The Memory of Trees (3 page)

‘It’s my problem.’

‘And the reason you want this gig so bad.’

‘I thought we were simpatico?’

‘Tree Man, it’s not confined to you and me.’

‘I want access to my daughter. Her mother’s putting every possible obstacle in the way of my seeing her. We’re unmarried, so my rights are limited. Litigation is expensive and I’ve no savings. You’re right, I need this job. I need it far too badly to be likely to fuck it up.’

‘My worry is you’ll convince yourself the project’s feasible, even if it isn’t,’ Abercrombie said. ‘You’ve just admitted you’re desperate for the bread.’

‘I’ll do my tests. I’ll tell you the objective truth when I’ve done them. Right now, things look promising, but I won’t lie to you, Saul. What would be the point? If we begin this and it fails, I’ll be unemployable.’

‘You got that right, Tree Man.’

‘What’s your budget?’

‘It stretches somewhere slightly north of fifty million pounds.’

‘You won’t need anywhere near that much.’

‘It’s there if I do,’ Abercrombie said. He turned to look behind them, at all the grassy wilderness he owned.

‘It’s an awful lot of what you call bread.’

‘Yeah, it’s a chunk of change, all right. What can I tell you, Tom?’ Abercrombie said, laughing. ‘I like trees.’

He liked them so much that he was going to oversee their planting across every part of this vast Welsh acreage. He was going to return to it the character the land had possessed in the Dark Ages, when England and Wales and Ireland too had been covered in dense, deciduous forest.

They had cleared it first for their settlements and then for their by-ways and then for cultivation. In the end, they had cleared it because cleared land seemed to them a symbol of civilization and forests the home of outlaws or just the gloomy refuge of magic and barbarism. They had chopped and hacked and burned in the name of progress until only a few areas of forest remained as a precious legacy to be nurtured and preserved in modern times by professional conservationists.

Saul Abercrombie wanted to reverse that process. He wanted to restore his domain to the virgin woodland it had been a thousand years ago. And he didn’t want to do it by planting saplings and watching them grow through patient decades. The stealth approach didn’t work for him. He was seventy years old. He had neither the decades nor the patience in him for stealth. He wanted a mature forest rightfully restored on a gigantic scale and had set aside north of fifty million pounds to see this ambition realized.

‘Ash and elder,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Yew, chestnut, oak, sycamore and beech.’

He talks like a hippie
, Curtis thought,
and this is his mantra
. He wants to build something profound and unprecedented. It will be wild and beautiful and his spectacular legacy. That was what Curtis supposed he had meant when he’d said the project went beyond whether the two of them could rub along all right together. He was a man for whom getting what he wanted was a lifelong habit. And he wanted nothing more than for his forest kingdom to be successfully realized.

As though reading his mind, Abercrombie said, ‘Broadleaf, brother, as far as the eye can see.’ Then, ‘Where will you source the trees?’

Curtis had thought about that. Of course he had. There were plenty of heavily wooded areas of British coastline doomed by erosion caused by the sea. Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight was one such spot. If someone was prepared to take the physical risk and organize the engineering and logistics, who would not be pleased to see those threatened trees on the precipice there saved and re-planted?

More cynically, there were lumber companies in Canada and the United States who would do almost anything to improve their compromised ecological credentials. They would get the same tonnage dollars from Abercrombie that they would get from customers looking to turn the wood into floors and furniture and roof joists. They wouldn’t get the same kudos, though. They’d bend over backwards to facilitate him.

Curtis explained all this. He did so once the quad bikes had taken them back to Abercrombie’s house, located about half a mile from the sea, towards the southern extremity of his land.

The house would have been a surprise had he not Google-Earthed it the previous day. It was modern, made mostly of wood from what Curtis assumed was a sustainable source. There were solar panels on the gentle slope of its roof. It was a spacious, handsome, two-storey affair, but even the most hyperbolic of estate agents would have blushed when calling it a mansion.

Abercrombie had mansions. He had homes in Barbados and London and British Columbia and they were far grander than this one was. Curtis had the intuition it might be razed and obliterated when the forest reached completion. The integrity of the forest would not be compromised by something modern and man-made. What a lonely construction that would make of the Saxon church, with its gory, stained-glass mystery, six or seven miles to the north-east of where they sat, the sun descending, on lawn chairs at a garden table to the rear of the property.

Unless Abercrombie planned to have the church razed too, of course. The church was an ancient monument and its stones had once been sanctified. But you could do such things, couldn’t you, when you were in the business of playing God.

They were sipping beer. That had turned out to be the second and less pleasant of two surprises. The first, welcome surprise had been Saul’s daughter, Francesca, exiting the house through the kitchen door and delivering their chilled bottles and iced beer glasses on a tray. She smiled and was introduced to Curtis, who stood and shook her hand. She was dressed in jeans and a blue cardigan he thought was probably cashmere over a plain white shirt. The breeze blew a tress of her hair across her face and she lifted a languid hand and brushed it away. She was one of those tall and slender women who move like liquid.

Her father asked her if she would join them, but she said she was working on something she was vague about in what she called the studio. She was as beautiful and as graceful in life as her pictures suggested she would be. With his counter-cultural phraseology and Artful Dodger manner of delivering it, there was something of the East End still about Saul. Francesca, by contrast, sounded like the product of a Surrey boarding school.

The unnerving surprise was the brand of beer Francesca had delivered him. Abercrombie’s was a Heineken. Curtis was served a Hoegaarden.

‘How did you know?’

Abercrombie chuckled. ‘That you have a taste for Weiss beer? Knowledge is power, friend.’

‘I’m flattered and all,’ Curtis said. ‘But really, how did you know?’

‘If you value your privacy, brother, don’t shop online.’

‘You’ve had me spied on?’

‘Assessed,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Secure Internet connectivity is an oxymoron, Tree Man. When it comes to privacy, the web is one faithless fucking bitch.’

A man exited the house and joined them, then. Dusk was gathering and he looked huge before he got close, loping over on light feet to where they sat and the detail of his clothing and features were properly resolved. He was shaven-headed and about six-four, dressed in camouflaged fatigues. And Curtis endured a third surprise, because he suddenly knew he’d had Sam Freemantle all wrong.

Deliberately so, he thought. Freemantle on the phone had just played on his preconceptions, planting assumptions, toying with him. He was nothing to do with tweed and twelve-bores; with partridge shoots and baiting traps to catch hares. His prey, should he hunt, was much more likely to be of the human variety. His claim to having spent the bulk of his life outdoors was probably true but had also been deliberately ambiguous.

He was Saul’s security and didn’t look to Curtis of the cut-price variety that gave the trade a bad name. Physically, he looked like he could create some serious carnage in the second row of a rugby scrum. But his body language suggested ex-military. Curtis would have bet what little money he had on that.

He nodded and smiled at Curtis and said, ‘Everything OK, Saul?’

‘Go and grab yourself a beer,’ Abercrombie said to him.

To Curtis, Freemantle said, ‘I took the liberty of locating your car and bringing up the things you left in the boot. In case you need them, I mean.’

‘I left my car locked,’ Curtis said. But this remark went ignored.

‘I assume you’ll stay the night?’ Abercrombie said.

‘I’d be delighted to stay.’

‘Go and grab that beer,’ Abercrombie said to Freemantle. ‘And bring me and Tree Man here another fresh one apiece.’

The three men talked. Curtis learned that his host had started buying the land he owned here in parcels twenty years ago. The bulk of it had belonged, ironically, to the Forestry Commission. They had planned to cultivate conifers on it but had enjoyed such success with their planting in Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands that the site had never been brought into productive use. There had never really been sufficient demand.

Ten years ago, when he finally owned the whole area that was originally covered by the forest he wanted to re-create, Abercrombie had everything on it ploughed under and then just left it to lie fallow for a full decade before embarking upon his scheme.

Curtis said, ‘How do you know the size and shape of what was here a thousand years ago?’

‘There are written accounts. There are illustrated maps. They contain place names. The places haven’t moved. There’s enough information to feed into a computer for fairly exact analysis. There are 3D software packages that can model to scale.’

‘And computers are one of your strengths.’

‘They are, Tree Man; it would be futile to deny it.’

‘Raven Dip is kind of self-explanatory,’ Curtis said. ‘Ravens were common enough in medieval times.’

‘If an omen of bad luck,’ Freemantle said.

‘And there’s a depression there in the ground,’ Curtis said. ‘Gibbet Mourning intrigues me, though. It sounds positively ominous.’ To Abercrombie, he said, ‘Could you tell me about it?’

‘I can do better than that, Tree Man,’ Abercrombie said, squinting at the descending sun. There was still some light in the sky but it was diminishing at a stealthy creep. ‘Sam here can treat you to the guided tour.’

‘Now?’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s going dark.’

‘Be cool, Tree Man. It’s ten minutes away, a stroll in the park. Sam knows the land like he knows his favourite lady of the night, every curve and hollow. The quads have headlights and you’ll be back in time for dinner. Chill, baby, is my advice. Take the trip. Go with the flow.’

Curtis didn’t know why he lacked the appetite to the extent he did for this excursion. He’d liked Abercrombie on meeting him and the initial impression hadn’t really altered. A man investing the money he was, in the project he planned, had the right to learn what he could about his prospective project manager. It was disconcerting that he’d learned the personal stuff he had, but not sinister or offensive, given the circumstances. A lot was at stake.

And he was comfortable enough in Freemantle’s company. The man was probably expert in half-a-dozen methods of killing an antagonist silently and unarmed. He was huge and oddly nimble in his movements. But he was intelligent and possessed a sly sense of humour and he’d been courteous so far to the point of genial. Curtis knew he didn’t pose a threat to Freemantle; to the esteem in which Abercrombie obviously held his to-do guy on the ground, or to his position in the general scheme of things. He wasn’t the enemy.

So what was it?

It was that stained-glass window in the tiny church. More specifically, it was the dripping trophy held by the knight who had despatched whatever the severed head had belonged to in life. It was grotesque and oddly real. Medieval artisans had been schooled in allegory, were well versed in the power of myth. But there was something about that giant, scaly head that looked authentically taken from life. It had spooked him.

They were about fifteen minutes away from the house when Freemantle signalled with a wave of his hand that they should stop and killed his engine. Here we go, Curtis thought, with a flutter of trepidation in his heart and his lovely daughter’s face imprinted, smiling, on his mind.

They took off their helmets. Freemantle tossed his on to the ground, where it bounced silently and then lay still. Curtis cradled his own helmet in his lap. He hoped this pause in their progress would not be a long one. Gibbet Mourning awaited them and the darkness was gathering all around.

‘He’s dying,’ Freemantle said. ‘Cancer of the throat. Inoperable. He’s been given eight months. He’s a stubborn bastard and will probably stretch that out to a year, knowing him. But his number’s up. He’d love to go out on something substantial. That’s why you’re here.’

‘You’re attached to him.’

‘I’d take a bullet for him. He’s full of shit, but then you get to know him, and I have. Fuck him around, Tom, and you’ll have me to deal with. I can be nice. I can also be the opposite of nice.’

‘I need the money.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m good.’

‘I know. Saul thinks you’re the best and I wouldn’t argue.’

‘And I’m Welsh.’

‘Kind of Welsh,’ Freemantle said. ‘Welsh enough.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Keep away from the daughter. I watched her from the house doing her barmaid cameo earlier. She likes you. At least, she’s intrigued. Why wouldn’t she be? You’re a good-looking young bloke and you’ve got that bruised thing going on some women find appealing. Steer clear, Tom, is my advice.’

‘Well. Thanks for your advice.’

‘Take it.’

Curtis put his helmet back on, fastened the chin strap and kicked the bike under him back into life.

There was little light left now and when he noticed the object growing in size and solidity in the middle distance he thought it might be a farm beast, a horse or bullock lying in the wilderness on its side. When they got closer, he saw that it was both much bigger and less dense than a living creature. The object was the whorls and twists of a thorn bush, a vicious spread of pain waiting to inflict itself on anyone who got too close to it.