I said, ‘Our Dennis was in the wood again just now.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t see him to speak to. He had someone with him, I think.’
‘Jake, he’s not going to do anything awful, is he?’
‘I don’t know what he’s going to do. You can’t tell with a man like that. I don’t see why it need be anything awful. There’s plenty needs doing, God knows.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve got to see this man,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll go over tomorrow and pay a return visit to Mrs Wainwright. Perhaps I’ll see him, if he’s on show.’
‘Try it by all means. But I shouldn’t stick your neck out on the subject of the wood. We’ll have to wait and see.’
‘All right. But I think I’ll go, all the same.’ She went across the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and peered inside. She said, ‘Did you see Stella?’
‘Just now? Yes, she was going out as I came in. I think she went down to the beach.’
She nodded and shut the refrigerator with a snap. She was still smiling. I took my head out of the door and shut it quietly after me.
CHAPTER NINE
I never found Carol again in the wood that day. I went to bed in a state of restless misery, partly from simply missing her and partly because I did not like the way Dennis Wainwright had looked at me or the look that came over Carol’s face when he was mentioned. Elizabeth left me in peace over her row with Stella, but I did not really like that either. It was against all precedent, and I could not understand it. Stella herself was as silent and unobtrusive as usual and Elizabeth remained very cheerful. The whole evening had a brooding quality that sent me to bed early with nothing to do but listen to the sea on the beach and very little hope of sleep before the early hours of the morning.
I woke late and tired, and was conscious at once that something had changed. It took me some time to realise what it was. The wind had stopped. It must in fact have stopped early in the night, because by morning the sea had lost its menace. No sea on a pebble beach is ever completely silent, but we were back to the Mediterranean murmur that had lulled us during our now unbelievably remote St Luke’s summer. Only there was no more summer of any sort. The sky was overcast and the motionless air damp and chilly. We went about almost on tiptoe and talked quietly, uneasy in the unaccustomed silence. Over breakfast Stella said she had remembered an engagement in town and had to get back at once. I went up to my room after breakfast, and when I came down she was gone. Whether she and Elizabeth had had anything more to say to each other I did not know. She did not say good-bye to me.
Elizabeth was pottering in the front of the house. She said, ‘That was a very flying visit.’
I said, ‘Yes,’ refusing to be drawn. She still looked like a cat that has had a good night among the mice, and I did not want to encourage her. I said, ‘Are you really going over to the Wainwrights’ this morning?’
‘I think so. Are you coming?’
‘No, no. You do a girl-to-girl drop in on Mrs Wainwright. I have no wish for a heart-to-heart with Dennis. But I’ll be interested to hear whether you see him and what you make of him if you do.’
‘I’ll ask to be introduced,’ she said. ‘It’s time I laid this bogy.’
‘Good luck to you,’ I said. ‘Only don’t come back telling me he’s charming. I shan’t be very easily persuaded.’
‘All right, I won’t. But I expect he will be, all the same.’
She went off, walking along the beach, when the breakfast things were out of the way. I took the car and set off for Burtonbridge. Half-way along the wood there was a van parked at the side of the track. The back doors were open and a man had his head inside, sorting out some gear I could not see. The van said Barrett & Son, Forestry Contractors. I pulled up short and got out. I walked over and stood behind him, but he still had his head stuck in the van and did not know I was there.
I said, ‘You got a job on here?’ He stopped doing whatever it was he was doing with his hands and for a second or two hung fire completely, as if he was trying to decide whether he had really heard anything or not. Then curiosity got the better of inertia, and he slowly withdrew himself from inside the van. He turned his head gradually in my direction as he did so, but did not fully straighten up, so that he finished in a curious sort of sideways bow, looking up at me half over his shoulder. He did not say anything, but stayed there looking at me, waiting for me to repeat my question. He was an ageless sort of chap, but I suppose somewhere on the wrong side of forty.
I said, ‘Is Mr Barrett doing a job in this wood?’ This was pushing things a bit, but I did not think he was the boss, and in my experience country firms do not generally, like solicitors or chartered accountants, take their names from a couple of generations back.
He said, ‘Mr. Barrett?’ This gave me a moment of misgiving, but he was slowly straightening himself all the time, and the nearer he got to the vertical, the easier I found him to talk to. I nodded encouragingly. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘You’re from Barrett’s, aren’t you?’
He looked at the side of the van as if he had always wondered what the lettering meant. Then he looked back to me. ‘Mr Barrett?’ he said. ‘He was out here yesterday talking to the gentleman that owns it.’
I nodded again. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw him, I think. What is Mr Wainwright having done, do you know?’
His eyes wandered again, but before he could say ‘Mr Wainwright?’ I said, ‘The gentleman that owns it.’ I jerked my head comprehensively in the direction of the wood and the red brick villa. ‘What job does the owner want Mr Barrett to do here?’
He was starting to sink again slowly, as if he longed to take refuge inside the van, but did not want to make too much of a thing of it. In my determination to keep in touch I found myself sinking slowly with him. He saw this and gave up the attempt, and for a moment or two we stayed there, both slightly crouched, gazing at each other between the open rear doors of the van.
Finally he said, ‘Clearance job, I reckon. Some sort. You could ask him, of course.’
‘Scrub clearance or felling?’ I asked. ‘Or thinning, perhaps?’ I felt the easing of my back muscles before I realised that he had begun to straighten up again. We were almost back to the vertical when he said, ‘Felling, too, I reckon. He’s over to Burtonbridge, at the office. You could ask him, if you’re interested.’
I did not ask him where the office was. I had the name and there is always the local telephone directory. He was sinking again rapidly, but this time I did not follow him down. I said, ‘Yes, I’ll do that. Thank you.’ I felt hollow and slightly sick. I knew the holm oaks needed professional attention, and there was clearance certainly, and probably some thinning, to be done. But I remembered Dennis Wainwright’s expression when he said he had his plans for the wood, and I know too much about people like Barrett & Son, with their baby bulldozers and horrible buzz-saws. It was always easy enough to undo the splendour of two centuries, even when a man had to sweat with an axe at the act of destruction. Nowadays it was mechanized mass-slaughter, as much like the axe as the gas-chambers of the genocide are like honest sword and dagger. I had never yet killed anyone for the sake of a tree, but I did not disguise from myself my conviction that a well-grown hardwood is worth any three of the average run of people. If Dennis Wainwright really intended the destruction of the oaks, I would knock him over the head for that alone, apart from my other overriding interest in his death, without hesitation or compunction if I thought I could get away with it.
But I did not know yet that he did. I was full of crawling apprehension, but I did not know for certain. I got back into the car and drove hard for Burtonbridge. I stopped under a No Parking notice and dived into a telephone box. Barrett & Son were in Castle Street. I found a tall young policeman leaning over the car. I said, ‘It’s not been there half a minute. Tell me where Castle Street is, and I’ll take it away at once.’
He straightened up and looked down at me with as much
disapproval as he had previously shown of the car. He said, ‘Well, sir, it does say No Parking, doesn’t it?’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘and I’m really very sorry, but I had to find an address urgently, and I’m a stranger here, pretty well.’
‘Who is it you’re wanting then, sir, so urgently?’
It was really no business of his, and I could not explain to this nice young country copper, with any hope of being understood, that I was on the trail of a firm of professional mass-murderers. I said, ‘A firm called Barrett. It’s at 15 Castle Street. If you’ll just tell me where that is, I’ll never park in the wrong place again as long as I live.’
He decided I was an eccentric, but not dangerous enough to concern him professionally. It was not a bad judgment, though at the moment it erred on the side of leniency. He said, ‘All right, sir. We won’t say anything more about it now. But you’ll have to be more careful in future. It’s a bad street, this. If you go down to the bottom and turn left at the lights, you’ll be in Fore Street, and second left out of that is Castle Street. But you won’t find it easy to leave her there either. You want to go to a proper park really.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I will. Thank you very much.’ I drove off in an elaborate flurry of unaccustomed hand-signals as if I was trying to pass a test, as in some sense I felt I was. There was, in fact, a gap in the ranks right opposite 15 Castle Street. I left the car there and addressed myself to the doorway. It said Barrett & Son, Forestry Contractors, First Floor. I went up and tapped at a door. A voice said, ‘Come in.’ It was a local voice, but sharpish. This would be the younger Barrett. His father had probably wielded an axe as somebody’s forester in the days when people had forests. The son was a businessman, fully mechanized and interested in results in less than a hundred years. He looked up at me from an old-fashioned desk fairly heavily covered with papers. He had not yet acquired a secretary and an office routine. The face was red and very slightly peevish.
I said, ‘Mr Barrett?’ and he nodded. ‘My name’s Haddon,’ I said. ‘I live out at Marlock, at the Holt House. My uncle had the house for years. Same name.’ He nodded again and waited for me to go on. He had sensed, as his kind are very quick to sense, that I had come to ask a favour, and he was stiffening mentally all the time he listened. ‘I understand you’re doing a job for Mr Wainwright, at Holm Oaks,’ I said. ‘I saw your man there and he suggested I should come and speak to you.’
He said, ‘Yes, Mr Haddon. What is it you want, then?’
‘I wondered if you could tell me what it is you’re doing for Mr Wainwright? I’m interested in forestry myself, and of course the wood’s straight in front of my house. It used to be my uncle’s, in fact. He sold it to Mr Wainwright before he died.’
He said, ‘You hadn’t thought to ask Mr Wainwright?’
‘I could, of course. But I was on the way into Burtonbridge when I saw your man. He didn’t know the details, but suggested I see you, so I came straight on. Of course, if it’s anything confidential—’
He did not like this. He had probably had brushes with the authorities before, and any suggestion of working on the sly had to be rejected. He said, ‘Nothing specially confidential. But as we shall be working on Mr Wainwright’s instructions—’
I said, ‘Look, Mr Barrett. You’ll be working straight in front of my house, and I have a right-of-way through the middle of the wood. If I’m sufficiently interested, I can watch the whole job. All I’m asking you is what the job is. I can’t see it does any harm for me to know in advance what’s going to be done, and my interest is natural enough. But if you’d rather—’
He tried to work out the implications, failed and decided it was safer to be friendly. ‘No, that’s all right, Mr Haddon. Mr Wainwright’s not given us to understand his instructions were in any way confidential. He wants the wood cleared, in fact.’
Something very large and cold settled suddenly in the pit of my stomach, but I pretended not to notice it. ‘You mean scrub-clearance and thinning?’ I said.
‘Not thinning, no. The whole wood’s to be cut and the ground cleared.’
I nodded in a matter-of-fact sort of way. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Any talk of re-planting?’
‘Nothing’s been said to us. As a matter of fact, I got the impression Mr Wainwright has other uses for the land. But I can’t say for certain.’
I nodded briskly. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘All right, thank you, Mr Barrett.’ I turned to the door but stopped and turned round again. ‘Any idea when you’ll be starting on the job?’ I said.
‘As soon as we can,’ he said, ‘but it can’t be this week, nor the next. I’d say the week after, if we’re clear of our other jobs.’
I nodded again. ‘Right,’ I said. I thanked him and got down to the car. It was not, after all, the Barrett I had to deal with, much as I disliked them and what they stood for. If I had left father and son dead at 15 Castle Street, there would be other mechanized tradesmen ready to do what they were ready to do. It was Dennis Wainwright I had to deal with. It was his decision and they were, God help us all, his trees. I believed more and more in the deliberate malice of my Uncle Clarence. I believed that he had left me the house to spite his proper heirs, and then sold Dennis Wainwright the wood to ensure that I got no blessing with my portion of pottage. If I had never seen the place, the appalling thing Dennis Wainwright was going to do would have happened anyhow, but I should have gone unscathed by it. Now I was directly involved with every threatened tree, and I was tortured by my apparent helplessness to save it.
I drove straight out again on to the Marlock road. When I was clear of the town, I pulled in to the kerb and sat and tried to think the thing out. The trouble was that, apart from a strong superficial repugnance, I knew so little of the man I had to deal with. I had seen next to nothing of him, and by Carol’s account inscrutability, even at close range, was his most obvious quality. I did not know why he wanted to cut the wood down, much less how he could be persuaded not to. If it was money he was after-if, for instance, he had discovered some enormously profitable use for the land now under the trees – he could presumably be bought off. But he had not even bothered to enquire my offer when I had suggested buying the wood back from him, and I could not seriously believe that any offer at all within my scope would make him change his mind. Moreover, I did not for a moment really believe that money was his main object. Like my Uncle Clarence, he was out to hurt somebody, or at least to indulge his sense of power over them. I could well believe what Carol had said about the two men’s seeing a lot of each other. They would have made a splendid pair. I hoped Uncle Clarence was roasting in hell-fire, and I wished with all my heart that Dennis Wainwright could join him. In the meantime, I wondered whether there was any influence that could be brought to bear, but I had little real doubt that he would resist anything short of compulsion as obstinately as he would resist appeals to his greed.
I had already told myself that I would kill Dennis Wainwright without compunction to save the wood; but now that the practical issue faced me, I doubted, not my resolution, but my ability to commit a successful murder, especially with a victim as formidable as this one. I sat in the car chewing at the thing in a sort of desperate misery; and all the time there lurked in the back of my mind the fear that it might be a knowledge, or at least suspicion, of my meetings with Carol in the wood that had decided her husband to get rid of it. Our meetings there made valuable beyond calculation a thing I should in any case have done murder to preserve; and my love for Carol turned into an almost intolerable hatred the outrage and anger I should in any case have felt at his decision.
I got cold sitting there. The clouds were moving again, and a cold air filtered through the chinks in the car’s defences. Finally I started the engine and drove hard for Marlock. The wind freshened all the way, and when I turned eastwards along the northern edge of the wood, it was buffeting the windscreen with considerable force. I stopped in front of the house and with the silencing of the engine
heard, filling all the moving air round me, the throb and roar of the sea breaking on the beach. Elizabeth came out of the front door. She saw the car and me sitting there. For a moment she hesitated, then she came running down the flagged path and out of the gate. She snatched at the handle and yanked the door open. ‘Jake,’ she said, ‘oh Jake, something awful’s happened.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘I know,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. At least, I suppose we’re talking about the same thing. You haven’t by any chance murdered our Dennis?’
She shook her head. ‘I wish I could. He’s going to cut the wood down. Jake, we must stop him.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Mrs Wainwright told me. He’d said something to her, apparently, that could only mean that. She’s as upset as I am, but she can’t do anything. She asked me to let you know in case there was anything you could do.’
‘I’ve been talking to the contractors. We’ve got about ten days. Did you see Dennis himself?’
‘No. I don’t know where he was. But I didn’t want to see him after that.’
‘I think I’ll have to go over. I don’t for a moment imagine I can do much with him, but if I can find out why he’s doing it, it might help. It’s such a crazy thing to do. You didn’t gather anything from Mrs Wainwright?’
We were walking together up the paved path, but now she stopped and turned to me. She said, ‘No, but there’s something funny going on. I don’t know. I got the impression that this business of the wood is a tremendous personal issue between them, but I’m not sure how. But I think she’s frightened of him, Jake. She didn’t say much, and I haven’t even seen him. But if you told me he was doing it just to spite her, I don’t think I’d be awfully surprised. I find it all a bit frightening, to be honest.’
The Holm Oaks Page 8
