by L. J. Hutton
“Whatever happens, what do you want me to do about your altar here? Do you want me to carefully pack it up and take it to somewhere safe? Or do you want me to leave it and let it take its chances? You created this, so you need to tell me what you’d prefer to happen.”
Glaring at him sullenly, as if it was all his fault, Hannah snapped. “Don’t you touch our altar! You leave it alone! Ain’t nobody gonna touch our altar! Father d’ain’t come here, ain’t no need for anyone else to, either!”
Sighing, Bill backed away, allowing Pelydryn to go back through and take Hannah away with Helyglys following them. Left with Tarian-derw, Bill asked,
“Are they ever any better than that? Only it seems to me that the years of abuse have seriously damaged their minds.”
Tarian-derw echoed Bill’s sigh with one of his own. “I fear you are right. When they are fully in our world they are calm. They spend much of their time just staring at the plants and animals, but seem happy in their own strange way. Pelydryn is the healer amongst us, and she says that neither woman is strong or healthy. And much as it pains her, she has decided that it might be kindest to let them gently slip away to the other side of the veil – something which will be a much easier journey for them from where they are now. Having looked within them, she tells me that they are both so warped and damaged by what they went through, that it is beyond her skill to properly cure them, yet worse, she is not entirely sure what might happen if she did. She fears, you see, that if she made them strong again, that there might be a deep desire to lash out at anyone and anything.”
“She may well be right,” Bill admitted sadly. “Memory is a strange thing, for a start off. Some things might be so ingrained in theirs that nothing will ever remove it, and it could well influence their behaviour for the rest of their lives. Oh dear. How terribly sad. What I’d add for your benefit is that I doubt our own healers could have done any more or any better than your sister’s done. In fact, had they been discovered up here with their father’s body, the chances are that the only thing that could have happened would have been for them to be taken into some care home to be looked after. They certainly wouldn’t have been able to live independently in our world. So if your sisters ever wonder whether they did the right thing in taking the women through to your space, please reassure them that they did. It might not feel like it to them when the sisters die, but they’ll have had the best of all options living with you.”
Tarian-derw gave a faint smile. “Thank you. I will pass that message on, and it is kind of you to think of my sisters in this. But is it true that someone might choose to destroy these trees?”
And suddenly Bill saw what had been in front of him all this time. The place where the portal had opened up was in between two venerable old crab-apple trees!
“Oh heck! Those are two more of your special trees!” he gasped.
“They are. Indeed this whole wood is very old. Not the individual trees, you understand, but as one ancient one has fallen, one of its saplings has taken its place.”
“Which means it’s precious to you – the elves – too?”
“It is.”
“What about the wood next to it? The one a bit up the valley?”
“That too.”
Bill felt the weight of responsibility for this place falling on him. Then suddenly he had an idea. His bank manager had been saying for a while now that he should be doing something with his savings, because with interest rates so low in the last few years, leaving them in the bank wasn’t the good thing it had once been. Well with a bit of luck, he’d have enough to buy the woods.
“Look, I can’t promise anything,” he said to Tarian-derw, “and I really do have to go now, because I have to be up bright and early tomor... this morning, but I’ll do my best to make sure the woods remain.”
By some miracle, Monday morning was quieter than normal, and so Bill managed to smother his yawns while sitting at his desk while working his way through a pile of paperwork. Even so, he managed to make a phone-call during his lunch hour to the estate agent dealing with the sale of the Mulligrew’s farm. From that he discovered that a local farmer wanted most of the fields but not the house or the woods, and that with there being a better chance of selling the house as a development site, the agent was motivated to split the property into lots. With a firm price for the woods and two connecting fields – which the other farmer didn’t particularly want anyway – it was then a case of making a phone-call to his bank the next day.
Therefore by the time he walked up to Carol and Sylvia’s for Sunday lunch, Bill was well on the way to becoming a Shropshire land owner.
“Are you serious?” Sylvia asked in astonishment as he broke the news.
“Well who else will respect the elves’ land?” was Bill’s response.
“But is that up to you?” Sylvia protested.
“And is it going to be a problem for you if you need that money in the future?” Carol added practically.
This time Bill grinned. “Ah! Well given that my mortgage on my flat is almost paid up – because I thought I might as well get it paid off in case I ever need to take early retirement – the bank suggested that I only pay for some of the land out of my savings. The chap I spoke to said that it would actually be better for me to put a hefty deposit down, and then have a small mortgage on the land. He was thinking of things like felling rights and the money that could come from that if I needed it, you see.”
“And you didn’t tell him that that would never happen,” Carol sighed with a wry smile. “Well if you’re not going to leave yourself in a pickle by doing this, then I suppose it’s not so bad.”
“It’s not just me being sentimental,” Bill protested. “The thing is, I feel we owe those elves something. It might sound weird, but... but, well... there wouldn’t have been any justice without them.”
Carol looked worriedly at him. “Bill? Are you sure you’re alright? This doesn’t sound like you. Justice? Surely they acted as vigilantes?”
Yet Bill shook his head. “No, I don’t see it that way at all. Look, remember back to us sitting outside The Talbot, and us talking about our weird cases? Me about that dreadful supermarket case, and you telling me about the man I now know was Justin Pickersleigh?”
They both nodded.
“Well I said back then that with that case I felt we’d let somebody – or maybe several somebodies – down, because the one who’d got killed had made so many people’s lives utterly wretched. They were the forgotten ones, the ones nobody had thought to check up on. Even now, with that man we don’t know if somebody eventyally committed suicide because they’d been driven to it. And yet there is provision within the law to prosecute someone for inciting a person to kill themselves had we picked up on that, or been alerted to it. But by the time we got there, there was no point because the bloke was dead anyway.
“Yet how is that different to what happened to Hannah and Grace Mulligrew? The assumption was that they had moved away, run away, or had taken up with someone who had helped them leave. So did any of the local team investigate their disappearance? No, they didn’t, and that’s not a criticism of them. It’s just that without a hint of foul play, we don’t have the time or manpower to go randomly digging.
“But you think of what would have happened to them without the elves’ intervention. Those two poor warped and damaged children – because mentally I don’t think they’re much beyond that stage of development – would have found the old man dead sooner rather than later. Would they have thought to walk down to somewhere and make a phone-call? Would they have known to report his death? I seriously doubt it. So they’d have dug a hole, rolled him in, and then what? Too scared to even go food shopping, they’d probably have quietly starved to death up there, on their own in dying as they had in living, and that would have been truly tragic.”
“Heavens, Bill,” Sylvia gulped, “you paint a dreadful picture. Were they really that bad?”
“Totally out of touch with reality,” Bi
ll sighed. “They didn’t even understand me when I was talking about the house getting demolished, I don’t think. God help them, but if Thomas Mulligrew was free with his fists as well as raping them, they might have been brain damaged, and for some time, too.”
“Sadly, a distinct possibility,” Carol agreed. “But I’m getting the impression that you weren’t just thinking of them, but the other cases as well? And was it that supermarket case that disturbed you so much in the first place?”
Bill nodded. “It was. I think without that I’d have been a lot more critical of the elves’ intervention. Yet the more I found out about what they’d done, the harder it’s been for me to see what they did as wrong. They never set out to harm those men, only to save their victims, and you can’t really argue with that motivation.
“But more than that, you think of all those girls in the quarry. How many more would have had to die before that place got found? I mean think about it: if Bose had killed Tufty but never run into the elves, what would have been to stop him going back there again and again? And the same goes for his lieutenant, Sanay Costa. I can never tell any of my colleagues just how deeply implicated he was in the killings, because I can’t tell them how I know. But given that the Estonian was to all intents his uncle, albeit never formally married to his aunt, if Bose had moved up the food chain, who would have been likely to take over Bose’s crew?”
“Oh my God!” Sylvia groaned. “Of course, it would have been Costa, wouldn’t it?”
Carol was also looking grim. “And he was the one other person who knew where the quarry was, and that the pile of bodies hadn’t been found yet. So of course, the next time his uncle came to him with sex workers to dispose of, he’d have carried on doing what Bose and Tufty had started.”
“And speaking of Tufty,” Bill added, and told them of what he heard and been shown by the elves.
“Poor Tufty,” Sylvia sighed, after Bill had also filled in what he knew of Tufty’s disastrous childhood, “he didn’t stand a chance, did he?”
However Carol had also realised, “But without Bose’s car remaining, it would have taken a lot longer to match the prints on the knife that killed Tufty, and would there have been enough to convict Bose of the murder? Tufty himself had smeared many of the prints when he tried to pull the knife out, so had it gone to court, a crafty barrister could have argued that someone else had taken Bose’s knife. For all that everyone might have been convinced of Bose’s guilt, proving it beyond reasonable doubt might have been touch and go. The bastard could have walked away scot-free!”
Sylvia was appalled. “Good grief, that would have been a miscarriage of justice, and yet you could see the potential for it to happen. Eventually Bose would have slipped up, because his sort always do – so arrogant that they get to think that they’re untouchable and get slipshod over covering their tracks. But how many other girls might they have killed in the process?”
“And it’s more than that,” Bill continued. “How much longer would it have been, Carol, before all of them would have been so decomposed that you’d have had trouble tracing much of anything from them? I know with the foreign girls there was little to work with, but you’ve got enough off the two local girls that we’re only waiting now on matching familial DNA to be able to give two families some closure on knowing where their missing daughters went to.
“More than that, think on the three women out at the hotel. Without the elves and the apple trees, I might not have picked up those case files. And without realising that Damien Farrah was linked to my case, I wouldn’t have gone out there. That would mean that those three women would have stayed there until some major landscaping got done.”
“Heavens!” Carol gasped. “And by then Farrah senior might have died, or been in some nursing home somewhere, too far gone to be brought to trial. He’s had one heart-attack while being on remand, you know. He’s currently on a prison ward.”
“Is he now?” Bill hadn’t heard that, but was surprised how satisfying he found the news. Then he saw the concerned way that Sylvia and Carol were looking at him again. “I will never forget that insight the elves gave me into Melissa’s death,” he quickly explained. “You know I’ve always been sympathetic to rape cases, but it was something else again to in effect experience it myself. Her level of terror was through the roof, so yes, I’m glad that at least one of the Farrahs has had a touch of the suffering they handed out to so many women.”
Carol smiled wanly. “Then you’ll probably be glad to hear that the middle son – that’s the nasty little one I met – has been linked through DNA to a series of nasty rapes and assaults, too. Once his father’s was actively in the system and I started running comparisons, it threw up connections to the other cases. Of course it only showed a familial link, but we were easily able to rule Damien out, and the youngest son willingly gave a sample of his and was soon eliminated but gave us another familial link which threw the odds very heavily onto the other remaining son. The middle son kicked up a fuss about giving a sample, and once we’d processed it, it was obvious why. So he’s locked-up too, at the moment, and the best news is that Mrs Farrah, her poor mouse of a daughter, and the youngest son, were deemed to be vulnerable, and so have been moved to a safe location where hopefully they’ll never get found. Now that’s something I feel is justice!”
Sylvia was looking pensive, and now said, “I’m beginning to see what you meant, Bill. So many of these victims would never have come to light, would they? Even mucky Justin Pickersleigh’s. Carol was telling me that the rest of the paedophile ring he was connected to were city-based up in the West Midlands, and so the assumption was that he’d taken his few personal photographs somewhere closer to Birmingham – perhaps quiet spots out at Clent or the Lickey Hills. Nobody was looking into Wales at all.”
“But you aren’t doubting what you do, are you, Bill?” Carol asked worriedly. “You aren’t at a point where you’d turn a blind eye to a human vigilante?”
Bill immediately shook his head. “Good God, no! And in fairness, Carol, I don’t see the elves as having acted as vigilantes. It might seem like I’m splitting hairs – but then these days life seems less black and white, and more fifty shades of grey. I’d even struggle to call what they did with the men as entrapment, because they simply touched on the men’s own grimy fantasies, which then got expanded on by themselves quite separately to anything the elves actually did. It was Costa and Bose’s own sexual-predator fantasies that got them so worked up just before they died, you know, and Farrah’s. The elves were most disgusted at them, and none of the three women ever let any of them so much as touch them.”
“Really?” Carol exclaimed. “My goodness, that does rather put things into a different light.”
“Not so much as a pole-dance around an apple tree,” Bill confirmed. “Even the idea of taking any clothes off for those creeps was revolting to them. So how can you call it entrapment when it was the men’s own minds that built the fantasy which drew them in? Had that been human women, it would be a very grey area legally if you could prove that they’d not so much as flashed some cleavage at them, let alone gone topless.”
“Well I do see your point,” Carol admitted, “but you must promise me, Bill, that you’ll be careful in the future. If you start having thoughts of deciding who you bring in for questioning, and who you let go, you could be on very dangerous ground.”
Bill grinned at her. “Don’t worry, the ungodly of Worcestershire have as much to fear from me as they ever did. I’m not going soft on them. And you have to admit that this was a most peculiar set of cases. Who would have thought that the apple trees were the connection between them, much less have looked for watchers beneath their branches? Surely there can’t be any other strange cases like that waiting to come to light?”
And yet there was a part of him that hoped that there might be. For all of the grim realities of these cases, there had been something wondrous about finally encountering the elves, and coming after his p
revious two brushes with the unearthly, he was half hoping that it wouldn’t stop. More than that, he was left with a sense of something he could best describe as a balance having been restored in these instances. Unlike so many cases which crossed his desk these days, the dispensation of justice in these wasn’t dependent on the legal system, where a crafty lawyer might get a truly wicked person off on a technicality. Damien Farrah, Vijay Bose, and Sanay Costa had all received a full taste of what they had been all too free to hand out, and even if there was a chance that Thomas Mulligrew might have been an abused child who had later become an abuser, and Justin Pickersleigh might charitably be called plain mentally unwell, they had at the last been made to understand what misery they had caused. Moreover, if their victims couldn’t be saved, at least they had been prevented from going on and wrecking any more lives, and that, Bill thought, was as good as it sometimes got.
Not exactly divine intervention, he thought, as he strolled home from Carol and Sylvia’s later that night, enjoying the quiet of a moonlit walk, but whatever it is that keeps pulling me to these other sides of our world, if it carries on, then I’m happy with that.
Author’s Notes
TO THOSE OF YOU WHO know of my forays into all things medieval in an academic sense, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that the lai of Sir Orfeo was the starting point for this story. The story is just as Nick explains it to Bill in the book, but I thought that the idea of someone sitting under an apple tree and coming across the fae was too good not to explore. And it’s interesting that by the medieval era it’s specifically an apple tree that Heurodis sits under, this coming at a time when there was a rise in the cult of the Virgin Mary, and you see the portrayed reverse of her as Eve (with all the apple associations), who is the arch-temptress and epitomises female weakness bringing about the fall of Adam. So if you were going to have any tree with ambiguity about it, presumably it didn’t get any better back then than the apple.