The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  It refused to budge.

  ‘Excuse me? I believe you were helping, yes?’

  Tom stooped beside her and heaved. Slowly, and with a horrible metallic grating noise as seventy years of rust gave way, the memorial stone tilted up on hinges hidden under its bottom edge to reveal a square, stone-lined hole in the ground. Rachel watched apprehensively as Eline reached in, still half-prepared for her to pull out a skull, but what she produced was a large rectangular object wrapped in cloth. Eline unwrapped it to reveal a leather suitcase. It was battered and dusty, but in remarkably good condition. She popped the locks and lifted the lid with a little crow of delight.

  Inside were a number of cloth-wrapped bundles, which gave off a strong smell of oil. Eline picked one up and unwrapped it to reveal a bundle of documents including an old passport – the old-fashioned blue version – and a wad of money. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘probably all obsolete by now,’ and tossed them back. The next was heavier. ‘Ah, here we are.’

  Wrapped in the protective oilcloth was a handgun. In the next parcel was a cardboard box of bullets.

  ‘Um…’ said Tom.

  Eline ignored him, inspecting the pistol closely. It was a semi-automatic with a square grip and short barrel; small, sleek and rounded. The magazine ejected smoothly, and the slide action was clean. ‘Incredible,’ she breathed.

  ‘I’ll say,’ replied Rachel. ‘As in what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  Eline opened the box of bullets and started reloading the gun’s clip. ‘I would say that was fairly obvious. I’m protecting myself. I could have done with it that night, but I could not be sure that old Brass-Eye’s men weren’t watching this place.’ She chuckled. ‘I think it is fair to say they are probably not any more.’

  Tom was doing a passable imitation of a meerkat, trying to look in every direction at once in case they were being watched. ‘You can’t wander around with a fucking gun!’ he protested.

  ‘Why not? Our enemy does. Or did you enjoy being shot at yesterday?’ Neither Tom nor Rachel could find an adequate reply to that, and Eline went on. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is a Browning FN 1910 – Belgian-made as all the best things are, obviously – nice and small, no external sight to snag on your underwear when you whip it out, very reliable. It was one of these that started the Great War. I think that you didn’t know that.’ She slotted the magazine, chambered a round, and fired a shot into the earth just to make sure. It made a surprisingly quiet, dry-twig cracking sound but Rachel and Tom jumped nonetheless. ‘And still in fine working order,’ Eline added.

  ‘Great, the weapon of choice for assassins,’ said Tom. ‘You’re going to get us arrested.’

  ‘Nonsense. Nobody heard that. And if they did they thought it was a branch breaking.’ She pocketed the pistol, threw everything else back into the suitcase and snapped it shut. ‘Okay, now we go.’

  27

  THE HIVE

  THE HIVE, HOUSING WORCESTER’S CENTRAL LIBRARY and historical archives, looked like a space fortress from a low-budget seventies science fiction show. It was clad in plates of a gold-coloured metal overlapping like fish scales, and rose to seven chunky square towers that didn’t have a single right angle between them – a deliberate architectural conceit designed to create the impression of something orderly but created naturally, possibly by bees as its name suggested. Giant, super-intelligent space bees. It looked like it had not been built so much as landed, in an open area bordered by a grimy Victorian railway viaduct on one side and a shopping centre on the other.

  Rachel, Tom and Eline found the main entrance via a series of wide ramps and walkways over a sunken grassed area like a drained moat. Inside, the historical archives reading room was just as disconcerting. Maybe it was because she’d been spending so much time in the company of Mary/Annabel/Eline visiting places where the skin between the worlds of the living and the dead seemed so tissue-thin as to be invisible, but she was expecting dusty shelves and heavy furniture, cobwebby corners and crackling, ancient tomes. Maybe it was simply too much television.

  She wasn’t expecting a large open-plan space with modern glass museum cabinets displaying artefacts from the city’s history and tables of gleaming white melamine and grey steel, overhung by large light panels, which provided a clean and directionless illumination.

  Rachel had to produce her driver’s licence and register for a research card before they were allowed access to the Oak Mary case files. The archivist – a slender Asian woman with bright henna tattoos decorating her hands – brought out six large brown cardboard boxes, weighing each of them first on sensitive electronic scales and recording the results, a precaution to make sure that nothing went missing. Rachel opened the first box; the battered, seventy-year-old manila folders inside looked incongruous in such a twenty-first-century setting, like a pensioner in an Apple store.

  ‘Right then,’ Rachel said. ‘Six boxes. That’s three each.’

  ‘Three?’ asked Eline. ‘What about me?’

  ‘Do you really think you’re up to this?’ Rachel asked, and laid her hand on the nearest box. ‘The details? The photos?’

  ‘My dear,’ said Eline with heavy scorn. ‘I’ve seen and done far worse things than were done to me. I know who I am. Nothing in any of these boxes is going to change that.’ She pulled two boxes towards her. ‘Come on.’

  ‘And have we got any more of a clue about exactly what we’re looking for?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Anything that mentions Bill Heath,’ said Eline.

  ‘Anything we might be able to use against what’s after Eline,’ Rachel added. ‘I don’t know what it would be. Something small, something that hasn’t made it into the stories online. Maybe someone named here is still alive – a witness, a reporter, a policeman. I don’t know.’

  They were able to disregard three of the boxes straight away; they contained large ring-binders of photocopies of original documents from the other boxes, as well as a load more stuck to large pieces of backing board as part of some kind of old display. The other three had original material, but in bewildering array. There were dossiers on each of the many possible victims, sheaves of yellowing press cuttings, maps and charts of the Lickey Hills, manila folders for suspects and witnesses, receipts, references, telephone memoranda, typewritten versions of illegible handwritten notes, and multiple carbon copies of everything. It appeared that every single scrap of paper pertaining to the Oak Mary investigation had been collected from every police station that had ever been involved with it – no matter how tangentially – and bundled into these boxes without any regard for how many of them were duplicates or irrelevant to the case.

  ‘God,’ said Rachel, surveying the expanse of it spread out over their worktable. ‘This is going to take days.’

  Tom soon found the photographs. They were in a wide brown cardboard envelope sandwiched between the script for a local opera production of an Oak Mary musical and a lurid fifties true crime article featuring two soldiers goggling with horror at a skull, which leered at them from out of a hollow tree.

  Rachel looked at Eline, concerned. ‘Are you okay with this?’

  ‘Do not treat me like a child,’ Eline snapped. ‘I have seen many dead bodies.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Tom, ‘but your own?’

  He began laying out the photographs. They were old-fashioned and heavy, glossy and curled at the edges. There was only a handful of distinctly separate images: three of the tree, a pair of shoes, some heavily soiled clothes, a dental x-ray, a disarticulated skeleton laid out with the toe bones in a neat line along the bottom, and three close-up angles of a skull. It lay on a policeman’s gloved hand as if being offered as a gift, and was devoid of flesh except for a knotted clump of hair still attached to the right temple. Rachel watched Eline looking at it, and saw her hand creep unconsciously up to stroke her own hair on that side of her head. Like all the other documents there were multiple copies collected from different police forces – prints and reprints – and Tom laid t
hem out side by side, forming a collage on the table of Oak Mary’s remains repeated over and over again.

  ‘Christ that’s grim,’ Rachel murmured.

  The smell of all those old photographs – the sweet-dry chemical tang of their emulsion and the dusty funkiness of the thick paper – reminded her of a time in her great-grandmother Gigi’s house in Kings Norton. Rachel had been eleven, a year before her father’s death and another five before the family was able to convince Gigi that only a nursing home could cope with her worsening dementia. Rachel had found a spare bedroom that she hadn’t been in before, and in there a tall mahogany wardrobe, and in that a battered old suitcase covered in stickers, and inside that a shoebox labelled STEPHEN.

  Granddad Stephen, he’d have been called, to go with Grannie Alice, if he’d lived long enough to be called anything by his granddaughter Rachel. Her daddy’s daddy. Gigi’s son. For an eleven-year-old the gulf of time between generations was almost impossible to conceptualise; you were either a child, a mummy, a daddy, or Old. The fact that there might be different degrees of Old was problematic because it forced you to think of someone who was Old as having once been a child, and it was impossible to see either Gigi or Grannie Alice in such a way. She knew they were mother and daughter, but not like Rachel and her own mummy, surely? Not really. She couldn’t imagine Gigi brushing Grannie Alice’s teeth and putting her to bed with a story.

  So even though the box said STEPHEN, it was hard to imagine the name belonging to a child. Nevertheless, inside the box that was exactly what she found: piles of photographs of, mostly, a young boy. Her granddad. At school they were doing a project on My Family Tree and she’d been pestering her mum for old photographs. Gigi was always giving her little gifts of old coins, stamps, and buttons; there couldn’t possibly be any harm in her borrowing one of Granddad Stephen’s baby photos, could there? She’d only be borrowing it, anyway. She’d bring it right back when she was finished with her project.

  She chose a photo of Stephen as a newborn, wrapped in a tartan blanket, his eyes tight shut. On the back of the photograph was a stencil of the photographer’s address:

  Harold K Jones

  Commercial Photographer

  873 Oldham Road, Manchester

  Scribbled underneath it in pencil – smudged but just legible – were the words:

  Born Wythenshawe General Hospital 9/12/42

  It was only a little detail and in the ordinary course of events one which she would have forgotten, but it was branded on her memory because when she finished her project and showed it to her mum she got one of the most frightening tellingsoff in her life. It wasn’t that her mum was angry – quite the opposite. She seemed cold and absolutely matter-of-fact when she told Rachel she was wrong, that Granddad Stephen hadn’t been born in Manchester. But it was there, Rachel had said, on the back of the photo. She didn’t understand why her mother was making such a fuss. No, her mother said, and her face closed like a door. That was the thing that frightened Rachel the most: that terrible blankness.

  Your father’s family is from Birmingham, Rachel was told. They have been for generations. There are no relatives in Manchester and never have been. Nobody has ever been born anywhere else. It was the sheer blatant ugliness of the lie that had made its impression on her, the utter incomprehensibility of it. Why would her mother lie about such a trivial matter?

  And why should that incident step into the footlights of her memory just now?

  After staring at the photographs for a while, Eline shook herself as if coming out of a trance and took a deep breath. ‘Let’s get on, shall we?’ she said, and resumed examining packets with brisk determination.

  Rachel looked at Tom and raised an eyebrow in a silent question. He shrugged.

  Half an hour later Rachel found something in a dogeared police witness dossier that made her sit bolt upright as if stung. ‘You mentioned Bill Heath?’ she said to Eline.

  Eline looked up. ‘Yes?’ she replied avidly.

  ‘Found a file for a Lorna Heath,’ Rachel said and tossed it over. ‘It seems that Bill was never questioned during the original investigation, but his wife went to the police after he died with a very interesting story.’

  Eline opened the folder and read the faded transcript of a letter written in 1957 – over a decade after the investigation had stalled.

  Dear sirs,

  You will wonder why I have chosen to wait this long to tell what I know, and to that I say that for all his faults Bill was still my husband despite everything. I cannot say that he was even an especially good man, he had fingers like a sieve when it came to money and couldn’t hold a decent job down for more than two weeks straight. He had his moods, but then don’t we all. Somehow he always managed to look sharp and was very generous with his gifts when he was flush. It was when he fell in with that Dutchman Van Alst that things turned bad. Van Alst would turn up at all hours of the night (and it was always night), in his shiny Rover, and off Bill would go with him, sometimes for days on end. Sometimes there would be a woman with them, and I asked Bill straight about that but he said that she was the Dutchman’s piece and nothing to do with him, that he had always been faithful only to me, and I believed him.

  Eline broke off. ‘“Piece”,’ she laughed, her lip curling in scorn. ‘Il est bien culoté!’

  Bill stopped pretending to be doing honest work but he had more money than ever before. But then one night he came back on his own, with his flash suit all covered in mud and leaves and he was shaking like a leaf too – pale and staring, wouldn’t say what it was that had scared him so badly. All he would say was that he wanted ‘no more to do with the Dutchman or his piece of skirt’. Neither of them came calling again.

  There was only one time I ever got anything more out of Bill about what happened that night. He was having nightmares – he’d never been that settled a sleeper at the best of times but these were full screaming night terrors – and after one particular bad one I found him sitting at our kitchen table and he stared at me with a face that looked like he was coming down with a fever. I don’t think he was properly seeing me, though. I don’t think he was even awake.

  He said, ‘I keep seeing her! In the tree! I keep seeing her eyes! Her eyes were open!’ I was too shaken up to ask him what he meant by that, and he took himself back off to bed after that and slept like the dead for the rest of the night.

  The next morning he denied he’d said anything of the sort, and I think maybe he really didn’t remember saying anything because he definitely hadn’t been all there. Three weeks later he was shouting and raving so much that they took him away to Scoles Farm Asylum in Rubery. Two days ago the asylum wrote to tell me that he’d died of apoplexy and I thought well finally I can tell someone what I know. I saw all the news reports and the appeals for information at the time and no doubt you’ll say I’ve been obstructing the course of justice for not having said anything before now, and yes I pity the poor girl for what she went through, but I pity Bill too. For good or ill he was my husband. So you can stop your searching for that poor girl’s killer, because the only ones who know what happened are all in the ground, where I hope you will let them rest.

  Yours respectfully,

  Lorna Heath

  Eline tossed the letter back on the pile. ‘I was never anybody’s piece. Not Van Alst’s, not Scheller’s, and especially not old Brass-Eye Collins, who thought he owned my soul. I would dearly love to know if any of those old men are still alive. Imagine the look on their faces seeing me walking up to them.’ Her sudden laugh rang clear across the open-plan space, and heads turned to show disapproving frowns.

  ‘Shh!’ said Rachel. ‘People are staring.’

  Eline flapped a dismissive hand. ‘Let them stare.’

  That was when all the fire alarms went off.

  28

  FIRE

  TO A LIBRARY, FIRE IS THE WORST OF ALL THREATS and so the Hive wasn’t taking any chances. The alarm was a great, raw, braying sound, which
filled the space like tear gas, and left no room for people to so much as ask each other what was happening, let alone carry on anything resembling a conversation. All that Rachel, Eline and Tom could do was collect their belongings and join the crowd of people who were being marshalled down the main staircase by library staff and out through the main doors into the wide paved space outside. They moved as far back as they could and scanned the roofline of the building anxiously, looking for smoke.

  ‘Is it a drill, do you think?’ asked Tom.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Rachel. ‘Did you see the way the staff were all rushing around? I don’t think they knew it was going to happen.’

  Eline was lighting a cigarette, unconcerned with the irony of her action. ‘Probably some little horror of a child,’ she puffed. ‘Did it on a dare.’

  * * *

  Inside, the Small Man sauntered up the main staircase, hands in his pockets. The noise didn’t bother him, nor did the librarians and security guards who scurried past him, up and down, oblivious to his existence. He was still high on the buzz generated by the obelisk sacrifice. The newspapers had picked up on the Oak Mary story, obviously, but he hadn’t anticipated how much power there was in this new Internet and its social media for spreading a simple narrative and strengthening it into something approaching myth. A person could make anything true: invent massacres, deny moon-landings, present the most obvious of lies as ‘alternative facts’. Why, with judicious manipulation of people’s basic fears, and a smidgen of luck, a small man could set himself up as King of the World.

  It was all so very short-lived, though. He knew that in a few days, at most, the butterfly attention of the world would move on. It was like a sugar rush, this boost, but it was enough that he could make himself unseen for a while and take advantage of the distraction he had caused.

  He made his way to the first floor and the reading table at which Mary and her protectors had been working, and surveyed the documents spread out there.