ‘So what did she say?’

  ‘Something to the effect that her work was accomplished, Dave. She said she had finished what she’d been meant to.’

  ‘You’re going to follow this up?’

  ‘Just putting you in the picture, mate. The forest is the story. It’s fucking huge. And so’s Saul Abercrombie. There’s a rumour about Abercrombie’s health, something filed by a stringer in New York in September of last year I need to try to verify.’

  ‘Good luck with it, Will. Keep me in the picture.’

  ‘That’s a given, buddy.’

  Baxter walked from his sitting room, where he’d pick
ed up the call, into his study, where he sat at his desk before his closed laptop and stared out of the window he faced. The view was neutral. Semi-detached houses confronted him across a tree-lined street sparse of traffic once the commute to the office and the school run were done.

  She hadn’t hanged herself. Hanging was carried out by skilled executioners like Albert Pierrepoint, the last man paid to do the job in Britain. They were professionals who knew how to tie a proper noose. They calibrated the drop necessary to have their bodyweight cleanly break the neck of their subject and kill them pretty much instantaneously.

  The wait for the moment standing over the trap door was an ordeal, the fitting of the rope and the canvas hood over the head while you waited further ordeals. Traditional hangings had generally been the punishment for a capital crime, after all. But in the moment of execution, hanging correctly accomplished was a relatively merciful way to kill someone.

  When prisoners who couldn’t stomach confinement hanged themselves from the bars of their cells with strips of bed linen or rolled towels, it was totally different. Their deaths did not involve a broken neck. It was slower because they suffocated or strangled themselves into extinction.

  That’s what Isobel Jenks had done. She’d done it from a coat hook with a bootlace. He’d seen the boots he assumed the lace had come from – Doc Martens – placed at the end of her bed. They’d been recently polished.

  Baxter shook his head. It was a shock because it made no sense to him. Choking away your own life was not a cry for help. It was a slow and certain death demonstrating only contempt for your existence. Isobel hadn’t struck him as someone self-destructive or even really lacking in self-esteem. On the contrary, she’d been possessed of the cocky self-regard that had prompted her indignant call to Sarah Bourne after what she considered to be Tom Curtis’s betrayal of her.

  He could still taste her; taste the memory of her and the scent of her too, sweating slightly and toiling under him as they shared a farewell fuck slightly less than twenty-four hours earlier. He would need to make a voluntary statement to the police. They’d likely find traces of his semen still inside her at the autopsy. They’d be carrying that out now, wouldn’t they?