The Memory of Trees (25 page)

He’d concealed himself by day in a hide he’d constructed in a shallow depression in the ground near Loxley’s Cross. At night he’d taken to foraging in the food bins behind the galley at the compound built for the labour force restoring the forest. He was living on scraps but they were plentiful scraps and concealment was relatively easy. In his old fugitive days there had been police forces with dogs out looking for him when he’d been on the run. No one was looking for him now.

They would get to Loxley’s Cross in weeks if not days with their diggers and planting. He thought the forest itself was probably big enough and dense enough by now for him to build a home in. It was a little too far distant from his food source as yet. But that was a situation altering every day as the growth stole relentlessly over what had once been the wilderness he’d managed for Saul.

He’d had a moment of weakness. He’d crept up to the house in the small hours desolately lonely and welling with self-pity and he’d spied on Francesca for an hour as she slept fitfully, watching her through the window of her room. There’d been a chink where the curtains had been carelessly pulled. His one-eyed sight had been better, then. He’d easily eluded the security lights and, of course, he’d meant her no harm. But she’d woken and roused help and he’d almost been discovered and shot by a man he did not recognize.

Fleeing that night, he’d realized that there was no going back. His status now was somewhere between a freak and an invalid. Saul would feel compassion for him and pension him off and pay for cosmetic procedures. Where he’d had the respect and trust of his boss, now there would only be pity. Francesca would wince, looking at his ruined face and scarred body. Even blind, he’d sense her doing it and it would be intolerable to him.

He’d felt in some ways like the master of this domain. Saul’s increasing physical weakness and Francesca’s indifference to her surroundings had encouraged that illusion. He realized now that the weapons he’d amassed in the armoury had been deadly symbols of empire building. He’d wanted to turn the house into a powerbase. The gym had been his parade ground. The comms room had been the observation tower from which his fortress could be vigilantly watched-over and defended.

Arrogance had undone him. As a consequence he’d lost his status, his looks, his health, his ambitions and his pride. He’d been angry at first at the indignity of what had been done to him. He’d been furious. He’d gone to the church at Raven Dip and sneaked inside and spat insults at God through an entire night, the oaths and blasphemies croaking out of his ruined throat so they rasped and repeated around the cold stone walls.

It did no good.

Eventually, after a fortnight had passed and the anger had subsided, he had gone back into the church and he had prayed. He had beseeched God to offer him a sign that all wasn’t as hopeless as it seemed be. Suicide had always seemed the coward’s way out to Sam Freemantle. Even in a remand cell awaiting his sentence for a string of armed robberies, he hadn’t seriously contemplated that.

To his astonishment, the sign came. It arrived in the shape of a slim, slight woman called Amelia, who’d approached him as he sat by the cairn of stones at Puller’s Reach, where the wind whispered through the leaves and branches of what he’d noticed, with surprise and failing sight, had become a copse now of yew trees.

He’d have challenged her as a trespasser only weeks earlier. He’d have drummed and harried her off Saul’s land with legal threats and quite probably some rough physical treatment as he pushed her into the passenger seat of the Land Rover and drove her to the exit of the western gate. He’d have taken her photograph and given it to the security boys who’d been manning the gates since shortly after Curtis arrived. He’d probably have emailed the picture to the Pembroke Constabulary.

But he was a changed man, humbled and reduced and what he craved was human company. He listened as she told him she had inhabited a cave on the shore and that he was welcome to share her refuge and her provisions whenever he wished to.

‘I come here every evening, at dusk,’ she told him. Then she laughed and said, ‘Of course, that’s only if the coast is clear.’

Once, her joke would have irritated him, made as it was slightly at Saul’s expense. But he’d been replaced in Saul’s affections by a new favourite in Tom Curtis. Maintaining the integrity of the estate was no longer his responsibility. And he found Amelia’s humour only mischievous and charming.

‘A warm welcome awaits you,’ she said. ‘Your presence won’t go unappreciated, Sam Freemantle.’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘I know everyone’s name in this locality.’

‘I’m no longer Sam Freemantle. Something happened to me.’

‘Were you hurt helping Tom Curtis? Did this happen because of him?’

‘Had he not come here, it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘I can make you forget your pain and disfigurement, Sam. I can make you forget them entirely.’

‘Can you really?’

‘I promise you, it’s true.’

And so the evening came when he craved company beyond endurance and he waited by the cairn for her, gnawing on a piece of stale loaf salvaged from the compound galley bins, what was left of his sight sensitive to the diminishing light in the spring sky as it reddened to the west and dusk approached.

He supposed she was one of those shiftless alternative types. They were hallmarked by piercings and tattoos. They wore their hair in dreadlocks and travelled in convoys of camper vans. They attended the summer solstice at Stonehenge and gate-crashed the festival at Glastonbury. Once he would have avoided such people. Now he didn’t care.

She came. She led him down a goat-narrow path on the cliff face he hadn’t known existed. She led him along the strand of shingle with the smell of brine making mucus well in his damaged throat as the sound of the waves brought a soothing rhythm to his ears.

They walked south for quite a long time. They came upon the planting atop the cliffs above them to their left. Freemantle heard the wind change in character as it soughed through dense foliage. ‘The forest,’ he said, to his companion, ‘the trees.’

Amelia laughed. It was a pleasant sound. ‘The memory of trees,’ she said.

He blinked and focused his remaining eye on her. She removed the hood she habitually wore from her head. He saw no metal puncturing her face. Her skin wasn’t inked. Her hair was abundant and silky. She was really quite beautiful.

Gloom descended and the air became cooler as they entered the cave and then darkness enveloped them completely. A new smell replaced the clean ozone smell of the sea and to Sam it smelled dead and ancient. There was something troubling about it and when his feet lost purchase in a pool of skittering slime on the cave floor he groped for Amelia’s hand, unsure of himself.

She returned his grip. Her hand was small and surprisingly strong and reassuring. She said, ‘Soon, Sam, you’ll have no cause for concern.’

He heard something splash heavily in the distance ahead of them. The sound shuddered off the cave walls. He heard a gasp of life and arousal and there was a hurrying, rubbing chafe as things that stank loathsomely lurched along the tunnel in their approach.

‘What’s that?’ he asked Amelia in the fetid darkness.

‘Company,’ she said. Her voice came from behind him. She was no longer at his side. ‘Goodbye, Sam.’

He barely had time to scream. And then they fell on him.

In what he thought of as more robust times, Saul Abercrombie had been a betting man. He’d bet at the tables in Las Vegas and Acapulco and Monte Carlo. He’d bet compulsively on business hunches. He had an actuary’s calculated understanding of risk. So he knew how heavily the odds were stacked against his survival. He had a chancer’s instinct and he nursed no illusions. Without a miracle, he would die within weeks. It was why he treated the evening prior to his departure back for Wales as what might be the last he would ever spend in London.

He felt better physically. He was stronger than he’d been on the day of the cave exploration. The Harley Street man had injected him with something as potent as it had been expensive. It was temporary, but temporarily it was working. He felt strong enough to stroll among the sites that had meant so much to him in his long and colourful career in the capital.

He walked through Bloomsbury until he came to Red Lion Square. The square hadn’t changed greatly since the day of the demo and his arrest. It had lost a few trees to Dutch Elm Disease. It had lost a few more to the Great Storm of 1987, the one the weather forecasters had rather infamously failed to predict and warn people about. But essentially it looked the same, surrounded as it was by austere and elegant Georgian houses no one lived in anymore.

Abercrombie remembered the turmoil of the times, which had been political. And he remembered the turmoil in his mind, which had been to do with being young and insecure and having yet made no impression on the world. He had been a student of politics in those days at the LSE and as he stood there in the gentle rain of a London spring, he recalled a quote coined by the great German statesman Otto Von Bismark he’d come across back then.

Bismark had not been a believer in the afterlife. He’d been a Junker and a soldier and was a pragmatic man. He’d said,
the only true immortality is posthumous fame
. It was a good line and in so far as it went, it was probably correct. And Saul thought that he was famous enough for the memory of his life and his accomplishments to endure after he was gone. But he wanted the present state of affairs to continue for rather longer than nature seemed to have planned. He was content to have Bismark’s dictum proven by his own demise eventually. He just wasn’t ready for the moment to arrive quite yet.

He walked from Bloomsbury to Soho and to Soho Square, where he’d enjoyed his epiphany a decade earlier. Jittery with crack, damn near psychotic in the aftermath of a huge crack binge, he’d kind of come-to there one summer dawn with no idea how he’d stumbled into that particular location.

He still believed that had he become aware of his surroundings in a nightclub, or even a store or a car park, he’d have broken down completely and been committed, despite his fame and wealth. He’d been close to that, a cigarette paper’s thickness away from it, truth be told.

But he’d regained something of his sensory awareness in Soho Square. The light had been soft through the leaf canopy and there’d been the smell of grass and flowers and bark and a chorus of happy birdsong. He’d hugged a tree. He’d actually hugged a sycamore tree and its gnarled surface had been real against his cheek. Its solidity had reassured him that the world could be predictable and benign. And beautiful in a prosaic, cyclical way he could learn to appreciate and enjoy without the stimulation of chemicals.

He looked at his wristwatch. He had a drinks appointment at 7 p.m. and didn’t want to be late for it. When time was short he’d discovered you became economical with it in a way he hadn’t been before. He’d been a man who habitually and unapologetically kept people waiting. He didn’t do that now.

Will Davies was already in the bar. The man from
the Mirror
looked about five years older than his picture by-line but that was a modest deception by the standards of Fleet Street, where most of the mugshots topping the stories were decades old. Abercrombie looked older than his own publicity shots, he knew. But then he’d been ageing in recent months with carcinogenic acceleration. The stock shot of him Davies’ paper had used had been taken only a year ago.

The bar was quiet early on an early summer evening, as he had known it would be. It was why he had chosen it. He shook hands with the reporter, accepted his offer of a drink and sat down. He was sipping a double measure of single malt and felt relaxed when the first question was asked of him. The pilgrimage paid to the two most important London locations in his adult life had delivered him a sense of calm.

‘Heard of a guy named Andrew Carrington?’

‘Not ringing any bells,’ Abercrombie said, after a pause. ‘Illuminate me.’

‘I was sent a pamphlet, something written in the early seventies and published by a small independent press in Oxford. It was sent anonymously.’

‘Anon,’ Abercrombie said. ‘That’s one prolific author.’

‘It was written under a pseudonym. I did a bit of research. Three or four people could have written it. It concerns Gregory of Avalon and the Forest of Mourning?’

‘Continue, brother. I may even subscribe. This is all news to me.’

‘I reckon this guy Carrington wrote it.’

Abercrombie sipped and shrugged.

‘He’s a professor of mythology. At least he was. He’s semi-retired. In the pamphlet he makes some fairly wild claims about the forest and its inhabitants. Actually, he makes some pretty wild claims about one inhabitant in particular.’

‘Again, brother, you’re gonna have to shine a light.’

‘And you’re lying through your elderly fucking skin.’

Abercrombie grinned. ‘I don’t have to take that shit,’ he said.

‘But you’re still sitting there.’

‘Why haven’t you pursued this story? I’m genuinely perplexed about that.’

‘People are less interested in forests than you’d probably think. Even in yours. They’d rather get irate about wind turbines.’

‘That’s not the real reason.’

‘Picture a young woman,’ Davies said. ‘Blonde, a bit vapid, skinny, smokes too much.’

‘You’ve just described half of Soho, brother.’

‘I’ve just described Isobel Jenks. Since I stopped writing about you and your fucking forest, she’s stopped following me. And my stereo system doesn’t choose its own playlist. And my car radio behaves itself.’

‘David Baxter was your source? Jesus, I can’t believe I didn’t work that one out.’

Davies grinned. He said, ‘You’re not a well man, Mr Abercrombie. But if you restore the Forest of Mourning, you might rejuvenate someone who can change that for you. And evil bitch that Carrington says she is, she might just be grateful enough to do it.’

Abercrombie drained his drink. ‘I thought you’d be more sceptical about that kind of supernatural shit,’ he said.