The Memory of Trees (30 page)

None of this was a surprise to Curtis. He’d been living with it on a daily basis for weeks by now. But he felt conflicted by the assault on this domain. It looked like they had gone to war with the land and that was contrary to everything he had accomplished before this project in his entire professional life.

He pondered on Amelia. He considered what poor Alfred Crawley had written and what Andrew Carrington had warned him against. He thought about Saul Abercrombie and his employer’s reluctance to accept the hand dealt him by fate and more compellingly by his own destructive habits. He thought about Fran. She had suggested he call her that, considering him a friend she said, his pillion passenger the previous night. And he wondered whether he believed any of it.

He did. Dora was the ironic proof. In her presence he could think about none of the things that really mattered to him or to his life or to his future fulfilment. Or he couldn’t without herculean effort. Had Amelia done this as part of some reciprocal bargain with Dora? If so, Dora had been made to forget the bargain’s striking. If so, it had not been done for Dora. It had been done to distract him from what he ought to be doing to stop this stuff from happening.

And it proved she wasn’t strong. She was spreading herself rather thin, was Amelia. She was covering a lot of bases or juggling a lot of balls or whatever platitude you wanted to use. But she wasn’t strong. Not invincibly strong, anyway. Not yet, she wasn’t. He made a mental note to call Carrington. He should do that as a matter of urgency. He should have done it already, he knew. He should have done it the previous evening, the moment he had finished reading Crawley’s account of the events at Loxley’s Cross.

They were there. To Curtis, Dodge looked like a high-end shanty town, constructed as it was of Kevlar-toughened fabric ribbed and framed with titanium rods and girders. They’d been really lucky with the weather. Twice in the decade before their daughter was born he’d been with Sarah to Glastonbury when the festival held there had become a quagmire. Here it had hardly rained since they’d begun. They could be wading through mud between the buildings on earth that was instead bald and hard with the wear of booted feet.

Their meeting was inconclusive. They’d done a roll call that morning. They’d lost another dozen people from the night shift.

Pete said, ‘It’s always at night that they go?’

The gangers sitting around the table in the logistics suite just looked at one another. There was a chart on the wall detailing the progress of the job. There was a computer bank dedicated to arboreal stock control and fuel supply monitoring for the vehicles and predicting meteorological conditions in advance of the weather they faced. There were software programmes for ordering food rations and carrying out a laundry cycle and ensuring everyone was paid on time. None of any of it addressed this particular problem.

‘So,’ Pete said, ‘they disappear at night. We know that the fence hasn’t been breached anywhere along its length. We know from the security guys that they’re not departing through the gates. What does that leave?’

Again, silence. Curtis thought about making a sarcastic crack about the missing people descending the cliffs and swimming away. But he thought it would be tantamount to workplace bullying. He could say what he liked only because he was in charge. It would be a joke made at the expense of the people around the table. They were not to blame. None of them were paid to be gaolers. And he had an ominous feeling about the fate of the missing by now.

One of the gangers, Carter, spoke. He was a picturesque individual, both of his burly arms heavily scrolled in Celtic tattoos, ears elaborately pierced, hair pony-tailed. Curtis had worked with him before and knew him to be both honest and completely professional.

‘The worrying thing is that they’re not taking anything,’ he said. ‘There’s been the odd incidence of petty pilfering here in Dodge. That goes with the territory. But nothing valuable has been taken from the site and when people disappear, they generally take stuff with them.’

Curtis nodded. So did Pete. What Carter was saying was true.

‘We haven’t lost a vehicle. Land Rovers are a big temptation. So are bikes. But nobody’s mislaid a single one. It’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced before.’

Curtis noticed that Carter was wearing a heavy silver crucifix on a silver chain. He hadn’t figured the man for a Christian. Maybe he was, or maybe it was just another of his adornments.

A little later that morning, Sarah Bourne went to the Riverside Café. She rightly assumed that the café’s proprietor would have a contact number at which she could reach Professor Carrington. He was on friendly terms with his regular customers. She could have gone through the university switchboard but regarded her business with the professor as personal and didn’t want to approach him that way.

She called him and arranged to meet him at his home. He gave her an address on Kingston Hill. She had ridden her bicycle to the café; it was a sunny June day and theoretically a pleasant one on which to ride. But she felt increasingly troubled about events going on in Wales. Charlotte was sleeping better, but the sketches had grown more lurid and disturbing. She had a painting rolled into a cardboard tube in her pack she wanted to show to Carrington.

The sun shone and the birds sang in the trees on her route. The pedestrians were bright in their summer clothes and Sarah noticed none of it. She was a mother who monitored what her daughter came into contact with assiduously. She knew that the images in her daughter’s mind were not coming from a computer game or site or some nightmarish DVD she’d been allowed inadvertently to watch. The problem was neither did she believe Charlotte was just dreaming them up.

The blood bond, Carrington had called it. To Sarah’s ears the phrase had sounded medieval. But that had just been her prejudice against a crusty scholar discussing folkloric myths. That sort of stuff held no interest for her and never had. Unfortunately though, it had involved her. And the blood bond between father and daughter wasn’t mythic at all. It was an undeniable biological fact.

His house was a chaotic mess. There were books and maps and pamphlets piled indiscriminately in every room. Everything lay under a patina of dust. There was an odour of stale pipe tobacco. He insisted on making tea before they spoke and presented it with some ceremony on a silver tray. Her cup was decorated with the Willow Pattern and didn’t look particularly clean.

‘I thought you were going to Wales.’

‘I am. I’m expecting a call from Tom Curtis. It’s pointless me going until he invites me. He’s probably reluctant to do so. He seems to be quite a stubborn man.’

‘Very,’ she said.

‘But he’s also a man who wants answers. And he’s in dire need of help. Unless he leaves it too late, he’ll call me. And then I’ll go to Wales. And it might already be too late. I’m doing the best I can to remain optimistic.’

‘Surely the invitation needs to come from Saul Abercrombie.’

‘Fate took Tom Curtis to the Forest of Mourning. It’s from your husband that the invitation needs to come.’

‘He’s not my husband.’

‘He’s the father of your child.’

‘Who painted this,’ Sarah said, picking up the cardboard tube from where she’d placed it beside her chair and handing it to him.

Carrington wore a pair of spectacles on a chain around his neck. He put them on and unfurled the picture in the tube, taking it over to the window of the room to examine it in daylight. The glass was not terribly clean, Sarah noticed. But the mid-morning sun shone strongly through it.

‘What is that?’

‘In Norse mythology they were called the Eaters of the Dead. They’re leech-like creatures. They feed the way a Lamprey does, on a host. But the process is rather quicker because they’re large and they’re thirsty.’

‘It looks revolting, and terrifying. I knew my daughter hadn’t dreamt it up, but I don’t know where she would have seen something so disturbing.’

‘Collective memory,’ Carrington said.

‘You’ve just said those creatures are mythic.’

‘So is the creature they served.’

‘Please don’t speak in riddles again.’

‘There are myths and there are myths,’ he said. ‘Some are completely fantastical. I never expect, for example, to encounter a mermaid.’

Sarah gestured at the picture. ‘While you think you might encounter one of those?’

‘Tom Curtis had an ancestor who did.’

‘You mean that Gregory guy?’

‘There will be people vanishing on the domain Abercrombie deludes himself is his. That’s the meaning of your daughter’s painting. It’s a warning for her father he will never get the chance to heed.’

‘That’s a bit contradictory,’ Sarah said.

‘Why?’

‘Because the forest is what’s required by this Eve person. That’s what you told me. Why would creatures who serve her kill the people restoring it?’

‘A tipping point has been reached. The land is reverting. There are more trees every day than they are putting in the ground.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Ask Tom Curtis if it’s impossible. It’s a conundrum he’ll be aware of, though I’d imagine he regards it as the least of his problems.’

‘I’m not ready to speak to him.’

‘You’re as stubborn as he is.’

‘I don’t want monsters in my daughter’s head.’

‘She’s his daughter too. That’s what’s putting them there.’

‘I want it to stop.’

‘One way or another, it will stop soon enough. Matters are reaching their conclusion, I feel. Whatever the outcome, things will be resolved.’ He rolled the picture with a visible shudder and fitted it carefully into the tube. He offered it back to her.

‘Keep it,’ Sarah said, ‘with my compliments. Please don’t bother to see me out.’

He took the picture outside into his garden after her departure and burned it in his empty leaf bin. Isobel Jenks, the ghost of Isobel Jenks, watched him do it, leaning against one of his poplars with a scowl twisting her wan features.

She wanted to interfere with him. Of course she did. She served someone malevolent to a degree beyond the human capacity to comprehend. She wanted to harm him but the precautions he had taken prevented her from doing so.

He honoured the old Gods. He was punctilious and faithful in this and he believed they protected him as a consequence. She could scowl at him in the garden. It had become startling at night sometimes when her face loomed out of the darkness to stare palely into one of his windows. But she could not get into the house and she could not hurt him. Andrew Carrington wasn’t confident of much concerning this present woeful business, but he was sure about that.

He had almost just now mentioned the nuisance Isobel had become to him to Sarah Bourne. Charlotte wasn’t the only innocent casualty of the work being done in Wales by Tom Curtis. He had decided against doing so because Sarah had obviously been so badly hurt by the business in the autumn and, though tact didn’t come naturally to him, he liked her.

He liked her despite her making it fairly plain that she didn’t much care for him. That was all right. Honesty was a quality he respected. And he’d never for one moment in his entire life felt the all too common craving to be popular.

He had entertained Sarah in his lounge. It was the tidiest room in what he regarded as a pretty neatly kept house. He cleared up the tea things noticing that she hadn’t drunk hers, which was a pity because he made a rather good cup of tea.

He went from the kitchen after washing up the cups to his study and picked his way through the unsteady pillars of books rising from the bare board floor and opened his strong box. He took the pendant and the amulet he had stolen from the Ashmolean and examined them, as it had become his habit to do three or four times every day.

He had thought about polishing them, but their dull lustre was the best clue as to their ancient provenance. They had been taken from their owner a very long time ago. He could only imagine the gleam in her eye should she ever lay eyes on them again. He thought he might see that expression for himself in a moment swiftly approaching. He did not delude himself he would enjoy the protection he did from the trivial nuisance Isobel Jenks had become when that confrontation occurred.

Pete decided he’d look for clues on the beach. The meeting had left him feeling embarrassed and frustrated pretty much in equal measure. He didn’t like to look stupid in front of Tom Curtis and keeping the workforce up to strength was one of his specific areas of responsibility.

He was generally good at keeping people happy. He had a way of cajoling more out of people than they thought they had to give. It was a happy knack that had made him valuable as a core team member on a number of projects to Tom in the past. He couldn’t really understand what would make people walk away from this particular gig. There was nothing he could identify that would make people unhappy about the work.

Parts of the estate were a mite spooky. You could call them atmospheric, but they were more than that. You might even see them as sinister. The bush at Gibbet Mourning had been positively monstrous and had freaked him out pretty badly. But the people paid to transport and excavate and plant hadn’t had to deal with that – he had, together with Tom.

When the people they’d employed worked in the dark they did so under floodlights. There were large areas of woodland now and some of them were very dense – and, by definition, isolated. But the missing weren’t being hunted down, were they? It wasn’t like there were bears in the woods.

The gangers should have told him sooner that people were deserting the job. It was their failure and they’d no doubt tried to keep it that way until they had realized it was a problem beyond their resources to solve. So it had been elevated with no warning whatsoever into his problem. That was fine. He’d deal with it. If he didn’t, it would become Tom’s problem and he’d have failed and he wasn’t about to let that happen.

He rode to the southern gate. He chatted to the security guys for a couple of minutes and verified that people weren’t streaming out on foot with packs on their backs. That wasn’t the sort of exodus these people would miss. Once outside the perimeter, he rode along the fence west to the area beyond Abercrombie’s land that led to the shore and had reminded him when he’d first arrived of a golf links built for giants.