by Lee, Frazer
Jupiter strafed around the corner, heading for the back door, and trod on what felt like a bendy section of branch. He heard a loud snapping sound, then felt a warm, numb sensation at his ankle.
Looking down, he saw his leg in the jaws of a metal trap that was big enough to ensnare a bear. The trap’s rusty metal teeth had penetrated his flesh, chomping right down to the marrow of his ankle bone. Blood gushed from the gaping wound and a rising scream filled his throat.
Someone appeared at his shoulder and knocked him unconscious before he could utter a sound. Falling, Jupiter was scooped up onto the shoulder of his assailant before he hit the ground.
The bear trap dangled from his ruined leg, heavy as a ball and chain, as the man carried Jupiter inside.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Tom cursed, hearing the computerized voicemail prompt once again, and slammed the receiver of his ancient hotel telephone onto its cradle so hard, the thing nearly flew off the nightstand. After showering away the blood, muck and sex of his adventures in the forest, he’d climbed into a clean set of clothes and phoned home.
Dialing his landline number using the old-fashioned dial on The Firs’ prewar telephone had proven a chore, and for each of his three attempts the call had gone straight to voicemail. It was usually set for call monitoring, so it would at least ring a few times so Tom could check the caller ID before deciding to pick up or not.
I bet Ellie reset it, that interfering bitch, thought Tom, she doesn’t want me speaking to my own goddamn wife.
Sighing, he picked up the receiver and dialed again. If Julia’s sister didn’t want him calling, he would at least make known his attempt to do so by leaving a message. He felt nervous and a little awkward as he listened to the automated message prompting him to “Please leave a message after the tone”. What would he say, how should he say it? No time to think as the machine beeped in his ear.
“Oh, um, hi, baby, I just wanted to um, check in with you and ask how you are. I’m still in, um, Scotland…obviously. I, uh, lost my cell, so if you want to talk… I’ll just get the number…”
He pulled open the draw beneath the nightstand, looking for the faded one-sheet brochure he remembered seeing in there when he first checked in. The drawer was empty.
“Wait a minute.”
Tom placed the receiver on the nightstand and crossed to the desk in the corner of the room. His laptop was in sleep mode; little light flashing beneath the catch on the lid. He popped the catch and muttered words of encouragement as the device lumbered back into life. Clicking on his Douglass desktop file, he then opened the folder marked Travel and Accommodations and found the number.
“You still there?” he asked, absentmindedly forgetting he was talking to a machine. “Oh, of course not. Anyways, the number here is plus four-four as it’s in the U.K. obviously…”
He was halfway through reciting the remainder of the numbers when the answer machine beeped shrilly in his ear; his time was up. Swearing under his breath, he clicked the phone off with his index finger, and was about to try calling a fifth time when there came a knock at the door.
“Who is it?” Tom hoped his tone would make it clear to whoever was knocking that he really wasn’t in the mood for visitors—especially if they were called Dieter.
But the voice that answered him belonged to Holly.
“Mr. McCrae,” she said, back to formalities, “the police are here. They’d like a word. Will I tell them you’ll come down?”
“Sure,” he answered. Then, after he heard her walking away; “Shit.”
Tom tried to conceal his surprise upon seeing the same rotund police officer that had interviewed him at the airport, awaiting him in the lounge bar. Officer Travis was accompanied by a pencil-thin colleague, who was in the process of commandeering refreshments from old Mr. MacGregor at the bar. Holly was close by, wiping tables. The portly officer invited Tom to take a seat opposite him and waited for his junior to bring over a pint glass filled to the brim with cola and ice. Tom was used to seeing giant sodas in the malls and drive-thrus back home, but never before in a pint glass, in a pub. He tried not to stare as the fat man lifted the glass to his lips, soda bubbles dancing and popping beneath his stubby red nose.
“Second time this week, Mr.…” The cop checked his notebook. “McCrae. Seems wherever there’s trouble, you’re not far away.”
The skinny cop smirked, and Tom took an instant dislike to him. Tom hoped the interview would be over quickly; he longed for the quiet anonymity of his room.
“It’s been an eventful couple days,” Tom replied. “Of,” the cop corrected.“ Couple of days, we say around here. But you’re not from round here are you, sir, as I believe we ascertained in our last little chat at the airport?
“What exactly can I help you with, officer? I’m a little busy—I have a conference call scheduled.”
“Conference call, eh? With whom?”
“With my employer back home.”
“Oh, then we mustn’t keep you, must we, Iver? Sounds important.”
The skinny man, Iver, smirked again, his face taking on the aspect of a toothless old man’s while working on a boiled sweet.
“Looks like you’ve been in the wars a bit,” Travis indicated the network of scratches on Tom’s skin. “Get those injuries in the fray, did we?”
“Actually, no. I was on a recce up at the Greyson’s farm when I,” Tom fidgeted with embarrassment, “well, I had a fall, got into a bit of a scrape with some Christmas trees.”
“I see,” Travis mused, looking suspicious and gesturing to Iver to take some notes in his little pad. “And when you got back from the farm, that’s when you encountered your little band of enemies, was it?”
“The landlord’s…wife was kind enough to give me a ride back here.” Tom glanced awkwardly at Holly, who was stocking shelves with alcopop bottles and clean glasses. We heard a commotion and headed into the bar right away.”
“And found your coworker beating up some locals?”
“Oh no, that wasn’t it at all.”
“But blows were exchanged.”
“They were, but Dieter was hopelessly outnumbered. Anything he did was purely in self-defense. Holly will back me up on that, I’m sure.”
Tom hated to drag Holly into this, but it seemed Inspector Travis had taken a dislike to him and he needed all the help he could get. Glancing over at the bar again, he saw Holly disappear into the shadows of the public bar on the other side; a less than encouraging display of solidarity.
“Are you? Make a note of that, Iver; seems Mr. McCrae’s story might require corroborating via our star witness.”
Travis took a long gulp from his cola and belched, wiping his fat lips with the back of his hand.
“And about the other matter—the brakes on our car?” Tom ventured.
“Your man, Dieter—he phoned it in earlier. We were already on our way over here when we got the second call from Mr. MacGregor about the outbreak of violence.”
“It took a long time for you guys to get here, if you don’t mind me saying so?”
“Not at all,” Travis replied, though his eyes told a different story. “Lot of local stations are all closed down, government cutbacks, you see. As a result, we are the nearest constabulary serving the Douglass area. Not much we can do about it, I’m afraid.”
“But by the time you got here, the protesters were gone.”
“Aye, we’ve got officers on the lookout for them—a double-decker bus is a pretty difficult thing to conceal…”
“So, our problem with the brakes, and this latest attack, you will look into them in case they are connected?”
“If that’s an appropriate course of action, Mr. McCrae, we will indeed follow it.”
Tom took a deep breath. Appropriate? Of course it was appropriate.
“Now, if you don’t mind answering a couple of my questions,” the fat man said.
“Of course.” Tom eyed the carriage clock on the mantelpiece of the
lounge bar.
“What exactly brings you to Douglass?”
“Business. As I told you back at the airport, I represent a company interested in developing a biofuels business here.”
“That you did. And you suspect these environmental protesters are wise to your company’s plans, is that it?”
“Seems logical, such groups have been known to get a little heavy handed in their approach.”
“And you really think they’d go to the lengths of sabotaging your hire car in order to…save some trees?”
“People have the strangest beliefs.” Tom thought again of the Jack Tree and the Jill Tree, and what Holly had said in passing, “May my offering be made of flesh and blood, of hearth and home…”
“Well, before we get too carried away with our conspiracy theories, I’d like to speak with your partner. I understand he’d had a fair bit to drink before it kicked off in here?”
The question was not for Tom, but more directed at MacGregor, who was maintaining a broody silence so thick you could have walked across it like a carpet. MacGregor grunted and turned his attention back to the tabloid newspaper he was pretending to read.
“It was his afternoon off,” Tom ventured.
“You’ve made it perfectly clear you’d like to cover for your workmate,” Travis said. “Admirable, in its way, I mean, I doubt I’d get anywhere near the same level of loyalty from the likes of Iver here. But if you could just let us question the man, that’d be very helpful.”
The look on Travis’s face was the opposite of the warmth of his words.
“I’ll go get him,” Tom offered. He was already poised to get up and leave the bar, eager to get away from the cops’ vaguely sinister Laurel and Hardy double act.
“You do that, Mr. McCrae. And, Iver, another Coke if you’d be so kind. A half this time, or I’ll be dying for a pish all the way back to the station.”
As the skinny copper did his master’s bidding, Tom slipped out of the bar and climbed the stairs to the guest rooms, the floorboards creaking with his footfalls as he went. He approached Dieter’s door and knocked. Hearing no response, Tom put his ear to the door. Silence. He tried the handle, and the door opened. Dieter’s suitcase lay open on the bed, half-packed, with clothes and other personal belongings scattered around it on the blanket.
“Dieter?” Tom called out, making his way across the room and to the en suite bathroom. The bathroom door was ajar, and it creaked even louder than the stairs as he pushed it open.
Dieter was nowhere to be found.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tom, Travis and Iver looked for Dieter everywhere, even venturing into the trees that bordered the parking lot to see if he’d maybe gone to walk off the booze and fallen asleep on a log somewhere. The glum cops also accompanied Tom to the local post office and general store to see if Dieter had popped in for a Snickers due to a case of drinker’s munchies. The storekeeper, a stoic old lady named Mrs. Gillespie said she, “Hadnae seen hide nor hair of him”. In fact no one that they asked in the village had seen him, he had simply vanished.
Iver suggested that the big man had staggered off drunk somewhere and passed out, joking that Dieter was behaving like more of a local than he might think. Brawling in the local pub then passing out in the woods were both traditional pursuits of Douglass loggers since time immemorial. Travis then reminded Iver to let him do the detective work, and Iver fell silent for the remainder of their search.
Tom reiterated that his company might want to file charges against the protestors and Officer Travis promised Tom to keep his concern about the severed brake cables on file. But he added that until they interviewed Dieter, they could not justify making any accusations against the protesters. Tom invited the police officers up to Greyson’s farm so they could see the damage done to the car for themselves, but they fobbed him off with an “all in due course”. Meantime, Tom was instructed to remain available for comment at The Firs. The revelation that he had also lost his mobile phone in the woods seemed to give Travis cause to eye him suspiciously one last time, before the rotund cop and his skinny sidekick finally left Douglass in a little hatchback police car that looked as though it had been culled from an Enid Blyton illustration.
With the policemen gone, Tom did one last circuit of the village, feeling incongruous with his scratched face and hands. At each house or cottage he passed, curtains twitched, their occupants peering out at him through surveillance slits in the gingham or lace; that feeling of being watched again. Let them look, thought Tom, maybe then they’ll be on the lookout for Dieter. He wandered up past the houses to the oldest edge of the village, where the tumbledown ruins of what must have been the very first dwellings stood crumbling in the fields.
He stopped beneath a tall, wooden telegraph pole; an imposter standing among so many trees. A chill wind rose up and enveloped him, and he shivered. He remained where he was, rooted to the spot, breathing the cool, clean air. Douglass was a beautiful place, so quiet and still. In his mind’s eye, a picture formed of Consortium bulldozers and mega-ton trucks roaring up and down the track where he was standing; massive worker drones helping to forge Douglass’s new purpose as a center for biofuels. He felt a pang of guilt, feeling all of a sudden like he was the harbinger of such irrevocable change by the very act of being there, scoping out the risks and contractual complications for The Consortium Inc. At the spot where the fields met the village, he was between two seasons, and two worlds; autumn and the old, and winter and the new. He took a couple more breaths of that sweet, fresh air and headed back toward the pub, craving the warmth of the fireside.
The whisky proved just as warming as the fire, and Tom was on his third glass. He’d started off with a fifteen-year-old single malt that smelled of the forest floor and tasted like fire, before moving on to a mellow little number that was distilled, Holly told him, using local honey. This was by far his favorite; the first had warmed him up like a sweater taken straight from the radiator, but the second, the Dalwhinnie, had a more subtle, lasting warmth that grew in tingles from beneath the skin. Holly added a dash of soda water and slid the glass across the bar into his eager hand.
Tom was surprised when Holly had offered water with his whisky. He’d long thought it was sacrilege to do so, especially in the country from where the stuff originated. She’d smiled, rolled her eyes and pointed out that if Tom went on a distillery tour, to any in the area, he’d be advised that whisky is already watered down to some extent during its creation. As they talked, Tom felt some of the tension from earlier dissipate between them, evaporated by the warm glow of the liquor. He was on his side of the bar, and she hers; they had reverted back to their roles of client and host, despite their fierce intimacy just a few hours earlier. Holly was easy company for sure, and Tom felt natural around her, like he could unwind. She’d made small talk about where he came from, his job, and had quizzed him on what a risk assessor who dealt with contractuals actually did. Whether or not she was genuinely interested, or merely fulfilling her part of the service industry bargain, was by the by to Tom. The ego-indulgence of talking about himself, his work, with this beautiful young woman was undeniably enjoyable. Holly’s eyes twinkled as she asked what kind of risk assessment he would make of her. He chuckled, and almost toppled on his barstool. Leaning against the bar, feeling a little woozy, Tom asked if she could maybe add a dash more water to his drink. He had both answered and side-stepped her question in one.
“You’ve a way with people, Mr. McCrae,” she said as she topped up his drink.
“I do?”
“I suppose that’s why you’re a successful businessman, your ability to lead a conversation?” She smiled at his puzzled look. “Must be a useful skill in meetings? I wonder who the real Tom McCrae is, though? I think I glimpsed part of him in the woods, beneath the Jill Tree…”
She leaned forward, and Tom saw an expanse of tender alabaster flesh beneath her blouse. She slid his drink across the bar and their fingers touched; the
electricity passing between them once more.
“I’d like to see more of him, I think…”
Tom found the flattery in her words appealing, arousing even. He recalled how sweet her skin had smelled when they had made love in the forest, how hot her breath had felt against his neck. He took a sip of his refilled drink, looked into her eyes.
“Are you happy out here, Holly? I mean truly?”
“You mean why did I marry a man more than twice my age?”
Sipping again, Tom nodded.
“My parents died when I was wee. Got myself into all sorts of trouble when I tried the city life. Wasn’t cut out for it, you see. So I came home, to the hills. Tommy was good to me once, at a time when no one was good. He took me in.”
“I can relate to that,” Tom said, savoring the bite of whisky in his throat. “I was orphaned, when I was little.” He swallowed, hard.
“So we’re both waifs and strays.” Holly smiled.
“And we’re both married, Holly.”
“True that, though it didn’t seem to stop you in the woods.”
“I guess not.”
“Do you feel guilty about it? I didn’t intend to make you feel bad, I just…”
“Do you? Feel guilt I mean? You clearly love your husband.”
“That I do,” she said. “But he…doesn’t please me the way he used to.”
Tom drained his glass and set it down on the bar, ready for another.
“I can relate to that, too,” Tom replied, his voice dry.
As Holly topped him up, their conversation became more businesslike. She told him one drink never to water down was a fierce medicinal known as Laphroaig. Holly advised him the best time to drink that was when in the throes of a bad head cold, and to prove her point she took a bottle of the stuff from the shelf above the bar and uncorked it. Tom sniffed deep and found that it smelled medicinal in the truest sense of the word; like an expectorant that had been fermented in a peat bog for several centuries. Far too strong for him in the immediate; he’d stick with the honey malt for now. He was just savoring another sip when the phone rang behind the bar.