The Memory of Trees (17 page)

‘Nope, things aren’t right here. They’re sort of out of kilter, if you know what I mean. This is a weird location, strange vibes.’

‘I need this job. It’ll make our reputations.’

‘You and Dora already have reputations.’

‘I don’t have a pot to piss in, is the truth of it. I was with Eddie Stanhope earlier, who drives a Bentley. Then I had tea with Patsy Carew, who has a villa on the Algarve. I’ve never made any real money, Pete. This job’s my shot.’

Pete turned and looked at him. ‘Going to court over your girl?’

‘Yes, unless Sarah has a sudden change of heart.’

Pete belched. ‘Then this job’s got you by the balls, Tom.’

A
ndrew Carrington had spent hundreds of hours in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He had researched there, written there and curated exhibitions there that had proven very popular with both the public and the press critics who reviewed such events. He had never stolen anything from the museum, though, and had never dreamed that he would. But he was about to do it now and couldn’t help but muse on how very strange it felt to be on the verge of committing a crime serious enough not only to ruin his professional name but to put him behind bars for a couple of years.

The artefacts he was after were not on public display. That was a blessing. It made the theft an easier proposition practically. And it meant that it would take longer for the theft to be discovered and for the police to be alerted and begin their dogged and meticulous process of recovery.

The theft would be discovered, that was inevitable. It might remain undetected for a few weeks or even months, but eventually someone would realize that something irreplaceable had gone. A process of elimination would point the finger of blame inexorably at him. He had the feeling, though, that by that time it wouldn’t matter very much and if it did, by then he wouldn’t really care.

The pieces he intended to steal were part of the Mandrake Hoard. It had been stumbled upon by an amateur treasure hunter armed with outrageous luck and a metal detector. He had made his find in the Cheviot Hills. This particular hill had not been a hill at all, but a burial mound. His treasure trove proved to be the possessions of a Saxon chieftain or possibly even a king. Carrington had helped to inventory and catalogue the hoard once lottery money had been used to pay for it at auction.

Most of the hoard was on display. It was the most spectacular collection of precious Saxon metalwork since the haul discovered at Sutton Hoo. The chieftain had been buried in his armour, with his sword and shield, and they were intact and with his helmet represented the finest examples of Saxon weaponry ever found in Britain.

The two items Carrington coveted were not on display because they did not really fit in. They were Celtic artefacts and they dated from a period a century before the other stuff the tomb had contained. They were, frankly, anomalous, a chronological and racial contradiction that had proved to be nothing more than a headache for scholars during the two baffled decades since the find.

They were a pendant and an amulet. They were heavily scrolled and fashioned from gold. The pendant had at its centre a flawless emerald. They were handsome pieces and despite their anomalous nature, they were priceless. But Carrington was not stealing them for their black market value. He was doing so because he was confident he had worked out what they were for. He thought he would have need of them should fate conspire to take him to Pembrokeshire.

The elements of the theft that made it so easy for him were also those that would make it obvious he was the thief. He was a Friend of the Museum, with a special swipe card giving him access to secure areas to which the public were not permitted to go. He did not have to endure the public indignity of having his bag searched on the security desk when he left. He could visit the museum at hours when it was not open at all to the general public. All of which was very convenient.

He saw three or four people he knew and was obliged to acknowledge on his way to the room where the pendant and amulet were tagged and shelved. The room was heavily locked and the heat and humidity of its interior were controlled. He didn’t know how frequently the items it contained were dusted. Even dusting them would be a specialist job and the climate control might make it completely unnecessary. If it was done, that was how long he had before they were on to him.

He barely looked at the two items before lifting them from the shelf and putting them in the bag. He was surprised handling them, as he always was, by their weight. They were gold and their purity was absolute. But he thought their weight owed as much to their significance as objects as to the density of the metal from which they had been fashioned.

A cosmological chart had been one of the items recovered in the Mandrake Hoard. It was engraved in bronze and it had been theorized that the noble occupant of the grave had been a distinguished traveller in his life, a man who had explored in sea-faring voyages well beyond the shores of his native country.

Carrington did not share this belief. He thought the chart signified activities much darker and more interesting than using the stars as a navigational aid. The objects now in his briefcase were the proof of that. A Saxon king had not commissioned their creation. But they had somehow come into his ownership and he had appreciated their properties, hadn’t he? He’d had sufficient regard for them that he’d had the pendant and the amulet buried with him.

Carrington endured a bad moment on his way out of the museum. An ex-colleague stopped him and insisted on discussing a matter over which they had disagreed for thirty years.

The rotund figure confronting him was Harold Flowers, a St Margaret’s medieval history don with an irritatingly amateurish sideline in mythology. He’d written something absurd speculating that Nazi militarism had been influenced by the cult of Odin. Then he’d compounded his sin by having this rubbish published in a respected journal. Carrington had dismissed it witheringly in an essay of his own. Now here the idiot was, wanting not so much to prolong as to exhume their original argument.

He felt he had no alternative but to capitulate. There was a place for academic pride and scholarly integrity, but it wasn’t with a briefcase full of stolen loot bulging heavily under one’s arm. He admitted to Flowers that he’d been mistaken. He accepted defeat totally and with good humour, he said. The argument for what Flowers had claimed was overwhelming. He congratulated his opponent with magnanimity and a smile. It almost made him physically sick to have to do it, but it was what the circumstances demanded.

He made for the exit cursing his luck. He thought that should he ever see Flowers again it would likely be as a performer in the witness box at his own committal proceedings.

It was just after seven in the evening. If he hurried he could be on the seven-thirty London train and back in Kingston by half nine. He’d deposit the contents of the briefcase in the strong box in his study and with luck he’d be in the pub by ten. Food did not really figure in his plans for the evening, but then he was fairly indifferent to food. A drink was a different thing entirely and Carrington felt he’d have earned a pint or two by the time he got to the pub tonight.

David Baxter was fairly sure he was being haunted. It wasn’t the stereotypical stuff, the creaking doors and phantom thumps on stairs with no one walking up or down them. There were no cold spots in his flat and he couldn’t claim to have witnessed a poltergeist cabaret of kitchen implements pitched as missiles by an antic spirit.

It was subtler than that. It was almost sly in its calculation. He’d been unnerved and irritated by it and after enduring almost a full day of it, he really wanted it to stop. He certainly wanted it to stop before night fell.

His flat occupied a quiet spot on a residential road in Richmond. It was an old stable conversion and he was extremely proud of it. His study had a wood-burning stove and his galley kitchen glittered with chrome and high-tensile steel. There was a Naim hi-fi system worth several thousand pounds. He’d been to their Salisbury showroom to audition in their listening suite before selecting and paying for it with his platinum Amex card.

It was the hi-fi system that was giving him the trouble. It had been doing so all day. He would leave his sitting room, where its components were mounted on their custom-finished hardwood shelves and the lights on each would glow, indicating they were innocently poised on standby. He would return and music would be playing. It was always the same tune and the system signalled that the source component producing the sound was his CD player.

It was a Dusty Springfield song. He knew that because he had heard her distinctive voice often on car journeys when he tuned into Radio Two. The song playing each time he came back into his sitting room was easing out of his speakers softly, at low volume. The song was, ‘I Only Want to be With You’
.

Baxter didn’t own any Dusty Springfield CDs. Open the disc drawer and it would be empty and the song would sigh to a halt only to have begun again if he left the room and then re-entered it.

Anyway, it didn’t exactly sound like Dusty Springfield. It sounded a bit like Annie Lennox, who had recorded the song with her first band, the Tourists. It didn’t sound exactly like her either, though. It sounded like an amalgam of the two of them and the instrumentation was subtly off-key. How the song actually sounded was less real than recalled by someone’s slightly inaccurate memory.

He didn’t think it would be happening if he wasn’t there. If he was working on a case, busy following someone or checking out their company profile in the Public Records office, he reckoned his hi-fi system would remain content to be switched off in his absence. It was more than tedious, it was genuinely unnerving. And after only a few hours, his haunting had taught him something he hadn’t really known about himself: that he lacked physical courage. He was well organized and very intuitive and disciplined. But he really did not want to be confronted by the ghost of Isobel Jenks and he knew that it was her spirit responsible for the trick with the music and, because he knew how vindictive she had been in life, he suspected this was only the start of things.

He didn’t want to open a wardrobe and reveal her hanging from a hook with a vacant leer across her dead face. He didn’t want her staring into his eyes from over his shoulder when he studied his reflection in the shaving mirror. Soon it would be dark and if her pale face smudged one of his windows looming from outside he thought that he might actually scream.

The smoke was the reason he suspected he might see her. He’d been aware of it really since the morning. He’d had his second conversation with Will Davies, the one in which the reporter had broken the news to him about the fact and manner of Isobel’s death, half an hour after he’d seen her in the park, by which time she was probably on an autopsy table. He had broken the connection. And he had smelled cigarette smoke in his flat.

Baxter didn’t smoke and he never had. It was a smell to which he was consequently sensitive. He was also house-proud and the idea that his furniture and towels might start to reek of fag smoke was a distasteful one.

He checked the windows, but the odour wasn’t drifting in through any of them. He opened them all to try to air the place. There was a light spring breeze that failed to do the job. The smoke scent lingered and grew stronger. By late afternoon, it had started to mingle with a scent by Calvin Klein he remembered, from his one-night-stand with her, that Isobel Jenks had worn in life.

By then he’d become familiar with the lyrics of the song Dusty/Annie persisted in singing on his sitting-room stereo.

Shortly before dusk fell he decided he’d go out for a drive. His BMW was his pride and joy. It was a rare sports coupe model he’d bought on eBay from a collector in Germany. It had a three-litre engine and would do close to 200 miles an hour at the top speed he’d never come close to reaching in it. The insurance premium was high but Baxter had been driving since he was eighteen, had an unblemished licence and could comfortably afford it.

He’d nicknamed his car the Beast. He thought there were people who might snigger at that, but every time he got behind the wheel of the Beast and keyed its ignition, he felt his self-esteem bolstered. He always climbed out of his car after a drive feeling several inches taller.

He settled into the contoured leather driving seat and backed it out of his garage. He put his side lights on because it wasn’t fully dark. He thought that he might drive around the M25 for a while. Five lanes of rush-hour traffic wasn’t everyone’s idea of fun, but it was everyone’s idea of normality and David Baxter badly needed that.

He might come back to his flat tonight and he might not, he thought. His wallet was in the hip pocket of his jeans. He thought that if he didn’t fancy coming back he could spend the night in a Travelodge without drama just by taking the exit from the motorway for Kingston or Wimbledon. Both had branches of the budget hotel chain and they were clean and comfortable and they didn’t have ghosts.

He could come back in the morning at nine a.m., when his Polish cleaning lady Jana was due. Jana was in her mid-twenties and ever-cheerful, and he didn’t think his hi-fi would get up to its delinquent tricks with Jana humming about the place with her polish and her dusters.

He drove in the outside lane of the motorway, when he reached it, at a steady seventy-five miles an hour because the traffic was light and because he’d read reliably in the
Daily Mail
that the overhead speed cameras had not been loaded with film for at least a couple of years.

He’d decided on the Kingston Travelodge. He could expense the modest cost. Later in the evening, they would have first editions of tomorrow’s newspapers. He could read a hard copy of
the Mirror,
see what sort of a splash they’d made of the story his tip-off had given Will Davies.

He didn’t expect anything about the enigmatic Tom Curtis much beyond a name-check. It would be all about the mad scale of Saul Abercrombie’s scheme. They’d run the archive shot of his arrest at the Red Lion Square demo back in the seventies. They’d do a run-down of his business career. There’d be an attempt at clarification on the state of his health. He didn’t expect a quote from the man himself.