The Jack in the Green

by Lee, Frazer

  Then his world tilted and spun. He felt hands gripping his wrists and his ankles as a familiar voice murmured something beyond the fog of his consciousness. He blacked out again as the hands held him aloft and carried him away.

  Jupiter was still clutching a fragment of the shrub in his hand, like a totem, when he awoke. His eyes opened less painfully this time and the vibration all around him told him he was safe and sound inside the camper.

  Stretching his arms and legs out as much as he dared in light of his injuries, Jupiter glanced around the van, getting his bearings. Dim, gray morning light seeped through the side windows, which were covered in a film of dancing sleet. Beneath the frosty display sat Charlotte, nursing a steaming mug of tea, her tousled red hair going off like a firework atop her head.

  “He’s awake.”

  Jupiter looked toward the front of the vehicle and saw Kegger glance over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. He looked vaguely glad that Jupiter was still alive, if such empathy was possible in the empty void between the large man’s ears.

  Denny and Amber peeked out at him from the confines of their sleeping bag. They couldn’t have looked less interested in Jupiter’s wellbeing if they had tried, he noticed with bitterness. He made a mental note to drop the fuckers at the next service station—for real this time.

  Charlotte took a sip of her drink and then crawled over to Jupiter, taking care not to spill a drop as the van rocked her slightly. She offered him the cup and he took it, grateful for its warmth in the palms of his hands. He lifted it to his broken lips gingerly and as he did so his damaged arms, the first still hurting from the protest and the other from the attack, twinged with pain. He gritted his teeth, not wishing to appear weak in front of Charlotte, and inhaled the deep aroma of fennel—Charlotte’s favorite brew.

  “Drink some, you’ll feel better.”

  Her voice was as soothing as the scent of the herbal tea.

  Jupiter took a sip and winced at the sudden sting of warm cup against the tender flesh of his mouth but drank on, feeling as brave as a wounded soldier on his way home for leave.

  “Thanks,” he whispered.

  He returned the cup to Charlotte as she sat down close beside him.

  “Bill’s lot did this, I suppose? Couldn’t get much sense out of you when we picked you up—other than that you didn’t want an ambulance.”

  “They did.”

  “Why?”

  “Why does Bill do anything?” Jupiter fixed her with a pained look. “Is it bad? My face?”

  “You look as pretty as a picture,” she replied as she fished in her little shoulder bag for something, “A picture by Francis Bacon,” she added.

  Charlotte located the thing she’d been looking for; a compact makeup mirror. She pressed it into his hand.

  “Careful, it’s an 18-certificate, your face,” she warned, apparently only half-joking.

  “Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ,” Jupiter said under his breath.

  The face looking back at him from the little circle of glass in the compact was barely recognizable as his own. His bottom lip was three times its natural size, the skin broken in three places where the flesh had been slammed against his teeth. His right eyebrow was swollen and bruised, crowned with a glistening red semi-circle of a cut. The hair above his ear was matted with dried blood where they had kicked him. Worst of all, his right eye was bloodshot, giving it the appearance of a crimson pool ball where the blood vessels had burst around the iris.

  He reached for the tea again and Charlotte handed it over, gesturing for him to finish the cup. A shiver passed through his body as he clung to the cup for dear life. Seeing his injuries had reactivated his nerve centers and he was beginning to feel their pain anew. He pressed his back against the vibrating metal body of the camper van. A wave of nausea hit him and it was all he could do to keep the contents of his stomach down. He must have turned deathly pale, because he became aware that Charlotte was inching away from him. She looked at him with the concerned disdain of a child minder tasked with looking after a projectile-vomiting toddler.

  The nausea subsided and Jupiter, cold sweat clammy on his forehead, sipped more tea in the hope it would settle his churning stomach. He forced a smile, which from the look on Charlotte’s face had only made him look more dreadful than ever.

  “What time is it?”

  “Coming on for ten o’clock. You’ve been under all night. We thought you’d gone with them at first, but then Kegger spotted you when he went back for Hot Wings.”

  “So I owe my life to Kegger’s insatiable need for junk food? I’d kiss him if he didn’t stink so bad,” Jupiter snarled. “Where the hell are we?”

  “On the road to Islay.”

  “Islay? What the fuck’s in Islay?”

  Coughing emanated from the sleeping bag at the front of the vehicle. A cloud of reefer smoke surrounded the bag’s occupants like a cloud.

  “Distillery tour, bruv,” Denny said, mid-toke. “Bit of culture on our travels.”

  “Distillery? What the hell are you on about?”

  Jupiter winced again as the fresh scab on his lip started to separate, causing the wound beneath to bleed afresh.

  “He’s joking,” Charlotte said, putting Jupiter out of his misery. “Islay’s the next meeting place. We got word at the services that there’s going to be a protest against the Forestry Bill.”

  “That bill didn’t make it through Parliament,” Jupiter said.

  “A lot can happen while you are unconscious. Story broke while you were…incapacitated. Some bloke from the Forestry Commission was on the radio earlier. He sounded gutted, saying they’d all lose their jobs and the forests will go to the highest bidder, to be privately run…”

  “You’re shitting me. It went through while I was sleeping? But the House of Lords blocked the bill. How on earth could it have gone through?”

  “The Lords voted against the previous bill, true. But the fuckers tweaked it on the back of some private sector kick-start scheme and got a marginal in the House of Commons. God knows who they bought and sold this time.”

  “Bloody hell, it’s like the Land Bill all over again.”

  Jupiter stroked his jaw.

  “You feel up to it? The protest I mean?” Charlotte asked. “We didn’t know whether to go for it or not with you in such a state. I thought you’d probably want us to. So, anyway, we put it to a vote.”

  “You did good. We made our feelings clear about that new runway; we’ll do the same with the forests. Fuckers can’t just pass a law in Whitehall and expect us to stand by while they chop all the trees down in Scotland. Fuck’s sake…”

  He paused for breath, lowered his voice, leaning in close so only Charlotte could hear him.

  “Mama Cath’s lot know about this?”

  “Don’t know. They left the services in that bus of theirs before the news broke.”

  “They must know about it. If it’s been on the radio, it must have hit the freak network by now.”

  “Why’d they give you such a kicking anyway? What did you say to them?”

  “Not so much what I said, more what I heard.”

  Charlotte looked puzzled. “Go on.”

  “Let’s just say I learned a couple of things last night.”

  “What things?”

  “Stuff Bill would rather nobody knew about, or Mama Cath for that matter. Let’s just say there’s a hierarchy to our little protest movement, a hitherto unknown fiscal dimension to proceedings…”

  “What are you going on about?”

  “Bill and his gang are on some kind of payroll. I heard Mama Cath talking about it on the bus before I got whacked. Couldn’t hear all the details, but I got the message all right. Someone is paying Bill and his boys to whip things up at protests.”

  “That can’t be true. It would go against everything Mama Cath stands for.”

  “That’s what I thought too.”

  He locked eyes with Charlotte.

  “But
if it isn’t true, then why did Bill and his boys see fit to knock seven shades of shit out of me?”

  Charlotte bit her lip.

  “It was a warning,” Jupiter continued. “They know I’m on to something.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We get to the protest site, lay low, find out what Bill is up to…”

  “And then?”

  “Then we fuck the bastard over good and proper.”

  They were so close now that Jupiter could feel Charlotte’s breath on his face. He chanced a hand on Charlotte’s thigh. She didn’t ask him to remove it. He kissed her as hard and as deeply as his injuries would allow him to, then sat back and swigged the last of the fennel tea. He felt a little better now he had some fire in his belly and the fennel taste of Charlotte on his lips.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The drive to Lithgoe’s place was tense to say the least. Dieter coughed and turned the in-car heating up a notch. He had not looked his best at breakfast, complaining of interrupted sleep caused by a lumpy mattress and rattling windows. The landlord’s offer of a different room had apparently sated Dieter—that was, until he discovered the replacement’s bathroom had not been cleaned and went on the rampage again. Tom knew the source of Dieter’s angst was Lithgoe’s dinnertime ruse; pretending to be a regular customer so he could get a look-see at the fish-out-of-water Yanks. Dieter was a sore loser and had let Lithgoe get to him, but Tom found the whole charade mildly amusing. What better way to get to know a potential client than by spying on him? The entire business was, in Tom’s book, no different than Googling someone before a meeting to get the skinny on their personality and activities.

  Dieter yawned, blinked his eyes and rubbed a hand across his face. The car’s heating was making him drowsy.

  Tom watched as the big man turned the heat down a notch, then opened the driver window a crack to let some fresh Highland air in. Tom did the same, glad of the fresh air in the stifling closeness of the car. Like Dieter’s, his eyelids were heavy. He could count the number of good nights’ sleep he’d had in the past year on his right hand and still have a couple of digits left. Yet he could not blame the dilapidated hotel room at The Firs for his poor sleep. After his sighting of the mystery man in the trees—an event Tom had tried to dismiss as hallucination caused by jet lag, and long hours on the road—he had fallen prey to the same screaming nightmare that woke him most nights. He had dreamed himself back into that room filled with crimson atrocities. Again, like his nightmare during the flight, those cold hands had pulled him up and out through the chimney into the freezing shock of night before depositing him onto the forest floor in a mess of blood and leaves. He had then dreamed that his body was sinking into the roots of the trees that were closing in all around him, trying to scream as damp earth filled his airways. He had woken up several times during the night, each time clutching on to his chest with fright, and each time blinking away his night terrors and wishing it was morning.

  Now that blessed morning had come, Tom gazed out of the passenger window at the awesome landscape. Every twist and turn in the road revealed new, weather-beaten wonders. When they had set off, thick frost still covered the mountainsides and fields like a silver blanket. Now that the sun was rising, an autumnal yellow, Tom could see the frost cover receding in places, gradually giving dominion to daylight. But the days were short and even in the comfortable microclimate of the air-conditioned rental car Tom could feel the cold in the air just by looking at the landscape.

  Following Holly’s directions, which she had kindly jotted down on a sheet of paper for them, Dieter took a sharp bend at the end of the high mountain road. The turn took them down a steep, winding road and deep into the lush, green wilderness of a valley. The land was so wild that Tom had difficulty imagining anyone living out there. But as they descended the winding track to the valley floor, the vista outside the windscreen opened up and Tom could see why an elderly gentleman like Lithgoe might make his home there.

  The view was breathtaking, rolling fields either side peppered with foaming brooks; tributaries fed by melting ice atop the tallest peaks. Here the road became more of a narrow track that slalomed along the valley floor, twisting this way and that with the natural undulation of the landscape and its little rivers and tributaries. Rickety wooden bridges, silver green with age, created passing points at the widest sections of river. Tom marveled at how much the banks had eroded in places, presumably when the brook waters had swelled during heavy rainfall and burst them. Craggy rocks became a more regular feature of the landscape as they pushed on, some as big as demolition balls. The narrow track led them upwards again, as a high as a hill, and as they cleared its brow Tom saw the waters of a loch, as smooth and still as glass.

  Overlooking it was a stone house, gray and impressive amidst the green. They drew nearer and Tom could see the vast slated roof, beneath which rows of leaded windows looked out across the flood land. There were enough windows for the place to have at least a dozen bedrooms, and the huge chimneystacks at either end of the structure spouted white plumes of smoke that drifted across the loch like mist. Dieter steered the rental car through the high gates, hewn from the same rock that had been used to construct the house.

  Both gateposts were crowned with an elegantly sculpted bronze of a stag, complete with proud antlers. Dieter drove between them and brought the car close to impressive stone steps that led to the huge black-painted doors of the main entrance. Tom peered out of his passenger window at the broody sky reflected in those many dark windows, each one a weather eye, gazing out across the craggy landscape to the loch. This close, the house was a behemoth, looming over their little car and casting its shadow far and wide. If it wasn’t so damned beautiful, Tom would have thought it haunted.

  He and Dieter stepped out of the car, both stretching out their limbs and muscles after another long drive. The air was chill, with a biting crosswind that rose up off the surface of the loch and made light work of the businessmen’s overcoats. It seemed to Tom that wherever he and his driver might go on their business trip, thick woolens might make be a more appropriate dress code than suits.

  They climbed the steps and Tom knocked at the door using the huge brass knocker that had been cast in the shape of a lion’s head, complete with mane rendered like a fiery sun. The sound of his knocks boomed like cannon fire on the other side of the door. Whatever room lay beyond the threshold must be vast to create an echo of that magnitude. The door soon opened with a click and a creak, and Tom and Dieter were face-to-face once again with Lithgoe’s elderly female chaperone from the restaurant at The Firs the night before. She peered out at them through the gap in the door, looking them up and down before addressing Tom.

  “You may come in,” she said in that peculiar brogue of hers.

  Tom and Dieter both took a step forward, eager to be out of the chill wind.

  “But you must stay out here,” she finished, looking directly at Dieter.

  His face fell, and he struggled to find a retort.

  Before he could find one, the old lady spoke again.

  “Mr. Lithgoe was clear that he would only grant audience for Mr. McCrae here. You may wait in your automobile. I’ll send out a cup of tea.”

  “And something to eat?”

  Dieter sounded hopeful, like a Dickensian schoolboy asking for more.

  The woman made no attempt to disguise the frown etching itself across her wrinkly forehead. She had evidently frowned a lot during her long lifetime.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  With that, she ushered Tom inside and slammed the door shut behind him, leaving Dieter to walk the long walk back to the car on his lonesome.

  The entrance hall was as vast as the echo from the door knocker had suggested, and then some. Each wall was festooned with flags from all over the British Isles and beyond; dusty treasures from a bygone age and a forgotten empire. The Lithgoe family had traveled, that much was certain, and had no shame about announcing the fac
t with trinkets and baubles collected or conquered during their tenure as lairds of the land.

  Tom walked the hall with his mouth wide open in wonder at the stuffed animal heads lining the walls, some of which included beasts it was no longer legal to hunt, let alone kill, then stuff and mount for decoration. He could barely take in the number of paintings the walls boasted, framed beautifully amidst ornate tapestries and yet more flags. Several times, he felt the urge to take a closer look, but the old woman marched so quickly through the hall he had to quicken his pace to keep up. Whatever was in the fresh air in this part of Scotland, it had put a spring in the old dear’s stride. Tom hoped he would be left to see himself out, giving him time to marvel at more of the treasures on display in the entrance-cum-gallery.

  He turned a corner, following his guide’s quickstep through a side doorway and into a smaller room, paneled with oak. The room was deathly quiet, and lit only by the scant light from a single window and a table lamp with thick tortoiseshell lampshade. It was a dark room—masculine, claustrophobic and clearly intended to put a visitor in his place before being granted an audience with the laird of the manor.

  “Wait here, Mr. McCrae. And make yourself comfortable, our Mr. Lithgoe winds his own clock.”

  Tom waited in the antechamber and waited for Lithgoe to arrive, as the old lady had instructed. He was still chuckling to himself about Dieter, marooned in the car outside while he trod the hallowed halls of Scottish gentry. He found it difficult to make himself comfortable though; both armchairs in the antechamber were as hard as the rough boulders outside, and low enough to accommodate a child. He chose to stand instead, pacing the last of the car travel-induced stiffness from his legs.

  Several minutes passed with no sign of his host. Tom was tempted to leave the antechamber to go explore the hallway and its wonders when he heard the slow tread of footsteps approaching from down the hall. Tom froze, for reasons unknown to him, and positioned himself by the window with his back to the door, to make it look like he was taking an interest in the gathering gloom outside.