by Lee, Frazer
He rummaged in his pockets for the piece of paper that had Travis’s number on it and called once again, using the ancient telephone on his nightstand. The same young officer from earlier answered and apologized; Travis was still out on police business. Tom asked her for Travis’s cell phone number, but she politely told him that she had already left voicemail for Travis asking him to call Tom at the earliest opportunity. Trying, and failing, not to sound too terse Tom rang off and then dialed the number for Mathers at Head Office. The CEO, too, was out—lunching, no doubt on the Executive Terrace. Tom left another message with Mathers’ P.A., and replaced the phone handset in its cradle.
He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the phone; still no word from Julia, not a peep. He retrieved his cell phone and thumbed it to life, inspecting the scratches on its smooth, shiny surface. Each scratch was inlaid with dark mud from the woods, especially visible on the little furrows across the phone’s glowing screen. It was as though the device had been subject to some ritual scarification during its mysterious travels; from his pocket to the forest floor, then back to his room while he slept. Acting on impulse now, he speed dialed Julia’s cell. It was a little after midday back home, maybe he would get lucky and Ellie might be preparing lunch or out getting supplies—that way Julia might actually answer the phone for once.
He listened to the international dial tone of long, single pulses and, expecting the voicemail prompt to kick in any moment, was about to hang up when the call connected.
“Julia? You there?” His voice entered the crackling silence like a scared child venturing into a darkened room.He heard a heavy sigh, then, “You’ve got a goddamned nerve calling her.”
The voice was Ellie’s. Tom was in no mood for Julia’s sister and her histrionics.
“Just put my wife on the line, I’d like to speak with her please.”
“Oh, you gave that privilege up a long while ago, asshole.”
Asshole? That was a little strong even for a ball breaker like Ellie.
“Just… Let me speak to Julia. I want to know she’s okay.”
Ellie made a noise that fell between a guffaw and snort.
“Oh, that’s good of you, Tom, real good of you.”
The line turned muffled. Ellie had placed her hand over the mouthpiece. He heard her speak, as though underwater, and caught a few words.
“It’s him…do you want me to?”
More muffled noises, then Ellie’s voice returned, loud and clear.
“My sister doesn’t want to speak with you, not now, not ever.”
Tom snorted. More B.S.
“Hey, if that’s really the case, then I want to hear it from her not you.”
Ellie ignored his attempted demand.
“She is off those awful meds you put her on, and back to her senses.”
“Then that’s good, right? I’m coming home soon, we can…”
Ellie cut him off, her voice strained with emotion.
“She told me everything, Tom, so it’s useless pretending anymore. We already met with the lawyers and they’ll have a restraining order in place before you can even clear customs.”
Tom’s stomach churned.
“What the hell is all this about? I want to speak to my wife.”
He hadn’t meant to raise his voice, but Ellie had that effect on him at the best of times.
“Just put her on, Ellie, or so help me, I’ll…”
“You’ll what? Assault me, too? Send me obscene texts? Just darn well try it, buster, and I’ll send you to jail myself.”
“Who assaulted anyone? What’s this about texts?” Tom felt cold all of a sudden, his arms becoming nests of erect hairs. “For God’s sake, Ellie, talk to me!”
“There is nothing more to talk about. Julia is filing for divorce, Tom. Get that into your thick skull right now. And you can forget ever seeing the baby, either, you relinquished that privilege too—a long time ago.”
“Ellie, you’re not making any sense. Baby? What baby? Our child died, I was there the night it happened.”
“Oh, you sure were, you freak.”
Ellie paused, composing herself for the killer punch.
“She’s pregnant, Tom, and you are to stay the hell away from her, you hear me?”
Tom gasped. “Pregnant? But that’s…that’s wonderful. Are they…are they both okay?”
Both. Tom hadn’t dared dream he could use that expression again; hadn’t dared hope for the chance to start over with a new life that he and Julia had created.
“Ellie? You still there?”
“Oh, you are some piece of work, Tom McCrae,” Ellie spat.
Tom could almost taste her bile through the echoing phone line.
“Mother and baby are going to be just fine, just so long as you stay the hell away from them.”
The line went dead as Ellie hung up. Tom fumbled with the phone keys, dialing and re-dialing Julia’s cell, then her landline. Her cell connected to an automated message saying the number was temporarily unavailable, and the landline—his landline—just rang and rang, indicating that Ellie had unplugged the phone from the wall. His mind whirled with the news of Julia’s pregnancy, and the apparent fact that she now wanted a divorce based on Ellie’s weird accusations against him. Recalling she’d said something about text messages, Tom navigated to the message menu on his smart phone, his thumb leaving a slick of adrenal sweat on the surface of the screen. Cursing his slippery digits, he found the folder labeled Sent and opened it.
Cycling through the list of messages, his heart sank. There were messages sent during the time he’d lost his phone, the timestamps listing them as delivered during the middle of the night, U.K. time. He opened one at random and found it contained a series of violent expletives, like stream of consciousness Tourette’s Syndrome. The message had been sent to Julia at 3 a.m. the night of his tryst with Holly. Scrolling down the list to earlier messages, he spied one with a photo attachment. His heart filled with dread at the prospect of opening the message. Chest pounding, he thumbed the message header and the sweat that was covering his skin turned ice cold as his body temperature plummeted.
There, on the screen, was a photo of him and Holly, stark naked and entwined in each other’s limbs against the trunk of the Jill Tree. The photo had been taken from a distance of some fifty feet or so, but the image was real. Tom and his betrayal; frozen in time by some unseen observer. This message, too, had been sent to Julia in the early hours of the morning. Tom scrolled down and saw a caption below the photograph.
JACK THE LAD.
The phone slid from his fingers and hit the carpet, and Tom started to weep.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Overnight, autumn turned to winter over Douglass. As the new day dawned, the little village looked fogbound, shrouded in drab gray daylight filtered through dense clouds that looked ripe to burst with thick snowflakes any moment. A bitter northeasterly wind picked up and did not stop, freezing pond water and topping each gatepost and roof tile with a layer of silver frost, the length and breadth of the village, with each gust.
Tom McCrae startled from his nightmare of talon hands and screaming trees. He opened his eyes at the shrill ring of the old telephone on the nightstand. Reaching out, still half-asleep, he answered.
“How goes the war, McCrae?”
Mathers.
What in the hell time is it anyway?
Tom wiped sleep from his eyes and checked; 6 a.m. local time. The boss was pulling a late shift, it seemed.
“You got my message, sir?” Tom wished he had a coffee in his free hand, craving the artificially enhanced clarity that caffeine might bring.
“Yes, terrible business by the sound of things. But you’ve held the fort admirably. And good to hear you met with Greyson, outlined our deal spec to him—that’s why I’m calling, Tom…”
“But my message, about Dieter, his clothes—you guys are going to follow up on that? I found his wallet, God only knows what happened to him…”
“Why goodness me, we’re going to follow up on it. You betcha, Tom. Don’t you worry about that. Such terror tactics are not to be taken lightly, and I can hear in your voice they got you good and rattled.” Mathers cleared his throat. “But it’s time now to ramp things up, fight fire with fire so to speak.”
“Ramp things up?”
“Yes indeed. We’ve had a breakthrough. Your contracts department and our legal division bashed heads with the venture capitalist think tank on the seventh floor and they made, well, something of a discovery. Part of the power station land borders with the Greyson tract, but here’s the good part; several acres on the other side went awry the last time the farmer renewed the lease. Must have been an oversight on his part…”
An oversight made just after his wife died, thought Tom. He felt a little sorry for the farmer; left to process paperwork he could scarcely understand following the loss of Alice, his rock.
“Little clutch of acreage just lying there in limbo, waiting for someone to reach out and grab ’em. So his bust is our boon,” Mathers went on. “We’ve been able to secure the land via the power company. Our new plant will eat right into the Greyson estate and there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it. The guys up on seven predict he’ll sell up and move on within eighteen months, given the disruption and the noise pollution. Between you and me, I think they’re running a book on it, and when those guys bet on something… Well, generally, it happens.”
“I see,” Tom said. It was all he could say. If every man had his price, Joe Greyson had just had his tender denied; without even having the chance to pitch it first.
“So, long story short, we’ve stepped up our timeline,” Mathers said. “A team is on its way to you now, they should be with you early afternoon. Prep work is to start before nightfall. Any questions?”
“Ah, just a couple. What kind of team? What kind of prep?”
“Logging team, McCrae. First job to do is to improve access to the site. Power infrastructure, building foundations next. It’s all down to your division’s excellent research, Tom. You know the rest.”
Tom did know the rest; he had helped build the schematic. The trees would come down, personnel would be shipped in, and the village as the locals knew it would be changed forever. An entire community superseded by heavy industry.
“You’re probably eager to get home?”
Mathers’ question hung in the cool air of Tom’s room like a storm cloud.
In a way he was keen to return home, but he also dreaded what awaited him there. The prime suspects were recriminations, writs from lawyers, divorce papers—and the gnawing, hollow feeling that he would never be allowed to spend time with his child after he, or she, was born.
“If you can hang on a little while longer,” Mathers continued. “Make sure the team has everything it needs to get started.”
Tom mumbled his agreement, put the phone down and headed for the shower.
He had work to do.
Showered, and dressed in his suit, which included the last of his clean shirts, Tom grabbed his laptop bag and headed out the door for breakfast. As he walked the narrow corridor, he almost collided with Holly as she exited her room. She closed the door quietly, with a barely audible click of the handle and put a finger to her lips, gesturing for Tom to keep quiet until they were away from the door.
Downstairs, Holly prepared a fresh pot of coffee for her sole customer and filled him in on the latest regarding her husband’s condition. He had woken during the night and said a few words, which included the confirmation of Holly’s suspicions; Cosmo had indeed assaulted her Tommy in the kitchen. The old landlord had startled the vagrant, who was in the process of stealing some food from the monolithic refrigerator set against the rear wall. Cosmo had grabbed the rolling pin from the work counter before MacGregor could react. Holly told Tom she was going to call the police just as soon as she was done giving Tom his breakfast.
Tom then asked her if she thought it possible Cosmo was also responsible for the Dieter-scarecrow, and she said now that he had attacked her husband she wouldn’t rule anything out.
“Who knows what he’s been getting up to in those woods all this time,” she mused. “I mean, I always thought of him as harmless enough, but he might be totally doo-bloody-lalley for all we know.”
Tom ran his fingers across the scarified surface of his smart phone, inside his pocket. He had left out the part about the photo of him and Holly coupling against the tree. Maybe that was one of the things Cosmo had been getting up to in the woods. Tom’s mind raced with conspiracy theories; the Greyson family had put Cosmo up to it, trying to get dirt on Tom so they could blackmail him, or launch a smear campaign in the press. Feeling hot all of a sudden, Tom loosened his collar and asked Holly for some water. She smiled at him, and he thought he’d detected a glimmer of pity in those big eyes of hers.
She was in on it, Tom thought, panicking a little now, she was in on it all along. It was a setup; the Greysons, Cosmo, her—all working together to bring him down. If a scandal like this hit the press, he would lose his job for sure. The Consortium had experienced its little scandals at the hands of investigative journalists in the past. Such affairs always ended with some poor sap taking the fall and being packed off to some retirement home in Florida. Tom felt sick. He had fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Maybe Dieter had worked it out, gotten wind of their plan; he had his ear to the local grapevine after all, there in the pub, mingling with the locals. They had gotten rid of him before he could warn Tom of his suspicions.
His paranoid thoughts weighing heavy on his mind, Tom did not notice Holly returning with a jug of water and a glass. He almost jumped out of his skin when she set it down in front of him. He grabbed the glass, filled it himself and gulped down water—all the while avoiding eye contact with Holly.
“I know you know what I’m going to ask you,” she said, “and I don’t want you to feel awkward about it, but please consider it would be of a great help to me, and the local people…”
Tom had no choice but to look her in the face now. As he did so, he noticed something draped across her arm. Something green.
“My Tommy has to be in his bed at least a week, so the doctor said. District nurse is coming today to check on him and change his dressings. I wouldn’t ask, but we did say we needed to find a way for you to blend in. What better way than this?”
She took the green thing from the crook of her arm and unfolded it, dangling it in front of Tom. It was MacGregor’s Jack in the Green costume.
“You…want me to wear that?” Tom asked, something close to fear in his voice.
“They like you, the local folk, you know that? Despite what you’re here for, so many of them have said how nice you seem. Polite, quiet, not how they expected…” Her voice trailed off.
“Not how they expected an American?” Tom finished.
“To be truthful, aye.”
She grinned. It was good to see her smile again; she looked fragile, and beautiful. Despite his conspiracy theories, Tom could not be sure he wouldn’t make the same mistake with Holly all over again, given half a chance.
“You’d be the first McCrae in an age to wear The Green according to the old folk, and they’re too canny to miss a beat,” she said. “And if you want to show Joe Greyson your community spirit… Well, I don’t know of a better way than this.”
“What do I have to do, if I wear it?”
“Lead the procession, day after Samhain’s the day the Jack comes out to play.”
Tom thought of the name, etched in blood on the tombstone. He swallowed. His glass was empty, and his mouth was dry.
“Just try it for size,” Holly said.
Before Tom could reply, she tugged it on over his head.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Outside, the village was gripped in the chill of a bank of freezing fog that had rolled in like a spectral tide. The inclement weather had done nothing to discourage the locals from continuing t
heir festivities, however, and the main street was filled with even more people than the day before.
Tom followed Holly up to the post office and general store, feeling ridiculous clad in MacGregor’s costume and peering out through the leafy eyeholes at the faces smiling back at him. They walked as far as the green, where locals and tourists alike were gathering.
Fergus, dressed in a horse costume, complete with long neck and snapping jaw, cantered over to Tom’s side. Pulling a wire attached to the jaw of his costume, Fergus played at biting Holly on the neck. She giggled and pushed the snapping horse’s mouth away. Fergus then neighed his welcome to Tom, the horse like sound descending into wheezing coughs. Tom guessed Fergus had been playing the mare all morning, and perhaps only now the freezing air was getting to the old man’s lungs. He was a bag of bones, and none too warmly dressed.
“Good on you,” Fergus spluttered. “You wear The Green well, laddie, like you were born into it.”
Tom nodded, aware that his gesture simply made him look more like a tree, bobbing in the wind. Fergus sidled closer.
“Only a canny wee man could pry that costume from the tight fist of old Tommy MacGregor,” he whispered. “Feet under the table at The Firs, what else you going to take that’s his?”
The old man was peering out of a gap in the horse’s neck, straight at Holly. He chuckled lasciviously, his throat once again giving way to great wheezing coughs.
Choke on it, you skinny old bastard, Tom thought.
He was beginning to regret ever allowing Holly to force him into his ridiculous garb, let alone out in public.
Holly cleared her throat, and made an announcement. “Now we’re just waiting on a few stragglers, then we’ll all process up to the ancient trees. There’ll be mulled wine awaiting when we get back.”