The Memory of Trees (16 page)

And then it thumped again. The intervals between the damp whump of its impact on the cave floor were getting shorter. It sounded much heavier than a man. It sounded clumsy and huge. It was hurrying, whatever it was, in its urgency to get to him.

Pete retreated. Once beyond the dog-leg, when he could see the cave entrance in daylight again, he jogged and then sprinted for the opening. He was on his bike and had it running and was off back the way he’d come before he’d bothered to secure the chin-strap of his helmet. Beach churned under his bike’s tread with no thought now for the preservation of his tyres. Under his leathers and long-johns, his skin crawled with gooseflesh as his trembling hand wrenched back the throttle to further increase his speed.

He no longer thought it had been a seal. It had been bigger than that, hadn’t it? But it hadn’t been a walrus either. It had been some creature with the stink of decomposition about it and he had the feeling it had been trying to approach him as quietly as it could. Its haste had betrayed it. It had wanted to get at him pretty badly and had given itself away.

Such speculation made no sense. He’d see things more rationally, he knew, when he reached the house on Abercrombie’s estate, met the man himself and saw Tom and Dora again in surroundings that were convivial and civilized and safe, and where he could steel himself with something fortifying from a well-stocked drinks cabinet.

He’d been badly spooked. He vaguely remembered a dream of a pursuit he’d been having. He tried to concentrate on the ground running rapidly beneath his wheels because sand and pebbles weren’t tarmac and the bike was heavy and the panniers loaded in a way that made it more difficult than it usually was to handle. But he was all the way back to the grass that reminded him of a golf links and had swung inland across it eastward before he felt properly safe again.

Abercrombie and Curtis didn’t get to see Saul’s yew tree at the time they’d decided to do so. Curtis was on the point of calling back Francesca when he got a call from the security team at the western gate to tell him Pete Mariner had arrived there aboard his motorcycle. Gibbet Mourning was roughly equidistant between Puller’s Reach and the gate. They decided they’d ride there instead and then escort Pete back to the house.

Curtis called Francesca and told her that there’d be three of them joining her and Dora for their late salad lunch. He looked up at the sky and around as he ended the call. It was shaping up into a lovely spring afternoon and he was looking forward to seeing his old colleagues and friends.

‘We can all take a trip to the Reach and see the yew after lunch,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Your people can get a feel for what we’re doing here. It’s only one tree, but it’s a potent tree at a potent spot.’

Curtis nodded. He remembered the cairn of whistling stones, the enigmatic figure he’d seen watching him from the cliff top, the sounds he’d heard there in the blind limbo of the fog bank. The Reach was a potent spot, all right.

Gibbet Mourning was another, he thought, looking at the squat shape of the great thorn bush and then at Freemantle’s Land Rover, parked there like an open secret, taunting them. Abercrombie’s pockets were stuffed with his spent cartridges. The illegally held gun was hidden under a tarpaulin now in the back of the vehicle. They’d have to retrieve and garage it in time. But there was no rush. It wasn’t as though it was going anywhere.

Pete seemed subdued to Curtis. He seemed a bit taciturn, which wasn’t like him at all. He thought it might be to do with the magnitude of the task. A set of map coordinates didn’t really prepare you for the sheer expanse and emptiness of the area of Wales they were going to transform back into dense woodland.

It was a task when you were actually there that seemed rather to defeat the imagination. He thought that would only change when the diggers arrived and the land turned black in swathes and the smell of loam permeated the air. In a sense this was the calm before the storm, but so pervasive was the calm that the storm was hard to visualise. It was coming, though, and soon. And it would be turbulent and mighty.

Even the sight of Dora didn’t animate Pete much and Curtis privately believed that Pete had carried a torch for his German sometimes-colleague since they’d first met five or six years earlier. Dora was good-looking and, unusually for someone who worked outdoors, seemed always to manifest the sort of worldly sophistication he associated more with nightclubs and casinos than with any rural pursuit.

She always seemed somehow polished, to him. She was good enough at the theory to hold down a professorship. But she really didn’t mind getting down and dirty in the field, either. It was one of the things Curtis thought most attractive about her. She was one of those rare women to whom mud didn’t do anything to diminish the glamour.

She was dressed in jeans and a denim shirt and when he hugged her in greeting and kissed her on the cheek he smelled in her loosely worn hair her familiar scents of Shalimar perfume and tobacco. And it occurred to him that had he intended to cheat on the partner he’d loved, he would have cheated with Dora rather than with any other woman. She’d been a temptation he’d resisted. Then to his own bewilderment, he’d cheated anyway with a callow and charmless girl.

In the event, he didn’t join them for lunch. That was fine – the meal was an opportunity for his boss and Francesca to get acquainted with his two trusted lieutenants and for Pete and Dora to try to get the measure of the man they were all ultimately being paid to satisfy.

Curtis had to go and check out what the ex-army logistics and mechanics boys were doing with the helipad and the airstrip they were improvising. Though the amount of material they’d bought along in their trucks suggested the results would be anything other than improvisational.

He had to check out too the progress being made with the living quarters being erected at a spot close to the estate’s eastern apex. It was a reminder of the vastness of the place that these substantial projects could be going on at two locations on it and, unless you knew, you could sit on Abercrombie’s sun terrace and really believe you had the tranquil wilderness stretching before you entirely to yourself.

These jobs were weather dependant and they were working to a schedule that was more than just tight. He’d worked with both teams before and knew that they were good. They’d have called him if they’d been confronted by snags or setbacks or with routine questions and they hadn’t. They’d been thoroughly briefed, they were specialists and they were getting on with it without any attendant drama. But he still had to verify their progress. It was his job.

He spent an hour with Stanhope, the former Royal Engineers Captain who’d built a thriving civilian business with ex-forces comrades constructing everything from tennis courts to pontoon bridges in the wake of large-scale floods. He asked Stanhope whether it would be possible to get some ex-army ordnance – specifically a couple of military-grade flame throwers and the petroleum jelly to fuel them with.

‘Shouldn’t be a problem, but they’re pretty heavy-duty, Tom. You sure you can’t manage with the civilian kit?’

The civilian kit had a throw of about twelve feet and was fuelled by propane. It was used mostly to clear canebrakes. ‘No,’ Curtis said. ‘I want the serious hardware for the job I have in mind.’

He ate a sandwich and shared tea from a flask with Carew, the Irish ganger supervising the building of the accommodation block. Leaving Carew with a handshake, he had a moment when he realized guiltily that he was revelling in the freedom Sam Freemantle’s absence had given him. He was pretty sure Freemantle would have deliberately cramped his style. Still could, should he come back. In the meantime he was getting on with things.

And so it was close to six o’clock by the time he returned to the house and observed without surprise that the quartet he’d left behind had by that time enjoyed a drink together.

They weren’t exactly pissed. They’d had one, possibly two drinks apiece. Doing so hadn’t noticeably affected Dora, but Francesca gave him a smile on his return that he thought Freemantle would have scowled on seeing. Abercrombie’s cheeks wore a slight flush and his eyes had brightened. He’d retrieved his steampunk goggles from wherever. They were hanging around his neck. Curtis thought it a measure of his increasing frailty that a man who’d been such a hedonist in the past could be so affected in the present by a couple of glasses of beer.

Pete’s demeanour was most altered by the booze. He’d loosened up. He’d changed out of his bike leathers and boots into a track top and a pair of khaki shorts. He’d brushed out his long blond hair, which the crash helmet had flattened on his journey there. He was relaxed and smiling and Curtis thought he’d probably been treated to a couple of outrageous anecdotes from Abercrombie’s rock ’n’ roll repertoire. Or maybe Dora had put him at his ease. She was sensitive to mood and with Pete knew from experience which buttons to push.

‘Took your time, Tree Man,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Everything simpatico?’

‘Both teams are slightly ahead of schedule. They’ve both got shifts working through the night. The airstrip boys should be done by midday tomorrow and the accommodation block will be up and running by tomorrow night. That’s plumbing, wiring, generator, the lot. They’re good.’

‘You get what you pay for,’ Abercrombie said. Then he said, ‘Your people are very curious to see my yew.’

Curtis wondered at the veracity of this remark. Bus men and holidays came immediately to mind. How excited could seasoned arboreal pros like Dora and Pete be to see a solitary yew?

He just nodded. He wanted to see it himself. Moreover, he wanted to see how his people reacted to the atmosphere of Puller’s Reach.

They all went and they went on the quads. And the surprise announced itself to the sharp eyes of Tom Curtis a good two miles short of their destination as they travelled over the undulating ground. He didn’t comment. A comment wouldn’t have been heard over the noise of five competing engines. He glanced at Abercrombie to see if there was some reaction in his expression, but behind the goggles it was impossible to tell.

There wasn’t one yew tree. There were two, the second slightly smaller than the one Curtis had planted. It stood parallel with the first to the edge of the cliff with about five feet of space between them. The earth around the base of its trunk was undisturbed. It looked as though it had emerged from the ground a couple of decades earlier and matured and thickened through the seasons.

‘Sam Freemantle must have planted it,’ Abercrombie said.

Curtis, who knew that the inviolate ground contradicted this theory, said nothing in reply. He could think of no natural explanation for what he was looking at. It was as though the yew he’d planted had been rapidly and exactly cloned and subject to growth so accelerated it would qualify as miraculous. Or uncanny.

To her father, glancing across to Curtis, Francesca said, ‘I reckon it’s that Balkan kidnap gang that’s stalking you, Dad. They’re probably bored. The devil makes work, and so on.’

So Abercrombie had told her about the earlier conversation they’d had on discovering Freemantle’s Land Rover. Of course he had. She was here because he was dying and he kept nothing from his daughter.

‘Well, they look like they belong, that’s for damn sure,’ Pete said.

Curtis looked at him and then for Dora, who had wandered away from the group and stood forty feet away, examining the Puller’s Reach cairn on her haunches.

‘Amen,’ said Abercrombie, slapping Pete on the back, raising his goggles to rest on his forehead, clearly pleased rather than freaked out by what he was looking at. He was a businessman. Production in his latest enterprise had just doubled and the increase in output had come at no extra cost.

Curtis studied Pete’s expression. It was slightly dazed, as though something had shocked him, unless he’d just had a couple more than the one or two beers the rest of them had cracked. He’d ridden his quad OK, but then he was an experienced motor cyclist and the terrain gave him plenty of room to steer a stray line or have the odd wobble.

He walked across to Dora. He said, ‘There’s only supposed to be one yew. Only one was planted. Nothing else has gone into the ground.’

‘Well, something’s come out of it,’ she said. She was fingering the stones of the cairn, stroking their moss and lichen-stained surfaces with delicate fingertips. ‘I’ve seen these before, in parts of Saxony and the Polish forests,’ she said.

‘What do they mean?’

‘It’s what they symbolize, Tom. It’s what they warn of.’ She stood and looked around and then held him directly with her eyes. They were dark brown, almost black, difficult to read. ‘They signify places of enchantment,’ she said. She brushed moss from her fingertips off against the fabric of her jeans where it was taut against her thighs.

He turned and walked past Francesca on his way to talk to Pete, who was staring down over the cliff face at the beach with a slight grin of bemusement. He smiled at her in passing. He didn’t realize how perfunctory the smile must have appeared until Francesca whispered after him, ‘She’s beautiful.’

‘What?’

‘More a question of who than of what, Tom. Dora is beautiful. And she’s lovely, which might prove to be what my dad would call a bitch.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do. But go and talk to Pete. He looks like he needs you to.’

‘I’ve known Dora Straub for years. Her professional credentials are impeccable.’

‘God, you’re so pompous in your project manager hat.’

‘How much did you lot have to drink?’

‘Go and talk to Pete, before he falls off the bloody edge of where he’s standing.’

He went and stood next to Pete, able to smell the beer on his breath, aware that somehow Pete had managed to sink a couple more than the others had.

‘Still no word on Charlotte?’

‘Nothing you’d call encouraging.’

Pete gestured at the beach. ‘There’s something fucking odd about this place. Something’s not right, Tom.’

‘I’ve been here a while. I thought it was just me.’